Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Except, a tiny voice in my head reminded me, when it wasn’t.

  Still, I couldn’t believe, even for a second, that he ever would have treated Lake like a commodity. That he ever would have let anyone harm her, no matter what they offered him in return.

  “What if the Rabid isn’t trading the kids he has now?” Devon asked, pacing the room with long, angry strides. “There’re two things every dominant wolf wants: territory and a pack.”

  Those were the things that had led Devon’s brother to leave Callum’s pack and transfer into another, just so he could have the opportunity to challenge and kill that pack’s alpha the moment he was accepted as a transfer. The need for territory and for a pack was something that Devon understood, more than he’d ever let on to me before now.

  “Dev’s right,” Chase said, recognizing the instinct, his voice taking on a fluid, reflective tone that told me this conversation was bringing him closer and closer to the edge of a Shift. “Why would Prancer give up any of his wolves when he could … just … make … more.”

  I felt Chase’s control begin to slip and reached out to him, grabbing his lapels with my fists and his mind with mine.

  Stay with me, Chase. Stay human.

  I had no idea what he’d do in wolf form in a room this small. The last time he’d been this upset, the need to hunt had been overpowering.

  Stay with me, I said, repeating the words in a soothing tone halfway between a lullaby and a command. Stay. Human.

  I could feel his wolf snarling beneath the surface, and for a moment, I thought I’d lost him, but as I spread my hands flat against Chase’s chest, willing him to calm, his wolf settled, and Chase nodded.

  Bryn.

  Chase.

  Bryn.

  For a split second, I wondered what the two of us would be doing if we were the only ones in this room. Then I forced myself to step back as I realized that Devon and Lake had been seconds away from stepping between Chase and me, willing to protect me at all costs.

  The last thing we needed right now was to fight amongst ourselves. The stakes to killing this Rabid had just shot up, because even more so than I’d realized before, if we didn’t kill him, future attacks were a foregone conclusion. Lots of them, probably. New werewolves, made to order.

  More kids who lost everything to the Big Bad Wolf.

  Why not adults? Was that it? Was that the whole trick to making new wolves? Children could survive, adults couldn’t?

  I pushed back the ponderings. It couldn’t be that simple, or the alphas would have already figured it out. And besides, even if we assumed that the Rabid could change adults, from the alphas’ perspective, younger was probably better. Inter-pack dominance, positioning yourself for power amongst the other alphas—the entire process was a long game. To people who lived practically forever, eighteen years wasn’t so long to wait for someone to mature, and the earlier a pack got ahold of someone, the more influence they had.

  Look at me.

  And that brought me back to the fact that I had every reason to believe that what the Rabid had done to Chase was what he’d had planned for me, when I was a kid. On some level, I’d always known it wasn’t a random attack and that the monster had come looking for me. That my parents had just been the ones standing in his way.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are.…

  But why me? Why any of us?

  I brought my eyes to Chase’s and in them, I saw myself. Saw that from the moment I’d first heard his tortured howl, my gut had been telling me that we were the same. I looked at him, and I saw the red haze of his dreams and of mine. Remembered the fight-or-flight instinct, a wild, feral, merciless, uncompromising need to survive that I’d felt in his mind and in my own.

  The alphas had asked Chase how he was attacked. They’d wanted to know, because they’d wondered if it would tell them something more than any previous investigations had. The Rabid had been hunting for more than a decade. During that time, at least some of the alphas must have known.

  They must have watched him and wondered how he made the impossible flicker to life.

  I wasn’t aware of the moment that my thoughts went from silent to verbal, but the others had no problem picking up on the things that had gone unspoken, their minds and their thoughts interwoven with mine. “Maybe the Rabid does something a little different each time,” I said, a hot feeling, like steam, seeping over my body in a way that wasn’t pleasant in the least. “Lake and I were looking for patterns earlier, but what if there is no pattern, other than the fact that every one of Wilson’s wolves should have died? What if the secret isn’t about the attack at all?”

