Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (12 page)

Bryn
. The echo was calming this time, but closer—under my skin instead of on top of it—and I shuddered, but pushed forward.

I took the things that were most me, the secrets I guarded most dearly, the dreams I’d see die before I revealed them, and I folded them into a tiny ball, tucking them away in my heart, in a place that went deeper than words or fears or emotions. I pictured that ball—a tiny sphere of light—and I promised myself that it would still be intact when I came back to retrieve it, that I’d still be me when all was said and done. If Callum
saw what I was doing, his amber eyes gave no hint of that knowledge, and I heard his voice in my head again.

Bryn
.

Giving in to its hypnotic call, I went back in the maze of my mind as far as I could remember, to the last time I’d stood before this Crescent, four years old and following Callum’s edict to look at him, only at him, as he Marked me as his own. Ali had stood beside me then, all of twenty-one, and I wondered if she’d felt the way that I felt now. If she’d let them violate her for my sake.

And then I raised my eyes to Callum’s, just as I had then, and I told him, with every part of myself, that I was his. That I was Pack. And that, for the first time since I’d learned to close myself off from the overwhelming will of the pack, I was really theirs, too.

Communal awareness came at me from all sides, like a wave knocking me off my feet and down into the undertow. My first instinct was to fight it, to run, to slam my mental walls back up ten times stronger than they’d been before, but they pulled at me, my pack-mates—their minds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Their togetherness. Their
wolves
. And even though I didn’t have another creature inside of me to respond to theirs, my body seemed completely unaware of this fact. I needed to be with them. Closer to them. Among them.

I needed to be Pack.

On some level, I knew that this was the hardest thing, the worst thing about letting them in—I had no guarantee that I’d ever be able to get rid of them, because I had no guarantee that I would ever want to. The life I’d been living was no less than sensory deprivation.

Callum’s hand was on my neck again, and I leaned into it.

Safety. Warmth. Alpha
, my pack-sense told me.

Callum. Here. Mine
. And then, one by one, the others came forward, placing a hand on me, touching me softly. It should have been creepy. I should have been giving lectures about my bubble and the fact that I despised having anyone stand inside it, but I wasn’t.

Instead, all I could think was that for the first time in forever, Callum wasn’t the only person who felt safe. He wasn’t the only one I could trust to protect me, to save me, to let me be me, even when it caused him no small amount of strife.

This was my family. Even the ones I didn’t like, even the ones who’d wanted me dead for as long as they’d known me—they were mine the same way Katie and Alex were. We were part of each other, and even if there was no love between us, there was something.

Pack
.

I felt the change before I saw it—electrifying on my skin’s surface, but world-changing inside of it. I could feel myself changing—not into a wolf but into the person I was in the pack. A daughter. A sister. A force of nature.

Their strength flowed through me. I couldn’t force my human limbs to harness the power of their wolves, but I felt it, and for the first time in forever, it didn’t scare me.

Callum arched his back, and with that single motion, his human form melted away, the transition from man to wolf as seamless as water going from a cup to a puddle on the floor. His fur was gray and tawny-tipped, and he stretched once, pushing his front paws into the ground and raising his tail, before straightening to his full height.

As a man, Callum was built more like a cowboy than a linebacker, threatening only if you knew how much power lay under his skin, but in animal form, his weight rearranged itself into something that took your breath away. No one, under any circumstances, would have mistaken Callum for a natural wolf. He was enormous, and with a wolfy smile on his face, he looked directly at me.

“Arrroooooooooo!”

That sound—which I classified as halfway in between a howl and a Justin Timberlake solo—had me whirling around. Devon! He was larger than a normal Were, nearly Callum’s size and not even full-grown. There was a Herculean grace to his movements, a lightness to his four-legged step.

My
Devon.

He jumped up and knocked me gently over, and a second later, the two of us were rolling around on the ground, the way we had when we were still really little. He took care with his
claws and teeth, and I dug my fingers into his belly, tickling and scratching, and when he buried his nose in my hair and
woofed
slightly, breathing in and out next to my ear, I smiled.

And then Kaitlin was there, barreling toward me at full speed. She dodged through the older wolves, and they carefully stepped aside, each and every gaze on her, their heads tilting to the sides with wolfish reverence.

Kaitlin dove headfirst into our wrestling match, and I wrapped my arms around her, lifting her puppy body up into the air and then bringing her down and rubbing my nose into her fur. She lapped at my face, and her tail beat viciously back and forth, so fast that her entire body was vibrating.

Girl!
She seemed to say.
Sister! Pack! Bryn!

The combination of these things seemed to be more than she could bear, and I let her prance up and down my body, until she lost her balance and rolled head-over-tail to the ground. The other wolves went deadly still beside me, but Katie bounced straight back up and with a dignified yip, brought Alexander down upon me as well. Struggling to keep up with his sister, he bounded over and immediately latched his teeth onto my pants leg and started tugging.

Katie was a wrestler, but Alex—I knew instinctively—wanted to run.

I
wanted to run.

But I couldn’t. Not yet.
Alpha. Alpha. Alpha
, my pack-sense was telling me, and in unison, Katie, Alex, Dev, and I turned to
Callum, who threw back his head and howled, a long, joyous noise that the others echoed.

That
I
echoed in my high, clear human voice.

