Trial by Fire (16 page)

“She doesn’t want me dead—not if there’s a chance she could turn me into one of her little sock puppets instead.”

My use of the phrase sock puppet seemed to throw Jed for a loop, but only for a moment. “If Val can’t get inside your head, she won’t have any other use for you. Lucky for you, woman’s not the type to accept defeat. She’s been trying to get in my head going on eleven years now. Most of the time, I shake her off. Doesn’t put her in the best mood, but as long as I keep my mouth shut about it, ’bout what she’s doing to everyone else, she lets me be.”

As I processed Jed’s words, I realized that I was talking to the one person in the entire coven who was able to insulate his emotions from Valerie’s influence. From that, I concluded two things: first, that even without the others in my head, I might be able to do the same; and second, if I wanted to figure out what was really going on in this coven, my current companion would be a good place to start.

“Eleven years—is that how long you’ve been with the coven?”

Jed shook his head. “That’s how long she’s been with the coven. She showed up on our doorstep, same way you did, with a little blonde moppet in tow. Cutest kid you’d ever seen—real solemn, except when Valerie wanted her otherwise. Two months after the two of them showed up, Valerie married Wes.”

“Wes?”

“He was a good kid,” Jed said. “Great leader. I’d been with him since he was seventeen. He was the one who talked me into finding others like us. He found them, saved them, made them family.”

Your coven has lost someone. You must have loved whoever it was very much. The words Ali had used to spur the psychics into showing their hand echoed in my mind.

“He’s the one who got killed by a werewolf?” I said. Doing the math, I hit a snag. “He wasn’t Caroline’s father?”

“Not by blood.”

That shouldn’t have surprised me. I knew better than anyone that blood wasn’t what made people family.

“Valerie was with us three years when Wes died. By that time, it seemed natural to most folks that she’d be the one to take over.”

“Most folks,” I repeated. “But not you.”

He shrugged. “Never wanted to lead much myself. Filling Wes’s shoes would have been tough on anyone, but Valerie took to it.” He paused. “I always thought she took to it a little too well.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why he’d stayed. It couldn’t have been easy, watching Valerie work her way into everyone else’s emotions, making them feel what she wanted them to feel—about her, about their former leader’s death, about Caroline. But before I could even ask the question, I had my answer, because in the brief exchange I’d seen between Jed and Valerie’s daughter, there’d been shades of Callum and me.

Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.

Now was not the time to get caught up in memories—not with company in my head and a slew of questions Jed might be willing and able to answer.

“Valerie had Caroline give me an ultimatum—either I hand over a Were under my protection, or your coven is going to attack my pack.” I measured Jed’s response. Nothing I said surprised him, but his jaw tightened when I mentioned Caroline, scars jumping to life on his face as the muscles underneath them tensed. I pushed harder, further, testing my intuition that Jed’s weakness, the whole reason he’d stayed with the coven, was the girl. “How do you think Caroline is going to feel if her mother uses her to murder a bunch of little kids?”

Jed reached out, lightning quick, and grabbed my arm, his fingernails digging into my flesh and sending my pack-mates into a defensive roar in my head.

“I know what’s at stake here,” Jed said, his voice surprisingly quiet given his viselike grip on my arm. “Know it better than you, so if you’ve got questions, ask them, but don’t play with me, Bryn.”

He had one of those tones—one that said that I was a kid and he wasn’t and he’d been waging wars since before I was ever born.

“Fine,” I said. “Question: why does the coven care so much about getting Lucas back? What’s he to Valerie?”

Jed let go of my arm. “I’m no expert on the workings of that woman’s mind, but if I were a betting man, I’d say that odds are that one teenage werewolf is not what she’s after. She’s just using him to get the others all riled up, same as she’ll use you.”

It had occurred to me that Valerie might not want Lucas—that she might want me—but I’d never thought, even for a second, that maybe neither one of us was the point. That if I met Valerie’s ultimatum, she might find something else to demand, some other reason to set her coven against my pack.

“If I gave Lucas back, she’d just find another excuse to fight us.”

“That a question?” Jed asked, looking amused.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Should it be?”

He grunted.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

The realization was strangely liberating. I’d spent all this time thinking that I had to choose between my own pack’s safety and sending an innocent to be tortured by people who blindly hated his guts, when in reality, there’d never been a choice.

On the downside, that meant we had no safety net, no backup plan, no options.

Ask him if he knows anything about the deal, Chase suggested quietly. He, Lake, and Dev had been so quiet that I’d almost forgotten they were there.

