Trial by Fire (9 page)

“Lucas wasn’t lying.” Maddy was the only one willing to speak up and voluntarily step into Devon’s line of fire. “I was there. Lake was there. We would have smelled it.”

“There’s lying and there’s not-lying,” Lake replied, mulling over each word. “If you ask me, Lucas was not-lying. His words weren’t exactly false, but for someone who wants our help, the boy isn’t really what you would call forthcoming.”

Lucas hadn’t ever explicitly said that the people after him weren’t a threat. He’d never said that they weren’t dangerous. He’d said that they were human, and I’d filled in the blanks on my own. The irony of the situation—that I of all people had assumed that by virtue of being human, a person couldn’t possibly be a threat—did not escape me.

Devon leaned over and pressed two fingers deliberately against my cheek, watching the skin go pale and then pink again. After a moment, he repeated the action.

“Are you done yet?” I asked, shoving him, to absolutely no avail.

“Depends. Is my bestie done lying to me and pretending things are okay when they aren’t? Hmmmmm?”

Devon poked me again. I was on the verge of giving in and promising him that whatever happened next, I would tell him, whether I thought hearing it would be good for him or not, but before I could say the words, our conversation was interrupted.

At first, the interrupter didn’t say anything. She just walked up to us—right up to us—so close that the tips of her black leather boots almost touched my jean-clad legs. She didn’t kneel to our level to speak. She didn’t even look down. Instead, she stared off into the distance.

Into the forest.

At Chase.

“Hello there,” Devon said, shifting position to move a fraction of an inch closer to the intruder. “Is there something I can help you with? Directions to the gymnasium? Personal tutoring on Hamlet? Predictions on this year’s Oscar favorites?”

Personally, I thought he was laying the drama geek vibe on a little thick, but the girl—the same one I’d seen in the cafeteria the week before—didn’t so much as bat an eye. In fact, I would have gone as far as to say that she paid less attention to Dev than any female had in a very long time.

When she did shift her gaze from the forest, the girl had eyes only for me.

“I’m Caroline,” she said, “and you’re the wolf girl.”

I’d certainly been called worse, but my breath caught in my throat the moment she said the word wolf.

I stood up and looked down at her. Humans didn’t know about the existence of werewolves, and they especially didn’t know about the existence of my pack here, in my territory, at my high school.

“Who are you?” I took a step forward. If we’d been anywhere near the same height, my face would have been right in hers, but she was so small that the top of her head didn’t even reach my chin.

“I’m Caroline,” she repeated. “Keep up.”

Caroline. Looked like a porcelain doll, felt like a threat.

My brain absorbed the information and fed it automatically to the rest of the pack, a transfer as simple and reflexive as taking a breath and then breathing out.

“I believe you have something that belongs to us.”

Us?

I glanced over Caroline’s shoulder, half expecting to see an army of pint-sized leather-clad divas, but as best I could tell, she was alone.

“Define something,” I said, pushing down the urge to place a hand on each of her shoulders and force her, belly up, to the ground.

Not here, I told myself. Not now.

“I believe its name is Lucas.” Caroline scuffed the heel of her boot into the ground, and it took me a minute to realize that she was etching a symbol into the snow. “On the off chance that you’ve had multiple Lucases show up at the home front in the past couple of days, ours should have been fairly clearly marked.”

For a split second, it was like I was staring right at the back of Lucas’s neck again, and the scar I’d seen there, ugly and puckered, was an exact reflection of the shape in the snow: a four-pointed star laid over a half circle.

“You recognize it,” Caroline said. “Very good. You get a sticker. Sadly, you won’t be able to really enjoy that sticker if we’re forced to put you down like a rabid dog.”

The second the threat left her mouth, Devon, Lake, and Maddy were on their feet, and I could feel the hackles rising on Chase’s back in the distance.

