Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (79 page)

I struggled to sit up, make myself taller, taking stock of my injuries as I did. In the time I’d been unconscious, I’d already started healing, but my left forearm was as good as useless, burned and wrapped in gauze. I thought of Jed and the layers and layers of scars decorating his aging flesh.

Werewolves healed quickly. Short of silver poisoning or being literally torn to pieces, they bounced back with minimal scars, but I wasn’t a werewolf, and unless I turned, someday, I’d be as old and scarred and battle-worn as Jed, strong enough to survive, with the things I’d lived through etched into the surface of my skin.

“After I took that last shot, there was an explosion. Jed pulled me out, dragged me away. He tried to take my gun.”

This time, I did see a flicker of emotion. Little Miss Huntress didn’t like being disarmed.

“We fought. I let him think he’d won, and the second he came out of fight mode, I knocked him out and dragged him far enough away from the explosions that I knew he’d be okay. Then I went after you.” Caroline shrugged, like nothing she’d said so far was important, like none of it mattered, to her or to me. “You know the rest.”

She stayed in the shadows, her back against the wall, the distance between us the only thing that kept me from reaching out with my one good arm and grabbing her by the throat.

As much as I didn’t want to, I believed her when she said that she hadn’t killed Eric—but either way, she’d shot him, left him as easy prey for the coven and their bag of tricks. She’d put a bullet in Lake’s dad and one in Chase, and the last time I’d seen her, she’d had a gun trained on the one person in this world who’d always been there, always been on my side, from day one.

“You didn’t shoot Ali?” I meant the words as a statement, but they came out like a question.

Caroline didn’t respond.

I could feel Ali, faintly, through the bond. Her mind was as much a mystery to me as always, and habit kept me from pushing past her walls. She was alive. She was safe. Everything beyond that—the sequence of events leading up to her putting Valerie down, the moment she’d recognized the coven leader
as the woman who’d thrown her away, those final moments before Caroline had put down her gun—those things were hers alone.

“You’re Ali’s sister.” I looked for a resemblance and found none. There was nothing of Ali in Caroline’s baby-doll features, nothing that should have told me that the empath who’d abandoned Ali because she didn’t have powers was the same one who’d taught Caroline to believe she was nothing without hers.

A memory—of Valerie reaching out and brushing my hair out of my face as she tried to stab her way through my mental defenses—flashed before my eyes, and I thought of the hundred thousand times Ali had done the exact same thing.

They were nothing alike.

“I’m not anyone’s sister,” Caroline said. “I’m not anyone. For what it’s worth, I could have killed you, all of you, in that fight, but I didn’t.”

Caroline didn’t sound like she thought that was worth all that much—and, fair or not, given the circumstances, I agreed with her appraisal. I knew better than most people what it was like to have the rug pulled out from underneath your very existence, to find out that everything you thought you knew was a lie, but I couldn’t summon up any pity for her. I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. I had no desire to understand.

“You’re awake!” Dev glided into the room with the grace of a Broadway dancer. Clearly, he’d had time to heal completely,
and just as clearly, he didn’t hold it against the other occupant of this room that she’d been the one to shoot him. “Has Caroline been filling you in?”

He said her name so easily, like she was just any other girl.

“She shot you,” I said, thoroughly disgruntled.

Dev shrugged. “Like Lake’s never threatened to do the same. Ms. Mitchell’s a menace with a shotgun. We love her anyway.” Dev actually had the audacity to start humming an upbeat little ditty.

“ ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’?” I said. “Really?”

Bryn, she shot me because I look like Shay
. Dev didn’t elaborate on his silent statement, but the rest of the scenes Archer had shown me in my dream fell firmly into place. The werewolf who’d attacked Caroline when she was little, the one who’d killed her father, looked so much like Devon did now that unless you knew wolves—really knew them—you wouldn’t have been able to tell one from the other. They shared the same massive size, the same markings.

The same parents.

Shay killed Caroline’s dad
.

That truth was like a splash of cold water in my face. Jed had told me that Valerie had taken to leading the coven a little too easily, a little too well. She’d never shown the hatred for werewolves that she’d instilled in the others. She was the type of person who could throw her own daughter away.

It wasn’t a stretch to think that she could have orchestrated the death of her husband.

I’d wondered about the terms of the deal Valerie had made with Shay, and now they were inescapably clear. She hadn’t attacked us to curry favor with Shay; she’d been paying off a debt—an old one.

Turning this over in my mind, I looked at Caroline—really looked at her—and wondered if she’d connected those dots.

Probably best not to ask, Bryn
, Devon said quietly.
She doesn’t talk about it, but she’s dealing
.

She
. As in
Caroline
. Ali’s sister, the self-proclaimed hunter of werewolves.

“Eric’s dead,” I said, unable to forgive her that, even if she hadn’t been fully in control of her own mind, even if she’d resisted the urge to shoot to kill. “She shot him, and now he’s dead.”

Devon fell into a standstill, the expression on his face 100 percent wolf.

I know
, he said silently, the words echoing through the pack-bond between us like a cry of mourning, a song for the dead.
I know. I know. I know
.

“I was supposed to protect him,” I said softly.

Dev nodded, accepting my words. “I wasn’t even there.”

I felt the weight of that. So did he. It would have been so much easier to put it all off on someone else—say, for instance, the person who’d put a bullet through Eric’s leg.

