Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (13 page)

“I can finish this up on my own,” I told him. “I’ve been doing my own training for years.”

“And you’ve been slacking. You only push yourself so far, Bryn.”

I got a feeling that he wasn’t talking just about physical training. With the semester more than halfway done, I still had a B-plus in algebra when it wouldn’t have taken much effort on my part to get an A. I was close to Devon but didn’t bother with any of my other age-mates. If the “Tree of Life” wanted to look like a fire hydrant, I was willing to revisit the issue.

“If you start talking about college and life choices, I’m out of here,” I promised him. “And if you have something else to do and somewhere else to be, don’t let me keep you from it.”

I got a vibe from him then—a twinge in my pack-sense that felt like being pricked with a lukewarm needle.

“I’m here and you’ll deal with me, Bronwyn.”

I took his words as an indication that a warm pinprick meant that he was feeling rather testy.

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine.”

As Calllum and I fell into silence, the voices at the edge of my mind—whirring, whispering ghosts of a something—made themselves heard more clearly. The constant barrage of emotions, filtered through the bond and blurred like words shouted from the bottom of a swimming pool, exhausted me as much as the paces that Herr Callum was jollily putting me through.

Focus
, I told myself.
Focus on the here and the now. Focus on why you’re doing this
.

I focused on Chase.

It was funny. I’d only seen him once, and I couldn’t even picture his human face with any kind of certainty, but his wolf form and his voice were as clear in my memory as they would have been if I’d seen and heard them the second before.

I got bit
.

I got bit
.

I got bit
.

That was why I was doing this. I needed to know what had happened to Chase, and I needed to know what was being done about it.

I opened my mouth to ask Callum point-blank if there was a Rabid in his territory—where Chase had been attacked and who they thought had attacked him, but just as I was about to let loose with the inquisition, a third set of tracks joined ours.

Lance.

Through the bond, he felt solid and heavy, and there was the faintest whiff of vanilla and cedar in his scent.

“Hey, Lance,” I said.

Lance, of course, said nothing.

“Sorry about ditching you a couple of months ago,” I said, intent on getting a response out of him.

Nothing.
Nada
. He just kept pace with me and Callum, without ever saying a word. The air between us felt almost as empty, but there was just a hint of something. It was either disapproval or amusement. Or possibly both.

Look at Lance, with actual emotions
, I thought. And then it occurred to me that there was some chance he could hear me.

Can Lance hear my thoughts?
I asked Callum silently.

He can feel them, same as I can, but fainter. Unless you want him to hear you. Most pups have trouble speaking mind-to-mind in human form, but you seem to be rather proficient. I attribute it to your stubborn nature
.

“And stubbornness is my folly,” I said out loud, snickering at my own joke, which Callum and Lance clearly did not get.

After a small eternity, in which I made a few more comments that made equally little sense to my companions and in which Callum chided me on my form not once, not twice, but three times—
you’re slipping, Bronwyn Alessia. Stay on the balls of your feet
—Lance, Callum, and I came to a halt at the Crescent.

I bent over, hands on my knees, breathing hard. Maybe I was out of shape. Or maybe twelve miles was an inhuman (not to mention
inhumane
) distance to force someone to run. Either way, I wasn’t in the best shape for a fight. Not that Callum or Lance paid much attention to my obvious pain.

“Now,” Callum said, and Lance came at me, a wall of muscle and bulk. He wasn’t as graceful as Callum, but he was lighter on his feet than a man his size had any right to be, and unlike me, he hadn’t just abused both of his lungs in the cruelest of fashions.

Rather than move in the direction of his blow, diffusing its effectiveness, I followed my instincts and dropped to the ground entirely, his ham-shaped first missing me by a hairbreadth.

In a fight, gravity can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the odds stacked against me, I had to play nice with the elements. Unfortunately, dropping to the ground
put me in a sensitive position, and as Lance bent toward me—probably dead set on picking me up and throwing me like a discus—my weight wasn’t balanced enough across my body to give me any kind of flexibility in how to respond. From my crouched position, I could only go forward. And going forward meant going into Lance, which was something like driving a pickup into a steel wall.

So instead, I went through Lance. More specifically, I dove in between his legs. It would have been a beautiful move, too, but at the last second, I felt his feet snap together, snaring mine and leaving me entirely vulnerable.

“Bryn, to your feet. Lance, again.”

At Callum’s commands, Lance released me, and without a moment’s pause, he came for me again, exactly the same as he had the first time. The predictability of his move gave me a fraction longer to think about my response, but thinking at all was a mistake, and he caught me in the shoulder.

Use the bond
, Callum told me.
Feel his movements before they get there. Don’t think. Just do
.

“Again,” he said out loud.

This time, I managed to dodge Lance’s fist, and when he brought his other leg back around mine, I jumped and then caught the fist he sent flying toward my face, intent on turning the momentum against him. Which would have worked beautifully if I’d been a Were. But I wasn’t, and instead, the effort of stopping his fist put some major pain on my palm.

Don’t let the bond convince you that you’re one of us, Bryn. You’re human, no matter how like a Were you feel
.

“Again.”

Time after time, Lance threw blows at me, and I dodged them, playing to my strengths. I was fast, I was light, and I wasn’t afraid of playing dirty. I was small and flexible and—as Lance muttered at one point—completely insane. The bond let me predict his movements, but it did little for letting him track mine, because even
I
didn’t know what I was going to do next.

“Again.”

