Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (25 page)

“You know about werewolves,” I said, meeting Keely’s gaze.

“I expect I might,” Keely allowed.

“And you’re not dead.”

Keely snorted. “This one sure knows how to sweet-talk a girl, doesn’t she, Lake?”

I wondered if Callum knew that there were humans in Montana who knew who and what we were, but if he didn’t, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. “The fact that you’re alive means you know how to keep your mouth shut. I can respect that.”

Lake pinched my leg. I ignored her.

“So I won’t ask you about any Rabids or any secrets.”

Another pinch. Harder this time. I swatted Lake’s hand away.

“But I am going to ask what you’ve heard about what it takes for a human to become a Were.”

My logic in asking that question wasn’t so much a rationale as an instinct. Any human who’d been within five feet of a werewolf and known him for what he was had thought about it. What it would be like to Change. What it would take to trigger it.

Ribs popping. Head throbbing. Punch after punch after punch
.

I forced the swell of fear down before Lake could smell it, before the peripheral in the back right corner could get a taste of me. Keely and I weren’t talking about a beating. I had no reason to be thinking about that. None. We weren’t talking about Marks or being bitten.

We were talking about slaughter.

“I asked about that,” Keely said. “When Mitch told me what he and Lake were and warned me that things could get rowdy here. He said he wouldn’t let a soul touch me, but even so, I asked what would happen if I got bitten or scratched—if I would change or just keel over. Never hurts to be informed.”

“Humans becoming Weres is supposed to be impossible,” I said, thinking that instead of celebrating birthdays, I should start marking my life by its impossibilities. One for a four-year-old escaping a Rabid. Two for being Marked by a thousand-year-old alpha. Three for closing my mind off to the pack so completely for so long. Four for a boy who should be dead.

Five for the way I’d claimed him above and beyond our allegiance to Callum’s pack. Six for the way Chase had come to me in my dreams.

“It’s not impossible,” Keely said, leaning forward on her elbows. “Just unlikely.”

Now that was interesting. In silent agreement with my assessment, Lake finally stopped pinching my thigh. “That
so?” she asked Keely, her voice a low rumble that reminded me of her dad’s.

Keely nodded. “The way I’ve heard it, in the past thousand years, a human being changed has happened three or four times. Mostly, they just die. If anyone could figure out how to bring humans over without killing ’em dead, I suspect there’d be a lot more of you wolf-types than there are.”

There was power in numbers. The larger the pack, the more powerful the alpha.

I digested the information Keely had given me slowly. Chase’s situation wasn’t impossible. It was
improbable
. I filed that information away for future knowledge.

“You know anything about the other times it has happened?” I asked Keely, not really expecting an answer. She shook her head and then excused herself, as the Were I’d felt earlier came up to the bar.

“I thought you wanted to find out about the Rabid,” Lake said, dropping her voice to a whisper.

“I do,” I whispered back, “but Miss Keely over there wasn’t talking, and right now, our best lead on the Rabid is Chase.”

I had no idea where the Rabid was or what he was doing, but I did know that a part of him was in Chase’s head.

Burnt hair and men’s cologne
.

Banishing the memory of the smell, I told Lake about the first time Callum had taken me to see Chase. About the way that, for a few moments, the Rabid’s claim to his prey had
outweighed Callum’s. About the way I’d seen Chase in my dreams and followed him into his own enough to know that the Rabid was still playing games.

“Let me get this straight,” Lake said when I was done, leaning back on her bar stool in a position I would never have been able to manage. “You and the Stone River Pack alpha and
El Rabido
are fighting it out for dominance in lover boy’s head.”

There were so many things wrong with that sentence. The casual way she’d referred to the Rabid. The words—
Stone River, Pack, alpha
—that brought Callum’s image to my mind and made me wonder how long thinking of him would feel like pressing on a bruise, just to see if it still hurt. And then there was the fact that Lake had referred to Chase as “lover boy,” when really, he was just a boy. My boy.

Mine
.

Mistaking my reaction for offense, Lake quickly added a second incomprehensible sentence onto her first. “Between Callum, the Rabid, and the infamous Bronwyn Clare, my money’s on you.”

Yeah. Right. The pain from my ribs, dull and aching, called the wisdom of that bet into question.

“Seriously, Bryn. You may be human, but I know you. You fight dirty.”

The vote of confidence made me smile, but the movement hurt my face, reminding me again that I wasn’t invincible.

I wasn’t even that hard to break.

“I’m going to go,” I said. “See how Ali’s doing. Get settled.”

Lake narrowed her eyes at me, trying to see past the surface of my words. I stared back at her, holding her gaze until she looked away. Realizing what I’d done—and what it would have meant in her wolf’s eyes—I offered up an olive branch.

“I’m not giving up, Lake. I’m just regrouping.”

I needed to think. I needed a plan, and as far as I was concerned,
recon
had just begun.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“A
LI?
” I
WASN
’
T ENTIRELY SURE THAT
I
WAS IN THE
right place, so I called out as I opened the front door. The word bounced off the walls, and even though everything about this cabin—three bedrooms scrunched side by side, a combined living and kitchen area twice as big as I was used to—screamed
not home
, it was the difference in echoes between this house and Ali’s that did me in.

