Raised by Wolves (10 page)

That I hadn’t always been one of them.

The familiar sound of a spit bubble popping had me looking over my left shoulder, toward Callum’s guard, and sure enough, I noticed that Casey wasn’t the only member of my household here. The twins were present and accounted for: two babies among scores of men, a burly Were who I recognized as one of Casey’s coworkers gently cradling one in each arm.

Well, at least I wasn’t completely on my own. Though after a moment’s reflection, I wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not. My allies in this circle consisted of a fashion-conscious teenage boy who believed in the holy power of the movie musical and two infants wearing shirts with little yellow and blue duckies on them.

An army, we were not.

Bryn. I felt a brush at the edge of my subconscious—not a word, but a gentle reminder—pushing against my hard-won psychic shields.

Right. Their ears were mine. I was supposed to be talking.

“I, Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, request the pack’s permission to speak with Chase, the Survivor.”

Since Chase didn’t have familial ties, the title seemed apt, and I thought I saw a fleck of understanding in Callum’s gaze, something that told me that he might have understood more than I’d given him credit for about my fascination with a boy who could kill me as easily as tell me the truth.

“As alpha of the Stone River Pack, I speak on behalf of my brothers in saying that I grant you these permissions, under the conditions as follow.”

I was prepared to hear this part, and I found myself strangely grateful that I was Callum’s and that he’d broken protocol enough to give me forewarning. I gave the requisite answers as he told me again about the way I would be expected to submit to those who accompanied me on my meetings, open my bond to the pack until this business was concluded, and run with them tonight.

And then Callum told me the last requirement. “In exchange for this favor, you will excuse yourself from any meetings involving the North American Senate for the next five months.”

This was … unexpected. All of Callum’s other conditions involved me becoming more a part of the pack, and being a good little pack daughter, but this one pushed me away. The Senate didn’t convene on a regular basis, and frankly, I had no desire to be there when they did. My bond with Callum connected me to his pack, and it made me smell like Stone River—and Callum—to other Weres, but I wasn’t connected to any of the other alphas on the Senate. I didn’t feel safe around them, and the artifice of bureaucracy surrounding the Senate did nothing to conceal the amount of testosterone pushing each of the alphas to test his dominance against the others. The eight of them had a gentlemen’s agreement not to challenge each other, but I didn’t relish being in a room with men nearly as strong as Callum who weren’t bound by his word to keep me safe.

“I agree to this condition, Alpha,” I said.

Was that relief on Callum’s face? My stomach twisted sharply as his features settled back into an unreadable mask, and I had a single second to wonder if he knew something that I didn’t.

Callum knew better than to leave me wondering long. His voice boomed out around me, calm and cool, saturated with power caged, and my thoughts stilled until all I saw was Callum, and all I heard were his words.

“Our conditions have been set and agreed to. The agreement is sealed.” Callum took a step toward me and dug his fingernails slightly into my bare shoulder blade—not enough to draw blood, because this time, the motion was for show and carried symbolic but not literal power. In response, I bowed my head and then reached forward, my nails digging into his flesh, putting my seal on the agreement.

Bryn.

There it was again, the push at the outside of my psyche, and I realized that this time, the reminder was less about prodding me to pay attention and more of a gentle push against my defenses.

The defenses that I’d just agreed to let down.

I bit my bottom lip and nodded, and as I closed my eyes and walked myself backward through everything I’d done over the years to close myself off from them, to protect myself, to become my own person, a sob got caught in my throat.

Callum might as well have ordered me to take off my clothes and let these men watch the strip show. I would be humiliated, laid bare, and vulnerable. Naked in every way that mattered.

Bryn. The echo was calming this time, but closer—under my skin instead of on top of it—and I shuddered, but pushed forward.

