Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology (75 page)

Like me, they had a way of surviving things that should have killed them dead.

“Devon’s Dev, and I don’t even know how old Mitch is.”

That left Lake. I’d already almost lost her once.

To Shay.

Thinking of the way Shay had looked at her, the expression on his face, made me remember exactly who and what Lake was. She was a female Were—one of very, very few, even with the
addition of Changed Weres in my pack. Shay wouldn’t want her dead. If she died—if any of the females died—the hope that any of the alphas would be able to get their hands on them—now, a year from now, a hundred years from now—died, too.

“They won’t kill the females.”

I measured Callum’s response to my words.

Silence.

“The psychics have a deal with Shay,” I said, working through the logic out loud. “And Shay would want the females alive.”

The number of people Shay wanted dead was probably relatively small: me; Mitch if he got in the way; depending on Shay’s mood, maybe Devon …

“This isn’t war,” I said softly, unsure if I was talking to Callum or myself. “It’s a hit.”

Slowly, the layers of Shay’s plan crystallized in my mind. He’d set the psychics up to attack us. He’d offered me help, hoping to gain access to our territory, and when I’d refused …

“You could die, Bryn.” Callum confirmed my thoughts, and for the first time, I heard emotion in his words. It was faint, but it was there, and though I had to strain to hear it, once I did, something inside me, something broken, began putting itself back together again, bit by bit by bit.

“I could die,” I repeated. “If I do, Devon will go alpha.”

There was no doubt of that in my mind; with Dev, it was only a matter of time.

“Devon could die,” Callum said softly.

“And if Devon died …” I forced myself to imagine it. I was the alpha; Dev was my second-in-command. If we were both dead—

“There’s not an obvious third,” I said.

There were two ways to become alpha: as a member of a given pack, you could challenge and kill the current alpha and take their rank, or, if the alpha was killed by an outsider, you could be strong enough that there was never any question that you would be next in line. Mitch was too peripheral to lead. Lake, Chase, and Maddy—they all had their natural strengths, but the hierarchy between them was far from clear, and unlike most Weres, my pack wouldn’t jump straight to fighting it out for supremacy.

In the time it took for them to reach a consensus, they’d be easy targets.

Sitting ducks.

Open.

“Senate Law forbids taking another alpha’s wolf,” I said slowly. “But if there’s no alpha, then technically, there isn’t a pack.”

If the psychics killed me, if they killed Devon, there would be an opening, however brief, for someone else to come rushing in.

I thought of Shay’s wolves, lined up and down the edge of our border. Waiting.

“Dev can’t fight,” I said, coming to a conclusion that crept under my skin and hung in the air all around me. “If I fight, Devon can’t, and I
have
to fight.”

Callum didn’t respond, but he didn’t have to. I was the alpha, and an alpha couldn’t run and hide, couldn’t send the pack off to fight, die on their own. The pack needed me there, the same way the peripherals had needed to see me when they’d arrived at the Wayfarer, the same way the others looked to me for the signal to run on the full moon.

“In the end,” Callum said, his voice soft, gentle, “it all comes back to you. You protect them, you love them, you live for them, and someday, you die. That’s what it means, Bryn-girl, to be what we are. It’s lonely. It’s impossible. It’s all-consuming.”

It is what it is
.

Callum didn’t say it. Neither did I. But it was there, between us. And it was true.

“Okay,” I said, fighting for acceptance the way a drowning man tries for air. “Devon can’t fight. I can’t risk sending the kids away, because someone could intercept them before they get to you. During the actual confrontation, the coven will be gunning for me, and they’ll be under orders from Shay not to kill any of the female Weres.”

Granted, Callum hadn’t
said
any of that. He’d just sat there, on the other end of the line, asking questions and letting me come to it on my own.

“Now I just need a plan for neutralizing the coven as quickly
as possible,” I said. “Any idea if taking out their leader will free up the others’ minds?”

Callum didn’t respond.

“Callum? Words of wisdom? Cryptic hints? Anything?”

Nothing. No answer. Silence.

And that was when I realized he’d already hung up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A
S
I
STALKED OUT OF THE HOUSE AND BACK TOWARD
the restaurant, my mind jumped from one thought to another, a never-ending medley of the things Callum had said, the promised confrontation with the psychics, and Jed’s suggestion that the only way to stop Valerie was to kill her. I thought of the carving Callum had sent me, and remembered all the times growing up that I’d seen him with a piece of wood in his hands. I remembered “borrowing” his knife when I was eight, trying to carve something myself. If Ali had been the one to catch me unsupervised with the sharp object, she would have freaked, but Callum had just sat down behind me and pulled me onto his lap. He’d put his hands over mine, guiding them, ready to catch the blade if it slipped.

Was that why he’d sent it to me? To let me know that even now, he was doing the same thing? Or was the message really
that he couldn’t do that anymore, that this time, if the knife slipped, I’d bleed?

Hurt.

Die.

“You okay?” Chase fell into step with me, and I felt his presence the way I always did, in my flesh and bones: a flash of similarity, a desire for the space between us to disappear.

This time, I kept my distance.

“Lucas is healing. He seems a little more … 
present
now. Maddy’s with him.” Chase paused, and I could feel him debating whether to continue. “He’s asking for you.”

