Trial by Fire

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Whose peripherals are they? I sent the question to Chase, possibilities dogging me at every step. Maybe Callum had broken his hands-off policy and sent me backup. Maybe Shay had gotten tired of waiting for the psychics to do his dirty work and had launched another attack.

  Maybe—

  I heard the truck before I saw it. Chase slammed on the brakes and threw open the door. “Ours.”

  He didn’t bother repeating the question, didn’t say more than that one word, but it was enough to make my entire body relax. Shay wasn’t attacking. Callum hadn’t foreseen some fuzzy future I couldn’t combat without him. The members of our pack who lived at the border of our territory—the ones Chase visited when he was running patrol—had simply come home.

  “All four?” I asked.

  “Jackson, Eric, Phoebe, and Sage.” The way Chase said their names told me something I hadn’t realized before—that the peripherals weren’t peripheral to him. They were the loners, the outsiders, the ones who could keep their distance and survive.

  They were what Chase would have been if it hadn’t been for me.

  “Are they okay?” I asked.

  Chase shrugged. “They’re not bleeding.”

  “But …,” I prompted.

  “But they need their alpha.” Chase waited for me to get in the car, then turned it around and accelerated. “Jackson and Sage haven’t said a word since they got here. Phoebe was still in wolf form when I left.”

  “And Eric?” I asked. He was the oldest of the peripherals, a college freshman who’d been attacked by the Rabid when he was thirteen.

  “Eric said that the Snake Bend Pack is closing in.”

  Our territory was adjacent to three others. One was Callum’s. One was Shay’s. The third was irrelevant—at least for the moment.

  As I got closer and closer to the Wayfarer, it was all I could do to keep from extracting the information from the peripherals’ brains with all the finesse of a person attempting to rip a phone book right down the center. The only thing on the surface of their minds was a mixture of sensations and emotion—confusion, adrenaline, hunt-lust, fear.

  No details.

  No explanations.

  Devon met me at the door to the restaurant. Behind him, I could see Eric, lanky and in need of a shave. Phoebe lay in wolf form in the corner, her head on her paws, and Jackson and Sage both took a step toward me, my presence washing over them like a wave across the sand.

  Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

  I was there. They were safe. We’d get through this.

  The part of me that had been lying dormant since I invited my friends into my head—the alpha part—began to rise inside of me like smoke. Beside me, Dev ran one hand through his freshly trimmed hair and gave me a small smile, one that told me he understood—and reminded me that in order for me to be fully alpha, he’d had to willingly step back into his role as number two.

  “It’s okay,” Dev told me, reading me, the way he always had. “You let us in. You let us protect you. You, Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare, actually admitted that you needed help, and I think we all know that’s a minor miracle in and of itself.” He cleared his throat. “And now it appears as though someone else needs your help.”

  Eric stepped forward. He was tall, though not as tall as Devon, and had not gotten a haircut the entire time I’d known him. I hadn’t seen him in months, but he still smelled like Cedar Ridge: like pine needles and fresh snow, like us.

  Eric bowed his head as he approached me, an instinctive gesture that made me reach out and place my fingers underneath his chin and bring his eyes back up to meet mine.

  “Welcome home,” I said.

  He closed his eyes, breathing in deeply. As loud as it must have been for him here, as disconcerting, I recognized that on some level, it was also a relief.

  “Two days ago, I was coming back from a dorm party,” he said, taking his time with the words. “And I felt something—like the world was turning itself inside out, like everything was wrong. I thought maybe I’d had too much to”—Eric cast his eyes around, looking for Ali or Mitch—“drink, but then I smelled it—sour and sweaty, like vinegar, only stronger.”

  Eric’s upper lip curled as he spoke. Peripheral or not, he still had the same reaction to the scent of a foreign pack. “I tracked it back to the border between our territory and Snake Bend, and there they were.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “At least fifteen men,” Eric replied, his hair falling into his face. “Older than me. A lot older, I’d guess. They claimed not to have crossed over to our side of the border, but there were so many of them, the scent was so thick—I couldn’t tell for sure whether that was a lie.”

  Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if Shay had fifteen full-grown Weres camped out along our northwest border, they were there for a reason.

  Biding their time.

  I looked past Eric, toward the others. Phoebe lived a good hundred miles north of Eric; Jackson and Sage lived farther south.

  “Was it the same for you?” I asked them.

  Phoebe inclined her head, then Shifted out of wolf form, the cracking of her bones providing a sound track to Jackson’s answer. “There were more than fifteen where I am,” he said. “Twenty, at least, spread all up and down the border.”

  Sage just nodded, and for a moment, I saw things through her eyes, saw the men standing a hundred yards away from her, tracking her progression with hungry, lupine eyes.

  I swore. Vehemently. And so loudly that Eric actually blushed.

  Technically, Shay wasn’t breaking Pack Law. He couldn’t invade my territory without explicit permission to do so, but there was nothing to stop him from playing the intimidation card. From lining his troops up along our borders. From letting them make my wolves feel like they weren’t safe.

  “He wants us to know that if we fight him, he’ll win.” Devon’s voice was sharp enough to maim, and there was no question in my mind whose blood he wanted—just like there was no question that someday Dev would go alpha. “He’s playing with you, Bryn.”

  My fingers worked their way into a fist, my fingernails digging into the skin of my palms. “Like he was playing with us when he made a deal with Valerie to have her coven attack us on his behalf? Like he was playing when he let them cut and tear and burn Lucas into ribbons and ash, for no reason other than needing a victim to bait me into a confrontation?”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Devon said, his voice low and comforting, “I’m going to kill him.”

  “Dev—”

  “Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. But five years from now, or ten, or fifty, or however long it takes for me to do it right, Shay is going to die. Maybe it will be long and brutal. Maybe it will be short and sweet. Maybe I’ll hate myself for it, or maybe I’ll enjoy it, but I will kill him for doing this to you. To them.”

  I wondered what it said about my life that I could listen to my best friend calmly discussing dispatching his brother to the great beyond, without having any emotional reaction other than an acknowledgment, deep in my gut, of the fact that Dev could do it, would do it, was probably meant to do it.

  According to Pack Law, if Devon killed Shay, he’d be the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. He’d have to transfer packs first, and Shay would have to accept him, but given Shay’s ego and what Devon meant to me, Shay would probably allow it. For a moment, I almost felt like Callum, looking over the years to come and seeing the likelihood play out, right before my eyes.

  Someday I would lose Devon.

  Someday Dev would kill Shay.

  Right now, however, thinking that far ahead was a luxury I couldn’t afford. The coven had us in their sights, and Jed’s warning that Valerie would repay my visit to her house in kind meant that I needed to be prepared for some sort of attack. Not five days later. Not after the deadline had passed.

  Now.

  Worse, if Shay wanted what I had badly enoug
h to make deals with humans, I wasn’t entirely certain that Senate Law and the threat of Callum’s reprisal would be enough to keep him—and his men—on their side of our invisible line.

  The phone rang, jarring me out of my thoughts and sending my heart pounding. Keely answered it, then turned toward me.

  “It’s for you,” she said, holding the phone out across the bar. “It’s Shay.”

  “I sent you an email.”

  Of all of the things Shay could have opened with, that wasn’t one I’d expected at all.

  “Does this email happen to explain why the entirety of the Snake Bend Pack is playing peekaboo across the border to my territory?”

  Shay laughed, and it was a horrible, genial sound that made me want to put a fist through his trachea and pull out his spine. “I know you’re new at this,” he said, condescension and sly, understated viciousness fighting for control of his every word, “but there is a simple explanation for this kind of thing.”

  He paused, and I pushed back the urge to bang the receiver into the wall over and over again until there was nothing left of either one of them.

