Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (76 page)

“So you’ll take Ali and the kids and hunker down somewhere safe until the threat has passed?”

Dev snorted. “Not for all the tea in China. Not for front-row seats at Fashion Week. Not for a featured role on
Glee
.”

I snorted right back at him. “Tell me how you really feel, Dev.”

“You’re the alpha. That means that you have to come first. And like it or not, you’re human, and that means you’re—”

“Breakable?” I suggested, the word Shay had used dripping sarcastically from my own lips. “I’m also Resilient. What happens when Valerie starts messing with your emotions? Or when Bridget whistles a little ditty that turns you from teen wolf into a sitting duck? Lucas said one of the psychics can control wolves. What happens if you can’t fight her off?”

Devon’s jaw snapped shut, and for once, he was absolutely silent. I waited, my eyes locked on his, his locked on mine, and after a long moment, he nodded. He wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t admit that there was even the smallest possibility that I was right, but he would take the younger kids and go, because I’d asked.

He would do what had to be done, even if it killed him. Even if it killed me.

He’d do it for the pack.

“Well, this is nice and cozy.”

If the circumstances had been different, it might have been gratifying to see the way the boys jumped then, given that I’d spent most of my life with werewolves sneaking up on me, but the person who’d gotten the drop on them was standing with
her back against the opposite wall, a gun in her hand, blonde hair concealing the left half of her face.

“Caroline.”

She shrugged, like my saying her name was an accusation—one to which she was completely indifferent.

“Did you come here to
warn
us?” Devon asked, putting melodramatic emphasis on the word. Swooping in to issue her mother’s ultimatums was more or less Caroline’s MO.

“I don’t know why I came here,” Caroline said, looking down at the gun. “But if you want to take it as a warning, that works. My mother won’t be able to hold the others back much longer.”

“Hold them back,” I repeated. “Yeah. Right.”

“You couldn’t make it easy,” Caroline said, ignoring my sarcasm. “You couldn’t just give us that thing and walk away.”

“That thing as in Chase?” I asked, following her gaze to my left, where Chase was eyeing Caroline with detached objectivity, even as his lupine nature became more apparent in his posture, his expression, the feel of his mind.

“Or that thing as in Lucas?” I continued. “Maybe you’d like my baby sister? She’s not quite a year old yet, but she’s a holy horror when she doesn’t get her way.”

“You’re like them,” Caroline told me, her pupils beginning to bleed outward as she stepped away from the shadows. “You’re just like them.”

“No,” I said, aware that Chase was close—very close—to Shifting. “
They’re
just like you. Did you know they used to be
human—Chase and Maddy and the rest? They were human, just like you. They were attacked, just like you. They survived. For that matter, so did I.” I thought about what Jed had said about the man who’d led the coven before Valerie. “My parents didn’t.”

My words seemed to snap Caroline out of it. She stopped moving forward. Genuine emotion overrode whatever psychic push Valerie had left in her daughter’s head, and I saw an instant of doubt, vulnerable and raw, in Caroline’s blue eyes, a single moment during which she wanted desperately to believe that she wasn’t alone.

That she wasn’t a monster.

That someone,
anyone
else could understand.

“Do you really think this is about Lucas?” I asked her. “You really think that your mother is willing to go up against an entire pack of werewolves just so she can squeeze out a few extra days of torturing one? Valerie wants to fight. She wants you to want to fight, and I think we both know that your mother has a way of getting what she wants.”

Uncertainty danced around the edges of Caroline’s features, but the mere mention of her mother was enough to make her pupils pulse. I thought of Ali’s description of her own childhood, growing up under the constant influence of an empath.

If she was sad, I was sad. If she was angry, I was angry. I loved her so much, because she wanted me to
.

Caroline wasn’t angry. She wasn’t sad. I wasn’t even sure she loved her mother, but whatever she was feeling, she felt it irrevocably and intensely, and the emotion had a mind of its own.

She glanced down at the gun in her hand and then back up at me. I had a single second to process the realization that if Valerie wanted me dead, she didn’t need a whole coven to do it.

“She didn’t send me here,” Caroline said, turning the gun over in her hand. “I came on my own, but it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again, lifting the gun. “What I want doesn’t matter. What you want doesn’t matter. This is what I was made for. It’s what I’m good at. It’s what I do.”

I felt a flare of energy the second before Chase Shifted. Caroline switched her gaze from me to him, and my heart jumped into my throat when I realized that a girl who’d been programmed to hate werewolves was standing there, watching him Shift, her hand on a gun.

Caroline’s knuckles went white. Her blue eyes bled black again. She turned her attention from Chase to me, and she raised the gun.

Bryn. Mine. Protect
.

Chase’s thoughts. Before I could process them—or what the wolf was about to do—he leapt, straight for the gun pointed at me.

Straight for Caroline’s throat.

Devon jumped forward, Shifting in midair faster and more
fluidly than any Were I’d ever seen. His body slammed against Chase’s, and the muted sound of flesh hitting flesh was drowned out by the snapping of teeth and a low, vibrating growl.

Almost instantly, Dev was back on four feet, and he whirled around, bringing the full force of his massive size to bear on Caroline, matching Chase’s growl with one of his own. The message was clear, even to an outsider: Devon had saved her, but if Caroline gave him reason to, he’d kill her himself.

