Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  And somewhere along the way, Shifting stopped being the hokey-pokey.

  Light explodes inside my head. It hurts—everything hurts—agony, sweet—and then finally, finally I’m Her.

  The first moment after the Shift was sensory overload. My ears flicked forward, and my nose twitched. I could smell everything, smell it so strongly that scents leapt to life as tastes on my tongue. I felt like I could inhale the world and swallow it whole.

  I wanted it all.

  For the first time in days, I wasn’t thinking about putting a bullet through someone’s beer, just to teach him some manners. I wasn’t thinking about the way peripherals from other packs looked at me like I was some kind of mixture between a Playboy Bunny and the Holy Grail.

  My thoughts were simple, pure. I felt them: a pang in my stomach, adrenaline rushing into my veins, dirt—silky and soft—beneath the pads of my feet. I could smell a deer in the distance, and I knew if I could catch it, it was mine.

  Unable to hold myself back any longer, I charged after the smell, the taste, the possibility, and somewhere in the recesses of my mind, my human half whispered three little words.

  Happy birthday, Lake.

  Nothing said sweet sixteen like a hunt.

  Coming out of wolf form hurt as much as Shifting had in the first place, and there was a part of me that welcomed the pain.

  Feel it. Feel it. Feel it.

  At least I was feeling something, other than sorry for myself. At least I still could. At least when I was hurting, I couldn’t ache.

  For several seconds after the Change was complete, I lay there, naked and trembling, my body out of sync with my mind. As a Were, I’d gotten real used to being in the altogether, so I didn’t even think about the lack of clothing until I heard a twig snap somewhere in the distance.

  It probably says something fairly revealing about my character that in that moment—stark naked, drenched in sweat—my first thought wasn’t to reach for my pants.

  I reached for my shotgun. As a general rule, it’s hard to feel naked when you’re packing heat.

  My eyes scanned the perimeter of the forest for signs of movement, and I ran one hand along the barrel of the gun. Some girls had dolls. Some girls had teddy bears. I had a Remington 870 shotgun named Matilda and had since I was twelve.

  There.

  My eyes landed on the outline of a form at the edge of the forest. Human. Male. I could have run. Even in this form, I was fast enough that a human wouldn’t have stood a prayer of a chance of keeping up—but this was our forest, our land, and fresh off a Shift, defending my territory mattered more than the fact that I was standing there in my birthday suit.

  Literally.

  The interloper and I were separated by maybe thirty yards, maybe less. The forest was dense, and I couldn’t make out the specifics of his face, but there was something familiar about the way he stood. A boy from school, maybe, come to gawk at the girls in the woods?

  It wouldn’t have been the first time, but there was something inside of me that said no, something that pushed me forward, even though I knew it was a bad idea. I didn’t think this boy had seen me Shift, but I didn’t know. The last thing I should have been doing was sauntering toward him, shotgun at the ready, buck naked with something to prove.

  It’s my party, I thought. If I wanted to put the fear of Jesus and psychotic blonde chicks into a Peeping Tom, I figured that was my prerogative.

  “You lost?” I called out. “Or just perverted?”

  The boy didn’t move. I narrowed my eyes and began to close in on him—soon enough, I could tell that his skin was freckled and his honey blond hair was the exact same shade as mine. He stared at me, and I returned the favor, hackles rising on the back of my neck and my upper lip threatening a snarl.

  Look away, I thought fiercely, willing him to give. With each step I took, it bothered me more that he didn’t. This human was trespassing on our land, he’d made me feel naked, and now he was looking at me.

  At my face.

  I was naked, and he was looking at my face.

  I lifted the gun, letting my finger dance around the trigger. I wouldn’t pull it, but the boy in my sights didn’t know that. Let him call my bluff.

  Call it Russian roulette or playing chicken—it just wasn’t in me to turn tail and run. Still, there was a part of me that couldn’t help thinking about the kids in our pack, and the thought triggered an unfamiliar hesitation in my stride. I’d gotten so used to living on the periphery of things growing up—it was easy to forget I was at the center of something bigger now.