Caroline didn’t feel like a threat to me, not anymore, but I didn’t want to see the tear tracks on
her
face.

I wanted her gone.

She’s Ali’s sister, Bryn. Her mother is dead
. Devon’s words inside my head were like a gentle nudge with a massive wet nose.
You do the math
.

I didn’t want to do the math.

“I want to see Chase,” I said, clinging to that instead. His presence on the other end of the pack-bond was muted, but it was there. He was weak, but he was healing.

He was alive. Impossibly, undeniably, wonderfully
alive
.

“We had to move him to the far side of the property.” Dev held up a hand and wiggled his fingers, holding off my protest. “Nuh-uh-uh,” he said. “You don’t get to complain about this. The closer he was to you, the faster he healed, but neither one of you was waking up. You shouldn’t have been out more than a couple of hours, but whatever it is you all can do, however that pesky little knack of yours works—yours was doing the work for him.”

I thought of the dreamworld, where Chase and I had lain side by side. I thought of the walls between us melting away and the things I would have given—
everything
—to make him okay. Chase was Resilient. So was I. We’d shared dreams often enough that I didn’t question the idea that we’d done it again, and it seemed right that after everything he’d given up for me, I’d somehow funneled some of my strength to him.

I didn’t know how it worked or what it meant, but at that instant, I didn’t care.

“Chase was getting better. You weren’t.” Coming from Devon, that was clearly a condemnation of Chase. “You usually have more sense than that.”

Apparently, it was also a condemnation of me.

I gave Devon a look. “Did you actually just accuse me of normally having common sense?”

Dev finally cracked a smile. “Touché.”

I didn’t realize that Caroline had left the room until I looked for her and discovered her gone.

Good.

“I need to see Chase,” I said, allowing myself one moment of selfishness before the alpha in me reared its head, forcing me to amend the statement. “I need to see everyone.”

I needed them near me. I needed to touch them, to know that they were okay.

Injured or not, I needed to run.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

W
AITING FOR NIGHTFALL WAS TORTURE—WORSE
than the searing ache in my left arm, worse than the itching underneath the gauze. Somehow, against all odds, my pack had survived this confrontation. Shay’s wolves were already pulling back from the border. The psychics—with the exception of Caroline and Jed, who had stayed for her sake—had dispersed. Aside from Chase, who was dealing with the aftereffects of being poisoned in more ways than one, and Mitch, who’d taken his share of hits—including a bullet—while defending Maddy and Lake, the pack was no worse for the wear, but like me, they felt the loss of one of our own keenly.

Even the babies, who didn’t know what they were feeling or where that aching, fathomless loneliness had come from, were in a state, mourning a loss they wouldn’t begin to understand for years. And then there was Lucas, his presence
a jarring reminder of the outside world, one the pack wasn’t in the mood to tolerate, let alone accept.

“Bryn?”

I was lying in Chase’s bed, his body curled next to mine as he slept, when Maddy approached. Her gaze was aimed at the floor, her eyes round and her breathing shallow. I listened for her through the pack-bond, but for once, her mind wasn’t on running, or the pack, or what we’d become together as soon as night fell.

There was only one word in her mind, only one emotion.

LucasLucasLucasLucas
.

I didn’t try to make sense of the intensity of it. I didn’t weed through her mind to find the moment when she’d known, the way Chase had with me. Instead, I sent my words through the bond to her.

Look at me, Maddy
.

She lifted her eyes, and I wondered how we’d come to this: her approaching me not as a friend, but as a member of my pack. I’d never asked for that kind of deference. I didn’t want it. Now that the threat was gone—for now, at least—I just wanted things to go back to the way they were before.

Even with Chase beside me, Callum’s words about being alpha—the weight, the responsibility, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that someday I’d die to keep my pack safe—were still there.

“We’re running tonight,” Maddy said, interjecting the words into my thoughts.

“Yeah, Mads. We are.” I kept my voice soft, unwilling to spook her. “What happened, with Eric … We need to be together. We need to let go.”

“Will you claim Lucas?” There was strength in the tilt of Maddy’s head, just like there was a simple grace to her words. She’d fought long and hard to be this person, and now she was willing and ready to fight for him. “I know it seems wrong, with Eric and everything, but Lucas needs a pack, and I need it to be ours.”

As I looked at her and listened to the pattern of her thoughts hovering just out of reach, it was easy to see the truth in Ali’s cautionary tale, easy to believe that Maddy’s wolf had made this decision for her, that love was an instinct for werewolves, not an emotion. Chase had told me once, a lifetime ago, that as a human, before the Change, he’d loved four things—and one of them was me. Forget that he hadn’t ever seen me or talked to me or even known in any concrete way that I existed. Forget that when he’d spoken the words, we’d met exactly twice.

His wolf had known, and Chase had known, the same way Maddy—and Lucas—did now.

“I was always going to claim him, Maddy. I didn’t win him from Shay just to send him away.”

It didn’t matter if Lucas was damaged, or that he’d come
here believing that doing so would put our pack in danger. He’d never really had a chance, and I could give him that. For better or for worse, he was Maddy’s, and that made him ours.

“Tonight,” I told her, and the strain melted off her body like she was shedding a second skin. She glowed, practically luminescent, and I felt a deep hum of approval, of contentment through the bond.

For the first time since we’d saved her from the Rabid—since she’d saved herself—she felt sure of herself.

She felt whole.