Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (42 page)

None of the adults in our lives had been particularly pleased with our adventure to Alpine Creek. Our parents had arrived at the cabin just after the battle of wills with the Senate had ended—and needless to say, Lake and I hadn’t fared quite as well against Ali and Mitch as we had against the entire werewolf establishment. I’d spent most of the summer
grounded, and with the new school year fast approaching, Ali and Mitch had only backed off because, laissez-faire alpha or not, my mood tended to trickle down into the others, and a pack of stir-crazy juvenile wolves was nobody’s friend.

“Want another root beer?” Keely asked me.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

The man who’d futilely asked for more coffee turned to glare at me, but all I did was raise an eyebrow, and he looked very quickly away.

There were seventeen werewolves permanently in residence at the Wayfarer now—Lake, Mitch, Katie, Alex, Devon, and twelve of the kids we’d rescued from Alpine Creek. Some of the others—mostly teens—had chosen to make their way elsewhere. I hadn’t objected. The two who’d been attacked most recently had gone home, with the understanding that the local pack would treat them like visiting dignitaries and not try to claim them or enforce any dominance of their own. For now. Two or three others, all eighteen years old (or close enough to it to convince Ali they didn’t need constant supervision), were playing at being peripheral, though my pack-sense—
alpha-sense
—told me that none of them would stay gone for long.

You’re quiet today
.

The sound of Chase’s voice in my head made my lips curve slowly upward. There were moments when my pack-sense was still, and for seconds, maybe minutes at a time, I could
remember what it had been like when the two of us were the only people in my head.

The only people in the world.

I knew without asking that he was nearby. That if I snuck out my window late at night and tiptoed into the forest, I’d see him. I’d bring him clothes, and he’d shed his wolf skin, and under the blanket of darkness, he’d tell me everything he’d seen since he’d been gone.

Chase was my eyes and ears. Lake and Devon were my guard, the way Devon’s parents were Callum’s, but Chase was my emissary, the one who ran the perimeter of our territory and reported back.

The job suited him, and it suited Ali that he wasn’t always here, that some days, there was space between us and she could pretend that since he hadn’t Marked me and I hadn’t Marked him, we were just two crazy kids with a crush.

You’re always quiet
, I replied to Chase’s comment by turning it around on him.
I miss you
.

I felt the reply from his wolf, the kind that told me that sometimes, they thought they’d spent their whole lives missing me.

Dork
.

Cynic
, Chase retorted.

I wished that I could leave my root beer on the counter and run out to meet him, but being alpha meant that I didn’t always get to do as I pleased. Sometimes, I had to do things
just because they needed to be done, even if they terrified me.

Even if they made me feel like there was a possibility that the entire world might fall out from underneath me.

That was what I was doing in the restaurant today—besides watching Maddy and Lake torturing the clientele. The alpha of the Stone River Pack had requested a meeting with me.

I’d agreed.

Callum and I hadn’t seen each other since he’d walked out of that cabin in the woods. He hadn’t called me. He hadn’t written. He hadn’t made a single move to even talk to me until now.

Pack. Pack. Pack
.

I took some relief in their presence, and I opened up my senses, reminding myself that I was doing this for them. That Callum was an ally, not my keeper. That I was an alpha, not his girl.

Sipping on my root beer, I swung my feet back and forth and found amusement in the way that Lake zeroed in on a target—human, most likely—to hustle at pool. A low hum in my pack-bond brought my eyes to look for Maddy, who had fallen into a quiet spell, the kind she still had every hour or two, and I reached out to her with my mind, reminding her that I was here. That we all were. And that she was herself.

Maddy, not Madison.

Ours, not Wilson’s.

Healing, not broken.

She hadn’t been able to go back to her family. Not after
being dead for ten years, not when she couldn’t go more than a mile away from the rest of our pack without her wolf driving her back—to pack, to safety, to home.

“Bryn.”

I turned toward Callum’s voice, and something inside of me began to dissolve. Seeing him would always make me feel like a kid, and it would always remind me of the things that had brought me here. The things he’d done and the things he hadn’t. Some days, I thought everything went back to Callum—

He’d saved me from the Rabid when I was four.