I was really beginning to hate that word. At this rate, I wouldn’t even get to shower before my first class. Impatient, I decided not to wait for Lance to come to me this time. I broke the first rule of Fighting with Werewolves 101. I attacked. And then, my common sense came back to me, and in the microsecond it took Lance to recover from an unexpected blow to a very sensitive region, I turned tail and ran, and I was up a tree before he managed to get ahold of me again.

“Good,” Callum said. I wonder if he noticed that I’d picked a taller tree this time. No way was Lance getting me off this branch with a well-aimed tackle. I waited for Callum to instruct us to begin again, but the word never came, and Lance looked up at me and smiled—or came as close to smiling as he ever did.

Then he nodded to Callum—a solemn half bow—and ran back off into the forest.

Callum looked up at me. “You’d best be getting to school. We’ll run again tonight,” he said. “And tomorrow, you’ll fight Sora.”

“When can I see Chase?” I asked.

“When you’re ready.”

“When will I be ready?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Do the words
straight answer
mean nothing to you?”

“Enough,” Callum said, in his “This is the Final Word” voice of authority. I half-expected the bond between us to shake with the alpha-ness of it all, but it didn’t. It was almost as if this tone—which I associated with Callum putting his foot down in the most intractable way possible—had nothing to do with Callum being the leader of our pack, and everything to do with him being Callum and me being me.

“There was nothing in my permissions about not asking questions,” I told him, feeling rather secure in my perch.

“And there was nothing in your request about ending your grounding,” Callum countered.

I narrowed my eyes. “That’s Ali’s decision, not yours.”

Callum didn’t reply, and it occurred to me that the expression on Ali’s face when she’d reamed me out about my illegal adventure into Callum’s basement had looked disturbingly similar to the look on the alpha’s face now.

Okay, so maybe it had been a joint decision. And maybe
the conditions of my permissions weren’t the only card that Callum had in his deck to hold over my head.

“Breakfast?” I asked, half as a peace offering and half to see if he’d take me up on the offer, or if he’d have other, more pressing pack business to deal with. “I could swing time for a Pop Tart if I skip out on my shower.”

A human probably would have found the notion disgusting, but Callum wasn’t human, and Weres didn’t much care about sweat. “You’d have more time to shower if you could knock yourself down from that seven-minute mile.” Callum’s lips turned up in a subtle, lupine smile and then he inclined his head slightly, accepting my invitation for breakfast. I let myself wonder, just for a second, if he was here for more than just training me. If I wasn’t the only one who remembered how much time the two of us had spent together when I was little.

“Are you coming, or do you intend to spend the entire day in a tree?”

The corners of his lips quirked upward, and I answered his question and his amusement by diving out of the tree, straight into his body, taking us both down to the ground.

Bit
.

Bit
.

I got bit
.

I reminded myself that this was what my training was about. It wasn’t about Callum and me. It wasn’t about the pack—there, still, in the corners of my mind. It was about
Chase. Chase and the Rabid, questions and answers. That was what mattered.

“You’re getting slow,” I told Callum.

He threw me back to my feet and was on his own an instant later, but his words belied the ease of that motion. “And you, little one, are getting big.”

CHAPTER TEN

T
HEY SAY NOT TO BRING A KNIFE TO A GUNFIGHT
. Extend the logic, and it’s probably not much of a stretch to say that you shouldn’t be relying on basic self-defense and martial-arts moves in an altercation with a werewolf. You should be bringing knives. And guns. And as much silver as you can physically carry.

Not all of the Weres I knew were allergic to silver—Devon wasn’t—but the old myths about silver bullets weren’t completely off base, either. Bullets had the potential to cause major problems, because accelerated healing increased the likelihood of a werewolf healing around a bullet, and having a piece of metal firmly embedded in one’s innards had a way of leading to malfunctions. Beyond that, a good 80 to 90 percent of Weres
were
allergic to silver, the same way that most humans had a bad reaction to poison ivy. At best, it caused a rash and discomfort. At worst, if the silver got into their bloodstream, it could kill them. In any case, unless you were fighting a silver-immune wolf, like Devon, it ended up evening the playing field
a little. They could kill you in an instant; you might, if you got lucky, be able to inflict some damage on them.

So I wasn’t overly surprised when, after weeks of sparring with a good dozen members of the pack, Callum changed up my training regime and gave me claws of my own. He’d taught me to throw knives around the same time I was learning to tie my shoes, so that was nothing new. My aim left a little to be desired—I could only hit a bull’s-eye about eight times in ten—but there was a decent amount of heat behind my throws, and if I could put enough distance between me and an opponent to make a long-range attack feasible, I stood a fighting chance of doing some damage—especially if the knife I was throwing happened to be made of silver.

Of course, werewolf communities didn’t exactly look kindly on humans who carried silver weapons, and Callum had made it clear from the time I hit my first bull’s-eye that unless I had very good reason to suspect that my life was in imminent danger, that particular alloy and any damage I might inflict with it were off-limits. Pack Law forbade werewolves from attacking humans, but humans who wielded silver weapons—or even carried them—were in a category of their own. The Senate was just as likely to put down a human intent on hunting Weres as vice versa.

So the fact that Callum had me practicing with knives and had actually mentioned the word
gun
in my presence was not altogether unexpected, but it was mildly disturbing
nonetheless, because for the first time, I got the sense that he really did think that my life was in danger, or that it might be in the future.

Which, of course, made me wonder if there was something about Chase I didn’t know.