Trial by Fire

Ali had the good grace not to look too relieved. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Bryn.”

“I know. And I wouldn’t trade the pack, not for anything.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and looped it over into a loose bun. “Chase wouldn’t ask me to—but seeing Lucas, hearing about everything he’s gone through, it makes me realize: I think I know more about Lucas’s past than I know about Chase’s.”

Maybe if it had been just Chase and me, we would have talked about his human life more, the way we did in the beginning, but the quiet moments, the ones where the rest of the pack just faded away, were so few and far between.

“People are allowed to have secrets, Bryn.” Ali’s tone was mild, but the words felt like a reproach. “Even from you.”

Ali looked like she was about to say something else, but instead, she killed the engine, and I realized we had made it to town.

Thank God.

I’d take a physical fight over Touchy-Feely Share Time, hands down. Hopefully, though, this wouldn’t come to an actual fight.

Assuming Ali’s intuitions about the coven were right, once we started making our way down Main Street, our targets would come to us. Based on my previous interactions with Archer and Caroline, it seemed likely that they’d stick to the armistice Caroline had promised—but just barely. If they could get under my skin, mess with my mind, they would.

And then some.

As far as I was concerned, they could try, but I had no intention of letting myself be intimidated. Once they made the first move, I’d know how to counter. Whatever mind games they tried to play would tell me more about who they were and how they operated.

The Callum I knew wouldn’t have sent me here otherwise. I hadn’t seen him in months, hadn’t heard from him, but I trusted that.

Game on.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A LIFETIME OF BEING TAUGHT TO WATCH MY BACK made it hard for me to stroll down Main Street without thinking about all the ways I was leaving myself open for an attack. Growing up with people who could turn you into an afternoon snack had a way of giving you an unusual perspective on playing bait. I’d done it before—once—and the effort had ended with me knocked unconscious and tied to a chair in the home of a Rabid serial killer who liked to dress girls up in their Sunday best before making them bleed.

Suffice to say, I was hoping for a better outcome this time—especially since I didn’t have werewolf backup waiting just around the bend.

“Mind games,” Ali reminded me, her voice muted. “They’re all about the mind games.”

I was about to ask her why every time she made a statement about psychics, she sounded as straightforward and certain as Lake would have sounded talking about guns, but just as my mouth was about to form the words, I felt something—eyes on the back of my head, a presence cast over me like a shadow.

Step. Step. Step.

The sound of feet treading lightly on concrete was unmistakable—soft, but perceptible to human ears. I glanced at Ali out of the corner of my eye, and she gave a slight nod. She heard it, too.

Step. Step. Step.

And then nothing.

I knew enough about hunting to know when I was being stalked. I also knew, with chilling certainty, that the silence wasn’t an indication that the person tailing us had dropped back. She’d wanted us to know she was there, and now she wanted us to know that she could disappear from our radar, that unless she willed it, we would never hear her coming at all.

Caroline.

I kept myself from whirling around. If there was one thing I’d had pounded into my head from day one, it was the necessity of never letting fear show in my posture, the speed of my breath, the weight of my motions.

If this girl wanted to play mind games, I could play them right back.

“Aren’t you going to say hello?” I asked, voice casual, eyes pointed straight ahead.

“Hello.” Caroline spoke the word directly into my back. She was closer than I’d realized—too close—but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of reacting.

“Playing hooky?” I asked, forcing myself to continue facing forward, sending the message, loud and clear, that she wasn’t a threat worth facing head-on.

“Mental health day,” Caroline replied, her tone light, but lethal. “I’ll be back at school tomorrow. You?”

I didn’t hear her shifting positions, didn’t catch even the slightest sound as she unsheathed a blade, but somehow—instinct, maybe, or my knack—I knew. I reached back and caught her hand seconds before she would have pressed the flat of her knife to my back, just to prove that she could.

“You should stick to throwing knives,” I said, tightening my grip and forcing the bones in her wrist together as I jerked upward and spun, bringing myself face-to-face with the blonde with the dead, dead eyes. “Perfect aim doesn’t really help you in hand-to-hand.”

For a moment, the potential for bloodshed—hers, mine—hung in the air between us, and the part of me that was alpha, the part that had grown up like a Were, wanted it. The coven had come here to my territory and threatened my pack. One of their females had come at me from behind.

That wasn’t the kind of thing I was wired to take sitting down.

“Bryn.” Ali’s voice was mild, but I nodded and dropped Caroline’s gloved wrist. We hadn’t come here to fight. We’d come for information, and so far, we hadn’t gotten much. In fact, the only thing I knew now that I hadn’t known before this little melodrama had gone down was that I could take the coven’s pint-sized emissary in hand-to-hand—but if she’d had a weapon trained on me from afar …

“I’m Ali.” In a surprisingly gentle voice, my foster mother introduced herself to the girl who’d pulled a knife on me.

“Caroline,” the girl said shortly.

There was a moment of silence while the two of them appraised each other. Ali had several inches and sixteen years on Caroline, but for a split second, the two seemed disturbingly well matched.

“We didn’t know the wolf girl had human friends,” Caroline said.

Ali shrugged. “I didn’t know your coven was on good enough terms with the people in town to risk pulling a knife on someone in broad daylight—unless, of course, you have someone running interference, showing them something else.”

Caroline blinked once when Ali said the word coven and once when my foster mother called that Caroline probably hadn’t come here alone. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think that if Archer could enter my dreams, the coven might have someone who could make the rest of the people in town think they were seeing something they weren’t.

“You have no idea what you’re up against,” Caroline said, and for a second—a single second—she sounded almost sad. “Don’t tell me the two of you would die for one of them. Don’t tell me they’re worth it. They’re monsters, and you know that, same as me.”

A reply was on the tip of my tongue, but before I could press Caroline to tell me how she could call my pack monsters, given what her coven had done to a battered teenage boy, a single note, haunting and low, made its way to my ears, and suddenly, whatever I was going to say didn’t seem nearly so important.

Caroline turning and walking away didn’t seem important.

Nothing did.

Objectively, I knew that another person might describe the sound as a whistle, compare it to the product of blowing a steady stream of air into a hand-carved woodwind. But to me, it wasn’t just a sound. It was a song.

It was paralyzing.

I knew what was happening, knew that there was a person making this sound, and that when she’d made it for Lucas, he hadn’t been able to move or scream or even care that he was being tortured.

I knew, I knew, I knew—and I didn’t care.

My hands fell to my sides. My lips parted slightly, the tension evaporating from my face and jaw. All my other senses receded, because nothing mattered as much as the sound.

The sound.

On some level, I realized that Ali had gone still beside me, her muscles as liquid and useless as mine. I saw people approaching, recognized Archer, noted the old woman standing beside him, looking every inch the storybook grandmother but for the snake coiled like a scarf around her neck. And then there was the third in their little trio, the one whistling that one-note song that snaked its way through my brain, around my limbs, in and out of my blood, my skin, everything.