Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Barnes, Jennifer Lynn

  I cursed. Callum waited.

  He thought I’d back out. He couldn’t imagine that seeing Chase meant enough to me that I’d give up being myself—and only myself—for any amount of time. But what Callum didn’t understand was that I wasn’t interested in seeing Chase the boy, or even Chase the werewolf. I needed to see Chase the hunted. And I needed that because without it, I was already incomplete.

  I needed my memories back. I needed to know what it was like for Chase, so I could know what it had it been like for me, and I needed to know if there was a Rabid in our territory, because if there was, the only way I’d ever really be myself again was to know that he was dead and that he’d paid for doing to Chase what someone had done to my entire family.

  Chase had survived. My parents hadn’t.

  “I agree to this condition, Alpha.”

  Callum visibly winced. If this had been any other power struggle between us, I might have felt victorious.

  “Fine.” Callum hadn’t expected things to go this far. Or maybe he had, but he’d hoped very much that they wouldn’t.

  “My penultimate condition is that, in service of making this interaction official, you accept my conditions in front of the pack, at our moonlight congregation tonight—”

  “I accept—”

  “I haven’t finished yet, Bryn. You have to stay for the Shift. You have to run with the pack.”

  Humans didn’t run with the pack.

  “You do realize that request is made of crazy, right?” I couldn’t help shedding the formal dialogue for this one. Weres maintained their faculties when they Shifted. Most of the time.

  “I’ll have the pack in control, Bryn, but you can’t see the boy if you’re afraid of him. I’ve been working with him nearly every day, and his control is progressing rapidly, but he’s too young to deal with the smell of your fear. You’ll run with the pack tonight, and you’ll continue to do so until the bond is strong enough that there’s no room for your fear.”

  I’d heard of psychiatrists treating phobias by making people do things like put their hands into a pit of snakes, but this was just ridiculous.

  “The bond protects you, Bryn. Once you open it, none of the others will see you as human. You’re Pack and you’ll run as Pack.” He smiled, his lips quirking upward just the tiniest bit. “I think you’ll like it, once you get past wanting to kill me for it.”

  “What’s the final condition?” I wasn’t agreeing to this one until I knew what he’d force on me next. For all I knew, he’d demand I cut off my foot, because if I couldn’t maintain my composure as one-legged human among four-footed Weres, I couldn’t possibly talk to one juvenile werewolf locked in a steel cage.

  Callum said, “I’ll tell you the final condition tonight.”

  I growled at him, taking some satisfaction out of the way the inhuman snarl felt working its way from my throat to my lips.

  “Most pack members wouldn’t have gotten forewarning on any of the conditions,” Callum said, and then he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. That simple motion was enough to completely pulverize the barrier between us.

  “You’re doing this to me on purpose,” I said. “You’re trying to torture me because you’re still mad that I managed to ditch my bodyguards, break into your house, and uncover your secret basement boy.”

  “I’m doing this,” he corrected, “because you’re mine.”

  His.

  Werewolves. They’re all about possession. Sometimes, I thought that parents—even human ones—were the exact same way. Your behavior reflects upon them. They want the best for you, because you’re theirs. Things that are okay for other people’s kids are out of the question for you, and no matter how old you grow, or how far you run, you can’t change where you came from.

  “You’re doing this because you suck.”

  Callum smiled charmingly, looking more like a boy than a thousand-year-old Were. “So I’ve been told, Bryn. So I’ve been told.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BY NIGHTFALL, THERE WERE MORE WERES AT THE Crescent than there were students at my high school—an effect of living in a small town at the heart of a major werewolf territory. I knew every person there by name, though some had driven in from out of town, a commute they made, like clockwork, once every twenty-nine days. Callum’s territory extended from Kansas up to Montana and though the majority of Weres were drawn to be close to their alpha, a few of Callum’s wolves maintained peripheral status, living at the edges of our territory, away from Ark Valley and the rest of the pack. Of the peripherals, only two were missing from the Crescent, and their monthly absence persisted only so long as Callum allowed it.