I took the things that were most me, the secrets I guarded most dearly, the dreams I’d see die before I revealed them, and I folded them into a tiny ball, tucking them away in my heart, in a place that went deeper than words or fears or emotions. I pictured that ball—a tiny sphere of light—and I promised myself that it would still be intact when I came back to retrieve it, that I’d still be me when all was said and done. If Callum saw what I was doing, his amber eyes gave no hint of that knowledge, and I heard his voice in my head again.

Bryn.

Giving in to its hypnotic call, I went back in the maze of my mind as far as I could remember, to the last time I’d stood before this Crescent, four years old and following Callum’s edict to look at him, only at him, as he Marked me as his own.

Ali had stood beside me then, all of twenty-one, and I wondered if she’d felt the way that I felt now. If she’d let them violate her for my sake.

And then I raised my eyes to Callum’s, just as I had then, and I told him, with every part of myself, that I was his. That I was Pack. And that, for the first time since I’d learned to close myself off from the overwhelming will of the pack, I was really theirs, too.

Communal awareness came at me from all sides, like a wave knocking me off my feet and down into the undertow. My first instinct was to fight it, to run, to slam my mental walls back up ten times stronger than they’d been before, but they pulled at me, my pack-mates—their minds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Their togetherness. Their wolves. And even though I didn’t have another creature inside of me to respond to theirs, my body seemed completely unaware of this fact. I needed to be with them. Closer to them. Among them.

I needed to be Pack.

On some level, I knew that this was the hardest thing, the worst thing about letting them in—I had no guarantee that I’d ever be able to get rid of them, because I had no guarantee that I would ever want to. The life I’d been living was no less than sensory deprivation.

Callum’s hand was on my neck again, and I leaned into it.

Safety. Warmth. Alpha, my pack-sense told me.

Callum. Here. Mine. And then, one by one, the others came forward, placing a hand on me, touching me softly. It should have been creepy. I should have been giving lectures about my bubble and the fact that I despised having anyone stand inside it, but I wasn’t.

Instead, all I could think was that for the first time in forever, Callum wasn’t the only person who felt safe. He wasn’t the only one I could trust to protect me, to save me, to let me be me, even when it caused him no small amount of strife.

This was my family. Even the ones I didn’t like, even the ones who’d wanted me dead for as long as they’d known me—they were mine the same way Katie and Alex were. We were part of each other, and even if there was no love between us, there was something.

Pack.

I felt the change before I saw it—electrifying on my skin’s surface, but world-changing inside of it. I could feel myself changing—not into a wolf but into the person I was in the pack. A daughter. A sister. A force of nature.

Their strength flowed through me. I couldn’t force my human limbs to harness the power of their wolves, but I felt it, and for the first time in forever, it didn’t scare me.

Callum arched his back, and with that single motion, his human form melted away, the transition from man to wolf as seamless as water going from a cup to a puddle on the floor. His fur was gray and tawny-tipped, and he stretched once, pushing his front paws into the ground and raising his tail, before straightening to his full height.

As a man, Callum was built more like a cowboy than a linebacker, threatening only if you knew how much power lay under his skin, but in animal form, his weight rearranged itself into something that took your breath away. No one, under any circumstances, would have mistaken Callum for a natural wolf. He was enormous, and with a wolfy smile on his face, he looked directly at me.

“Arrroooooooooo!”

That sound—which I classified as halfway in between a howl and a Justin Timberlake solo—had me whirling around.

Devon! He was larger than a normal Were, nearly Callum’s size and not even full-grown. There was a Herculean grace to his movements, a lightness to his four-legged step.

My Devon.

He jumped up and knocked me gently over, and a second later, the two of us were rolling around on the ground, the way we had when we were still really little. He took care with his claws and teeth, and I dug my fingers into his belly, tickling and scratching, and when he buried his nose in my hair and woofed slightly, breathing in and out next to my ear, I smiled.

And then Kaitlin was there, barreling toward me at full speed. She dodged through the older wolves, and they carefully stepped aside, each and every gaze on her, their heads tilting to the sides with wolfish reverence.

