Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (5 page)

Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—

I stopped myself from thinking about it and helped Devon to do the same by jabbing his left side with my index finger. If we’d been alone, I might have butted him gently with my head, but this was high school, and the good people of Ark Valley had enough reasons to think that those of us who lived in the woods were just a little bit off.

“Ten-to-one odds Callum has either Sora or Lance on Bryn-duty tonight,” I said, changing the subject with an
unspoken apology for bringing up the previous one at all. “You Macalisters seem to be Team Bryn favorites at the moment.”

Devon’s lips settled into an easy, practiced smirk, and the nearly imperceptible tension in his neck and shoulder muscles receded. “If there’s any justice in this world, watching you should convince them how lucky they’ve been to be blessed with a son such as myself.”

“He says with patented Smirk Number Three.”

Devon shook his head and made a sound somwhere in the neighborhood of
tsk-tsk
. “You’re getting rusty, Bronwyn. That was clearly Smirk Number Two: sardonic with a side of wit.”

I breathed an internal sigh of relief that Devon was fully himself again. All Weres felt the tug between their human sides and their wolves, but Dev fought it more than most. He danced to his own drummer and dared the world to tell him that a purebred Were should have better things to worry about than what he was wearing. All things considered, Devon was almost as much of a rarity as I was. The only difference was, his particular oddity—being the son of a female werewolf rather than that of a male Were’s human mate—gave him the advantage over other werewolves, while mine meant that I’d always be the slow one. The weak one. The one who needed protection from pack secrets that came out after dark.

“Hey, Bronwyn?”

Until those words broke the surface of my mind, I’d been
deep enough in my thoughts that I hadn’t been paying attention to the finely honed senses that would have otherwise warned me of an outsider’s approach. Was I slipping, or what? It was one thing to let a werewolf get a drop on you, but a normal teenage boy? That was just embarrassing.

“Yes?” I hadn’t expected to see Jeff (of motorcycle fame) in anything resembling a social setting for at least a semester. He’d been avoiding me since the moment I’d hopped off his bike, and like a chameleon, I’d faded into the background, keeping my distance from his human friends the way I had before my little joyride. As I turned to face him, I caught a whiff of a second scent—Juicy Fruit and plastic—and realized that he wasn’t alone.

There was a girl with him, and she was smiling.

Two of my classmates, approaching me of their own free will? I glanced at Devon and raised an eyebrow, but his gaze was fastened on Human 1 and Human 2. They didn’t even seem to realize they were being watched, and they certainly didn’t feel me stiffen as Devon took a step closer to me.

Gently, I put a hand on Devon’s chest and pushed him back. I’d told Callum I had no interest in provoking interspecies aggression, and I’d meant it. Previous grand-theft-auto attempts aside, my instinct to keep my head down and not draw attention to the pack was almost as well defined as the three parallel scars under the band of my jeans.

“You dropped this.” Jeff held out a pen that I’d been using
to take notes (or rather, pointedly
not
take notes) before the bell rang. But as I reached for it, he twirled it twice and tucked it into the jean pocket of the girl standing next to him. “I think I’ll keep it as payment due for that little klepto moment of yours with my bike.”

The girl standing next to him had a name, and I knew it, but I didn’t bother thinking it. She was a typical Ark Valley girl, a little too quiet, a little too sweet, with metaphorical claws lurking just under the surface.

“Jeff!” the girl said. “You’re horrible. I’m sorry, Bronwyn.”

But she didn’t take the pen out of her pocket. Instead, she wrapped an arm around Jeff. I wasn’t exactly an expert on human-courting behavior, but I sensed the ceremony of the moment. He’d given her my pen. She’d giggled. In another few seconds, they’d both walk away and never give me a second look.

Compared to the werewolf version of courting—he bites her, she bites him, his connection to the pack spills over onto her for all eternity—the whole thing seemed artificial and insignificant.

And yet, for a fraction of a second, I froze.

Sorry, Bronwyn
.