Getting out of Snake Bend had been only half of Lucas’s goal; he’d said from the beginning that he wanted to be a part of our pack, and now, with Shay out of the way, there was nothing to keep me from giving Lucas his wish.

Except, of course, for the fact that the psychics might pick any moment to descend.

“It can wait,” Chase said, and even though I’d been thinking more or less the same thing, coming from him, it chafed—maybe because I couldn’t help remembering that he’d used that same soft, quiet tone to tell me that even if we lost Lake, it would be okay.

It wouldn’t have been okay. And neither would I.

“Shay wants the females alive.” I changed the subject—out loud and in my head. “That’s the good news.”

“You’ll make the girls our first line of defense, then.” After
my one-sided conversation with Callum, Chase actually answering me made for a pleasant change of pace. “If Maddy, Lake, Phoebe, and Sage take the perimeter, then the psychics will have to work their way back to the rest of us with less than lethal force. It’s a good plan, Bryn. It buys the rest of us some time.”

“Not all of us.”

“The bad news?” Chase guessed.

I nodded. “I’m going to ask Dev not to fight.”

I expected Chase to ask why. He didn’t.

“He won’t say yes.” Chase didn’t—wouldn’t—look at me, but even from this angle, I could see that his expression had gone carefully neutral.

“Devon won’t be happy about it,” I corrected. “But he’ll do it.”

Maybe that was the difference between Chase and Dev. Neither one of them wanted to see me hurt. They both would have died for me, the same way I would have died for them. They felt an animal need to protect me, and always had—but at the end of the day, Dev felt that way about other things, too. He would have gone to Shay’s pack to protect Lake. He’d stand down on this fight for the good of the pack.

“Dev will do it,” I said, taking a page from Chase’s book and staring straight ahead. “But you wouldn’t.”

“Bryn,” Chase said, reaching for my arm, his touch light against my skin.

“Would it even matter,” I asked him, feeling that touch to my core, “if I told you it was what I wanted? If it was what needed to happen for us to know that the pack was going to come out of this okay?”

To his credit, Chase didn’t hesitate before he answered. He didn’t sugarcoat it. He didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. “No.”

“Well,” I said roughly, “then I guess it’s a good thing I’m not asking
you
.”

Chase’s hand tightened, ever so slightly, his touch turning to a hold. He stopped walking, and I turned to face him.

“If it came down to me or the pack,” Chase said, his face giving away nothing, his mind calm and cool on the other end of the bond, “what would you choose?”

I tried to process the fact that he was even asking, that from his perspective, in his mind, that was even okay.

“You’d choose the pack,” Chase said. He moved his hand from my arm to my chin, angling my eyes gently toward him. “I know that, Bryn. I’m okay with it, and I will
never
ask you to choose.”

I searched his eyes, wishing that I could smell the truth on him, the way he could on me.

“If it ever comes down to a choice between me and the pack, I want you to choose them. Don’t think about it, don’t second-guess it, don’t feel guilty after the fact. I know you, Bryn.
I know you
, and I am not asking you to change.” His lips curved
upward in a slow, sad smile, and I thought about what Callum had said about being alpha—it was lonely, it was impossible, it was all-consuming.

Chase brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “But at the end of the day, Bryn, if
I
had to choose between you and the pack, I would choose you—every single time, no questions asked. You need to know that, because that’s who
I
am, and it’s not going to change. Not now, not ever. For me, it will always, always be you, even if deep down, you wish I could be something or someone else.”

Standing there, looking at Chase and listening to him say something I hadn’t even allowed myself to think, I knew objectively that I wasn’t being fair. That I couldn’t expect the pack to matter to him the way it did to me. That he had accepted what I was, even though it meant that he would never be my number-one priority, the way I was his.

I knew it wasn’t fair to him to expect more than that, but with everything that had happened in the past few days—with everything that was on the verge of happening even now—I couldn’t convince myself that mattered.

I would always choose the pack. Chase would always choose me—and I wasn’t sure I could accept that, fair or not.

Unable to think, to breathe, I brushed my lips lightly over his, pretending for a moment that the two of us were the only people in the world, and then I turned and ran for the Wayfarer, where we weren’t.

“Are you actually asking me to let you go out there and fight the coven alone?” Dev’s voice was surprisingly pleasant. He shifted his gaze from me to Chase, who’d followed on my heels, and raised his eyebrows in a look meant to convey that I was crazy.

Ignoring said look, I tried to stay focused on the task at hand. “The coven is working for Shay. Shay wants our females, so he set the coven up to take me out of the picture without irreparably damaging the girls. Once I’m gone, you’re next in line for alpha, Dev. Think about it. Shay would have taken you in exchange for Lucas—is he really that sentimental, or do you think he just wanted you out of the way?”

“Touché,” Devon said. His mother had beaten me unconscious at Callum’s command. His brother had tortured a wolf under his care. The Macalisters weren’t really a family known for their sentimentality.

“Dev, if you stay and the coven kills both of us, Shay will sweep in and pick the females off one by one. Is that what you want for Lake? For Maddy? For Katie and Lily and—”

“Enough.” Devon held up one palm in a gesture that looked so choreographed, I almost smiled. “You’ve convinced me that only one of us can fight.”