Trial by Fire

The moment my hand touched Archer’s, images flooded my brain in rapid fire: things he seemed to feel he owed it to me to share.

Not lies.

Like a slide show, the images flashed through my mind, bits and pieces of things that Archer had seen in other people’s dreams, in reality.

I saw Devon Shifting from human form and Caroline’s knuckles going white around the handle of a gun.

Flash.

I saw a little blonde girl, covered in blood. I saw her scramble backward as a large wolf—Devon? No, not Devon, not quite—approached.

Flash.

I saw Ali lifting a gun and taking aim at a woman exactly her height. I saw her pull the trigger, saw Valerie go down.

I heard Caroline say four simple words: “You shot my mother.”

Flash.

I saw Ali releasing the clip on her gun. She lowered her hands to her sides. She met Caroline’s eyes and waited for the girl to shoot.

“For what it’s worth,” Ali said, her voice catching in her throat as she looked back at Valerie’s body, “she was my mother, too.”

I woke up stiff, with morning breath and a body that felt like it had been put through a blender. It was dark outside my window, night just beginning to give way to the last moment before the dawn. Before I even opened my eyes, my pack-sense went haywire, flooding my body with thoughts and emotions, locations, tastes and smells.

Instantly, I knew where each member of my pack was. I knew who was awake and who was sleeping, who was injured, who was dead.

“You’re awake.” The voice was quiet, female, flat. I reached for the knife I kept on my nightstand, but it wasn’t there.

“Devon didn’t kill my father.” Caroline said those words the way someone else might have said hello. “I didn’t kill that Were.”

That Were.

I knew who she was talking about. I could see his very human corpse in my mind—lanky and in desperate need of a haircut.

“His name was Eric,” I said.

He’d been a freshman in college. The oldest of the Changed Weres. Excited to go to dorm parties. The first to speak up when things went awry.

“He was ours.”

Words like peripheral meant nothing in death. Eric’s absence was noticeable—a phantom limb, a gaping hole in my psyche. In human terms, we hadn’t known each other very long or very well, but right now, I didn’t feel human. I felt like I’d let Eric down. Like I should have protected him. Like I’d failed.

I didn’t shed a tear, didn’t even think about it. I wanted to go out to the woods, where the others had buried Eric, and howl.

“I could have killed him,” Caroline said, her own voice catching. “I was so angry, so scared, it was so much—and I could have put a bullet right through his heart. I had the shot, and I didn’t take it. I never miss, Bryn, but she couldn’t make me aim to kill.”

That was the first time Caroline had mentioned her mother, but I couldn’t read any emotion in her words, other than something empty, something fierce.

“I shot that Were—Eric—but I wasn’t the one who killed him. I didn’t kill anyone.”

I struggled to sit up, make myself taller, taking stock of my injuries as I did. In the time I’d been unconscious, I’d already started healing, but my left forearm was as good as useless, burned and wrapped in gauze. I thought of Jed and the layers and layers of scars decorating his aging flesh.

Werewolves healed quickly. Short of silver poisoning or being literally torn to pieces, they bounced back with minimal scars, but I wasn’t a werewolf, and unless I turned, someday, I’d be as old and scarred and battle-worn as Jed, strong enough to survive, with the things I’d lived through etched into the surface of my skin.

“After I took that last shot, there was an explosion. Jed pulled me out, dragged me away. He tried to take my gun.”

This time, I did see a flicker of emotion. Little Miss Huntress didn’t like being disarmed.

“We fought. I let him think he’d won, and the second he came out of fight mode, I knocked him out and dragged him far enough away from the explosions that I knew he’d be okay. Then I went after you.” Caroline shrugged, like nothing she’d said so far was important, like none of it mattered, to her or to me. “You know the rest.”

She stayed in the shadows, her back against the wall, the distance between us the only thing that kept me from reaching out with my one good arm and grabbing her by the throat.

As much as I didn’t want to, I believed her when she said that she hadn’t killed Eric—but either way, she’d shot him, left him as easy prey for the coven and their bag of tricks. She’d put a bullet in Lake’s dad and one in Chase, and the last time I’d seen her, she’d had a gun trained on the one person in this world who’d always been there, always been on my side, from day one.

“You didn’t shoot Ali?” I meant the words as a statement, but they came out like a question.

Caroline didn’t respond.

I could feel Ali, faintly, through the bond. Her mind was as much a mystery to me as always, and habit kept me from pushing past her walls. She was alive. She was safe. Everything beyond that—the sequence of events leading up to her putting Valerie down, the moment she’d recognized the coven leader as the woman who’d thrown her away, those final moments before Caroline had put down her gun—those things were hers alone.

“You’re Ali’s sister.” I looked for a resemblance and found none. There was nothing of Ali in Caroline’s baby-doll features, nothing that should have told me that the empath who’d abandoned Ali because she didn’t have powers was the same one who’d taught Caroline to believe she was nothing without hers.

A memory—of Valerie reaching out and brushing my hair out of my face as she tried to stab her way through my mental defenses—flashed before my eyes, and I thought of the hundred thousand times Ali had done the exact same thing.

They were nothing alike.

“I’m not anyone’s sister,” Caroline said. “I’m not anyone. For what it’s worth, I could have killed you, all of you, in that fight, but I didn’t.”

Caroline didn’t sound like she thought that was worth all that much—and, fair or not, given the circumstances, I agreed with her appraisal. I knew better than most people what it was like to have the rug pulled out from underneath your very existence, to find out that everything you thought you knew was a lie, but I couldn’t summon up any pity for her. I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. I had no desire to understand.

“You’re awake!” Dev glided into the room with the grace of a Broadway dancer. Clearly, he’d had time to heal completely, and just as clearly, he didn’t hold it against the other occupant of this room that she’d been the one to shoot him. “Has Caroline been filling you in?”

He said her name so easily, like she was just any other girl.

“She shot you,” I said, thoroughly disgruntled.

Dev shrugged. “Like Lake’s never threatened to do the same. Ms. Mitchell’s a menace with a shotgun. We love her anyway.” Dev actually had the audacity to start humming an upbeat little ditty.

“ ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’?” I said. “Really?”

Bryn, she shot me because I look like Shay. Dev didn’t elaborate on his silent statement, but the rest of the scenes Archer had shown me in my dream fell firmly into place. The werewolf who’d attacked Caroline when she was little, the one who’d killed her father, looked so much like Devon did now that unless you knew wolves—really knew them—you wouldn’t have been able to tell one from the other. They shared the same massive size, the same markings.

The same parents.

Shay killed Caroline’s dad.

That truth was like a splash of cold water in my face. Jed had told me that Valerie had taken to leading the coven a little too easily, a little too well. She’d never shown the hatred for werewolves that she’d instilled in the others. She was the type of person who could throw her own daughter away.

It wasn’t a stretch to think that she could have orchestrated the death of her husband.