Raised by Wolves Read online

  “Your stuff is packed because we’re leaving,” Ali said, matter-of-fact.

  “Leaving? For where? Who?”

  “Yes. Montana. You. Me. The twins.”

  What was she talking about? Montana? That was the very rim of Callum’s territory. Only peripherals lived there.

  “We’re leaving?”

  “Well, after what they did you to, we’re certainly not staying here.”

  I remembered the set of Ali’s jaw and the ferocity in her voice when she’d said that I was hers first—her daughter, her responsibility, her charge.

  When it comes to her safety, my word is law.

  “Casey?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, but I asked anyway.

  Ali’s expression—already hard—went completely blank. “Casey,” she said in a tone that seemed to communicate that she couldn’t be bothered with elaborating further, “is gone.”

  “Gone as in dead?”

  Ali shrugged. “Might as well be.”

  “You’re leaving Casey,” I said, my voice going up an octave. “You’re leaving Casey and taking me and the twins and we’re moving to Montana?”

  Ali nodded. “That about covers it.”

  “But, Ali—”

  “This isn’t up for discussion. It’s decided. The station wagon’s been mostly packed for two days. We’ve just been waiting on you to wake up. Now, can you get out of bed?”

  No, I could not get out of bed. I couldn’t even process what was happening. I’d known that Ali wouldn’t take the whole Pack Justice thing well, but this …

  “Bryn. Can you get out of bed? Can you walk?”

  I swung my feet over the side of my bed and stood up. All things considered, it was easy. Even my ribs didn’t protest too much.

  “Doc said you did a lot of healing while you were unconscious,” Ali told me. “You’re still banged up, but your pupils aren’t dilated, and he said that unless there were signs of a head injury, you should be fine to travel.”

  Travel.

  As in leave.

  Leave our home.

  Leave our family.

  Leave the pack.

  “Ali, we can’t go.”

  She turned around and walked toward the door. At first, I thought she was going to walk out without answering me at all, but instead, she spoke in a tight, strangled voice that made me wonder if she’d turned around because she didn’t trust herself to maintain steely control over the muscles in her face.

  “They beat you, Bryn. Callum beat you. He had you beaten. When they brought you back to me, you were bleeding. You had fourteen bruises, six lacerations, two black eyes, and you were unconscious. They did to that to you.”

  “I broke the rules,” I said. “Pack Law, I—”

  Ali whirled back around. “Don’t you dare say this is your fault. Don’t you think it, don’t you even come close to making excuses for them. They hurt you. And everyone just stood there and let them—my friends, your friends, my husband—”

  Ali’s voice cracked and her body hunched over. For a moment, I thought she’d collapse inward and crumble to the floor, but instead, she straightened and threw her head back. “I don’t care what you did. I don’t care who they think they are, or what Pack Law says, or who’s dominant to who.” She took a long, ragged breath. “All I care about is you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She crossed the room and hauled me up in front of a mirror. “Tell me again that you’re fine.”

  The unforgiving surface of the mirror told me in no uncertain terms that although the bruises on my face were beginning to yellow and fade, I still looked like I’d been tie-dyed in a vat of black, blue, green, and corpse-colored paint.

  “Ali, I’ll be okay,” I said, trying to convince her to take a step back and think about this. “It could have been so much worse.”

  She snorted. “If you think you’re making a convincing case for staying, you’re mistaken. Just listen to yourself, Bryn. ‘It could have been worse.’ Who’s to say that it won’t be in the future?” She paused. “Do you think I want that for you? For Katie and Alex?”

  Katie and Alex.

  Up until now, I’d been dazed and stressing. Now, I was panicked. “They won’t let you take the twins. The pack, they’ll never let Katie go. You’ve seen the way they—”

  “Oh, rest assured, I’m dealing with the pack.” The tone in Ali’s voice left very little doubt in my mind that when she said “the pack,” she meant “Callum.”

  Callum, who’d given me to her in the first place.

  Callum, who’d ordered my punishment.