For the first time, Caroline flicked her eyes around the rest of our little group, and she held one gloved hand out to Devon. “Down, boy,” she said, not even bothering to reply to Maddy or Lake. “That wasn’t a threat. It was a conditional statement. If we get back what’s ours, everyone lives to howl at the moon another day. If we don’t …”

Caroline shrugged delicately. A low growl ripped its way out of Maddy’s throat. I glanced at her, and she swallowed the inhuman noise, but not without taking a step closer to the little blonde girl with the great big mouth.

“Who’s we?” My voice gave no hint of the deafening barrage of thoughts in my mind. I was cool, calm, collected.

So was she.

“My family.” Caroline dragged her eyes up and down my body, and they settled on my sunburned cheeks. “I see you’ve already met Archer. He has an uncanny way of getting under your skin, wouldn’t you say?”

She gave me time to reply, then smiled when I didn’t say a word. “You’ll have to excuse his manners, though. Archer’s all about the hunt.”

Hello, mutt-lover. The voice echoed through my memory, and my temples throbbed just thinking about it.

“My mother told him to wait, but Archer was anxious to meet you in person. If she tells him to pull back, though, he’ll listen. My mother can be a very persuasive woman, and she has no desire for bloodshed, especially not yours, Bryn.”

They knew my name.

“I think you’ll find us reasonable. We won’t attack. We won’t rush you. My family can be very patient—some of us, anyway.” Caroline folded her hands in front of her and brought blue eyes to meet mine once more. “You have one week.”

“One week,” Lake repeated. “One week or what?”

Lake, I said sharply. On instinct, I held her back, my mind willing her feet not to move, not to carry her into a confrontation with an enemy whose true nature was still, for the most part, unknown.

“One week or what?” Devon repeated. He didn’t make a move on Caroline, and it was taking everything I had to keep Lake from ripping out her throat, so I let him press the question in his own way: with a gentle elevation of one eyebrow and an endless, pointed stare.

Caroline took a step back, but I knew by the expression on her face that it wasn’t a retreat. She ran the tip of one gloved finger over the inside edge of her jacket, and I saw a flash of silver.

She didn’t draw her weapon, but I knew the others had seen it, too.

“I never miss.” Caroline said the words simply, the same way I would have said that my eyes were brown.

“Guess that makes two of us.” Lake hooked her fingertips through the belt loops on her jeans, a casual gesture completely at odds with the tension in her neck.

“No,” Caroline said softly. “You do miss. If the target’s too far away, or if the wind isn’t right. If you throw knives or take a shot with an arrow, if you line someone up in your sight—sometimes, you miss.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And you don’t?”

Caroline inclined her chin slightly. “No.” A faint breeze caught her hair, and it fanned out like a halo around her head. Beside me, Devon stiffened and took a step forward.

“Can’t smell me, can you?” Caroline said, a soft, deadly smile working its way onto her lips. “Call it a gift. Once I leave here, you won’t be able to track me. If I’m a hundred yards out, you won’t hear me coming.”

Her tone was enough to send a chill up my spine, but that was nothing compared to what I was feeling from the others. She was standing right in front of them, and they couldn’t smell her. She was armed, and unless they wanted the whole school to see it, they couldn’t attack.

“What are you?” I couldn’t help asking the question. She looked human, but there wasn’t a human on the planet who could sneak up on a Were. There wasn’t a hint of fear on her face.

There was no doubt.

She knew what we were, and she wasn’t afraid—and that was terrifying.

“I’m a hunter.” Caroline’s smile grew predatory. “It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.”

Threat.

The sensation was so overwhelming, so intense that I could feel it as bile in the back of my throat, an incredible pressure at my temples, a knife through my stomach. I let go of my mental hold on Lake, because I needed every ounce of control I had to keep myself from springing forward and tackling this thing in front of me to the ground.

She shouldn’t have been able to make me feel this way. I shouldn’t have taken her words at face value, but it was all too easy to believe that when she took aim, she really didn’t miss—that she couldn’t, that the rest of her so-called family was just as unnatural, just as deadly.

Threat. Threat. Threat.

Predatory grin still in place, Caroline took another step backward, her hands held out to the sides, like she was dancing.

Like she was seconds away from going for her knife.