He’d Marked me.

He’d raised me.

He’d given me Ali, who loved me enough to take me away.

He’d trained me.

He’d pushed me.

He’d lied to me.

And ultimately, he’d let me discover the truth, because based on everything I’d learned about Callum’s
knack
, he had to have known that I would.

“Let’s walk,” I said.

For a long time, Callum and I walked and said nothing. And then, finally, he spoke. “How are your grades?”

Somehow, I hadn’t pictured that as being his opening.

I rolled my eyes. “It’s summer. No school, ergo no grades. Ali’s been homeschooling the youngest of the new Weres,
though. They aren’t quite elementary school–ready yet, so she’s got her hands full.” I paused. “Lake, Maddy, and I will be driving in to the closest high school starting in September. Chase and Devon, too.” I was babbling, but I couldn’t seem to help it. “How is Ali?” Callum asked me.

I nodded. “She’s good. She misses Casey, but I don’t think she’ll ever go back to him.”

Casey had dropped by, with my permission, a few weeks after we’d gotten back from Alpine Creek. He’d come to see the twins and to talk to Ali. It killed me that I’d been the one to tear the two of them apart, but the simple truth was that Ali might eventually forgive him for the part he’d played in hurting me, but she’d never let him in again. Not when she knew that if push came to shove, pack loyalty would always run deeper than anything he felt toward her.

“He visits the twins sometimes,” I said. “We’re thinking of taking them to Ark Valley for Christmas. If the alpha of that region gives us permission.”

Katie and Alex were nine months now, but they looked more like two-year-olds. They were gaining on Lily every day, much to her indignant dismay. Ali said the twins’ growth would slow down by their first birthday, but that they’d always be a little ahead of the curve.

“Is this what you came here to talk about?” I asked. “Ali and the twins? My grades?”

“Education is important,” Callum argued reflexively.

This wasn’t what I’d expected for my first interaction with one of the other alphas as their equal. Callum had walked out that door the day my pack had killed Wilson, the same as the others alphas had, and he’d signed off on giving me part of his territory from afar. Somehow, I’d imagined our first face-to-face meeting being more ominous.

I’d imagined it hurting more.

“We miss you,” Callum said. “And Devon.”

Sora and Lance couldn’t have been happy about the fact that Devon had left Ark Valley, but at the same time, I doubted they were surprised. Their oldest son had left his pack and fought his way to the top of another when he wasn’t that much older than Devon was now.

With or without me, Dev would have left Ark Valley eventually. He was too strong and too independent to stay.

“I miss you, too,” I told Callum. A month earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to say the words. I wouldn’t have even been able to think them, and I certainly wouldn’t have meant them. I wondered if he knew that I wasn’t talking about the pack. For most of my life, he’d been one of the most important people in it. He’d lied to me and he’d beaten me and he’d helped me and then left me alone to deal with the fallout, but he was still Callum. I still had his Mark carved into my body.

I always would.

Moving with fluid grace, Callum turned and pulled me into a hug. He didn’t rub his cheek against mine, didn’t Mark me
as his or try to get me to submit. He just held me, and then he moved back and looked me in the eye.

I felt his wolf reaching out to me, calling to me through the power that bound me to others of his kind. At first, my instinct was to slam up my psychic shield, but a small sound escaped Callum’s mouth, and I realized that he wasn’t asking to be let into my head, or to control my bonds.

He was offering to let me into his.

Cautiously, I looked into his eyes, and I reached out to him, my heart speeding up as I did. Part of me recoiled, waiting to be slapped back, and throughout my territory, Cedar Ridge wolves stopped what they were doing and answered my distress.

I’m fine
, I told them.
I’m going to be okay
.

And I would be. This was Callum. And even though a large part of me didn’t trust him, there were also parts of me that always would.

So I let down my own walls, and I stared into his eyes, and Callum reached out and caught my mind, the way he’d caught my body when I’d launched myself at him as a child, putting me on his shoulders and spinning me around.

