Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (66 page)

For the first time, I saw a chink in Caroline’s otherwise
emotionless armor: she raised one eyebrow, ever so slightly, and turned to me. “Is he serious?”

“Almost never,” Lake replied. “But the boy has a point. It’s one thing to breeze into town and
say
you can do something. It’s another thing to put your money where your mouth is and prove that it’s true.”

“Are you suggesting that I’m
not
the reincarnation of Humphrey Bogart?” Devon gave Lake a disgruntled look. “I’m hurt.”

“And I’m going to finish my lunch outside.” Caroline slid her chair back and stood up. “I’d give you all a demonstration, but Bryn’s already gotten a hint of my tracking skills, and to show you the rest, I’d have to ask one of you to play the target. I doubt there’d be any volunteers.”

Devon stood up. “Where do you want me?”

“Devon.” At times like this, I really wished he had an aversion to his full name so my saying it could carry the same weight as his calling me Bronwyn.

“What?” Dev said, the very picture of innocence, all six foot five of him.

I wasn’t buying it.
This is how you make friends and influence people, Devon?
I asked.
By volunteering for target practice?

He shrugged.
What did you expect me to do, Bryn, compliment her shoes? She’s a trained killer who issues ultimatums on behalf of an entire coven of psychics. I don’t think we’d get very far with girl talk, and besides, have you
seen
her shoes?

I had to admit that there was a twisted kind of reason to his logic. To get any information out of Caroline, we’d have to talk her into spending more than three minutes at a time in our presence. If challenging her to show off her skills gave us more time to work our way in, it wasn’t the worst idea in the world—except for the part where Devon volunteered to be the target.

“You want me to demonstrate my skills on you?” The neutral set of Caroline’s features gave way to a small, self-satisfied smile.

Devon straightened his lapels. “I’d love for you to demonstrate your skills on me.”

Beside me, Lake groaned.
Forget Bogart
, she told me.
He’s channeling rakish bad boys 101. Don’t know about you, B, but I think I’m gonna be sick
.

I was right there with Lake on that sentiment. I was used to seeing Devon hop from one role to the next, but nine times out of ten, I was the target of his shenanigans, and he reverted to form the second I smiled.

But Caroline wasn’t smiling anymore. She was smirking, and I was only about 90 percent sure that Devon was playing, because as the four of us walked outside, he didn’t say a single word to me—not out loud and not in my head.

Dev, I really hope you know what you’re doing
, I told him as Caroline jumped the parking lot railing and headed for the forest, the three of us on her heels.

Bronwyn, dearest, have you ever known me to charge into something blind or without a plan?

Yes
, I replied immediately.

Devon’s eyes flitted from Caroline’s form to mine.
Something that
wasn’t
your idea?

It was possible that in the history of our friendship, I’d gotten Devon into more trouble than I’d gotten him out of. It was also possible that if the roles had been reversed, Dev would have had my back, no matter what.

Fine
, I told him.
But if you get hurt, I’m going to kill you
.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” Caroline asked. For the first time, I could sense something beyond cold detachment in her voice. She wanted Devon to say yes. She wanted to shoot him.

She wanted to hunt.

I recognized her desire. Lake recognized it. Dev had to have recognized it, too, but as he went radio silent on the other end of our pack-bond, I took the message loud and clear. I was going to have to trust him to take care of himself on this one, and I was going to have to stop thinking about the reasons this was a bad idea and start thinking about ways to make it work.

Chances were good that Caroline would assume that Devon would have the same reaction to silver that most werewolves did. Chances were also good that she wouldn’t go for a kill shot. We still had four days left on her mother’s ultimatum, and Caroline didn’t seem like the type to kill on a whim.

No matter how badly she wanted it, no matter how strong
the instinct to hunt down her prey was, she was still human. She wasn’t Rabid. She wasn’t out of control. She was scarily in control, and while I had no doubt she could kill, my gut said that she wouldn’t until she had orders.

I’d spent enough time skirting Callum’s dictates to recognize when someone else had had following orders pounded into her for years.

