Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
“I’m losing it,” he said. “The pressure—it’s pulling me—he’s pushing me—”
Lake stepped into my peripheral vision, right next to Griff. I began counting down in my head.
Three, I thought, training my eyes back on Sora’s.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lake said from beside me, her words aimed at Griffin, not me.
Two, I thought.
“Lakie, I’m so sorry—”
One. I took a deep breath. The muscles in my arms tensed. I went to pull the trigger.
“Ow!”
I stopped.
“Bryn, please.” Sora’s voice was more insistent this time, less gentle, but I turned to look at Griffin.
“What did you say?” I asked, my voice catching like a sob in my throat. “You said ow,” I continued, my voice rising—high-pitched, desperate, loud. “You said ow. Why?”
Griffin stared at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. My fingers tightened around the barrel of the gun.
“Tell. Me. Why.”
“Lake hit me,” Griffin said.
“Of course I hit you! You think you can just blink out of existence, and I won’t even hit you?”
Lake had punched him, and he’d felt it. It had hurt.
I lowered the gun, my body shaking like it might never stop, my arm weak, my shoulder useless.
“She hit you,” I said dumbly, “and it hurt.” I didn’t wait to see the words register on their faces. Instead, I turned back to Sora.
Her eyes were sharp.
“You don’t know that it will work,” she told me.
“We don’t know that anything will,” I countered. “All we know is that up until five seconds ago, the only thing that had ever hurt Griffin was someone hurting Lake, and now it looks like she might be able to hurt him, too.”
Two Shadows couldn’t exist in the same place.
A Shadow was injured when you injured his living twin.
And—if Lake and Griffin were any kind of test case—the twin in question could fight the Shadow.
“Let him come,” I told Griffin, before turning back to Sora. There was no room for questions here, no room for doubt. I took the gun from my hand and transferred it to hers.
“You can fight him. You can win.”
Sora handed the gun back. Without a word, she began to strip off her shirt, and that was when I knew—she’d fight the Shadow, the way she’d fought her brother when he was alive.
As a wolf.
Her face was impossible to read. Her hands hung loose by her sides. The last thing she said to me, before she started to Shift, was five little words.
“Permission to enter your territory?”
Beside me, Lake dropped her hand from Griffin’s shoulder. She took a step back, masking her anguish with a broad and predatory smile. Griff closed his eyes, spread his hands out to the side, and stopped fighting.
The moment before he disappeared and everything went to hell in a handbasket, I gave Sora her response.
“Permission granted.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE SECOND GRIFFIN DISAPPEARED, THE REST OF us scattered like shrapnel. Behind me, I heard Sora Shifting: snap-snap-crunch-scream-snap. The sound was an unholy rhythm, a grossly melodic call to arms. My skin itched with the sound of it; my bones ached with the desire to shed my human flesh like unwanted clothes.
Opposite me, Chase tilted his head slightly sideways, the muscles in his neck straining against his human form.
Shift. Shift. Shift.
The call was there, in the air—but it wasn’t alone. There was another presence, just as feral, just as hard to deny.
He was here.
The humid summer air was thick with violence, thick with rage—everywhere, all around us.
Small room. No windows. No doors.
I called up the image, and power rose in my body, heat radiating outward from my stomach. The constant pain in my shoulder faded to mere memory, taking with it my limitations, my awareness of anything except my opponent.
I felt his presence like an actual shadow, blocking light from my eyes. I whirled around and stepped sideways, caught in an unthinking waltz.
I just had to survive until Sora finished Shifting.
I just had to keep him here until she could take him out.
Ghostly fingers stroked the back of my neck—human fingers. For now. I ducked out of their ice-cold grasp, exploding forward and away, adrenaline pumping through my body, my limbs tingling with an almost electric charge.
And then I saw him.
He must have wanted me to, must have chosen that moment to let me see his face. His hair was dark brown, a shade or two lighter than Sora’s. His eyes were darker than they’d been in life—so dark that the pupil bled into the iris, a single, inky orb.
He smiled.
“Hello, little Bryn.” He didn’t sound like a monster. He never had. “Still so beautiful. Still so strong.” He breathed in deeply through his nose and stepped forward. “Still mine.”
Seeing him made it easier to track his movements, but I held to my Resilient state, let it flow through my body, like water through a dam.
Fight. Fight. Fight.
“What do you think will happen,” the Shadow with Wilson’s face said slowly, “if I Change you now?”
The question sent a chill down the back of my neck, like a spider crawling down my spine. The chunk this thing had already taken out of my shoulder had numbed me, before it had hurt. This wasn’t a normal Were we were dealing with. If Wilson brought me to the brink of death and Changed me—the way Callum hadn’t, not yet—what manner of beast would I be?
No. I wouldn’t think about that. I wouldn’t think about anything, except the smell of death and clammy palms and the claustrophobic room in my head, where my nightmares lived.
Fear.
The Shadow stepped forward and then blurred. One second, he was ten feet away from me, the next, he was rubbing his cheek over mine. In a flash of black fur, Chase leapt for me, leapt for him, but Wilson disappeared.
