Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I really was not ready to deal with a something else. Psychics and werewolves, and mind games from both, were more than enough for me, thank you very much.

  “She’s a psychic,” Ali replied, “but knacks with physical manifestations are rarer, and having a set of skills, instead of just one, isn’t what I would call common.”

  Whole lot of good that did us.

  “In most covens, the person with the most power is usually the leader.”

  I heard the stress Ali put on the word usually, and responded, “And when they’re not?”

  “Then they’re the odd one out.”

  The same way a normal human would be. The same way Ali had been. I thought of the way she’d introduced herself to Caroline, the way she’d accused the adults of using a child to do their dirty work. The rest of the coven had approached us as a group, but twice now, they’d sent Caroline after me alone.

  They talked about the things she could do like she wasn’t quite human.

  In the werewolf world, the easiest way to get information on any pack was through the peripherals. That was why we kept the Wayfarer restaurant open to people passing through from other packs, and that was why step two of my reconnaissance plan might involve trying to get the coven outsider alone.

  Again.

  A plan began to form in my mind, and it occurred to me that maybe I’d been a little hasty in swearing off my human education forever.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE BEST THING ABOUT HAVING FRIENDS WHO KNEW me as well as Devon and Lake did was that they recognized from the moment I told them my plan that trying to talk me out of approaching Caroline was futile.

  The worst thing about being alpha was that on some level, all three of us knew that even if they hadn’t been inclined to go along with the plan, I could have forced it.

  Forced them.

  I wouldn’t have done it, but the fact that I could seemed so much more noticeable now. Hierarchy was like breathing: the only time you thought about it was when something went wrong. With the presence of an outside threat, every instinct we had was amped up to the nth degree.

  I couldn’t help thinking that did not bode particularly well for Caroline, hunter or not.

  “Ali suspect anything?” Devon asked once he, Lake, and I had put sufficient distance between us and the Wayfarer.

  “Does she find it highly suspicious that the three of us are going back to school when there’s a psychic army looming threateningly in the background?” I leaned back in my seat. “Of course she does. But given that she helped me play psychic bait yesterday, she can’t really complain about us doing the same thing today. Besides, Callum forbids it.”

  Devon and Lake snorted in unison.

  “Bryn Rule number twenty-three,” Devon intoned, “whenever someone tells you to do something, make it a point to do the exact opposite.”

  “I’m not that bad.”

  Lake grinned. “Plausible deniability is a girl’s best friend.”

  “Rule twenty-seven?” Devon guessed, wrinkling his brow, deep in the throes of mock thought.

  “Fourteen,” Lake interjected. “If I remember correctly, Bryn Rule twenty-seven involves the evils of werewolf bodyguards.”

  “Present company excluded, of course,” Devon added, eyeing me reproachfully.

  “You guys aren’t here as bodyguards,” I said, eyeing him right back. The last thing I needed was for Devon or Lake to feel obligated to throw down with Caroline in front of our Weston High fan club. “Shay made a deal with the coven. Caroline’s mother is the head of the coven. Ergo, we need Caroline to start talking.”

  Lake smiled.

  “We need her to start talking of her own volition,” I clarified. “No violence. No scenes. No ‘but I’ve been watching NCIS reruns and I think I’m really getting a hang of this interrogation thing.’ ”

  And no Keely, I added to myself. If anyone could recognize her knack for what it was, it would be another psychic, and we couldn’t risk word of Keely’s knack getting back to Shay.

  “No interrogation? Why don’t you just come right out and say ‘no fun’?” Lake grumbled.

  I shrugged. “No fun. The coven gave us one week to hand over Lucas. Today is the third day. The last thing we want is to prod them into early action.”

  “So if we can’t threaten Caroline, and we can’t interrogate her, how are we supposed to get her to say a darn thing?” Lake’s question was a good one, and I didn’t reply—mostly because my plan didn’t have much nuance beyond “poke it with a stick and see what happens.”

