Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (60 page)

Between Caroline’s little demonstration at lunch and the fading burn on my skin, I was fairly certain I did have some idea of what we were dealing with, but I didn’t argue with Ali—mainly because my foster mother telling me that I didn’t know how dangerous people like this could be meant that for some reason, she did.

“You have experience with psychics?” I asked.

Ali pressed her lips together in a thin line and then wiped her hands on her jeans and nodded. “You could say that.”

Her words hung in the air between us, and Ali turned
toward the kitchen. “If they lay a hand on you, I’ll kill them myself.”

“And how, exactly, are you going to take on a whole
family
of psychics?” I asked, aiming for a light, teasing tone and failing miserably.

Ali shrugged. “For you, I’d find a way, and technically, a group of psychics isn’t called a family.” Ali started walking toward the kitchen. “It’s called a coven.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HAT NIGHT
, I
SLATHERED MY SKIN WITH A THICK
coat of aloe vera and slept with a fire extinguisher next to my bed. I might have been promised a seven-day cease-fire at lunch, but the psychics would have to forgive me if I was hesitant to take the word of a bunch of superpowered psychopaths who got their jollies from torturing teenage werewolves.

I think you’ll find us reasonable
, Caroline had said.

“Yeah, right,” I muttered, turning over in bed. Despite the risks, I needed to get some rest. A sleep-deprived alpha was nobody’s friend.

Closing my eyes, I let my alpha-sense take over, reached out through the bond, and found the others. I let their thoughts and senses flood my own.

Alex. Lily. Katie. Mitch.

Devon, Maddy, Lake, and Chase.

The peripherals at the very edge of our territory. The rest of the kids at the Wayfarer.

We were safe. We were together. We were fine.

The dream started with Callum. He was standing in my old workshop—the one place in Stone River territory that I’d carved out as my own. Callum was watching something, a soft smile creasing a face that had never aged past thirty, relaxed, but leaking power all the same. I followed his gaze and saw myself standing there—a younger Bryn, though not by much, peeling dried glue off her fingertips as she stared with nearly comical concentration at the result of an afternoon’s work: a sculpture, maybe, or a mobile.
What
I was working on was fuzzy. It didn’t matter.

The look on Callum’s face did.

I couldn’t put words to the emotion, couldn’t describe it, except to say that during the course of my childhood, I’d caught him looking at me that way a hundred thousand times: like I was a puzzle, like I was precious.

Like he didn’t want me to grow up, because things would change forever once I did.

As if he could hear my thoughts, the dream Callum turned to look at me—the real me, not the memory of the girl I’d been a year or two before. He moved his lips, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t make out the words or the familiar tone of his low and steady voice.

I wanted to so badly it hurt.

He took my shoulders gently in his hands, bent down to my
level. I opened my mouth but could not say a word. Everything began to go dark and fuzzy, but I held on, fought to hear what he was saying, wished he could look at me like I was little, like I was his—just one more time. But Callum faded away, to darkness, to nothing, leaving me staring at my younger self, this dream Bryn so caught up in things that didn’t matter. She turned, saw me. She pointed.

She smiled.

I glanced down to see what she was smiling at, and that was when I realized—I was bleeding. There were three deep wounds in my side, parallel lines.

The Mark.

I watched in horror as the gashes spread across my torso, leaving me unable to move until the sound of clapping broke me from my stupor. Young Bryn faded away, the way Callum had, and a new form took shape on my workbench.

Archer.

“Bravo,” he said. “Encore, encore! The angst. The drama. The symbolism. You’re first-class entertainment, little Bryn.”

Little Bryn
should have sounded like an improvement over
mutt-lover
, but it didn’t.

“What?” The trespasser smiled sardonically. “No she-wolf this time?”

I found myself looking for her, even though I didn’t want to. The dreamworld shifted on its axis, the workshop giving way all around me to the forest, the snow. My body rebelled
against the sudden change, nausea taking me down to my knees. The snow was wet and cold under my fingertips.

It melted under Archer’s feet.

So much for a cease-fire.

“Hey now,” he said, looming over me and sounding almost offended. “I’m not doing anything unsavory here. This is a dream of your making, not mine, wolf girl. I’m just along for the ride.”

Pain chipped away at my temple, like a metal pick striking ice. I fought my way through it, getting to my feet, fists clenched and thirsting for this psychic’s blood, but suddenly and without warning, I couldn’t breathe.

I looked down and realized with mounting horror that the gashes in my side were still growing—bigger and bigger—and they weren’t even bleeding anymore. I could see through them, all the way through my body and out the other side.

Beneath my skin, where there should have been fat and bone and muscle, there was nothing.

No organs. No blood.

I was hollow.

