Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“Yes,” Lucas said in the same throaty whisper he’d used with Maddy. “I am.”
Pack. Pack. Pack.
There was growling and howling and the snapping of teeth. The pack, already on edge before our run, felt the call of darkness and blood at the very sound of our newest member’s words.
Challenge. Challenge. Challenge.
The word passed from one mind to another, and it didn’t matter that none of us had ever seen a challenge. It didn’t matter that our pack wasn’t supposed to be like any other pack. The animal part of their psyche knew what this meant. I knew what this meant.
Saying no was never an option.
A direct challenge to the alpha always ended with a fight to the death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
INSTINCTIVELY, THE PACK MOVED OUT, ENCIRCLING us, but leaving space enough to fight.
I had no weapons, a bum arm, and none of Lucas’s speed or strength. I was human. He was a Were. It didn’t matter if he was weaker than others of his kind. It didn’t matter if he was smaller. It didn’t even matter that I was Resilient.
I would have stood just as much of a chance against an atomic bomb.
The only reason I’d lasted this long as the Cedar Ridge alpha was that the others had chosen me to lead in the first place. Any one of them, at any time, could have done what Lucas was doing now. They could have challenged me, they could have killed me, and they could have claimed leadership of the pack themselves.
The laws that forbid one werewolf from killing another only applied between packs. Within our own ranks, Pack Law and survival of the fittest were one and the same—at least when it came to being alpha.
Think, I told myself, my breath coming quickly and my chest tightening. Think, think, think!
But I couldn’t. There was nothing to think. There was no answer. There was only me—human and breakable.
Meat.
I remembered, suddenly, what it had been like growing up in Callum’s pack, knowing that if he hadn’t protected me, one of the Weres might have killed me. I remembered knowing how dangerous werewolves were, but life as the Cedar Ridge alpha—in their heads and out of them—had undone a lifetime of lessons.
You’ll never be as strong as they are.
You’ll never be as fast as they are.
If they lose control, you’re dead.
I’d forgotten. I’d let myself forget, and now there was nothing to be done.
I couldn’t run. I couldn’t hide. I had to stay and fight and die, because I’d wanted to help. Because I loved Maddy. Because I couldn’t let myself believe that some people were too far gone to save.
In an ideal world, I would have had time—to think, to prepare—but this wasn’t an ideal world; it wasn’t even a human one, and any challenge to the alpha had to be settled at a breakneck pace.
Sometimes literally.
I tried not to think about all the ways this could end, tried to concentrate on the here and now, but the more I concentrated, the direr the situation seemed.
Lucas was already on one side of the circle. He took off his shirt, and any remaining hope I’d had that he might fight me as human evaporated from my mind. He was going to Shift, and he was going to devour me whole.
I turned to walk to the opposite end of the circle, my head held high. Damn him for doing this to me. Damn him to hell and back, but I wasn’t going to die crying. Given half a chance, I’d take out his eyes.
Devon caught me roughly by my good arm as I walked by, and I turned to glare at him. This was hard enough without thinking about all the people I was leaving behind, all the people I was letting down. This was hard enough without looking at Devon’s face and realizing that he was going to have to watch me die.
“You’ll challenge Lucas,” I said softly, my voice full of knowing. “The second this is over.”
That was the real tragedy here, the thing that made this whole exercise pointless. Absurd. The moment Lucas had issued this challenge, he’d signed his own death warrant as much as mine. It didn’t matter if he was stronger than I was. There were plenty of people in my pack who were stronger than him, and they wouldn’t allow him to lead. They wouldn’t let him kill me and live another day.
Lucas was so far gone he couldn’t see it, and somehow, I doubted that Shay had pointed out the inevitability when he’d planted this suggestion in Lucas’s head.
Layers upon layers upon layers.
Shay had known that Lucas was going to do this. He’d broken him and sent him, broken, to me. He’d played me—the bet, the stakes, scratching on the eight ball when he must have always intended to lose. This was his fail-safe.
This was the endgame.
“You’re not going to die.” Devon spat the words right in my face. “You are not allowed to die.”
“Fine,” I said. “You win. I’ll just—oh, wait. I don’t have a choice.”
I didn’t want to be doing this—not with Dev, not with any of them. I didn’t want to say good-bye.
“There’s always a choice.” Dev tightened his grip and pulled me up onto the tips of my toes. “Do you think for one second that if all of this was going to end with you dead, Callum would have taken a hands-off policy and just let you die? Don’t you think he saw at least a hint of this coming? And if so, do you think he would have let you accept Lucas into this pack if he’d thought there was even the remotest chance that you might die over something so preventable, so useless?”
I thought of Callum telling me on the phone that I might die, never indicating, even for a second, that the danger extended past the coven per se.
Something caught inside me, like a breath catching in my throat.
“He must have seen it, Dev. He must not have cared.”
Devon let go of my arm, but he leaned down, bringing his face very close to mine. “You,” he said, “are the most impossible person I have ever met. You’re bulletproof and self-sacrificing and beautiful in ways that you will never understand. You are Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. You turned the entire werewolf Senate upside down. You laugh in the face of danger. You are the alpha of this pack, and you are not going to die.”