“You have one week,” she said, and then, with every confidence that not one of us would go for her back, she turned and walked toward the school.

You can’t smell me, she’d promised. You won’t hear me coming.

It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.

I never miss.

“Show of hands,” Devon said, breaking the silence. “Who thinks we’re screwed?”

CHAPTER NINE

WE CUT OUT ON THE REST OF THE SCHOOL DAY, AND as Chase leapt in wolf form into the back of Lake’s Jeep and I buried my fingers in his stiff, damp fur, I had a sinking feeling that none of us would be back.

Not until this threat was taken care of.

Maybe not ever.

For as long as I could remember, I’d attended public school, human school, pretending that I could be one of them. That I could be normal. That I had some kind of future outside the boundaries of a werewolf pack. But maybe that was all it would ever be.

Pretense.

One way or the other, I had no business going through the motions of a normal school day while a foreign wolf lay on a bed in Cabin 13. Maybe this was a sign that as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t give Maddy homeroom or prom or any typical teen experience to make up for all the things she’d missed growing up.

The five of us were Pack, and we belonged with the others. We belonged at home, not out in the open where a threat could waltz up to us at lunchtime and calmly issue ultimatums we weren’t at liberty to respond to.

It was a miracle that none of the Weres had lost their grip and Shifted.

That wasn’t a chance I was going to be taking again anytime soon. If Caroline and her “family” wanted a confrontation, they would have to come to us. I had to believe that on our turf, werewolf strength and instinct and the thirst for our enemies’ blood would be worth something, no matter what—besides Caroline—the other side had in their arsenal.

Worse comes to worst, you don’t have to fight them, the pragmatic part of my brain whispered. Give them what they want, and they’ll go away.

I didn’t want to be the kind of person who could consider that option, but what I wanted wasn’t what mattered. Keeping my pack safe mattered. Making sure that no one laid a finger on Katie or Alex or Lily mattered.

But didn’t Lucas, with his haunted eyes and heartbreaking wariness, matter, too?

“He really did lie.” Maddy’s thoughts weren’t far from my own, but I knew that this was harder for her, that she’d wanted to believe in Lucas, because she’d seen so much of herself in the things that had been done to him. “Lucas lied.”

“No,” Lake corrected tersely, taking a turn with all the zeal of an Indy 500 driver. “He didn’t lie. He just left out a few key details, such as the fact that the humans who are after him aren’t exactly what you’d call run of the mill.”

I’m a hunter, the little blonde girl had said. It’s what I was made for. It’s all that I do.

“Caroline might have been exaggerating her abilities.” I had to say the words, even though I didn’t believe them. There was a tone to Caroline’s voice, a look in her eyes that I recognized all too well. “If you can’t smell her, you wouldn’t be able to tell if she was telling the truth.”

Devon glanced at me for a second, maybe less. “You believe her,” he said—a statement, not a question.

“Believe what?” I asked. “That she’s the perfect hunter?”

The kind you didn’t see coming. The kind who never missed.

I shook my head, trying to clear it of unwanted thoughts.

“I believe,” I said slowly, “that she’s a threat, and I know she’s not working alone.”

The burn on my skin was fading, but the questions it had inspired weren’t going away. We didn’t know how big Caroline’s family was. We didn’t know what they were, other than human. We didn’t know why they wanted Lucas, and we certainly didn’t know the limits of what they could do.

“You think they’re like Keely?” Lake asked, gunning the engine the moment she said the bartender’s name. “With her … you know …?”

Before Ali had yanked me out of Callum’s pack and brought me to the Wayfarer, I hadn’t known there was anything unusual in the world, other than werewolves. I hadn’t known that Callum saw possible futures laid out in a complicated web, or that I had an unnatural ability to survive things that would kill a normal girl. I hadn’t had a clue that there were people out there like Keely, who could make you spill your secrets just by looking at you a certain way.

In all the time since I’d discovered those things, I hadn’t once stopped to wonder what else—or, more to the point, who else—was out there.

“So, what?” I said. “Some people are really scrappy, and some people are easy to talk to, and some people are made to hunt?”

