Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology Read online

  I snorted. On any other girl, it would have been a perfectly normal, if indelicate, sound to make. On me, it sounded more animalistic. More wolfish, even though I wasn’t a Were. Hazard of being raised by a pack. For the most part, with a little effort and a lot of resolve, I could keep them out of my head, but they still snuck their way into my mannerisms. I’d never be one of them the way Devon was one of them. I’d never Shift to another form, and I’d never have a wolf sharing my body and stalking through the corners of my mind. But I’d never be like other girls, either.

  I shook my head to clear it of thoughts—another gesture that wasn’t as human as I was—and I realized when I zoned back in that Devon had already taken his leave. He’d made it to the trail and a good ways down it in a matter of seconds, not bothering to mask his inhuman speed. Nobody but Weres came as far into the forest as Ali’s house. Nobody but Ali and me.

  “Close the door and hang up your jacket,” Ali called the orders to me from the kitchen. She had an uncanny sense for knowing what was happening in her house even if she couldn’t see it. Before she’d bellowed, I’d been microseconds away from dumping my coat on the floor.

  I followed her orders to a T and then walked into the kitchen, following the sound of Ali’s voice and the scent of cooking food. I had a good nose—a matter of necessity in the pack, human or not—but I couldn’t quite parse what I was smelling into its component parts. “Marinara sauce,” I mused out loud. “Peanut butter. Onions. And …”

  “Oreos,” Ali declared, popping one into her mouth. “You want?” she asked after she’d gulped hers down.

  I took the proffered Oreo and surveyed the rest of the kitchen. “Cravings?” I asked.

  Ali shrugged hopelessly.

  “Where’s the steak?”

  It didn’t matter what Ali was craving, there was always meat involved. The baby had turned her into a carnivore, and Ali, who couldn’t stomach even the sight of a rare steak eight months ago, ate them daily now. Such was the price of a Were pregnancy. That, and the fact that instead of kicking, like normal babies, Ali’s son Shifted forms. A couple of months ago, I’d joked about selling tickets to watch her stomach during the full moon. Now, with the baby’s birth closer all the time, it really wasn’t funny anymore.

  “I’m going to be fine,” Ali said, reaching up to rub my shoulder with one hand.

  “You always do that. It’s like you can read my mind.” I meant it as a complaint, but it came out nostalgic, like part of me was preparing to look back fondly on that habit when she was gone.

  “I’m going to be fine,” Ali said again. “You know me, Bryn. Have I ever backed down from a fight?”

  Never. Before Callum had thrust me into her care, she hadn’t even been a part of the pack. She’d only just found out that werewolves were real and that more often than not, they took human women as their mates. For an orphaned kid she’d never even met, Ali had abandoned her own life and risen to the challenge. She’d taken Callum’s Mark and mastered it, insulating herself—and me—from most of what it entailed. There wasn’t a Were within a hundred-mile radius that she hadn’t stood up to on my behalf, Callum included. I thought that was why he’d given me to her, instead of to one of the other Weres. He’d made her Pack so that she could take care of me, knowing that she’d be unaffected by dominance hierarchies, knowing that she wouldn’t put up with someone giving me crap just because they were dominant enough to think that they could.

  “You’re going to be fine,” I said, repeating Ali’s words. I believed it. I really did. I just forgot that I did sometimes. I’d seen too many women die in childbirth. Female werewolves were extremely rare, and human bodies weren’t meant to carry werewolf pups.

  “Where’s Casey?” I asked, changing the topic of conversation and hoping that my thoughts would follow suit. “It’s not like him to miss a meal.” Ali’s husband was an eater. And for the past eight months, he’d been quite the hoverer as well. Food plus Ali meant that he should be here, and even though I hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that it wasn’t just me and Ali anymore—or the idea that when I slept, there was an adult Were sleeping down the hall—Casey’s absence struck me as fundamentally strange.

  “Casey’s eating out tonight,” Ali said. “Here, taste this.”