  Callum, who hadn’t looked at me or said a word to me since I’d touched Chase.

  “It’s not Callum’s fault,” I said, wanting desperately to believe it. “Ali, he took care with me. He gave me the only chance that he—”

  “I am not having this conversation with you, Bryn. I’m just not. I can’t.” She ran a hand through her hair, and for a moment, she looked very young. “The fact that you don’t hate him for this breaks my heart. And if we weren’t leaving because of what they’d done to you, we’d be leaving because the pack has twisted you enough to make you think that it’s okay for someone to treat you that way. It’s not, and we are. Leaving.”

  There was no arguing with her. I would have had better luck convincing Devon to don knockoffs.

  With gentle hands, Ali took hold of my waist, careful of my tender body, and she pulled me close, burying her face in my hair. Her shoulders shook, and I realized that she was crying. Sobbing. Clinging to me in a way that made me think she’d never let me go.

  “You didn’t wake up,” she said. “I waited, Bryn, and I waited, but you didn’t wake up.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I whispered. I didn’t mean to do any of this. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.

  This was my fault. Mine.

  Without warning, Ali let go of me and straightened back up. She wiped the tears off her own face and then off mine with the same gentle, brisk motion, and then she walked over to my bookshelf, picked up the box there, and turned to leave.

  “Be ready to go in an hour.”

  An hour. How could a person get ready to leave their entire life behind in one hour? I sat back down on my bed, not even caring about the way my bruises protested and the pain radiated outward from them like liquid spilling over the edges of a pool.

  Devon. I had to call Devon.

  And Chase.

  Chase.

  All of a sudden, the air around me felt very warm and the room felt very small. My breath caught in my throat and my stomach dropped, like someone had unlatched a trapdoor in my intestines.

  If Ali followed through with this, if we left, I’d lose him.

  Bryn?

  His voice in my head calmed me, even as my rational self blathered on that the last thing I should have been worrying about when my entire life was being ripped out from underneath me was a boy I’d seen exactly twice.

  I’m here, I replied silently. I’m awake. And Ali’s going to take me away.

  Chase didn’t reply immediately, and for a moment, I was terrified that he had gone. But then, slowly, images began to make their way from his consciousness to mine. They danced at the edges of my mind, and like a butterfly, every time I tried to latch on to one, it flew away.

  He took it away.

  My mouth set in a firm line, I pictured the bond between us and pulled. Growing up, I’d never been a match in strength for the other kids in the pack, but I could hold my own at tug-of-war based on the fact that I never let go. Once I got a grip on that rope, if someone wanted to get it back from me, they would have had to pry it out of my limp, dead arms. Even once they’d pulled me across the line, I didn’t stop fighting.

  Chase never stood a chance.

  The images flashed into my mind, and I managed to hold on to them long enough for a concrete picture to form in my brain.

  Bars.

  Steel.

  Ca
ge, I realized. They’d caged him. My lip curled upward with fury. Didn’t they realize how awful it was, to be trapped there? I could feel him pacing back and forth.

  He wanted out.

  I won’t let them do this to you. I’ll—

  Nothing, he said back. If I can get out, I will.

  A long pause.

  They’ll let me out when you’re gone.

  Understanding washed over me, and relief. They weren’t punishing him. He wasn’t trapped because he’d disobeyed. He was there because I was leaving, and for whatever reason, they didn’t want him trying to stop me.

  Another vague image, a half-completed thought he didn’t want me to hear—

  “Ali.” I said her name out loud, and things became very, very clear. Ali had asked them to cage Chase, and they’d agreed. If I’d been in my right mind, I might have wondered what exactly Ali had been forced to sacrifice to get them to grant her request—not to mention permission to leave—in return. But I was too angry to think about anything other than the fact that despite Ali’s ranting and raving about the way the pack had treated me, they were treating Chase like an animal on her bequest.

  I couldn’t let her do this. I wouldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t let her do any of this. I wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t step foot in that car, and she couldn’t make me. It was going to be a cold day in July before I let her do this to me. To him.