  Luckily, this situation seemed to fall under Devon’s area of expertise, and he obligingly picked up the mantle. “Now, don’t shoot me, ladies, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you two, as lovely and endearing as you are, might not be terribly well versed in the art of making friends and influencing people.”

  Lake snorted. “And you are? Seems I remember you wanting to rip Miss My Family Can Be Very Patient’s aorta out her nose, same as I did.”

  Devon executed a delicate shrug of his massive shoulders. “The thought might have occurred to me once or twice, but you know what they say, Lake—you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

  I could feel Devon’s Gone with the Wind impression coming on, but since it seemed to be a step in the right direction compared to disembowelment, I decided to let it slide.

  “You should have seen the way the other members of the coven talked about this girl, Lake.” I paused, letting my words sink in. “They’re scared of her—the kind of scared that involves pupils twice as big as they ought to be.”

  Lake gave me a look that said I wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing her that playing nice with Caroline was the answer.

  I tried again. “Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe we’ll try to talk to her and she’ll shut us down, but my gut is telling me that she’s used to living on the fringe. She’s used to people being afraid. She might even like it, but deep down, she has to be lonely or angry or bored.”

  If watching Ali assess the trio the day before had taught me one thing, it was that you didn’t need supernatural powers to play off other people’s emotions. Whatever Caroline was hiding beneath that unbothered, uninvolved exterior, I was willing to bet that it ran deep, and given that she’d explicitly threatened the lives of everyone I loved, I wasn’t going to feel guilty about using that.

  Using her.

  It took me a moment to realize that Lake had stopped driving and that both of my friends had gone still beside me. It was several seconds more before I realized that if my alpha status had been noticeable before, I was practically bleeding dominance now.

  Pack was what mattered.  Protecting them.  Destroying threats.

  For a few seconds, I stayed there, in that distinctly alpha frame of mind where nothing and no one else mattered but protecting my pack, and then, like a drowning man coming up for air, I managed to pull myself back. We were just going to talk to Caroline, try to get some answers.

  That was all.

  Devon in full-on charm mode was a terrifying thing. Caroline must have thought so, too, because she avoided him, evaded him, and glared brutal, bloody murder in his direction right up until the moment the three of us sat down at her table at lunch.

  “Mind if we join you?” Devon slung one arm over the back of his chair and stretched his legs out, looking for all the world like some kind of larger-than-life male model smoldering on the side of a city bus.

  “It’s a free country.” Caroline met his eyes with an unnatural, absolute calm. “You can sit wherever you want.”

  Most people’s bodies telegraphed their thoughts in ways that run-of-the-mill humans never noticed, but Caroline was like a blank slate. She wasn’t hiding her fear. She wasn’t deliberately communicating that she wasn’t afraid. She just sort of was.

  There was some chance that this was going to be harder than I’d thought.

  “You left before the real fun
started yesterday.” I kept my voice casual, all too aware that the rest of the student body was watching the four of us like we were their soap opera of choice. “Your family is just a bucket of laughs.”

  Caroline bared her teeth, and it took me a moment to realize that she was smiling with her mouth but not with her eyes. “The others are very friendly. Have you given any more thought to what we talked about on Monday?”

  “I have.” Devon leaned forward in his chair, staying out of her personal space, but bringing the full force of his blue eyes to bear on hers. “I don’t know about the girls, but I’m having some, shall we say, doubts.”

  “Doubts,” Caroline repeated.

  Devon grinned. “Doubts. I could tell you that I’m devilishly handsome, have an impeccable sense of style, and am much, much stronger than I look, but I could also claim to be the reincarnation of Humphrey Bogart.” He lowered his brows slightly and played his here’s looking at you, kid face for all it was worth. “How’s a girl like you supposed to know who or what to believe?”

