The woman’s eyes scanned her lawn and then she lifted her gaze to the edge of the forest. Devon and I should have turned around, should have run, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I couldn’t leave.
Devon stayed there, by my side, his breath and mine the only sounds in the silence, and then, just before the woman’s gaze turned toward the place where we stood partially camouflaged by the cover of the woods, something happened.
There was a flicker in the air. A crash sounded from inside the house. The woman whirled around, and the moment before my muscles unlocked and Devon and I took for higher ground, I saw him again.
Griffin.
Only this time, he looked the way he had when we were kids.
“You want to tell me what’s going on with my favorite menace to society, or should I hazard a guess?” Devon arched one eyebrow. In combination with the clothes he’d pilfered from one of my old neighbor’s clotheslines, the expression made him look utterly absurd.
“That shirt is at least three sizes too small.”
Devon struck a pose. I could not swear to it, but he might have flexed his pecs. “I know.”
The fact that I didn’t smile, didn’t smack him, didn’t make so much as one comment in retaliation told him that this was serious. That there was something wrong. With me.
There was something wrong with me.
“C’mon, birthday girl. Tell old Dev what’s ailing you, yeah?”
His British accent was spot-on. “Can’t you take anything seriously?” I grumbled.
Dev met my eyes. “Do you want me to take this seriously?” he asked, his accent and cadence entirely his own. There was power in Devon’s voice, a hint of the fact that, some day, he’d probably have a pack of his own.
Telling him was as good as telling Bryn. And telling Bryn—
“I won’t tell her.” Devon’s words brought the world to a standstill. He was loyal, loyal to a fault, and she was the center of his world, and he was saying that he’d keep this from her, for me.
This was wrong. Telling him was wrong. Keeping things from Bryn—my best friend and his—was wrong. Keeping things from the alpha was dangerous, especially if I was a liability to the pack.
“Okay,” I said, and that broke the dam. Words came easier now, no matter how much I shouldn’t have been saying them. “I saw my dead brother. I saw him in the forest this morning and just now on the porch of our old house.”
I waited for Devon to tell me that I was crazy.
“Is he a threat?” Devon asked instead.
“No!” I hadn’t thought that far ahead, hadn’t let myself even hope that what I was seeing might be real.
“Have you seen him before?”
The word no was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite form it.
I won’t let anyone get ya.
How many nights had I lain awake in bed, after Griff was gone, and heard those words? How many times had I imagined him standing guard in wolf form at the end of my bed?
“You really don’t think I’m crazy?”
“Oh, I know you’re crazy,” Devon replied. “You name your shotguns and hustle pool against werewolves twice your size. You, my dear, are boatloads of crazy. Entire barges, really. You always have been. It’s one of your charms.”
This from a werewolf who worshipped Armani.
“Maybe what you’re seeing is a figment of your imagination, and maybe it’s your brother, taking a peek at your lovely self from the other side. Either way, unless you think he’s going to hurt something, or unless you’re feeling the urge to go a little crazier than usual yourself, it’s not pack business, and I’m not worried.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and this time—strangely—I meant it. Nothing had changed. I still might be seeing things. My dead brother still might have dropped by to say hello. But suddenly, I felt like the kind of girl who could deal with either option.
“You really won’t tell Bryn?”
Dev shook his head. “I’ve no idea how you’ve managed to keep her from picking up on your thoughts and feelings as much as you have, but far be it from me to stand in the way of a little mental aerobics.”
Werewolves could smell lies. The pack-bond meant we had a mental connection to one another—one Bryn could explore at will. Keeping secrets was a tricky thing, but I’d had years of practice thinking about some things and not-thinking about others.
About Griff.
“Thanks, Devon.”
“I live to serve.”
I snorted and would have said more, but I felt something: eyes on the back of my head, pinpricks crawling up my neck.
I breathed in and out. I thought of Griffin, and then I turned around. He was there, in the distance, older again, but somehow just the same: same eyes, same smile, same intensity to his face.
I won’t let anyone get ya.
He didn’t say the words, and I didn’t hear them, but they were there. He was there.
The knowledge was instantaneous and absolute. I didn’t question it. I started forward. Griffin raised one palm, and I paused. He smiled, and then he was gone.
Don’t go, I thought. Don’t leave. Don’t be gone. Don’t be gone again.
I let the thoughts run their course, my breath visible in the night air. Then I closed my eyes and nodded, like I was saying yes to something—I didn’t know what.
My throat went dry. My teeth worried at my lips, and then I opened my eyes and forced myself to smile.
At the place where I’d seen him, if only for a second.
“Happy birthday,” I said, and this time, I wasn’t talking to myself. I sent the words out into the universe and hoped that wherever he was, he’d hear them and know that I hadn’t forgotten.
Couldn’t ever forget him.
Happy birthday, Griffin, I thought, and for once, I just let myself think it. Miss you. Love you. Always.
Beside me, I could feel Devon wanting to ask me if I was okay again, but he didn’t. He kept his mouth shut, and he didn’t close the space between us. He gave me a moment, two, three.
