Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (80 page)

The moon wasn’t full. The snow on the ground was fresh. Our numbers were diminished, and the forest still smelled like blood, but the energy running through and around us was no less palpable than it had been the last time the Cedar Ridge Pack had met.

The need to shed my own skin, to be one of them, was no less real.

Five feet from the spot where the others had buried Eric, Lucas stood, hunched and waiting. To a lone wolf, standing in the middle of another pack, knowing he didn’t belong must have been torture.

I glanced sideways at Chase. As far as I was concerned, he shouldn’t have even been out of bed. As far as he was concerned,
I shouldn’t have granted Maddy’s request to claim Lucas until I’d had at least a few more days to heal myself.

And there it was again. I was the alpha; Chase was putting my welfare above the pack’s. Love was so much less complicated when I was halfway dead.

As if he knew exactly what I was thinking, Chase gave a wry little smile and brought his head to rest on top of mine.
I can’t help it
, he said.
And neither can you
.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha
.

The call pushed Chase back from my body, and as he melted into the rest of the pack, I searched for the right words to say to the others. Our pack had never been much on ceremony. On the nights when we ran together, the power just burst out of us, like water breaking through a hole in a dam. At most, I nodded to usher it in, but this wasn’t just another night at the clearing.

Too much had happened, and for better or worse, every single one of us was changed.

“Brothers and sisters.” Those were words I’d learned from Callum—or at least, the
brothers
part was. “Tonight we mourn the loss of one of our own. He will be remembered.” For a moment, I felt less like the alpha and more like myself. “I will remember him.”

Unbidden, Lucas stepped forward, and Chase matched the lone wolf’s movement with a subtle movement of his own, quiet and understated, even as he kept one eye on Lucas and one eye on me.

“We protect each other,” I continued, the words coming faster now. “That’s what packs do, and I like to think that even when we’re hurting, none of us are the kind of people who could hear a request for protection and turn that person away.”

I nodded to Lucas, who took another step toward me. The pack spread out around us, then crowded inward, until we were surrounded on all sides, alpha and lone wolf separated only by inches from the rest of the pack.

“We know what it’s like to be kicked around, to be small and weak and feel like no matter what happens, there’s never going to be a place where we really belong.” My breath turned to frost in the night air, and unwillingly, I shivered. “We were wrong.”

Normally, at this point, the alpha would call Lucas by his family ties, but I didn’t know his mother’s name, or his father’s, and I wasn’t about to mention his severed relationship with Shay.

“Lucas,” I said slowly, “beloved of Maddy, step forward.”

There wasn’t much of anywhere for Lucas to go, but the words and the ceremony of the moment seemed to have taken on a life of their own.

Pack. Pack. Pack
.

The feeling rose inside me—unbearable ecstasy, unbridled joy. I lifted my right hand. Lucas knelt. The lines on the back of his neck—a half circle embedded with a four-pointed star—were still faintly visible, and in a single motion, I slashed my nails through them.

A tiny bead of blood rose on Lucas’s skin, mixing with sweat and adrenaline and the smell of things to come. I closed my eyes and reached for the connection, the invisible cord that tied me to Maddy and Chase and Lake, Lily, the twins, and all the others. I felt it.

I owned it.

And then I threw it at Lucas. Power surged through me. All around us, the others began to Shift. Lucas’s back arched, and his pupils went wild and wide.

Pack. Pack. Pack
.

“You’re mine,” I whispered, “and you’re theirs, and all that we are is yours.”

The low hum of the others’ minds gave way to Lucas’s as a familiar scent filled the air.

Pack. Pack. Pack
.

Lucas rose on unsteady legs. Maddy was beside him in an instant, and they leaned into each other, as if his body had been made only for hers. My stomach lurched, and without thinking, I reached for Chase, and he was there, beside me.

There as the urge to run became overwhelming.

There as I tasted something sharp and bitter and electric on my tongue.

Maddy must have felt it, too, because her face went pale and she stopped breathing, her chest frozen and still.

“I was always the weakest,” Lucas said, and though neither his tone nor his words surprised me, there was something
about the set of his eyes that made my stomach roll. “I never hurt anyone, but that never stopped anyone from hurting me.”

I wanted to tell him that it wouldn’t be like that here, that he could trust us not to do to him what had been done again and again and again. I wanted to make him see that he could trust me, but now that I could feel his emotions, now that I was in his head, I could taste the tinny, sour flavor of blood in his memory and see for myself the number of times he’d been forced to swallow his own.

I looked in Lucas’s eyes. I looked inside him. And no matter how hard or how far I looked, I saw nothing but hurt.

Anger and hurt and helplessness
—and the desire to never be helpless again.

“I know what Shay must have been thinking when he sent me here. I know what he wants me to do, and the real kicker is that as much as I hate him, I hate myself more. I hate
weakness
more.”

“Lucas—” Maddy choked out his name, and he silenced her, pressing his lips to her temple in a tender, bittersweet kiss.

“You understand, Maddy,” he said, his voice a hoarse and heady whisper. “I know you do.” His eyes flickered from hers to mine, and this time, there was no submission in his gaze. He met my stare with his own, and he spoke down to me.

“I told you once, for reasons that I can’t really fathom, that by the time this was over, I’d be six feet under, or I’d be free.”

The real meaning of Lucas’s words—his definition of
free—
hit me a moment too late. I’d believed—we’d all believed—that Lucas just wanted to be free of Shay and the psychics, that he’d wanted to transfer to Cedar Ridge because he knew we’d keep him safe.

