Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (83 page)

And just like that, I couldn’t feel the pain, not in any way that mattered. I ran faster, the burst of energy coming out of nowhere, the need to escape overwhelming, all consuming.…

And then gone.

As suddenly as I’d shifted into the altered state, I fell out of it.

No
, I thought.
No, no, no
.

I’d been so close. For a moment, I’d almost had it. I’d felt it. I’d
controlled
it, but now I was just me again: sweating and exhausted and human, as incapable of summoning up my Resilience as I would have been at fighting back the tide.

Spent, I collapsed on the ground, my back against the trunk of an old tree, my lungs and legs and common sense rebelling against the ordeal I’d just put myself through: the physical pain, the strain on my endurance, the panic I’d worked myself into on purpose.

At least I’d managed to get there this time. At least it had worked. If I could flip into fight or flight mode at will on Cedar Ridge land, in the safety of a forest that felt like home, there was hope that I’d be able to do it elsewhere, that I might be able to control this power I only halfway understood.

A large part of me still balked at the idea that some people were born with unnatural aptitudes: psychic knacks that pushed the bounds of possibility. Until I’d run into a coven of psychics bent on my destruction, I’d never identified that way myself. I was just a girl with a habit of surviving things
that would have killed a normal person—things like being attacked by a werewolf or set on fire by a coven of psychics.

Just, you know, for instance.

Avoiding a trip down memory lane, I waited for my breathing to even out and ignored the burning ache in my chest. It took a full five minutes for my heart rate to go back to normal, and even then I knew that I’d be feeling the effects of this little experiment tomorrow. This was the third time I’d attempted to jump-start my knack—which typically flared up only when I was in danger—and the first time I’d actually managed to tap into the power, for a few seconds at least.

“Damn fool thing you just did, Bryn,” someone opined, from behind me.

I didn’t bother turning around. At seventeen, I liked being called foolish about as much as I liked people treating me as if I was some fragile little butterfly, best kept under glass.

“I’ll live,” I replied. I’d spent my entire life surrounded by werewolves, whose animal instincts didn’t always line up with human ideas about “violence” and what was and was not an acceptable form of “conflict resolution.” Running in my bare feet wasn’t going to kill me.

“I don’t know,” my companion drawled, coming into view and rubbing the back of his hand roughly over his chin. “That mother of yours might kill you if you come in from the rain looking like that.”

“It’s not raining,” I replied, deliberately sidestepping the
older man’s point about Ali, which was probably true. My foster mother was not enamored with the fact that, as the alpha of a pack of werewolves—the only human alpha in history—my life was pretty much the textbook definition of
dangerous
. Ali wouldn’t take too kindly to the idea that after seven and a half months of relative calm, I was willingly putting myself through the wringer.

For practice.

Beside me, Jed said nothing, letting me mull over his words. Of all the people currently living at the Wayfarer, the old man was probably the only one who could have taken one look at me and known what I was up to—and why. Like me, Jed was Resilient. And human, which put him in the minority around here.

Reflexively, my mind went to a series of numbers ingrained in my very being.
Eight females. Ten males. Two humans
. The rest of the Cedar Ridge Pack was always there in my mind, their names a constant whisper in my subconscious. As alpha, I could feel each and every one of them—four-year-old Lily was waiting impatiently for Katie and Alex to wake up from their naps; Lake was spinning a pool cue around her fingers like a baton; Devon was in the shower, singing into a bottle of shaving cream at the top of his lungs; and Chase …

Chase was gone. Not for good. Not even for the night. He was checking in on the peripherals, the members of the pack who’d chosen to live at the edges of our territory instead of at
the center. As much as Chase hated leaving me—leaving what we had together—I knew there was a part of him that felt the distance as a relief. He wasn’t wired for pack living the way I was.

He was used to being on his own.

“Penny for your thoughts.” Jed’s voice was as gruff as always, but there was something about the set of his features—old and worn and wrinkled—that made me think he was being generous with his offer, that he didn’t need to pay a fictional penny for my thoughts when he understood why I’d been running fast and hard enough that I’d come close to throwing up.

“Things have been quiet,” I said finally, answering Jed’s question carefully. “They won’t always be quiet.”

And there it was. The reason I couldn’t just sit back on my haunches. There was a threat out there, and every day was like waiting for the guillotine to fall. I had to be ready. I had to do something. The rest of the pack trusted me to be prepared. They trusted me to make the right decisions, even when there wasn’t a right decision to be had.

They trusted me to lead, but I didn’t trust myself.

Sure, I’d make the decisions, I’d do whatever I could to make them safe, but at the end of the day, I was human. I was slower, weaker, more fragile—and if the previous year’s events had taught me anything, it was that to protect my pack, I might need to be something else.

Since I hadn’t heard word one from the werewolf who’d promised to Change me into one myself, that left only one
option. I had a psychic knack. I had power. I just didn’t know how to use it.

Yet.

“Seems to me, a girl like you could think of better uses for quiet time than running around and getting her feet all cut up.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Jed preempted the words.

“Seems to me, you could have asked someone.”

“For help,” I clarified, since Jed was a man of few words. “Asked someone for help.”

There were days when I relied on the rest of the pack as much as they relied on me, and days when the concept of help seemed as foreign as the idea that most girls my age were just starting to look at colleges. Being an alpha was impossible and lonely and bigger than anything my human half might have wanted.

“I don’t need help,” I said softly, willing that to be true.

Jed rolled his eyes heavenward. “I’m not suggesting you go belly-up and ask your Weres for pointers,” he said. “I’d wager the ability works differently once there’s another set of animal instincts at play.”