About a hundred yards into the woods, Caroline stopped. In a slow, deliberate movement, she bent down and unsheathed a dagger strapped to her side. She turned and the weapon left her hand before I even realized she was preparing to throw it. It whizzed past Devon’s left ear, slicing through the air and making it sing, a deadly sound that stopped only when the blade cut down a bird, mid-flight, pinning it to a tree half a football field away.

“I don’t miss. You can either take my word for it, or you can start running.”

Devon grinned—and then he ran. Caroline didn’t bother tracking his movements. She didn’t move to pull out a weapon. Instead, she turned to me.

“It’s your call,” she told me. “Do I aim for him?”

No. Absolutely not. Never
.

“Aim for his hair,” I told her. “He’s been going for a little more volume lately, and if you’re as good as you say you are, you should be able to give him a trim.”

Caroline nodded. She reached into her jacket and pulled
out an arrow, tipped with silver, and a small crossbow, sized to fit perfectly under her jacket without being seen. The sheer number of weapons she had managed to conceal within seemingly ordinary clothes defied the laws of physics.

Devon was still visible in the distance—well outside the range in which I could have hit him, but not so far gone that she didn’t stand a chance.

“Move,” she whispered. “Run.”

Hearing her words, despite the distance, he turned at a ninety-degree angle and began running in a line perpendicular to the one on which Lake, Caroline, and I stood. His pace and motions were erratic and unpredictable.

He was fast.

Caroline didn’t lose a moment. She didn’t pause to get a feel for the wind. She didn’t narrow her eyes. She just lifted her arm and turned her head to face me, and without even looking at Devon, she fired.

This was a mistake.

I knew that when I saw the look in Caroline’s eyes: certain and satisfied and a little bit sad, like there had never been any question in her mind that she would hit him, and like she wished, on a gut-deep level, that there was.

“You got him.” Lake tried very hard to keep the admiration out of her voice. “Right where it hurts—in the hair gel.”

Dev?
I didn’t have the benefit of Lake’s eyesight, and I needed to know for myself that he was okay, that Caroline
hadn’t missed her target by a fraction of an inch in the wrong direction.

I’m fine, Bryn. Not quite as pretty as I was a few seconds ago, but fine
.

All things considered, he was taking it well, but for some reason, Caroline wasn’t.

I assessed her reaction. “Are you upset that you hit him, or upset that it was only his hair?”

Caroline’s eyes flashed. “I don’t get upset,” she said. “I don’t lose control.”

“That the difference between you and a werewolf?” I asked.

Caroline took a step forward, closing the space between us. “I’m nothing like you.” Even though her tone never changed, the way she spaced her words did, each one issued with the weight of an entire sentence. “Any of you.”

I caught her gaze and held it. “You hunt. Werewolves hunt. There’s a part of you that likes it. You’re a predator. You may not go furry on the full moon, but you’re not any more human than they are.”

“Maybe not.” That wasn’t the response I’d expected. “But if there weren’t people like you, the world wouldn’t need people like me. If I’m a monster, you made me that way.”

“Is this the collective ‘you’ we’re talking about here?” I asked, pushing her that much further, that much harder.

Caroline’s right hand lashed out, but unlike the woman who’d hit Ali the day before, she didn’t strike me. She brought
her fingertips to the edge of the glove on her opposite hand, and she tugged.

There was a part of me that expected an explosion of power the second her skin hit the crisp winter air, but there was nothing: no sound, no smell, no foreboding sense of things to come.

And then I saw the scars. They were puckered and white, and they drew my eyes to the skin around them. The skin that was there.

The skin that wasn’t.

“Werewolf attack,” she said. “When I was seven.”

I shook my head. “Unless you’re hiding a lot more scars somewhere, you’re mistaken.”

Werewolves didn’t attack to maim. Under the Senate’s rule, they didn’t attack at all, and when a wolf went Rabid, he didn’t care about anything but the hunt. He certainly didn’t let a seven-year-old girl walk away after taking a single chunk out of her arm.

“I shot him, right between the eyes.”

“Were you shooting silver?” Lake asked quietly.

