Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (44 page)

The boy didn’t move. I narrowed my eyes and began to close in on him—soon enough, I could tell that his skin was freckled and his honey blond hair was the exact same shade as
mine. He stared at me, and I returned the favor, hackles rising on the back of my neck and my upper lip threatening a snarl.

Look away
, I thought fiercely, willing him to give. With each step I took, it bothered me more that he didn’t. This human was trespassing on our land, he’d made me feel
naked
, and now he was looking at me.

At my face.

I was naked, and he was looking at my face.

I lifted the gun, letting my finger dance around the trigger. I wouldn’t pull it, but the boy in my sights didn’t know that. Let him call my bluff.

Call it Russian roulette or playing chicken—it just wasn’t in me to turn tail and run. Still, there was a part of me that couldn’t help thinking about the kids in our pack, and the thought triggered an unfamiliar hesitation in my stride. I’d gotten so used to living on the periphery of things growing up—it was easy to forget I was at the center of something bigger now.

That if this boy
had
seen me Shift, it wasn’t just my life—or my dad’s—I was risking.

Lake?

I heard Bryn’s voice in my head. She was our new pack’s alpha—and human: a living, breathing contradiction with an attitude at least as big as mine. She was also the closest thing I had to family, next to my dad.

Next to Griff.

I’m fine
, I told her softly.
Just looking for a minute of peace and quiet. You mind?

Another alpha probably would have taken umbrage at the not-so-subtle hint, but Bryn’s only reaction was snorting and pulling back from our pack-bond, allowing me my own mind, my own thoughts, my own memories—

No
. I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to think about any of it. I wanted to Shift again, to run for the mountains and not turn back until dawn, but I couldn’t, not without making my dad and Bryn and the rest of the pack wonder if there was something wrong.

There was
nothing
wrong.

I was almost to the edge of the forest now, but no matter how close I got to the human boy, he didn’t move, and the features on his face didn’t get any clearer. I was looking straight at him, but I couldn’t
see
him. He was my age, or close to it. Honey blond hair, freckled skin, and—and—and …

The eyes
.

His form flickered, like static on a television, and I realized that the entire time I’d been watching him, he’d never moved.

Never blinked.

Never breathed.

He had no smell.

The hair. The eyes. That solemn smile
.

For a split second, the boy’s features were clear and so
familiar that I couldn’t see anything else. Didn’t
want
to see anything else.

Griffin
.

I tried to say his name out loud, but couldn’t, and a second later, the boy with my dead brother’s eyes was gone.

“Hey, birthday girl. You’ll never guess what I got you.” Devon gave me a smile that was probably supposed to be charming, and if I’d been anyone else, I probably would have been charmed. Luckily, I was immune—and then some.

“I’m not guessing,” I told him, my voice flat. “And if the answer involves singing, Shakespeare, or show tunes, I don’t want to know.”

Devon fancied himself a drama geek. I wasn’t in the mood.

“Well,” he huffed, wiggling his eyebrows derisively. “Someone’s a little cranky.”

Someone had seen an apparition of her dead brother in the forest. Someone really wasn’t feeling all that chatty.

“Hey.” Dev reached out and brushed his hand against the side of my face. I wanted to pull back, but the wolf inside wouldn’t let me. Being Pack meant knowing that no matter what, you were never alone. Not even when you wanted to be.

“You okay?” Devon asked quietly, cupping my face and angling it toward his.

I nodded—the closest I could come to telling a lie. Dev had enough self-preservation not to call me on it. He was a purebred werewolf: larger, stronger, and more protective than most. He also had the distinction of being Bryn’s best friend—come to think of it, her
only
friend, other than me. The three of us had history, and I knew that if I said even a single word to him about what I’d seen in the forest, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

I didn’t want to talk about Griffin.

I never talked about Griffin.

And here it was, my birthday
—our
birthda
y
—and I was seeing him, not the way he’d looked when we were kids, but the way he would have looked if the two of us had never gone swimming that day, if we hadn’t been so far out from the shore, if it hadn’t started raining quite so hard.

The way he would have looked if he’d grown up.

I’m losing it
.

“I’m fine,” I said tersely, not caring whether Devon smelled the lie or not. “And I mean it about the show tunes. I hear so much as one word of that stupid
Spring Awakening
song, and things are gonna get ugly.”

Devon moved his hand from my face to the top of my head, tousling my hair. “Things are already ugly,” he said, peering down at me. “Hideous, really.”

Dev’s ability to disparage my looks was one of his finer characteristics—a huge step up from the heady stares and hungry eyes I was used to receiving from males of our kind.
Female werewolves were rare, and tall, blonde, leggy ones were more or less an endangered species. By my last count, we numbered one.

