Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (93 page)

She wasn’t thinking about the pack.

“You killed Lucas.” Ali didn’t sugarcoat it. She didn’t hedge. “Just like I killed my mother before she could kill you.” The weight of the things we’d done hung in the air between us. “It happened, it’s done, and I’m not sorry that either one of us is alive. You can regret a lot of things, Bryn, but don’t you ever feel sorry for that.”

“Never,” Katie chirped, like this was all a game—because at her age, everything was.
“Never ever ever ever!”

So much for crying over spilled milk.

“Everybody decent?” Lake yelled those words from the front porch, and that was the only warning we got before she let herself in.

“Morning, Lake.” Ali gestured toward the kitchen table, but Lake shook her head.

“I already ate. Twice. I just stopped by because I was packing and I thought I’d see if there was anything Bryn wanted me to bring.”

When most girls said the word
packing
, they meant clothes. When Lake said
packing
, she meant heat.

“Fix me up with one of everything,” I told her. “And make it silver.”

Lake nodded. At any other time, weapons talk would have made her downright giddy, but this wasn’t just any Rabid we were hunting.

There was a chance—maybe even a good one—that this was a friend.

“We’ll need restraints,” I said, thinking out loud. “And something to knock her out with if she’s …”

If she’s out of control?

If she’s a monster?

If she’s insane?

Across the table, Alex peered curiously up at me.

“If she’s
sleepy
,” I said.

Lake glanced at the twins and nodded. “If she’s
sleepy
,” she repeated, “I reckon a Taser or two might help her
nap
.”

Neither Katie nor Alex wanted anything to do with a conversation about naps. Ali set Katie back down, and the twins began babbling to each other, in words I couldn’t make out or understand. They had their own language, their own gestures, their own little twin world that, even as their alpha, I could never truly enter. The older they got, the more intense that connection was. If I reached out for her mind, I felt his. If I reached out for his, I felt hers.

Beside me, Lake paused in the middle of a sentence in which she was referring to a tranq gun as a
pillow
. She trailed off, her gaze caught on the twins. Alex reached out and grabbed Katie’s fist.

Griffin
.

I didn’t go looking for the thought through the bond, and Lake didn’t send it to me, but in that moment, she was thinking her brother’s name so intensely that I couldn’t help overhearing.

Natural-born females, like Katie and Lake, were so rare because a cruel genetic quirk ensured that female werewolf pups were only carried to term if they were half of a set of twins. It had never occurred to me before that seeing Katie and Alex like this might be hard for Lake, whose own twin had died when we were only a few years older than my siblings were now.

I could barely remember the way Griffin looked and was suddenly struck by the realization that Lake would never forget. That what Katie and Alex had now was something Lake and
Griffin had once. Something they wouldn’t ever have again. I reached out for Lake’s mind and felt the ache, the emptiness, the space inside of her where her brother should have been.

How could I have missed this? She might as well have been missing a limb, and I’d never seen it, never noticed.

Stay out of my head, Bryn
. Lake’s voice was shaky in my mind, but I retreated, giving her space.

“So,” I said, “about those
pillows
 …”

After a few more minutes of thinly veiled conversation, Lake went off to see about the weapons—and to get away from me. I hadn’t meant to go nosing around in her head.

Just like I hadn’t meant to send Maddy out into the big bad world to deal with a black hole of emotion alone.

Not wanting to prod Ali into another pep talk, I stood up from the table, restless and aching with everything I couldn’t afford to let myself feel.

“We need to leave within the hour,” I told Ali. “I’m going to check on Chase and Jed.”

That much, I should be able to handle.

That much, I could do.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“S
IT DOWN
.”

Checking on Jed wasn’t exactly going as planned. He was already up when I got there, already packed, and waiting for me when I showed up at the cabin he and Caroline shared. The Deadliest Little Psychic was nowhere to be seen, and Jed seemed to be under the impression that now was as good a time as any for lesson two.

“Jed, I don’t think—”

He didn’t let me finish that sentence. “Once upon a time, that might have been true, but I’d say that these days you’re doing plenty of thinking. Not thinking doesn’t keep a person up at night.”

Jed’s observation was mild, but it made me wonder just how tired I looked.

“Are you actually accusing me of thinking too much?” I raised one eyebrow in an imitation of an expression I’d seen on Devon’s face one too many times. “Have you met me?”

I’d been guilty of a lot of things in my life, but an
overabundance of caution or logic had never been one of them. You didn’t end up accidentally founding your own werewolf pack by thinking things through or making pro and con lists.

“I’m not going to pretend to know what it’s like in your shoes, Bryn. You’ve got a lot on your mind, probably always will.” Jed eased himself down on the ground next to me. “But if you want to control what you are and what you can do, you’re going to have to learn when to think and when to give in and
feel
.”

I couldn’t help thinking that this would have been infinitely easier a year ago, or two, or three, back when I’d been nothing but feelings. Look Before You Leap Bryn could have mastered her Resilience in a heartbeat.

But I wasn’t that girl anymore.

“Close your eyes. Breathe. And remember.”