And then we ran. Furry bodies all around me, bumping into me, weaving in and out of my legs, and I just jumped over them. I cried out to them. I sang and screamed and tried to outrun them, and even though I stood about as good a chance as one of the babies, they let me. Gray and gold and brown and white and black and every shade in between: the pack was a blur of colors, and even though I couldn’t help but pick up on their awareness of my pale, patchy, furless skin, it didn’t matter. Not to me and not to them.

Any one of them—save perhaps for the twins—could have killed me in a heartbeat. They could have broken my bones, snapped my neck, opened my jugular. They could have eaten me, destroyed me, torn apart my remains.

But they didn’t. And the call of my connection to them was so strong that I didn’t even think about the other wolves I’d seen in my lifetime: men Shifting into monsters, jaws snapping at human throats.

Instead, I thought of the wind in my face and the smell and taste of the forest, the feel of it under my brothers’ paws.

The pack was safe.

The pack was together.

The pack was
mine
.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I
WOKE UP AN HOUR BEFORE MY
alarm went off with a cramp in my calf, leaves in my hair, and a strange substance that I desperately hoped was dirt under my fingernails. It took me a moment to remember, and then the night before came back to me like a dream. I’d felt powerful. Invincible. Safe.

And totally and completely unlike myself.

It was scary how easy it was to get lost to the pack-mentality. How right it felt to belong, despite the fact that belonging wasn’t something I’d ever needed before. At school, I didn’t really mind the way the other girls turned up their noses at me. I’d never really bothered much more with the fact that most of the pack tended to view me as Other, too. Unless they sensed an outside threat, I was Callum’s pet and Devon’s friend, not one of them, and that was fine.

But last night, I’d been something different. And even now, lying in my bed in Ali’s house, I could feel them—each
and every member of the pack: Devon curled at the bottom of his bed; Marcus prowling through his house with clenched fists and fist-shaped holes in his walls; Katie and Alex still asleep. Casey was …

Casey was in bed with Ali. And that was where I drew the line. Because,
eww
.

This whole pack-bond thing was kind of out of control. Especially if I followed the logic of my current situation to completion, because that told me that as much as I was in their heads, they were in mine.

Stupid werewolves.

Still in bed, Bryn
?

Callum’s voice was in my head, not surprising given the fact that he’d practically been there before I’d opened up to the others.

Are you reading my mind?
I asked him point-blank, ignoring his question and the fact that I was probably due to start training any minute.

Your thoughts are your own, m’dear. Your emotions, physical movements, location, and instincts are another matter
.

My
instinct
was to tell him that he blew. Trusting that he’d pick up on that little psychic tidbit, I rolled out of bed and stumbled to my closet, unsteady and wobbly on my feet. I felt like I’d run a marathon. Through a vat of cement. With weights on my legs.

The night before, I’d been too drunk on power to listen to
any objections my body might have had about the pace I’d kept. Today, however, each and every complaint was registering loud and clear.

We’ll start with a morning run, I think. You’ve a bit of time before the school day starts
.

I was sure that it wasn’t just my imagination. There was some self-satisfied amusement in Callum’s mind-voice. Didn’t he realize it was Monday morning and that being up at this hour was almost certainly a crime against God and man? I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to project my thoughts back to him in words—for all I knew, that might be an alpha-only skill, but I thought I’d give it a try.

Sadist
.

His response came to me in colors and feelings, rather than words, but I got the message clear enough. He was laughing at me. Chuckling, in a fond kind of way.

I pushed at him—not to close off the bond but to shove him out of my head, or as far to the corners of it as he would go. He stayed for a moment, his presence taking over so much of my mind that I couldn’t move. After making his point, he retreated.

Stupid werewolves and their stupid dominance maneuvers. It was bad enough dealing with them every day when it came to external conflict. The last thing I needed was people marking territory
inside
my head.

Without even thinking about it, I sent Callum an image of
a dog hiking his leg at a fire hydrant. And then one of a rebel flag from the Revolutionary War.

Callum didn’t respond in my head, but I knew he’d gotten the message, because he met me at the front door, and the first thing he said, with a single arch of his eyebrow, was, “Don’t tread on you?”

“More like ‘don’t metaphorically pee on my brainwaves,’ but it’s the same sentiment, really.”

“Vulgarity does not become you, Bryn.”

“Are you going to lecture, or are we going to run?”

He sighed, and I didn’t need a bond with the pack to see that he was thinking that I had always, always been a difficult child. And then, just in case that point wasn’t clear, he verbalized it. “You have always, always been a difficult child.”

I smiled sweetly. “I try.”

He jerked his head to the side and I nodded, and together, the two of us took off jogging. We followed the path for about a half mile, and then Callum veered off into the woods and jacked up his pace. I worked to keep up with him, even once we’d finished a five-mile loop and he started us back through again.

“Not bad for an old man,” I told him, even though I was winded and knew he could continue on like this indefinitely.

“Brat,” he returned, his tone completely conversational.

It had been a long time since the two of us had spent time
like this: one on one, without him swooping in to lecture me about something or make some grand declaration about my life and future in his territory. When I was really little, we’d done this a lot more. He’d taught me to fight. Every day, we went running, and when I’d wipe out at the end, he’d carried me on his back. And then I got older, and the times like this one had been fewer and further between. He’d taken a step back. Left me to Ali. Spent most of his time on pack business that I had no part in.

I didn’t want to admit that it hurt that I’d had to open up the bond to bring that Callum back to me. Was this even real? If he spent time with me because we were more connected now, or because of the conditions he’d set down, did it mean anything? Or was I just another chore, the alpha doing his duty by the pack, bratty little human girl and all?