Me.

“Could you maybe put a bag over your head or something?” Devon asked, his voice pitched low and serious. “There are children present.”

“Ha-ha,” I replied. “Very funny.” But even as I spoke, I couldn’t keep my eyes from flickering over to the children in question.

For once, the youngest members of our pack were both in human form, and baby Katie appeared to be gnawing on baby Alexander’s leg. My breath caught in my throat just looking at them, and I was broadsided with the slew of emotions I’d been trying to bury.

Twins
.

Females of our kind survived the womb only if we were half of a pair. You could look at Katie and know immediately that there was an Alex. My own twin’s absence was like a scar—one I’d carry across my face for the rest of my unnaturally long life.

I need to get out of here. I need to do something
.

I needed to run.

“You look like you’re planning something,” Devon observed, unperturbed. “Should I mayhaps inform Bryn that you will be needing her assistance?”

For the longest time, it had been me and Bryn, and Devon
and Bryn. She was the only thing we had in common, and a year ago, she would have been the person I went to the second I started itching to do
something
. But everything was different now. Bryn was different.

She was alpha.

“I think I can handle this one on my own,” I said.

This time, when Devon smelled the lie, he called me on it. “Lake, my dearest, darling gun-toting menace to society, that’s simply not true.” Dev took a step closer and lowered his voice. In a room full of werewolves, we
really
had to whisper to keep from being overheard. “Whatever it is, you
don’t
think you can handle it by yourself, and given what you
can
handle, I find that a little frightening.”

I didn’t want to reply but the words came bursting out of my mouth, feral and fierce. “I need to go somewhere.
Now
.”

I looked him straight in the eye, allowing the whisper of a challenge to vibrate through the bond between us. I shouldn’t have been picking a fight, but I wanted to hit something and knew from experience that he could take a punch.

Devon’s pupils dilated with the effort it took not to answer my unspoken throw down. “You need to go somewhere?” he repeated. “Did you have a specific location in mind, or were you just planning on taking off for parts unknown?”

His voice was deceptively mild, and I thought of the forest, the mountains, the apparition with Griffin’s eyes.

“I need to go to Shelby.” The words surprised me, and I
rolled them over in my mind.
Shelby, Montana
. The town where Griffin died.

“Okay,” Devon said.

“Okay?” I repeated.

Devon inclined his head, and I heard his voice in my head, loud and clear.
If you need to go to Shelby, we’ll go to Shelby. Road trip. Tonight
.

Across the room, Bryn jerked to a stop and turned toward the two of us. Pack-bonds were tricky things, and most people our age had trouble communicating mind-to-mind—unless they were alpha. For a second, I could feel Bryn prowling at the edges of my brain, and I wondered if she sensed that something had just passed between Devon and me.

I leaned back on my heels and gave Bryn a lazy smile, and—realizing what she’d been doing—she stopped actively poking around the corners of my psyche. I’d always had my secrets, and she’d always had hers. She wasn’t going to press me, and for that, I was grateful.

If my best friend knew what I’d seen, she’d worry, and once she started worrying, the part of her that was alpha wouldn’t be able to keep from trying to fix this, make things better, save me.

I didn’t need saving. And if I did, I was sure as hell going to be the one to save myself.

“Tonight,” I told Devon. I would have preferred going alone, but if the only way to keep Bryn out of it was to deal Devon in, so be it.

It would have been easy enough to liberate my dad’s truck from its spot in front of our cabin, but Bryn and I had spent most of the summer grounded for our last impromptu road trip, and there was a part of me that felt like going to Shelby was the equivalent of traveling back in time and hopping from one memory to the next—not the kind of thing best achieved in a pickup.

I’d left the town in question on four legs. I was going back the same way, and though I wasn’t sure what I expected to find there, the irrational part of my brain knew exactly what it was looking for.

Don’t even think it
, I told myself. Whatever I’d seen in the forest—be it a ghost or a figment of my imagination—it all went back to Shelby. To Griffin. To things I’d been trying for years to forget. I’d been caught off guard in the forest, but this time, I’d be ready: ready to see him, ready to talk to him, and if he wasn’t really there, ready to admit—to Devon at least—that I was losing my mind.

For once, the white-hot pain of Shifting wasn’t enough to banish the thoughts from my mind. All too soon, it was over, and the feelings that had been creeping up on me all day—the aching, the loneliness, the hunger—became a living, breathing thing. Unable to hold it in any longer, I threw my head back and howled, a foreign, haunting sound that I felt from haunches to nose.