Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “I may not have gotten into your dreams this morning, kiddo, but I’ve been there before. You flashed back to a memory of the werewolf who raised you, and the marks he left on your body were suddenly larger than life. You ran with your pack, and then you dreamed about a female wolf—a wolf that forever hovers just out of reach. If I recall correctly, you’ve even dreamed that you’re hollow inside. I’m not Freud, but I’d say that has some pretty disturbing implications, wouldn’t you?”

  Apparently, keeping Archer out of my head was no protection against more mundane mind games. Even though I knew he was trying to get to me, I couldn’t help staring at the image on the wall and wondering if he was right.

  “Admit it, little Bryn—they’ve done a real number on you. Not a werewolf, barely human. They took you and they raised you and they used you. You’re just a kid, and you never even had a chance.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure how to reply. Blow me and screw you both seemed like strong contenders, but the peanut gallery in my head appeared to be favoring castration.

  To his credit, Archer seemed to sense that it was time to retreat. “Breakfast’s downstairs in five, wolf girl.”

  This time, I couldn’t help hearing the words wolf girl a little differently, but I pushed the thought out of my head and concentrated on the business at hand. If Archer was Valerie’s version of a wake-up call, it was probably safe to assume that breakfast was a thing to beware.

  “Good morning.” Valerie smiled. Needle-sharp pinpricks bombarded the base of my skull—but this time, Valerie’s attempt to manipulate my emotions wasn’t my biggest problem.

  Gathered around the kitchen table were the handful of psychics I’d already met and several I hadn’t. The old woman whose knack allowed her to influence animals was feeding part of her muffin to a snake. A pair of college-aged girls were engaged in some kind of staring contest, their eyes bloodshot and their irises ink black.

  “Valerie, could I have a word with you? Alone?” I was tired of skirting the issue, tired of pretending that I’d come here to join the coven when both of us knew I’d come here to test my mettle against hers.

  Valerie’s smile broadened, cutting through the smattering of wrinkles near the edges of her lips. Her eyes zeroed in on mine, and I felt a stab of loneliness, confusion, rage—before the sound of snapping teeth and a guttural growl pushed her back out.

  Sooner or later, she’d get tired of testing me, tired of losing. I needed to make my move before that happened.

  “What would you like to talk about?” Valerie asked, moving around the kitchen table to pour herself some tea.

  “Shay.”

  Her stride broke, just for a moment, and I knew I’d hit my target.

  “Whatever you have to say to me you can say in front of everyone. We don’t have secrets here, Bryn.” Her tone sounded genuine, but her eyes were steely, merciless, hard. There were six other people at the dining room table and more coming into the room the longer I stood there, and in unison, their pupils surged.

  The old woman whispered something, and her snake began writhing its way slowly toward me. The girls in the staring contest suddenly turned those fathomless black eyes on me.

  “Was there something you wanted to say, Bryn?” Valerie sipped her tea.

  There was a lot I wanted to say to her—once I managed to get her away from her little army of marionettes.

  “Go ahead, Bryn. Say it.”

  There were too many eyes on me, too much power in this room. I felt trapped, and things began to go red around the edges. The instinct crept up on me, dark and sure, and for a second, it was more of a presence in my mind than Devon, Lake, or Chase.

  Trapped. Trapped. Need to escape. Survi—

  “Easy there.” A strange hand clapped me on the shoulder, and without thinking, I grabbed the hand and the attached arm and moved to flip the owner onto the kitchen floor. To my surprise, the hand’s owner ducked out of my grasp and took a step back, palms held up, facing me. “I come in peace.”

  His delivery of that line sounded so much like Devon that I almost smiled, and that cleared my mind enough that I was able to really look at him. My opponent was much older than I’d expected: sixty-five if he was a day, and though his eyes sparkled, I could see each one of those years literally carved into his skin.

  He had more scars than anyone I’d ever seen.

  “I’m never quite myself before my morning walk,” he told me. “I’m sensing maybe you’re not much of a morning person, either. Care to join me?”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say no, but annoyance flashed across Valerie’s face the moment the man extended the invitation, and that made me reconsider.

  “Maybe that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s not.” Caroline stepped out from the shadows and made her presence known. I wasn’t the only one who turned to track her progression into the room. In fact, the only two people who didn’t react that way were Valerie, whose eyes were locked on mine, and the old man, whose weathered face softened the moment Caroline appeared.

  “Rule nineteen, Caro,” he said, his voice gruff. “And for that matter, twelve.”

  I got the feeling that unlike the facetious “Bryn Rules” my friends like to reference, Caroline and the old man really did have a numbered list.

  “Rule seven,” the girl in question countered.

  The man rolled his eyes. “Fifty-three.”

  That, apparently, was something Caroline couldn’t argue with, and my companion turned his attention back to Caroline’s mother. “Don’t worry, Val,” he said, brown eyes shining against white-scarred skin. “I’ll bring our little visitor back. Scout’s honor.”

  With those words, he put his hand on my shoulder again and guided me to the door. This time, I didn’t resist—not because of the way he’d handled Valerie and Caroline, but because the moment he touched me, I felt a familiar sensation, like I knew him.

  Like we were the same.

  He’s Resilient, Chase whispered from his place in my mind. Like you. Like me.

  Like us.

  I tried to remember what Valerie had told me the day before, but all I could remember was the man’s name—Jed.

  The two of us walked in silence, each taking the other’s measure. Once we were out of earshot of the house, Jed spoke. “Came close to flashing out in there, didn’t you?”

  “Flashing out?”

  He strung his thumbs through his belt loops and kept walking. “It’s what happens when people like us get backed into a corner. Smart girl like you must realize that woman was backing you into one on purpose.”

  I knew other Resilients. The majority of our pack was Resilient. But this was the first time I’d met another human whose gift was being scrappy and stubborn and coming out unscathed when other people would be dead.

  “I wasn’t going to lose it,” I told him.

  The man grunted.

  “I’m better at keeping my head than people give me credit for.”

  He grunted again. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you, but she was pushing the others, and if you’d flashed out, they would have attacked.”

  “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 figur
e 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 answ
er 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.