Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (39 page)

Great. The townspeople must have reacted to the gunfire and fighting, but somehow, Wilson had slipped away with me, leaving my friends to deal with the fallout.

“You must be wondering where your friends are,” Wilson said, pulling up another chair and sitting directly across from me, like we were going to have a nice chat over cookies and tea. “You see, after we made our little exit—dirt bombs do wonders
for compromising werewolves visuals—your erstwhile protectors got a little caught up in town. People in Alpine Creek don’t like me, but they like outsiders even less. Especially the type who come in armed and start shooting up Main Street. I mostly keep to myself. Your friends, on the other hand, well, you can see why someone might think they were dangerous. I can only imagine that someone must have called the sheriff. He’s easily bribed, but unfortunately for you, he’s more of a shoot-first-demand-money-later type of guy.”

An image flashed into my mind. Devon, hands in the air, poised to make a run for it, men closing in from all sides.

“Don’t worry,” Wilson said. “The sheriff doesn’t shoot silver.”

I tried to send this information to the others, but their minds were too full. I couldn’t get in, couldn’t risk distracting them by pulling on our bond. Their problem right now was the humans of Alpine Creek. To come for me, they had to get away from a gun-happy small-town sheriff—and since it had been ingrained in each of us since childhood that Weres didn’t hunt humans—they were struggling.

“Good thing we got out of there when we did,” Wilson said, bringing one hand up to touch my cheek. I jerked back, and he smiled. “I imagine that’s something you know a little about. Escaping against all odds. Coming out of a fight without a scratch when you should be dead.”

He searched my eyes, and if I hadn’t already figured out that
the children in this house were like me, it would have occurred to me then.

“A few of your Callum’s wolves tried to kill me once. You were there. I doubt you remember, but suffice it to say, I lived to hunt another day. Some people are just born survivors. They hang on, they get through, and they never give up. You’re one of them. So am I.”

He caught my chin and forced me to look up at and into him. At first, all I saw was his wolf, lurking below the surface, giddy with the anticipation of the hunt. But then, after a moment, I saw something else.

Felt something else—a flash of recognition. A twinge of familiarity.

We were the same.

“No,” I said out loud. “We are
nothing
alike.”

But it was still there. Something. There was no connection between us, but there was a pull: like to like, the same magnetism that had brought me to Chase in the basement.

“Werewolves and humans aren’t so different,” he said. “We share the vast majority of our DNA. Growing up in a pack, you probably haven’t been exposed to many humans with gifts, but they’re out there, and just like some of our human cousins are gifted, some werewolves are born with a little something extra as well.” He smiled. “Most of them become alphas, like your Callum.”

Callum, who had a knack for seeing the future. Just like
Keely had a knack for getting people to open their mouths, and I had a knack for getting out of sticky situations. A knack, like this Rabid’s, for not ending up dead.

“But I don’t want to talk about Callum,” the Rabid said, unwilling to lose my attention in the middle of his grand reveal. “I want to talk about us. Do you have any idea how special you are? How rare?”

Did it matter? Did I care if I was one in ten thousand, or one in a million?

“I’m resilient,” I said. “I survive things that others wouldn’t. I bounce back. I’m hard to kill.”

“Is that all you think this is, Bryn? Do you really think that it’s just you? That you’re just so tough that you come out on top? Come now. Think. Tell me, haven’t you ever felt it, creeping up your spine? Whispering to you. Taking over your limbs, your sight, your fear, your rage …”

Wilson spoke about his survival instinct like it was a separate being. Like it was sacred. Like he wasn’t a madman reveling in violence so much as the avatar for something primal and cruel. “We’re chosen. Tell me you don’t feel it. Tell me you don’t sense it when you look at me, when you look at the boy that I sent you.”

Chase hadn’t escaped the Rabid. The Rabid had attacked him and left him bleeding on the pavement, knowing that he was leaving the carnage in Stone River territory and that Callum would clean up the mess. Knowing that sooner or
later, if Chase was a part of Callum’s pack, the two of us would meet.

Chase hadn’t escaped the Rabid. The Rabid had sent him to me.

No. I wouldn’t let him taint what Chase and I had. I’d die first.

“I guess this explains how you find them,” I said, keeping my voice low and dull. “Your victims.”

“I find them the same way you would,” he said. “The same way you will, once you’re mine. Like to like. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone strong enough to help me, someone as special as I am.” He leaned forward and touched my hair. “You’re glorious as a human. So brave. So strong. I should thank Callum for that, I really should. As a Were, you’ll be a princess.” He sighed. “My princess.”

I shuddered and my throat burned, acid working its way from my stomach to my mouth. I fought the nausea as best I could. In my head, the others roared, and the connection between us pulsed, bright like lightning in my mind.

They’d escaped from the sheriff with only a bullet graze to Devon’s side that had already started to heal.

Hold on, hold on, hold on
, they told me.
We’re coming
.

No
, I replied.
You don’t understand
.

I begged them to come completely into me, to take my thoughts and knowledge as their own and to know what they were up against.

Not just a pack of werewolves. A pack of Resilient werewolves—capital
R
—who’d lose their minds the moment danger closed in. Of my other selves, only Chase had the same advantage. Devon was a purebred and Lake was a fighter, but their instincts to fight, to escape, to
win
weren’t any stronger than the average werewolf’s.

“They’re coming,” Wilson said out loud. “Your friends. I can feel them. I can smell them. They smell like anger. Like blood.”

“So do you.” I met his eyes, and I smiled. “You may be scrappy,” I said, intentionally using the word to demean everything he’d just told me, “but you’re still allergic to silver, aren’t you? You took a couple of bullets. I took a chunk out of your side. You have to be hurting right now.”