“Nuh-uh-uh,” the monster said, his voice coming from all around us. “Can’t run, can’t hide.”
I felt him, felt his breath on my skin, felt him closing in.
“I should thank you,” he whispered, in stereo. “For killing me.”
I flew backward and hit a tree trunk. I absorbed the blow and rolled to my feet. I heard the sound of paws on the ground. I felt him leaping—
Thud.
A large wolf—tan fur, white markings, lethal—collided with the invisible predator midair. A high-pitched yelp turned into a growl as the two of them hit the ground, each grappling for control.
Sora was brutal, efficient. Fighting an invisible opponent, she was nothing but fangs and claws, beautiful, deadly grace. Blood, so dark it was nearly black, marked the white fur around her muzzle. Phantom teeth sunk into her flank, but she shook her assailant off violently and whirled around, jaws snapping, fur on end.
The air quivered, like the surface of a pond under an onslaught of skipping stones, and then Wilson appeared again.
This time, I doubted it was on purpose.
In wolf form, he was the creature I remembered from my nightmares. There was a white star on his forehead. His eyes were intelligent, his fur matted with blood. Suddenly, I didn’t have to work to hold on to the red haze.
It threatened to overwhelm me.
Escape. Have to—run—have to—
I reined it in, pulling the power inward, feeling it as a ball of fire in my chest. I wasn’t four years old anymore.
I wasn’t running.
Sora flew through the air again, mouth full of blood-marked teeth, death in her eyes. She grabbed him by the throat.
She pinned him.
His legs scrambled for purchase, but she slammed her body sideways, crushing his limbs under her weight. She met his eyes, his blood filling her mouth.
And then he Shifted—silently, effortlessly, as only a
He gargled.
For a second, they stared at each other—wolf and human, twins. I knew, beyond all rationale or reason, that she’d held him at this point before.
That she’d let him go.
I stopped breathing. She nudged his face with her nose. Licked his chin. And then, without warning, she lunged. Her teeth closed around his human neck. She bit down, until she hit bone, and then she jerked her head sideways.
His spine snapped.
His eyes lolled backward.
His head hung on by a thread.
I felt Sora begin to Shift before I heard it. In human form—naked, her body smeared with blood—she knelt next to him.
“Give me a knife.” Her voice was rough, her words short and sharp. I walked to her, knelt next to her, placed my knife in her hands.
She leaned forward, whispered something in his ear. Then, dark hair running free down her back, her lips ruby red with her brother’s blood, she drove the knife into his chest and cut out his heart.
His legs turned gray, then his torso, his arms, his face, until we were looking at a corpse. His eyes sank back in his skull; his body decomposed. The earth rumbled under our feet, and in an explosion of light—fireworks at midnight, the sun just after an eclipse—he was gone.
Sora collapsed backward on her knees, her body folding in on itself. The curve of her spine caught the last bit of twilight, and I could see heavy breaths wracking her body.
Fifteen, twenty seconds later, she rose. She walked calmly to her discarded clothes. She got dressed, and then she turned back to me.
“The message I gave you?” she said. “For Devon?”
I nodded.
She closed her eyes. “I’ll tell him myself.”
Belatedly, I remembered to let go of the little room, the panic, the fear—and the fight drained out of my body with it. I was so tired, exhausted—and I hadn’t even done anything.
“That’s the danger,” Jed said gruffly. “You stay there too long, you hold on too tight—it can kill you.”
Because what I really needed was to add more to the list of things that could kill me.
One by one, I surveyed our little group. We’d survived. All of us. But as I met Lake’s eyes, I realized something was wrong.
“Where’s Griffin?” I asked.
She didn’t respond, and I realized that he hadn’t come back. Wherever he went when he wasn’t here, wherever Wilson had sent him—he hadn’t come back.
“Bryn.” Sora—a clothed Sora—called my name from the Stone River side of the Montana-Wyoming border. I forced myself to tear my attention away from Lake, even as I felt her fighting a silent battle with herself—
Not to care.
Not to let it hurt this time.
Not to think about burying him again.
I staggered toward the border, turning my eyes and mind away from Lake, giving her what little privacy I could.
“Thank you,” I told Sora quietly, wondering if taking her twin’s heart had provoked in her some measure of what Lake was feeling now.
The bond between them had outlasted even death—and now he was gone. Really gone.
Sora inclined her head slightly, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge my thanks in any way. I waited for her to speak and wondered if there was something I was supposed to be saying.
Hallmark didn’t exactly make cards for occasions like this.
“You promised me,” Sora said finally, her voice dry and hoarse, “that when this was over, you would give Callum a chance to make things right.”
Apparently, the fact that she hadn’t died didn’t void that promise in her eyes, and that made me think—
“Make what right?”
There was another long silence.
“Make what right, Sora?”
She may not have been part of my pack, but I was an alpha, and that dominance was audible in every single syllable as it exited my mouth.
