Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  To try to come up with a plan, find a way out of this.

  For me.

  Just before I went to bed that night, I got an email from Shay. He hadn’t CC’ed the other alphas this time, and reading over his message, I could hear the condescension dripping from his honeyed words. Underneath the condescension, I could sense something a thousand times worse.

  Satisfaction.

  Shay didn’t demand that I return Lucas immediately. He didn’t contradict my claim that I had the right to deal with a trespasser as I saw fit. Instead, he said, very politely, that he would be more than happy to retrieve Lucas as soon as I’d handled the situation to Cedar Ridge’s satisfaction, and then he signed off with a final line.

  I feel it only fair to warn you—I’m not the only one with a vested interest in his whereabouts, and the others might not be quite so understanding.

  Others? I thought, my heart dropping to my stomach. What others?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THAT NIGHT, I DIDN’T SLEEP. I READ SHAY’S EMAIL A half dozen times, paced the full length of my room, and read it a half dozen more. No matter how many ways I looked at it, I could only think of two possible interpretations.

  Either Shay was lying to me, or Lucas was.

  If Shay was lying, he was probably doing it just to get under my skin. Psychological warfare was the closest he could come to an assault, and if his objective had been to keep me up at night, turning the possibilities over and over again in my head, he’d succeeded.

  I’m not the only one with a vested interest in his whereabouts …

  Who else could possibly care where Shay’s whipping boy was? Since I hadn’t heard from any of the other alphas, all of whom had received my email admitting that Lucas was here, I doubted that any of them were the “others” Shay was referring to, and that left, what? One of the few lone wolves who weren’t associated with any pack? Lucas’s family, who—depending on whether he’d been born Snake Bend or transferred in—might or might not be a part of Shay’s pack?

  A Rabid?

  None of the possibilities were good ones, and they all seemed far-fetched. If Lucas had family outside of Shay’s pack, he would have gone to them, not me, looking for salvation, and I couldn’t imagine that he’d done anything to attract the attention of someone who lived in No-Man’s-Land, between one alpha’s territory and the next.

  Shay was probably just messing with me. There was nothing to keep a Were from lying in an email. For Lucas to mislead me, in person, with Maddy, Lake, Devon, Chase, or some combination thereof in the room, would have been significantly harder, given the werewolf ability to smell lies.

  Then again, I knew the power of telling half-truths better than just about anyone. Lucas hadn’t said that anyone besides Shay was after him, but I hadn’t asked.

  At three in the morning, unable to sleep or lie down or even sit still, I decided it was time to remedy that.

  Ali was a light sleeper, but her hearing was completely human, and I used my hold over the twins to keep them in a nice, quiet, undisturbed sleep as I snuck out my window. After I’d made my escape, I ran to Cabin 13, eased open the door, and slipped inside before shutting it behind me and moving quickly through the front hall.

  “Watching you try to be stealthy is just plain sad.”

  Lake didn’t bother whispering, and the sudden sound of her voice took me off guard just enough that I felt a flash of irritation—at her for sneaking up on me and at myself for being so focused on my Lucas mission that I hadn’t heard or felt her coming at all.

  “What are you doing here?” I snapped, keeping my voice low.

  “Bryn, just about everyone in these parts has hearing like mine. Whispering isn’t going to do you a lick of good.” One second, Lake was sitting, and the next, she was on her feet beside me. I never even saw her stand up. “Luckily for you, my dad sleeps like the dead, and nobody else within range would bat an eye at you taking a midnight stroll that just happens to bring you up close and personal with the only werewolf in the state of Montana who wouldn’t die to keep you safe.”

  “Did you follow me here?” I asked.

  Lake shrugged. “The word follow seems to suggest you got here first.”

  I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t a race, Lake.”