  No magic sequence. No recipe for how to ravage a body just right.

  “What if it’s about the victim?”

  Chase and I were the same.

  We did whatever it took to get out of a situation alive and intact. If you blocked us into a corner, we lost it. If you beat us down, eventually, we popped back up. We fought, and we held on, and at the end of the day, we lived.

  I’d grown up in a werewolf pack where everyone was stronger than I was and yet, until that day with Sora, I’d never really gotten hurt. With training, there were times when I could get lucky enough to get a few good blows in on a full-grown Were. When the Big Bad Wolf had come knocking at my parents’ door, I’d known to run and hide. When you broke my ribs, I didn’t stay down for long. When I refused to fight, when I resisted the urge to let everything go red and let my inner fury out, I passed out for three days.

  When the stakes were high and you tried to force your dominance on me, I rewired the entire hierarchy of the pack.

  It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t human, and when I’d asked Callum about it, he’d told me that my bond with the Stone River Pack hadn’t changed me, that I was exactly what I’d always been.

  I was a person who had the potential to survive a full-blown werewolf attack.

  I was scrappy as hell.

  “Don’t you guys get it?” I said, the words pouring out of my mouth, one after another after another. “Chase and I, we’re the same. We’re not normal. We’re …”

  I refused to use the word scrappy out loud and rapidly searched for a suitable replacement.

  “We’re resilient. Our brains must just be wired differently than everyone else’s, because we don’t respond to threats the way normal people do. Something happens to us, and we fight. Or flight—fly, whatever. The point is, when the situation is bad, when things are really dicey, Chase and I pull through. And so did the kids in Wilson’s cabin. They got bit, and they survived.”

  I couldn’t explain how exactly the answer had come to me, or why I believed it so strongly when there were probably other solutions to be found. But I did believe it, and because I did, the three of them did, too.

  “It’s not about how you attack them,” Lake said, lifting the thought from my mind. “It’s about who you attack. It makes sense—if only one in ten thousand people has the ability to survive, and you attack randomly, then only one in ten thousand major attacks will lead to a Change.”

  “And since Were attacks on human aren’t common …”

  “It never happens.”

  I felt Chase again, felt his wolf stirring under the surface of his skin, but this time, he pushed the instinct down on his own, replacing it with icy fury.

  “If you know who to attack,” he said softly, “if you can figure out what allows someone to survive and selectively attack those people …”

  Hunt down those people like animals. Like prey. I brought one hand to the side of Chase’s face, needing to touch him, needing him to know that I understood.

  “If you know who to attack,” I said, finishing his thought, feeling for a moment like we were the only two people in the room, “then making new werewolves really isn’t that hard.”

  I wondered how the Rabid was finding them, the people like us. I didn’t have to wonder what alphas like Shay would do if they found out how to tra
ck our kind, too.

  That couldn’t happen.

  The Rabid had to die, and the secret had to die with him. Then, and only then, would things go back to normal. Weres would stop attacking humans, because the humans they attacked wouldn’t survive, and the risk of exposure wasn’t worth it for one new werewolf every couple of hundred years.

  The Rabid had to die. It was a variation of the same single-minded thought that had driven me for months.

  “We need a plan.” For someone who’d once made a practice of rushing into things blind, I was beginning to feel like a broken record with those four little words. Unfortunately, this time, I didn’t have a plan, so I was forced to take the situation apart, piece by piece.

  Goal: kill the Rabid.

  Problem: a sneak attack at the cabin was out, because our target had at least a dozen not-so-human shields. If we fought Wilson at the cabin, we’d have to fight his little homemade pack, too.

  Problem: we couldn’t fight the kids. Not Madison. Not the others. Not when they were victims in all of this, too.

  “We’ll either have to catch the Rabid when he leaves the cabin, or we’ll have to lure the kids away from him.” Those were the only two options I could see, and I wasn’t fond of either of them.

