Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (22 page)

Bars.

Steel.

Cage, I realized. They’d
caged
him. My lip curled upward with fury. Didn’t they realize how awful it was, to be trapped there? I could feel him pacing back and forth.

He wanted out.

I won’t let them do this to you. I’ll—

Nothing
, he said back.
If I can get out, I will
.

A long pause.

They’ll let me out when you’re gone
.

Understanding washed over me, and relief. They weren’t punishing him. He wasn’t trapped because he’d disobeyed. He was there because I was leaving, and for whatever reason, they didn’t want him trying to stop me.

Another vague image, a half-completed thought he didn’t want me to hear—

“Ali.” I said her name out loud, and things became very, very clear.
Ali
had asked them to cage Chase, and they’d
agreed
. If I’d been in my right mind, I might have wondered what exactly Ali had been forced to sacrifice to get them to grant her request—not to mention permission to leave—in return. But I was too angry to think about anything other than the fact that despite Ali’s ranting and raving about the way the pack had treated me, they were treating Chase like an animal on her bequest.

I couldn’t let her do this. I wouldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t let her do any of this. I wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t step foot in that
car, and she couldn’t make me. It was going to be a cold day in July before I let her do this to me. To him.

To herself and to Casey. To the twins.

She wasn’t doing this.

End of story.
Finit
.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I’
D TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN
’
T STAY MAD AT ME
forever, but I have a feeling you’d take that as a challenge.”

Exactly two hours after I’d sworn that Ali would drag me kicking and screaming to the car over my own dead body, I was sitting shotgun, alive and not bloody in the least. I’d been giving her the silent treatment for the past hundred miles—not that it was doing any good.

Part of me understood why she was doing this. If Ali hadn’t been so icily furious on my behalf, I might have hated the pack—and Callum—but
if
was a luxury for another time. Right now, I could handle being mad at Ali, but I wasn’t sure I could handle anything else, and I wasn’t going to risk the dense vortex of emotions in my gut working their way to the surface. I was not about to break down. Not in this car, not once we got to Montana, not ever.

“You would be doing the same thing,” Ali told me. “If something happened to me, if you were in charge of Katie,
and if the pack had attacked her—whatever the reason—you would do the exact same thing.”

“Shut. Up.” I broke my silence.

“I’m doing this, I’m not sorry I’m doing this, and I’m not going to undo it,” Ali said. “Live with it, kiddo.”

“You didn’t even ask me what I wanted,” I shot back. “What happened—it happened to
me
.” It was bad enough that Callum had taken it upon himself to decide what I could and could not handle knowing with respect to The-Night-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. I wasn’t about to let Ali take this away from me, too. “
I’m
the one they hurt.
I’m
the one who bled,
I’m
the one whose body is so bruised that I might as well start answering to the name ‘Patches,’ and
I’m
the one who had to watch Callum—”

I broke off. Didn’t want to go there.

“Watch him what?” Ali said evenly.

“Nothing,” I said through clenched teeth. “He did what he could.”

I knew it was wrong to be mad at Ali for trying to protect me, but not Callum for hurting me in the first place. I just didn’t care.

“Do you honestly think that Callum didn’t know what would happen, Bryn? From the moment he left you alone with Chase?” She stared out at the road before us, and I leaned forward and flipped on the radio, hoping to drown out her words.

Her face tightened and then her hand lashed out. My arm,
like a creature possessed, jerked upward, throwing up a block to protect my face before my conscious mind had time to realize that all Ali was doing was turning the radio back off.

Unsettled, I lowered my arm and hugged it tight to my chest, feeling small and stupid and laid painfully bare.

If Ali noticed my reaction, she at least had the decency not to call me on it. Instead, she pressed on with the current topic: Callum, justice, and me.

“How many times in your life have you gotten the drop on Callum, Bryn? How many times has anyone? He knew damn well you’d break the conditions before he set them down.”

Callum had always known what I was going to do before I did it. I’d spent my entire life trying to get the drop on him.

He knew me.

No
. I didn’t want to hear this. She couldn’t make me. Radio. On.

In the backseat, Katie whimpered from her car seat. Both twins had cried solid for the first hour, and about fifteen minutes back, they’d finally cried themselves out and fallen asleep. My brother and sister weren’t any happier to be leaving than I was.

Shhhhhhh
, I told Katie silently.
It’s okay. I’m here
.

The farther we drove away from Callum’s stronghold, the weaker the twins’ bond to the pack grew, and the more they latched on to Ali and me. Especially me. I was pretty sure that Katie had yet to figure out that I wasn’t a wolf. The night I
ran with the pack confused her. Even now, with my own pack-bond muted, I was the closest thing she had to Pack.

