Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“I loved him, Bryn. I would have died for him, and he—” She took in a sharp breath, her grip on her stomach tightening. “I still loved him.” Those words held the weight of a confession. “Even afterward. Even after he—”
She couldn’t say the words.
I knew then with haunting prescience that the moment when Lucas had challenged me and I’d faced down the challenge would always be between the two of us. We would never get past it. I would always think of it when I looked at Maddy, and she would always think of it when she looked at me.
It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t betrayal, it wasn’t even hurt—but that unnameable emotion, that burden might lighten in time, but it would never really go away. Not because we couldn’t forgive each other—we had.
Things would never be simple with Maddy and me because neither one of us would ever fully forgive ourselves.
“This isn’t your fault.” I brought the conversation back to the present, back to a place where I might be able to make a difference and chip away at her guilt. “This Shadow is playing with you. It’s torturing you.”
“I let it do this,” Maddy said. “Somehow, being near me—”
“No.” I wracked my mind for something I could say, something that would smell true to her nose. “There was another murder, in Missouri, just north of the Arkansas state line. The Senate thought it was the work of the same Rabid.”
Or at least, some of them had.
“You’re not making this thing kill, Maddy. It’s following you because it can.” I could feel myself coming close to something I didn’t want to say out loud. “It wants you to feel like this is your fault. It wants your pain.”
Maddy’s eyes flickered with uncertainty, then horror, then the barest hint of recognition. She knew firsthand what it was like to live with someone who got pleasure out of other people’s pain.
“Don’t give this thing what it wants.” There was an alien depth to the emotion in those words—one I heard, even as I was saying them. Maddy heard it, too, and she heard the wealth of things I wasn’t saying.
Understanding shone in her eyes, then hardened into something else.
She knew.
Beside me, I could feel Chase’s mulling over the fact that something had passed between Maddy and me—something unspeakable. Across the room, Lake looked severely tempted to beat the answer out of me with the butt of her gun.
My cell phone rang, breaking the tension in the room. I knew before I answered it that it was Devon. The ring tone—the theme song from Moulin Rouge!—was a big tip-off.
“Remind me never to leave you alone with my cell phone again,” I said, answering on the second ring.
“Hello to you, too.”
“What have you got?” I asked. It would have been better if we’d been able to have this conversation silently, but the farther away the two of us got from each other, the fainter the connection. We’d been able to connect in our dreams, but it would be more difficult now that we were both awake, and this was one of those times when I needed to hear every single word—even if that meant that Lake, Chase, and Maddy would hear them, too.
“As soon as I woke up—and assured Ali that you would be fine, for which you owe me a day at the spa, at the very least—I went to find Mitch.”
I wasn’t sure how old Mitch was, but he was by far the oldest person in our pack—and the only one likely to have the answers I’d asked Devon to find.
“I caught him near Keely.”
“Devious,” I commented. Keely was the bartender at the Wayfarer. Like me, she had a psychic knack, but hers was for making people spill their secrets. If Mitch knew the answer to Devon’s questions, Devon would have gotten it out of him, just by virtue of Keely being in the room.
“You were right. Mitch says Samuel Wilson did have a twin.”
Chase didn’t respond in any visible way to Devon’s bombshell. Maddy looked down. Lake reared back. Of the three Weres in this room, she was the only one who seemed truly surprised.
The rest of us knew too much about the monster, firsthand. Even in death, he’d never let us go.
Later, I told myself. Later, I could process this. Later, I could think about what it meant, but right now I needed one more piece of information.
“I need to know what pack Wilson was born in.”
While male Weres sometimes transferred packs, females usually stayed in their natal pack until they died. If we knew which pack Wilson was born in, there was a good chance we’d be able to find his living twin. If Griffin was right, if his only real weakness was Lake, finding this monster’s twin was the first step toward identifying his Achilles heel.
“I suspected you might need that information.” Devon’s voice was too light, too calm. He was playing a part, and I had no idea why. “I asked Mitch that very question.”
“And?”
Devon cleared his throat. “Samuel Wilson,” he said, in that same, unnatural tone, “was born a member of the Stone River Pack.”
I had to remind myself to keep breathing. I fought the urge to gasp.
The Rabid who’d killed my parents had been born as one of Callum’s wolves. That revelation alone would have been a bombshell, but the implications were far, far worse.
At one point in time, Callum’s pack had counted among its numbers three female Weres, but now that Katie and Lake were in my pack, Stone River only had one.
“Devon.” I said my friend’s name and then swallowed hard.
No wonder he sounded so off.
The only female in Callum’s pack old enough to be Wilson’s twin was Sora.
Devon’s mother.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I HUNG UP THE PHONE WITH DEVON AND SUNK BACK onto the stiff motel bed. Callum had to have known, back when we were hunting Wilson, that he was Sora’s twin.
Sora had to have known.
To catch a Rabid, you have to think like a Rabid.
Had she been talking about her brother?
