Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (108 page)

“I want you to promise me something.” Sora reached back and pulled her ponytail over to one side, baring her neck on the other. The knife in my hand felt heavy.

Too heavy.

“What?” I asked, my mouth cotton dry, my palms sweating.

“Don’t let things end between you and Callum the way they’re ending for Devon and me. Whatever Callum does, whatever he sees or doesn’t see, says or doesn’t say, however the next year plays out”—she took a deep breath, her chest rising and falling with the effort—“trust that he has his reasons, and that you matter.”

She looked over my shoulder, at the setting sun.

“You’ve always mattered.”

To Callum? To her? To Devon? She didn’t elaborate. Instead,
she reached down and took the knife from my right hand and placed it in my left.

“Start with a gun.”

A moment later, I had one in my hand. Was it hers? Mine? I wasn’t sure. I felt like I was moving through a fog. Sora wrapped her hand around mine and brought the gun to rest on the side of her head, where neck met skull. She angled the barrel upward.

“Put a bullet here,” she said, and then she nodded to the knife. “Then cut out my heart.”

My hand shook. My eyes stung with tears. I tried to blink them away, but they built behind my eyelids until I couldn’t see—I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see her waiting, ready and willing to die.

“You can do this,” Sora whispered. “You have to.”

I hurt for Dev. I hurt for me. I hurt, and I hurt, and I hurt—and I had to kill her.

“Bryn.” The voice came from behind me, but I didn’t recognize it. Chase? Griffin? Jed?

I didn’t know. I didn’t care, because I was standing there with a gun, and Sora was waiting. The trigger was cool against my finger. My injured shoulder was screaming with the effort it took to hold the gun.

Do it
, I thought.

“He’s back, Bryn. He’s coming.”

So the voice was Griffin’s, then. There was tension in it, and
exhaustion. The monster was here and ready to play. Maddy’s distraction had only worked so long.

Do it
.

“Bryn.” Sora’s voice was gentle, but unwavering. If I didn’t kill her, she’d take care of the job herself, and I owed her more than that.

I owed her this.

“Okay,” I said, a sob caught in my throat. “Okay.”

Beside me, Griff stepped into view, a visual reminder that we were running out of time, a ghostly countdown clock to the next attack. He trembled. His eyes took on an odd, otherworldly light.

“I’m losing it,” he said. “The pressure—it’s pulling me—he’s pushing me—”

Lake stepped into my peripheral vision, right next to Griff. I began counting down in my head.

Three
, I thought, training my eyes back on Sora’s.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Lake said from beside me, her words aimed at Griffin, not me.

Two
, I thought.

“Lakie, I’m so sorry—”

One
. I took a deep breath. The muscles in my arms tensed. I went to pull the trigger.

“Ow!”

I stopped.

“Bryn, please.” Sora’s voice was more insistent this time, less gentle, but I turned to look at Griffin.

“What did you say?” I asked, my voice catching like a sob in my throat. “You said
ow
,” I continued, my voice rising—high-pitched, desperate, loud. “You said ow. Why?”

Griffin stared at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. My fingers tightened around the barrel of the gun.

“Tell. Me. Why.”

“Lake hit me,” Griffin said.

“Of course I hit you! You think you can just blink out of existence, and I won’t even hit you?”

Lake had punched him, and he’d felt it. It had
hurt
.

I lowered the gun, my body shaking like it might never stop, my arm weak, my shoulder useless.

“She hit you,” I said dumbly, “and it hurt.” I didn’t wait to see the words register on their faces. Instead, I turned back to Sora.

Her eyes were sharp.

“You don’t know that it will work,” she told me.

“We don’t know that anything will,” I countered. “All we know is that up until five seconds ago, the only thing that had ever hurt Griffin was someone hurting Lake, and now it looks like
she
might be able to hurt him, too.”

Two Shadows couldn’t exist in the same place.

A Shadow was injured when you injured his living twin.

And—if Lake and Griffin were any kind of test case—the twin in question could fight the Shadow.

“Let him come,” I told Griffin, before turning back to Sora.
There was no room for questions here, no room for doubt. I took the gun from my hand and transferred it to hers.

“You can fight him. You can win.”

Sora handed the gun back. Without a word, she began to strip off her shirt, and that was when I knew—she’d fight the Shadow, the way she’d fought her brother when he was alive.

As a wolf.

Her face was impossible to read. Her hands hung loose by her sides. The last thing she said to me, before she started to Shift, was five little words.

“Permission to enter your territory?”

Beside me, Lake dropped her hand from Griffin’s shoulder. She took a step back, masking her anguish with a broad and predatory smile. Griff closed his eyes, spread his hands out to the side, and stopped fighting.

The moment before he disappeared and everything went to hell in a handbasket, I gave Sora her response.

“Permission granted.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

T
HE SECOND
G
RIFFIN DISAPPEARED, THE REST OF
us scattered like shrapnel. Behind me, I heard Sora Shifting:
snap-snap-crunch-scream-snap
. The sound was an unholy rhythm, a grossly melodic call to arms. My skin itched with the sound of it; my bones ached with the desire to shed my human flesh like unwanted clothes.

Opposite me, Chase tilted his head slightly sideways, the muscles in his neck straining against his human form.

Shift. Shift. Shift
.

The call was there, in the air—but it wasn’t alone. There was another presence, just as feral, just as hard to deny.

He was here.

The humid summer air was thick with violence, thick with rage—everywhere, all around us.

Small room. No windows. No doors
.

I called up the image, and power rose in my body, heat radiating outward from my stomach. The constant pain in my shoulder faded to mere memory, taking with it my
limitations, my awareness of anything except my opponent.

I felt his presence like an actual shadow, blocking light from my eyes. I whirled around and stepped sideways, caught in an unthinking waltz.