  “If it was, I would’ve given you a head start. Now, you want to tell me why the alpha of the Cedar Ridge Pack is sneaking out windows and putting herself in a potentially dangerous situation without backup?”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to remind Lake that she’d scoffed at the idea of Lucas being a threat, but I bit the retort back. Just because Lake thought she could take someone with three paws tied behind her back didn’t mean that I’d stand a chance against him in a fair fight. The best I could hope for in a fight against a Were—any Were—was catching him off guard enough that I could take to higher ground and wait out the assault. With weapons, I might stand a chance at inflicting some damage, but I hadn’t exactly come here armed.

  Rather than acknowledge that Lake might actually have a point, I met her eyes. “You breathe a word of this to Devon or Chase, and I will kill you.”

  Lake smiled. “I’ll take that under advisement. Now, you care to clue me in to what we’re doing here, or should I start making educated guesses?”

  I glanced at the door to Lucas’s room. If he was awake, he was hearing every word we said, and I didn’t want to give up the element of surprise.

  I got an email from Shay, I told Lake silently. He said that I’m welcome to deal with Lucas’s trespassing as I see fit, but that he thought it fair to warn me that he wasn’t the only one with an interest in Lucas’s whereabouts.

  Lake’s lips twitched, and though a normal person might have mistaken her for someone holding back laughter, I knew instinctively that she was holding back a growl.

  Shay Macalister is a piece of work, Lake said. And if we can help it, neither one of us is breathing a word of this to Dev.

  On that, Lake and I were in absolute agreement. The last—and only—time Shay and I had come face-to-face, Devon had come dangerously close to fighting him on my behalf. In size and brute power, the two were evenly matched, but Shay had at least a hundred years of experience on Devon, and I didn’t want to add any fuel whatsoever to that fire.

  You ready to see what our visitor has to say? I asked Lake.

  I was born ready, Bronwyn. Lake punctuated that statement by releasing the safety on a shotgun I hadn’t even realized she was holding.

  Is that really necessary? I said, giving her a look. It’s not like you’re actually going to shoot him.

  He doesn’t know that. Lake waggled her eyebrows. And for the record, I’m packing silver, just in case.

  My gut twisted at the idea of using fear as leverage with someone who’d come here looking for protection, but as Lake had made abundantly clear, injured or not, Lucas was a Were, and he was healing. In a fight, Lake could take him, but she might not be able to get to him before he got to me. I didn’t think Lucas would attack either one of us, but in life-or-death situations, thinking wasn’t enough.

  You needed to know.

  The door to Lucas’s temporary room creaked as I opened it. It took my eyes a moment to find him, because Maddy was asleep on the bed. The covers were bunched up around her, and I knew that in her sleep, she’d burrowed into them, turning Lucas’s bed into her den.

  The fact that he’d let her—and that he was sleeping on the floor so she could have the bed—did not go unnoticed. That Maddy had fallen asleep in his presence was even more staggering. She wasn’t the type to trust blindly, and whatever else Lucas was, he wasn’t Pack. She shouldn’t have felt that comfortable around him; he shouldn’t have been willing to sleep on the floor for her.

  I felt a stab of possession spike through me—Maddy was ours; she trusted us—but that didn’t stop me from sending a silent message to Lake, asking her to put the shotgun down.

  With a glance at Maddy and a sharp intake of breath
, Lake complied. I heard the click of the safety, and she set the gun near the door, her eyes on Lucas’s as she crossed the room and put her body between his and mine.

  “He’s coming for me, isn’t he?” Lucas was awake. His voice was dull, and on the bed, Maddy made a noise halfway between a whimper and a whine.

  “No.” I wanted to kneel down next to Lucas, to put myself on his level, but I didn’t move, allowing Lake—long-limbed and lethal—to stay between us at all times. “Shay isn’t coming, at least not yet, but he said something, and I need to know if it’s true.”

  Lucas pushed himself farther into the corner. Through the pack-bond, I caught a flash of an image from Maddy’s dream: the back of a hand connecting with a toddler’s chubby cheeks. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know who, but the fractured memory was enough for me to feel, just for a second, the intensity with which Maddy looked at Lucas and saw the life she and the others had lived with the Rabid. I glanced at Lake, and since I couldn’t kneel next to Lucas, she did.

