Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (74 page)

Survive. Survive. Survive
.

An instant before I completely lost it and gave in to the desire to do to Shay what I had done to the psychics on the street, the cue ball disappeared off the table, falling into one of the side pockets. Something gave inside me, and the blood-red haze began to fade.

Shay had just scratched.

On most shots, it wouldn’t have mattered all that much, but I was familiar enough with pool to know that scratching on the eight ball meant forfeiting the game.

Shay had lost.

I was still trying to process this when Shay froze in his stride toward Lake.

Devon turned back toward the table. Lake grinned.

“Well,” she drawled, setting her own stick down, “that has to hurt.”

Lake had always been a horrible winner, and it took me a moment to find the naked, vulnerable relief underneath her gloating.

Shay scratched
, I thought, letting myself believe it this time.
He lost
.

Beside me, I felt Chase reaching out, on the verge of saying something through the bond, but he must have decided against it, must have known how I would have taken it, because all there was between us was silence.

Relief painted my body with an unearthly, adrenaline-fueled glow. Lake was okay. I was okay. We were all okay—including Lucas, who Shay had just officially lost.

“Your permissions expire in a little over an hour,” I told Shay. “I expect you to retract your claim on Lucas and be off my land before then.”

I could feel Callum in the set of my jaw, the ease with which the words rolled off my tongue.

Shay snapped his pool cue in two, as easily as he could have—and would have—snapped my neck if it weren’t for Callum and the Senate. He stalked over to Lucas and lifted his limp body like a rag doll. Shay held him with one hand and flexed the fingers on the other until they began to take on the appearance of claws. He slashed his not-quite-human nails across Lucas’s face, and I felt the world shifting around us.

This was how pack transfers—the official kind—worked. The first alpha retracted his claim, cut off all mental ties,
leaving the second alpha free to instate his—or in my case,
her
—own.

As I watched, unable to tear my eyes away, Shay wrenched his mind out of Lucas’s with all of the delicacy of a dentist using pliers to pull teeth.

“You are nothing to me,” he said, the words coming out more like a growl than any I’d ever heard spoken out loud. “I am nothing to you. If you step foot on Snake Bend territory again, I will kill you.”

With that, Shay dropped Lucas back onto the ground, and the younger Were’s back arched so hard and fast that I thought his body would snap in two.

“Lucas.” Maddy was by his side in an instant, and as the panic cleared from Lucas’s eyes and he met hers, I saw the contours of his face the way she did, felt his hand on hers as if it were mine.

Lone. Wolf
.

My pack-sense trembled with the realization that Lucas didn’t feel foreign anymore—that now that Shay had released his hold, Lucas felt like something else altogether.

“He’s yours if you want him.” Shay kept his comment short and sweet. “But he’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”

That sounded more like a promise than a threat, and I thought of the psychics and everything Lucas had already led—however unwittingly—straight to our door.

“I doubt the Senate will be pleased when they find out you’ve been making deals with psychics.” I tossed the words
out like they meant nothing, but I saw the moment they hit their mark. “I may be new to all of this, but I’m fairly certain that bringing the outside world into Pack matters is frowned upon.”

Shay recovered before I could fully register how deep my threat had cut. “The Senate would want proof,” he said, “and without my help, I doubt you’ll be alive to give it.”

Without his
help
? I snorted. Shay had orchestrated all of this. He’d forced my hand to allow him entry to my lands, he’d strong-armed me into wagering one of my wolves against one of his, and now that he’d lost, he was trying to
offer me help
?

“Your pack has one adult male, fewer than a dozen teenagers, and a handful of children. You can’t expect to face down a coven of psychics on your own.”

To my left, Devon’s eyes glittered. “Would this be the same coven of psychics who are attacking us at
your
request?”

Shay shrugged, the human gesture completely at odds with the feral glint in his eyes. “The
why
and the
how
don’t matter. If I were you, I’d be more concerned with the
when
.”

Jed had warned me that Valerie might call an end to the armistice, repay my visit with one of her own now that she had a better idea of what I could do. Now, Shay seemed to be promising that Jed’s words would prove true.

“You have hours.” Shay began walking backward toward the door, each footstep falling like a gavel. “At most, you have a day. If and when you come to your senses, say the word, and
the Snake Bend Pack would be more than willing to cross into your territory and fight on your side.”

Fight on our side? He was the one who’d set them on us. Maybe if I hadn’t realized that, I would have taken his offer as mercurial, but given everything I knew, it seemed absurd.

“You’re offering to fight on our side?” I asked. “Couldn’t you just tell them to back down?”

Shay smiled. “Invite us into your territory,” he said, “and I will.”

Every time I thought I had Shay’s strategy figured out, I peeled back a layer of his machinations and found another one underneath.

He’d sent Lucas here so he’d have a reason to come to my territory. He’d made a play for Lake, and just in case that failed, he’d lined his pack up along our borders and sent the coven after me so that I’d have reason to invite his people in.

“The answer,” I said, the words working their way up from the pit of my stomach, uncompromising and sure, “is no.”

Backing me into a corner was a mistake, and someday, Shay would pay for it. Maybe not today, but eventually he’d regret every trap he’d laid for me and mine. I took a step toward him, this foreign alpha who didn’t belong here, and the rest of my pack moved in tandem, all eyes on Shay as we closed in.

