Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
I can do this, Bryn, Lake said. I’ve done it a million times before with a million other Weres.
Lake had been hustling pool since she was ten. I was pretty sure she hadn’t lost since she was twelve.
I’ve never asked you for anything, Lake said, the intensity of her voice pushing out every other thought in my head. Not since we were kids, and I’m asking you now, as your friend, as Maddy’s friend, to let me do this.
Without thinking about it, I glanced over at Dev, but there was no counsel in his eyes, only violence, anguish.
“Do we have a bet?” Shay asked, his own face an emotionless mask.
Lake caught my gaze and held it, and after a long moment, I nodded.
“Choose your stakes,” I said roughly. “The game is pool.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LAKE DIDN’T SO MUCH AS LOOK AT SHAY AS SHE walked over to the pool table and chose her cue. She just ran her hands over the length of the wood and murmured something under her breath. I could see her lips moving but couldn’t make out the words, and I wondered if she was talking to the cue, the way she sometimes did her guns, or if the words were just another part of the performance she was putting on for Shay’s sake.
On Thanksgiving Day, I’d watched Lake teaching a bunch of twelve-year-olds how to hustle pool. She’d told them that the trick was to look completely helpless so your opponent would underestimate you. Now my friend’s entire future was riding on her ability to put her money where her mouth was and practice what she preached.
Lake could do this. She could.
I wanted to believe it. I wanted to tell myself that Lake really was that good, and that I wouldn’t have been any kind of friend at all if I’d kept her from trying, but I couldn’t, because despite everything we’d been through together, despite what she and the others had done for me the night before, I couldn’t shake the feeling building up inside me, the one that said that I was supposed to be protecting her.
“Take me instead.” My voice was low and guttural—a foreign thing in my own throat.
“Excuse me?” Shay raised one eyebrow, and for a single second, he looked so much like Devon that it hurt to look at him.
“The game hasn’t started yet. You can still change the stakes.” I ignored the low rumble of the others inside my head.
I ignored Chase, who’d gone ashen beside me, the unreadable look on his face masking the flash of horror and denial I could feel through the bond.
“Are you suggesting that if I win, you’ll abdicate the rule of your pack to your second-in-command and willingly transfer into mine?” Shay sounded vaguely amused. I thought of everything he could do to me, everything he would do to me, and then I nodded, unwilling to let myself feel even the smallest bit of fear.
Unwilling to let him smell it.
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
Devon could take care of the pack once I was gone, he could be their alpha, and I could put my life on the line to save Lake.
Shay’s face hardened, amusement morphing into something darker. I recognized the emotion from places in my memory I didn’t want to go. The blood, the screams, my human parents. The smell of mildew and bleach as I backed myself farther and farther under the kitchen sink. Even dead, the Rabid still haunted my dreams, and I knew that Shay wanted that. He wanted me to cower, wanted to wear my blood and taste my human screams.
“You think highly of yourself,” he said, his eyes pulsing with bloodlust, and the muscles in his jaw tense with the effort it took to fight it back. “But at the end of the day, you’re human. You’re frail, you’re weak, you’re breakable. You’re meat. This one …” Shay turned to look at Lake, and through the bond, I felt her conflicting desires to lash out and shrink back from his gaze. “This one is strong.”
Shay didn’t come right out and say that Lake would make a good incubator for his future children, but he might as well have, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the image of Lake running, running, running and never getting far enough away.
Bryn, if we lose, I’m going with her. Dev met my eyes from across the room as the silent words passed from his mind to mine. If I’d been capable of feeling anything other than the animal need to answer Shay’s innuendos with fury and blood, I might have taken a moment to consider what it would mean to lose Devon and Lake at the same time.
What it meant that he would leave me to go with her.
Instead, I gritted my teeth and nodded. If we lose, Dev, I want you to go.
Shay flicked his eyes from Devon’s to mine, unable to hear our words, but aware that something had passed unspoken between us.
“So the stakes aren’t changing.” Lake tossed her hair over one shoulder and twirled the pool cue absentmindedly in her hand. “Now that we’ve got that over with, you want to break, Shay, or should I?”
Lake threw out the challenge, looking cocky and young and like the type of person who would rush into a bet like this one without thinking things through, but I knew better. Her bravado was a familiar mask, a special brand of fearlessness that she could put on at the drop of a hat.
She was smart. She was strong. She could do this. I repeated that to myself over and over again.
“You can break.” Shay walked past her and picked up the longest pool cue, twirling it lightly. “I spent most of the fifties in pool halls. If I broke, you’d never even get the chance to shoot.”
Shay might as well have taken a page out of Caroline’s book and pronounced himself incapable of missing a shot.
Unperturbed, Lake racked up the balls and walked the perimeter of the table, her hips swinging with forced carelessness, her eyes registering every angle, every contour, every ball. She placed the cue ball just to the left of the table’s center and leaned over, lining up her first shot. Numbness worked its way up my body, inch by inch.
Lake relaxed her grip on her stick.
Shay smiled.
And then she took her first shot.