  “We’re not looking to hurt you,” she said. “Not unless you’re looking to hurt us.”

  “I’ve never hurt anyone.” Lucas’s words rang with the kind of truth that I didn’t need a werewolf’s sense of smell to recognize as honest and bare. “I’m the one who gets hurt.”

  His words twisted like a knife in my gut, but I soldiered on, softening my voice but delivering the message all the same.

  “Shay says he’s not the only one after you.” I paused and measured Lucas’s reaction, but his eyes were as dull as his voice, and I couldn’t see anything in them but what I already knew. “Is he lying?”

  For several seconds, Lucas didn’t reply. Then he looked up, right at my eyes, for a single beat of my heart. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know as in you’re not certain, or you don’t know as in you have no clue why Shay might say such a thing?”

  Lucas retreated even further into himself, and when he replied, his voice was barely audible to my human ears.

  “The first one.”

  “So when Shay says there might be someone else after you, that’s not crazy talk, is it?” Lake kept her voice soft, and she didn’t make a single move toward him, but there was no way for him not to answer.

  Lake Mitchell wasn’t the kind of person you just shrugged off.

  “No. It’s not crazy talk.”

  The air whooshed out of my lungs as I processed our visitor’s answer. Lucas didn’t know for sure if Shay was lying, but he knew that it was possible that his alpha was telling the truth.

  That someone else was after him.

  And he’d come here, to my land, and asked for my help, without so much as a word of warning.

  “Assume that whoever might be coming after you is coming,” I told him sharply. “Who is it?”

  Lucas didn’t answer. I took a step forward, pitching my voice low and staring directly into his eyes with an intensity none of my wolves could have denied. “Is it one of the other alphas?”

  “No.”

  “Is it a Rabid werewolf?”

  “No.”

  “Is it your family?”

  “I don’t have a family.”

  “Lucas, we can’t help you if we don’t know what we’re up against. Keeping this information to yourself is the same as lying, and if you lie to me, I will send you back.”

  I felt, rather than saw, Maddy stirring, but she didn’t object to my words. If Lucas was a threat—if the people after him were a threat—we needed to know. She knew that. She trusted me.

  Lucas turned to look at her and took a ragged breath, and then he answered my question, his words coming out in a rushed whisper. “They’re human, okay? The Snake Bend Pack has dealings with humans, and Shay … loaned me out.”

  “He what?” Lake and I spoke at the same time. Maddy didn’t even blink.

  “Shay gave me to some humans, okay? Not forever, just for a little while, to punish me for whatever he was punishing me for.” Lucas brought one hand to the scar on the back of his neck, and in that moment, I knew that Shay wasn’t the only one who’d left a mark on his body.

  Whoever these humans were, whatever they wanted with a Were, they’d left their mark, too.

  “Humans aren’t even supposed to know about us,” Lake said. “The Senate kills people when they find out.”

  It was an ugly truth of our world that sometimes the secret of a pack’s existence took precedence over a single human life—even now. In all the time I’d known Callum, he had never lifted a lethal hand to a human, but I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the other alphas batted an eye at safeguarding our secret with that kind of force.

  Most Weres hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of Callum allowing Ali and me into his pack. Human females were for breeding, and most Weres accepted that only because there were so few females of their own kind to go around. The idea of an alpha handing one of his wolves over to humans was unfathomable.

  Lucas tore his eyes away from Maddy and spoke directly to me. “I don’t know why Shay does what he does. Most of the time, it’s not exactly advisable to ask, but when he got tired of beating me, he gave me to some humans and let them do the same. They were strong, and they had weapons, and I was restrained.”

  As strong as werewolves were, they could still be outnumbered, and Lucas wasn’t really on the more formidable end of the werewolf spectrum to begin with.

