Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  This was where she was killed.

  Through the pack-bond, I could hear Chase’s racing thoughts, and Lake’s, and I realized that beneath the pungent scent of iron and human flesh, they could smell something else.

  The kind of something that smelled like a werewolf, but not. A dream smell, a memory, a scent they couldn’t quite make out.

  I heard a noise then—a rustling in the brush to my left. Caroline whirled, her blonde hair fanning out around her baby-doll face. She had a crossbow in her left hand and a pistol in her right, and she was halfway to pulling the triggers before my eyes ever locked in on her prey.

  It was a boy, about my age, standing only a few feet away—a pale and almost see-through boy, standing in a field of blood. He had golden hair, halfway between honey and a light, sun-kissed brown. There was a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. His cheekbones were sharp, and his eyes were green, the exact same shade as Lake’s.

  Caroline fired, and I watched as a bullet passed straight through the boy. A bolt came within a foot of his body, but he waved his hand, and it fell to the ground.

  This was what Chase had smelled at the crime scene.

  This was the kind of monster who could kill without leaving a trail.

  This was a nightmare, dressed up like a boy.

  It started walking toward us, and a sense of déjà vu washed over my body. There was something familiar about this thing, this boy. Something more than the way he smelled—or didn’t smell—and the serious expression on his face.

  “Lake,” he said.

  For a split second, there was silence all around us, and then Lake replied, her voice barely more than a whisper, but filled with a whole host of emotions, each as sharp as glass.

  One word.

  She just said one word.

  “Griff.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  GRIFF? AS IN GRIFFIN? AS IN …

  “Lake,” he said again. “Lakie.”

  I hadn’t heard anyone call her that, not since the first summer she and Mitch came to visit the Stone River Pack alone. We were six years old, and she was wild—wild with grief, with anger, with an emptiness that slowly, over time, Devon and I had seemed to fill.

  An emptiness that, looking at Lake now, I knew we never had.

  “This isn’t happening,” Lake said. “You aren’t real. You’re never real.”

  The depth of anguish in her voice told me how much I’d never known about one of my closest friends. She made a point of being strong and fearless and bulletproof in every way that mattered. She was the one who’d pulled me out of the dark place after Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d never fully realized—she’d never let me realize—that she had a dark place of her own.

  Every time I’d come close to it, she’d pulled back.

  But now all of that darkness was bleeding off her, like radio waves of pain—and her brother, her dead brother, was standing there in front of us, with a body that bullets passed straight through and a scent the others couldn’t quite grasp.

  A scent present at the Wyoming murder.

  “Lake—” I was going to tell her to back away from him, but realized that she wouldn’t hear me if I did. It was like she and this boy—this creature with her dead brother’s face—were the only two people in the world.

  She walked toward him, her body shaking with every step, her head thrown back, like if she could just face this head-on, everything would be fine.

  She would be fine.

  Watching her, I thought of Katie and Alex, the bond between them growing stronger by the day. I felt something building up inside of Lake, fire where she once was frozen, numbness giving way to pain.

  “I told you once,” the boy who couldn’t have been Griffin said, “that I was never going to let anything get you, and I never have. Every fight you fought, I fought. Every tree you climbed, I climbed. And when you ran, Lake, I ran with you. Always.”

  I could hear Griffin in this thing’s words. I could see the boy I barely remembered in the lines of his face. But this couldn’t be Griffin. Griffin was dead, and we had every reason to believe that this thing in front of us was a killer.

  “You weren’t there.” Lake’s voice was uneven and shrill. She sounded like a little kid on the verge of a meltdown. “You weren’t there, and every time I thought I felt you, every shadow I saw out of the corner of my eye—on our birthday—”

  “I was there. I was always there.” His voice was an echo of hers, quiet and intense and so full of emotion that I thought he might choke on the words, trying not to cry. “And now I’m here.”