  “My pack goes where I go—within my own territory, of course. We’ve been in our current stronghold a long time, and quite frankly, I’ve been considering a move. To decrease the chance of exposure, of course.”

  “Of course,” I replied dully. Shay’s picking up and moving his entire pack to the border between our territories could not possibly bode well for us, but there was no law against it.

  He’s doing this by the book, I thought. I wasn’t sure whether the realization was comforting or not. The Senate wouldn’t be fond of the idea of an alpha aligning himself with a coven, but it wouldn’t give Callum the kind of justification he’d need to take Shay out of the picture without declaring himself the alpha of the entire North American continent. There was nothing in Pack Law to say that Shay couldn’t abuse his own subordinates, nothing to say he couldn’t bat me around like a cat with a mouse. But there was a law that said that Shay couldn’t step a foot on my territory without asking permission, and just like that, I knew why he’d called.

  “Do you actually think I’m going to agree to let you and the little foot soldiers you’ve got peppered up and down my border cross over into Cedar Ridge territory?”

  He had to be actually, clinically insane.

  “Of course not,” Shay replied smoothly. “If you read the email I sent, you’ll see that I only requested passage for myself and one guard to assess the situation with the Snake Bend wolf you’re currently holding at your compound.”

  He made it sound like I was keeping Lucas hostage.

  “I think you’ll find that the other alphas consider my request to be quite reasonable. A few of them may have even chimed in to say as much. You’ve had the boy for days. Whatever justice you were going to impart on the trespassing matter should have been carried out immediately. Indecision,” he said, savoring the word, “is a sign of weakness.”

  “Cut the crap, Shay,” I said, only I didn’t use the word crap, and I didn’t call him Shay. There were so many other names that seemed more appropriate. “You don’t want Lucas.”

  I could practically hear him smiling on the other end of the line. “Do you?”

  He’d backed me into a corner, and now he was dangling a carrot just out of reach. I recognized the tactic. There was only one person at the top of a werewolf pack—good cop, bad cop all rolled into one.

  “Are you saying you’d consider cutting ties with Lucas?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking the question. Before I’d gotten bogged down in psychics and conspiracies, getting Shay to relinquish his claim on Lucas had been the goal. I hadn’t been within a hundred yards of Lucas for almost forty-eight hours, but I could still see him kneeling on that bed, baring his scars.

  I could hear him telling me that if I couldn’t help him, he wanted to die.

  “I’m willing to entertain the idea,” Shay replied, “if you’ll give me a little something in return.”

  “I’m not giving you any of my wolves.”

  “Pity,” Shay said. “I do think the boy actually believed you could save him, that you cared.”

  I didn’t rise to the bait, but knowing he was doing it on purpose didn’t take the sting out of his words. I wanted to help Lucas, and I couldn’t. If a loophole existed, I hadn’t found it.

  I’d lost.

  “I also hear you’ve got yourself into a sticky situation with a coven of psychics.” Shay reverted back to bad-cop form. “If you could be persuaded to part with one or two of your little ones, I might be able to help you with that, too.”

  “The answer is no.”

  “No, you won’t consider my offer, or no, you really don’t care about the safety and longevity of your pack?”

  I hated Shay—hated him more than I’d thought I could hate anyone.

  “I will not, under any circumstances, give you any of my wolves.” My voice echoed with more than my sixteen years of experience, and I wondered if this was what it felt like to issue a decree as an alpha, the kind of promise I couldn’t have broken even if I’d wanted to.

  “Well, if you’re not open to the idea of a trade, perhaps you’d prefer a wager?”

  I would have preferred Shay be abducted by aliens and vaporized at the molecular level—but if Shay was telling the truth, if the other alphas were backing his request for entry into my territory, I couldn’t imagine that they’d react well to my holding Lucas much longer.

  Across the room, Chase met my eyes, and I didn’t need the pack-bond to know what he was thinking.

