Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (63 page)

I wanted to point out that unlike Casey, whose loyalties had
and would always lie with Callum, Chase would never have to choose between his alpha and me. I
was
his alpha. But Ali wasn’t done talking yet, and I didn’t interrupt her.

“You’ve seen the way Casey is when he visits, the way he still looks at me, the way he acts when Mitch and I are even in the same room.” Ali very deliberately did not elaborate on whether or not Casey had anything to be jealous about. “Whatever I had with Casey is over for me, Bryn, but for as long as I live, it won’t ever be over for Casey, and I have to deal with that. I’m a big girl. I can do it, but you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and you have no way of knowing what you’ll want five years from now, or ten. Maybe Chase is the one. Maybe he isn’t. But if you let things get intense now, there won’t ever be someone else for him, and you’re the one who’s going to have to deal with the consequences.”

I was beginning to suspect that I would have preferred Ali giving me the sex talk.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Ali. Chase isn’t like other Weres. He’s not possessive. He doesn’t expect me to bow down to anyone.”

She looked less than convinced.

“And besides,” I added, “as
intense
as things are, I have an entire pack inside my head. If it were just him and me, then maybe things would be going too fast, but they’re not.” I glanced out the window, unsure whether I wanted to say the next part out loud. “Before I was alpha, it was like the two
of us were the only people in the world, and now we’re not.”

Ali had the good grace not to look
too
relieved. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Bryn.”

“I know. And I wouldn’t trade the pack, not for anything.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and looped it over into a loose bun. “Chase wouldn’t ask me to—but seeing Lucas, hearing about everything he’s gone through, it makes me realize: I think I know more about Lucas’s past than I know about Chase’s.”

Maybe if it had been just Chase and me, we would have talked about his human life more, the way we did in the beginning, but the quiet moments, the ones where the rest of the pack just faded away, were so few and far between.

“People are allowed to have secrets, Bryn.” Ali’s tone was mild, but the words felt like a reproach. “Even from you.”

Ali looked like she was about to say something else, but instead, she killed the engine, and I realized we had made it to town.

Thank God.

I’d take a physical fight over Touchy-Feely Share Time, hands down. Hopefully, though, this wouldn’t come to an actual fight.

Assuming Ali’s intuitions about the coven were right, once we started making our way down Main Street, our targets would come to us. Based on my previous interactions with Archer and Caroline, it seemed likely that they’d stick to the
armistice Caroline had promised—but just barely. If they could get under my skin, mess with my mind, they would.

And then some.

As far as I was concerned, they could try, but I had no intention of letting myself be intimidated. Once they made the first move, I’d know how to counter. Whatever mind games they tried to play would tell me more about who they were and how they operated.

The Callum I knew wouldn’t have sent me here otherwise. I hadn’t seen him in months, hadn’t heard from him, but I trusted that.

Game on.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A
LIFETIME OF BEING TAUGHT TO WATCH MY BACK
made it hard for me to stroll down Main Street without thinking about all the ways I was leaving myself open for an attack. Growing up with people who could turn you into an afternoon snack had a way of giving you an unusual perspective on playing bait. I’d done it before—once—and the effort had ended with me knocked unconscious and tied to a chair in the home of a Rabid serial killer who liked to dress girls up in their Sunday best before making them bleed.

Suffice to say, I was hoping for a better outcome this time—especially since I didn’t have werewolf backup waiting just around the bend.

“Mind games,” Ali reminded me, her voice muted. “They’re all about the mind games.”

I was about to ask her why every time she made a statement about psychics, she sounded as straightforward and certain as Lake would have sounded talking about guns, but just as my mouth was about to form the words, I felt something—eyes
on the back of my head, a presence cast over me like a shadow.

Step. Step. Step.

The sound of feet treading lightly on concrete was unmistakable—soft, but perceptible to human ears. I glanced at Ali out of the corner of my eye, and she gave a slight nod. She heard it, too.

Step. Step. Step.

And then nothing.

I knew enough about hunting to know when I was being stalked. I also knew, with chilling certainty, that the silence wasn’t an indication that the person tailing us had dropped back. She’d wanted us to know she was there, and now she wanted us to know that she could disappear from our radar, that unless she willed it, we would never hear her coming at all.

Caroline
.

I kept myself from whirling around. If there was one thing I’d had pounded into my head from day one, it was the necessity of never letting fear show in my posture, the speed of my breath, the weight of my motions.

If this girl wanted to play mind games, I could play them right back.

“Aren’t you going to say hello?” I asked, voice casual, eyes pointed straight ahead.

“Hello.” Caroline spoke the word directly into my back. She was closer than I’d realized—too close—but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of reacting.

“Playing hooky?” I asked, forcing myself to continue facing forward, sending the message, loud and clear, that she wasn’t a threat worth facing head-on.

“Mental health day,” Caroline replied, her tone light, but lethal. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. You?”

I didn’t hear her shifting positions, didn’t catch even the slightest sound as she unsheathed a blade, but somehow—instinct, maybe, or my knack—I knew. I reached back and caught her hand seconds before she would have pressed the flat of her knife to my back, just to prove that she could.

“You should stick to throwing knives,” I said, tightening my grip and forcing the bones in her wrist together as I jerked upward and spun, bringing myself face-to-face with the blonde with the dead, dead eyes. “Perfect aim doesn’t really help you in hand-to-hand.”

