Trial by Fire

“I need you here,” I told Devon quietly. “Lucas showed up in my room last night.”

I’d expected those words to distract Dev, but he just glanced at Chase and then turned back to me. “I know,” he said, and the similarity between my best friend’s facial expression and Chase’s was eerie.

You told him? I asked Chase silently, torn between annoyance and shock. Chase and Devon weren’t exactly friends, and Chase wasn’t really what one would call chatty.

“Of course he told me,” Devon retorted, even though I knew for a fact he hadn’t heard me ask the question. “You can just imagine how thrilled I was to hear it.”

I wasn’t sure which was worse for Dev: that Lucas had gotten close enough to me that, if he’d wanted to, he could have ripped out my throat, or that Chase had been the one to stop him—and spend the night.

“Dev, I need you and Lake to keep an eye on Lucas. Wherever he goes, you go, and if you can keep him away from the younger kids—”

Devon’s eyes glittered. “You don’t even need to ask, milady.”

The milady he tacked on to the end of that sentence was the only thing that reminded me that Dev wasn’t usually the type who lived life on the cusp of violence. All of us were on edge.

And, Dev? I added. If you can keep him away from Maddy …

I didn’t allow myself to finish that silent request. It didn’t seem right to ask Devon to keep Maddy from Lucas while the rest of our group roamed free. Maddy was a big girl, and if she wanted to stay close to Lucas, to watch him, to figure him out—I couldn’t keep her from it, any more than Callum had been able to keep Chase from me.

I knew what it was like to look at someone and see yourself, to need answers, and as off balance as Lucas seemed, I had to remind myself that the day I’d met Chase, he’d snarled at me from inside a cage and told me that I smelled like meat.

You don’t have to ask me to watch out for Maddy, Bryn. Devon met my eyes.  And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d have to ask Maddy to watch out for me.

“Somebody ask for tranq guns?” Lake called, crossing the room in three long-legged strides, ponytail swinging. She handed one to Ali and one to me. “One dart will make a large male groggy or knock out a little bitty human girl.”

I assumed from the tone of Lake’s voice that the “little bitty” comment referred to Caroline, and that Lake herself would have taken no small pleasure in pulling the trigger. She’d been taught all her life not to attack humans, but knock- ing them unconscious with tranquilizer guns was more of a gray area.

“Thanks, Lake.” Accepting the gun from Lake, Ali turned back to me. “You ready to get out of here?”

I nodded, and Chase echoed the motion. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that he needed to stay here, but Ali shook her head slightly, and I let her speak instead.

“How far away can you be and still sense Bryn?” Ali put the question to Chase and waited for his response. I figured that she was probably planning to tell him to hang back far enough that no one would see him, but close enough that I could call for him if things went bad. I realized a second after Ali asked the question that she probably wouldn’t like Chase’s answer.

“I always sense her.” Chase shrugged, but despite the human gesture, I could tell that the answer was coming as much from the wolf as the boy. “Always feel her.”

Ali held up one hand.

“TMI?” I guessed.

“Something like that,” she confirmed before turning her attention back to Chase. “If you can always sense her, you’ll know if she’s in trouble, and you’ll come. Otherwise, this is kind of a mother-daughter thing.”

If there was one argument Chase couldn’t counter, it was that.

“I’ll wait at the edge of our property,” he said, addressing the comment to me, like we were the only two people in the room—like the seven words he’d said to Ali and the heads-up he’d given Dev had tapped out his desire to speak to anyone but me. “You need me, I’m here.”

That was what Chase did—whether he agreed with me or not, whether it was comfortable for him or not, he was always there.

“I should go.” I forced my voice to sound normal and pressed back the desire to close my eyes and remember what it had felt like to wake up that morning with him by my side. “And hopefully, when we get back, we’ll have answers.”

I didn’t bother to enumerate the questions; there were too many of them, and everyone in the room knew each one as well as I did. The only thing the others didn’t know was that Callum was the one who’d nudged Ali and me into doing recon on the psychics.

Slipping the tranq gun into the inside pocket of my jacket, I couldn’t help wondering what exactly Callum had seen that had caused him to set us on this path.

Time to find out.

“So. You and Chase. How’s that going?”

Apparently, this was Ali’s version of small talk. I immediately started wishing that the drive to town was a significantly shorter ordeal. Ali had me as a captive audience for at least another ten or fifteen minutes, and this was a conversation I’d been expertly avoiding for months.

“So,” I returned evenly. “You and Mitch. How’s that going?”

I knew that was a bit of a low blow, but I really didn’t want to try to explain to Ali, who’d done everything possible to make sure I had things in my life other than the pack, that as much as Chase and I were just getting to know each other on human terms, there was another part of me—the part that had been raised to think like a wolf—that had known him the second we met.

“I’m not criticizing here, Bryn. I just want to make sure you’re careful.”

For one horrific moment, I thought she might be on the verge of giving me a sex talk. Luckily, her next words laid that worry to rest.

“Dating means something different to werewolves than it does to humans, and Chase hasn’t been one long enough to understand that, let alone control whatever his wolf feels when he’s close to you. You’re only sixteen, and wolves mate for life.”

Casey hadn’t.

I didn’t say the words, but the second I thought them, I felt like a horrible person. I was the one who’d torn Ali’s marriage apart in the first place. I would have preferred biting off a chunk of my own tongue to throwing that in her face.

“I tried to make it work with Casey.”

If I hadn’t already been silent, Ali voluntarily bringing up his name would have shocked me into it.

“I wanted it to work, but it didn’t, because Casey’s not human, and no matter how much he thought he loved me, there were always going to be things that mattered more.”

I wanted to point out that unlike Casey, whose loyalties had and would always lie with Callum, Chase would never have to choose between his alpha and me. I was his alpha. But Ali wasn’t done talking yet, and I didn’t interrupt her.

“You’ve seen the way Casey is when he visits, the way he still looks at me, the way he acts when Mitch and I are even in the same room.” Ali very deliberately did not elaborate on whether or not Casey had anything to be jealous about. “Whatever I had with Casey is over for me, Bryn, but for as long as I live, it won’t ever be over for Casey, and I have to deal with that. I’m a big girl. I can do it, but you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and you have no way of knowing what you’ll want five years from now, or ten. Maybe Chase is the one. Maybe he isn’t. But if you let things get intense now, there won’t ever be someone else for him, and you’re the one who’s going to have to deal with the consequences.”

I was beginning to suspect that I would have preferred Ali giving me the sex talk.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Ali. Chase isn’t like other Weres. He’s not possessive. He doesn’t expect me to bow down to anyone.”

She looked less than convinced.

“And besides,” I added, “as intense as things are, I have an entire pack inside my head. If it were just him and me, then maybe things would be going too fast, but they’re not.” I glanced out the window, unsure whether I wanted to say the next part out loud. “Before I was alpha, it was like the two of us were the only people in the world, and now we’re not.”