This time, Jed didn’t have to tell me what to remember. I knew what he wanted me to do. Ultimately, the thing that prodded me into doing it wasn’t that Callum had implied he wouldn’t Change me until I’d learned. It was the realization that Maddy had survival instincts every bit as honed as I did.

She was Resilient, too.

If the worst turned out to be true and we couldn’t get through to her, if she was caught up in a red haze of her own, too shattered on the inside to do anything but hurt, I’d need every advantage I could get just to keep the two of us alive.

So I forced myself to think of the look on Maddy’s face—
broken, but regal and holding it together by a string—the day she’d left.

I’m going to go away, and I’m going to get better, because if I don’t, the next time someone challenges you, it’s going to be me
.

Those were words Maddy had actually said to me. For once, I didn’t fight the memories. I didn’t fight back the darkness, the horror, the fear that she’d been closer to the edge than I’d realized.

You did this to me. You
.

Now my mind was putting words in her mouth, things she’d never said.

You killed him. You left me to deal with it alone
.

I heard the words in Maddy’s voice. I allowed my imagination to conjure up the nightmares I hadn’t let myself dream the night before. I saw Maddy, covered in blood. I saw her Shifting to wolf form.

I saw Lucas—hopeless, hungry, and full of fury—leaping for my throat.

Blood, blood, everywhere there was blood
.

Just like that, I was back under the sink at my parents’ house, hiding from the Big Bad Wolf. Except this time, when I peeked out and saw the Rabid tearing through my father’s skin and shredding it like a manic child opening a present, the Rabid wasn’t the one from my memories, the one who’d haunted my dreams.

It was Maddy.

You did this to me
.

The fear was overwhelming and absolute. I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to be feeling it. I didn’t want the world to be closing in around me as I watched blood splatter up against off-white walls.

All of a sudden, I was standing, yards away from where I’d been before. My back was to the wall of Jed’s cabin, and I could feel my pulse throbbing in my stomach.

“Feel it?” Jed asked, over the sound of my breathing, the deafening beating of my heart.

I could feel the surge of energy, that whisper deep inside of me, the kind of power that let a panicked mother lift a car.

“Hold on to it.”

My body was quickly realizing that there was no present danger. I could feel the power beginning to leak out of my limbs, but I pulled it back.

The smell of wet cardboard and rotting flesh. The heavy sound of breathing in the silence
.

I lived and breathed the fear, and my senses heightened. I felt something—an odd kind of silence, not quite a noise—behind me. Hopped up on power, I whirled, and a second later, I slammed Caroline back against the exterior wall of the cabin, my hand around her neck.

I hadn’t heard her coming, but I’d known she was there. After a moment, I let go of my Resilience, allowed it to slip away. I pried my hand away from Caroline’s throat.

Unfathomably, she smiled. “I take it the lesson went well?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
WO PSYCHICS, TWO WEREWOLVES, AND A PSYCHIC
human alpha walk up to a crime scene.…

It was like the beginning of a very bad joke, and I found myself wishing that Devon were there to share it with. Instead, our merry little band—Lake, Chase, Jed, Caroline, and me—stood in absolute silence, the wind cutting through the trees with a high-pitched whistle and carrying new scents to the Weres’ noses.

“There’s no one around for miles,” Lake told us. “That it?”

She jerked her head toward a house in the distance, and I nodded, even though there was nothing about the way the house looked—from the outside, in the dark—that would have tipped off the average observer to the fact that days earlier, someone had been murdered there.

Unconsciously, I began running through everything we knew about the circumstances in which the death had been discovered.

The front door was closed when the police responded to a 911 call placed from the vicinity. They found the body—what was left of it—inside. The walls were dripping blood.

I forced myself to focus on the sights and sounds of the here and now. We were close enough to the mountains that even in the dead of summer, it smelled like snow, and the moon overhead was a shade fuller than it had been the night before.

To my eyes, the world was shadowy and dark, quiet, still. I could barely make out the outlines of the people standing right next to me, but to the Weres, the scant moonlight would have been as good as a spotlight, illuminating the leaves on the trees, each blade of grass, and the house in the distance.

Beside me, Chase breathed in deeply through his nose. Through the bond, I could feel him sorting his way through layers and textures, scent upon scent upon scent.

“Anything?” I asked him, my voice quiet, but echoing through the silence nonetheless.

He closed his eyes and breathed in again. Even though I couldn’t quite make out his features, I could picture the expression on his face almost exactly: long eyelashes lying still against pale skin, nostrils flared, and concentration playing around the edges of his lips.

“There was definitely a werewolf here,” he said finally. “Female. Young.”

He glanced at Lake, and she nodded, kneeling to the ground and bringing a handful of dirt up to her nose.

Was it Maddy?
I asked her, not wanting to give life to the question by saying it out loud.

For the longest time, Lake didn’t reply, but even through
the darkness, I could see her lowering her head toward the ground. Her blonde ponytail picked up the light of the moon, making her look like an angel caught midprayer, knees in the dirt, head bowed.

Chase joined her on the ground, crouching down with liquid grace, the whites of his eyes catching the moonlight the way Lake’s hair had.