Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“What did he look like?” Ali enunciated each of the words, and I could tell she was fighting to keep her voice from rising in pitch.
“Dark hair. Early twenties. Penchant for sarcasm.”
That wasn’t exactly a quality description, but at the time, I’d been too busy wanting to kill the guy to take note of his features. Still, the description seemed to satisfy Ali and she let out a breath that I hadn’t realized she was holding.
“Early twenties,” she repeated.
“College aged,” I confirmed. “Maybe a little older, but not much.” I hesitated a fraction of a second but then had to ask: “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Ali said. “I’m fine. You should be, too. Entering other people’s dreams isn’t all that different from what people with open pack-bonds can do with each other, and the psychic doing it can’t hurt you. He can annoy you. He can frighten you. But that’s it.”
I decided, for the time being, not to mention that the psychic in question appeared to be able to cross that line with relatively little effort.
“You seem to know a lot about psychics.” I let that statement hang in the air, but Ali didn’t offer up an explanation, leaving me to wonder if I wasn’t the only one dancing around full disclosure.
“I don’t know enough,” Ali said instead, “and neither do you. I told Callum as much.”
“And …?” I knew by the look on Ali’s face that there was more.
“And,” Ali continued, “he said that it was absolutely crucial for me to tell you that if you go anywhere near this coven, he’d be very displeased. I believe his exact words were that you shouldn’t be poking your nose around their affairs and that he forbids it.”
Forbids it?
Forbids it?
I sputtered, “Who does he think he is? I’m not his responsibility, and he’s not my alpha. He can’t forbid anything.”
Even when I had been living under Callum’s rule, even when he’d been the closest thing to family that Ali and I had, I’d never have let him get away with being that high-handed. Forbidding me to do something was as good as telling me to do it.
Irritation mounted until I felt like snarling. Slowly, however, common sense intruded on my ire, and a little bell began going off in the back of my head.
Callum knew that telling me specifically not to do something was a surefire recipe for making me want to do it.
He knew that.
I glanced at Ali to see if she was thinking the same thing. The edges of her lips turned upward. “Callum’s many things, Bryn, but he isn’t an idiot. The only reason he’d ever ask me to tell you that something was strictly, absolutely off-limits was if he wanted to ensure that you’d do the exact opposite of what you were told.”
When it came to maneuvering around the rules, I’d learned from the master. If the Senate asked, Callum could honestly say that other than telling Ali to keep me at home and under guard, he’d done nothing. He hadn’t offered us any advice in his position as alpha, and he most certainly hadn’t suggested that if I wanted to find my way out of this situation, I’d need to investigate the coven firsthand.
“Think if I go into town alone, someone will show up to play more mind games?” I asked.
“Most psychics don’t have aggressive powers.” Ali glanced out the window. “For every person who’s good in a fight, there are twelve who are better at messing with your mind. Even if this coven is one of the more powerful ones, if you show up in town without a werewolf escort, someone will show.”
I was shocked that Ali was willing to consider the idea of me playing bait—until I realized that she hadn’t specified my going into town alone. She’d said that someone was sure to show if I went in without werewolf backup. Given that she and I were the only humans in the pack, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that she was planning on coming with me.
Knowing Ali the way I did, though, I was starting to suspect that it was more than that. Ali wasn’t just planning on coming with me—she seemed dead set on it, like she wanted to flush out the psychics as much as or more than I did. I could see the drive to do this hidden beneath the almost-neutral set of her features.
Ali didn’t just want to come with me. She needed to come with me. The only thing that wasn’t 100 percent clear to me was why.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ALI AND I STOPPED BY THE RESTAURANT ON OUR way to town. Living with werewolves meant that everyone would know the second we left the Wayfarer grounds anyway, so there was no point in sneaking around. Besides, Ali needed to drop the twins off with Mitch and check in with the older Resilients to make sure the younger ones were doing okay. There weren’t too many kids in our pack young enough to need constant supervision, but the older Resilients—some of whom were just a few years younger than me—had been taking care of the littler kids for years.
In the clutches of the Rabid, they’d been the ones to bear the brunt of the abuse.
If there was one thing that seeing Lucas had taught me, it was how lucky they all were to have come out of it with their minds and spirits intact.
“Where’d you say you’re going again?” Mitch asked. His voice was mild, but he was a Were and Ali was female, so the things he didn’t say hung in the air between them, heavy and clear.
“We’re going to town,” Ali repeated, unfazed by the question and the manner in which it was delivered. “Just for an hour or so. Think you can hold things down here?”
“I suspect I can.” Mitch paused for a split second and then he turned to me and said, “Bryn, I ever tell you that you and Ali here are an awful lot alike?”
Ali couldn’t seem to decide whether to smile or throw her hands up in the air at that, so I saved her the trouble of responding.
“I’m going to assume that’s a compliment,” I told Mitch. “For both of us.”