  “Problem,” Lake said out loud. “If we lure the kids away to attack the Rabid, we’ll have to split up.”

  Needless to say, after the last time, none of them were fond of that idea.

  “Problem.” Chase ran one hand up his arm as he spoke. I doubted he even noticed he was doing it. “We can’t just wait for Prancer to leave his house. We don’t have time.”

  I looked down at my watch, as if there was even the slightest chance that it would tell me how long we had before Ali and Mitch figured out where Lake and I had gone, or how long it would take Callum to respond to the psychic beacon that had gone up the second I’d rewired Devon’s and Lake’s bonds. For that matter …

  “Problem,” I said. “If the Senate is making the Rabid a deal, they’ll probably come here to do it in person.” That was the way it was with werewolf bargains. Like my permissions, the alphas’ deal with the devil would require a certain amount of ceremony.

  “Okay, so we can’t just wait it out and hope the Rabid leaves his cabin sometime soon, and we can’t risk splitting up to lead his harem on a merry little chase.…”

  The fact that Lake had referred to the wolves as a “harem” did not escape my attention, but I wasn’t about to touch that issue—or the vibes I was getting from the bond between us—with a twenty-foot pole.

  “We’ll have to lure him out,” I said instead. Chase leaned toward me, the way a plant turns toward the sun. “If we can’t go to him, we’ll have to bring him to us.”

  Now.

  “Hmmmmm,” Devon said. “If I was a psychotic werewolf who had a fetish for turning small, defenseless children into my own personal lapdogs, what would it take to get me to leave my happy little family to come into town?”

  In the back of my mind, an answer began to surface, but before I could verbalize my half-formed plan, Lake and Devon both started to glare at me.

  I turned to Chase, looking for backup. His face was set, his expression stony. I laced my fingers through his and looked him straight in the eye, folding myself into his mind, absorbing his objections and showing him my need to do this.

  “We’re not using you as bait,” Lake said, pulling me reluctantly back into my own body. “And don’t you argue with me, Bryn, because if this guy didn’t already have his own little party going on in the woods, you would never agree to let me lure him into town by letting him know there was a female Were there.”

  She was right, but we also didn’t have any other choices. The Rabid didn’t need females. He didn’t want them. But he was in the business of making werewolves and apparently had a way of identifying the kind of people who could survive the Change. People like me. Resilients.

  Naming the knack and those who had it satisfied me, but it did nothing to distract me from the fact that if our Rabid was a psycho, the fact that the Resilient in question was the one who’d gotten away might be more enticing than any of us knew.

  “He has a girl out there,” I said. “About our age. Her name is Madison, and she died when she was six years old. Not really, but that’s what her family thinks, and that’s when her life ended. She was six; I was four. As far as we know, mine was the only attack that was ever interrupted by other wolves. Some of the Rabid’s other victims might have ended up dead, and Callum’s pack found Chase after the fact, but I’m the only one who got away absolutely unscathed. He never even got the chance to attack me, and he really, really wanted to.”

  No sense hiding from the Big Bad Wolf. I’ll always find you in the end.

  But he hadn’t found me. Not in time. I knew Weres well enough to know that predators didn’t enjoy giving up their prey. If Callum hadn’t taken me into his pack, the Rabid probably would have come for me again. And again. And again, until he succeeded.

  I said as much out loud, and my logic hung in the air.

  Who better to play bait than the one who got away?

  “I got away, too,” Chase said, bringing our joined hands to my stomach, like all of his problems could be solved by holding me tighter. “First when he attacked me, and later when we severed the hold he had on my mind.”

  Chase was right. The Rabid would want him. Want to hurt him. Want to make him pay. An acidic, burning feeling flared inside of me at the idea of letting Chase play bait.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “God, Bryn! You are such a hypocrite. At least Chase isn’t human! At least he can protect himself. If this guy gets ahold of you—”

  “Don’t throw my species in my face,” I said, facing Lake down. “How would you feel if your dad locked you up in a glass room somewhere because you were female, and male werewolves were always going to be bigger and physically stronger than you were? Maybe this Rabid would come if Chase was the bait, but he’d definitely come expecting a lot more of a fight than he would from little old human me.”