My words were met with silence.

“And what about the other guy?” I continued. “The one I keep seeing in my dreams? That’s not just a knack. You can’t just be born with a knack for burning people in their sleep. That’s …”

Impossible?

Insane?

“That’s not a knack,” I said mutinously. “That’s magic.”

The word felt ridiculous coming out my mouth. I’d grown up around things that would have made normal girls take off screaming, but I’d never once believed in magic. Werewolves were just another species. Pack-bonds were connections, as natural as a mother feeding her infant in the womb. Even Callum’s seeing the future was something I could write off as …

Quirky.

But this? The symbol carved into Lucas’s skin. The foreign presence in my dreams. My pink and sunburned skin.

This was a whole new world of weird.

“I’m going to throttle Lucas,” I said, my voice deceptively cheerful. “I mean, seriously? He couldn’t have warned us?”

“Maybe he knew that if he told us the truth, we would send him away.” Maddy’s voice was soft, and in an uncharacteristically affectionate gesture, she laid her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. “Maybe he doesn’t believe that anyone else could ever want to fight for him.”

I leaned my head over so that my temple was touching the top of Maddy’s head. Behind us, Chase stood up on his hind legs and put one paw on my shoulder and one on hers, huffing into our faces before nudging each of us with a wet, cold nose. The affection he showed Maddy surprised me, and my surprise made me realize that in human form, Chase never touched anyone but me.

“This is all Shay’s fault,” Devon said from the front seat. “He’s the one who gave Lucas to those … whatever they are. Shay probably sent Lucas there hoping that he would run to us and bring She Who Hunts to Kill right to our front porch.”

That did sound kind of like the type of thing Shay would do. For a few minutes, the five of us were silent. Then Lake pulled into the parking lot in front of the restaurant and slammed the car into park. “So, who wants to share all of this with my dad and Ali?”

“Not it,” Devon said quickly.

“Not it,” Lake and Maddy chorused. Beside me, Chase let out a small howl, and I cursed under my breath.

“Have I ever mentioned that being alpha sucks?” I said.

“A time or two,” Devon replied, but he didn’t even have the decency to sound sorry for me.

Sitting there in the backseat of Lake’s car, Chase and Maddy close enough that they felt more like extensions of my physical body than members of my pack, I tried to remember what it was like to be a normal teenager, but the next second, Lake popped open the driver’s-side door, and a burst of winter wind brought with it the smell of wet fur and cedar trees.

We were home, and underneath the familiar pack scent, my senses registered something else.

Something foreign.

Close.

Still in wolf form, Chase leapt out of the car and came to a halt a few feet in front of us, glancing back over his shoulder, as if to tell us to stay where we were. Undaunted, Lake sauntered forward, Devon on her heels.

“Looks like Lucas is feeling better,” Lake said pithily. “Because unless my nose is mistaken, he’s not in Cabin thirteen.”

Maddy glanced at me and then slid out of the backseat. I followed, concentrating on my pack-sense and trying to pinpoint who among our pack was inside the Wayfarer restaurant and what they were feeling.

Lily. Mitch. Three of the older Resilient kids.

They were in there, with Lucas. The same Lucas who’d lied to me. The one who was currently topping the Not Just Humans’ Most Wanted List.

For once, the constant chill on the back of my neck that told me there was a foreign wolf nearby was drowned out by another feeling.

I was now officially pissed.

The first thing I saw when I stepped across the threshold of the Wayfarer was Lucas, his hands wrapped around Lily’s tiny frame. The first thing I heard was the three-year-old’s scream, shrill enough to shatter glass.

Lily, I thought, my heart jumping into my throat. I was already moving for the shotgun behind the counter when I realized that neither Devon nor Lake was reacting like Lucas was threatening one of ours. A split second later, I registered that on the other end of the bond, Lily wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t hurting. She was ecstatic.

“No, no, no!” she shrieked, trying to escape Lucas’s grasp but holding back just enough that she couldn’t. “No more tickles!”

