Trial by Fire

I’d wondered about the terms of the deal Valerie had made with Shay, and now they were inescapably clear. She hadn’t attacked us to curry favor with Shay; she’d been paying off a debt—an old one.

Turning this over in my mind, I looked at Caroline—really looked at her—and wondered if she’d connected those dots.

Probably best not to ask, Bryn, Devon said quietly. She doesn’t talk about it, but she’s dealing.

She. As in Caroline. Ali’s sister, the self-proclaimed hunter of werewolves.

“Eric’s dead,” I said, unable to forgive her that, even if she hadn’t been fully in control of her own mind, even if she’d resisted the urge to shoot to kill. “She shot him, and now he’s dead.”

Devon fell into a standstill, the expression on his face 100 percent wolf.

I know, he said silently, the words echoing through the pack-bond between us like a cry of mourning, a song for the dead. I know. I know. I know.

“I was supposed to protect him,” I said softly.

Dev nodded, accepting my words. “I wasn’t even there.”

I felt the weight of that. So did he. It would have been so much easier to put it all off on someone else—say, for instance, the person who’d put a bullet through Eric’s leg.

Caroline didn’t feel like a threat to me, not anymore, but I didn’t want to see the tear tracks on her face.

I wanted her gone.

She’s  Ali’s sister, Bryn. Her mother is dead. Devon’s words inside my head were like a gentle nudge with a massive wet nose. You do the math.

I didn’t want to do the math.

“I want to see Chase,” I said, clinging to that instead. His presence on the other end of the pack-bond was muted, but it was there. He was weak, but he was healing.

He was alive. Impossibly, undeniably, wonderfully alive.

“We had to move him to the far side of the property.” Dev held up a hand and wiggled his fingers, holding off my protest. “Nuh-uh-uh,” he said. “You don’t get to complain about this. The closer he was to you, the faster he healed, but neither one of you was waking up. You shouldn’t have been out more than a couple of hours, but whatever it is you all can do, however that pesky little knack of yours works—yours was doing the work for him.”

I thought of the dreamworld, where Chase and I had lain side by side. I thought of the walls between us melting away and the things I would have given—everything—to make him okay. Chase was Resilient. So was I. We’d shared dreams often enough that I didn’t question the idea that we’d done it again, and it seemed right that after everything he’d given up for me, I’d somehow funneled some of my strength to him.

I didn’t know how it worked or what it meant, but at that instant, I didn’t care.

“Chase was getting better. You weren’t.” Coming from Devon, that was clearly a condemnation of Chase. “You usually have more sense than that.”

Apparently, it was also a condemnation of me.

I gave Devon a look. “Did you actually just accuse me of normally having common sense?”

Dev finally cracked a smile. “Touché.”

I didn’t realize that Caroline had left the room until I looked for her and discovered her gone.

Good.

“I need to see Chase,” I said, allowing myself one moment of selfishness before the alpha in me reared its head, forcing me to amend the statement. “I need to see everyone.”

I needed them near me. I needed to touch them, to know that they were okay.

Injured or not, I needed to run.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

WAITING FOR NIGHTFALL WAS TORTURE—WORSE than the searing ache in my left arm, worse than the itching underneath the gauze. Somehow, against all odds, my pack had survived this confrontation. Shay’s wolves were already pulling back from the border. The psychics—with the exception of Caroline and Jed, who had stayed for her sake—had dispersed. Aside from Chase, who was dealing with the aftereffects of being poisoned in more ways than one, and Mitch, who’d taken his share of hits—including a bullet—while defending Maddy and Lake, the pack was no worse for the wear, but like me, they felt the loss of one of our own keenly.

Even the babies, who didn’t know what they were feeling or where that aching, fathomless loneliness had come from, were in a state, mourning a loss they wouldn’t begin to understand for years. And then there was Lucas, his presence a jarring reminder of the outside world, one the pack wasn’t in the mood to tolerate, let alone accept.

“Bryn?”

I was lying in Chase’s bed, his body curled next to mine as he slept, when Maddy approached. Her gaze was aimed at the floor, her eyes round and her breathing shallow. I listened for her through the pack-bond, but for once, her mind wasn’t on running, or the pack, or what we’d become together as soon as night fell.

There was only one word in her mind, only one emotion.

LucasLucasLucasLucas.

I didn’t try to make sense of the intensity of it. I didn’t weed through her mind to find the moment when she’d known, the way Chase had with me. Instead, I sent my words through the bond to her.

Look at me, Maddy.

She lifted her eyes, and I wondered how we’d come to this: her approaching me not as a friend, but as a member of my pack. I’d never asked for that kind of deference. I didn’t want it. Now that the threat was gone—for now, at least—I just wanted things to go back to the way they were before.

Even with Chase beside me, Callum’s words about being alpha—the weight, the responsibility, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that someday I’d die to keep my pack safe—were still there.

“We’re running tonight,” Maddy said, interjecting the words into my thoughts.

“Yeah, Mads. We are.” I kept my voice soft, unwilling to spook her. “What happened, with Eric … We need to be together. We need to let go.”

“Will you claim Lucas?” There was strength in the tilt of Maddy’s head, just like there was a simple grace to her words. She’d fought long and hard to be this person, and now she was willing and ready to fight for him. “I know it seems wrong, with Eric and everything, but Lucas needs a pack, and I need it to be ours.”

As I looked at her and listened to the pattern of her thoughts hovering just out of reach, it was easy to see the truth in Ali’s cautionary tale, easy to believe that Maddy’s wolf had made this decision for her, that love was an instinct for werewolves, not an emotion. Chase had told me once, a lifetime ago, that as a human, before the Change, he’d loved four things—and one of them was me. Forget that he hadn’t ever seen me or talked to me or even known in any concrete way that I existed. Forget that when he’d spoken the words, we’d met exactly twice.

His wolf had known, and Chase had known, the same way Maddy—and Lucas—did now.

“I was always going to claim him, Maddy. I didn’t win him from Shay just to send him away.”

It didn’t matter if Lucas was damaged, or that he’d come here believing that doing so would put our pack in danger. He’d never really had a chance, and I could give him that. For better or for worse, he was Maddy’s, and that made him ours.

“Tonight,” I told her, and the strain melted off her body like she was shedding a second skin. She glowed, practically luminescent, and I felt a deep hum of approval, of contentment through the bond.

For the first time since we’d saved her from the Rabid—since she’d saved herself—she felt sure of herself.

She felt whole.

The moon wasn’t full. The snow on the ground was fresh. Our numbers were diminished, and the forest still smelled like blood, but the energy running through and around us was no less palpable than it had been the last time the Cedar Ridge Pack had met.

The need to shed my own skin, to be one of them, was no less real.

Five feet from the spot where the others had buried Eric, Lucas stood, hunched and waiting. To a lone wolf, standing in the middle of another pack, knowing he didn’t belong must have been torture.

I glanced sideways at Chase. As far as I was concerned, he shouldn’t have even been out of bed. As far as he was concerned, I shouldn’t have granted Maddy’s request to claim Lucas until I’d had at least a few more days to heal myself.