Trial by Fire Read online

  “Tell Ali I’ll need medical supplies,” he said. “Lake knows where they are.” With those words, Mitch turned to carry the boy away, leaving the rest of us standing there, slack-jawed and tense.

  Lake was the first to snap out of it, and she hurried back to the kitchen to relay the message to Ali. Chase’s eyes followed Mitch’s progression, and I could see the gears in his head turning as he analyzed the situation. He ran a hand through my hair, assuring himself with every light touch that I was all right, convincing the wolf inside him to still.

  Devon didn’t move, and this time, I said his name silently.

  Dev?

  After a long moment, Devon managed to drag his eyes away from the blood seeping into the wooden planks of the porch. His fists clenched, and he turned toward me. “Bryn.”

  There was a wealth of information in that one word, and I knew that whatever Devon said next was going to send a tremor through our pack, like static feedback or a punch to the gut.

  “I caught his scent, and it wasn’t pretty.”

  I waited for Devon to make a comment about Calvin Klein cologne or something equally flippant, but he didn’t. Instead, he cut right to the chase.

  “This kid is from the Snake Bend Pack, Bryn. His alpha is Shay.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I ONLY KNEW THREE THINGS ABOUT SHAY MACALISTER.

  One: he was a purebred werewolf, one of a relatively small number in the country who’d been born to two werewolf parents instead of just one. Purebreds were larger, stronger, and faster and had fewer weaknesses than werewolves with human blood flowing in their veins.

  Two: Shay wanted me dead. It wasn’t personal. I had something he wanted. More females in a pack meant more live births and stronger, purebred children, and the only thing standing between the other alphas and doubling their numbers—and their power base—was me.

  And, okay, maybe it was a little personal for Shay, since I’d been responsible for destroying a Rabid who knew the secret to changing human girls into Weres. It was also possible that once I’d done so, I’d derived great satisfaction from putting the screws to the other alphas—and Shay in particular—flaunting the laws that forbid one alpha from taking wolves who belonged to another, even if that other alpha was a teenage, human female.

  At the moment, however, it was Shay’s third distinguishing characteristic that turned my stomach to lead and blew a cold chill down the length of my spine.

  Shay was Devon’s—my Devon’s—brother. He was everything Dev didn’t want to be, everything he’d spent his entire life rebelling against, and already the presence of one of Shay’s wolves on my land had sapped the mirth from Devon’s features and left something stone hard and formidable in its place.

  “Hey.” I reached out for Devon’s arm. “You okay?”

  Devon stood there, every muscle in his body tensed. He didn’t answer my question. Callum would have forced Dev’s eyes to his and repeated the query, but I nudged Devon’s shoulder with my head, a gesture of comfort far less human than I was and not particularly alpha in the least.

  On instinct, Dev nudged me back, his muscles relaxing—but not by much. “Only you,” he said crisply, “would be worried about me at a time like this.”

  Like Shay, Devon was purebred. Boy-band tendencies aside, he could take care of himself—physically.

  “Seriously, Dev. You want to tell me this isn’t messing with your head at all?” I didn’t have to put even an ounce of my power as alpha behind the words. Best-friend privilege said it all.

  “Well, of course it is,” Devon replied. “One of Brother Dearest’s wolves showed up on our land, beaten within an inch of his life and caught between Shifts. If you’d been the one to open that door instead of Mitch, the smell of human blood probably would have sent him rabid, and you’d be significantly less charming as a decimated pile of meat.”

  Dev—do you think Shay sent him? I couldn’t make myself ask the question out loud, and Devon responded in key.

  I don’t think anything is below Shay. He’s not like other people, Bryn. You know he’s not.

  “If your brother wanted Bryn dead, is this how he’d do it?” Chase’s words took me off guard—not because I had forgotten that he was in the room (though I had), but because his tone, understated and detached, contrasted so sharply with the animal set to his features. His wolf wanted to touch me, to protect me, to tear Shay to pieces, but Chase’s human side wanted answers—whether asking the question was like driving an elbow into Devon’s gut or not.

