Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (81 page)

I thought of Callum telling me on the phone that I might die, never indicating, even for a second, that the danger extended past the coven per se.

Something caught inside me, like a breath catching in my throat.

“He must have seen it, Dev. He must not have cared.”

Devon let go of my arm, but he leaned down, bringing his face very close to mine. “You,” he said, “are the most
impossible
person I have ever met. You’re bulletproof and self-sacrificing and beautiful in ways that you will never understand. You are Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. You turned the entire werewolf Senate upside down. You laugh in the face of danger. You are the alpha of this pack, and you
are not going to die
.”

As far as pep talks went, it was a good one, but Dev couldn’t stay there next to me. He couldn’t fight my battles for me. There was a mandate buried deep in the biology of his species that said he had to step back and watch.

So he did. He faded back into the circle, next to Maddy and Lake, next to Mitch, next to Chase, who was trying to get to me but couldn’t quite get his body to move.

I could feel his anguish, sewn into the air all around me, and the hum of the pack’s acknowledgment that a challenge to the alpha had to be met.

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Were; the mandate was there in my head, too. I felt it in the marks Callum had left in my skin. I felt it in the bond that made me who and what I was.

Fight. Fight. Fight
.

It would have been so easy to give in to the instinct, to let the world go red and go out fighting without feeling a single
instant of pain, but this time, flashing out seemed like giving up.

There had to be another answer.

There had to be.

The sound of Lucas Shifting tore me from my thoughts. How could I ever have thought he was scraggly or malnourished? He was
hungry
—there was a difference.

I felt the pain of his Shift as an echo in the bond that I’d thrown at him, and an image came to mind, of an old woman standing in front of three grown Weres, forcing them to halt mid-Shift.

I’m the alpha
, I thought.
Until he kills me, I’m the alpha
.

Physically, I might have been the weaker party, but mentally, I was dominant. I always had been. There was a reason the Cedar Ridge Pack had chosen me as their leader, and it wasn’t my physique.

I pictured the bond that tied Lucas to the rest of the pack. I pictured the portion of it that tied him to me. I’d done that.
Me
. I couldn’t take it back, but there was a chance I could use it.

Lucas came toward me, and I stepped forward to meet him. I caught his eye, and I pushed. His lip curled and he leapt forward.

Stop!
The command snapped out of me like it had been shot from a cannon and traveled through the pack-bond to Lucas, who jerked back suddenly to land a foot in front of me, just short of his goal. His teeth flashed and he let loose a sick
and bone-crunching bark, but his body didn’t move. I could see the nails on his feet digging into the frozen ground as he strained against my hold.

Somebody hadn’t realized that to take down an alpha, you had to be able to fight them in more ways than one.

For a few seconds, I stood there, staring at him and
willing
him to lie down, belly up. He fought me. He pushed back, and as he lost himself to animal rage, to panic, it got harder and harder to hold him.

Keeping him from killing me wasn’t enough.

I had to end this, but I didn’t know how. Even as my own instincts surfaced, even as I threw everything I had—Resilience included—into the bond, I couldn’t fathom the idea of
ordering
someone to die.

If I could keep him still enough, if I was sure I could hold him—

No
.

It wasn’t working. I was
fighting, fighting, fighting
, and it wasn’t enough. I needed
more
. More power. A stronger will.
Something
.

An image began to form in my mind, a ridiculous image that I didn’t have time for, one of me and Chase lying in Callum’s cage, looking up at the stars. I heard Devon’s voice telling me that when Chase had been on the brink of death, somehow I’d taken everything I might have used to heal myself and given it to him.

The stronger the pack, the stronger the alpha.

That was the way it worked. That was why Shay wanted greater numbers. That was why the rest of the alphas would have sold their souls for what was mine.

I was Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. I was impossible. And I was not giving up. My body started to shake with the strain of holding Lucas off. He inched closer. I gritted my teeth. I pictured the pack-bond that connected me to Chase, to Lake, to Devon and all the rest.

I pictured
their
power, and I pulled.

The rush was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and with it came the rest of their instincts—the bloodlust and the adrenaline and the need to force this challenger
down
.

My body alive with that power, I turned my attention back to Lucas and said a single word: “Down.”

Lucas fell to the ground. His mouth snapped shut. His eyes opened wide with fear. Even with the power of the pack—and their animal instincts—flowing through me, like charge through a wire, I wanted to let him live.

I wanted to give him another chance.

I wanted to, but I couldn’t.

Over
, I told him, my mind-voice echoing with power that wasn’t mine. Lucas rolled onto his side. I knelt next to him, fear nothing more than a memory, a distant memory, like maybe every time I’d ever felt it was nothing more than a dream.

Challenge. Challenge. Challenge
.

Kill. Kill. Kill
.

I held Lucas there in wolf form. I looked into his eyes. I ran one hand gently over the fur on his neck, and then, with the power of an entire pack behind me, their Resilience bleeding into mine, I told him to go to sleep.