As far as pep talks went, it was a good one, but Dev couldn’t stay there next to me. He couldn’t fight my battles for me. There was a mandate buried deep in the biology of his species that said he had to step back and watch.
So he did. He faded back into the circle, next to Maddy and Lake, next to Mitch, next to Chase, who was trying to get to me but couldn’t quite get his body to move.
I could feel his anguish, sewn into the air all around me, and the hum of the pack’s acknowledgment that a challenge to the alpha had to be met.
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Were; the mandate was there in my head, too. I felt it in the marks Callum had left in my skin. I felt it in the bond that made me who and what I was.
Fight. Fight. Fight.
It would have been so easy to give in to the instinct, to let the world go red and go out fighting without feeling a single instant of pain, but this time, flashing out seemed like giving up.
There had to be another answer.
There had to be.
The sound of Lucas Shifting tore me from my thoughts. How could I ever have thought he was scraggly or malnourished? He was hungry—there was a difference.
I felt the pain of his Shift as an echo in the bond that I’d thrown at him, and an image came to mind, of an old woman standing in front of three grown Weres, forcing them to halt mid-Shift.
I’m the alpha, I thought. Until he kills me, I’m the alpha.
Physically, I might have been the weaker party, but mentally, I was dominant. I always had been. There was a reason the Cedar Ridge Pack had chosen me as their leader, and it wasn’t my physique.
I pictured the bond that tied Lucas to the rest of the pack. I pictured the portion of it that tied him to me. I’d done that. Me. I couldn’t take it back, but there was a chance I could use it.
Lucas
Stop! The command snapped out of me like it had been shot from a cannon and traveled through the pack-bond to Lucas, who jerked back suddenly to land a foot in front of me, just short of his goal. His teeth flashed and he let loose a sick and bone-crunching bark, but his body didn’t move. I could see the nails on his feet digging into the frozen ground as he strained against my hold.
Somebody hadn’t realized that to take down an alpha, you had to be able to fight them in more ways than one.
For a few seconds, I stood there, staring at him and willing him to lie down, belly up. He fought me. He pushed back, and as he lost himself to animal rage, to panic, it got harder and harder to hold him.
Keeping him from killing me wasn’t enough.
I had to end this, but I didn’t know how. Even as my own instincts surfaced, even as I threw everything I had—Resilience included—into the bond, I couldn’t fathom the idea of ordering someone to die.
If I could keep him still enough, if I was sure I could hold him—
No.
It wasn’t working. I was fighting, fighting, fighting, and it wasn’t enough. I needed more. More power. A stronger will. Something.
An image began to form in my mind, a ridiculous image that I didn’t have time for, one of me and Chase lying in Callum’s cage, looking up at the stars. I heard Devon’s voice telling me that when Chase had been on the brink of death, somehow I’d taken everything I might have used to heal myself and given it to him.
The stronger the pack, the stronger the alpha.
That was the way it worked. That was why Shay wanted greater numbers. That was why the rest of the alphas would have sold their souls for what was mine.
I was Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. I was impossible. And I was not giving up. My body started to shake with the strain of holding Lucas off. He inched closer. I gritted my teeth. I pictured the pack-bond that connected me to Chase, to Lake, to Devon and all the rest.
I pictured their power, and I pulled.
The rush was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and with it came the rest of their instincts—the bloodlust and the adrenaline and the need to force this challenger down.
My body alive with that power, I turned my attention back to Lucas and said a single word: “Down.”
Lucas fell to the ground. His mouth snapped shut. His eyes opened wide with fear. Even with the power of the pack—and their animal instincts—flowing through me, like charge through a wire, I wanted to let him live.
I wanted to give him another chance.
I wanted to, but I couldn’t.
Over, I told him, my mind-voice echoing with power that wasn’t mine. Lucas rolled onto his side. I knelt next to him, fear nothing more than a memory, a distant memory, like maybe every time I’d ever felt it was nothing more than a dream.
Challenge. Challenge. Challenge.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
I held Lucas there in wolf form. I looked into his eyes. I ran one hand gently over the fur on his neck, and then, with the power of an entire pack behind me, their Resilience bleeding into mine, I told him to go to sleep.
Forever.
CHAPTER THIRTY
EVERY MORNING, I WOKE UP AND I SAW THE PERSON who’d killed Lucas staring back at me in the mirror. Every night, I went to bed wondering if there was ever a point where I could have stopped him from drawing that line in the sand. Like clockwork, I stared up at my ceiling, analyzing all the moments, big and small, that had led to his challenge. I searched for an answer that wouldn’t have led to my looking into his eyes and watching him die.
I knew Lucas wouldn’t have survived long without the protection of a pack. If I hadn’t been so trusting, if I’d turned him away, the outcome would have been the same—at least for him.
I blamed myself for not being able to get through to him. I blamed Shay for setting me up. But mostly, I blamed the fact that when Lucas had challenged me, he’d had reason to believe that he would win.