  “I don’t know,” Devon said shortly, his jaw turning to granite, his gaze averted from mine. “I’m not exactly an expert on the inner workings of Shay’s dark and twisted mind.”

  By the time Devon had come along, his much older brother was already the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. They weren’t exactly what one would call close.

  “Okay. I had to ask. If you think of anything, let us know.” With that, Chase turned his attention from Dev to me. “What do you need?”

  The look in Chase’s pale blue eyes was still feral, the desire to protect me simmering just under the surface—but he’d grown up in a world very different from the one I’d known as part of Callum’s pack, a world where females weren’t shuffled off into a back room or given bodyguards at the first sign of trouble. Chase was asking, not telling; thinking instead of acting on instinct.

  I’d never been so glad that Chase was Chase and that neither one of us had been born a Were.

  “I need to talk to Mitch,” I said, following his example and trying to think this through, even though I wasn’t exactly known for an overdeveloped tendency to look before I leapt. “Whatever happens, our first priority is making sure that whoever this visitor is, he doesn’t die.”

  I hadn’t been an alpha for long, but even I knew that having a Snake Bend wolf die on my territory wouldn’t look good. Until I knew exactly what was going on, and how to proceed, I couldn’t afford to give Shay any reason to come here, looking like the injured party and demanding something—or worse, someone—in return.

  It was two days before they let me anywhere near the injured boy—two days for his injuries to heal enough that he was in control of his wolf, two days that I spent gnashing my teeth and trying to unravel the tangled web of political possibilities surrounding his entry to our territory.

  Had Shay sent him here, on the verge of death, with the hope that he’d attack me? Would the other alphas blame Shay for the action of a wolf who was clearly Rabid? Had someone attacked one of Shay’s wolves on our land—and if so, who? A member of one of the other packs, crossing into our territory to make trouble? A Rabid, gone rogue or mad and hunting anyone and anything in his way? Or, God forbid, one of my own peripherals?

  By Senate law, our peripherals could attack trespassers, but what had been done to this boy wasn’t animal retribution.

  It was torture.

  I had to talk to him, and after two days of letting Mitch—and more importantly, Ali—tell me no, I was done listening to the word. In a happy coincidence, they also appeared to be done saying it, so I didn’t have to go through the awkward and unquestionably ill-fated process of trying to pull rank on the woman who’d been my mother since I was four.

  “I want to go with you.” Devon’s voice was perfectly pleasant, but I recognized the look in his eye, because the exact same expression had been staring out at me from the mirror for days.

  “Can you behave yourself?” I asked mildly.

  Devon did a good impression of someone who was offended. “Moi?” He ruined the effect somewhat by brushing invisible dust off the tips of his fingers, a motion as close to popping his knuckles as someone with Devon’s sensibilities could come.

  I reached out to him with my mind but hit a smooth, blank wall. Of all the wolves in my pack, Dev was the one most clearly poised to become alpha himself someday. The promise of his future dominance made him an ideal second-in-command, but there was power there, too, and that power meant that if he
wanted to, Dev could guard his mind from me absolutely, in a way that no one else in our pack could.

  “Dev.”

  “What do you expect me to say, Bronwyn?” he asked, adopting Callum’s habit of calling me by my full first name when he was irked. “This boy—who belongs to Shay—came here, to our territory, half mad and out of control of his Shift, and plopped himself down more or less on your front porch. He could have killed you, and accident or not, that’s not the kind of thing you can expect me to shrug off like a hideous hair day.”

  Challenge.

  There was a whisper of it in the bond between us, and I brought my eyes to Devon’s in a staring contest that neither one of us wanted to be engaging in. For several seconds, we stood there, locked in something we didn’t completely understand, and then Devon blinked.

  Literally.

  He didn’t avert his gaze. He didn’t round his shoulders, but he blinked, and that was enough.

  I’d won.

  “I’m still coming with you, you impossibly irritating little wench.”

