Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“Why mountains?” I asked, hoping Lake’s answer might jog something loose in my mind. I’d always wondered, but never asked about her tendency to Shift and run off into the night. Like Griffin, Lake’s occasional need for space wasn’t exactly the kind of thing we discussed.
“It’s quiet there.” Until Lake actually said those words, I hadn’t been sure she would answer, but once she started talking, she didn’t seem inclined to stop. “You pick the right mountain, and you could get lost forever: just you and the rocks and the sky. The higher it is and the harder it is to get to, the less chance you have of running into other people. Or werewolves.”
A glint of metal caught my eye, and I changed the subject to one I knew Lake would be more comfortable with.
“That Matilda?” I hadn’t gotten a good look at the shotgun Lake was currently cleaning, but her old standby had the status of a ratty old teddy bear or favorite pet.
“Nope,” Lake said, not missing a beat. “This is Abigail. She’s new.”
The second Lake started naming weapons, Chase pressed another kiss to my temple and then made himself scarce. He seemed to sense that it had been a while since Lake and I had time for girl talk.
“Abigail, huh?” I said.
Lake grinned. “I named yours Greta.”
Of course she did.
“Hey, Lake. Do you and Caroline ever talk weapons?” I don’t know what possessed me to ask that question, except for the fact that as long as I’d known Lake, she’d been one hell of a shot, and most days, Caroline’s knack seemed to be her single most defining feature.
Lake snorted. “Bryn, you might not have noticed this, but Caroline doesn’t talk. Except to Devon, and that’s only when she’s trying to get him to shut up.”
Actually, I hadn’t noticed Caroline and Devon talking at all. It made me wonder what else I had missed, wrapped up in pack business and blind to anything else.
“It’s not fair.” The sudden fierceness in Lake’s tone caught me off guard. If I hadn’t known better, I might have thought her eyes were wet with unshed tears.
“The fact that Devon never shuts up?” I joked, knowing better than to act like I’d noticed the emotion on her face.
Lake shook her head. I waited.
“If Maddy was a guy, the worst they could do is kill her.” Lake shoved her gun to the side. “Now, there’s nowhere she can run that they won’t find her, if we don’t find her first. It’s not right, and it’s not fair, and goddamn it, we shouldn’t have to do this.”
Lake rubbed the heel of her hand roughly over her face, dashing away her tears. “She’s our friend, and if it wasn’t for Shay wanting her, wanting me—if it wasn’t for that, he never would have pulled that crap with Lucas in the first place. He wouldn’t have tried to kill you, and you wouldn’t have had to kill Lucas, and Maddy wouldn’t have lost her freaking mind. She wouldn’t have lost control, and we wouldn’t have to sit here, polishing our weapons and looking at this stupid map.”
Lake slammed her elbow back into a tree trunk, hard enough to break her skin. I forgot sometimes that I wasn’t the only one with things on her mind, that Maddy wasn’t just my responsibility or my friend.
In fact, I had a sinking suspicion that parts of this outburst had been building up inside Lake for a very long time, and this was the first time she’d had someone to listen.
“It’s not just me. Or Maddy. It’s Phoebe, and it’s Sage, and someday it’s going to be Katie and Lily and Sloane—”
She stopped short of rattling off all of their names, one by one, but my mind completed the task, and I realized that if Lake had known I was planning on voluntarily becoming a Were—a female Were—she would have slapped me silly and shot me in the kneecap, just for good measure.
Lake never had a choice about what she was, and in the world we lived in, with the numbers the way they were, things would never, ever be fair.
“Shay’s not getting within a hundred yards of Maddy,” I said, because that was the only thing I could give her, the only promise I might be able to keep. “No one is getting to Maddy, because we’re going to find her first.”
Even if she’d gone Rabid.
Even if she was the monster who’d painted those white walls red with blood.
Even if the person she really wanted to tear limb from limb—the reason she wanted vengeance—was me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THAT NIGHT, I COULDN’T BREATHE INSIDE THE TENT. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think. We still didn’t have a plan, and when exhaustion finally beat back everything else competing for space in my mind, I fell into a nightmare, the kind that followed you seamlessly from one dream to the next.
I was running. Someone was chasing me.
Something.
Hands grabbed my shoulders. Nails that might have been claws dug into my arms, but I couldn’t feel the pain. I couldn’t feel anything.
Suddenly, the forest disappeared, and I was sitting at a wrought-iron table that had been painted white. My hands were folded neatly in my lap. My legs were crossed at the ankles. Stiff, lacy fabric crinkled as I shifted in my seat.
The girl sitting across from me, dressed in a frilly frock identical to my own, was Maddy. She reached forward, and a tiny china teapot materialized. With dainty hands and an expressionless face, she poured my tea and then her own.
The light all around us was bright, almost unbearable, but in the corners of the room, there were shadows, and in the shadows, there were eyes.
Unperturbed, Maddy lifted her teacup upward. With shaking hands, I reached for my own.
“It’s not what you think,” Maddy said.