  That if this boy had seen me Shift, it wasn’t just my life—or my dad’s—I was risking.

  Lake?

  I heard Bryn’s voice in my head. She was our new pack’s alpha—and human: a living, breathing contradiction with an attitude at least as big as mine. She was also the closest thing I had to family, next to my dad.

  Next to Griff.

  I’m fine, I told her softly. Just looking for a minute of peace and quiet. You mind?

  Another alpha probably would have taken umbrage at the not-so-subtle hint, but Bryn’s only reaction was snorting and pulling back from our pack-bond, allowing me my own mind, my own thoughts, my own memories—

  No. I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to think about any of it. I wanted to Shift again, to run for the mountains and not turn back until dawn, but I couldn’t, not without making my dad and Bryn and the rest of the pack wonder if there was something wrong.

  There was nothing wrong.

  I was almost to the edge of the forest now, but no matter how close I got to the human boy, he didn’t move, and the features on his face didn’t get any clearer. I was looking straight at him, but I couldn’t see him. He was my age, or close to it. Honey blond hair, freckled skin, and—and—and …

  The eyes.

  His form flickered, like static on a television, and I realized that the entire time I’d been watching him, he’d never moved.

  Never blinked.

  Never breathed.

  He had no smell.

  The hair. The eyes. That solemn smile.

  For a split second, the boy’s features were clear and so familiar that I couldn’t see anything else. Didn’t want to see anything else.

  Griffin.

  I tried to say his name out loud, but couldn’t, and a second later, the boy with my dead brother’s eyes was gone.

  “Hey, birthday girl. You’ll never guess what I got you.” Devon gave me a smile that was probably supposed to be charming, and if I’d been anyone else, I probably would have been charmed. Luckily, I was immune—and then some.

  “I’m not guessing,” I told him, my voice flat. “And if the answer involves singing, Shakespeare, or show tunes, I don’t want to know.”

  Devon fancied himself a drama geek. I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Well,” he huffed, wiggling his eyebrows derisively. “Someone’s a little cranky.”

  Someone had seen an apparition of her dead brother in the forest. Someone really wasn’t feeling all that chatty.

  “Hey.” Dev reached out and brushed his hand against the side of my face. I wanted to pull back, but the wolf inside wouldn’t let me. Being Pack meant knowing that no matter what, you were never alone. Not even when you wanted to be.

  “You okay?” Devon asked quietly, cupping my face and angling it toward his.

  I nodded—the closest I could come to telling a lie. Dev had enough self-preservation not to call me on it. He was a purebred werewolf: larger, stronger, and more protective than most. He also had the distinction of being Bryn’s best friend—come to think of it, her only friend, other than me. The three of us had history, and I knew that if I said even a single word to him about what I’d seen in the forest, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  I didn’t want to talk about Griffin.

  I never talked about Griffin.

  And here it was, my birthday—our birthday—and I was seeing him, not the way he
’d looked when we were kids, but the way he would have looked if the two of us had never gone swimming that day, if we hadn’t been so far out from the shore, if it hadn’t started raining quite so hard.

  The way he would have looked if he’d grown up.

  I’m losing it.

  “I’m fine,” I said tersely, not caring whether Devon smelled the lie or not. “And I mean it about the show tunes. I hear so much as one word of that stupid Spring Awakening song, and things are gonna get ugly.”

  Devon moved his hand from my face to the top of my head, tousling my hair. “Things are already ugly,” he said, peering down at me. “Hideous, really.”

  Dev’s ability to disparage my looks was one of his finer characteristics—a huge step up from the heady stares and hungry eyes I was used to receiving from males of our kind. Female werewolves were rare, and tall, blonde, leggy ones were more or less an endangered species. By my last count, we numbered one.

  Me.

  “Could you maybe put a bag over your head or something?” Devon asked, his voice pitched low and serious. “There are children present.”

