Which led me right back to the problem at hand. “You’re Pack, Dev. You’re not a peripheral, you’re not otherwise connected—you’re one of Callum’s wolves. Callum could kill us for this, but it’ll be worse for you.”
Callum’s pack could do more than kill Devon. He was so deeply connected to them that if Callum decreed it, they could use the bond to twist him. They could rip out his mind with their anger. They could make him want to die.
For a moment, Devon said nothing, and then, he ran one hand over his gelled hair and pulled his perfectly groomed eyebrows down into a scowl. “The first time I saw you, you were covered in blood. I heard Callum tell my dad that it must have been from your mother, because by the time the Rabid got to your father, you’d retreated under the sink. You were red and shaking and it was the first time in my entire life that I felt the kind of fear from a human being that an animal sends out just before they die.” Devon looked at me. “And then, you looked at me, and even though I was only five years old, I knew that what had been done to you was the worst thing I would ever see. I knew that I would never, ever let someone do that to you again.”
Because this was my fight, this was his fight. I didn’t have a right to deny him that. Not when I’d left for Montana without a word. Not when I’d broken every promise I’d ever made him to take care of myself.
My throat tightened. Chase put a hand on my shoulder. Devon didn’t react to the gesture, reminding me that when the situation called for it, he was (a) a first-rate actor and (b) capable of showing restraint. I’d brought Devon here, just like I’d brought Lake, when without me, they would have been fine. They would have been safe.
Fifteen different images hit my mind at once: Sora and the ugly face of Pack Justice; Ali locking up Chase so Callum wouldn’t have a reason to tear him apart; Lake curled into a ball on my bedroom floor; Mitch telling me that some Weres got funny around females. The madman in the woods.
God, what if he got hold of Lake? What if I couldn’t stop him? What if Callum tore Devon to pieces, just for helping me? What if Devon’s own mother was the one to deliver the blows?
I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take knowing that as much as Lake and Devon had done everything in their power to protect me, always, I couldn’t do the same thing for them. Because I was human. Weak. Stupid.
Trapped.
This time, I welcomed the feeling of claustrophobia, remembering that the last time I’d felt it, Chase had cut his bond with the Rabid. The last time I’d let this feeling take control of my own actions, I’d rewired my bond with Chase.
Could you do it again? The question Lake had asked me once was drowned out by the panic, the suffocation—the need—not to survive but to protect.
I brought my hand up to Chase’s, and the bond between us pulsed and throbbed. With no warning, I became acutely aware of each of our connections to Devon and Lake, and theirs to us.
Mine.
Ours.
Mine.
I could feel Chase’s determination, his willingness to follow wherever I led. I felt my love for Devon in shades of silver, and his for me, equally bright and bittersweet. Mine for Lake. Lake’s for Devon.
And Chase’s for me.
I felt it coming, the way some people could smell rain in the air—a low, uncontrollable rush of power—and I knew. Our bonds to Callum’s pack, to Callum, pulled us back away from one another. They pulled us down and kept us there, drowning, leashed. Inside, I roared, and I saw myself taking the bonds in my teeth, my very human teeth, and ripping through them, the way Chase had torn himself away from the Rabid.
Trapped. Escape. Survive.
Protect.
Beside me, Chase growled, and I felt him, felt Us, Chase-Wolf-Bryn. As we threw everything we had at Devon and Lake and took everything they had in return.
Ours, Chase thought, adding his will to mine, because he knew—he knew I loved them. He knew what it was like to be helpless and completely unable to protect those you loved.
Ours, I replied. Something exploded between the four of us: a wave of knowing. A realignment of the earth. And then, for a moment, there was silence.
Lake was the first to recover. “Huh. You know, I really don’t think other people can do that, Bryn. If it was even remotely possible, my dad would’ve found a way to pull some mojo a long time ago.”
Impossibility. These days, it was my strong suit.
“What just happened here?” Devon asked, still sounding dazed.