He didn’t have my permission to be here any longer, and I wasn’t asking him for help.

Not surprisingly, given Shay’s pedigree, he didn’t flinch.
He didn’t blink. He didn’t even shrug. Instead, he lowered his voice to a whisper that crawled up my spine. “Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re in danger, I’m here, and Callum’s not.”

The statement hung in the air, and without another word, Shay Shifted effortlessly into wolf form, and in a blur of timber-colored fur—his markings a perfect match for Devon’s—he was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I
KNEW BETTER THAN TO LET
S
HAY GET UNDER MY
skin, but still, his parting shot hit me hard. I’d almost lost Lake—and Dev. I’d been threatened and burned, and another alpha was circling my territory, just waiting for an opportunity to swoop in.

There was a good chance the psychics were planning an attack.

And where was Callum?

Not here. He hadn’t even taken my phone call.

“If the psychics are planning to attack, we need to set up a defense.” I looked at the others, one after another: the peripherals, Lucas, my inner guard. “Able-bodied fighters need to be ready to fight. Earplugs are a must. Dev, tell Ali to get the younger kids together. They’re going on a field trip. Lake?”

Leaning back against the pool table, Lake preempted my next request. “Weapons?” she asked, all business.

“Anything that will help us secure the perimeter. I’m thinking some strategically placed explosives wouldn’t hurt.”

Some people lived for the phrase
strategically placed explosives
. Lake was one of those people.

“On it.”

I turned to Chase. “Help Maddy with Lucas,” I said.

Lucas’s bones were probably already healing, but he still hadn’t picked himself up off the floor. I couldn’t be sure how much damage Shay had done when he’d pulled out of Lucas’s head, so despite being free to claim him, I held back, uncertain if Lucas could take that kind of mental assault at the moment.

Besides, I had bigger fish to fry.

“Meet back here in half an hour,” I said. Just enough time for the others to finish their jobs and for me to get on with mine.

I didn’t know the coven’s plan of attack. I didn’t know the extent of their knacks. I didn’t know their weaknesses, or if killing Valerie would remove the emotional suggestions she’d planted.

But I knew somebody who probably did.

Callum might not have been omniscient. He might have seen the future as a complicated web, with possibilities branching out like leaves on a thousand-year-old tree. He might have
been limited by distance, but chances were good that he’d know something.

More than I knew, at least.

Now that Shay was technically out of the picture, Callum’s sharing what he knew couldn’t be considered a political alliance. The coven wasn’t a part of our world, their safety wasn’t a Senate concern.

“You’re going to answer,” I said, willing the words to be true. “You have to.”

I picked up the phone. I dialed.

“Hello.”

One word. Just one—but the moment I heard Callum’s voice, I had to sit down.

“This is the alpha of the Cedar Ridge Pack,” I said, my voice shaking with the things I wasn’t saying. “We have a situation with some humans, and from one alpha to another, I need some advice.”

“Bryn.” That was all he said—my name—but it was enough to make me feel absolutely naked, like he could see the expression on my face, like he could see inside me, no matter how far away he was.

“Callum.” A hint of steel crept into my voice. This wasn’t a social call.

“Did you get my gift?”

“Yes.” I paused. “I don’t suppose it means that the key to the coven’s destruction is
horses
.”

Callum made a choking sound, and I wondered if I’d actually managed to surprise a laugh out of him.

“This is serious, Callum. We have kids here. Katie. Alex. A half dozen others under the age of ten. Ali’s packing them up as we speak.”

“And where are you sending them?”

There was only one place I could send them, one person I could trust with their safety. Callum had to know that.

Had to know that it was him.

“I’ll get them out of the line of fire however I can.” I danced around the truth.

“And how many escorts will you be sending with your little ones?” Callum did a passable job of sounding curious, but I wasn’t fooled. He wasn’t asking for his benefit.

He was asking for mine, and I realized almost immediately that I couldn’t send the kids off by themselves—and that I didn’t have many guards to spare. Counting the peripherals, and me, we had ten able-bodied fighters—eleven if Lucas could heal enough to fight by our side. I couldn’t spare more than one or two to escort the kids, and that wasn’t good enough, not when the coven—or, if he was up for risking the Senate’s wrath, Shay—could feasibly intercept them along the way.

“I’ll send the kids into lockdown here,” I told Callum, thinking out loud. “If we fight the psychics, there’ll probably be casualties, but to get to the kids, they’d have to take us
all out, and I don’t think they have that kind of manpower, knacks or not.”

“Who do you think they’ll kill?”

If I hadn’t known Callum, hadn’t spent my entire life reading meaning into his most indecipherable tones, I would have thought the question was facetious, but it wasn’t.

He wanted names.

“You’d know better than I would,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.

Callum didn’t respond. I couldn’t even hear him breathing on the other side of the line, but werewolf hearing probably meant that he could hear the beating of my heart, the sound I made each time I swallowed.

“There are eleven of us,” I said, “assuming the wolf I just won from Shay can fight.” I didn’t mention that this assumption was stretching it, given Lucas’s current condition—and his previous experience with the psychics. “Chase, Maddy, and the peripherals are … 
scrappy
.”