  For the first time, I saw a chink in Caroline’s otherwise emotionless armor: she raised one eyebrow, ever so slightly, and turned to me. “Is he serious?”

  “Almost never,” Lake replied. “But the boy has a point. It’s one thing to breeze into town and say you can do something. It’s another thing to put your money where your mouth is and prove that it’s true.”

  “Are you suggesting that I’m not the reincarnation of Humphrey Bogart?” Devon gave Lake a disgruntled look. “I’m hurt.”

  “And I’m going to finish my lunch outside.” Caroline slid her chair back and stood up. “I’d give you all a demonstration, but Bryn’s already gotten a hint of my tracking skills, and to show you the rest, I’d have to ask one of you to play the target. I doubt there’d be any volunteers.”

  Devon stood up. “Where do you want me?”

  “Devon.” At times like this, I really wished he had an aversion to his full name so my saying it could carry the same weight as his calling me Bronwyn.

  “What?” Dev said, the very picture of innocence, all six foot five of him.

  I wasn’t buying it. This is how you make friends and influence people, Devon? I asked. By volunteering for target practice?

  He shrugged. What did you expect me to do, Bryn, compliment her shoes? She’s a trained killer who issues ultimatums on behalf of an entire coven of psychics. I don’t think we’d get very far with girl talk, and besides, have you seen her shoes?

  I had to admit that there was a twisted kind of reason to his logic. To get any information out of Caroline, we’d have to talk her into spending more than three minutes at a time in our presence. If challenging her to show off her skills gave us more time to work our way in, it wasn’t the worst idea in the world—except for the part where Devon volunteered to be the target.

  “You want me to demonstrate my skills on you?” The neutral set of Caroline’s features gave way to a small, self-satisfied smile.

  Devon straightened his lapels. “I’d love for you to demonstrate your skills on me.”

  Beside me, Lake groaned. Forget Bogart, she told me. He’s channeling rakish bad boys 101. Don’t know about you, B, but I think I’m gonna be sick.

  I was right there with Lake on that sentiment. I was used to seeing Devon hop from one role to the next, but nine times out of ten, I was the target of his shenanigans, and he reverted to form the second I smiled.

  But Caroline wasn’t smiling anymore. She was smirking, and I was only about 90 percent sure that Devon was playing, because as the four of us walked outside, he didn’t say a single word to me—not out loud and not in my head.

  Dev, I really hope you know what you’re doing, I told him as Caroline jumped the parking lot railing and headed for the forest, the three of us on her heels.

  Bronwyn, dearest, have you ever known me to charge into something blind or without a plan?

  Yes, I replied immediately.

  Devon’s eyes flitted from Caroline’s form to mine. Something that wasn’t your idea?

  It was possible that in the history of our friendship, I’d gotten Devon into more trouble than I’d gotten him out of. It was also possible that if the roles had been reversed, Dev would have had my back, no matter what.

  Fine, I told him. But if you get hurt, I’m going to kill you.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” Caroline asked. For the first time, I could sense something beyond cold detachment in her voice. She wanted Devon to say yes. She wanted to shoot him.

  She wanted to hunt.

  I recognized her desire. Lake recognized it. Dev had to have recognized it, too, but as he went radio silent on the other end of our pack-bond, I took the message loud and clear. I was going to have to trust him to take care of himself on this one, and I was going to have to stop thinking about the reasons this was a bad idea and start thinking about ways to make it work.

  Chances were good that Caroline would assume that Devon would have the same reaction to silver that most werewolves did. Chances were also good that she wouldn’t go for a kill shot. We still had four days left on her mother’s ultimatum, and Caroline didn’t seem like the type to kill on a whim.

  No matter how badly she wanted it, no matter how strong the instinct to hunt down her prey was, she was still human. She wasn’t Rabid. She wasn’t out of control. She was scarily in control, and while I had no doubt she could kill, my gut said that she wouldn’t until she had orders.

