Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (41 page)

“You?” It took me a second to locate the person speaking, and a few more beats to recognize him. He looked more like Devon than he should have, the expression on his face twisting familiar features into something ugly.

Shay.

I stiffened and let my senses reach past the borders of my new pack, my Resilient pack, and when I stepped out from behind the psychic shield of our numbers, the power in the room hit me like a blow to the stomach. I’d felt it before, in Chase’s body, but now, I felt something new. Instead of cowering or running away, my instinct was to protect what was mine:
my
territory,
my
wolves,
my
status. This was the Senate. These were alphas, but the roar of the pack I led at the edges
of my mind, the way they held back on my command and my command only, forced me to accept an unforgiving, unlikely truth.

These men were alphas. So was I.

“Callum.” My eyes sought him out, and my mouth made the word of its own volition. I felt like I’d never said it before, like it was a word in a foreign language that I didn’t speak. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. Wasn’t sure what—or who—he was. To me.

To the wolves I was bound to protect.

“Bryn,” Callum returned calmly. “Seems you’ve gotten yourself into a bit of trouble.”

One of the other alphas snorted. “Where’s Wilson?”

“The Rabid?” I asked, seething warmth making its way from my stomach up the back of my throat and out of my mouth as pure venom. “The one who attacked and killed defenseless children in his pursuit of turning other kids into werewolves? The one who was using his ability to do so as a leg up into the Senate’s hierarchy? That Wilson?”

“Yes. That Wilson.” Shay didn’t like me. I met his eyes full-on and didn’t even blink. Let him not like me. The feeling was mutual.

“Oh,” I said lightly. “That Wilson is dead.”

Shay moved forward then, in a blindingly quick motion, and instinct told me that he would have closed his hand around my throat and slammed me against the nearest wall
had it not been for the fact that in a move just as quick, each and every one of the wolves in my pack moved to defend me. Chase stepped directly in front of me, so close that my nose almost touched his back. Lake pulled to my side, and the children flanked her—even Lily, who twisted out of my grasp and leapt out toward Shay, her teeth flashing, like she hadn’t quite learned yet that they weren’t as potent in human form as they were when she was a wolf.

If I’d let her, she would have torn him to pieces.

But ultimately, it was Devon’s presence, massive and looming, that stilled Shay’s forward motion. The two of them faced off: Dev young and perfectly groomed, even in the middle of chaos; Shay a mirror of everything Dev could have been if he’d cared more about being a purebred werewolf than being a person.

“Back. Off.” Devon said the words slowly, giving each of them the weight of its own sentence. A ripple of unrest went throughout the room, the alphas shifting from one foot to another, their eyes on the confrontation.

Challenge
.

Dev tilted his head slightly to the side, and I wondered which character he was playing, or if this was 100 percent Devon Macalister, down to the set of his jaw.

Challenge
.

Dominance
.

“Dev.” I said his name quietly, knowing this could get ugly
if I didn’t stop it. At the sound of my voice, Devon broke eye contact with Shay and took a step back, closer to me.

“She’s their alpha,” a man who smelled like sea salt and sulfur breathed, his green eyes flecked with yellow, his pupils widening. “The children think they’re hers.”

They didn’t just
think
they were mine, I wanted to say. They
were
mine. I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t exactly see the logic behind the choice, but there it was.

I was the one who’d set them free.

I was the one who’d showed them what they could do. I was the person they’d chosen to connect to, and because I’d started it all, I was at the center of the things that connected us all.

I was
theirs
. And even though I was their alpha, even the smallest of my pack-mates seemed to sense that I was also the most vulnerable. The weakest physically. The one that Shay wanted to disembowel.

“I didn’t kill Wilson.” My voice—barely more than a whisper—echoed with the power of the entire pack, a frenzied blood-thirst that made me sound less human than I was. “They did. The ones he Changed. The ones you
let
him Change.”

Lily growled, and coming from a cherubic two-year-old, the sound seemed more demonic than lupine.

“They’re free now,” I continued, my voice still echoing with power that wasn’t mine. “And nobody gets to them except through me.”

“You can’t honestly believe we’d let you keep them,” Shay
said, his tone incredulous. Every instinct I had said that he was challenging me and that staring him down almost definitely wasn’t going to get me out of this one. Like flame and tinder, the challenge caught on; I could feel it spreading across the room from one alpha to another. They were stronger than I was. One on one, I didn’t stand a chance against any of them. Even surrounded by Resilient werewolves who’d do anything I asked them to, I was outclassed. Resilient or not, my wolves were just kids, and every alpha in this room except me numbered their years in centuries.

I’m not backing down
. I tried to let them see that in my face. I may have been outclassed, but if these alphas thought they could take even one of these kids from me when they’d been perfectly content to leave them to a Rabid in exchange for new wolves of their own, they were mistaken.

I won’t back down. Not now. Not ever
. Even if I was signing my own death warrant.

My gaze flickered over to Callum, and his amber eyes focused on mine in a way that made me wonder if he was seeing me at four or five or six or ten, or any age up until the point that Ali had taken me away.

Bryn
. I didn’t hear his voice in my head, but I saw that single word—my name—in his eyes. Saw the recognition behind it. The feeling. And something else: a look I knew, one I’d seen many times before. It was a look that pushed me. One that challenged me to take everything he’d ever taught me and
think
. There was a way out of this dilemma, but I had to find it and set it in motion myself.

So I did what Callum’s eyes bid me and
thought
. And the answer was there, in everything I knew about the men in this room and everything Callum had taught me about maneuvering my way around werewolves.