  “Ha-ha,” I replied. “Very funny.” But even as I spoke, I couldn’t keep my eyes from flickering over to the children in question.

  For once, the youngest members of our pack were both in human form, and baby Katie appeared to be gnawing on baby Alexander’s leg. My breath caught in my throat just looking at them, and I was broadsided with the slew of emotions I’d been trying to bury.

  Twins.

  Females of our kind survived the womb only if we were half of a pair. You could look at Katie and know immediately that there was an Alex. My own twin’s absence was like a scar—one I’d carry across my face for the rest of my unnaturally long life.

  I need to get out of here. I need to do something.

  I needed to run.

  “You look like you’re planning something,” Devon observed, unperturbed. “Should I mayhaps inform Bryn that you will be needing her assistance?”

  For the longest time, it had been me and Bryn, and Devon and Bryn. She was the only thing we had in common, and a year ago, she would have been the person I went to the second I started itching to do something. But everything was different now. Bryn was different.

  She was alpha.

  “I think I can handle this one on my own,” I said.

  This time, when Devon smelled the lie, he called me on it. “Lake, my dearest, darling gun-toting menace to society, that’s simply not true.” Dev took a step closer and lowered his voice. In a room full of werewolves, we really had to whisper to keep from being overheard. “Whatever it is, you don’t think you can handle it by yourself, and given what you can handle, I find that a little frightening.”

  I didn’t want to reply but the words came bursting out of my mouth, feral and fierce. “I need to go somewhere. Now.”

  I looked him straight in the eye, allowing the whisper of a challenge to vibrate through the bond between us. I shouldn’t have been picking a fight, but I wanted to hit something and knew from experience that he could take a punch.

  Devon’s pupils dilated with the effort it took not to answer my unspoken throw down. “You need to go somewhere?” he repeated. “Did you have a specific location in mind, or were you just planning on taking off for parts unknown?”

  His voice was deceptively mild, and I thought of the forest, the mountains, the apparition with Griffin’s eyes.

  “I need to go to Shelby.” The words surprised me, and I rolled them over in my mind. Shelby, Montana. The town where Griffin died.

  “Okay,” Devon said.

  “Okay?” I repeated.

  Devon inclined his head, and I heard his voice in my head, loud and clear. If you need to go to Shelby, we’ll go to Shelby. Road trip. Tonight.

  Across the room, Bryn jerked to a stop and turned toward the two of us. Pack-bonds were tricky things, and most people our age had trouble communicating mind-to-mind—unless they were alpha. For a second, I could feel Bryn prowling at the edges of my brain, and I wondered if she sensed that something had just passed between Devon and me.

  I leaned back on my heels and gave Bryn a lazy smile, and—realizing what she’d been doing—she stopped actively poking around the corners of my psyche. I’d always had my secrets, and she’d always had hers. She wasn’t going to press me, and for that, I was grateful.

  If my best friend knew what I’d seen, she’d worry, and once she started worrying, the part of her that was alpha wouldn’t be able to keep from trying to fix this, make things better, save me.

  I didn’t need saving. And if I did, I was sure as hell going to be the one to save myself.

  “Tonight,” I told Devon. I would have preferred going alone, but if the only way to keep Bryn out of it was to deal Devon in, so be it.

  It would have been easy enough to liberate my dad’s truck from its spot in front of our cabin, but Bryn and I had spent most of the summer grounded for our last impromptu road trip, and there was a part of me that felt like going to Shelby was the equivalent of traveling back in time and hopping from one memory to the next—not the kind of thing best achieved in a pickup.

  I’d left the town in question on four legs. I was going back the same way, and though I wasn’t sure what I expected to find there, the irrational part of my brain knew exactly what it was looking for.

  Don’t even think it, I told myself. Whatever I’d seen in the forest—be it a ghost or a figment of my imagination—it all went back to Shelby. To Griffin. To things I’d been trying for years to forget. I’d been caught off guard in the forest, but this time, I’d be ready: ready to see him, ready to talk to him, and if he wasn’t really there, ready to admit—to Devon at least—that I was losing my mind.