  I was so caught up in trying to figure out why Casey was “eating out” and what Ali wasn’t telling me that I almost took the bite she offered me. At the last second, I came to my senses and realized that whatever concoction Ali’s cravings had led her to create, I really, truly didn’t want any part of it.

  “Your loss,” she said, spooning the goop, which definitely contained both the peanut butter and the marinara sauce I’d smelled, into her mouth. She followed it with an Oreo.

  “I’m going to throw up,” I said, gagging—and not just for show.

  “It’s all part of my master plan,” Ali replied. “Cravings are just the pregnant woman’s excuse for making everyone around her as nauseated as she is.”

  “You’re evil, Ali.”

  She smiled and serenely took another bite. “I know.”

  I took refuge in the refrigerator and nosed around until I found something edible. Popping the container into the microwave, I turned my attention back to Ali, who was very good at distracting me—just not quite good enough.

  “Your husband’s not home for dinner, even though he hasn’t gone more than ten feet away from you since you hit seven months. Callum decided to start enforcing my curfew and assigned an entire team to keep an eye on me. You’re making pregnancy jokes to distract me from asking questions.” I ticked the observations off on my fingers as I spoke out loud. “Something’s going on.”

  “If I asked you to please, as a personal favor to me, stay out of it, would you?” Ali asked.

  I busied myself by checking on my microwavable mac and cheese and didn’t reply.

  “Didn’t think so,” Ali sighed. “What if I told you that I was tired and cranky and very pregnant, and that I needed you to do this for me, because I can’t take the extra stress right now?”

  Now that was a low blow, and Ali knew it. I didn’t want to be worried about her, and she didn’t want me worrying about her. “You’re going to be fine,” I said, trying to respond the way I would have if I really wasn’t concerned at all. “And telling me to stay away just makes me want to know more. It’s obviously pack business, and there must be some danger involved, otherwise Callum wouldn’t be pulling his ‘trouble’s afoot’ routine. But it can’t be too dangerous, because Casey’s involved, and Callum would never risk him this close to your due date.”

  Ali didn’t say a word. I tried to read her face, but she had an ability matched only by Callum’s to hide her emotions completely.

  “Do you really need me to leave this alone?” I asked softly. I couldn’t risk hurting her, even if we both wanted to pretend that there was nothing—and could be nothing—wrong.

  “Yeah, Bryn, I think I do.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll leave it alone—for now. But I’m not going to like it, and once that kid is born, and you’re fine, I’m getting a tattoo, piercing my belly button, and eloping to Mexico with someone you’ve never met.”

  She laughed and then stuck another Oreo in my mouth. As I was chewing, she tweaked my hair. “Bryn, Callum’s got you under surveillance. You wouldn’t make it a foot into a tattoo shop before someone yanked you back out.”

  “You never know,” I replied. “Tonight, my guard was Devon, and I happen to know for a fact that he thinks tasteful body art is quite the thing.”

  Ali responded to my retort with one of her own, and we went back and forth for so long that it didn’t occur to me until much later that she had assumed that my security team would still be in place by the time the baby was born. And that really made me wonder, because our pack had a tendency to take care of trouble very quickly. Threats were eliminated the instant they were identified. Callum ran a tight ship, and I couldn’t imagine what kin
d of pack business would necessitate my being inside by dusk every night for a month or more.

  Despite my promise to Ali, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and by the end of the week, I’d come to the realization that the weirdest part of all of this wasn’t that something had everyone on edge. It was the fact that nobody would tell me what it was. The pack didn’t just want me safe. They wanted to keep me in the dark.

  And ever since the night the Big Bad Wolf had come knocking at my parents’ door, I hadn’t been overly fond of the dark. Not metaphorically. Not actually. I liked seeing what was laid out in front me. And if Callum and Ali and Devon thought they could keep me blindfolded indefinitely, they were wrong.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TWO WEEKS TO THE DAY AFTER CALLUM TOLD ME to stop slacking in algebra, I got a C-minus on a quiz. It seemed like a good counterstrike at the time. After our little encounter in my workshop, the almighty alpha had pretty much disappeared, but true to his word, bodyguards materialized every day like clockwork to escort me home by dusk, willing or not. My promise to Ali meant that I couldn’t do more than keep an ear to the ground to figure out why, and everywhere I turned, there were unspoken whispers, the kind that pulled at my pack-bond and made my hipbone itch, just below the Mark.