For a second, I thought she was trying to tell me that I’d misconstrued everything that had happened in the past few days, that she wasn’t the monster we were hunting, and relief washed over my body, pleasant and warm.
A smile cut across Maddy’s features, sharp where they were round. Her teeth gleamed, the exact shade of porcelain as the teacups.
“It’s not what I think,” I said, in a singsong voice that didn’t feel like my own.
“It’s not what you think.”
I brought the teacup to my lips, and that was when I realized—
We weren’t drinking tea. The cup was filled with blood.
I woke with a start, no more capable of screaming than I had been when I was caught in the midst of the dream. This was what came of Jed’s little lessons. Once you let yourself be scared, once you opened up the door to the darkest parts of your psyche—
There it was.
Not wanting to disturb the others, I glanced around the tent. Chase and Lake were missing—no surprise there. They didn’t need shelter of any kind to feel at home in the woods. Jed was snoring on the far side of the tent, and in between us, Caroline was fast asleep.
Her eyes were open.
Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that she was the only person I’d ever met who could bring that particular cliché to life. In sleep, she looked even more doll-like than usual: perfect and petite, with eyes so big and round that her eyelids only covered them halfway.
Given the dream I’d just had, the last thing I wanted to think about was dolls. Ignoring the chill crawling up my spine, I slipped out of my sleeping bag and tiptoed out into the night.
The sky had cleared enough that I could see the stars overhead, like fireflies trapped in glass. I wondered if Maddy could see them, wherever she was. I wondered if there was even a small part of her that was still Maddy, if there was anything left of the girl I’d known at all.
Where are you, Maddy?
I sent the words off into the night, knowing they’d never reach her. Our minds weren’t connected anymore. The phantom I’d seen in my dream was just that—a phantom, the by-product of opening the floodgates and trying in vain to dam them back up, only succeeding halfway.
If I hadn’t severed the pack-bond and withdrawn my mind from Maddy’s, we could have actually shared dreams. I could have seen her, talked to h
Lightning struck in the distance, so far away that it was nothing but a dull flash of light on the horizon. I waited for the sound of thunder, but it never came. Instead, a chain reaction went off in my brain, and I remembered the last time nightmares had kept me up at night.
Those nightmares had been real.
And the person who’d orchestrated them?
He’d had a knack for getting under people’s skin and entering their dreams, the way I could sneak peeks at my pack’s. I might not be able to connect with Maddy, but that didn’t mean she was off the grid altogether.
This time, when I went back into the tent, I was able to close my eyes. I was able to sleep. Because the person who’d spent the better part of last fall haunting my nightmares, the one who might have stood a fighting chance at finding Maddy, or at the very least, her dreams—
He owed me. Big time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“CHANGE OF PLANS,” I TOLD LAKE, WHO HAD “WEAPONED up” in anticipation of the morning’s adventures. “You, Caroline, and Chase are going to scout out the Rabid’s old house in Alpine Creek.”
I paused.
“Wilson’s house,” I corrected myself.
Samuel Wilson had been the Rabid in my mind for so long: the one, the only. Referring to him by name felt wrong, but with another killer on the loose, it seemed simpler—unless I wanted to give in and start referring to the current Rabid as Maddy.
She wasn’t the only one there when that boy was killed. I clung to that thought, seesawing back and forth between believing that Maddy had lost it and hoping that, despite appearances, she had not.
Chase had smelled something else at that house. A partner? An intruder? A demon plaguing her mind?
There’s no such thing as demons, I thought, but I could still see the Maddy of my dreams, sipping blood from a teacup. Six months ago, I would have sworn she wasn’t capable of murder. Two years ago, I would have told you with a straight face that there was no such thing as someone who could see the future or a woman who could control other people’s thoughts.
At this point, we really couldn’t rule anything out.
“See what you can find at the old house,” I told Lake, sticking to the task at hand and banishing the trip down memory lane until later. “Check the woods, too, but lie low.”
The last thing we needed was anyone from Alpine Creek recognizing that two of my three scouts had been there before.
“If Maddy’s there, call me. If you see anything, if you smell anything, if you even think you might remember something that could lead us to her, call me.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” Lake gave a lazy little salute, but the set of her jaw told me that she was glad to be doing something—and that she would have followed me straight to the ends of the earth if I’d asked her to.
“Where are you going?” Caroline announced her presence with a question. Unlike Lake, our human companion didn’t trust me to hand out orders.
“Me?” I asked, figuring that it served her right for eavesdropping.
“No, not you. The other insomniac mutt-lover in the vicinity.” The term mutt-lover should have made me angry, and it should have brought up bad memories, but instead, it sounded almost like a nickname. Caroline sounded almost human.
“Well, half-pint,” I said, matching her nickname/slur for nickname/slur, “I’m hoping Jed will take me to see an old friend.”
“And what old friend might that be?” Jed sounded only mildly put out that I’d already started breaking up the crew, when he’d been sent along specifically for adult supervision.
I took that as a good sign and turned around. “Do you keep in touch with the rest of the coven?” I asked him.
Jed mulled over the question, his stare telling me that there was only a fifty-fifty chance I’d get an answer. “Some, yes,” he said finally. “Some, no.”