  For once, the white-hot pain of Shifting wasn’t enough to banish the thoughts from my mind. All too soon, it was over, and the feelings that had been creeping up on me all day—the aching, the loneliness, the hunger—became a living, breathing thing. Unable to hold it in any longer, I threw my head back and howled, a foreign, haunting sound that I felt from haunches to nose.

  Devon answered, and I froze, acutely aware of the way his call melded into mine and so damn grateful that I wasn’t alone. As the sound of howling faded, a timber-colored wolf appeared in the darkness, and for a moment, my body wasn’t my own. I saw Devon as my wolf did, and I saw myself as he must have: long limbed, graceful, deadly.

  Hunt. Hunt. Hunt.

  The desire was there, and through the pack-bond, I could feel it reverberating through Devon’s body as well, but he shook his head—an oddly human gesture that reminded me that the two of us had Shifted for a reason.

  Griffin.

  I hadn’t told Devon what I’d seen. I hadn’t told him why I wanted to go to Shelby. I couldn’t put any of it into words, but in this form, I didn’t need to. Devon turned toward the forest, tilting his head to the side and waiting, and I sprang forward, blurring into motion.

  In human form, I didn’t have much of a sense of direction, but now I could feel our destination calling me, like a siren luring a sailor to final death.

  Time to go home.

  The house didn’t look like much from the outside. The paint was chipped and faded, the steps on the front porch splintered and worn. There was a tricycle in the yard, and a hole in one of the window screens. I wanted to go inside so badly it hurt, and I couldn’t keep a low-pitched whine from working its way up the back of my throat.

  Dev nudged me with his nose. I’m here, he seemed to say, even though he didn’t force a word from his mind into mine. You’re okay.

  I huffed directly into his face, and he took a step back, boyish grin dancing across lupine features.

  I’m okay, I thought, pushing down the urge to move out from the cover of the trees. It’s just a house.

  I’d lived here the first six years of my life, give or take. There was a time, when I was a baby, when we’d lived in Colorado, but I couldn’t remember it any m
ore than I could conjure up an image of my mother’s face. But this place—

  This was home.

  I closed my eyes, letting the smells—layered and rich—take me back.

  “Hey, Lake?”

  “Yeah-huh?”

  “I won’t let anyone get ya.”

  Griffin was small for his age, and I was big. When we wrestled, I won three times out of four—but for some reason, his words made my insides feel warm and gooey.

  He made me feel safe.

  I kicked off the covers and crept from my twin bed to his. He scooted over without being asked, and I climbed in upside down, settling my head next to his feet and my feet next to his head. I wiggled my toes. Griffin wiggled his.

  “I won’t let anyone get you, either,” I said. “I’ll tear their head off.”

  Griffin nodded, as if he had expected nothing less. “Hey, Lake?”

  “Yeah-huh?”

  “Your feet smell.” Griff grinned, thoroughly delighted with himself and with me.

  “Do not.”

  “Do, too.”

  “Do not.” I paused. “Hey, Griff?”

  “Mmm-hmm?” His voice was getting lighter. I could hear his heartbeat and my own—this was what going to sleep sounded like. This was us.

  “You’re ugly.”

  The feel of hot breath on my face brought me back to the present. I blinked and remembered that I was a wolf, not a girl, that I was sixteen, not five.

  Devon huffed again and nudged my side with his head. I was halfway through a retaliatory head butt when I realized what he’d been trying to show me.

  The light on the porch was on. A woman I didn’t recognize opened the screen door and peered out into the darkness.

  I froze. My light coat of fur was a beacon against the night air. She was going to see me. Worse, she might see Devon. A person could mistake me for a natural wolf—a big one, granted, but not impossibly so. Devon, on the other hand, was six foot five in human form and large even for a Were.

  I shouldn’t have brought him here. I shouldn’t have come.