  Personally, I wished Alpha Dearest had required their presence tonight. Next to Devon, I had only one friend in our pack. Her name was Lake, she was my age, and she and her dad had spent summers in Ark Valley when the two of us were younger. Lake was one of our pack’s only female werewolves and the most outspoken person I’d ever met. I couldn’t help wishing that she and her dad had driven in from the edge of our territory for tonight’s meeting. Purebred werewolf or not, Dev wasn’t quite enough to counterbalance the members of our furry family who didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy feelings for the human girl standing in our midst.

  “There’s no shame in turning tail and getting the Helen Hunt out of here,” Devon told me. “In fact, I would quite recommend it.”

  Devon being Devon should have calmed my nerves, but I couldn’t manage so much as a smile. From the other side of the crowd, Callum began making his way toward me, and I could feel the sand slipping through the hourglass, each grain a punch to my stomach and a reminder that my time was running out.

  Without a word, Callum placed his hand on the back of my neck, and though it was meant as a calming gesture, physical contact with the alpha had the hairs on my arms doing the wave, one after another.

  To a normal girl, the energy in this place would have felt like an excess of adrenaline—something similar to the air in a locker room before a big game, or a math class in the moments leading up to an exam. But I knew better. This wasn’t adrenaline. This was preternatural. It was ungodly.

  It was pure, undiluted animalistic energy, and the moment I opened the bond to the pack and joined their group mindset, it wouldn’t be an alien feeling on my skin, static in my arm hairs.

  It would be inside of me, and I would be as lost to it as they were.

  Callum’s grip on the back of my neck tightened just a bit, and I wondered if my face had given my thoughts away so clearly. In another few minutes, they’d be clear enough to everyone, not in words, but in feel, as the bond let my emotions bleed onto them and into theirs.

  Soon, Callum and I were standing at the center of the Crescent, Weres all around us. Sora, Casey, and Lance were the closest to me, with Marcus near the back, probably at Callum’s orders. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  “Hello, brothers.”

  If Sora objected to the fact that Callum’s greeting wasn’t gender neutral, she didn’t show it. I, for one, was feeling a little disenfranchised—not to mention outnumbered. There were easily a hundred of us in this clearing, and sleek, self-possessed Sora and I were the only females.

  I was the only human.

  One werewolf was dangerous. An entire pack was an immovable force, an unbeatable army.

  I was outnumbered, unarmed, weak, and screwed. In that order.

  “Hello.” The pack murmured the word back to Callum in unison, but I could barely parse the syllables into their meaning. There was a sort of melody to them, an inhuman, musical tone that made it sound more like a hum of energy than any kind of salutation.

  “One in our number has requested our counsel,” Callum said. “Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, our ears are yours.”

  Though he followed protocol to a T, his words were unlike any that this circle had heard before. First there was the fact that I was a daughter, and the fact that my familial allegiance was given by my mother’s na
me, and then there was the fact that everyone here knew that Ali hadn’t given birth to me, that I was an orphan.

  That I hadn’t always been one of them.

  The familiar sound of a spit bubble popping had me looking over my left shoulder, toward Callum’s guard, and sure enough, I noticed that Casey wasn’t the only member of my household here. The twins were present and accounted for: two babies among scores of men, a burly Were who I recognized as one of Casey’s coworkers gently cradling one in each arm.

  Well, at least I wasn’t completely on my own. Though after a moment’s reflection, I wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not. My allies in this circle consisted of a fashion-conscious teenage boy who believed in the holy power of the movie musical and two infants wearing shirts with little yellow and blue duckies on them.

  An army, we were not.

  Bryn. I felt a brush at the edge of my subconscious—not a word, but a gentle reminder—pushing against my hard-won psychic shields.

  Right. Their ears were mine. I was supposed to be talking.