“Griff!” Lake’s voice broke into our standoff, and reluctantly, I tore my eyes from Sora’s in time to see Lake launch herself at newly reappeared Griffin. In a flurry of overly long limbs, her body collided with his, nearly bringing them both down. She wrapped her arms around his body and squeezed, hard enough to leave marks.
Anyone else’s hands would have passed through him, but not hers.
Never hers.
Griffin ran a hand through Lake’s hair and tweaked the end of her ponytail, a calming gesture and a familiar one. Then he pulled back. He untangled himself from Lake’s arms, extracted himself from her steely grip, and turned his attention to me—and by extension, to Sora.
“It’s Maddy,” he said.
The second I heard her name, my insides twisted—a portent of things to come.
“She’s in labor,” Griffin continued, sounding calmer than he looked. “I would have stayed with her, but I couldn’t. The baby—it made me—I felt it—I couldn’t be there.”
I nodded, like I understood, even though I didn’t. The only thing I was able to wrap my mind around was the fact that something was about to go down.
Something bigger than Maddy giving birth.
“Sora?” That was all I said—no elaboration, no pretense that what she was about to say might not rock me to my core. I waited for her to speak, feeling emptiness bubbling up inside of me instead of anger, exhaustion instead of fear.
I didn’t want to hate Devon’s mother again, didn’t want to look at her and see the bad things, instead of the good. She must not have wanted that, either, because she expelled a long breath and then started talking.
“What exactly did Callum tell you about Maddy?” she asked. “What did he tell you about the Senate?”
Callum had told me that Maddy might be rabid.
I’d discovered she wasn’t.
He’d told me that if Maddy wasn’t the killer, the Senate wouldn’t be able to enact the vote.
“He told me she was safe,” I said, realizing even as I said it that those words had never left his mouth.
He’d said that the Senate couldn’t enact the vote.
He’d said that they wouldn’t be able to cross into our land without permission.
He’d never said they wouldn’t come after her. He’d never said that she was safe.
“Maddy’s in No-Man’s-Land.” My thoughts went from my brain to my mouth with no filter. “And once you get there, No-Man’s-Land is fair game.”
The other alphas couldn’t cut through my territory to get to Maddy, but they might not have to. By definition, any slice of No-Man’s-Land fell between two territories—maybe more. Maddy’s cave was in the mountains, and the mountains were accessible from Cedar Ridge territory, from Shadow Bluff, and from Vallée de Glace in the North.
It might not be easy, but it was doable, and Callum had never said Maddy was safe. He’d just listened to me say it.
He’d let me believe it.
“Two other alphas have access to that mountain,” I said. “If they realize she’s there …”
Maddy had been hiding out in No-Man’s-Land for months—but this time, there was a trail of bodies, including one in Winchester, that could lead the other alphas straight to her door.
Looking at Sora’s poker face and seeing Callum’s, I knew suddenly that the Shadow Bluff alpha wasn’t the problem, and neither were our neighbors to the north. Shay had called the Senate meeting. He was the one who’d been building alliances.
“He’s coming for her,” I said. “Shay got passage—from Shadow Bluff or the northern packs, from someone who has access to that mountain.”
And Callum knew.
This had nothing to do with the Shadows. Callum’s ability to sort through possible futures would have been operating full force. He’d seen this coming. He’d known Shay might come after Maddy, and he hadn’t said a word.
“Callum has his reasons,” S
This was what Callum did, who he was. He played God. He played me. He let bad things happen.
You need to be human for this.
I’m sorry, he’d said. For something that might happen and might not.
I swallowed down the words that wanted to come and instead gave Sora a small, flippant nod.
“Thanks for the heads-up.” My words came out sounding tired, not sarcastic.
Damn it. I didn’t have time to be tired. I didn’t have time to celebrate Wilson’s permanent death, to sob with the memory of holding a gun to Sora’s head, to rail against Callum for playing with us like we were dolls.
I stuffed my feelings back in their little steel box, and I turned to the others: to Lake, who hadn’t taken her eyes off Griffin, to Chase, still in wolf form. I turned to Jed and Caroline, both ready to fight at a moment’s notice.
“Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY. IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY. I didn’t bother blocking my thoughts off from the others—to the point where I wasn’t sure whether my silent mantra, as we climbed the mountain, was for my benefit or theirs.
We would get to Maddy in time, and even if we didn’t, I had to trust that she could hold her own. Shay wouldn’t physically harm her—she was too valuable, the baby was too valuable.
Shay would try to claim her. He’d dig his fingernails into her skin and try to force his mind into hers, instating a bond that would tie her to the Snake Bend Pack.
To him.
But Maddy was Resilient. She could fight him. She could resist.
I just had to hope that she would be able to hold on until I got there, that giving birth wouldn’t have taken too much out of her. I had to trust that, push come to shove, her survival instinct—and her instincts as a mother—would be enough.
It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.
We were getting close. I nodded to Chase and Lake, let them go. Faster than my human eyes could track them, they ran.