I just had to survive until Sora finished Shifting.

I just had to keep him here until she could take him out.

Ghostly fingers stroked the back of my neck—human fingers. For now. I ducked out of their ice-cold grasp, exploding forward and away, adrenaline pumping through my body, my limbs tingling with an almost electric charge.

And then I saw him.

He must have wanted me to, must have chosen that moment to let me see his face. His hair was dark brown, a shade or two lighter than Sora’s. His eyes were darker than they’d been in life—so dark that the pupil bled into the iris, a single, inky orb.

He smiled.

“Hello, little Bryn.” He didn’t sound like a monster. He never had. “Still so beautiful. Still so strong.” He breathed in deeply through his nose and stepped forward. “Still
mine
.”

Seeing him made it easier to track his movements, but I held to my Resilient state, let it flow through my body, like water through a dam.

Fight. Fight. Fight
.

“What do you think will happen,” the Shadow with Wilson’s face said slowly, “if I Change you now?”

The question sent a chill down the back of my neck, like
a spider crawling down my spine. The chunk this thing had already taken out of my shoulder had numbed me, before it had hurt. This wasn’t a normal Were we were dealing with. If Wilson brought me to the brink of death and Changed me—the way Callum hadn’t, not yet—what manner of beast would I be?

No
. I wouldn’t think about that. I wouldn’t think about anything, except the smell of death and clammy palms and the claustrophobic room in my head, where my nightmares lived.

Fear
.

The Shadow stepped forward and then blurred. One second, he was ten feet away from me, the next, he was rubbing his cheek over mine. In a flash of black fur, Chase leapt for me, leapt for him, but Wilson disappeared.

“Nuh-uh-uh,” the monster said, his voice coming from all around us. “Can’t run, can’t hide.”

I felt him, felt his breath on my skin, felt him closing in.

“I should thank you,” he whispered, in stereo. “For killing me.”

I flew backward and hit a tree trunk. I absorbed the blow and rolled to my feet. I heard the sound of paws on the ground. I felt him leaping—

Thud
.

A large wolf—tan fur, white markings, lethal—collided with the invisible predator midair. A high-pitched yelp turned into a growl as the two of them hit the ground, each grappling for control.

Sora was brutal, efficient. Fighting an invisible opponent, she was nothing but fangs and claws, beautiful, deadly grace. Blood, so dark it was nearly black, marked the white fur around her muzzle. Phantom teeth sunk into her flank, but she shook her assailant off violently and whirled around, jaws snapping, fur on end.

The air quivered, like the surface of a pond under an onslaught of skipping stones, and then Wilson appeared again.

This time, I doubted it was on purpose.

In wolf form, he was the creature I remembered from my nightmares. There was a white star on his forehead. His eyes were intelligent, his fur matted with blood. Suddenly, I didn’t have to work to hold on to the red haze.

It threatened to overwhelm me.

Escape. Have to—run—have to—

I reined it in, pulling the power inward, feeling it as a ball of fire in my chest. I wasn’t four years old anymore.

I wasn’t running.

Sora flew through the air again, mouth full of blood-marked teeth, death in her eyes. She grabbed him by the throat.

She pinned him.

His legs scrambled for purchase, but she slammed her body sideways, crushing his limbs under her weight. She met his eyes, his blood filling her mouth.

And then he Shifted—silently, effortlessly, as only a dead
werewolf could. She let go of his neck, just for a second. Blood dripped off his body, disappearing the moment it hit the ground.

He gargled.

For a second, they stared at each other—wolf and human, twins. I knew, beyond all rationale or reason, that she’d held him at this point before.

That she’d let him go.

I stopped breathing. She nudged his face with her nose. Licked his chin. And then, without warning, she lunged. Her teeth closed around his human neck. She bit down, until she hit bone, and then she jerked her head sideways.

His spine snapped.

His eyes lolled backward.

His head hung on by a thread.

I felt Sora begin to Shift before I heard it. In human form—naked, her body smeared with blood—she knelt next to him.

“Give me a knife.” Her voice was rough, her words short and sharp. I walked to her, knelt next to her, placed my knife in her hands.

She leaned forward, whispered something in his ear. Then, dark hair running free down her back, her lips ruby red with her brother’s blood, she drove the knife into his chest and cut out his heart.

His legs turned gray, then his torso, his arms, his face, until we were looking at a corpse. His eyes sank back in his skull;
his body decomposed. The earth rumbled under our feet, and in an explosion of light—fireworks at midnight, the sun just after an eclipse—he was gone.

Sora collapsed backward on her knees, her body folding in on itself. The curve of her spine caught the last bit of twilight, and I could see heavy breaths wracking her body.

Fifteen, twenty seconds later, she rose. She walked calmly to her discarded clothes. She got dressed, and then she turned back to me.

“The message I gave you?” she said. “For Devon?”

I nodded.

She closed her eyes. “I’ll tell him myself.”

Belatedly, I remembered to let go of the little room, the panic, the fear—and the fight drained out of my body with it. I was so tired, exhausted—and I hadn’t even done anything.

“That’s the danger,” Jed said gruffly. “You stay there too long, you hold on too tight—it can kill you.”

Because what I really needed was to add more to the list of things that could kill me.

One by one, I surveyed our little group. We’d survived. All of us. But as I met Lake’s eyes, I realized something was wrong.

“Where’s Griffin?” I asked.

She didn’t respond, and I realized that he hadn’t come back. Wherever he went when he wasn’t here, wherever Wilson had sent him—he hadn’t come back.

“Bryn.” Sora—a clothed Sora—called my name from the
Stone River side of the Montana-Wyoming border. I forced myself to tear my attention away from Lake, even as I felt her fighting a silent battle with herself—