  “I, Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, request the pack’s permission to speak with Chase, the Survivor.”

  Since Chase didn’t have familial ties, the title seemed apt, and I thought I saw a fleck of understanding in Callum’s gaze, something that told me that he might have understood more than I’d given him credit for about my fascination with a boy who could kill me as easily as tell me the truth.

  “As alpha of the Stone River Pack, I speak on behalf of my brothers in saying that I grant you these permissions, under the conditions as follow.”

  I was prepared to hear this part, and I found myself strangely grateful that I was Callum’s and that he’d broken protocol enough to give me forewarning. I gave the requisite answers as he told me again about the way I would be expected to submit to those who accompanied me on my meetings, open my bond to the pack until this business was concluded, and run with them tonight.

  And then Callum told me the last requirement. “In exchange for this favor, you will excuse yourself from any meetings involving the North American Senate for the next five months.”

  This was … unexpected. All of Callum’s other conditions involved me becoming more a part of the pack, and being a good little pack daughter, but this one pushed me away. The Senate didn’t convene on a regular basis, and frankly, I had no desire to be there when they did. My bond with Callum connected me to his pack, and it made me smell like Stone River—and Callum—to other Weres, but I wasn’t connected to any of the other alphas on the Senate. I didn’t feel safe around them, and the artifice of bureaucracy surrounding the Senate did nothing to conceal the amount of testosterone pushing each of the alphas to test his dominance against the others. The eight of them had a gentlemen’s agreement not to challenge each other, but I didn’t relish being in a room with men nearly as strong as Callum who weren’t bound by his word to keep me safe.

  “I agree to this condition, Alpha,” I said.

  Was that relief on Callum’s face? My stomach twisted sharply as his features settled back into an unreadable mask, and I had a single second to wonder if he knew something that I didn’t.

  Callum knew better than to leave me wondering long. His voice boomed out around me, calm and cool, saturated with power caged, and my thoughts stilled until all I saw was Callum, and all I heard were his words.

  “Our conditions have been set and agreed to. The agreement is sealed.” Callum took a step toward me and dug his fingernails slightly into my bare shoulder blade—not enough to draw blood, because this time, the motion was for show and carried symbolic but not literal power. In response, I bowed my head and then reached forward, my nails digging into his flesh, putting my seal on the agreement.

  Bryn.

  There it was again, the push at the outside of my psyche, and I realized that this time, the reminder was less about prodding me to pay attention and more of a gentle push against my defenses.

  The defenses that I’d just agreed to let down.

  I bit my bottom lip and nodded, and as I closed my eyes and walked myself backward through everything I’d done over the years to close myself off from them, to protect myself, to become my own person, a sob got caught in my throat. Callum might as well have ordered me to take off my clothes and let these men watch the strip show. I would be humiliated, laid bare, and vulnerable. Naked in every way that mattered.

  Bryn. The echo was calming this time, but closer—under my skin instead of on top of it—and I shuddered, but pushed forward.

  I took the things that were most me, the secrets I guarded most dearly, the dreams I’d see die before I revealed them, and I folded them into a tiny ball, tucking them away in my heart, in a place that went deeper than words or fears or emotions. I pictured that ball—a tiny sphere of light—and I promised myself that it would still be intact when I came back to retrieve it, that I’d still be me when all was said and done. If Callum saw what I was doing, his amber eyes gave no hint of that knowledge, and I heard his voice in my head again.

  Bryn.

  Giving in to its hypnotic call, I went back in the maze of my mind as far as I could remember, to the last time I’d stood before this Crescent, four years old and following Callum’s edict to look at him, only at him, as he Marked me as his own. Ali had stood beside me then, all of twenty-one, and I wondered if she’d felt the way that I felt now. If she’d let them violate her for my sake.

  And then I raised my eyes to Callum’s, just as I had then, and I told him, with every part of myself, that I was his. That I was Pack. And that, for the first time since I’d learned to close myself off from the overwhelming will of the pack, I was really theirs, too.