  From Dev, that was a term of endearment, and I took the degree to which he sounded on the verge of slipping into an exaggerated British accent as an indication that he was in control of himself—and that unless my life was in immediate danger, he’d behave when cross-examining Shay’s wolf.

  “Yeah,” I said, punching him lightly in the stomach, “I love you, too.”

  Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door of Cabin 13, where Mitch had been tending to the injured wolf.

  Lake answered the door and pulled me inside. “’Bout time you got here,” she said. “Now would you please tell him I can stay and to stop picking at me to take to the hills?”

  Based on the mutinous expression on her father’s face, I inferred that the “him” Lake was referring to was Mitch.

  “Well, go on. Tell him.” Lake folded her arms over her chest, the expression on her face an exact mirror of the scowl on Mitch’s.

  Are you crazy? I asked, sending the words from my mind to hers. In response, Lake shrugged, which I took to mean something along the lines of “Yes, in fact, I am.”

  “It’s okay by me if she stays,” I said, but that was as far as I was willing to go; I hadn’t thrown down with Ali on my own behalf, so I wasn’t about to press the issue with Mitch for Lake. Besides, why she would want to be anywhere near a male Were from a pack that was, in all likelihood, less female-friendly than ours was a mystery to me.

  “Please,” Lake snorted in response to the expression on my face. “Have you seen this kid? I reckon I could take him with three paws tied behind my back, no shotguns, no knives.”

  “If you had paws,” Devon volunteered helpfully, “you wouldn’t be able to use a shotgun.”

  In her human form, Lake fought dirty, which for a Were meant using weapons other than claws and teeth. In wolf form, she was faster than just about anyone I’d ever seen, but she wasn’t as big as most males and couldn’t match them in brute strength—so she improvised.

  “You three gonna squabble like children, or do you want to talk to the boy?”

  I took Mitch’s question as implicit permission for Lake to stay. I could almost pretend this was just another adventure, with Devon and Lake and me alternating between keeping one another out of trouble and getting into it.

  Almost.

  “I’ll do the talking.” I said the words quietly, more to psych myself up for the coming interrogation than anything else. Mitch nodded his approval, and then he stepped aside to allow the three of us entry to a small hallway.

  Wolf. Foreign.

  The feeling washed over me as I walked forward, but it receded more quickly than it had before, like my instincts knew as well as I did that even if the boy was a threat, they were no longer needed to sound the alarm. That thought in mind, I breathed through the unmistakable smell of Snake Bend in the air, noting that it was tinged with antiseptic and something that smelled like coffee or chocolate: the boy’s scent, separate from the smell of his pack.

  Lucas, Bryn. Mitch’s voice was rough in my mind, and my brain itched just listening to it. The boy’s name is Lucas.

  Mitch was Pack, but even living at the center of our territory, he seemed more like a peripheral, less connected to me and the others than we were to one another. It was a testament to Mitch’s experience and age—a few hundred years, at least—that he was able to keep his mental distance and still make his words heard in my mind at will.

  “Lucas,” I repeated out loud. I stepped into the room and was greeted with a face so blank that I had to wonder if he’d heard me say his name or registered my presence here at all.

  The boy in question was olive-skinned, but pallor had settled over his cheeks, and he didn’t twitch or move at all as I approached. The stillness was unnatural on a Were, and watching him felt as odd as seeing a lion lying faint on the floor. He looked like someone had drained the blood from his body and then leeched his will to live straight from his soul.

  I crossed the room to stand at the foot of his bed, keeping myself just out of his reach. “I’m Bryn,” I said, for lack of a better opening, “and you’re on Cedar Ridge land.”

  “I know.” His voice wasn’t quiet or raspy or anything else I’d expected of it. Instead, it had an almost musical quality to it, like he would have been more at home singing along to an acoustic guitar than forcing his mouth to speak regularly. “I came here for you.”

  Devon was beside me in an instant. To his credit, he didn’t stand straight, and his lip didn’t curl back to reveal canines, but his size and presence spoke for themselves. “Did your alpha send you?” Devon asked, refusing to refer to Shay by name.