  “Callum’s going to kill you, you know,” Devon said as I tucked the quiz into my backpack with a quick, vicious grin. Technically, it wasn’t found material, but I thought it would make a rather fetching rosebush all the same.

  “I’d like to see him try.” I’d given up on the idea that Devon might crack and give me some hint about what it was that had every wolf in a hundred-mile radius teetering on edge, gnashing their teeth, and closing rank around their females like we’d spontaneously combust the moment they left us to our own devices. “In case you haven’t gotten the memo, I’m not so easy to kill.”

  Devon didn’t flinch, but the fact that he didn’t counter my words with a pithy quote from the Bard and/or Dirty Dancing told me that my words had sent his mind down the same paths that I tried my best to avoid. His pupils didn’t dilate. His jaw didn’t clench, but I felt a hum of energy like the striking of a tuning fork in the air between us.

  It didn’t take a genius to infer that Devon’s inner wolf disliked the idea of anyone trying to hurt me. Plain old Dev didn’t seem too fond of the possibility, either, and I knew from previous experience that neither boy nor beast particularly cared for being reminded that if things had gone differently the night Callum had brought me home, I might not have lived long enough to be a thorn in anyone’s paw.

  Blood. Blood-blood-blood-blood—

  I stopped myself from thinking about it and helped Devon to do the same by jabbing his left side with my index finger. If we’d been alone, I might have butted him gently with my head, but this was high school, and the good people of Ark Valley had enough reasons to think that those of us who lived in the woods were just a little bit off.

  “Ten-to-one odds Callum has either Sora or Lance on Bryn-duty tonight,” I said, changing the subject with an unspoken apology for bringing up the previous one at all. “You Macalisters seem to be Team Bryn favorites at the moment.”

  Devon’s lips settled into an easy, practiced smirk, and the nearly imperceptible tension in his neck and shoulder muscles receded. “If there’s any justice in this world, watching you should convince them how lucky they’ve been to be blessed with a son such as myself.”

  “He says with patented Smirk Number Three.”

  Devon shook his head and made a sound somwhere in the neighborhood of tsk-tsk. “You’re getting rusty, Bronwyn. That was clearly Smirk Number Two: sardonic with a side of wit.”

  I breathed an internal sigh of relief that Devon was fully himself again. All Weres felt the tug between their human sides and their wolves, but Dev fought it more than most. He danced to his own drummer and dared the world to tell him that a purebred Were should have better things to worry about than what he was wearing. All things considered, Devon was almost as much of a rarity as I was. The only difference was, his particular oddity—being the son of a female werewolf rather than that of a male Were’s human mate—gave him the advantage over other werewolves, while mine meant that I’d always be the slow one. The weak one. The one who needed protection from pack secrets that came out after dark.

  “Hey, Bronwyn?”

  Until those words broke the surface of my mind, I’d been deep enough in my thoughts that I hadn’t been paying attention to the finely honed senses that would have otherwise warned me of an outsider’s approach. Was I slipping, or what? It was one thing to let a werewolf get a drop on you, but a normal teenage boy? That was just embarrassing.

  “Yes?” I hadn’t expected to see Jeff (of motorcycle fame) in anything resembling a social setting for at least a semester. He’d been avoiding me since the moment I’d hopped off his bike, and like a chameleon, I’d faded into the background, keeping my distance from his human friends the way I had before my little joyride. As I turned to face him, I caught a whiff of a second scent—Juicy Fruit and plastic—and realized that he wasn’t alone.

  There was a girl with him, and she was smiling.

  Two of my classmates, approaching me of their own free will? I glanced at Devon and raised an eyebrow, but his gaze was fastened on Human 1 and Human 2. They didn’t even seem to realize they were being watched, and they certainly didn’t feel me stiffen as Devon took a step closer to me.