Unwittingly, my mind flashed back to the day Callum had found me hiding under the kitchen sink in an old house I barely remembered—the day I’d seen a rabid werewolf kill my parents like they were nothing more than meat. Sora had been part of the cavalry that had come with Callum to rescue me. She’d been the one who Shifted, the one who leapt for the monster’s throat.
The two had grappled.
Flashes of fur. White, gleaming fangs.
My memory was piecemeal, at best, but the images were there, and they were hard to shake. The Rabid had gone out the window, and Sora had followed. The monster should have died that night. We’d attributed the fact that he hadn’t to his knack—a perfect match for my own. But maybe Wilson’s survival hadn’t just been a combination of Resilience and luck.
Maybe Sora had let him go.
Not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t stick around to watch him die, knowing that she’d been the cause.
Now, he was back, and the only thing we knew of that might hurt a Shadow was attacking its twin. I hadn’t wanted to think about the implication of that when I’d believed Griffin might be the killer, and I certainly didn’t want to think about it now. For better or worse, after everything we’d been through, Sora was still Devon’s mother.
My Devon’s.
Hurting Lake hurts Griffin. I didn’t want to take that line of reasoning one step further.
To kill a shadow …
No.
I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t let the thought form in my head. I couldn’t let it be true.
There had to be another way.
Numb, except for the constant throb of my shoulder, I looked back down at my phone. Slowly, painfully, I dialed Callum’s number.
He answered on the first ring.
“Bryn?”
I could tell by the way he’d said my name that until I’d called, he hadn’t been sure that I’d made it. If Shadows really did interfere with his knack, he might not have seen the outcome of the last attack, or the way
“I’m fine,” I said. Chase made a snuffing sound under his breath, and I amended my statement. “Mostly fine.”
“What happened?”
I don’t know what possessed me to reply the way I did, but the only words I could seem to manage were: “I got bit.”
A manageable bite, like this one, wasn’t enough to Change a person. Even if it had been, there was no way of knowing if a Shadow could do that kind of thing at all—and still, the only response I could muster was the same phrase Chase had said to me when I’d learned it was possible for someone to be born human and Changed into a Were.
“You got bit,” Callum repeated, using a tone that I recognized well as the calm before the storm.
“I’m fine,” I said, cutting his temper off at the pass. He rarely lost it, but right now none of us had the time to deal with the fallout if he did. “Jed stitched me back together. Pain sucks, but it’s manageable.” I let out a half laugh, short and harsh. “Just call it practice.”
The change in the room around me was immediate, and I realized I’d said that last bit out loud.
Practice? Lake said. Practice for what?
Chase didn’t ask, and I realized that he knew the answer—maybe he had always known the answer.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Samuel Wilson had a twin?” I turned my focus back to Callum, hoping that it would provide sufficient distraction for Lake. “That it was Sora?”
I wanted him to tell me that I was mistaken, that Sora wasn’t this monster’s twin, that I had it all wrong. I willed him to say that. I prayed.
“When?” Callum asked. “When would you have had me tell you? When we rescued you? When you latched on to Devon and he on to you? When Samuel resurfaced, and we realized he’d never stopped killing? When the kids in your pack killed him?”
Would I have wanted to know? I couldn’t help asking myself the question. If it hadn’t been for whatever happened that full moon, with Maddy and the baby, if the Shadows hadn’t come back—would I have wanted to know that the Big Bad Wolf was Devon’s uncle? That my second family in Callum’s pack had been his family, too?
“Once you realized we were dealing with a Shadow,” I said, neatly cutting those questions out of the equation. “Two hours ago, when we were on the phone, and you knew that a Shadow was stalking Maddy, why didn’t you tell me then?”
“Had we not gotten cut off, I would have.”
I believed him—not because he wouldn’t hide key information from me, but because we were dealing with an enemy whose actions he couldn’t foresee. If he’d had a line on the future, Callum would have had no qualms about withholding information, but I didn’t think he’d play fast and loose with my life, not when he had no way of knowing how that might turn out.
This particular Rabid had died obsessed with the idea of Changing me.
“He and Griffin can’t be at the same place at the same time.” I leaned back against the wall, wincing as my shoulder protested the movement. “If Griffin hadn’t broken back through when he did, I’d be dead. And if Wilson isn’t tied to Maddy, if he’s playing with her because he can and not because he has to, there’s no limit on where or who he might have killed.”
I could see the victims in my mind, their corpses lined up like paper dolls. The boy in the cabin. The girl in Winchester. The unidentifiable mass of skin and blood and bones in Missouri.
How many victims had we’d missed? How many more would there be if we didn’t find a way to stop this thing? In life, Samuel Wilson had been the worst kind of monster. He hadn’t just attacked teenagers. He’d killed children.
And now he was bullet proof.
“This is just the beginning.” I tried to stay calm. I tried to be rational. “Sooner or later, he’ll find a way to push Griffin out. He’ll come to finish the job, and then—”
The corpses in my mind multiplied, stacks upon stacks of bodies. Little bodies. The Shadow would kill me, and then he’d move on—to Caroline and Jed, Chase and Lake. To humans who never stood a chance. To children.