  Sometimes, at the end of the day, you had to take care of yourself.

  “No wager?” Shay said, and I tore my eyes away from Chase’s. “In that case, bring Lucas to the border—unless you’d prefer to give me your permission to come collect him myself. There’s a thing or two I’d like to say to the boy, and I believe the psychics want a word as well.”

  While Shay blathered on, I used the bond to ask Devon to check my email. Dev confirmed everything Shay had told me and informed me that in the time that Shay and I had been talking, another alpha had replied, asking that I either permit Shay access to my territory or send Lucas back to Shay.

  That might not have sucker punched me the way it did but for the fact that the alpha was Callum.

  Time was running out. I had to make a decision, but the only thing I could think about was Callum, teaching me how to throw a knife. Callum, running a hand over my hair. Callum, trading away a portion of his territory to save Marcus, who hadn’t deserved it.

  I knew then that I couldn’t do the safe thing. I couldn’t hang Lucas out to dry, not if there was a chance—even a small one—that I could save him without endangering the rest of my pack.

  I knew what Callum would do, and I had to try.

  “Shay, you, and only you, have permission to come into my territory for exactly three hours.” The moment the words were out of my mouth, I could feel Devon on the other side of the bond, sending an email to the other alphas that said the same thing.

  The email was time-stamped. The clock was ticking.

  “Am I coming to retrieve my wolf, or am I coming to play you for him?”

  I wasn’t sure of the answer to that question, so I responded by hanging up the phone. If Shay was as close to the border as he’d claimed, he’d be here in a little over an hour, and I needed time to assess the situation.

  To decide.

  What do you expect me to do? I knew things were dire when I started having pretend conversations with Callum in my head. You sent that email. I did what you wanted me to do, what you would have done. What now?

  There was no answer—not from pretend Callum, and not from anyone else. As I sat there, the countdown already under way, I was sure of only one thing.

  If Shay and I wagered anything—and that was a big if—it would be on my terms. Not his.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I STOOD WITH MY BACK AGAINST THE
POOL TABLE, one ankle crossed in front of the other, waiting. The restaurant was eerily quiet, and as I felt Shay drawing nearer, twin urges—one to shudder and one to growl—fought for dominance in my mind. All around me, my backup seemed to be fighting the same battle, but they faded into the woodwork, letting me take the lead.

  Before we could fight as a team, I had to meet Shay one-on-one, alpha to alpha.

  Foreign. Wolf.

  Threat.

  I was familiar enough with Shay’s type to know that he wanted me to feel him coming. He wanted me to feel his presence washing over my body like thick, syrupy oil. He wanted me to shudder, to growl, to make one wrong move after another after another.

  Shay wanted the advantage. Considering that we were on my land, surrounded by my wolves, that wasn’t going to happen. Shay could puff up his chest and leak pheromones until the cows came home, and I still wasn’t going to respond like he was a threat—even though all my instincts were telling me that he was. I wouldn’t let him get a rise out of me, wouldn’t let him see me scared. No shuddering. No growling. As the door to the Wayfarer opened, I didn’t bat an eye. I didn’t straighten to my full height. I just stayed there, leaning against the pool table, using the knife in my right hand to clean the fingernails on my left.

  “You look well.”

  Judging by Shay’s words, you would have thought the two of us were old friends, but I suspected that he meant them more as a complaint than anything else. For a fragile little human lotus blossom, I had an annoying habit of coming out of things unscathed. Shay probably would have preferred to see me in pieces.

  Glancing down at my fingernails, I took my time responding to his greeting. “It took you an hour and fifteen minutes to get here. Presumably, it will take you an hour and fifteen minutes to go back where you came from, which means that the permission I granted you to be here expires in half an hour.”

  I wasn’t going to let him get a rise out of me, but I didn’t have to sit there and exchange niceties, either.

  “Very well,” Shay replied, strolling through the room like he owned the place. “This shouldn’t take long.”