In response, Lucas hooked his arms around her body and flipped her upside down.

“She throws up, you’ll be dealing with it,” Mitch told him, but his lips twitched, like he was trying to keep from smiling at the picture that Lily and Lucas made.

“That dastardly fiend,” Devon whispered. “She’s never going to wind down in time for her nap.”

Lily made a sound halfway between a giggle and a bark and kicked her feet. Beside me, Chase bristled, and I felt the hair on the back of my own neck rising in tandem with his hackles.

Whatever Chase had learned when he went to see Lucas, the feeling I was getting, loud and clear, through the pack-bond was that he didn’t trust him, and now that Chase was in wolf form, his instinct to protect our territory was sharper, his bond to the rest of the pack harder to deny and his brain incapable of understanding human thoughts—or recognizing that, red-faced and screaming in the hands of the enemy, Lily was fine.

He leapt forward, teeth bared, growling.

I reached out to him with my mind but was met with the uncompromising certainty of the wolf. Lily was ours. Lucas was foreign. He was touching her, and the pup was screaming.

“Chase!” I yelled at the exact same moment that Mitch took a casual step forward and grabbed Chase by the scruff of his neck. Bearing down on him, Mitch forced wolf eyes to meet his, and slowly, Chase sank to the floor.

Lily, seeing further opportunity for mischief, wriggled her way out of Lucas’s arms and leapt to land on Chase. “Wrestle!” she declared.

Before I could do a thing, the jumper she was wearing went the way of many play clothes before it. Shifting was simpler for the younger wolves: they melted from one form to another with liquid ease, and all it had taken to trigger Lily was seeing Chase in wolf form.

Now in animal form herself, Lily bobbed her furry head slightly and then grinned, an expression that looked eerie on her puppy face.

Slowly, awareness dawned on Chase. The human part of his brain realized that Lily was fine, that she was happy, and his wolf instincts recognized the unmistakable signal that she was ready to play. In the wild, play fighting was nature’s way of preparing wolf pups for the real thing. At the Wayfarer, it was par for the course.

Lily pounced on Chase’s paws, and I looked toward the other kids, all of whom were valiantly holding on to their human forms, just to show that they could. Most of our pack were right at that age when they tried very hard not to want to be kids, even though they weren’t quite adolescents.

“Go ahead,” I told them. “Somebody has to watch out for Chase. Lily’s going to decimate him.”

For a moment, none of the kids moved, but I flicked my gaze over to them and made it an order, and that was all it took. They were off and running before they even switched forms, and as much as Chase didn’t want to leave my side, a silent please convinced him to lead them out to play.

Or, more to the point, out of harm’s way.

I pulled my mind away from Chase’s, but not quickly enough to keep from picking up that while Chase and his wolf would guard the pups, neither wanted to turn his back on Lucas, and neither wanted to leave me there with him.

Luckily, Chase’s human half seemed to know that I could take care of myself, and his wolf half knew, on a bone-deep level, that I was alpha, and together, those things were enough to buy me some time alone with Lucas—if alone meant “with Lake, Devon, Maddy, Mitch, and Keely standing by.”

Lucas took one look at my face, and he knew. I couldn’t smell fear, not the way the Weres could, but I knew what it looked like, etched into features that were trying desperately not to show it, and when I took a step forward, Lucas went as still as a corpse. I could see his pulse jumping in his throat, but he closed his eyes and stood there, waiting.

Just like that, I was back in the woods behind Callum’s house, my lips bleeding, my ribs cracked. It had taken everything I had not to fight Sora as she came at me again and again. I’d swallowed every instinct, and with each blow, I’d lost a tiny bit of myself, of the life I’d always thought that I’d lead.

I’d broken the rules, Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d stood there, just like Lucas was standing now.

Pissed or not, betrayed or not, I wasn’t going to be the kind of alpha who inspired that kind of fear.

“Maybe we should sit down,” I said. On all sides of me, I felt my backup fighting their own internal battles, their wolves crying out for retribution, and their human halves seeing what I saw and thinking that there had to be a way, some way, for it to be different.