I cleared my throat. “I … well, Chase and I … we … ummm … we redid your pack-bond,” I said, hoping Dev wouldn’t be mad.
Can you hear me? I asked silently.
Devon nodded. Like my own thoughts. Your voice—it isn’t coming from outside of me, it’s not coming through an external connection. It’s coming from inside my head.
“Rewiring bonds … it’s this thing,” I said out loud, “that Chase and I do.” This thing we did that, when I’d done it last, had brought Callum’s entire pack barreling down on us.
Lake, playing it cool, pushed back the feeling of awe that I could feel from her end of our connection. “There’re four of us. Does that mean we qualify as a pack now? Because if we do, we need to think of a seriously killer name for ourselves.” Devon opened his mouth and Lake cut him off. “No allusions to musicals, Broadway boy.”
“The lady doth offend my ears,” Devon said. “Begone, foul witch!”
Lake snorted. “I’ve missed you, too, Dev.”
I barely registered the interaction between the two of them, because I was stuck on what Lake had said about Chase and I being able to do something that nobody else could do.
On an unconscious level, I’d assumed that what I’d done with my pack-bond, I’d been able to do because I was human and Pack, connected, but different. I’d spent years manipulating my own bond, protecting my mind from Callum’s pack. And maybe I’d made Chase different, too, or maybe being a turned werewolf instead of a born one had something to do with it. But maybe not. Maybe what it really boiled down to was what I’d known from the moment I first saw him, sprawled in a cage.
Chase and I were the same.
Enough with the philosophizing. Lake’s voice. Inside my head—and somehow, it didn’t sound the way it did when she spoke out loud. It was quiet. Unassuming in tone, if not in words. Not timid, but understated and cautious.
Vulnerable.
Focus, Lake told me, and I could feel her taking a step back from my mind, folding herself inward and concentrating—to the extent that she could—on hiding from me the things that I didn’t normally see.
I nodded and took the reins. “Rabid. Here, in Alpine Creek. There’s a cabin in the woods. We’ll only have one shot.”
Chase pulled me close to him, and I wondered if he’d even realized he’d done it. And then I realized that my hand was on the top of his hipbone, but somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to remove it as I continued speaking to my friends. My pack.
“The last time I messed with someone’s pack-bond, it set off a psychic flare that brought the entire pack straight to us.” I paused, letting my words take hold, my grip on Chase tightening. “If what Chase and I just did has the same effect, we’re working under a time limit here, so let’s move. Lake and I are set for an attack. I have a plan. Boys, it’s hunting season. Weapon up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
NOBODY LIKED MY PLAN.
“You want us to split up?” Chase asked, his brow wrinkling in obvious bewilderment.
Lake echoed the sentiment, her voice flat. “Why would we split up? There’s four of us and one of him.” After a brief moment’s pause, she amended her head count to better reflect our real odds. “Three and a half of us, one of him.”
Three and a half, as in three werewolves, one human. I narrowed my eyes. “For your sake, Lake, I’m going to pretend that Devon is the half.”
Dev, unquestionably the strongest person in this room, just shrugged and let me keep my delusi
ons. “It’s because of my petite stature,” he said. All 6′ 4″ of him.
My sensibilities halfway appeased, I turned my attention back to the crux of Lake’s point. “Yes, we have stronger numbers, but we have no idea how old this guy is! Do any of you think for a second that the four of us together could take Callum?”
The fact that Callum was still my point of reference and would probably always be the standard to which all others compared was less than comforting.
“We can take him.” Chase said the words quietly, but an echo of them, silent and whispered from his mind to mine, lingered in my thoughts. “Not Callum. Prancer. The four of us together, I think we could take him.”
I paused for a single moment before thrusting that idea into the guillotine and dropping the blade. “And how many of us would make it out of that kind of confrontation alive?”
I felt their collective hackles go up all around me. For better or worse, this was our pack now. We couldn’t afford to lose each other. I’d die if anything happened to a single one of them.