Caroline’s eyes went suddenly blue, her pupils shrinking to pinpoints as she stared at Devon in wolf form. For whatever reason, seeing him had knocked out the effects of Valerie’s interference, and for a split second, I relaxed.

Then Caroline’s finger tightened around the trigger. With no warning whatsoever, she took aim and fired—but not at me.

In her right mind and of her own volition, she put a silver bullet straight through Devon’s heart.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Y
OU CAN KNOW, OBJECTIVELY, THAT YOUR BEST
friend isn’t allergic to silver. You can be fully aware that, setting the silver issue aside, most werewolves can take a bullet to the heart and come out of it okay. You can
know
it, and it doesn’t matter.

The second I saw the bullet pierce Devon’s chest, I was on the floor beside him, saying his name out loud, calling to him through the pack-bond, willing him to be okay. My hands warm and sticky with his blood, I felt the Change ripple through his body as he Shifted back to human form.

“Dev. You’re going to be okay, Devon. You’re going to be fine.”

He said something—softly. I couldn’t make it out, couldn’t get my human ears to decipher whatever he was trying to say.

You’re going to be okay, Dev. You’re going to be
fine.

If I could have made it an order, I would have. I would have
ordered
him to be okay, but I didn’t get the chance, because he spoke again—silently this time—and I heard what he said just fine.

Caroline
.

I felt a pulse of rage go through my body, and all around me, the rest of the pack felt it, too.

The smell of Devon’s blood brought the rest of the pack straight to us, and as a unit, they turned their attention on Caroline. She moved quickly, quietly. Mitch caught her roughly by one arm, but an instant later, he was wearing a dagger through his bicep, and she was gone.

She dove out a window, straight through the glass.

The pack wanted to follow. They wanted to tear her open, hunt her down, make her bleed the way Devon was bleeding now.

Prey. Prey. Prey
.

With their animal instincts beating a constant rhythm in my mind, I could feel the desire rising in my own body: tears in my eyes, a tightening in my throat, and the thrum of my heart and theirs all around me.

“Could be … trap,” Devon wheezed.

The second I heard his voice, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Appreciating his meaning took me a second longer. Caroline had just taken out one of our strongest fighters
and
whetted the pack’s desire for blood. Every instinct they had, every instinct
I
had said to chase her.

But what if that was what she wanted?

I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Valerie had sent her daughter here to lure us out, even though the memory of Caroline’s eyes—blue and completely her own—and the expression on her ashen face as she’d leveled the gun at Dev made me think that none of this had been planned, that she hadn’t come here to kill anyone, that shooting Dev after he’d saved her life had been … personal.

Time was passing. Precious seconds, and once Caroline was out of eyesight, she was impossible to track. The pack wanted to go after her.
I
wanted to go after her. But I couldn’t take the chance that it was a trap.

I couldn’t take any chances, because if there was one thing the blood on my hands had hit home, it was the reality that from here out, we were playing for keeps.

“She’s not prey,” I said out loud. “Not yet. We’re going to let them bring the fight to us.”

Beside me, Devon groaned. With no small amount of ceremony, he lifted his right hand, dug his fingernails into his chest, and ripped out the bullet.

“Well, there goes that manicure,” he muttered.

“Somebody bring me a med kit,” I said, my voice the only sound in the room. “Mitch, I’ll need you to weigh in on a couple of things. Lake, bring me up to speed on the explosives. And will somebody
please
get Devon some clothes?”

My hands soaked in my best friend’s blood, I prepared
my pack for war. Now that the course was set, now that we’d passed the point of no return, I felt an odd sense of calm rolling over my body, a whisper in the back of my mind.

I could practically taste the red haze of Resilience, hovering just out of reach.

We waited for the attack at the edge of the forest, where we had the benefit of cover and our attackers would not. Lake, Maddy, Phoebe, and Sage took the front line; Devon and the kids were hidden safely away. Our perimeter was lined with explosives, and I was ready and willing to use them.

If Caroline tried to set up some kind of sniper’s nest and pick us off one by one, she was going to be very unpleasantly surprised.

I felt detached from what we were about to do, but my heart was pounding, feeding my brain adrenaline, fueling the pack’s appetite for blood. This was a
hunt
. We were hunters, and the air was heavy with the things a werewolf pack, backed into a corner, could do.

Would do.

I could see the expression on Caroline’s face as she took in Devon’s wolf form, pulled the trigger. She’d shut down emotionally, but as I played the moment over and over again in my mind, I caught wisps of fury, vulnerability, fear.

Pack. Pack. Pack
.

I didn’t want to kill her, didn’t want to kill any of them, but if it came down to our lives or theirs, if Caroline started shooting, I’d put her down like a rabid dog—the same way I was going to go after Valerie and end this once and for all.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha
.

My chest tightened and a ball of energy exploded inside me, pushing me forward,
willing
me to force my way to the front of the pack—in front of Lake, in front of Maddy. Every instinct I had said to face this threat head-on.

“Bryn.”

My eyes were so focused on the horizon that I didn’t see Ali until she’d made her way back to the point in the forest where I stood. Briefly, I wondered what she was doing here, but then I saw the gun in her hand and the look on her face—one I recognized all too well.