Kaitlin dove headfirst into our wrestling match, and I wrapped my arms around her, lifting her puppy body up into the air and then bringing her down and rubbing my nose into her fur. She lapped at my face, and her tail beat viciously back and forth, so fast that her entire body was vibrating.

Girl! She seemed to say. Sister! Pack! Bryn!

The combination of these things seemed to be more than she could bear, and I let her prance up and down my body, until she lost her balance and rolled head-over-tail to the ground. The other wolves went deadly still beside me, but Katie bounced straight back up and with a dignified yip, brought Alexander down upon me as well. Struggling to keep up with his sister, he bounded over and immediately latched his teeth onto my pants leg and started tugging.

Katie was a wrestler, but Alex—I knew instinctively—wanted to run.

I wanted to run.

But I couldn’t. Not yet. Alpha. Alpha. Alpha, my pack-sense was telling me, and in unison, Katie, Alex, Dev, and I turned to Callum, who threw back his head and howled, a long, joyous noise that the others echoed.

That I echoed in my high, clear human voice.

And then we ran. Furry bodies all around me, bumping into me, weaving in and out of my legs, and I just jumped over them. I cried out to them. I sang and screamed and tried to outrun them, and even though I stood about as good a chance as one of the babies, they let me. Gray and gold and brown and white and black and every shade in between: the pack was a blur of colors, and even though I couldn’t help but pick up on their awareness of my pale, patchy, furless skin, it didn’t matter. Not to me and not to them.

Any one of them—save perhaps for the twins—could have killed me in a heartbeat. They could have broken my bones, snapped my neck, opened my jugular. They could have eaten me, destroyed me, torn apart my remains.

But they didn’t. And the call of my connection to them was so strong that I didn’t even think about the other wolves I’d seen in my lifetime: men Shifting into monsters, jaws snapping at human throats.

Instead, I thought of the wind in my face and the smell and taste of the forest, the feel of it under my brothers’ paws.

The pack was safe.

The pack was together.

The pack was mine.

THE NEXT DAY, I WOKE UP AN HOUR BEFORE MY alarm went off with a cramp in my calf, leaves in my hair, and a strange substance that I desperately hoped was dirt under my fingernails. It took me a moment to remember, and then the night before came back to me like a dream. I’d felt powerful. Invincible. Safe.

And totally and completely unlike myself.

It was scary how easy it was to get lost to the pack-mentality. How right it felt to belong, despite the fact that belonging wasn’t something I’d ever needed before. At school, I didn’t really mind the way the other girls turned up their noses at me. I’d never really bothered much more with the fact that most of the pack tended to view me as Other, too. Unless they sensed an outside threat, I was Callum’s pet and Devon’s friend, not one of them, and that was fine.

But last night, I’d been something different. And even now, lying in my bed in Ali’s house, I could feel them—each and every member of the pack: Devon curled at the bottom of his bed; Marcus prowling through his house with clenched fists and fist-shaped holes in his walls; Katie and Alex still asleep. Casey was …

Casey was in bed with Ali. And that was where I drew the line. Because, eww.

This whole pack-bond thing was kind of out of control. Especially if I followed the logic of my current situation to completion, because that told me that as much as I was in their heads, they were in mine.

Stupid werewolves.

Still in bed, Bryn?

Callum’s voice was in my head, not surprising given the fact that he’d practically been there before I’d opened up to the others.

Are you reading my mind? I asked him point-blank, ignoring his question and the fact that I was probably due to start training any minute.

Your thoughts are your own, m’dear. Your emotions, physical movements, location, and instincts are another matter.

My instinct was to tell him that he blew. Trusting that he’d pick up on that little psychic tidbit, I rolled out of bed and stumbled to my closet, unsteady and wobbly on my feet. I felt like I’d run a marathon. Through a vat of cement. With weights on my legs.

The night before, I’d been too drunk on power to listen to any objections my body might have had about the pace I’d kept. Today, however, each and every complaint was registering loud and clear.

We’ll start with a morning run, I think. You’ve a bit of time before the school day starts.