  “So, yes, Shay might be telling the truth when he says that he’s not the only one looking for me. They had me, and they hurt me, and when I finally got loose, I ran away. I turned tail, and I ran, and they might come looking for their pet werewolf, okay?” Lucas’s voice grew louder as he spoke, but the neutral expression on his face never wavered. “It’s not like the alpha is going to give them anyone else.”

  The alpha.

  The words echoed in my head, and I wanted to drive my fist through a wall—or better yet, through Shay’s small intestine.

  Alphas were supposed to protect their packs. Sometimes that meant fighting an outside threat. Sometimes that meant being the bad guy to keep order within the pack, sacrificing the needs of the few to ensure the best outcome for the pack as a whole. But being alpha never meant throwing someone out like he was garbage.

  It never meant letting a bunch of humans cut into one of your Weres like he was some kind of science experiment or a slice of meat.

  “Are you sending me back?” Lucas’s voice was devoid of any emotion, quiet and clear.

  “We’ll see,” I said, which was the best I could give him. Still, for the first time since I’d read Shay’s email, the muscles in my neck and back began to relax. A known threat was preferable to an unknown one.

  Besides, we had an entire werewolf pack at our disposal. A small one, granted, and young, but still—how much of a threat could a bunch of humans possibly be?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I MADE THE EXECUTIVE DECISION NOT TO TELL Devon or Chase about my correspondence with Shay—Chase because I wanted him to form his own impressions of Lucas, and Devon because Lake and I had agreed that the less Devon knew about Shay’s machinations, the better. I did, however, tell Mitch everything. If someone was after Lucas—human or not—I couldn’t just leave the Wayfarer and the youngest, most vulnerable members of our pack without cluing someone in to what was going on, and there was no way to skip school without raising a pack-wide alarm.

  The fact that I was one of nine werewolf alphas in North America and had to suffer through the tenth grade was wrong on so, so many levels, but try telling that to Ali “Education Is Your Future” Clare.

  I had, multiple times, and it wasn’t an experience I was looking to repeat.

  So instead, I let Lake drive me to school and watched Maddy stare out the window as we drove, knowing without probing her thoughts that her mind was on Lucas—and unable to think of a single thing to say to distract her. Devon spent the entire drive looking at me with a familiar expression—suspicion, exasperation, and steely
calm—on his face, and I dug my heels in and refused to allow my mouth to form as much as a single syllable of what he wanted to know.

  I could handle this, and besides, it wasn’t like I told Devon everything.

  Somehow, I made it through first period without giving my human classmates any visible indication that something was wrong. The last thing I needed was to fan the rumor mill flames, but for once, fate was on my side. With Thanksgiving break over, the entire high school was living on borrowed time. Finals were looming and winter vacation was less than three weeks away. My eyes were bloodshot, and with each passing lecture, I became more and more aware of the sleep I hadn’t gotten the night before, but that did little to nothing to separate me from my classmates.

  If anything, it made me blend in.

  At the front of my third-period classroom, my history teacher droned on about Oliver Cromwell, and the pages of my three-ring binder began to look increasingly inviting. My head drooped. Each blink lasted just a little bit longer than the one before. Every time I closed my eyes, I let the bond that tied me to the pack flare, assuring myself that everyone was still there, that everyone was in one piece, that they were okay.

  I breathed in and out.

  They breathed in and out.

  Somewhere, one of the younger ones Shifted, and with her transition, my entire body relaxed.

  I blinked.

  She blinked.

  And then I fell asleep.

  Smells! Smells! I wanted to inhale them, to eat them, to make them mine. My back arched, and I pressed my paws into the thick carpet. Oh, that felt good! The world was bronzed, the colors dulled, and the sounds—the words—all around me meant nothing.

  I rolled over onto my back and threw my head from one side to the other, going after carpet fuzz like it was some kind of worthier prey: a butterfly or a cricket or something soft and warm with a heart that went thump thump thump.

  Out! I wanted out, but something kept me here, inside, near to … something.