Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (65 page)

“I don’t think I’d ever actually seen my eyes look like that before. I was twelve years old, and that was the first time I could ever remember being able to feel something just because it was the way I felt. I went through eight foster homes in six years, then I went to college, and one of the girls I’d kept in touch with from one of the group homes disappeared. The rest of the story, you know.”

“You went looking for the girl and found a pack of werewolves,” I said.

“And the pack’s alpha had just taken in a little girl, a human girl, and he told me that she’d need somebody to take care of her, because the rest of the pack would always be bigger, and they’d always be stronger, and she’d be alone.”

To someone who’d grown up as the only normal kid in a coven of psychics, Callum’s words must have really hit home. My whole life—or at least Ali’s part in it—suddenly made so much more sense. She’d loved me and protected me and taught me to be my own person because no one had ever done that for her.

“The coven in town. Is it the same one you—”

“No.” Ali didn’t even wait for me to finish the question. “I thought it might be. That’s part of the reason I went with you today, but I didn’t recognize any of the people we just saw, and if I had to guess, I’d say this coven is much smaller than ours was. Their knacks are ones I’ve seen before, but that’s to be expected. For every million people who have a way with animals, there’s one who can influence them; for all the people who can sing lullabies that put babies to sleep, there are a handful who can put normal people into a trance. Entering dreams just means you’re really good at getting inside other people’s heads, and I’d lay ten-to-one odds on this coven having an empath, because the hatred the three in town felt when they talked about werewolves wasn’t just theirs. Their pupils were the size of marshmallows.”

I hadn’t been paying attention to pupil size, but I’d seen an alien depth to the emotion and recognized it as unnatural, dangerous. On some level, I’d felt the same thing when Bridget had spoken about Caroline. If someone was manipulating the psychics’ emotions to make them hate werewolves, it seemed like a fair assumption that the same person might be nudging them into being scared of Caroline.

Or at least
more
scared than they otherwise would have been, given the whole “I was born to hunt” thing.

“You said that most powers are just extensions of natural abilities—like the way Keely is really easy to talk to, and the way that people like me are … 
scrappy
.” I paused. “But you
heard how quiet Caroline was when she was tracking us. She got within an inch of us without me hearing her, smelling her, anything. At school yesterday, none of the Weres could catch her scent, and she says she has a way with weapons, that once she takes aim, she never misses a shot. That she
can’t
.” I decided to stop beating around the bush. “She feels like a predator, Ali. That’s not just a knack, and it really doesn’t seem that mental. Even the other psychics are scared of her. So is she one of them, or is she … something else?”

I really was not ready to deal with a
something else
. Psychics and werewolves, and mind games from both, were more than enough for me, thank you very much.

“She’s a psychic,” Ali replied, “but knacks with physical manifestations are rarer, and having a set of skills, instead of just one, isn’t what I would call common.”

Whole lot of good that did us.

“In most covens, the person with the most power is usually the leader.”

I heard the stress Ali put on the word
usually
, and responded, “And when they’re not?”

“Then they’re the odd one out.”

The same way a normal human would be. The same way Ali had been. I thought of the way she’d introduced herself to Caroline, the way she’d accused the adults of using a child to do their dirty work. The rest of the coven had approached us as a group, but twice now, they’d sent Caroline after me alone.

They talked about the things she could do like she wasn’t quite human.

In the werewolf world, the easiest way to get information on any pack was through the peripherals. That was why we kept the Wayfarer restaurant open to people passing through from other packs, and that was why step two of my reconnaissance plan might involve trying to get the coven outsider alone.

Again.

A plan began to form in my mind, and it occurred to me that maybe I’d been a little hasty in swearing off my human education forever.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
HE BEST THING ABOUT HAVING FRIENDS WHO KNEW
me as well as Devon and Lake did was that they recognized from the moment I told them my plan that trying to talk me out of approaching Caroline was futile.

The worst thing about being alpha was that on some level, all three of us knew that even if they hadn’t been inclined to go along with the plan, I could have forced it.

Forced them.

I wouldn’t have done it, but the fact that I
could
seemed so much more noticeable now. Hierarchy was like breathing: the only time you thought about it was when something went wrong. With the presence of an outside threat, every instinct we had was amped up to the nth degree.

I couldn’t help thinking that did not bode particularly well for Caroline, hunter or not.

“Ali suspect anything?” Devon asked once he, Lake, and I had put sufficient distance between us and the Wayfarer.

“Does she find it highly suspicious that the three of us are
going back to school when there’s a psychic army looming threateningly in the background?” I leaned back in my seat. “Of course she does. But given that she helped me play psychic bait yesterday, she can’t really complain about us doing the same thing today. Besides, Callum
forbids
it.”

Devon and Lake snorted in unison.

“Bryn Rule number twenty-three,” Devon intoned, “whenever someone tells you to do something, make it a point to do the exact opposite.”

“I’m not
that
bad.”

Lake grinned. “Plausible deniability is a girl’s best friend.”

“Rule twenty-seven?” Devon guessed, wrinkling his brow, deep in the throes of mock thought.