  To herself and to Casey. To the twins.

  She wasn’t doing this.

  End of story. Finit.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I’D TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN’T STAY MAD AT ME forever, but I have a feeling you’d take that as a challenge.”

  Exactly two hours after I’d sworn that Ali would drag me kicking and screaming to the car over my own dead body, I was sitting shotgun, alive and not bloody in the least. I’d been giving her the silent treatment for the past hundred miles—not that it was doing any good.

  Part of me understood why she was doing this. If Ali hadn’t been so icily furious on my behalf, I might have hated the pack—and Callum—but if was a luxury for another time. Right now, I could handle being mad at Ali, but I wasn’t sure I could handle anything else, and I wasn’t going to risk the dense vortex of emotions in my gut working their way to the surface. I was not about to break down. Not in this car, not once we got to Montana, not ever.

  “You would be doing the same thing,” Ali told me. “If something happened to me, if you were in charge of Katie, and if the pack had attacked her—whatever the reason—you would do the exact same thing.”

  “Shut. Up.” I broke my silence.

  “I’m doing this, I’m not sorry I’m doing this, and I’m not going to undo it,” Ali said. “Live with it, kiddo.”

  “You didn’t even ask me what I wanted,” I shot back. “What happened—it happened to me.” It was bad enough that Callum had taken it upon himself to decide what I could and could not handle knowing with respect to The-Night-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. I wasn’t about to let Ali take this away from me, too. “I’m the one they hurt. I’m the one who bled, I’m the one whose body is so bruised that I might as well start answering to the name ‘Patches,’ and I’m the one who had to watch Callum—”

  I broke off. Didn’t want to go there.

  “Watch him what?” Ali said evenly.

  “Nothing,” I said through clenched teeth. “He did what he could.”

  I knew it was wrong to be mad at Ali for trying to protect me, but not Callum for hurting me in the first place. I just didn’t care.

  “Do you honestly think that Callum didn’t know what would happen, Bryn? From the moment he left you alone with Chase?” She stared out at the road before us, and I leaned forward and flipped on the radio, hoping to drown out her words.

  Her face tightened and then her hand lashed out. My arm, like a creature possessed, jerked upward, throwing up a block to protect my face before my conscious mind had time to realize that all Ali was doing was turning the radio back off.

  Unsettled, I lowered my arm and hugged it tight to my chest, feeling small and stupid and laid painfully bare.

  If Ali noticed my reaction, she at least had the decency not to call me on it. Instead, she pressed on with the current topic: Callum, justice, and me.

  “How many times in your life have you gotten the drop on Callum, Bryn? How many times has anyone? He knew damn well you’d break the conditions before he set them down.”

  Callum had always known what I was going to do before I did it. I’d spent my entire life trying to get the drop on him.

  He knew me.

  No. I didn’t want to hear this. She couldn’t make me. Radio. On.

  In the backseat, Katie whimpered from her car seat. Both twins had cried solid for the first hour, and about fifteen minutes back, they’d finally cried themselves out and fallen asleep. My brother and sister weren’t any happier to be leaving than I was.

  Shhhhhhh, I told Katie silently. It’s okay. I’m here.

  The farther we drove away from Callum’s stronghold, the weaker the twins’ bond to the pack grew, and the more they latched on to Ali and me. Especially me. I was pretty sure that Katie had yet to figure out that I wasn’t a wolf. The night I ran with the pack confused her. Even now, with my own packbond muted, I was the closest thing she had to Pack.

  To home.

  “I can’t feel them anymore,” I muttered, my words lost to the song blaring from the speakers.

  It began to rain, and Ali turned the windshield wipers on and the radio off.

  “You can’t feel who?”

  “The pack. Even after … what I did … they were still there. Faintly.” Chase was just more there. But as the mile markers ticked by, everything was getting fainter, and now I couldn’t feel any of the Weres at all, except for Chase—and I could barely feel him. He existed only as an image, a sound, a feel in the recesses of my brain, but even that was getting harder and harder to hear.