To home.

“I can’t feel them anymore,” I muttered, my words lost to the song blaring from the speakers.

It began to rain, and Ali turned the windshield wipers on and the radio off.

“You can’t feel who?”

“The pack. Even after … what I did … they were still there. Faintly.” Chase was just more there. But as the mile markers ticked by, everything was getting fainter, and now I couldn’t feel any of the Weres at all, except for Chase—and I could barely feel him. He existed only as an image, a sound, a feel in the recesses of my brain, but even that was getting harder and harder to hear.

“Chase didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, allowing my ire to take the place of the holes in my soul. “You made them lock him up, and he didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Believe it or not, I’m not a monster, Bryn. I asked Callum to lock him up, because Callum issued an edict that no one was to stop us from leaving. Based on the way that boy stood guard over you while you were unconscious, flashing from one form to another, daring us to move him from your side, I inferred that he might not be able to keep himself in check when we left, and that you might not want him to face the kind of
justice
that had been visited upon you.”

For a single second, that took the wind out of my sails. “Did you have them lock Casey up, too?” I sneered, once I’d recovered.

“As a matter of fact,” Ali replied, her grip on the wheel tightening, “I did.”

Radio. On. Only this time, it was Ali’s decision, not mine, and she turned down the volume and changed the station. In the backseat, Katie closed her eyes again, and for the next hundred miles, the four of us drove in near-silence, the gentle warble of country music the only sound in the car.

Ali drove straight through the night. At some point, I fell asleep, and in my dreams, Chase came to me in wolf form. His fur was black, his body lean and muscled, and his eyes were lighter even than their human counterparts: two orbs of ice blue in a sea of darkness. I didn’t say a word, and he didn’t make a sound. The two of us just sprawled out on the ground about a foot apart. I could feel his warm breath on my face, and after an eternity of the two of us staring at each other, I buried my hands in his fur, which should have been coarse, but felt silky soft in my hands. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, and I could feel my heart beating in unison with his.

“This doesn’t mean we’re mates,” I told him.

He opened his mouth very wide in a mischievous, wolfy yawn.

“Women’s liberation and all that,” I continued, catching
his yawn and trying to push it down. “No Mark. No lifetime commitment. No ‘property of’ signs. We just have a bond, that’s all.”

His tail beat quietly against the dirt beneath us, and a smile worked its way onto my own lips.

“Loser,” I said, playing my fingertips over his rib cage, oddly compelled to scratch his belly.

In response to my insult, Chase bared his teeth in mock threat, but scooted closer toward me, and after a long moment, I laid my head on his neck, and the two of us—girl and wolf—fell asleep, into a dream within a dream.

I see you
.

Words dripped, sing-sung, from a crooked mouth. No face. No body. Just a mouth—bones cracking, jaw breaking.

I see you
.

Sharp smile, fanged and smeared with red.

I recognized the voice. I recognized the blood, but this wasn’t my nightmare. It was Chase’s.

Like a strobe light, images flashed in rapid fire in front of me. A man: brown eyes, open face, never aged past thirty. Red teeth. Gray wolf, white star. Jaws snapping.

So much blood.

I looked for Chase, called to him, but I couldn’t find him. I was too far away.

Wolf. Fight
.

Not my dream. Not my instinct. Not my haze, but the whole world went blood-red nonetheless, almost purple. Rotted. Congealed.

Chase. I had to find Chase.

I could feel his eyes opening. Lightning in his stomach, jaw aching as he Shifted back to human form.

Look at me
, Callum whispered to him, a ghost on his shoulder.

You’re mine
, said the mouth with the wolf attached.
I made you. You belong to me
.

And that was what did it, because Chase didn’t belong to blood and panic. Didn’t belong to a Rabid rotting from the inside out. He didn’t even belong to Callum, steady and sure.

He belonged to
me
.

Light surged all around us in a starburst, halfway between the moment of detonation for an atomic bomb and the skyline on the Fourth of July.

Warm
.

Safe
.

Mine
.

And just like that, Chase and I were back on a bed of wet leaves and grass, the smell of dirt and autumn reminding me that this was a dream. Only a dream.

In human form, Chase curled beside me, his forehead damp with sweat, and I ran my fingers through his matted hair, as naturally as I had his wolf fur. I folded my body against his,
keeping watch until his breathing slowed, and mine slowed, and together, we faded into sweet, blissful nothing.