  Communal awareness came at me from all sides, like a wave knocking me off my feet and down into the undertow. My first instinct was to fight it, to run, to slam my mental walls back up ten times stronger than they’d been before, but they pulled at me, my pack-mates—their minds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Their togetherness. Their wolves. And even though I didn’t have another creature inside of me to respond to theirs, my body seemed completely unaware of this fact. I needed to be with them. Closer to them. Among them.

  I needed to be Pack.

  On some level, I knew that this was the hardest thing, the worst thing about letting them in—I had no guarantee that I’d ever be able to get rid of them, because I had no guarantee that I would ever want to. The life I’d been living was no less than sensory deprivation.

  Callum’s hand was on my neck again, and I leaned into it.

  Safety. Warmth. Alpha, my pack-sense told me.

  Callum. Here. Mine. And then, one by one, the others came forward, placing a hand on me, touching me softly. It should have been creepy. I should have been giving lectures about my bubble and the fact that I despised having anyone stand inside it, but I wasn’t.

  Instead, all I could think was that for the first time in forever, Callum wasn’t the only person who felt safe. He wasn’t the only one I could trust to protect me, to save me, to let me be me, even when it caused him no small amount of strife.

  This was my family. Even the ones I didn’t like, even the ones who’d wanted me dead for as long as they’d known me—they were mine the same way Katie and Alex were. We were part of each other, and even if there was no love between us, there was something.

  Pack.

  I felt the change before I saw it—electrifying on my skin’s surface, but world-changing inside of it. I could feel myself changing—not into a wolf but into the person I was in the pack. A daughter. A sister. A force of nature.

  Their strength flowed through me. I couldn’t force my human limbs to harness the power of their wolves, but I felt it, and for the first time in forever, it didn’t scare me.

  Callum arched his back, and with that single motion, his human form melted away, the transition from man to wolf as seamless as water going from a cup to a puddle on the floor. His fur was gray and tawny-tipped, and he stretched once, pushin
g his front paws into the ground and raising his tail, before straightening to his full height.

  As a man, Callum was built more like a cowboy than a linebacker, threatening only if you knew how much power lay under his skin, but in animal form, his weight rearranged itself into something that took your breath away. No one, under any circumstances, would have mistaken Callum for a natural wolf. He was enormous, and with a wolfy smile on his face, he looked directly at me.

  “Arrroooooooooo!”

  That sound—which I classified as halfway in between a howl and a Justin Timberlake solo—had me whirling around. Devon! He was larger than a normal Were, nearly Callum’s size and not even full-grown. There was a Herculean grace to his movements, a lightness to his four-legged step.

  My Devon.

  He jumped up and knocked me gently over, and a second later, the two of us were rolling around on the ground, the way we had when we were still really little. He took care with his claws and teeth, and I dug my fingers into his belly, tickling and scratching, and when he buried his nose in my hair and woofed slightly, breathing in and out next to my ear, I smiled.

  And then Kaitlin was there, barreling toward me at full speed. She dodged through the older wolves, and they carefully stepped aside, each and every gaze on her, their heads tilting to the sides with wolfish reverence.

  Kaitlin dove headfirst into our wrestling match, and I wrapped my arms around her, lifting her puppy body up into the air and then bringing her down and rubbing my nose into her fur. She lapped at my face, and her tail beat viciously back and forth, so fast that her entire body was vibrating.

  Girl! She seemed to say. Sister! Pack! Bryn!

  The combination of these things seemed to be more than she could bear, and I let her prance up and down my body, until she lost her balance and rolled head-over-tail to the ground. The other wolves went deadly still beside me, but Katie bounced straight back up and with a dignified yip, brought Alexander down upon me as well. Struggling to keep up with his sister, he bounded over and immediately latched his teeth onto my pants leg and started tugging.