The cue ball ricocheted off its target, and the rest shot outward, like an explosion had gone off at their core.
I felt, rather than saw, the first ball drop into one of the center pockets, and I forced myself to breathe.
There were too many of us in this room. There was too much riding on this moment, and it went against every instinct I had—as an alpha, as their friend, as a person who knew what it meant to fight for survival every second of every day—to just stand there, watching and willing Lake to sink one ball after another after another.
It hurt to hope.
It hurt to breathe.
Lake moved around the table with the precision of a surgeon, mid-operation, and the more shots she took, the closer the mask of fearlessness on her face came to slipping.
She wanted this.
She was fighting.
She was scared.
I ground my fingernails into the palm of my hand until red half-moons dotted my skin. I couldn’t feel the pain, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but wait for Lake to sink the next ball.
And then she missed.
With a sickening grin, Shay leaned down to the table, lined up his shot, and sent two balls ricocheting into opposite pockets with the ease of a pro. He worked his way around the table, shot after shot after shot.
I could feel Lake on the other side of the pack-bond, feel her insides shattering like glass as she tried so hard not to be scared. Seeing the bravado on her face nearly brought me to my knees.
Shay only had three balls left.
Then two.
Then one.
I knew then that I never should have let Lake risk it, never should have put her in a position where a game of pool could cost her everything, everything.
It’s going to be okay, Bryn. Whatever happens, it’ll be okay. Chase met my eyes, and for the first time in memory, I felt like I was looking at a stranger. If Shay won, if he took Lake, nothing would be okay. Not now, not ever. If Chase didn’t understand that, he didn’t understan
“Call your pocket.” Lake’s voice was steady, and she thrust her chin out, like she could make him miss by sheer force of will.
“Back left corner.”
My eyes went immediately to the pocket in question. If Shay made this shot, he’d win—the bet, Lake …
I saw the eight ball hit the corner of the pocket. Saw it hover there. Saw it fall in.
Protect. Protect. Survive.
As my Resilience rose up inside me, I could barely make out the world around me. I could barely see Lake, shutting down and shutting out the fear. I could barely see Shay, moving slowly toward her from one side, or Devon, cutting across the room from the other.
But I did see the cue ball as it bounced off one corner and rolled slowly toward another. My eyes tracked its progression, my fight-or-flight instinct taking control of my body even as they did.
Survive. Survive. Survive.
An instant before I completely lost it and gave in to the desire to do to Shay what I had done to the psychics on the street, the cue ball disappeared off the table, falling into one of the side pockets. Something gave inside me, and the blood-red haze began to fade.
Shay had just scratched.
On most shots, it wouldn’t have mattered all that much, but I was familiar enough with pool to know that scratching on the eight ball meant forfeiting the game.
Shay had lost.
I was still trying to process this when Shay froze in his stride toward Lake.
Devon turned back toward the table. Lake grinned.
“Well,” she drawled, setting her own stick down, “that has to hurt.”
Lake had always been a horrible winner, and it took me a moment to find the naked, vulnerable relief underneath her gloating.
Shay scratched, I thought, letting myself believe it this time. He lost.
Beside me, I felt Chase reaching out, on the verge of saying something through the bond, but he must have decided against it, must have known how I would have taken it, because all there was between us was silence.
Relief painted my body with an unearthly, adrenaline-fueled glow. Lake was okay. I was okay. We were all okay—including Lucas, who Shay had just officially lost.
“Your permissions expire in a little over an hour,” I told Shay. “I expect you to retract your claim on Lucas and be off my land before then.”
I could feel Callum in the set of my jaw, the ease with which the words rolled off my tongue.
Shay snapped his pool cue in two, as easily as he could have—and would have—snapped my neck if it weren’t for Callum and the Senate. He stalked over to Lucas and lifted his limp body like a rag doll. Shay held him with one hand and flexed the fingers on the other until they began to take on the appearance of claws. He slashed his not-quite-human nails across Lucas’s face, and I felt the world shifting around us.
This was how pack transfers—the official kind—worked. The first alpha retracted his claim, cut off all mental ties, leaving the second alpha free to instate his—or in my case, her—own.
As I watched, unable to tear my eyes away, Shay wrenched his mind out of Lucas’s with all of the delicacy of a dentist using pliers to pull teeth.
“You are nothing to me,” he said, the words coming out more like a growl than any I’d ever heard spoken out loud. “I am nothing to you. If you step foot on Snake Bend territory again, I will kill you.”
With that, Shay dropped Lucas back onto the ground, and the younger Were’s back arched so hard and fast that I thought his body would snap in two.
“Lucas.” Maddy was by his side in an instant, and as the panic cleared from Lucas’s eyes and he met hers, I saw the contours of his face the way she did, felt his hand on hers as if it were mine.
Lone. Wolf.
My pack-sense trembled with the realization that Lucas didn’t feel foreign anymore—that now that Shay had released his hold, Lucas felt like something else altogether.