And then I turned—away from the spot where Griffin had stood, away from the past. I met Devon’s eyes and felt my pupils beginning to change.
“You ready?” Devon asked, and I knew he wasn’t talking about Shifting. A tremor ran through my body, and I nodded.
“Let’s go home.”
I heard my bones beginning to crack and felt it a moment later. The Change still hurt. It still broke me. But for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel broken, and in the second before the agony subsided, with the scent of the forest fresh in my nose, I heard it: a whisper on the wind, a memory, a dream.
Happy birthday, Lake.
I lowered my head, bent my legs. I breathed in through my nose. And then I shot forward and ran.
Nothing said sweet sixteen like a hunt.
EGMONT
We bring stories to life
First published by Egmont USA, 2011
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © Jennifer Lynn Barnes, 2011
All rights reserved
www.egmontusa.com
www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, Jennifer (Jennifer Lynn)
Trial by fire / Jennifer Lynn Barnes.
p. cm.
Summary: Bryn, the new alpha of her werewolf pack, must deal with an opposing pack led by her friend when a runaway begs her for help and protection from abuse.
eISBN: 978-1-60684-475-5
[1. Werewolves—Fiction. 2. Runaways—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction.
4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B26225Tr 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2011002853
CPSIA tracking label information:
Random House Production • 1745 Broadway • New York, NY 10019
All rights reserved. No part of th
is publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
v3.1
For Daddy, from his not-quite-human girl.
CHAPTER ONE
“NO MORE SCHOOL, NO MORE BOOKS, NO MORE teachers’ dirty looks …”
For a two-hundred-twenty-pound werewolf, Devon Macalister had a wicked falsetto. Leaning back in his chair with casual grace, he shot a mischievous look around our lunch table. “Everyone sing along!”
As the leader of our little group—not to mention the alpha of Devon’s pack and his best friend since kindergarten—the responsibility for shutting down his boy-band tendencies fell to me. “It’s Thanksgiving break, Dev, not summer vacation, and technically, it hasn’t even started yet.”
My words fell on deaf ears. The smile on Devon’s face widened, making him look—to my eyes, at least—more puppy than wolf. To my left, Lake, whose history with Devon’s flare for the dramatic stretched back almost as far as mine did, rolled her eyes, but her lips parted in a grin every bit as irrepressible and lupine as Devon’s.
A wave of energy—pure, undiluted, and animalistic—vibrated through my own body, and I closed my eyes for one second … two.
Three.
In control of the impulse to leap out of my chair and run for the woods, I glanced across the table at the last member of our little quartet. Maddy was sitting perfectly still, blinking her gray eyes owlishly, a soft smile on her lips. Images—of the night sky, of running—leapt from her mind to mine through our pack-bond, as natural as words falling off lips.
The impending full moon might have been giving the rest of our table werewolf ADD, but Maddy was perfectly Zen—much more relaxed than she normally would have been when all eyes were on the four of us.
Despite our continued efforts to blend in, the buzz of power in the air and the unspoken promise that within hours, my friends would shed their human skin were palpable. I recognized the feeling for what it was, but our very human—and easily fascinated—classmates had no idea. To them, the four of us were mysterious and magnetic and just a bit unreal—even me.
In the past nine months, my life had changed in more ways than I could count, but one of the most striking was the fact that at my new high school, I wasn’t an outsider, ignored and avoided by humans who had no idea why people like Devon and Lake—and to a lesser extent me—felt off. Instead, the other students at Weston High had developed a strange fascination with us. They didn’t approach. They didn’t try to penetrate our tight-knit group, but they watched and they whispered, and whenever Devon—Devon!—met their eyes, the girls sighed and fluttered their eyelashes in some kind of human mating ritual that I probably wouldn’t have completely understood even if I’d grown up like a normal girl.
Given that I’d been raised as the only human child in the largest werewolf pack in North America, the batting of eyelashes was every bit as foreign to me as running through the woods, surrounded by bodies and warmth and the feeling of home, would have been to anyone else. Some days, I felt like I knew more about being a werewolf than I would ever know about being a teenage girl.
It was getting easier and easier to forget that I was human.
Soon. Soon. Soon.
The bond that tied me to the rest of the pack vibrated with the inevitability of the coming moon, and even though I knew better than to encourage Devon, I couldn’t help the way my own lips tilted up at the corners. The only things that stood between the four of us and Thanksgiving break were a couple of hours and a quiz on Shakespeare.
The only thing standing between us and delicious, feral freedom was the setting of the sun.
And the only thing that stood between me and Chase—my Chase—was a distance I could feel the boy in question closing mile by mile, heartbeat by heartbeat, second by second.
“Bronwyn, please, you’re making me blush.” Dev—who could read me like a book, with or without whatever I was projecting through the pack-bond—adopted a scandalized tone and brought a hand to his chest, like he was seconds away from demanding smelling salts and going faint. But I sensed his wolf stirring beneath the surface and knew that it was hard for Devon on a day like today to be reminded that I wasn’t his to protect in the same way anymore.