Before Caroline’s psychotic mother had come along, married the coven’s leader, and had him killed, the group of psychics had lived together as a family. But under her influence, they’d done horrible things, and besides Caroline and Jed, who had stayed at the Wayfarer, the rest had scattered to the wind the moment Valerie’s psychic influence had worn off.
“Who exactly are you wanting me to take you to see?”
I gave Jed a stare of my own, one that I hoped told him that if he didn’t help me, I’d find some other way to do it on my own. And then I smiled in a way I hoped he would find at least a little bit endearing.
“Remember Archer?”
I didn’t know Archer’s last name. I wasn’t sure how old he was, or what he’d been doing in the months since I’d seen him last.
Right now I didn’t care.
He slid into the booth across from me. Jed had chosen our rendezvous point. The others had dropped us off, and calling this particular diner a dive would have been generous. Over in the corner, the old man dropped two quarters into an old-fashioned jukebox, leaving Archer and me some semblance of privacy.
I didn’t beat around the bush. We’d spent enough time coming here to meet him—with the clock ticking, there was no time to waste.
“You stalked me.” I opted for bluntness over charm. “You tormented me, you tried to burn me in my sleep, and unless my memory is mistaken, at one point when we were awake, you actually set me on fire.”
The Archer I’d known—the one who’d dogged my dreams and played mind games with me, literally—was caustic. He was half seduction, half sadist, and he hadn’t seen me as a person, because Valerie hadn’t wanted him to.
Caroline’s mother—Ali’s mother—had possessed a knack for manipulating other people’s emotions. She’d tempered Archer’s toward me with equal parts hatred, curiosity, and disgust.
But now he was just a guy—older than me, but younger than Ali—and I was the one playing with his emotions.
Specifically, his guilt.
“You didn’t come all of this way just to yell at me,” Archer said, though his tone suggested that he wouldn’t have had a problem with it if I had. “And if you’re trying to get me to say that I owe you, then you’re right.”
That was easier than I’d thought it would be.
“I need you to find someone for me,” I said.
“I don’t find people.” Archer fiddled with a sugar packet, flicking it back and forth over his index finger and his thumb.
“But you can find their dreams.” I didn’t wait for a reply. “You can talk to them. You can manipulate what they see. You can, if memory serves correctly, set them on fire—”
“You’re really not going to let that go, are you?” he asked. From the look on his face, I thought he might have been joking, but I wasn’t sure.
“I need you to find a specific person’s dreams,” I said.
“And then what do you need me to do?” Archer leaned back against the booth, his eyes dull, and I realized that he thought I was going to ask for something else, that I was going to use him the way Valerie had.
As a weapon.
“That’s it,” I said. “I just need you to find her dreams and tell me what you see. Talk to her, see if she’s okay, try to get her to tell you where she is.”
“Consider it done.” Archer looked like I’d challenged him to a game of chess. “Whose dreams am I finding?”
I told him and debated whether or not to mention the fact that we had no guarantee Maddy was the same person she’d been when she’d left the pack, and had every reason in the world to think that she wasn’t.
“If you can’t give me a general idea of where her body is, I’m going to need something that belongs to her. Clothing is best, or maybe a piece of her hair?”
Did he seriously think that I carried around an inventory of hair for every person in my pack?
I was saved from asking that question out loud by the telltale buzz of my phone against my hip. Withdrawing it from
SHE WAS HERE.
For a split second, I thought the universe—or possibly Shay—was taunting me with vague declarations about Maddy’s location, but then I realized that of the group I’d sent to Alpine Creek, Caroline was the only one not in danger of destroying a cell phone the moment she Shifted.
HOW LONG AGO DID SHE LEAVE? I typed back.
DON’T KNOW. The reply came almost immediately, and it was followed by an addendum, which set the phone to buzzing once more. LAKE SMELLS BLOOD.
Caroline and I were going to have to have a serious conversation about her texting habits. Seriously. “She was here”? “Lake smells blood”? These kinds of things merited a phone call.
Glancing back up at Archer, I noticed that he had a funny smile on his face. “I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen you actually look your age,” he told me.
Right. Because texting was so very teen.
Unsure whether he’d find me making a phone call equally amusing, I dialed Caroline’s number.
She answered on the third ring and cut right to the chase. “Maddy was here, but she’s not anymore. Lake smells blood. I want to go inside, but Chase and Lake seemed to think we should ask you first.”
Blood? Check.
Potentially rabid werewolf? Check.
Of course Caroline wanted to go inside.
“How far away from the house are you guys?” I asked, uncertain how close Lake would have had to get in order to pick up on the scent.
“We’re about a hundred yards out.”
My breath caught in my throat. At that distance, if Lake was smelling blood, it meant one of two things: either there was a lot of blood, or it was fresh.
“Archer,” I said.
“Yes?” His amusement seemed to have dwindled, based on the content of my conversation.
“Three questions,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers as I spoke. “One: do you have a car? Two: do you have plans tonight? And three: how fast can you drive?”