“Our best chance to get out of this unscathed is to split up. One person goes in and plays sniper. The others rush in once the target is hit.”
I could see the logic worming its way into their thick skulls, and I pressed on. “If we all go, the Rabid will know it’s an attack. There’s no other reason three werewolves would show up unannounced in his woods. If one of us goes in and the others fall back, it won’t be considered as much of a threat.”
Lake ran a hand through her blonde hair, twisting her ponytail around her wrist. “He won’t expect us to be armed to the hilt.”
That was a near certainty. Lake was the only Were I’d ever met with a fondness for weapons. Weres rarely fought in human form, and with any luck, the Rabid wouldn’t be expecting a long-range attack. One werewolf killing another with a series of well-placed bullets would have seemed as absurd to most Weres as the idea of natural wolves settling dominance disputes with pistols at dawn.
“I’ll go,” Chase said quietly. “He won’t consider me a threat at all.”
It cost Chase to say those words, to know that they were true. To the Rabid, Chase would never be a real person, let alone one who deserved to be viewed with any kind of wariness or respect.
“He might not perceive you as a threat, but he’ll know you’re coming,” I said, my voice matching Chase’s for lack of volume. “He’ll smell you a mile off, and he’ll know it’s you. He’ll be waiting. He’ll have something planned.”
“He won’t expect me to have a gun.”
At the word gun, Lake leaned back against the dilapidated nightstand, crossing her right foot over her left. “Do you know how to shoot?” she asked Chase.
He shrugged. “Point. Pull trigger. How complicated could it be?”
Dev reached out one arm in a show of holding Lake back, even though she hadn’t moved a muscle. “Down, girl! The boy knows not what he says!”
“I’ll go,” Lake said, rolling her eyes at Devon’s theatrics. “I’m the best shot.”
Devon echoed her eye roll with one of his own. “And I stand the best chance of coming out of this alive if Mr. Crankypants catches on to the fact that someone has him in their sights.”
Dev was young, but he was purebred, and Lance had trained him to fight the same way that Callum had trained me.
For a moment, I let the three of them stare each other down, and then I put an end to it.
“It has to be me,” I said.
All three of the others looked at me like I’d suggested inviting Prancer to a Very Special Tea Party.
“If any of you get close to him, he’ll know that there’s a Were here,” I said. “If he senses me, he’ll sense a human. Outside of the Stone River wolves, most people can’t tell that I’m Pack from a distance.” The distinction between my scent and the others’ was the difference between someone who’d spritzed themselves with body splash and someone who sweated it from their pores. “I won’t even register on this guy’s threat meter. He’ll probably just assume that I’m some kid from town, poking around the woods on a dare.” I knew better than to pause and give them a chance to interject. “Besides, next to Lake, I’m the best shot. If I go, the Rabid won’t be on guard, he won’t be expecting me, he won’t recognize me, and I can hit him first try.”
Every single one of my friends knew that I had the best argument, but none of them wanted to admit it.
“And besides,” I added, “it’ll take me three times as long to get to the cabin as it would any of you. If I stay out of range and someone needs me, they’re out of luck. Any of you could get there in seconds.”
Through the bond, I got the feeling that none of them would mind keeping me out of the range of fire indefinitely.
“No.” I said the word and spoke it into their minds at the same time. “I’ve got guns, I know how to shoot, and I’ll be careful. If I can’t get him in my sights, then I’ll come back. He’s not going to want to attack a human in his own backyard. None of his previous victims have lived within a hundred miles of Alpine Creek. He’s lived here for more than a decade. He has a vested interest in going on vacay to snack. Unless he realizes that I’m there to attack him, he won’t attack me.”
And, I promised silently, I won’t shoot unless I’m sure I can kill.
They still didn’t like it. I’d always known that Devon was protective, and it had been perfectly clear from day one that Chase and I hurt more for each other’s suffering than our own, but I’d never realized that Lake felt the same way, that every illicit adventure we’d ever been on, she would have thrust me behind her in a second, the instant danger appeared.