There was nothing we could do to fight back. Nothing.
To kill a Shadow …
I couldn’t afford to follow that thought to completion. In my mind, I saw Devon’s face. I saw his smile, the way he could look utterly ridiculous one minute and like a lethal fighter the next. I saw Sora, who had his eyes, but none of his humor.
No.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Sora was this monster’s twin. It wasn’t fair that stopping him should fall to us. But most of all, it wasn’t fair that being alpha had turned me into the kind of person who could think the unthinkable.
I didn’t want to be that person.
“We don’t know how to kill him, Callum.” I swallowed, hard. “All we have is a theory.”
What we had wasn’t a theory. It was unspeakable. And there I was, saying the words.
“Now that he’s tasted my blood, he’ll be hungry for more. He’ll kill me, but it won’t stop there.” I paused, wishing that my life was the only one on the line, that this was my sacrifice to make. “It won’t ever stop.”
“No.” Callum wasn’t telling me I was wrong about this monster. He was saying what the voice in my head kept saying, over and over again.
No. No. No.
“Tell me there’s another way,” I pleaded. “Tell me there’s something I can do, somewhere I can go to look for answers. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Callum didn’t say a word.
“Tell me.”
Nothing.
“We have no way of fighting back,” I whispered. “Once he gets done with us, who’s next? Ali? The twins? Human children who don’t understand that monsters are real, any more than I did, cowering underneath that sink?”
Even if there were another option, another way of fighting back, there was no guarantee that we would find it in time—and while we looked, more people would die.
No matter what I did, people always died.
“You do not know what you are asking, Bronwyn.”
For the first time, Callum’s use of my full first name didn’t affect me at all. I knew exactly what I was saying, and he was the one who’d raised me to be the kind of person who could say it.
“Sora’s his twin, Callum. He’s a Shadow because he’s shadowing her. She’s his link to this world.”
Get rid of the link, get rid of the Shadow. I wanted him to tell me there was a flaw in my logic. I wanted to be wrong.
“You’ll hold the knife, then?” Callum asked. “You’ll look into Sora’s eyes and cut out her heart?”
Devon had his mother’s eyes.
The temperature in the room around me seemed to drop ten degrees. My face felt clammy and flushed. The brutality of what I was suggesting hit me full force.
To kill the Shadow, we might have to kill Sora. Sora, who’d bandaged my cuts and fed me cookies when I was a kid. Sora, who’d taught me to use a slingshot. Sora, who for better or worse, was one of Callum’s most trusted soldiers.
Devon’s mom.
“I’ll have no part of this,” Callum said. “If you’re certain it’s the only way, you’ll do it yourself.”
I hadn’t expected this from him, hadn’t imagined he would put this decision in my hands. Sora was his wolf. At one point in time, our killer had been, too. Everything Callum had done in the past few years had been aimed at protecting me, shaping me. But this?
This wasn’t a choice the Callum I knew would ever have put in my hands. I still dreamed about Lucas, still thought about him, still felt the weight of snuffing out his life, and that had been self-defense. He’d been a danger to the pack, a loose cannon, and he was the one who’d challenged me.
But Sora wasn’t a danger. She wasn’t evil. This wasn’t self-defense. This was me, sitting on a ratty bed in a motel room, thinking about sacrificing her life
This was me, talking about murder like it was an option.
“I don’t know what else to do,” I said.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, and I waited for him to say something to make this—any of it—better.
“What would you do if it were Lake?” Callum asked finally. Something in his tone made me feel like, this time, he was looking for something from me—absolution, understanding? I wasn’t sure which.
“If it were Griffin that was the killer, and the only way to kill him was to kill Lake, what would you do?”
I’d thought that Griffin might be the killer, but I’d never let myself follow that thought to completion, because the idea of hurting Lake, sacrificing Lake—I couldn’t have done it.
Could I?
That was the position I’d put Callum in. He was so old, so powerful that it was easy to forget that he had emotions, that his pack mattered to him, that there were people—other than me—who he loved.
“Three hundred years,” Callum said softly. “She’s fought by my side for three hundred years, Bryn. I wouldn’t see her dead on a theory, and neither would you.”
Three hundred years? Sora had been a part of Callum’s life longer than the United States had been a country, longer than any human would ever live.
And still, if it wasn’t just a theory, if he were sure that this would work and there was no other way—he would have done it. That was what it meant to be alpha.
That was what I was becoming, even now.
“You wouldn’t have to.” Lake came to stand next to the bed, and I realized she was talking to Callum as much as to me. “If it were Griff doing the killing, if we thought me dying might make a whit of difference, Bryn, you wouldn’t have to kill me.”
I read between the lines to what Lake wasn’t saying.
If it had been her, if her death was the way to stop the monster, she would have killed herself.
“This isn’t your choice,” Lake told me. “It’s not his,” she continued, jerking her head toward the phone. “You two don’t just get to sit there and talk it out and decide that she lives, no matter how many other people have to die. You don’t get to keep this from her.”