  The boy on the bed shuddered and then his body fell almost immediately back into stillness, like even shivering was too much for his fractured mind to bear.

  “When you say you came here for Bryn,” Lake added, her eyes glittering and utterly lethal, “what exactly would you be meaning by that?”

  So much for my doing the talking.

  “I can’t … I can’t live like that. Not anymore. It’s—” The boy blinked and even that seemed to take gargantuan effort. “I just can’t do it.” Ignoring Lake and Devon, Lucas looked at me—not at my eyes, but close enough that I felt the weight of each word out of his mouth. “They say you help people. That you save them. Callum’s Bryn. That’s you, right?”

  “You didn’t come here to kill Bryn.” Devon’s voice matched the tone in Lucas’s almost exactly, and I wondered if Dev even realized he was doing it. “And your alpha didn’t send you?”

  Lucas moved, and I braced myself. At first, I thought he was leaping to his feet, but when he stopped moving, he was still on the bed, kneeling and no longer covered by the threadbare sheet.

  Angry white scars crisscrossed his torso and arms like tiny Xs and Os. He’d been cut, long and deep, over and over again. “You want to know if Shay sent me?” he asked Devon. “If your brother sent me?” Lucas breathed in raggedly and lowered his voice. “You look just like him.”

  Devon didn’t even blink, but inside, I winced for him, knowing that Lucas’s words would undoubtedly have left a mark.

  “I suppose whether or not Shay sent me depends on your definition of the word sent. He beat me. He hounded me. And when it got to the point that I couldn’t think of fighting back, couldn’t even muster up the strength to keep wishing he was dead, when I thought that things couldn’t get any worse for me in Snake Bend”—Lucas settled back, his eyes blank, his voice soft—“they did.”

  “Why?” The word burst out of Lake’s mouth a second before I could give voice to the question myself. “Why would your own alpha do something like that?”

  Now Lucas didn’t look at Lake, or at me. He looked at Devon, and I wondered if he was really seeing Dev or if he was still caught up in memory, seeing Shay in the features the brothers shared.

  “Why?” Lucas repeated. “My alpha is the type who needs a punching bag when things are going badl
y.” He shifted his gaze from Devon to me. “And lately, things haven’t exactly been going well.”

  Lucas’s words hit me hard, the image of his bloodied body interwoven in my mind with that of the scars that still marred his flesh. Shay had done that to Lucas. He’d done it because he was a bully and because he couldn’t touch the person he most wanted to hurt, the reason things had not been going according to his master plan.

  Me.

  Six months earlier, Shay had gone to Alpine Creek, Wyoming, expecting to return with fresh blood and females for the Snake Bend Pack, and because of me, he’d gone home empty-handed and watched as a human girl walked away with everything he’d wanted for himself.

  I’d seen the bloodlust in Shay’s eyes. I knew how badly he’d wanted to slam me into a wall, to rip out my insides and watch my body crumble to the ground. But thanks to the power Callum held over the rest of the werewolf Senate, thanks to the Senate’s own laws, Shay couldn’t touch me.

  In the wild, when an animal is forced to pull back from attacking an adversary and turned its wrath on an easier target instead, they called it redirected aggression.

  There was a chance—a good one—that what Shay had done to Lucas he’d done because of me.

  “What do you want from us?” I asked Lucas, unable to keep myself from taking a step closer to the dead eyes that looked up at me from the bed. “Why did you come here?”

  I didn’t bother telling myself that the only one to blame for Shay’s actions was Shay. It didn’t even matter if I believed it. I wasn’t the kind of person who could look at someone like Lucas and walk away with something as pat as an “it’s not my fault.”

  In response to my question, Lucas tilted his head to the side, a gesture more animal than not. “I want you to claim me,” he said, like it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. “I don’t want to be Snake Bend anymore. I want to be Cedar Ridge.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “HE WANTS TO TRANSFER PACKS?”