“No.” Caroline issued the word like it was a challenge. “But it was enough to slow him down. Enough for me to get away.” She pressed her lips together into a thin white line. “Not enough for my father to get away, too.”

Bullet or not, there wasn’t a werewolf on the planet who would let his prey get away with nothing more than a sizable
love nip. When werewolves attacked, they attacked to kill—and the only people who didn’t die as a result were the kind who could survive things that normal people couldn’t.

Caroline wasn’t Resilient—I would have known in a heartbeat if she was, the way I’d known from the moment I’d seen Chase that we were
the same
, the way the Rabid—who’d been Resilient himself—had known exactly which kids could survive being Changed.

We just
knew
—and Caroline didn’t engender even a spark of that recognition.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Lake asked me.

I glanced away from Caroline, just for a second. “I’m thinking she got away because he
let
her.”

One second, I was standing and talking, and the next, I was on the ground, and Caroline’s foot was wedged under my chin, holding me down, pushing my head back.

There was a slight chance she was better at hand-to-hand than I’d given her credit for.

With Caroline’s foot bearing down on my trachea, I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t panic. I didn’t fight her, and I managed to keep Devon and Lake from responding to the action.

“Nobody
lets
me do anything,” Caroline said, her eyes slits in an otherwise cherubic face. “I do what has to be done, and if that means shooting silver, to make sure that what I put down stays down, then that’s what it means.”

My lungs rebelled inside my chest, and I knew that the
second things started going hazy, the familiar blood-red haze of my survival instinct wouldn’t be far behind. In a matter of seconds, Caroline would be the one on the floor, and I would have lost the only advantage that mattered right now: she was talking.

“Werewolves are animals. God made me a hunter. You do the math.” Having had her say, Caroline lifted her foot off my trachea, and I fought down the urge to put her in the dirt, to show her
my
mettle.

“Do we look like animals to you?” Devon asked, coming up behind me. With a sizable chunk of his hair now missing, he looked more like a disgruntled eighties pop star than an animal of any kind. “Whoever attacked you deserved the bullet, and if you’d been shooting silver, he would have deserved that, too, but unless the wolf in question was a pup at the time, it wasn’t Lucas. It wasn’t Lake. It wasn’t me.”

“Did they tell you that our pack is mostly kids?” Lake asked, looking Caroline straight in the eye. “Our age or younger. Some of them aren’t much older than you were when you got those.” Lake gestured to the scars on Caroline’s arm. “You attack us, and you’re no better than whatever took a bite out of you.”

“You’re not human.” Caroline’s voice went cold. If I hadn’t been watching for it, I might not have noticed the way her pupils surged, covering her irises like ink spreading slowly across a page. “I won’t feel bad for you—or for them.”

My eyes on hers, I climbed to my feet, wondering if she
knew her feelings weren’t entirely her own. “I’m human,” I said softly.

Her pupils constricted.

“If you were really human, if there was any humanity left in you, then you would understand. They aren’t like us. They’ll never be like us.”

I wanted to tell her that there was no me and her, no
us
, but there was a part of me that didn’t want to know whether those words would smell like a lie.

A werewolf had killed my father, too.

I pushed down that thought. “If your coven is so convinced that werewolves are animals, then why would you make a deal with Shay?”

“Shay?” Caroline repeated.

“Lucas’s alpha.”

Either the words weren’t ringing a bell, or Caroline had an even better poker face than I’d given her credit for.

“Big guy, kind of looks like me?” Devon kept his tone casual, and my heart sank for him, for what it cost him to acknowledge any similarity to the brother he barely knew.

“Shay,” I said sharply, expounding so Devon didn’t have to. “The guy who gave Lucas to your coven? Sadistic, kind of smarmy? About yea tall?” I raised my hand over my head. “Probably asked you guys for something in exchange for loaning out his favorite punching bag?”

Caroline stopped looking at me like I was the enemy and
started looking at me like I was insane. “No one
gave
us Lucas. We caught him. He doesn’t have a pack or an alpha. He’s on his own, and if he hasn’t killed yet, he would have eventually. Lone wolves always do.”