He slammed his arms into me, pushing my chair over backward. My head cracked into the back of the chair, and for a moment, I saw bright lights. Then everything cleared, and I saw him standing over me, his eyes beginning to yellow.

“I’m going to like Changing you,” he said. “And once I do, we’ll be bonded in a way you can’t even imagine. If you think your connection to Callum’s pack is strong, you’ve seen nothing. Normal pack-bonds don’t hold a candle to what we have. Normal obedience is nothing compared to what you owe your Maker.”

He’d had a hold on Chase, even after Callum had claimed Chase as part of the Stone River Pack. I was pretty sure I knew
exactly
how strong that made the bond between a Changed werewolf and the person who brought them over. Chase had broken his, with my help and with Callum’s; if this psycho brought me over, I’d have to do the same.

Instead of shaking me, Wilson’s words gave me valuable information. They told me that he didn’t know what I’d done to my pack-bond. He didn’t know that I’d re-carved it, connecting myself first and foremost to Chase. He didn’t know that I’d done the same thing with Devon and Lake. This Rabid thought he knew so much about being resilient, but all he knew was how to fight. Maim. Kill. He didn’t know how to see pack-bonds as a threat to his safety, how to attack them, how to escape.

He didn’t know that I’d done it before and that if he brought me over, I’d do it again.

He
was the one who didn’t know the depths of what he was. What I was. What all of the kids outside were.

He was the one who didn’t know what he was messing with.

“Your friends are here,” Wilson told me. As if I didn’t already know. As if I hadn’t felt them coming. As if I couldn’t see out of their eyes—all of their eyes at once. Bleeding and bloody, they were armed to the hilt, and right now, they didn’t care about the fact that the rest of Wilson’s wolves were victims.

Anyone who stood between them and me was fair game.

No
, I wanted to say,
don’t hurt them
. But how could I? How could I tie my pack’s hands behind their backs, when the wolves outside were bound to kill them?

Bound to obey.

“You see now,” Wilson said, straightening my chair. “You understand. We’re all powerful, but the power? It’s mine.”

Mine
.

Mine
.

Mine
.

The words echoed in my mind, and in that second I knew exactly what to do.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I’
D THOUGHT IT MYSELF:
W
ILSON DIDN
’
T KNOW
what it really meant to be resilient. He didn’t know how to use it for anything but blood.

I did.

I closed my eyes and thought of Chase. I thought of Wilson. I thought of Madison, the grinning six-year-old, and Madison, the ghost of a girl who’d greeted me when I woke up. I thought of what it meant to be a survivor myself, and I cast my mind outward, looking for that in them. The power was twisted in Wilson. Ugly. Dark. And that darkness bled onto the others, tainted them.

Madison leapt, and Chase met her midair, their teeth snapping at each other’s throats. To their left, Lake took aim and fired atone of the other wolves—small but vicious. My friends and my kind clashed, and their directives pulsed in my head and my veins, until they were all I could hear.

Protect
.

Protect
.

Obey
.

Obey
.

Save Bryn
.

Kill them all
.

I don’t know where the burst of strength came from, and I didn’t question it. I just shoved my arms outward, straining against the ropes, and they snapped, with the fury of a mother throwing a car off her baby boy. Like a wild thing—a whirl of energy and rage and pulse after pulse of something that I couldn’t name—I jumped out of the chair. But instead of going for Wilson’s throat, instead of killing him, I ran for the door.

My first order of business wasn’t payback. It was salvation, and right now there was so much at stake.

“Stop!” I yelled, issuing the word at top volume with both my mouth and my mind. The bond that connected me to Chase, Devon, and Lake crackled, and all three of them paused. Thrown—and affected by the charge of
something
in the air—their attackers paused, for just a second.

And then their directive was back.

Obey
.

“No,” I screamed. “You don’t obey him. You obey
me
, and I said to
stop
.”

I reached for Wilson, for his bond with the others, and I pulled it toward me—pulled their hopes and fears and the
people they’d been before he’d stolen that from them toward me—and it sent them as perfectly still as my friends.

“What are you doing?” Wilson growled, gripping me from behind. Slowly, the wolves—his wolves—turned from my friends to face him. A growl broke from Madison’s throat, followed directly by a whine.

She was confused. Who was the alpha here—Wilson or me?

“You think you can steal them? Make them yours?” Wilson asked, his gaze losing its focus, making him look unhinged.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to make them mine. I want to make them theirs.”

You have a choice
. The words flowed out of me, and into the wolves I was commanding—Devon, Lake, Chase, and all of the others.
You can choose to obey, to submit, to let someone else make your decisions, or you can decide. You can decide who you want to be, who you want to be tied to. Who you trust
.

I showed them, with my mind, what I’d done to interfere with their bond to Wilson, and what Chase and I had done, when we’d chosen each other and my friends over Callum’s pack.

Madison was the first one to melt back into human form. Naked and lying on the ground, she lifted her head, unaware of her own nudity. Broken, but regal.

“Madison, no,” Wilson said sharply, like a man talking to a dog.

“Funny thing about resilience,” I said, my heart breaking
for her and for all of them. “Being resilient doesn’t just give you the ability to survive. It doesn’t just make you a fighter. It makes you resistant. To injury. To death.” I met Madison’s eyes, looking only at them and not at the rest of her body. “To dominance.”

Being what we were meant that Chase and I—and all of Wilson’s victims—played by different rules. That was the reason that at the ripe old age of four, I’d been able to shut Callum’s pack out of my head. It was the reason that Chase and I had been able to choose each other over all else.