  Gently, I put a hand on Devon’s chest and pushed him back. I’d told Callum I had no interest in provoking interspecies aggression, and I’d meant it. Previous grand-theft-auto attempts aside, my instinct to keep my head down and not draw attention to the pack was almost as well defined as the three parallel scars under the band of my jeans.

  “You dropped this.” Jeff held out a pen that I’d been using to take notes (or rather, pointedly not take notes) before the bell rang. But as I reached for it, he twirled it twice and tucked it into the jean pocket of the girl standing next to him. “I think I’ll keep it as payment due for that little klepto moment of yours with my bike.”

  The girl standing next to him had a name, and I knew it, but I didn’t bother thinking it. She was a typical Ark Valley girl, a little too quiet, a little too sweet, with metaphorical claws lurking just under the surface.

  “Jeff!” the girl said. “You’re horrible. I’m sorry, Bronwyn.”

  But she didn’t take the pen out of her pocket. Instead, she wrapped an arm around Jeff. I wasn’t exactly an expert on human-courting behavior, but I sensed the ceremony of the moment. He’d given her my pen. She’d giggled. In another few seconds, they’d both walk away and never give me a second look.

  Compared to the werewolf version of courting—he bites her, she bites him, his connection to the pack spills over onto her for all eternity—the whole thing seemed artificial and insignificant.

  And yet, for a fraction of a second, I froze.

  Sorry, Bronwyn.

  I was human. They were human. Whatever games they were playing should have been my games, but my talents currently tended more toward flushing out an alpha who swept into my life just long enough to issue orders and disappear for weeks on end, busy with pack business more important than little old me.

  Sorry, Bronwyn.

  Devon put an arm around me and curled his lips into an expression I recognized as Smirk Number One: sarcastic with a touch of I-couldn’t-care-less. “Why, Bryn,” he said with a hint of Scarlett O’Hara in his voice, “I do believe he’s given her your pen.”

  Devon’s words freed up my mouth, which—true to form—spoke without consulting my brain. “Well, get Freud on the phone. He’ll have a field day with this one.”

  That should have been the end of it, but unfortunately, algebra was my last class of the day, and that meant that Devon wasn’t the only wolf in the near vicinity. Ark Valley was small, the combined middle/high school was even smaller, and even though I wasn’t close to any of the other juveniles in our p
ack, when it came to confrontations with the outside world, we were family.

  Or as they would have phrased it, I was theirs.

  There were only three of them, and one was a seventh grader, but werewolves mature quickly. By age twelve, they look like teenagers, and by the time they’re in high school, they could pass for twenty. Somewhere around fifteen or sixteen, their growth slows down, and most don’t ever age past about thirty, no matter how many centuries they see.

  Moral of the story? My age-mates were all physically advanced for their age, and Jeff had reason to be looking nervous.

  They didn’t descend, not right away, and they didn’t say a word. My pack-mates just circled us, with long, ambling strides, their eyes flickering from me to Jeff and back again.

  Out of habit, I shut them out. Bond or no bond, nobody got into my head but me, and the last thing I wanted was to feel the low, dangerous vibration of a growl beneath the surface of someone else’s skin.

  To Jeff, they must just have looked like an odd assortment of strangely intense ruffians whose backwoods roots showed in every crevice of their faces. To me, they looked like Trouble, capital T.

  I brushed my hand lightly against Devon’s arm, and he nodded.

  “Thank you for that extremely Freudian performance, Jeff. Sir, madam, we bid you good day.” Dev boomed out the words in his best Sean Connery accent, but all the while, he kept his eyes on the others, staring them down, warning them not to come closer. There was a single moment in which I thought the others might disregard the warning and close in, but a few seconds later, the tension broke. Callum’s wolves had ultimate control over their animal instincts, and they knew as well as I did that altercations with the outside world wouldn’t be met with smiles and pats on the back from the pack’s alpha.

  Unaware of just how much of a reprieve they’d gotten, Jeff and his little lady scurried away, and I was left with four teenage werewolves—none of whom liked the idea of my walking home by myself.