  I’d spent enough time skirting Callum’s dictates to recognize when someone else had had following orders pounded into her for years.

  About a hundred yards into the woods, Caroline stopped. In a slow, deliberate movement, she bent down and unsheathed a dagger strapped to her side. She turned and the weapon left her hand before I even realized she was preparing to throw it. It whizzed past Devon’s left ear, slicing through the air and making it sing, a deadly sound that stopped only when the blade cut down a bird, mid-flight, pinning it to a tree half a football field away.

  “I don’t miss. You can either take my word for it, or you can start running.”

  Devon grinned—and then he ran. Caroline didn’t bother tracking his movements. She didn’t move to pull out a weapon. Instead, she turned to me.

  “It’s your call,” she told me. “Do I aim for him?”

  No. Absolutely not. Never.

  “Aim for his hair,” I told her. “He’s been going for a little more volume lately, and if you’re as good as you say you are, you should be able to give him a trim.”

  Caroline nodded. She reached into her jacket and pulled out an arrow, tipped with silver, and a small crossbow, sized to fit perfectly under her jacket without being seen. The sheer number of weapons she had managed to conceal within seemingly ordinary clothes defied the laws of physics.

  Devon was still visible in the distance—well outside the range in which I could have hit him, but not so far gone that she didn’t stand a chance.

  “Move,” she whispered. “Run.”

  Hearing her words, despite the distance, he turned at a ninety-degree angle and began running in a line perpendicular to the one on which Lake, Caroline, and I stood. His pace and motions were erratic and unpredictable.

  He was fast.

  Caroline didn’t lose a moment. She didn’t pause to get a feel for the wind. She didn’t narrow her eyes. She just lifted her arm and turned her head to face me, and without even looking at Devon, she fired.

  This was a mistake.

  I knew that when I saw the look in Caroline’s eyes: certain and satisfied and a little bit sad, like there had never been any question in her mind that she would hit him, and like she wished, on a gut-deep level, that there was.

  “You got him.” Lake tried very hard to keep the admiration out of her voice. “Right where it hurts—in the hair gel.”

  Dev? I didn’t have the benefit of Lake’s eyesight, and I needed to know for myself that he was okay, that Caroline hadn’t mi
ssed her target by a fraction of an inch in the wrong direction.

  I’m fine, Bryn. Not quite as pretty as I was a few seconds ago, but fine.

  All things considered, he was taking it well, but for some reason, Caroline wasn’t.

  I assessed her reaction. “Are you upset that you hit him, or upset that it was only his hair?”

  Caroline’s eyes flashed. “I don’t get upset,” she said. “I don’t lose control.”

  “That the difference between you and a werewolf?” I asked.

  Caroline took a step forward, closing the space between us. “I’m nothing like you.” Even though her tone never changed, the way she spaced her words did, each one issued with the weight of an entire sentence. “Any of you.”

  I caught her gaze and held it. “You hunt. Werewolves hunt. There’s a part of you that likes it. You’re a predator. You may not go furry on the full moon, but you’re not any more human than they are.”

  “Maybe not.” That wasn’t the response I’d expected. “But if there weren’t people like you, the world wouldn’t need people like me. If I’m a monster, you made me that way.”

  “Is this the collective ‘you’ we’re talking about here?” I asked, pushing her that much further, that much harder.

  Caroline’s right hand lashed out, but unlike the woman who’d hit Ali the day before, she didn’t strike me. She brought her fingertips to the edge of the glove on her opposite hand, and she tugged.

  There was a part of me that expected an explosion of power the second her skin hit the crisp winter air, but there was nothing: no sound, no smell, no foreboding sense of things to come.

  And then I saw the scars. They were puckered and white, and they drew my eyes to the skin around them. The skin that was there.

  The skin that wasn’t.

  “Werewolf attack,” she said. “When I was seven.”

  I shook my head. “Unless you’re hiding a lot more scars somewhere, you’re mistaken.”