Forever.

CHAPTER THIRTY

E
VERY MORNING
, I
WOKE UP AND
I
SAW THE PERSON
who’d killed Lucas staring back at me in the mirror. Every night, I went to bed wondering if there was ever a point where I could have stopped him from drawing that line in the sand. Like clockwork, I stared up at my ceiling, analyzing all the moments, big and small, that had led to his challenge. I searched for an answer that wouldn’t have led to my looking into his eyes and watching him die.

I knew Lucas wouldn’t have survived long without the protection of a pack. If I hadn’t been so trusting, if I’d turned him away, the outcome would have been the same—at least for him.

I blamed myself for not being able to get through to him. I blamed Shay for setting me up. But mostly, I blamed the fact that when Lucas had challenged me, he’d had reason to believe that he would win.

If I’d been stronger, if I’d been faster, if I’d been the type of opponent that other people feared, Lucas would still be alive.
He’d challenged me because I was human. I’d won because I wasn’t—not really, not anymore.

Chase slid into bed beside me, the way he had every night since the fight. We didn’t talk about it. He didn’t yell at me, the way Devon had beforehand, or say that he’d recognized the darkness in Lucas, the desperation, even though he had. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t push. He just held me, and I breathed in his scent.

Every night, he was there.

And even though I was lonely, I wasn’t alone.

A week before Christmas, Maddy came to me. It had been eleven days since Lucas’s challenge.

“I’m leaving.” She said the words calmly, but I knew what they had cost her. The Wayfarer was Maddy’s home. We were her family.

She was already gone.

“I don’t blame you,” Maddy said. I stared at her, and she amended her statement. “I don’t want to, but every time I see you, I see him. Every time I hear you, I hear
him
, and I know it was his fault. I know that he’s the one who did this to you and to me, and I want to hate him for it, but I don’t. I can’t, and I can’t be here. I can’t stay here.”

“Maddy, it’s okay.” I’d known she was going to leave—probably before she did.

“No,” Maddy replied. “It’s not. I’m not. But someday, I will be.”

I recognized that as both a promise and a statement of fact. Whatever it took, whatever she had to do, Maddy was going to survive this. I just wished she didn’t have to do it alone.

I wished that I hadn’t been the one to kill the boy she loved.

“There’s a stretch of land along the Colorado border,” I said. “Sage’s family lives there. They know. You’d be safe there, and you wouldn’t have to see me—”

“You’re there, Bryn. You’re everywhere, every day, all the time.” Maddy met my eyes, but it wasn’t a challenge. It was a request, one that told me she was beyond dominance, beyond submission, beyond everything other than the need to get away. “You have to let me go.”

It took me a moment to realize what she was asking.

“You want me to let you go,” I repeated. “As in
go
go?”

“You’re a part of me, and if I’m going to get through this, I need you not to be.”

I saw in her eyes that she’d thought this through, that while I’d been lying in my bed, looking up at my ceiling, she’d been doing the same in hers.

“If you’re not Cedar Ridge, we can’t protect you. Any alpha who sees you could take you by force and make you theirs.”

Lone werewolves were dangerous. A lone female was more or less unheard of. The other alphas would hunt her to the ends of the earth if they knew.

“No one is going to see me,” Maddy said with that same quiet dignity she’d always had. “I’ll stick to No-Man’s-Land. I’ll lie low.”

I couldn’t let her do this.

“If you force me to stay, I’ll hate you. Maybe not right away, but sooner or later, I won’t be able to help it anymore, and I’m not going to do that to either of us, Bryn. I’m going to go away, and I am going to get better, because if I don’t, the next time someone challenges you, it’s going to be me.” She paused, her chest heaving with the effort of saying the words. “I don’t want to be that person.
Please
.”

She didn’t give me the chance to respond.

“Being Resilient means having the ability to shake off pack-bonds. I did it with the Rabid. If you force me to, I’ll do it with you. But I’d rather you just …”

She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and finished the statement in a whisper, from her mind to mine.
Let me go
.

I nodded then, because I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes. I reached out and touched her face gently.

I dragged my nails over the flesh of her neck, lightly leaving my mark.

And then I let her go.

The world realigned in an instant, and I did my best to tune out my senses, the ones that recognized what Maddy was now—and what she wasn’t anymore.

“Anytime you want to come back, you can. No conditions,
no questions asked.” I sounded calmer than I felt, and that somehow tricked my brain into thinking I could handle this. “If you get into trouble and can’t or don’t want to come here, go to Colorado.”

I might not have been sure of much when it came to Callum, but I was sure that he wouldn’t use Maddy the way the other alphas might. She’d be a person and not just a power play to him.

“Bye, Bryn.”

Just like that, Maddy was gone.

For the first time since Lucas’s challenge, I let myself cry.