Mitch shook his head in consternation, and Ali reached up and patted his shoulder, in a motion that I was fairly certain she didn’t mean to look nearly as intimate as it did. “We’ll be fine, Mitch. If it’ll make you feel better, have Lake rustle up a couple of tranquilizer guns. Just make sure they’re loaded for humans, not Weres.”
Lake wasn’t the kind of person you had to ask twice for weapons, so she didn’t even wait for her dad to give her a nod before she took off out the front door of the restaurant. I gave it ten-to-one odds that she’d be back with tranq guns in less than three minutes.
Unfortunately, three minutes was all it took for Devon and Chase to show up at the restaurant and innocuously volunteer to shadow Ali and me on our trip to town. Given that the whole reason we were going into town was to flush out people who tortured werewolves for fun, I wasn’t inclined to indulge the boys’ protective instincts over my own.
“I need you here,” I told Devon quietly. “Lucas showed up in my room last night.”
I’d expected those words to distract Dev, but he just glanced at Chase and then turned back to me. “I know,” he said, and the similarity between my best friend’s facial expression and Chase’s was eerie.
You told him? I asked Chase silently, torn between annoyance and shock. Chase and Devon weren’t exactly friends, and Chase wasn’t really what one would call chatty.
“Of course he told me,” Devon retorted, even though I knew for a fact he hadn’t heard me ask the question. “You can just imagine how thrilled I was to hear it.”
I wasn’t sure which was worse for Dev: that Lucas had gotten close enough to me that, if he’d wanted to, he could have ripped out my throat, or that Chase had been the one to stop him—and spend the night.
“Dev, I need you and Lake to keep an eye on Lucas. Wherever he goes, you go, and if you can keep him away from the younger kids—”
Devon’s eyes glittered. “You don’t even need to ask, milady.”
The milady he tacked on to the end of that sentence was the only thing that reminded me that Dev wasn’t usually the type who lived life on the cusp of violence. All of us were on edge.
And,
I didn’t allow myself to finish that silent request. It didn’t seem right to ask Devon to keep Maddy from Lucas while the rest of our group roamed free. Maddy was a big girl, and if she wanted to stay close to Lucas, to watch him, to figure him out—I couldn’t keep her from it, any more than Callum had been able to keep Chase from me.
I knew what it was like to look at someone and see yourself, to need answers, and as off balance as Lucas seemed, I had to remind myself that the day I’d met Chase, he’d snarled at me from inside a cage and told me that I smelled like meat.
You don’t have to ask me to watch out for Maddy, Bryn. Devon met my eyes. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d have to ask Maddy to watch out for me.
“Somebody ask for tranq guns?” Lake called, crossing the room in three long-legged strides, ponytail swinging. She handed one to Ali and one to me. “One dart will make a large male groggy or knock out a little bitty human girl.”
I assumed from the tone of Lake’s voice that the “little bitty” comment referred to Caroline, and that Lake herself would have taken no small pleasure in pulling the trigger. She’d been taught all her life not to attack humans, but knocking them unconscious with tranquilizer guns was more of a gray area.
“Thanks, Lake.” Accepting the gun from Lake, Ali turned back to me. “You ready to get out of here?”
I nodded, and Chase echoed the motion. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that he needed to stay here, but Ali shook her head slightly, and I let her speak instead.
“How far away can you be and still sense Bryn?” Ali put the question to Chase and waited for his response. I figured that she was probably planning to tell him to hang back far enough that no one would see him, but close enough that I could call for him if things went bad. I realized a second after Ali asked the question that she probably wouldn’t like Chase’s answer.
“I always sense her.” Chase shrugged, but despite the human gesture, I could tell that the answer was coming as much from the wolf as the boy. “Always feel her.”
Ali held up one hand.
“TMI?” I guessed.
“Something like that,” she confirmed before turning her attention back to Chase. “If you can always sense her, you’ll know if she’s in trouble, and you’ll come. Otherwise, this is kind of a mother-daughter thing.”
If there was one argument Chase couldn’t counter, it was that.
“I’ll wait at the edge of our property,” he said, addressing the comment to me, like we were the only two people in the room—like the seven words he’d said to Ali and the heads-up he’d given Dev had tapped out his desire to speak to anyone but me. “You need me, I’m here.”
That was what Chase did—whether he agreed with me or not, whether it was comfortable for him or not, he was always there.
“I should go.” I forced my voice to sound normal and pressed back the desire to close my eyes and remember what it had felt like to wake up that morning with him by my side. “And hopefully, when we get back, we’ll have answers.”
I didn’t bother to enumerate the questions; there were too many of them, and everyone in the room knew each one as well as I did. The only thing the others didn’t know was that Callum was the one who’d nudged Ali and me into doing recon on the psychics.
Slipping the tranq gun into the inside pocket of my jacket, I couldn’t help wondering what exactly Callum had seen that had caused him to set us on this path.
Time to find out.
“So. You and Chase. How’s that going?”