I was human. They were human. Whatever games they were playing should have been my games, but my talents currently tended more toward flushing out an alpha who swept into my life just long enough to issue orders and disappear for weeks
on end, busy with pack business more important than little old me.

Sorry, Bronwyn
.

Devon put an arm around me and curled his lips into an expression I recognized as Smirk Number One: sarcastic with a touch of I-couldn’t-care-less. “Why, Bryn,” he said with a hint of Scarlett O’Hara in his voice, “I do believe he’s given her your pen.”

Devon’s words freed up my mouth, which—true to form—spoke without consulting my brain. “Well, get Freud on the phone. He’ll have a field day with this one.”

That should have been the end of it, but unfortunately, algebra was my last class of the day, and that meant that Devon wasn’t the only wolf in the near vicinity. Ark Valley was small, the combined middle/high school was even smaller, and even though I wasn’t close to any of the other juveniles in our pack, when it came to confrontations with the outside world, we were family.

Or as they would have phrased it, I was
theirs
.

There were only three of them, and one was a seventh grader, but werewolves mature quickly. By age twelve, they look like teenagers, and by the time they’re in high school, they could pass for twenty. Somewhere around fifteen or sixteen, their growth slows down, and most don’t ever age past about thirty, no matter how many centuries they see.

Moral of the story? My age-mates were all physically
advanced for their age, and Jeff had reason to be looking nervous.

They didn’t descend, not right away, and they didn’t say a word. My pack-mates just circled us, with long, ambling strides, their eyes flickering from me to Jeff and back again.

Out of habit, I shut them out. Bond or no bond, nobody got into my head but me, and the last thing I wanted was to feel the low, dangerous vibration of a growl beneath the surface of someone else’s skin.

To Jeff, they must just have looked like an odd assortment of strangely intense ruffians whose backwoods roots showed in every crevice of their faces. To me, they looked like Trouble, capital
T
.

I brushed my hand lightly against Devon’s arm, and he nodded.

“Thank you for that extremely Freudian performance, Jeff. Sir, madam, we bid you good day.” Dev boomed out the words in his best Sean Connery accent, but all the while, he kept his eyes on the others, staring them down, warning them not to come closer. There was a single moment in which I thought the others might disregard the warning and close in, but a few seconds later, the tension broke. Callum’s wolves had ultimate control over their animal instincts, and they knew as well as I did that altercations with the outside world wouldn’t be met with smiles and pats on the back from the pack’s alpha.

Unaware of just how much of a reprieve they’d gotten, Jeff and his little lady scurried away, and I was left with four teenage werewolves—none of whom liked the idea of my walking home by myself.

General rule of thumb: except for Devon, the rest of our age-mates usually gave me a fairly wide berth. One seemingly mild glance from Callum was all it took to warn them away from thinking I was future mate material, and unless werewolves were on the lookout for a breeding partner, most of them didn’t have any use for humans. There were at most a dozen of us human-types living in the woods at any given time, and besides me, every single one was mated to one of the pack’s males. There were more human females, lots of them, buried in unmarked graves: the ones who hadn’t survived taking on a bond with the pack during the mating process, the ones who’d died in childbirth, the ones who’d lived to a ripe old age while their werewolf mates stayed young.

No, thank you.

If Callum hadn’t scared off any and all of my would-be suitors, I would have done the job myself.

“You three can go now,” I said, trying to put a hint of Callum—understated authority and uncompromising power—in my voice.

Not one of them moved.

Since I obviously wasn’t good at commanding their fear and respect, I tried to appeal to their rationality. “I’m fine. I’m
safe. The outside threat just went
poof
.” Unfortunately, this seemed to be falling on completely deaf ears. Jeff was gone, and if anyone had a claim to me, it was Devon, but our age-mates just stood there, flanking my position like the threat hadn’t abated.

If I’d opened up my bond, I might have been able to figure out why, but I also would have been devoured whole by the power that flowed through the entire pack. I was connected to each of them through Callum’s Mark, but just living with the pack had me treading water for every breath of independence I managed to take.

All of which meant that I had to rely on more subtle methods of finding out the things that I needed to know.