If I’d been stronger, if I’d been faster, if I’d been the type of opponent that other people feared, Lucas would still be alive. He’d challenged me because I was human. I’d won because I wasn’t—not really, not anymore.
Chase slid into bed beside me, the way he had every night since the fight. We didn’t talk about it. He didn’t yell at me, the way Devon had beforehand, or say that he’d recognized the darkness in Lucas, the desperation, even though he had. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t push. He just held me, and I breathed in his scent.
Every night, he was there.
And even though I was lonely, I wasn’t alone.
A week before Christmas, Maddy came to me. It had been eleven days since Lucas’s challenge.
“I’m leaving.” She said the words calmly, but I knew what they had cost her. The Wayfarer was Maddy’s home. We were her family.
She was already gone.
“I don’t blame you,” Maddy said. I stared at her, and she amended her statement. “I don’t want to, but every time I see you, I see him. Every time I hear you, I hear him, and I know it was his fault. I know that he’s the one who did this to you and to me, and I want to hate him for it, but I don’t. I can’t, and I can’t be here. I can’t stay here.”
“Maddy, it’s okay.” I’d known she was going to leave—probably before she did.
“No,” Maddy replied. “It’s not. I’m not. But someday, I will be.”
I recognized that as both a promise and a statement of fact. Whatever it took, whatever she had to do, Maddy was going to survive this. I just wished she didn’t have to do it alone.
I wished that I hadn’t been the one to kill the boy she loved.
“There’s a stretch of land along the Colorado border,” I said. “Sage’s family lives there. They know. You’d be safe there, and you wouldn’t have to see me—”
“You’re there, Bryn. You’re everywhere, every day, all the time.” Maddy met my eyes, but it wasn’t a challenge. It was a request, one that told me she was beyond dominance, beyond submission, beyond everything other than the need to get away. “You have to let me go.”
It took me a moment to realize what she was asking.
“You want me to let you go,” I repeated. “As in go go?”
“You’re a part of me, and if I’m going to get through this, I need you not to be.”
I saw in her eyes that she’d thought this through, that while I’d been lying in my bed, looking up at my ceiling, she’d been doing the same in hers.
“If you’re not Cedar Ridge, we can’t protect you. Any alpha who sees you could take you by force and make you theirs.”
Lone werewolves were dangerous. A lone female was more or less unheard of. The other alphas would hunt her to the ends of the earth if they knew.
“No one is going to see me,” Maddy said with that same quiet dignity she’d always had. “I’ll stick to No-Man’s-Land. I’ll lie low.”
I couldn’t let her do this.
“If you force me to stay, I’ll hate you. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later, I won’t be able to help it anymore, and I’m not going to do that to either of us, Bryn. I’m going to go away, and I am going to get better, because if I don’t, the next time someone challenges you, it’s going to be me.” She paused, her chest heaving with the effort of saying the words. “I don’t want to be that person. Please.”
She didn’t give me the chance to respond.
“Being Resilient means having the ability to shake off pack-bonds. I did it with the Rabid. If you force me to, I’ll do it with you. But I’d rather you just …”
She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and finished the statement in a whisper, from her mind to mine. Let me go.
I nodded then, because I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes. I reached out and touched her face gently.
I dragged my nails over the flesh of her neck, lightly leaving
And then I let her go.
The world realigned in an instant, and I did my best to tune out my senses, the ones that recognized what Maddy was now—and what she wasn’t anymore.
“Anytime you want to come back, you can. No conditions, no questions asked.” I sounded calmer than I felt, and that somehow tricked my brain into thinking I could handle this. “If you get into trouble and can’t or don’t want to come here, go to Colorado.”
I might not have been sure of much when it came to Callum, but I was sure that he wouldn’t use Maddy the way the other alphas might. She’d be a person and not just a power play to him.
“Bye, Bryn.”
Just like that, Maddy was gone.
For the first time since Lucas’s challenge, I let myself cry.
I woke up on December 24, looked in the mirror, and made a decision. I didn’t tell anyone, because I knew they would argue with me. I brushed my lips against Chase’s, and his curved upward in response.
I willed him to keep sleeping.
I walked toward the door and paused at the dresser, just long enough to look at myself in the mirror one last time and pick a small wooden carving up off the base. I tucked it into the pocket of my jeans, helped myself to the keys to Ali’s car, and drove.
It took hours to reach my destination. I threw the car into park and slipped out of the driver’s seat. Then I walked right up to the edge of the sign—WELCOME TO COLORADO—and I waited.
I didn’t have to wait long. Callum seemed smaller than I remembered, and he looked younger, right up until we were standing less than two feet apart, and then my eyes adjusted and saw him as they always had.
For a few seconds, we just looked at each other, poker faces firmly in place, Callum on his side of the border and me on mine.
“I don’t suppose Ali knows you took off with her car,” he said finally. I would have taken his speaking first as a sign of victory, but I recognized a hint of mischief around the corners of his eyes.