“Lucas said that Valerie made some kind of deal with his alpha,” I said, searching Jed’s features for some kind of reaction. “Shay gave Lucas to Valerie. Any idea what he asked for in return?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Jed replied facetiously. “This Shay guy got any reason to want anyone in your pack dead?”

I could practically feel the blood drain out of my face. Shay had reason to want anyone who stood between him and the Changed females dead—including, but not limited to, me.

“Thought so.” Jed ran a scarred hand roughly over his neck. “Going after your pack is a risk, and Valerie’s not in the habit of risking something for nothing. The question you should be asking isn’t what Shay wanted Valerie to do—it’s why she’s doing it.”

My mind was reeling. Shay sent Lucas to the coven. They tortured him. Lucas escaped and came running straight to me. Shay had to have known that Lucas would go for help—maybe he’d even asked the coven to let him escape conveniently close to my territory so that I would be the obvious choice. Then, when Valerie came after our pack, she could use Lucas as an excuse—a focal point for her coven, an excuse to keep me from figuring everything out.

From the outside, it would appear that the coven had their own reasons for fighting us—reasons that weren’t Senate business in the least.

Somewhere, in Snake Bend territory, the Snake Bend alpha was sitting back on his haunches and watching a group of psychics fight the battles that Senate law wouldn’t let him fight. Shay couldn’t challenge me. He couldn’t fight me, and he couldn’t take what was mine, but technically, he wasn’t.

He was letting someone else do the dirty work for him.

Why would Valerie agree to something like that? What could Shay have possibly offered her to justify the risk? And more importantly, now that I knew that giving Lucas back wouldn’t change our situation, what exactly could I do to stop this from turning into an all-out war?

“If we take Valerie out,” I said, disturbed by how easy it was for me to ask the question, “does everyone else go back to normal?”

“You a killer?” There was no condemnation in my companion’s voice, and I got the distinct feeling that if he’d gotten any of his scars fighting, his opponents probably hadn’t lived long enough to scar.

“No,” I said. “I’m not a killer, but I do have a tranq gun, and we could keep her unconscious for a good, long time.”

“Val uses her own daughter to keep the others in line. She’s convinced the entire coven that Caro is a remorseless, soulless killer. Kid even believes it herself. If undoing that were as easy as knocking Val out, I would have done it myself, years ago.” Jed stared me straight in the eye. “Doesn’t matter if she’s unconscious. There’s a part of her mind that doesn’t sleep, and once a suggestion is implanted, it’s in there good. Killing her might work, but it also might not.”

He watched me, waiting for some indication of whether or not I was up to the task. Whether I could kill just because it might break Valerie’s spell.

I had a knife.

I had the training.

We have a problem. Dev’s voice broke into my thoughts, sparing me from answering the question. You need to come home, Bryn. Now.

“I have to go,” I said, and Jed nodded, like that answered that.

“Go on, then,” he said. “But don’t be surprised if Valerie moves up her little game. You came here, to her house. She’s likely to answer in kind.”

I would have liked to ask Jed other things—what sort of knacks the other members of the coven had, how many of them there were, what we could do to defend ourselves—but I didn’t get the chance, because whatever the problem back at the Wayfarer was, it was a big one.

Lake, Devon, and Chase pulled out of my head at once.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I MADE IT TO THE EDGE OF THE PSYCHICS’ PROPERTY, running at a solid and furious pace, my skull pounding with the sudden withdrawal of my guard. I could still sense them—Lake and Devon were at the Wayfarer; Chase was on his way here; and all three of them were on edge, like someone had shot a flare directly into the heart of our pack, but the two-way street that I’d opened for them was closed.

Something had snapped them out of my mind and back into their own.

Someone want to tell me what’s going on? I made it to the road and sent the question out to anyone who might feel compelled to listen.

Chase answered my call. Four peripherals, Bryn.   At the Wayfarer.

Through the bond, I could feel Chase getting closer, moving faster, and I realized—belatedly—that Lake had loaned him her truck.

“Peripherals.” I said the word out loud and let the ramifications wash over me. I ran harder, faster, every inch the alpha determined to get back to her pack. The road was deserted, the morning sky giving way to what looked to be another gray afternoon. My limbs were human-heavy, my pace too slow.

I needed to be there. With them. Now.

Forcing myself to calm down, I kept my eye on the road and tried to focus on logic over instinct. There were peripherals at the Wayfarer, and they’d arrived unannounced. When the Wayfarer had been at the edges of Callum’s territory, that might not have been nearly as much of an insult, but it was the center of ours—our base of operations, our home—and four peripherals coming this far into our territory without permission was on par with an act of war.