In those seconds that I was inside Callum’s head, I saw the world through his eyes, and I realized that Mitch had vastly understated the power of Callum’s prescience. It wasn’t just a habit for knowing what was going to happen, an instinct. It was a web, an intricate web of possibilities, of dominoes
that could fall, paths that might be taken, and the futures that might result from each.

Everything was connected. Every action had a consequence, and though it was very hard to get the drop on Callum, he wasn’t all-knowing. His power was limited by physical proximity—of all the children Wilson had attacked, I’d been the only one close enough for him to see. And even when an event was close enough, when he could make out the threads crisscrossing the time line’s web, he wasn’t perfect. He couldn’t control the future. He could only steer it—stay away from actions that led to dead ends; do things that he didn’t want to do to save the people he cared about in the long run.

Slowly, I unraveled his interactions with me. He’d come to save me when I was four, because he’d known I’d need saving, but he hadn’t gotten the vision in time to save my parents as well. And when he’d failed on that front, he’d seen horrible things in my future if he left me there, so he took me with him. And he’d known that the pack wouldn’t accept me unless they had to, so he’d Marked me and forced their hands, and he’d seen that he couldn’t give me to any of the other wolves or keep me himself without putting me at the center of a firestorm, so he’d chosen Ali and shown her what awaited me if she said no.

And then I flashed forward, and I saw myself from his perspective, the moment I’d heard those three little words from Chase’s lips.

I got bit
.

The possibilities in my future rearranged themselves, and Callum fought against them, trying to keep me safe. It was the reason he’d kept Chase away from me—down that path had been danger, and at the time, it had been the last thing that Callum had wanted for me. He’d always known that I’d be important someday, but he hadn’t foreseen the way I’d come to be a part of him. He hadn’t realized that he couldn’t always be the one saving me.

And from the moment I’d met Chase, he’d known. He’d known what could happen, known a thousand ways it could have gone wrong. I’d asked permissions, and he’d laid down the conditions. He’d trained me—not for fear of what might happen during my meeting with Chase, but in preparation for what I would face afterward. He’d made me open my pack-bond so that I would connect to Chase, not to keep me from it.

And then came the hardest thing to see, the hardest decision he’d made. Telling me to obey the others.

But if he hadn’t wanted to keep me from Chase, if he hadn’t been trying to keep the Rabid a secret—why?

Because
, his eyes seemed to whisper,
you had to leave
.

If he hadn’t given me the order, I wouldn’t have disobeyed it. If I hadn’t disobeyed it, he couldn’t have had Sora beat me, and Ali would never have taken me away. And if I’d never left Callum’s territory, I wouldn’t have had the time or the space or the room to grow up. I wouldn’t have recruited Lake to our
fight. I wouldn’t have been forced to use the dreamscape to communicate with Chase. I wouldn’t have found my way into the Rabid’s head.

Changing one piece of the puzzle changed them all, and this was something that Callum had constructed very carefully.

I came back into my own body and sat down hard on the ground. I’d realized that Callum had probably planned for me to throw Shay’s line about democracy back in his face, that he’d known or at least suspected that the Rabid’s victims would claim me as their alpha, but I hadn’t really let myself hope that I was anything more than a detail.

That to Callum, the big picture had always gone back, again and again, to
me
.

For months, years, maybe my entire life, Callum had been preparing me to save the children Wilson had Changed; he’d been pulling my strings and Chase’s and everyone else’s. And that moment—the one that had nearly destroyed me—when he’d ordered me beaten, he’d done it not to save face with the pack, but because he needed Ali to take me to Montana.

He’d done it for
me
.

“I’m not sorry for it, Bryn. I’d do it again. And I needed you to know that.”

I got the feeling that he wasn’t here looking for forgiveness, and he wasn’t here just to let me know that even when I thought he’d left me, I’d been loved. He was warning me—because sometime, down the line, his knack for seeing and
manipulating the future might involve me again. Depending on what he foresaw—for his pack, for me, and for mine—he might be left with some tough choices and he wouldn’t promise to deal me in, not if keeping me in the dark pushed things in the direction he wanted them to go.