  “Chase didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, allowing my ire to take the place of the holes in my soul. “You made them lock him up, and he didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m not a monster, Bryn. I asked Callum to lock him up, because Callum issued an edict that no one was to stop us from leaving. Based on the way that boy stood guard over you while you were unconscious, flashing from one form to another, daring us to move him from your side, I inferred that he might not be able to keep himself in check when we left, and that you might not want him to face the kind of justice that had been visited upon you.”

  For a single second, that took the wind out of my sails. “Did you have them lock Casey up, too?” I sneered, once I’d recovered.

  “As a matter of fact,” Ali replied, her grip on the wheel tightening, “I did.”

  Radio. On. Only this time, it was Ali’s decision, not mine, and she turned down the volume and changed the station. In the backseat, Katie closed her eyes again, and for the next hundred miles, the four of us drove in near-silence, the gentle warble of country music the only sound in the car.

  Ali drove straight through the night. At some point, I fell asleep, and in my dreams, Chase came to me in wolf form. His fur was black, his body lean and muscled, and his eyes were lighter even than their human counterparts: two orbs of ice blue in a sea of darkness. I didn’t say a word, and he didn’t make a sound. The two of us just sprawled out on the ground about a foot apart. I could feel his warm breath on my face, and after an eternity of the two of us staring at each other, I buried my hands in his fur, which should have been coarse, but felt silky soft in my hands. His chest rose and fell as he breathed, and I could feel my heart beating in unison with his.

  “This doesn’t mean we’re mates,” I told him.

  He opened his mouth very wide in a mischievous, wolfy yawn.

  “Women’s liberation and all that,” I continued, catching his yawn and trying to push it down. “No Mark. No lifetime commitment. No ‘property of’ signs. We just have
a bond, that’s all.”

  His tail beat quietly against the dirt beneath us, and a smile worked its way onto my own lips.

  “Loser,” I said, playing my fingertips over his rib cage, oddly compelled to scratch his belly.

  In response to my insult, Chase bared his teeth in mock threat, but scooted closer toward me, and after a long moment, I laid my head on his neck, and the two of us—girl and wolf—fell asleep, into a dream within a dream.

  I see you.

  Words dripped, sing-sung, from a crooked mouth. No face. No body. Just a mouth—bones cracking, jaw breaking.

  I see you.

  Sharp smile, fanged and smeared with red.

  I recognized the voice. I recognized the blood, but this wasn’t my nightmare. It was Chase’s.

  Like a strobe light, images flashed in rapid fire in front of me. A man: brown eyes, open face, never aged past thirty. Red teeth. Gray wolf, white star. Jaws snapping.

  So much blood.

  I looked for Chase, called to him, but I couldn’t find him. I was too far away.

  Wolf. Fight.

  Not my dream. Not my instinct. Not my haze, but the whole world went blood-red nonetheless, almost purple. Rotted. Congealed.

  Chase. I had to find Chase.

  I could feel his eyes opening. Lightning in his stomach, jaw aching as he Shifted back to human form.

  Look at me, Callum whispered to him, a ghost on his shoulder.

  You’re mine, said the mouth with the wolf attached. I made you. You belong to me.

  And that was what did it, because Chase didn’t belong to blood and panic. Didn’t belong to a Rabid rotting from the inside out. He didn’t even belong to Callum, steady and sure.

  He belonged to me.

  Light surged all around us in a starburst, halfway between the moment of detonation for an atomic bomb and the skyline on the Fourth of July.

  Warm.

  Safe.

  Mine.

  And just like that, Chase and I were back on a bed of wet leaves and grass, the smell of dirt and autumn reminding me that this was a dream. Only a dream.

  In human form, Chase curled beside me, his forehead damp with sweat, and I ran my fingers through his matted hair, as naturally as I had his wolf fur. I folded my body against his, keeping watch until his breathing slowed, and mine slowed, and together, we faded into sweet, blissful nothing.