Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (14 page)

“All right, Devon. I want you to put Bryn in a choke hold.”

Those weren’t words I was particularly fond of hearing, but as Devon complied, Callum’s instructions to me proved even less welcome. “Bryn, I want you to break his hold and go in with the knife. You want to exact maximum damage in the short-term—disable him, but don’t inflict permanent injury.”

There wasn’t much I could do with a knife—silver or not—to permanently damage Dev, but still, there were two kinds of people in the world: people who liked making their best friends bleed and people who did not. I fell into the latter classification.

“It’s okay. Hurt me you will not, young Bronwyn.”

“You do a terrible Yoda, Dev.”

Even though the exchange between us was light and familiar, our bond to each other—and the rest of the pack—told me that neither one of us was comfortable with this. If the two of us had been inseparable before I’d opened my bond, there were times when I felt like we were practically the same person now. All of Callum’s wolves lurked in the recesses of my brain, their eyes tracking my movements wherever I went. But even as our age-mates pulled closer to me for the first time in memory,
Devon stood as a barrier between us—a Slab of Werewolf, every bit as intimidating and significantly less silent than his dad.

Devon didn’t want to hurt me. His wolf gnashed its teeth at the very idea, and for a split second, my pack-sense surged, and it was almost like Devon’s beast was talking to me. Or something inside of me.

Females, it seemed to be saying, were supposed to be
protected
. Pups were to be
cherished
. The girl was
his
, and he did
not
want to be laying hands on her. He did
not
want to fight her.

Yeah, well, I’m not so hot at the idea of fighting you, either
, I thought in Devon’s direction. His head flicked forward, and I wondered how clearly my words had come through. It was weird. I’d been talking to his wolf instincts, not his conscious mind, but both parts seemed to understand me just fine.

“Well, children?” Callum prodded.

Devon slumped slightly, in a show of submission, and then followed Callum’s directives to a T. He put one arm around my neck, and though he couldn’t have been using even a measure of full strength, his grip was like steel. Since I’d spent the better half of the past week being drilled on effective escape maneuvers, my body responded immediately, twisting my legs to the side and using the firmness of Devon’s grip to hold up my body as my right leg scissored up to kick him in the side of the face. His other arm went to grab my leg, but the movement gave me a window during which to butt my head into his elbow and flip out of his grasp.

Like lightning, I had a knife in each hand, and as Devon came at me—a blur of popped collars and freshly ironed designer jeans—I settled my arms into an
X
over my chest, with every intention of thrusting them outward in a
V
, slicing through his clothes and into his flesh.

But even the best-laid plans go astray.

Logically, I knew that Devon would heal—within an hour, if not minutes. Instinct was telling me to fight him, tooth and nail, claw and blade, with whatever it took to survive. But both logic and instinct lost out, as I caught sight of the label on Dev’s shirt.

He should have been moving fast enough that my measly human eyes couldn’t make out the brand.

He wasn’t.

So I dropped my knives and with the heel of my right hand smacked him on the forehead.

Callum was not pleased. “Bryn!”

“What? He was going half speed, if that, and you want me to
knife
him?”

“I want you to be able to defend yourself.”

“Against
Devon
?”

The question hung in the air in all of its ridiculousness. I didn’t need to defend myself against Devon. Or Sora. Or Lance. Or anyone else Callum had set me up against. I wasn’t even certain that I needed to be able to defend myself against
Chase
. He was just a boy. A new wolf. A Were who didn’t quite
have control of his animal instincts. One who was working every day with Callum to tame them.

He wasn’t Attila the Freaking Werewolf Hun.

Callum’s forehead wrinkled—a sure sign of frustration—and he turned his attention to Devon. “Do you want her to live?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then hit her. Hard. Go after her full speed. Don’t hold back, because she needs to know not to.”

Devon nodded.

“That’s an order. Start again, both of you.”

My skin hummed and throbbed at the tone in Callum’s voice, and it echoed through each and every part of me. I shuddered, and then it was gone, but I could still feel the remnants of the order through Devon via the bond.

Females were to be
protected
, but the alpha was to be
obeyed
.

Quite a quandary for Dev, who didn’t have the luxury of my humanity and my ability—bond or no bond—to make my own decisions even when Callum tried to force his will upon me.

Lips twitching spasmodically, Devon put me back in the hold, and I did the only thing I could think of to alleviate his guilt and put him in fighting mode for real. “Armani is for mama’s boys, and a movie doesn’t count as a real film if nothing gets blown up.”

You’re going down, Bronwyn. Them’s fighting words
.

I was distracted for half a second by the sound of Devon’s voice in my mind, but as his grip tightened around my neck and the desire to breathe became paramount, something snapped inside of me.

Fight
.

Fight
.

Fight
.

The burst of adrenaline came out of nowhere. It felt cold and calculated, but on some level I realized that my frenzied movements would have appeared feral to anyone observing them from outside of my body. I escaped Devon’s grasp, backpedaled, and before I had a knife in my left hand, my right was launching one directly at my attacker’s heart.

Dev moved quickly, kicking the blade out of the way, and then he was on top of me again. I twisted my left hand, driving the knife toward muscles in his chest and shoulders. He batted me off with an inhuman growl, and I fell to the ground. He pounced, overpowering me, bringing his teeth to my neck. I rolled back, pulling my feet tight to my chest and using them to push against his torso, but he didn’t move.

Trapped
.

Blood
.

Fight
.

SURVIVE
.

