Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (24 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

B
Y THE TIME
I
GOT TO THE DOCK
, L
AKE WAS ALREADY
lounging, her head thrown back and her feet dangling just above the surface of her namesake. The way I saw it, I had two choices: deal her in, or lie to her face. Experience—and my acquaintance with her trigger finger—told me that she made a better ally than an enemy, and if there were some things that were mine and mine alone, to play and replay in my head as I stared at my ceiling each night, there were others that I needed a second opinion on. And if that second opinion happened to come from a waitress with no compunctions whatsoever about eavesdropping on any and all Weres who passed through her territory, all the better.

“You heard anything about the new wolf?” I asked, plopping down next to her on the dock. Even with my ribs protesting so much that I wondered if they’d poked a hole in my lungs, the question made its way easily off my tongue. Things were always easy with Lake and me, even though Mr. Mitchell always swore that “doing things the hard way” was
her middle name, the same way “pack business” could have been mine.

“I heard my dad talking to Ali on the phone,” Lake said, staring out at the water. “Mama Bear was spitting nails—something about you and this new boy.”

“Chase.” Supplying his name didn’t make me lose track of reality, but when I blinked, I kept my eyes closed for a fraction of a second longer than I would have otherwise, waiting for Chase or his wolf to appear, emblazoned on the inside of my eyelids. Now that I wasn’t running anymore, it was harder to picture him, harder to feel him on the other side of the bond I’d forged.

“Ali didn’t say the boy’s name,” Lake continued, closing her own eyes and tilting her head back, offering her face up to the sun. “She just said that he was bad news—for you. That Callum was hiding something. That you’d end up hurt.”

At first, I’d assumed that the conversation Lake had overheard was the one that had directly prefaced Ali dragging me and the twins off to the Wayfarer, but her words made me ask for a clarification on that point, and it became apparent that Ali had been in contact with Mitch long before I’d broken the conditions of my permissions.

Ali’s lack of confidence in my ability to stay out of trouble was astounding. Or it would have been, if I’d proven her even the tiniest bit wrong.

“Did Ali or your dad know that the Rabid who attacked
Chase was the one who killed my family?” I was fairly certain I knew the answer to that question, but I had to ask. A week ago, I would have sworn that Callum couldn’t have kept something like that from me, either.

To my relief, the second the word
Rabid
left my mouth, Lake’s eyes flew open, and she almost fell off the end of the dock, supernatural grace and balance the only things that saved her from taking a nosedive I wouldn’t have been able to avoid.

“The Rabid who killed your … I thought Callum killed that scum-licking, dirt-sucking, mother—”

Sensing that Lake could provide an infinite number of adjectives to describe the man Chase called
Prancer
, I cut her off. “I thought so, too, but no. The Rabid got away. Nobody thought it crucial to tell me. Flash-forward eleven years, and what do you know, Chase gets bit.”

Lake digested that for a moment. “And I’m guessing the alpha didn’t particularly want you to figure that one out.”

I was grateful that she hadn’t said Callum’s name this time. “He let me see Chase, knowing I’d figure it out, and then he had me beaten for doing it.”

Ali’s logic had crept into my thoughts enough that my mouth was verbalizing it to Lake. If I could run with broken ribs, I could force myself to part with one or two ugly truths and to silently say the words that cut me most.

Callum. Pack. Stone River. Permissions
.

I thought the words and thought them hard, pushing through it like the pain was nothing.

Callum
.

Pack
.

Stone River
.

Callum
.

Under the waistband of my jeans, the Mark was still there. I placed my hand over it, lining my fingers up with the grooves that Callum had carved into my skin.

“The Rabid is still alive. He’s been alive all this time, and now, he’s messing with
my
—” The possessive seemed more important than the noun that followed it. I wasn’t sure what to call Chase—my friend? My wolf? My other self?

“So it’s true,” Lake said, saving me the trouble of finishing my sentence.

“What’s true?”

“You and this boy. You Marked him.”

When she put it like that, the impossibility of the situation became a magnitude more difficult to ignore. I wasn’t a werewolf, and I certainly wasn’t the Stone River Pack alpha. Callum hadn’t been present when I’d thrown my pack-bond at Chase. The alpha hadn’t forged a new connection between us, I hadn’t bitten Chase, he hadn’t bitten me, and what we shared was nothing like the bond between a werewolf and his mate.

It also bore no resemblance to the bond between Callum and me.

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was—” How could I possibly describe what had happened, even to Lake? “We’d just figured out that his Rabid was the same as mine, and they were going to separate us.”

We’d panicked. Both of us. “I had to calm him down. I couldn’t let them take him away. I had to—”

Had to what? I wasn’t explaining this right. Lake was sitting very still, an odd light in her eyes that I couldn’t quite diagnose.

“I had to protect him. And me. So I took everything I felt for the pack. I saw the bond, and instead of closing myself off to it, I pulled. I pulled at it and I thrust it toward Chase.”

I expected Lake to tell me again that what I’d done was impossible, but instead, she looked down at her knees, and in the softest voice I’d ever heard her use, she asked me the last question I ever expected to hear from her lips. “Could you do it again?”

For a second, I thought she was asking if, given the chance, I would go back in time and do the exact same thing again, knowing the consequences, but there was something between us—a light shifting of air, a pulsing in her bond with the pack and the muted power of the Mark on my side—that told me that wasn’t so.