  The thing I felt building up inside of Lake—the fire, the pain, the hope—filled her. It overcame her. Something deep in her soul reached out for something deep in his. The bond between them surged, electric and undeniable, and I felt it the way Lake did, like a phantom limb brought suddenly back to life.

  I knew then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that whatever else this thing in front of us was, whatever it had done, Griffin’s face wasn’t just some mask it had chosen to wear. This was Griffin, as surely as Lake was Lake.

  “What are you?” Caroline took a step forward, her eyes narrowed into slits, her tone lethal. She may have revised her opinion of werewolves in the past six months, but the Griffin standing before us wasn’t a werewolf.

  Not anymore.

  “I’m dead,” Griffin said, then he nodded toward Lake. “But she’s not.”

  To Caroline, who couldn’t feel the bond between them, those words probably weren’t very illuminating, but to me, they sounded like an explanation, intuitive and complete.

  Griffin was dead.

  Lake was not.

  Female werewolves were always half of a set of twins, the girl’s survival in the womb dependent on the boy’s. Katie and Alex were two halves of the same whole. That was what Griffin was to Lake, what she was to him.

  “You’re dead,” Lake said, bitter and trying not to sound broken. “You’re dead, and I’m not, and you’re telling me that you just hung around? And you didn’t say anything, didn’t tell me—”

  “I couldn’t,” Griffin said, the words cutting through the air like a whip. “Don’t you think I tried, Lake?” His voice got very soft, and I felt like I was eavesdropping, even though I wasn’t. “Sometimes, late at night, there were moments when you could see me, right before you fell asleep. And on our birthday, every year, when hurt was tearing through your insides and you were smiling on the surface, I tried even harder. That one time, when we turned sixteen …”

  He trailed off, and I realized that maybe Lake had seen him—in her dreams, on her birthday. Maybe she’d seen him, or thought she’d seen him, or imagined seeing him and hadn’t told me. I wanted to believe that, to believe that this was some kind of miracle and not a nightmare, but Griffin’s scent—as faint and hard to define as it was—had been all over the Wyoming murder site.

  We’d found him here, where another victim had just been killed.

  No. Lake’s voice was firm in my mind. She must have known by the look on my face what I was thinking, but she didn’t want me to go there. Just no, Bryn.

  “Why now?” she asked Griffin, but I knew she wasn’t asking for my benefit or because she had any lingering suspicions herself. She was asking because she had spent years broken and incomplete, missing him, and she needed to know.

  “I couldn’t make you see me before.” The quieter Griffin’s voice got, the harder it was to hear anything in it but truth. “But now I can. Everything’s changed, Lake. Everything.”

  Lake nodded, her lips pulled into a thin and colorless line. Through the pack-bond, I could feel a nauseating ball of fear unfurling in the pit of her stomach—not because she was afraid of her brother, but because she was scared to believe that things had really changed. Scared to close her eyes, for fear that she might open them and discover that all of this had been a dream.

  “You’re dead, but you’re here.” Caroline sounded calm, b
ut her eyes were locked on to Griffin’s, like a snake’s as it swayed gently in front of a mouse. “What exactly does that make you?”

  “I’m a dead werewolf with a twin who’s still alive,” Griffin replied, giving the hunter a look I remembered well from my youth—one that said she was really very slow. “If you want to get technical, I’m pretty sure the word you’re looking for is ghost.”

  Werewolves. Psychics. And now ghosts. It made a sick kind of sense—especially given the things we’d seen—and not seen—smelled—and not smelled—at the murder scene in Wyoming. What kind of predator smelled like a memory, a dream? What kind of werewolf could drag a body to Main Street without being seen? The same kind that could dance in blood without ever leaving footprints.

  A dead werewolf, brought back as a ghost.

  “You killed that girl.” Chase said the words that I couldn’t force myself to speak. Griffin didn’t bat an eye, didn’t seem surprised at the accusation.