Whose peripherals are they? I sent the question to Chase, possibilities dogging me at every step. Maybe Callum had broken his hands-off policy and sent me backup. Maybe Shay had gotten tired of waiting for the psychics to do his dirty work and had launched another attack.

Maybe—

I heard the truck before I saw it. Chase slammed on the brakes and threw open the door. “Ours.”

He didn’t bother repeating the question, didn’t say more than that one word, but it was enough to make my entire body relax. Shay wasn’t attacking. Callum hadn’t foreseen some fuzzy future I couldn’t combat without him. The members of our pack who lived at the border of our territory—the ones Chase visited when he was running patrol—had simply come home.

“All four?” I asked.

“Jackson, Eric, Phoebe, and Sage.” The way Chase said their names told me something I hadn’t realized before—that the peripherals weren’t peripheral to him. They were the loners, the outsiders, the ones who could keep their distance and survive.

They were what Chase would have been if it hadn’t been for me.

“Are they okay?” I asked.

Chase shrugged. “They’re not bleeding.”

“But …,” I prompted.

“But they need their alpha.” Chase waited for me to get in the car, then turned it around and accelerated. “Jackson and Sage haven’t said a word since they got here. Phoebe was still in wolf form when I left.”

“And Eric?” I asked. He was the oldest of the peripherals, a college freshman who’d been attacked by the Rabid when he was thirteen.

“Eric said that the Snake Bend Pack is closing in.”

Our territory was adjacent to three others. One was Callum’s. One was Shay’s. The third was irrelevant—at least for the moment.

As I got closer and closer to the Wayfarer, it was all I could do to keep from extracting the information from the peripherals’ brains with all the finesse of a person attempting to rip a phone book right down the center. The only thing on the surface of their minds was a mixture of sensations and emotion—confusion, adrenaline, hunt-lust, fear.

No details.

No explanations.

Devon met me at the door to the restaurant. Behind him, I could see Eric, lanky and in need of a shave. Phoebe lay in wolf form in the corner, her head on her paws, and Jackson and Sage both took a step toward me, my presence washing over them like a wave across the sand.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

I was there. They were safe. We’d get through this.

The part of me that had been lying dormant since I invited my friends into my head—the alpha part—began to rise inside of me like smoke. Beside me, Dev ran one hand through his freshly trimmed hair and gave me a small smile, one that told me he understood—and reminded me that in order for me to be fully alpha, he’d had to willingly step back into his role as number two.

“It’s okay,” Dev told me, reading me, the way he always had. “You let us in. You let us protect you. You, Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare, actually admitted that you needed help, and I think we all know that’s a minor miracle in and of itself.” He cleared his throat. “And now it appears as though someone else needs your help.”

Eric stepped forward. He was tall, though not as tall as Devon, and had not gotten a haircut the entire time I’d known him. I hadn’t seen him in months, but he still smelled like Cedar Ridge: like pine needles and fresh snow, like us.

Eric bowed his head as he approached me, an instinctive gesture that made me reach out and place my fingers underneath his chin and bring his eyes back up to meet mine.

“Welcome home,” I said.

He closed his eyes, breathing in deeply. As loud as it must have been for him here, as disconcerting, I recognized that on some level, it was also a relief.

“Two days ago, I was coming back from a dorm party,” he said, taking his time with the words. “And I felt something—like the world was turning itself inside out, like everything was wrong. I thought maybe I’d had too much to”—Eric cast his eyes around, looking for Ali or Mitch—“drink, but then I smelled it—sour and sweaty, like vinegar, only stronger.”

Eric’s upper lip curled as he spoke. Peripheral or not, he still had the same reaction to the scent of a foreign pack. “I tracked it back to the border between our territory and Snake Bend, and there they were.”

“How many?” I asked.

“At least fifteen men,” Eric replied, his hair falling into his face. “Older than me. A lot older, I’d guess. They claimed not to have crossed over to our side of the border, but there were so many of them, the scent was so thick—I couldn’t tell for sure whether that was a lie.”

Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if Shay had fifteen full-grown Weres camped out along our northwest border, they were there for a reason.

Biding their time.

I looked past Eric, toward the others. Phoebe lived a good hundred miles north of Eric; Jackson and Sage lived farther south.

“Was it the same for you?” I asked them.

Phoebe inclined her head, then Shifted out of wolf form, the cracking of her bones providing a sound track to Jackson’s answer. “There were more than fifteen where I am,” he said. “Twenty, at least, spread all up and down the border.”

Sage just nodded, and for a moment, I saw things through her eyes, saw the men standing a hundred yards away from her, tracking her progression with hungry, lupine eyes.