“Fourteen,” Lake interjected. “If I remember correctly, Bryn Rule twenty-seven involves the evils of werewolf bodyguards.”

“Present company excluded, of course,” Devon added, eyeing me reproachfully.

“You guys aren’t here as bodyguards,” I said, eyeing him right back. The last thing I needed was for Devon or Lake to feel obligated to throw down with Caroline in front of our Weston High fan club. “Shay made a deal with the coven. Caroline’s mother is the head of the coven. Ergo, we need Caroline to start talking.”

Lake smiled.

“We need her to start talking
of her own volition
,” I clarified. “No violence. No scenes. No ‘but I’ve been watching
NCIS
reruns and I think I’m really getting a hang of this interrogation thing.’ ”

And no Keely, I added to myself. If anyone could recognize her knack for what it was, it would be another psychic, and we couldn’t risk word of Keely’s knack getting back to Shay.

“No interrogation? Why don’t you just come right out and say ‘no fun’?” Lake grumbled.

I shrugged. “No fun. The coven gave us one week to hand over Lucas. Today is the third day. The last thing we want is to prod them into early action.”

“So if we can’t threaten Caroline, and we can’t interrogate her, how are we supposed to get her to say a darn thing?” Lake’s question was a good one, and I didn’t reply—mostly because my plan didn’t have much nuance beyond “poke it with a stick and see what happens.”

Luckily, this situation seemed to fall under Devon’s area of expertise, and he obligingly picked up the mantle. “Now, don’t shoot me, ladies, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you two, as lovely and endearing as you are, might not be terribly well versed in the art of making friends and influencing people.”

Lake snorted. “And you are? Seems I remember
you
wanting to rip Miss My Family Can Be Very Patient’s aorta out her nose, same as I did.”

Devon executed a delicate shrug of his massive shoulders. “The thought might have occurred to me once or twice, but
you know what they say, Lake—you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

I could feel Devon’s
Gone with the Wind
impression coming on, but since it seemed to be a step in the right direction compared to disembowelment, I decided to let it slide.

“You should have seen the way the other members of the coven talked about this girl, Lake.” I paused, letting my words sink in. “They’re scared of her—the kind of scared that involves pupils twice as big as they ought to be.”

Lake gave me a look that said I wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing her that playing nice with Caroline was the answer.

I tried again. “Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe we’ll try to talk to her and she’ll shut us down, but my gut is telling me that she’s used to living on the fringe. She’s used to people being afraid. She might even like it, but deep down, she has to be lonely or angry or bored.”

If watching Ali assess the trio the day before had taught me one thing, it was that you didn’t need supernatural powers to play off other people’s emotions. Whatever Caroline was hiding beneath that unbothered, uninvolved exterior, I was willing to bet that it ran deep, and given that she’d explicitly threatened the lives of everyone I loved, I wasn’t going to feel guilty about using that.

Using her.

It took me a moment to realize that Lake had stopped
driving and that both of my friends had gone still beside me. It was several seconds more before I realized that if my alpha status had been noticeable before, I was practically bleeding dominance now.

Pack
was what mattered.
Protecting
them.
Destroying
threats.

For a few seconds, I stayed there, in that distinctly alpha frame of mind where nothing and no one else mattered but protecting my pack, and then, like a drowning man coming up for air, I managed to pull myself back. We were just going to talk to Caroline, try to get some answers.

That was all.

Devon in full-on charm mode was a terrifying thing. Caroline must have thought so, too, because she avoided him, evaded him, and glared brutal, bloody murder in his direction right up until the moment the three of us sat down at her table at lunch.

“Mind if we join you?” Devon slung one arm over the back of his chair and stretched his legs out, looking for all the world like some kind of larger-than-life male model smoldering on the side of a city bus.

“It’s a free country.” Caroline met his eyes with an unnatural, absolute calm. “You can sit wherever you want.”

Most people’s bodies telegraphed their thoughts in ways that run-of-the-mill humans never noticed, but Caroline was
like a blank slate. She wasn’t hiding her fear. She wasn’t deliberately communicating that she wasn’t afraid. She just sort of
was
.

There was some chance that this was going to be harder than I’d thought.

“You left before the real fun started yesterday.” I kept my voice casual, all too aware that the rest of the student body was watching the four of us like we were their soap opera of choice. “Your family is just a bucket of laughs.”

Caroline bared her teeth, and it took me a moment to realize that she was smiling with her mouth but not with her eyes. “The others are very friendly. Have you given any more thought to what we talked about on Monday?”

“I have.” Devon leaned forward in his chair, staying out of her personal space, but bringing the full force of his blue eyes to bear on hers. “I don’t know about the girls, but I’m having some, shall we say,
doubts
.”

“Doubts,” Caroline repeated.

Devon grinned. “Doubts. I could tell you that I’m devilishly handsome, have an impeccable sense of style, and am much, much stronger than I look, but I could also claim to be the reincarnation of Humphrey Bogart.” He lowered his brows slightly and played his
here’s looking at you, kid
face for all it was worth. “How’s a girl like you supposed to know who or what to believe?”