  Support for my position came from the most unlikely ally. “Bryn’s right,” Devon said, his voice low and contemplative in a way that made me think his desire to Shift was strong but controlled. “Believe me when I say that I wish that she wasn’t, but girlie knows her business on this one. This guy is sick, and if he thinks Bryn is waiting for him in town with a little bow around her neck, he’s not going to be able to resist. Not even if he suspects it is a trap.”

  Chase growled, and the sound seemed to jump from his throat to Lake’s. Neither one of them were happy with this plan, and the electricity in the air told me that we were about to be having a debate of a different kind. Once one of them Shifted, they all would, and then I’d be arguing with their wolves instead of people, and having seen the way Chase’s wolf thought of me, I doubted that would go down in favor of my plan.

  Protect.

  Protect.

  Protect.

  “Fine, I get it. You guys want to protect me. But what about the kids out there who Wilson hasn’t attacked yet? Who would we rather set him up against—me or them? Because if we don’t move quickly enough, if someone gets here and stops us, that’s what’s going to happen. At least I can fight back.”

  Protect.

  Protect.

  Protect.

  None of them were convinced—not even Devon, who’d spoken up on my behalf.

  “I can fight back,” I said again, “and you guys can cover me. Lake brought a freaking munitions store with her. We’ve got every weapon imaginable. You guys stay just out of range, and as soon as he shows, you descend, and we pump him full of so much sterling that he’s puking silver.”

  If they wanted to protect me, they could. They could be my backup; once we got Wilson into town, I’d even step back and leave the kill to someone else. But first, we had to get him into town, and this was our best chance to do it.

  “How’s he going
to know you’re there?” Lake asked finally. “We can’t exactly take out an ad.”

  I glanced at Chase and thought of the way this Rabid had tracked us both, set us up, and moved in for the not-quite kill.

  “How did he track us in the first place?” I asked, throwing out the rhetorical question. “Scent, genotype, Craigslist—I don’t care. Maybe he just has a knack for finding Resilients. And even if he doesn’t, at least one of those kids saw me in the woods. This guy’s a hunter, and I’d be very surprised if he didn’t already have my scent. He’ll come. But if we want to make doubly sure, I’d lay money on someone in town having his number.” As segregated as Ark Valley was, it still abided by the natural laws of small towns. Everyone had everyone’s phone number, if they had a phone. “I’ll go to the restaurant or the hardware store or wherever and ask whoever’s in charge to give Wilson a call, something along the lines of ‘There’s a girl here asking for you. She says her name is Bronwyn.’ ”

  “That’ll do it,” Dev said. “Crankypants can’t possibly know that many Bronwyns.”

  None of them were happy with the idea, but at this point, we didn’t have any other options. It hurt my ego to admit it, but I could do more to hurt the Rabid as bait than I ever would as a hunter. As long as he ended up dead, that was something I could live with. And as I looked at my friends and at Chase, one by one, they gave me their silent consent, even though I knew that if something happened to me and victory came at too high a cost, none of them could live with it.

  “Look at the bright side, guys. He’s not going to kill me. Worse comes to worst, he’ll attack me, and I’ll Change.” The words hung in the air, but no one was comforted by my bravado. Not even me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “CAN I GET YOU ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE?”

  My cup was still three-quarters full, and the waitress hadn’t bothered to bring the pot back with her, so I recognized a fact-finding mission when I saw one. Towns like Ark Valley and Alpine Creek didn’t get many visitors, and I was well acquainted with the expression in the waitress’s eyes: a particular mix of boredom, curiosity, and suspicion. She hadn’t hesitated when I’d asked her to call “Mr. Wilson,” immediately replying “The one who lives in the woods?” and letting loose with a sound somewhere between a hmmm and a harrumph, I couldn’t tell which.