That I was alpha.
That Chase and I were … whatever Chase and I were.
“Fine,” I said, flicking a French fry in Devon’s general direction. “Have it your way. No more school, no more books …”
Dev made an attempt at harmonizing with me, but given my complete lack of vocal chops, it did not go well, and a horrified silence descended over our entire table.
After several seconds, Devon regarded the rest of us with mock solemnity. “We shall never speak of this moment again.”
“In your dreams, Broadway boy.” Shaking out her long blonde hair—a motion laden with excess adrenaline—Lake stood and stretched her mile-long legs. If the girls in school were all secretly pining for Devon, the boys were absolutely smitten with Lake. Clearly, they’d never met the business end of her shotgun or had their butts whipped at pool.
Soon. Soon. Soon.
Across the table, Maddy sighed, and Devon bumped her shoulder with his, a comforting gesture meant to communicate that he understood. Soon, our entire pack would be gathered in the woods. Soon, the Weres would Shift and I would let their power flow through me, until I forgot I was human and the difference between four legs and two virtually disappeared.
Soon—but not soon enough.
“So,” I said, my voice low and soothing, intent on keeping my pack-mates focused, however briefly, on the here and now. “Hamlet. What do I need to know?”
“New girl.”
I balked at Lake’s answer. “I was thinking more along the lines of Guildencrantz and Frankenstein.”
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” Devon corrected absentmindedly as he followed Lake’s gaze to the double archway at the front of the cafeteria. I turned to look, too, and the rest of the student body took their cue from us, until everyone was eyeballing the girl who stood there.
She was small—the word tiny wouldn’t have been a misnomer—and her eyes seemed to take up a disproportionate amount of her face. Her skin was very pale, and she was dressed almost entirely in black, save for a pair of white leather gloves that covered her arms from the elbows down.
She looked like a porcelain doll, and she felt like a threat. Given that I could tell, even from a distance, that she wasn’t a Were, I had no idea why something inside me insisted I track her every move.
“The natives are getting kind of restless,” Devon commented offhand. Weston wasn’t a big school, and mid-semester transfers were practically unheard of, so White Leather Gloves was garnering more than her fair share of murmurs and stares.
Including mine.
“Mayhaps I should go play the white knight, divert the spotlight a little?”
Devon’s suggestion was enough to make me switch my gaze from the new girl to him.
“No.”
I wasn’t sure who was more shocked by the sharpness with which that word exited my mouth—Devon or me. Our pack didn’t do orders. Given the way I felt about people getting dictatorial with me, I wasn’t prone to pulling rank on anyone else. Besides, Devon and I had spent so much time together growing up that even if he hadn’t been my second-in-command, I still wouldn’t have been able to force my will on him. The closest I could come to ordering him to do anything was threatening to decapitate him if he didn’t stop singing The Best of ABBA at the top of his lungs, and even that was mostly futile.
With a lightly inquisitive noise, Devon caught my gaze and held it. “Something you’d like to share with the class there, Bryn?” he asked, arching one eyebrow to ridiculous heights while keeping the other perfectly in place.
I debated answering, but it was probably nothing—just that time of t
he month, with emotions running high and my heart beating with the power of the impending full moon. Still, I hadn’t spent my entire life growing up around people capable of snapping my neck like a Popsicle stick without learning to pay attention when my instincts put me on high alert.
If my gut said someone was a threat, I had to at least consider the possibility that it was true—even if the someone in question was five foot nothing and human down to the tips of her leather-clad fingers.
Instead of mentioning any of this to Devon and opening that can of worms, I threw another French fry in his general direction, and the tension between us melted away as he reached for his plate and armed himself. “You know, of course,” he said, pitching his voice low, “that this means war.”
I couldn’t help glancing back toward the archway and the new girl who’d been standing there a moment before, but she was already gone.
Pack. Pack. Pack.
Protect. Protect. Protect.
I let the feeling wash over me, absorbed it, and then relegated it to the back of my head, with the promise of soon, soon, soon and the desire to run. At the moment, I had more immediate concerns—like my retention of Hamlet definitely leaving something to be desired and the incoming French fry flying directly at my face.
That night, I was the first one to arrive at the clearing. We hadn’t had a fresh snowfall since the second week in November, but this time of year, the layer of white on the ground never fully melted away, and I breathed in the smell of cedar and snow. I was wearing wool mittens and my second-heaviest winter coat, and for a moment, I closed my eyes and imagined, as I always did just before the Shift, what it would be like to shed my clothes, my skin, and my ability to think as a human.
There had been a time in my life when the last thing I wanted was the collective werewolf psyche taking up even a tiny corner of my brain, but a lot had changed since then.
Different pack.
Different forest.
Different me.
Without opening my eyes, my hands found their way to the bottom of my puffy jacket, and I pulled it upward, exposing the T-shirt I wore underneath. My fingers tugged at the end of the shirt, and my bare skin stung under the onslaught of winter-cold air.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology Page 32