The world around me seemed to slow down with the strength of that command. The word—
survive
—pumped
through my blood, burning me from the inside out like air held too long in lungs stretched past capacity. I saw nothing but a blood-red haze, granular and all-encompassing. One second, Devon was on top of me, and the next, I’d managed to dig my own teeth into his neck, which caused him to rear up, which let me stretch out far enough to grab my discarded knife, which—before I even knew what was happening—had gone straight for tendons I shouldn’t have even been able to reach.

The details were lost to the tightening in my chest, the narrowing of my field of vision. All I knew was that I had to
fight
.

Bryn, stop
. Callum’s voice—the alpha voice—irritated me, and I shook it off, intent on escaping, but then it came again, louder. And insistent. And, strangely enough, more Callum than alpha.
Bronwyn, CEASE
.

And so I did. I stopped. The haze receded. And it wasn’t until I froze in motion that I realized how quickly I’d come to cutting my best friend’s Achilles heel.

Dumbfounded, I went absolutely still, and Devon, his eyes dilated and beginning to yellow, shook his head, clearing his mind and pushing his beast down. Of the two of us, Dev recovered first, and—after rubbing his red-rimmed eyes—he leaned forward, blew a single puff of air at my face, and then mimicked my earlier action and smacked me in the forehead.

“Armani,” he said testily, “is for
gentlemen
.”

I wanted to grin, but with the knife still in my hand, I
couldn’t quite do it. Devon wasn’t human. No matter what I’d done, his injuries would have healed faster than the bruise I’d given myself falling out of bed that morning. What scared me wasn’t what I’d almost done. It was the fact that I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.

What was wrong with me? What
was
I?

“Did the bond change me?” The words were out of my mouth before the question had fully formulated in my brain. “What you did to me when you Marked me, what I did to myself when I let the pack in … did that … am I …?”

“You’re human, Bryn. The bond connects you to us—it changes the way you think and the way the pack thinks about you, but it doesn’t have any physical effects.”

“What do you mean it changes the way I think?” I asked. “I just went all Tarzan wild-child there. Don’t tell me that’s normal.”

Don’t tell me that’s
human.

“Bryn, Ali is bonded to the pack, once through Casey and once through me. Have you ever seen her go all ‘Tarzan wild-child’ on someone?”

Ali could wrangle kiddos with the best of them, but she wasn’t strong physically. She wasn’t a fighter—physically. And somehow, I couldn’t imagine her facing off in a death match against any Were and coming out of it on top.

Then again, my bond with the pack was open. Ali’s was closed.

I narrowed my eyes at Callum. “You swear you didn’t change me?”

He nodded. “You, my dear, are exactly what you’ve always been.”

I nodded back, but there was something in his eyes—faraway pupils oscillating in size—that made me wonder exactly what he meant by that statement.

But then Callum shook his head, like an animal trying to shake off a fly, and as his eyes settled, he said the word I’d grown to hate over all others. “Again.”

Training. School. Training. Sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Morning after morning, night after night, that was the way things went. With Devon, I fought using silver. With the others, steel. I went home with bruises. They went home bleeding. And somehow, each time I fought one of them, I felt closer to the pack. The bond that connected us was growing, and even though these training sessions were nothing like the way natural wolves play-fight as pups, the physical proximity and the intensity of it magnified my feeling that I belonged to and with the pack, the nagging sensation that I
was
one of them.

For the first time in my life, I felt like a two-legged, furless, wolf-less werewolf. As if being fifteen didn’t give me enough
identity issues, Callum’s conditions were turning me into a giant ball of contradictions.

The bond told me that I was Pack; my physical limitations told me that I wasn’t a Were. I liked fighting. I liked the rush. I liked my knives. But at the same time, the old lessons had been too firmly ingrained to allow me to forget that I shouldn’t want to fight them, that it should terrify me, that my first and only prerogative when engaging a werewolf should be to create an opening and run. Hide. Climb something. Find protection.

Callum had spent my entire childhood teaching me that I wasn’t a Were, that my life was always in danger, that I would always, always be at a disadvantage, but now that he had his wolves jumping me at every turn, I felt safer and more protected than I ever had.

Clearly, I was insane.

Bizarrely, I was also happy. Ali, on the other hand, was not. She refused to look at me when I came back from training sessions. Until I’d bathed and bandaged myself, I was invisible—unless I tracked dirt onto her clean kitchen floors. She adamantly refused to ask me about the conditions Callum had laid upon me the night of the full moon, and I didn’t volunteer any of information.

Instead, the two of us got locked into a series of snappish fights about other things. She mandated that I spend more time at my studio, kept an irritatingly close watch on my grades as finals closed in, and outrageously threatened to ground me
(again) if Devon and I didn’t spend at least one night a week kicking back and watching TV shows on DVD. The more I threw myself into my training, the more she forced my hand in day-to-day life. The two of us engaged in an epic screaming fight one Friday when she somehow got Callum to rearrange my sparring schedule so that she and I could drive to the city and shop after school.

She just wouldn’t let me be. Every step I took that brought me closer to the pack was countered with a move designed to pull me back. I never wanted this, Ali insisted on reminding me. There was more to life than fighting. I used to like doing other things. Did I want to miss out on life because Callum had decided to play God?

Personally, I wasn’t sure what her problem was. I was fine. I was happy. And pack or not, I was still me. Did she want me to pretend to be normal? Who was she kidding?

I’d never been a normal girl.

And then, one Saturday morning, I came down to breakfast, and it all came to a head when she flat-out told me that I wasn’t going to training.