She was asking if I could rewire someone else’s pack-bond. She was asking if I could rewire hers. Lake and her dad were peripherals. Callum didn’t require their attendance at the
Crescent, but they were still a part of Callum’s pack. He was still her alpha.

“I don’t know, Lake.”

Could you try?
I didn’t hear the words, the way I would have if my bond with Chase didn’t stand between Callum’s pack and my mind, but I could see the question on the tip of her tongue. After a moment, she bit her lip, and whatever I’d imagined I’d seen disappeared, replaced by a look I associated with Lake’s reaction to being dared to do something.

An alarm sounded in the back of my head, because that look was trouble. Lake Mitchell didn’t turn down dares.

“I suspect you’re wanting to know why Callum didn’t kill the Rabid,” Lake said.

Cautiously, I nodded.

“And I suspect you’re wanting to know if he has plans to kill the Rabid now that he’s back?”

This was why I had dealt Lake in. She had no inhibition, no sense of propriety, and she was fearless. Pack or not, she wouldn’t shy away from pressing Callum’s buttons. Growing up removed from Ark Valley had given her the luxury of following her own will more than the alpha’s, and right now, Callum’s privacy and hallowed judgment didn’t command her respect nearly as well as my need to make sure that this Rabid was put down.

“If Callum’s not going to kill the Rabid, I will.” I said those words out loud for the first time and knew that it wasn’t a bluff.
It wasn’t me blustering or running off at the mouth without thinking. It wasn’t foolishness, and it didn’t matter that I was human and the Rabid was not.

He’d messed with what was mine. He’d killed my family. He’d hurt Chase. And the only way to get him out of Chase’s head forever was to see him dead.

I told Lake as much, and she didn’t even blink. She didn’t ask me how exactly one human girl was going to take down a Rabid that had been evading our entire pack for over a decade. She just took me at my word and moved on to the next order of business.

“What do you need me to do?”

I looked out at the water, working my way through the situation, taking into account everything I knew about Lake, the Wayfarer, and her brand of persuasion. I thought of the human bartender, with her talk-to-me face and eyes that didn’t look like they missed much, and I thought about the kind of clientele that a place run by a peripheral male would naturally attract.

Wolves weren’t solitary creatures. Where there was one werewolf, sooner or later, there were more, and Mitch and Lake weren’t our pack’s only peripherals.

“I think I need you to talk to the bartender,” I said, turning the idea slowly over in my mind. If any of Callum’s other wolves had been here, the bartender would know, and if she’d gotten them drunk enough, they might have talked. Lake
didn’t ask for the rationale behind my request. She just stood up and made her way back to the restaurant, because she knew as well as I did that any good plan started with recon.

It wasn’t until Lake and I were sitting on stools in front of the bar that I thought to wonder how exactly a human female had ended up working for Lake’s dad. Looking for answers, I closed my eyes and let my senses take over. The woman in question smelled like Walmart soap and evergreen trees. She bore no Marks and had no connection to the pack. Not to Stone River, and not to any of the others. She wasn’t on edge and there wasn’t the slightest whiff of fear in the air around her. From somewhere behind us, I heard a rustle, and my fingers curled reflexively into fists.

Wolf
.

And not one of ours, either.

“Easy, girl,” Lake said, even though I got the feeling that the intruder’s presence sent her hackles up, same way it did mine. “This here’s neutral territory. We welcome all types.”

Technically speaking, this wasn’t neutral territory, and it wasn’t Lake’s. Montana was Stone River territory. It belonged to Callum, and the wolf behind us did not.

“He’s a peripheral,” Lake told me. “One of Shay’s.”

I hadn’t had much practice identifying other packs by smell,
but I recognized the name. Shay was the youngest alpha in North America. He’d challenged the former leader of the Snake Bend Pack around the turn of the century and won. Like Devon, Shay was a purebred Were, and Sora was his mother, too. Technically, that made him Devon’s half-brother, but since neither of us particularly cared for him, we didn’t think of him that way. Shay had broken all ties with his family—and Callum—long before either Devon or I were born.

“Your dad lets Shay’s wolves eat here?” I asked. It was unfathomable.

“Only the peripherals, and only the ones that can mind their manners,” Lake said. “It doesn’t hurt to have friends.”

I tried to see the sense in that, however much my instincts were telling me it was wrong-wrong-wrong. I’d thought that the Wayfarer was a resting point for Stone River peripherals, but given the host of smells in the air, its clientele was far more eclectic than I’d given it credit for.

All the more reason to talk to the bartender and find out what she knew.

“I’m Bryn.” I opened my eyes again and met hers, and if she noticed that I’d been smelling her, she didn’t comment on it.

“Keely.” For a long moment that was all she said, and then she turned and narrowed her eyes at Lake. “You up to something?”

Lake’s lips worked their way into an easy grin. “Always. You heard anything about a Rabid?”

I’d expected her to finesse the question more, but who was
I kidding? This was Lake. Keely paused for a moment and then snorted. “If I lied, you’d smell it, so I’ll stick with
that’s no concern of yours
and suggest you leave it at that.”

Lake opened her mouth to argue, but I pinched her leg in the age-old sign for
shut up and let me do the talking
.