Like Jed and me, many of the wolves in my pack were Resilient. At one point in time, they’d been human.

Just like I was.

Just like I wouldn’t be anymore, once Callum made good on his promise to Change me.

In the distance, I heard a rumble of thunder. Looking up, I noticed the blue sky turning a dark and ominous gray.

“How’d you know it was going to rain?” I asked Jed.

He snorted. “I’ve broken just about every bone in my body at one point or another, Bryn. I can feel a storm coming from a mile away.”

Jed’s body was covered in scars. I’d gotten so used to seeing them that I barely noticed anymore, but his words reminded me he’d had a lifetime of experience coming out on top of fights he had no business winning.

If anyone understood that a few scratches were a small price to pay for what I was seeking, it was Jed.

“You’ll help me?”

Jed nodded, gazing out at the horizon, looking oddly at peace as it started to rain. “I’ll help you,” he said. “But we’ll do it my way.”

I was going to go out on a limb and guess that his way did not involve putting myself through hell in hopes of convincing my body I was under attack.

“Fine by me.”

Jed gave me a look that said he thought I was constitutionally incapable of doing things any way but my own. Once upon a time, that might have been true, but now I’d do whatever it took to keep my pack safe. To be the kind of alpha they deserved and make sure that what had happened last winter never, ever happened again.

With nothing more than a nod in my direction, Jed began walking back toward shelter, but I just sat there, letting the
rain beat against my body and thinking about a broken boy with hungry eyes.

A boy I’d invited into my pack.

A boy who’d tried to kill me.

A boy I’d killed.

Bone-tired and sopping wet, I went home.

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE CLOSER
I
GOT TO THE
W
AYFARER, THE MORE
aware I was of the rest of the pack, and the more aware they were of me. Being alpha meant that the others didn’t have an all-access pass to my mind, the way I did to theirs, but even without the benefits of the pack-bond, my friends knew me well enough to know that a quiet Bryn meant Trouble with a capital
T
.

I wasn’t altogether surprised to find someone waiting for me at the clearing.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

If ever a werewolf had mastered the art of yelling from the diaphragm, it was Dev. Like a knight guarding a princess’s tower, he put his hands on his hips and threw his head back haughtily.

I could so feel a Monty Python impression coming on.

“ ’Tis I,” I yelled back, playing along. “Queen Bryn.”

With any luck, I could distract my best friend—and second-in-command—enough that he wouldn’t pay much attention to the fact that I looked like I’d been mud wresting—and lost.

“Queen?” Devon repeated, looking down his nose at me. Since he was six foot five, he had a long way to look. “Thou dost not look like a queen.”

I rolled my eyes, but amended my previous statement. “ ’Tis I. Peasant Bryn.”

Dev’s lips twitched, but he didn’t crack a smile, which was not a good sign. That Peasant Bryn line was comedy gold.

“You okay?” he asked, dropping the accent and searching my face for the answer.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “I just went for a run.”

To a werewolf’s nose, those words would have smelled true. I
was
fine—as fine as I could be, given everything that had happened in the past two years.

“You want to tell me why you’re not wearing any shoes?” Devon asked, quirking one eyebrow to ridiculous heights.

“Not really,” I replied. “Peasant Bryn is a girl of few words.”

Maybe I should have given him a real answer, but this was Devon. He couldn’t stand to see me in pain. I doubted he’d understand why I’d sought it out.

A twig snapped somewhere behind us—fair warning we were about to have company. If I’d been in a more charitable mood, I might have acknowledged the fact that “company” had probably stepped on the twig on purpose. I knew better than anyone if Caroline didn’t want to be heard, she wasn’t heard. She came out of nowhere and disappeared the same way. She was the ultimate hunter, a psychic with supernaturally good aim.

We weren’t really what one would call best buds.

“Heya, Caro,” Devon called, perfectly amiable. I didn’t understand how he could call her by a nickname. She’d been a part of the coven that had waged war against our pack. She’d made our people bleed—Devon included.

“Did Jed find you?” Caroline met my eyes and ignored Devon. Dev wasn’t the type to be ignored, but for some reason, he let Caroline get away with it.

If you asked me, Caroline got away with a lot.

“Jed found me,” I told her. I didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t seem to expect me to.

“In that case,” she said, turning back the way she came, “I guess there’s not really anything else for me to say.”

As she turned, I caught a glimmer of something in her eyes, and I couldn’t help but think of the way Ali looked, gritting her teeth and breathing through the worst life had to offer, the memories that cut her to the bone.

“Wait.”

Caroline paused. She waited. I didn’t know what else to say to her, didn’t want to be talking to her at all, but the resemblance to my foster mother, however fleeting, had reminded me that no matter what this girl had done, she was family. Ali’s family.

Her biological family.

“You should come by to see Ali more,” I said finally.

That was as close to an olive branch as I could come. Caroline
lived with Jed: on our land, but not in the house I shared with Ali; privy to what the rest of us really were, but not a part of the pack. If I’d had my way, the girl who’d shot Devon and—whether she’d meant to or not, whether she’d had a choice in the matter or not—helped kill one of our own would have been living in another hemisphere. But Ali cared about her. She wanted a relationship with her, and I couldn’t be the one to screw that up.

Family mattered to Ali the way Pack did to me.

Family. Pack
. That combination of words made me think of another person who should have been standing here, but wasn’t. A person whose absence I couldn’t blame on Caroline in any way, shape, or form.