I-am-doing-this.
Out loud, all I said was, “You guys.”
“Fine.” Chase was the first to agree. Even as he did, he lowered his head to mine and nuzzled me—the universal wolf gesture for Come home safe.
Lake fixed me with a steely glare. “You die, and I’ll find someone with a knack for raising the dead, bring you back all zombified, and kill you myself.”
“I’m not helpless,” I told her, dropping my gaze to my wrists. She nodded.
Ultimately, Devon was the hardest sell. “I would rather shave my head and mold my personal look after a prison guard named Bubba than let you do this.”
Of all of them, Dev had been protecting me the longest. He was also the only one who’d seen me after my first run-in with our Rabid. I could sense that image, of a skinny, blood-soaked child, close to the surface of his mind.
Taking a step back, I twisted my wrists sharply and settled into a fighting pose as the claws came out.
I’m not that little girl anymore, Dev. I’m tougher than I look. If you don’t let me do this, you’re saying I’m helpless. You’re making me helpless, and I’m really sick of playing the victim.
In the back of my head, it occurred to me that I might be able to make Devon agree—the same way I’d forced Chase to promise to stay out of it when Callum had Sora beat me. But Dev had an incredible ability for holding grudges, and I wasn’t sure that I could put up with the dramatics inside my head as well as out.
“Fine. But Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare, I’d not have you endangering yourself on my watch.”
I smiled. “My stubbornness is my folly?” I guessed.
“You said it. I didn’t.”
Somehow, I doubted he was joking this time. Rather than reply, I twisted my wrists inward, and the silver blades whooshed in, hidden again.
And then, I went to kill the Rabid.
Devon, Lake, and Chase were all in my head. My senses—human and therefore dulled—confused them and put them at a handicap for fully understanding what was going on, but I trusted that they’d get used to it. I knew the way into the woods as well as the Rabid who lived there did. I’d seen it through his eyes, and even though the glance had been fleeting, I’d discovered that the knowledge behind it stuck in a way that made me feel closer to my prey than I’d ever wanted to be. For bette
r or worse, I knew where to find the Rabid. The only difficulty was staying downwind and keeping to the upper ground. My Glock ate into my back, a solid reminder that from this point forward, we were playing for keeps.
As silently as I could, I moved toward Wilson’s cabin, my path twisting enough that if he did hear or sense me, he might not read anything into it.
Wolf. Close by.
I wasn’t sure which of the little hitchhikers in my head had sent that message, but as soon as they pointed it out, I recognized the feeling in my gut for what it was. A wolf. Not Pack, but a wolf.
Burnt hair and men’s cologne. Baby powder.
I wondered at the additional component to the Rabid’s scent but didn’t let it throw me. Even monsters could pride themselves on good personal hygiene.
I crouched, covering my back with a tree, and I looked. From this distance, I could make out the cabin, which was much larger than I’d realized from what I’d seen inside the Rabid’s head. The difference gave me the illusion of distance, let me forget how close to this man I’d come in my mind.
Settling into my crouch, I scanned the perimeter of the cabin, identifying each and every point of entry. Unless Prancer decided to do us all a favor and take an early evening stroll, I wasn’t going to be able to get a sight on him.
That silent admission had the other three nipping at the heels of my mind, pushing against our bond, willing me to call them in.
But I didn’t. I held my position, and I watched.
Wolf, I thought, feeling it. Baby powder and burnt hair and men’s cologne.
And then there was movement behind one of the windows. With steady hands, I reached for my gun and pulled it out of my jeans. I could almost make out the edges of a person’s form, but given my inferior human senses, it could just as easily have been an armchair. And then, I got unbelievably lucky.
The front door opened.
I moved my arms, aiming my gun at the door, and my finger began to press down on the trigger, little by little, as I waited for my target to appear. A mile away, Lake, Devon, and Chase prepared themselves to converge on me. To protect me.
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