  Lake reared back like Chase had punched her. “Griffin didn’t do this,” she said, her lips peeling back into a snarl. “He gets sick just looking at human blood. Dad always said he had no stomach.” Her voice wavered, and for a moment, she looked less like she was about to shoot someone and more like she might cry. “If one of us so much as skinned a knee …”

  Lake believed what she was saying. She did. But Griffin wasn’t a kid anymore. He wasn’t even a werewolf. He was a ghost, and we didn’t know what that meant, what dying and lingering and existing in some kind of limbo without contact, without touch for years could do to a person.

  Everything’s changed. Griffin’s words echoed in my mind, and I couldn’t help thinking that if everything had changed, we had no idea what Lake’s brother was capable of—what he had done to get back here, what he might do to stay.

  “Back away from him, Lake.” I didn’t realize I’d said the words as an order until her feet started moving backward, against her will.

  “Bryn,” she bit out, “you go alpha on me now, and there’s no going back.”

  I came to stand beside her, reaching out to touch her arm. “Sorry.” I reined in the power building up inside of me and broke off the command. That wasn’t the way to get through to her, not about this.

  “We don’t know for sure, Lake—what he’s doing here, what he is.”

  She didn’t want to listen to me, but she couldn’t entirely shut out my words, either.

  The target of our discussion cleared his throat. “You could always ask, Bryn,” he said quietly.

  That was the first time Griffin had said my name, and I couldn’t steel myself against the sound of his voice, couldn’t help remembering that for a while—a short little while—he’d been my friend, too.

  “You were there,” Chase said, stepping in between Griffin and me. “First in Wyoming, and then here.”

  That wasn’t a question, but Griffin responded as if it was. “I was there, but I was too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Caroline asked. I didn’t need any kind of special access to her mind to see that she didn’t trust anyone—or anything—she couldn’t shoot.

  “I was too late to stop what happened in Wyoming.” Griffin closed his eyes, his head bowed, his entire body tense. “I was too late to stop this.” He forced his eyes open and spread his arms out, gesturing toward the blood-splattered grass beneath our feet. “Not that we know how to stop it, exactly.”

  We? I’d been so focused on Griffin—what he was, what he might be capable of—that I hadn’t thought even for a second about the person we’d come here expecting to find.

  Maddy.

  In the dream we’d shared, she’d told me that the only person who could help her was dead. I’d assumed she was talking about Lucas—but what if she wasn’t?

  “We,” I repeated, watching Griffin’s reaction and searching his eyes for some hint of what was going on inside his head. “As in you and Maddy.”

  I should have put it together earlier, but when your friend’s twin brother comes back from the dead and lands smack-dab in the middle of a murder spree, it has a way of short-circuiting the part of your brain responsible for “logic.”

  “I spent years watching you all,” Griffin said finally, “watching out for Lake. But after that last fight, after the challenge—”

  For the first time, the word challenge didn’t take me right back to the forest, to standing over Lucas’s dead body. I was too busy trying to diagnose the expression marring the boyish innocence of Griffin’s face. Guilt? Sorrow?

  Hunger?

  “You didn’t need me, Lake.” Griffin said the words like he was making a confession, like Lake was his priest. “But Maddy did.”

  “You went with her.” Lake reached out to touch the side of his face and pulled back at the last second, as if she’d only just remembered that her hand might pass straight through. “When Maddy left the Wayfarer, you left me and went with her. You watched out for her.”

  It was a beguiling thought, that even once Maddy had lost us, she’d never really been alone. But whether or not I could afford to believe it—that was another story. A drop of water landed on my forehead—rain. I looked up. This was thunderstorm season, and by the looks of the sky, things were only going to get worse.

  “We need to go,” Griff said. “The weather’s getting bad, and Maddy shouldn’t be alone.” An alien intensity fell over his face, his eyes glowing in a way that made me wonder how anyone could ever mistake him for a human or a Were. “When I’m not there,” he said, his voice low and hoarse and nothing like the boy I’d once known, “when I have to go somewhere—that’s when it finds her.”