I woke with a start, and in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the darkness, my other senses flared to life. The room didn’t smell right. It didn’t
feel
right, and the scratching sound of
inhuman nails against wooden floor told me that I wasn’t alone.

A silver knife was in my hand before I realized I had reached for it. I put my back to the wall and like a wild thing, I crouched slightly, holding my blade at the ready, right next to my ear.

The wolf at the foot of my bed backed up slowly. It took me a moment to recognize him, and a moment past that to push down the compulsion to throw the knife at the spot directly between his light brown eyes.

“Lucas?” I said, trying to process that he was there on my bedroom floor. He made no move to attack, and I returned the favor, but my fingers tightened around the hilt of the blade, ready to buy me whatever time they could.

In human form, Lucas was unassuming. Small. As a wolf, he was scraggly, with ribs poking out under matted fur and eyes that I could describe only as hungry.

“Change.” My voice shook slightly as I said the word, and I narrowed my eyes, allowing my own pack’s power to flow through me, banishing the kind of fear that the wolf in front of me might be able to smell. “Change, or I’ll call for the others, and we’ll hand you to the coven wrapped up in a little bow.”

At the word
coven
, the wolf went very still, and then I heard the first crack of bone. The shudder that went through Lucas’s body in the instant before the Change whetted my own appetite—for running, for hunting, for
something
—but I kept myself from moving, from approaching him.

I didn’t lower the knife.

By the time Lucas finished Changing, my own brow was covered with sweat, and my senses were heightened. My heart made itself known with uncompromising force beneath my rib cage, and my ears caught the muted sound of Lucas’s ragged breaths. He was hunched over on the floor, but he lifted his eyes to stare just over my left shoulder. The moonlight caught his irises.

He was naked.

Modesty warred with my survival instincts and lost. I knew better than to take my eyes off a predator, naked or not.

“I would never hurt you,” Lucas said, his voice breaking. “I needed … to run … I needed … to Shift.…” He shivered, eyeing the knife in my hands. “I needed …”

Me
.

My mind finished the sentence for him, and I prayed he wouldn’t say it out loud.

“I needed to know,” Lucas said.

I breathed an internal sigh of relief that the naked boy on my floor hadn’t confessed his undying need for me.

“Yeah, well, I need you to cover yourself up.” I lowered the knife and reached across my body with my left hand to grab the blanket off my bed. I tossed it toward Lucas, and he caught it and did as I asked.

“I also need for you not to show up in my bedroom in the middle of the night.” I tried to put this in terms he could
understand. “This is my territory. My personal territory, and no one comes here without an invitation.”

“I need to know.” Lucas was hunched over so far that his broken request was issued more to my feet than my face. “Are you going to hand me over?”

“I don’t know.” Now my voice was the one breaking. “I’m sorry, Lucas, but I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m hoping there’s a way, I’m going to try to find a way, but if you’re asking if I’ll send my pack to war to keep you safe, when Shay could come in at any moment and demand you back, the answer is no. I can’t promise that, and you shouldn’t be asking me to.”

“There’s a lot of things he shouldn’t be doing,” a low, even voice said.

Chase
.

I felt him before I saw him, and my body didn’t register even a hint of surprise at his presence. Of course he’d come. Of course he was moving to stand between Lucas and me.

“Lucas shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be asking you to do this. And he shouldn’t take it the wrong way that I’m going to give him until I count to three to put as much distance between the two of you as he possibly can.”

“Chase—”

Chase didn’t let me finish. “He should also be glad that I beat the others here, because I doubt Devon or Lake would be nearly as understanding about this as I am.”

Even in the scant moonlight, I could make out the way
Chase’s pupils surged until his eyes were more black than blue. There was a part of him—a bigger part than I’d realized—that knew violence, the way he and I knew each other.

He was fighting it, and he was trying, but I could sense his human half wanting to hurl Lucas across the room every bit as much as his wolf wanted to sink fang into flesh.

“One.”

As the alpha, I could have made him stop, but I didn’t.

“Two.”

Lucas took off through the window, the same way he must have come in, and Chase followed him far enough to shut the pane carefully behind him, lock it. He let out a long, even breath.

“He didn’t hurt you.”

I got the feeling that Chase was talking to himself more than asking me a question.

“He didn’t hurt me,” I echoed. Now didn’t seem to be the right time to point out that I could take care of myself. Instead, I pried my fingers off the knife still clutched in my right hand and massaged my knuckles.

Chase’s eyes faded back to their natural blue, and he crossed the room. He ran one hand over my arm and nodded, as if to convince himself that I was fine, that Lucas hadn’t hurt me—even though he could have.

“Bryn?”

“I’m fine.”

Chase nodded, breathed in my scent.

“He’s broken,” I said. “The look on his face, it was just …”