For a moment, the potential for bloodshed—hers, mine—hung in the air between us, and the part of me that was alpha, the part that had grown up like a Were, wanted it. The coven had come here to my territory and threatened my pack. One of their females had come at me from behind.

That wasn’t the kind of thing I was wired to take sitting down.

“Bryn.” Ali’s voice was mild, but I nodded and dropped Caroline’s gloved wrist. We hadn’t come here to fight. We’d come for information, and so far, we hadn’t gotten much. In fact, the only thing I knew now that I hadn’t known before
this little melodrama had gone down was that I could take the coven’s pint-sized emissary in hand-to-hand—but if she’d had a weapon trained on me from afar …

“I’m Ali.” In a surprisingly gentle voice, my foster mother introduced herself to the girl who’d pulled a knife on me.

“Caroline,” the girl said shortly.

There was a moment of silence while the two of them appraised each other. Ali had several inches and sixteen years on Caroline, but for a split second, the two seemed disturbingly well matched.

“We didn’t know the wolf girl had human friends,” Caroline said.

Ali shrugged. “I didn’t know your coven was on good enough terms with the people in town to risk pulling a knife on someone in broad daylight—unless, of course, you have someone running interference, showing them something else.”

Caroline blinked once when Ali said the word
coven
and once when my foster mother called that Caroline probably hadn’t come here alone. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think that if Archer could enter my dreams, the coven might have someone who could make the rest of the people in town think they were seeing something they weren’t.

“You have no idea what you’re up against,” Caroline said, and for a second—a single second—she sounded almost sad. “Don’t tell me the two of you would die for one of
them
. Don’t
tell me they’re worth it. They’re monsters, and you know that, same as me.”

A reply was on the tip of my tongue, but before I could press Caroline to tell me how she could call my pack monsters, given what her coven had done to a battered teenage boy, a single note, haunting and low, made its way to my ears, and suddenly, whatever I was going to say didn’t seem nearly so important.

Caroline turning and walking away didn’t seem important.

Nothing did.

Objectively, I knew that another person might describe the sound as a whistle, compare it to the product of blowing a steady stream of air into a hand-carved woodwind. But to me, it wasn’t just a sound. It was a song.

It was paralyzing.

I knew what was happening, knew that there was a person making this sound, and that when she’d made it for Lucas, he hadn’t been able to move or scream or even care that he was being tortured.

I knew, I knew, I knew—and I didn’t care.

My hands fell to my sides. My lips parted slightly, the tension evaporating from my face and jaw. All my other senses receded, because nothing mattered as much as the sound.

The sound
.

On some level, I realized that Ali had gone still beside
me, her muscles as liquid and useless as mine. I saw people approaching, recognized Archer, noted the old woman standing beside him, looking every inch the storybook grandmother but for the snake coiled like a scarf around her neck. And then there was the third in their little trio, the one whistling that one-note song that snaked its way through my brain, around my limbs, in and out of my blood, my skin,
everything
.

Archer and the old woman closed in on me from either side, the snake slithering from Grandma’s neck down her shoulder, poised to strike.

For a second, a split second, the sound stopped as the woman who was whistling took a breath, and I had a moment of clarity, a moment when I could think and move and realize exactly how bad this situation was, before the sound started again.

A feeling, alien and familiar all at once, crackled through my body. The
sound
pushed back against it, willing me to relax, to forget, to just stand there and let the psychics have their way with me, but this time, I heard a lower sound, an older one, a whisper from the most ancient part of my mind, from my gut, from the core of what it meant to be me.

Threat, threat, threat
, it seemed to be saying.
Survive
.

My body was relaxed, my limbs frozen in place, but that single word was enough to free my mind. My vision blurred. Darkness began to close in from all sides, and even before I saw red, I tasted it, the color tinny and electric on my tongue.

This was what it meant to be Resilient. The taste, the color, the rush of adrenaline into my bloodstream. The fury and power and uncompromising need to
escape
. To
fight back
.

To
survive
.

Instinct took over. One second I was standing there, and the next, the roar inside me was deafening, drowning out anything my external senses had to offer. I leapt forward, the world colored in shades of black and blood, blood-red, and by the time I came fully back into myself, the sound had stopped, and everyone who wasn’t me and wasn’t Ali was on the ground.

I couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there, or what I’d done, but whatever it was must have sent a message, because as they climbed to their feet, the woman who’d been whistling kept her mouth closed, and the other two kept their distance.

“Easy there, mutt-lover. If we wanted to fight, you’d be dead right now.” Archer gave me a genial smile. Like he knew me. Like we were friends. “I’m not much of a fighter, but even I could have slid a knife between your ribs in the time it took you to fight off Bridget’s hold.”

Having said his piece, Archer glanced pointedly to his left, at the old woman, who was stroking her snake’s triangular head like it was a kitten. The suggestion was clear—if Grandma had wanted me dead, her pet could have seen to that just fine.

“You should know what you’re up against.” Bridget’s speaking voice was absurdly plain compared to the sound she’d made before. For some reason, that didn’t surprise me,
but the note of kindness in it did. “If we fight you, really fight you, there will be casualties on both sides, but we
will
win. Your people will fall, some of them”—she glanced at Ali—“without ever realizing there’s a battle they should be fighting.”

Bridget’s warning sank in.

Being Resilient meant being resistant to dominance and having a knack for escaping even the direst situations. If I could fight my way through Bridget’s hypnotic hold, chances were good that Chase, Maddy, and the other Resilients could do the same.