  The words sent a light chill over the back of my neck. I could feel my palms sweating, clammy.

  “When what finds her?” Caroline asked.

  Griff glanced at the scene around us—the signs of the struggle, the blood. “The thing that did this,” he said. “The other ghost.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  GRIFFIN HAD JUST GIVEN ME EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED: a reason to believe that he wasn’t our killer, an alternative explanation that fit the evidence just as well. Chase could barely grasp Griffin’s scent. If there was another ghost, it made sense to think it might have that same not-quite-there smell.

  But the Griffin I’d known had been a very smart little boy. Smart enough to know exactly what to say to make us follow him. Smart enough to throw suspicion onto someone—something—else.

  “Here.” Griffin—who hadn’t said a word the entire time we’d been following him—spoke in the low voice of an adult trying not to wake up a napping child. He tilted his head toward a small opening in the brush.

  Maybe he was leading us to Maddy. Maybe he was leading us off the side of the cliff. Right now that was a risk I had to take. Finding Maddy, making sure the rest of the Senate didn’t find her—that had to be my top priority.

  Glancing back at Griffin, I thought of the room I’d built for my fears. I readied myself. Then I ducked through the brush.

  The cave I’d seen in Maddy’s dream was smaller than I thought it would be, and darker. My head scraped the ceiling as I stepped over the threshold; Lake and Chase had to duck. Behind us, Jed and Caroline lingered near the mouth of the cave, either to cover our backs or because they knew that what was about to happen was private.

  Griffin wasn’t lying. Not about Maddy. She’s here.

  Knowing Maddy was close, knowing what she had gone through—already, it cut me to the bone. Beside me, Chase’s mind was flooded with scents: damp stone, fresh dirt, sweat, and something sour.

  Outside, the storm was raging. Inside, it was quiet.

  Too quiet.

  An unreadable expression on his too-pale face, Griffin pushed past me and made his way farther back into the darkness. When my eyes adjusted, I saw a small form huddled against the wall of the cave. She was lying on one side, her arms curved protectively around her middle. Her clothes were worn, her face dirty, and the slant of light from the entrance
caught her eyes just so, giving her the look of a person caught in the throes of fever.

  But she was Maddy, unmistakably Maddy, and a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding whooshed out of my chest when I felt that spark of recognition deep inside me. Even after listening to the story Griffin had spun, I hadn’t been certain what we would find here.

  Who we would find here.

  But she still looked like our Maddy. She still felt like Maddy. She wasn’t the killer, and she was alive. That was more than I’d hoped for, more than I had a right to ask for, when I’d believed she was capable of the things we’d seen.

  The other ghost. Griffin’s words lingered in my mind. He’d brought us here, to her, but what was the likelihood that there were two ghosts following Maddy around?

  Then again, what had the likelihood been that there was even one?

  “Bryn?” Maddy didn’t sound sure of herself, like she thought I might have been a dream—which was probably a fair assumption, all things considered.

  “Maddy.” Everything in me wanted to go to her, to kneel beside her, but I couldn’t bring my feet to move—not until I knew that she wanted me there, wanted me close. “Mads.”

  “You came,” Maddy whispered. For a moment, all I could think was that the first time I’d seen Chase, locked in a cage in Callum’s basement and half out of his mind with the Change, he’d said the same thing.

  “Of course I came.”

  Maddy closed her eyes, and as Chase inhaled beside me, he caught a scent, too faint for my human nose to pick up.

  Tears.

  She hadn’t shed them yet, and I didn’t know whether I should go to her or just go. But we’d come here for a reason, and Callum’s warning was still fresh in my mind.

  “The other alphas will be looking for you,” I told Maddy, matching her whisper with one of my own. “Soon.”

  I wanted to be saying something else—that we loved her, that we missed her, that if I could have taken her pain and made it mine, I would have, in a heartbeat.