Regrouping was one thing. Recon was good, and the Wayfarer wasn’t a bad place to do it. But this wasn’t home.

Thinking about Ark Valley made my mind go quiet, and my pack-sense surged. Chase came first, and I saw him running, the way Lake and I had earlier. I felt his stride in the muscles stretching down my own thighs and the urge to run, to be with him, almost devoured me whole.

Next, I felt the twins, two rooms over. Devon, Callum, and all of the other members of our pack were too far away for me to feel, except for Lake and her dad.

“Ali?” I called again, keeping my voice down this time,
because my connection to the twins hummed with the low buzz of sleep. She didn’t reply, and I found all three of them sleeping on the same king-sized bed on a comforter that wasn’t ours. Alex was on his tummy, his tiny human hands buried in Kaitlin’s fur, and Ali’s entire body was curved around the two of them. The moment I walked into the room, Katie stirred.

She blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. And then she wriggled. Glancing at Ali, dead to the world, I walked quietly to the bed and picked Katie up. She burrowed into my body, like she thought she could carve out a puppy-sized space in my side.

“Hey there, baby girl,” I whispered.

Katie snuffed, and I realized she was smelling my breath. I wondered if I smelled like home, and if she could make out the faint scent of blood from my bruises.

Katie whined and then licked me.

“Shhhhh,” I told her, settling her puppy form in my arms. “Mama and Alex are sleeping.”

Katie stilled, and I brought my eyes back to Ali. She’d driven through the night to get us here. I doubted she’d slept much the three before that, when I’d been wafting in and out of consciousness.

“Mama’s tired,” I told Katie, my own stomach twisting. “Mama’s had a hard day.”

Week.

Month.

And me being me probably hadn’t made it any easier for her.

Katie, well and truly bored with my revelations, yawned, her puppy-mouth opening so wide that if she were in human form, she probably would have dislocated her jaw.

“Did you wake up just for me, baby?” I asked her. She snuggled into my side again, and I took the cue. Gingerly, I slid onto the edge of the bed. I propped myself up on a pillow and let Katie sprawl out on my stomach. She laid her nose just under my chin, let out of a whoof of puppy-fresh breath, and fell asleep. I curled toward Ali, careful not to squish Alex, willing the three of them to sleep well.

Willing all four of us to be okay.

Sleep came. The clearing. The forest. The smell of early autumn—but no Chase. I knelt down to the ground, and with the motion, I lost my awareness that this was a dream. That maybe Chase’s absence just meant that he wasn’t asleep. Instead, I dug two fingers into the dirt and brought it to my nose.

I couldn’t smell him. I couldn’t smell anything. A sluggish worry wrapped its way slowly around the base of my spine, and like a snake, it slithered up my back, one vertebra at a time. I couldn’t smell
anything
. It was worse than being blindfolded,
worse than small spaces, worse than opening my mouth to scream, knowing the sound would never make it from my throat.

I couldn’t
smell
.

I hugged my knees to my chest, unable to rise into a crouch, unable to ready my fists or reach for my blade. And then the world around me folded in on itself, like someone was making origami. Like I was a test paper and someone had crumpled me up and thrown me away.

And then the world was being uncrumpled, and the forest unfolded into something new.

Something small.

Something that smelled like wet cardboard and drain cleaner. I would have taken comfort in the fact that I could smell again but for the memories that combination brought with it.

Teeth ripping into flesh. Skin tearing like Velcro. Blood splattering. Again and again, vicious, relentless, thorough. Blood-blood-blood-blood-blood …

Jaws. Daddy. No! I wasn’t back there. This wasn’t real. I was big now. I was strong.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are, little one. No sense hiding from the Big Bad Wolf. I’ll always find you in the end.…”

Even though I was big now, even though I knew that this was impossible and that it wasn’t happening again, I couldn’t
stop myself from walking through the old, familiar motions. I peeked out of my hiding space under the sink, saw the man.

I couldn’t smell him.

I saw him Change.

Star on his forehead. Gonna find me. Blood. Blood-blood-blood—

I closed my eyes, the same way I had when I was four. I closed them, but I could hear the monster breathing—
right outside
.

It was gonna get me. The Big Bad Wolf was gonna get me
.

Wood cracked, splintering. It was the front door—the door the wolf had locked behind him, back when he had been a man. And in came others—so many others. A man with exactly three lines on his face: one from smiling, two from frowning.

Callum
, the grown-up me realized, even as the four-year-old inside me watched, unable to move.

A woman with a sleek dark ponytail—
Sora
—dove across the room, tackling the Big Bad Wolf away from me.

“I’ve got you, Little One.” Hands reached in to grab me, but I didn’t resist. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Blood-blood-blood-blood
.

“Shut your eyes.”

I couldn’t follow Callum’s gentle command. Couldn’t then. Couldn’t now. The first time, I’d seen Sora change to wolf form and go for the Rabid’s throat. Then Callum had turned
my head away. Only this time, he didn’t. He let me watch, and there was nothing to see.

No Big Bad Wolf.

No house.

Nothing but the forest, outside of Callum’s house. I turned back to face him in his arms, and he dropped me. I hit the ground hard, and Sora, still in human form, lashed out at me. She was too fast. I was too slow.

Bryn
.

No. Not again. No-no-no-no—