“Jeff’s gone, and you’re all acting like the threat is still here,” I said. “Would I be correct in guessing that means that there is an outside threat? And would this be the same outside threat that has Callum insisting I be inside every day by dark?”

Devon groaned. The other three just exchanged looks. I’d promised Ali I wouldn’t push things, and that was the only reason I wasn’t out scouring our territory for the threat, slipping out my bedroom window at night to get a good look at whatever it was that came out with the moon—besides the obvious, of course. Weres could Shift anyplace, anytime, but it was harder for them to stay human at nighttime, especially during that time of the month.

But because I was Pack, I was safe. Even when they Shifted. Even when the moon was full.

Or so I’d been told, over and over again, for as long as I could remember.

“The threat isn’t internal.” As the words left my mouth, I transitioned from trying to convince myself to treating the entire situation as a giant logic puzzle. “And it’s probably not a human.” That much went without saying; no mere human could put an entire werewolf pack on high alert. “Whatever is putting the growl in your growlers isn’t a foreign wolf, either, because it wouldn’t take the lot of you more than an hour to send him back to his own alpha, tail between his legs. Unless, of course, he was a lone wolf, in which case Callum would take care of it himself.”

Weres were pack animals, and nine times out of ten, loners were loners for a reason. Without psychic bonds to others of their kind, werewolves had a tendency to go Rabid. Give in to the desire to hunt. Hunt more than rabbits or deer. Given my history, it made perfect sense that the pack wouldn’t want me to know if a wolf on our lands was on the verge of madness, but if that was the case, the whole thing would have been over and done with in seconds.

Werewolves policed their own, and a wolf that hunted humans was as good as dead.

“No, it has to be something bigger than that,” I mused. “Something that you all see as a threat but that Callum won’t
let you eliminate. Something that makes you want to protect me, even though I don’t need your protection.”

All four of them bristled at that one—even Dev. He just got over it quicker.

“Gentlemen, I think I’ve got this from here,” he said, and with a wave of one manicured hand and a glint of steel in his eyes, he sent our age-mates on their way before I could trick them into revealing anything I didn’t already know.

“You did that on purpose,” I told him.

Devon, his posture and body language still leaking dominance, snorted. “Darn tootin’. If you poke enough angry bears with sticks, someday you’re going to get burned, sweetheart.”

I was tempted to mock him for mixing his metaphors, but I didn’t. In normal circumstances, Devon would have been on my side, hunting up answers and pushing the limits of my promise to Ali. The fact that he wasn’t just made me want to know more.

“Ah, right on time,” Devon said.

I realized that Callum was standing between us. He had a way of appearing out of nowhere, silent and deadly, and the carefully neutral expression on his face made me reconsider the wisdom of baiting him in the first place.

“I take it you’re here about algebra?” I asked him. Callum had a pesky habit of knowing what I was going to do before I did it, and there wasn’t a thing that went down in his territory that escaped his notice.

“A moment, please, Devon?” Callum asked, his tone perfectly pleasant. Devon nodded, his eyes cast downward as he stepped aside. The alpha’s effect on his wolves was immediate and overpowering.

Bless my human immunity.

“Bryn.”

That wasn’t what I expected him to say. I expected him to yell-without-yelling. To narrow his eyes at me. To grab my chin in his hand and force me to meet his most uncompromising gaze.

He didn’t. Instead, all he said was my name. My stomach twisted sharply. Something was wrong.

“Ali?”

“She’s fine now. There were some complications. She’s on bed rest.”

The pack had its own doctor, a werewolf who’d been trained in the 1800s but did his best to keep up with modern medicine of both the human and veterinary varieties. In the past two centuries, he’d overseen more than his fair share of births, and it stood to reason that he knew what he was talking about. Besides, it wasn’t like Ali could go to a normal hospital, not when her baby was anything but.

Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—

I tried not to think about the bad thing. I tried not to think about women, just like Ali, who hadn’t survived. I tried not to picture myself hiding under the sink, terrified and alone,
knowing there wasn’t a single thing I could do to stop death when it came knocking on my door.