“Actually,” I said, finally responding to Shay’s words, my eyes still on Callum’s, “I do think you’ll
let
me keep them. Because this isn’t Europe. This isn’t Asia. And in North America, alphas don’t take other alphas’ wolves. We don’t challenge each other, and if you want to take what’s mine, you’re going to have to challenge me.”

You’re going to have to
kill
me
. Those words went unstated, but every single person in the room understood that they were there, and a wave of static energy pulsed through the air. Alphas didn’t like being challenged. Especially not by females. Especially not by humans.

Especially not by me.

“Seems to me the girl has a point,” Callum said, his face neutral, his body perfectly relaxed in a way that would have scared the daylights out of anyone with enough sense to know that Callum wasn’t the type to get mad.

He got even.

“By Senate law, if a wolf wants to transfer packs, both alphas have to sign off on it, and Bryn seems a bit resistant to that idea,” Callum continued.

Shay growled. “You can’t be serious, Callum. She’s human! She’s weak. If we want what she has, we’ll take it.
I’ll
take it.”

Callum didn’t growl, but he must have stopped holding back, stopped shielding his power from the others, because in the next instant, something ancient and undeniable flooded the room.
This
was what it meant to be alpha.
This
was what real power felt like.

Each and every one of the men in the room stumbled. I didn’t even blink.

“Now, see, that depends,” Callum said, his voice still neutral, his face still blank. “On whether or not we consider ourselves a democracy.”

I couldn’t help the satisfied smile that spread slowly over my lips. I’d seen this coming. I’d set him up to say it. If the Senate was a democracy, none of the alphas in this room could challenge me or take a single wolf that belonged to me. And if we weren’t a democracy, well …

In that case, Callum had no reason to hold back. No reason to recognize anyone else’s claims to their wolves.

“Well, Shay, are we a democracy or aren’t we?” I took great pleasure in throwing those words, the exact words Shay had used to force a vote on the Rabid, back into the Snake Bend alpha’s face.

Game. Set. Match.

No one wanted to challenge Callum, and to take what was mine, that was exactly what they were going to have to do. I
wasn’t sure if this was just some cog in a greater scheme of Callum’s, some detail that had to fall into place for the future he most desired, or if maybe he was doing this for me. Because I mattered. Because maybe I was worth it.

My chest tightened, and I could almost hear the sound of glass shattering as something inside me broke, but I couldn’t risk letting anyone else see the breaking, so I kept my face carefully neutral, like someone who’d learned from the very best.

“I think we’re done here,” I said, daring the alphas, any single one of them, to tell me we weren’t. “You can see yourselves to the door.” For a moment, I thought Callum would throw his head back and roar with laughter, but he didn’t. He just glanced up at the ceiling as one by one, I met the other alphas’ gazes, and one by one, they turned away and filed out the door, their hatred for me and the way Callum had tied their hands palpable in the air. As I watched them go, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someday they’d be back. Maybe not to this cabin. Maybe not anytime soon, but eventually, some or all of these alphas would decide that the prize was worth the gamble. They’d call Callum’s bluff and take their chances. And when they did, things were going to get ugly.

Finally, I brought my face back to Callum’s, and out of habit, my hand went to my waist, to the Mark that had once connected the two of us into something more. For a moment, I felt a pang for what we’d lost, but that longing was drowned out by a moment of prescience, one that told me that Callum
knew as well as I did that this wasn’t the end. Not between the two of us and not with the Senate. Someday, the other alphas would strike back.

And when they did, we’d be ready.
I’d
be ready.

For the first time in my life, Callum looked away from my gaze before I looked away from his, a slight, knowing smile playing at the corners of his lips. Then, without a word, he turned and followed the other alphas out the door, until the only ones left in the cabin were the ones whose minds and heartbeats I knew as well as my own. The ones whose strength and power pulled at me from all directions, with the familiar call of
alpha, alpha, alpha
.

Pack, pack, pack
, I whispered back, my mind to theirs.
Let’s run
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“H
EY, COULD
I
GET A REFILL ON THIS COFFEE?
”

“That depends,” Lake said, looking at the customer with dancing eyes before turning to shout toward the bar. “Maddy, you want me to shoot him?”

Maddy—who’d joined Lake as a waitress and proven that the only thing more terrifying than one of them was two—pretended to think it over for a moment and then shook her head. “If you shoot him, it’ll take him longer to run far, far away. And besides, it might hurt your tip.”

Lake turned back to the man in question—one of many Weres who’d ventured into the Wayfarer in the two months since it had become the center of a new territory. Montana and western North Dakota no longer belonged to the Stone River Pack. The Wayfarer and the land surrounding it for a good hundred miles on either side belonged to the newly minted Cedar Ridge Pack, courtesy of Callum.

Technically speaking, the new territory belonged to me.

There was a part of me—the human part—that still believed
it was all semantics, that I was an alpha in name only, because Weres couldn’t understand the idea of a pack without one. But there was another part—the part of me that knew every second of every day where each and every one of my wolves was—that recognized that the title wasn’t a meaningless one. It wasn’t empty.

It was real.

But it was different, too, from the way things had been in Callum’s pack. The wolves in Cedar Ridge and I were all connected, but until or unless we were threatened, I didn’t control that connection, and I didn’t use it to control anyone else. I hadn’t spent my entire life referring to Callum as a patriarch only to turn into his female counterpart overnight. If there was a problem, I solved it. If they needed me, I was there, but in their human lives, the wolves in my pack could choose when to follow me and when not to, and most of the time, I didn’t make an active attempt at leading. It wasn’t like Lake was ever going to let me live under the delusion that I ran things. She bossed me around as much as she always had, and that wasn’t even taking her dad or Keely or Ali into account.