I swore. Vehemently. And so loudly that Eric actually blushed.

Technically, Shay wasn’t breaking Pack Law. He couldn’t invade my territory without explicit permission to do so, but there was nothing to stop him from playing the intimidation card. From lining his troops up along our borders. From letting them make my wolves feel like they weren’t safe.

“He wants us to know that if we fight him, he’ll win.” Devon’s voice was sharp enough to maim, and there was no question in my mind whose blood he wanted—just like there was no question that someday Dev would go alpha. “He’s playing with you, Bryn.”

My fingers worked their way into a fist, my fingernails digging into the skin of my palms. “Like he was playing with us when he made a deal with Valerie to have her coven attack us on his behalf? Like he was playing when he let them cut and tear and burn Lucas into ribbons and ash, for no reason other than needing a victim to bait me into a confrontation?”

“If it’s any consolation,” Devon said, his voice low and comforting, “I’m going to kill him.”

“Dev—”

“Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. But five years from now, or ten, or fifty, or however long it takes for me to do it right, Shay is going to die. Maybe it will be long and brutal. Maybe it will be short and sweet. Maybe I’ll hate myself for it, or maybe I’ll enjoy it, but I will kill him for doing this to you. To them.”

I wondered what it said about my life that I could listen to my best friend calmly discussing dispatching his brother to the great beyond, without having any emotional reaction other than an acknowledgment, deep in my gut, of the fact that Dev could do it, would do it, was probably meant to do it.

According to Pack Law, if Devon killed Shay, he’d be the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. He’d have to transfer packs first, and Shay would have to accept him, but given Shay’s ego and what Devon meant to me, Shay would probably allow it. For a moment, I almost felt like Callum, looking over the years to come and seeing the likelihood play out, right before my eyes.

Someday I would lose Devon.

Someday Dev would kill Shay.

Right now, however, thinking that far ahead was a luxury I couldn’t afford. The coven had us in their sights, and Jed’s warning that Valerie would repay my visit to her house in kind meant that I needed to be prepared for some sort of attack. Not five days later. Not after the deadline had passed.

Now.

Worse, if Shay wanted what I had badly enough to make deals with humans, I wasn’t entirely certain that Senate Law and the threat of Callum’s reprisal would be enough to keep him—and his men—on their side of our invisible line.

The phone rang, jarring me out of my thoughts and sending my heart pounding. Keely answered it, then turned toward me.

“It’s for you,” she said, holding the phone out across the bar. “It’s Shay.”

“I sent you an email.”

Of all of the things Shay could have opened with, that wasn’t one I’d expected at all.

“Does this email happen to explain why the entirety of the Snake Bend Pack is playing peekaboo across the border to my territory?”

Shay laughed, and it was a horrible, genial sound that made me want to put a fist through his trachea and pull out his spine. “I know you’re new at this,” he said, condescension and sly, understated viciousness fighting for control of his every word, “but there is a simple explanation for this kind of thing.”

He paused, and I pushed back the urge to bang the receiver into the wall over and over again until there was nothing left of either one of them.

“My pack goes where I go—within my own territory, of course. We’ve been in our current stronghold a long time, and quite frankly, I’ve been considering a move. To decrease the chance of exposure, of course.”

“Of course,” I replied dully. Shay’s picking up and moving his entire pack to the border between our territories could not possibly bode well for us, but there was no law against it.

He’s doing this by the book, I thought. I wasn’t sure whether the realization was comforting or not. The Senate wouldn’t be fond of the idea of an alpha aligning himself with a coven, but it wouldn’t give Callum the kind of justification he’d need to take Shay out of the picture without declaring himself the alpha of the entire North American continent. There was nothing in Pack Law to say that Shay couldn’t abuse his own subordinates, nothing to say he couldn’t bat me around like a cat with a mouse. But there was a law that said that Shay couldn’t step a foot on my territory without asking permission, and just like that, I knew why he’d called.

“Do you actually think I’m going to agree to let you and the little foot soldiers you’ve got peppered up and down my border cross over into Cedar Ridge territory?”

He had to be actually, clinically insane.

“Of course not,” Shay replied smoothly. “If you read the email I sent, you’ll see that I only requested passage for myself and one guard to assess the situation with the Snake Bend wolf you’re currently holding at your compound.”

He made it sound like I was keeping Lucas hostage.

“I think you’ll find that the other alphas consider my request to be quite reasonable. A few of them may have even chimed in to say as much. You’ve had the boy for days. Whatever justice you were going to impart on the trespassing matter should have been carried out immediately. Indecision,” he said, savoring the word, “is a sign of weakness.”