“He’s yours if you want him.” Shay kept his comment short and sweet. “But he’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”
That sounded more like a promise than a threat, and I thought of the psychics and everything Lucas had already led—however unwittingly—straight to our door.
“I doubt the Senate will be pleased when they find out you’ve been making deals with psychics.” I tossed the words out like they meant nothing, but I saw the moment they hit their mark. “I may be new to all of this, but I’m fairly certain that bringing the outside world into Pack matters is frowned upon.”
Shay recovered before I could fully register how deep my threat had cut. “The Senate would want proof,” he said, “and without my help, I doubt you’ll be alive to give it.”
Without his help? I snorted. Shay had orchestrated all of this. He’d forced my hand to allow him entry to my lands, he’d strong-armed me into wagering one of my wolves against one of his, and now that he’d lost, he was trying to offer me help?
“Your pack has one adult male, fewer than a dozen teenagers, and a handful of children. You can’t expect to face down a coven of psychics on your own.”
To my left, Devon’s eyes glittered. “Would this be the same coven of psychics who are attacking us at your request?”
Shay shrugged, the human gesture completely at odds with the feral glint in his eyes. “The why and the how don’t matter. If I were you, I’d be more concerned with the when.”
Jed had warned me that Valerie might call an end to the armistice, repay my visit with one of her own now that she had a better idea of what I could do. Now, Shay seemed to be promising that Jed’s words would prove true.
“You have hours.” Shay began walking backward toward the door, each footstep falling like a gavel. “At most, you have a day. If and when you come to your senses, say the word, and the Snake Bend Pack would be more than willing to cross into your territory and fight on your side.”
Fight on our side? He was the one who’d set them on us. Maybe if I hadn’t realized that, I would have taken his offer as mercurial, but given everything I knew, it seemed absurd.
“You’re offering to fight on our side?” I asked. “Couldn’t you just tell them to back down?”
Shay smiled. “Invite us into your territory,” he said, “and I will.”
Every time I thought I had Shay’s strategy figured out, I peeled back a layer of his machinations and found another one underneath.
He’d sent Lucas here so he’d have a reason to come to my territory. He’d made a play for Lake, and just in case that failed, he’d lined his pack up along our borders and sent the coven after me so that I’d have reason to invite his people in.
“The answer,” I said, the words working their way up from the pit of my stomach, uncompromising and sure, “is no.”
Backing me into a corner was a mistake, and someday, Shay would pay for it. Maybe not today, but eventually he’d regret every trap he’d laid for me and mine. I took a step toward him, this foreign alpha who didn’t belong here, and the rest of my pack moved in tandem, all eyes on Shay as we closed in.
He didn’t have my permission to be here any longer, and I wasn’t asking him for help.
Not surprisingly, given Shay’s pedigree, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink. He didn’t even shrug. Instead, he lowered his voice to a whisper that crawled up my spine. “Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re in danger, I’m here, and Callum’s not.”
The statement hung in the air, and without another word, Shay Shifted effortlessly into wolf form, and in a blur of timber-colored fur—his markings a perfect match for Devon’s—he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I KNEW BETTER THAN TO LET SHAY GET UNDER MY skin, but still, his parting shot hit me hard. I’d almost lost Lake—and Dev. I’d been threatened and burned, and another alpha was circling my territory, just waiting for an opportunity to swoop in.
There was a good chance the psychics were planning an attack.
And where was Callum?
&
“If the psychics are planning to attack, we need to set up a defense.” I looked at the others, one after another: the peripherals, Lucas, my inner guard. “Able-bodied fighters need to be ready to fight. Earplugs are a must. Dev, tell Ali to get the younger kids together. They’re going on a field trip. Lake?”
Leaning back against the pool table, Lake preempted my next request. “Weapons?” she asked, all business.
“Anything that will help us secure the perimeter. I’m thinking some strategically placed explosives wouldn’t hurt.”
Some people lived for the phrase strategically placed explosives. Lake was one of those people.
“On it.”
I turned to Chase. “Help Maddy with Lucas,” I said.
Lucas’s bones were probably already healing, but he still hadn’t picked himself up off the floor. I couldn’t be sure how much damage Shay had done when he’d pulled out of Lucas’s head, so despite being free to claim him, I held back, uncertain if Lucas could take that kind of mental assault at the moment.
Besides, I had bigger fish to fry.
“Meet back here in half an hour,” I said. Just enough time for the others to finish their jobs and for me to get on with mine.
I didn’t know the coven’s plan of attack. I didn’t know the extent of their knacks. I didn’t know their weaknesses, or if killing Valerie would remove the emotional suggestions she’d planted.
But I knew somebody who probably did.
Callum might not have been omniscient. He might have seen the future as a complicated web, with possibilities branching out like leaves on a thousand-year-old tree. He might have been limited by distance, but chances were good that he’d know something.
More than I knew, at least.
Now that Shay was technically out of the picture, Callum’s sharing what he knew couldn’t be considered a political alliance. The coven wasn’t a part of our world, their safety wasn’t a Senate concern.
“You’re going to answer,” I said, willing the words to be true. “You have to.”