It had never occurred to me that to Lucas, giving himself over to another alpha—any alpha—might feel like a trap. I’d never thought, even for a second, that he might have something else in store for us—for me—once his transfer into our ranks was complete.

I should have seen it. We all should have, but for a werewolf, Lucas was small, weak—not a threat to anyone or anything.

Unless you were human.

Dead-eyed and sure, Lucas spoke. “As a member of the Cedar Ridge Pack, I question your right to lead us. I question your power over me.”

I felt the pull of the pack-bond like a noose around my neck. The hair on my arms rose, and a growl worked its way up from my diaphragm. My lips curled in warning.

Don’t do it
, I told myself.
Don’t say the words, Bryn
.

But as alpha, I had to say them, and the instinct that propelled me to do so became clearer and more insistent in my mind. “Are you issuing a challenge to your alpha?” I asked, Shay’s warning that Lucas would bring me nothing but trouble echoing through my memory, taunting me with every sign I hadn’t wanted to see.

“Yes,” Lucas said in the same throaty whisper he’d used with Maddy. “I am.”

Pack. Pack. Pack
.

There was growling and howling and the snapping of teeth. The pack, already on edge before our run, felt the call of darkness and blood at the very sound of our newest member’s words.

Challenge. Challenge. Challenge
.

The word passed from one mind to another, and it didn’t matter that none of us had ever seen a challenge. It didn’t matter that our pack wasn’t supposed to be like any other pack. The animal part of their psyche knew what this meant. I knew what this meant.

Saying no was never an option.

A direct challenge to the alpha always ended with a fight to the death.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I
NSTINCTIVELY, THE PACK MOVED OUT, ENCIRCLING
us, but leaving space enough to fight.

I had no weapons, a bum arm, and none of Lucas’s speed or strength. I was human. He was a Were. It didn’t matter if he was weaker than others of his kind. It didn’t matter if he was smaller. It didn’t even matter that I was Resilient.

I would have stood just as much of a chance against an atomic bomb.

The only reason I’d lasted this long as the Cedar Ridge alpha was that the others had chosen me to lead in the first place. Any one of them, at any time, could have done what Lucas was doing now. They could have challenged me, they could have killed me, and they could have claimed leadership of the pack themselves.

The laws that forbid one werewolf from killing another only applied
between
packs. Within our own ranks, Pack Law and
survival of the fittest were one and the same—at least when it came to being alpha.

Think
, I told myself, my breath coming quickly and my chest tightening.
Think, think, think!

But I couldn’t. There was nothing to
think
. There was no answer. There was only me—human and breakable.

Meat.

I remembered, suddenly, what it had been like growing up in Callum’s pack, knowing that if he hadn’t protected me, one of the Weres might have killed me. I remembered knowing how dangerous werewolves were, but life as the Cedar Ridge alpha—in their heads and out of them—had undone a lifetime of lessons.

You’ll never be as strong as they are.

You’ll never be as fast as they are.

If they lose control, you’re dead.

I’d forgotten. I’d let myself forget, and now there was nothing to be done.

I couldn’t run. I couldn’t hide. I had to stay and fight and die, because I’d wanted to help. Because I loved Maddy. Because I couldn’t let myself believe that some people were too far gone to save.

In an ideal world, I would have had time—to think, to prepare—but this wasn’t an ideal world; it wasn’t even a human one, and any challenge to the alpha had to be settled at a breakneck pace.

Sometimes literally.

I tried not to think about all the ways this could end, tried to concentrate on the here and now, but the more I concentrated, the direr the situation seemed.

Lucas was already on one side of the circle. He took off his shirt, and any remaining hope I’d had that he might fight me as human evaporated from my mind. He was going to Shift, and he was going to devour me whole.

I turned to walk to the opposite end of the circle, my head held high. Damn him for doing this to me. Damn him to hell and back, but I wasn’t going to die crying. Given half a chance, I’d take out his eyes.

Devon caught me roughly by my good arm as I walked by, and I turned to glare at him. This was hard enough without thinking about all the people I was leaving behind, all the people I was letting down. This was hard enough without looking at Devon’s face and realizing that he was going to have to watch me die.

“You’ll challenge Lucas,” I said softly, my voice full of knowing. “The second this is over.”

That was the real tragedy here, the thing that made this whole exercise pointless. Absurd. The moment Lucas had issued this challenge, he’d signed his own death warrant as much as mine. It didn’t matter if he was stronger than I was. There were plenty of people in my pack who were stronger than him, and they wouldn’t allow him to lead. They wouldn’t let him kill me and live another day.

Lucas was so far gone he couldn’t see it, and somehow, I doubted that Shay had pointed out the inevitability when he’d planted this suggestion in Lucas’s head.

Layers upon layers upon layers.

Shay had known that Lucas was going to do this. He’d broken him and sent him, broken, to me. He’d played me—the bet, the stakes, scratching on the eight ball when he must have always intended to lose. This was his fail-safe.

This was the endgame.

“You’re not going to die.” Devon spat the words right in my face. “You are not
allowed
to die.”

“Fine,” I said. “You win. I’ll just—oh, wait.
I don’t have a choice
.”

I didn’t want to be doing this—not with Dev, not with any of them. I didn’t want to say good-bye.

“There’s always a choice.” Dev tightened his grip and pulled me up onto the tips of my toes. “Do you think for one second that if all of this was going to end with you dead, Callum would have taken a hands-off policy and just let you die? Don’t you think he saw at least a hint of this coming? And if so, do you think he would have let you accept Lucas into this pack if he’d thought there was even the remotest chance that you might die over something so preventable, so useless?”