Apparently, this was Ali’s version of small talk. I immediately started wishing that the drive to town was a significantly shorter ordeal. Ali had me as a captive audience for at least another ten or fifteen minutes, and this was a conversation I’d been expertly avoiding for months.
“So,” I returned evenly. “You and Mitch. How’s that going?”
I knew that was a bit of a low blow, but I really didn’t want to try to explain to Ali, who’d done everything possible to make sure I had things in my life other than the pack, that as much as Chase and I were just getting to know each other on human terms, there was another part of me—the part that had been raised to think like a wolf—that had known him the second we met.
“I’m not criticizing here, Bryn. I just want to make sure you’re careful.”
For one horrific moment, I thought she might be on the verge of giving me a sex talk. Luckily, her next words laid that worry to rest.
“Dating means something different to werewolves than it does to humans, and Chase hasn’t been one long enough to understand that, let alone control whatever his wolf feels when he’s close to you. You’re only sixteen, and wolves mate for life.”
Casey hadn’t.
I didn’t say the words, but the second I thought them, I felt like a horrible person. I was the one who’d torn Ali’s marriage apart in the first place. I would have preferred biting off a chunk of my own tongue to throwing that in her face.
“I tried to make it work with Casey.”
If I hadn’t already been silent, Ali voluntarily bringing up his name would have shocked me into it.
“I wanted it to work, but it didn’t, because Casey’s not human, and no matter how much he thought he loved me, there were always going to be things that mattered more.”
I wanted to point out that unlike Casey, whose loyalties had and would always lie with Callum, Chase would never have to choose between his alpha and me. I was his alpha. But Ali wasn’t done talking yet, and I didn’t interrupt her.
“You’ve seen the way Casey is when he visits, the way he still looks at me, the way he acts when Mitch and I are even in the same room.” Ali very deliberately did not elaborate on whether or not Casey had anything to be jealous about. “Whatever I had with Casey is over for me, Bryn, but for as long as I live, it won’t ever be over for Casey, and I have to deal with that. I’m a big girl. I can do it, but you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and you have no way of knowing what you’ll want five years from now, or ten. Maybe Chase is the one. Maybe he isn’t. But if you let things get intense now, there won’t ever be someone else for him, and you’re the one who’s going to have to deal with the consequences.”
I was beginning to suspect that I would have preferred Ali giving me the sex talk.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Ali. Chase isn’t like other Weres. He’s not possessive. He doesn’t expect me to bow down to anyone.”
She looked less than convinced.
“And besides,” I added, “as intense as things are, I have an entire pack inside my head. If it were just him and me, then maybe things would be going too fast, but they’re not.” I glanced out the window, unsure whether I wanted to say the next part out loud. “Before I was alpha, it was like the two of us were the only people in the world, and now we’re not.”
Ali had the good grace not to look too relieved. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Bryn.”
“I know. And I wouldn’t trade the pack, not for anything.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and looped it over into a loose bun. “Chase wouldn’t ask me to—but seeing Lucas, hearing about everything he’s gone through, it makes me realize: I think I know more about Lucas’s past than I know about Chase’s.”
Maybe if it had been just Chase and me, we would have talked about his human life more, the way we did in the beginning, but the quiet moments, the ones where the rest of the pack just faded away, were so few and far between.
“People are allowed to have secrets, Bryn.” Ali’s tone was mild, but the words felt like a reproach. “Even from you.”
Ali looked like she was about to say something else, but instead, she killed the engine, and I realized we had made it to town.
Thank God.
I’d take a physical fight over Touchy-Feely Share Time, hands down. Hopefully, though, this wouldn’t come to an actual fight.
Assuming
And then some.
As far as I was concerned, they could try, but I had no intention of letting myself be intimidated. Once they made the first move, I’d know how to counter. Whatever mind games they tried to play would tell me more about who they were and how they operated.
The Callum I knew wouldn’t have sent me here otherwise. I hadn’t seen him in months, hadn’t heard from him, but I trusted that.
Game on.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A LIFETIME OF BEING TAUGHT TO WATCH MY BACK made it hard for me to stroll down Main Street without thinking about all the ways I was leaving myself open for an attack. Growing up with people who could turn you into an afternoon snack had a way of giving you an unusual perspective on playing bait. I’d done it before—once—and the effort had ended with me knocked unconscious and tied to a chair in the home of a Rabid serial killer who liked to dress girls up in their Sunday best before making them bleed.
Suffice to say, I was hoping for a better outcome this time—especially since I didn’t have werewolf backup waiting just around the bend.
“Mind games,” Ali reminded me, her voice muted. “They’re all about the mind games.”
I was about to ask her why every time she made a statement about psychics, she sounded as straightforward and certain as Lake would have sounded talking about guns, but just as my mouth was about to form the words, I felt something—eyes on the back of my head, a presence cast over me like a shadow.
Step. Step. Step.
The sound of feet treading lightly on concrete was unmistakable—soft, but perceptible to human ears. I glanced at Ali out of the corner of my eye, and she gave a slight nod. She heard it, too.