Trial by Fire
Page 9
“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 badly.” 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?”
No matter how many times I said those words, I still couldn’t quite believe that was why Lucas had come all the way to the Wayfarer, a place that must have felt like enemy territory to his wolf, the same way he felt foreign to me. Bleeding and bloody, beaten within an inch of his life and unable to Shift, he’d limped and stumbled his way over mountains and through the forest and around God knew how many towns where he might have been spotted and shot—and he’d done all of that in the single-minded pursuit of one thing.
Me.
They say you help people. Callum’s Bryn.
I struggled to keep my head up under the memory of Lucas’s words and the hope I’d seen in his otherwise dead eyes. I didn’t want to be anyone’s last hope any more than I wanted to be some kind of werewolf legend: the Little Human That Could.
“What this kid is asking,” Chase said slowly, mulling over the words, “is it even possible?”
After meeting with Lucas, I’d retreated to the forest to process his request. Chase had been waiting for me when I got there, and everything that had happened passed between us with a single touch. Devon and Lake had followed on my heels, and now, there we were, the four of us. I breathed in deeply through my nose, banishing Lucas’s scent with theirs and reminding myself that, alpha or not, I wasn’t in this alone.
“People do transfer packs,” Devon said slowly. “It’s a coming-of-age thing.”
I snorted. “Coming-of-age? Please, Dev. This isn’t Catcher in the Rye. Pack transfers happen when a wolf gets exiled from one pack and picked up by another, or after someone’s been peripheral for years. That’s how it happened when Mitch left Callum’s pack. That’s how it happened a hundred years ago when Shay transferred to Snake Bend. That’s how it works. It’s nature’s way of shaking up the gene pool—and it doesn’t happen like this.”
I wasn’t telling Devon anything he didn’t know, but in a show of grace, he didn’t call me on it. I took that as a sign that he knew how uncomfortable I was with Lucas’s coming here, looking at me like I was different from the others, like I could be his savior. Being alpha was one thing with my own pack—we were young, and we were family, and I would have died for any of them, no questions asked. I needed to protect them, more than I needed water or air or any kind of human connection.
But this?
Lucas wasn’t a member of our pack. I didn’t know him, didn’t love him, couldn’t see inside his mind or feel his emotions as my own. I knew from experience—first with Callum’s pack and later with the Rabid—that I had the ability to rewire pack-bonds, breaking another alpha’s hold over a wolf and psychically instating my own, but I also knew that doing so wasn’t something the powers that be in our world would let me get away with a second time. Mitch had said it himself—not all alphas were as forgiving as Callum had been when I’d claimed Devon, Lake, and Chase.
The same law that kept the other alphas from coming here and raiding our ranks for child brides forbade me from interfering with Lucas’s ties to Shay’s pack. I couldn’t just welcome him with open arms and say, “Hey, sorry your alpha has been torturing you on my account. Make yourself at home.”
“Shay has to agree,” I said slowly, realizing even as I did that I might as well be saying something about hell freezing over or pigs taking flight. “For Lucas to transfer from Snake Bend to Cedar Ridge, Shay would have to agree.”
Anything less could start a war—or worse, give the other alphas, Shay included, the justification they needed to take what was mine.
I wanted to help Lucas. I did. The idea of sending him back to Shay, knowing what Shay would do to him for running away, made me want to vomit.
But I couldn’t risk my pack’s safety for his.
—Maddy—
The part of me that was alpha felt her approaching, and I wondered how long she’d debated before joining the four of us in the woods. She was the newest recruit to our inner circle, and even though we were Pack, even though that made us family, I knew she was still getting used to trusting other people, to believing that they could care about her the way we did.
Being raised by a psychopath will do that to you.
“Hey, Mads.” Devon greeted her with a smile, and I knew he felt the same tug I did: to protect Maddy, to make her feel safe, to make sure she knew that on four legs or two, she belonged. Only this time, those mandates were in conflict with each other. Protecting Maddy meant telling her that everything was fine, that we would take care of this, that she didn’t need to worry about Snake Bend or Shay or the battered boy in Cabin 13. But doing that would put up a wall between her and the rest of us. It would be saying that Maddy was weak or broken, that because she’d been a victim, she’d never get to be anything else.
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 badly.” 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?”
No matter how many times I said those words, I still couldn’t quite believe that was why Lucas had come all the way to the Wayfarer, a place that must have felt like enemy territory to his wolf, the same way he felt foreign to me. Bleeding and bloody, beaten within an inch of his life and unable to Shift, he’d limped and stumbled his way over mountains and through the forest and around God knew how many towns where he might have been spotted and shot—and he’d done all of that in the single-minded pursuit of one thing.
Me.
They say you help people. Callum’s Bryn.
I struggled to keep my head up under the memory of Lucas’s words and the hope I’d seen in his otherwise dead eyes. I didn’t want to be anyone’s last hope any more than I wanted to be some kind of werewolf legend: the Little Human That Could.
“What this kid is asking,” Chase said slowly, mulling over the words, “is it even possible?”
After meeting with Lucas, I’d retreated to the forest to process his request. Chase had been waiting for me when I got there, and everything that had happened passed between us with a single touch. Devon and Lake had followed on my heels, and now, there we were, the four of us. I breathed in deeply through my nose, banishing Lucas’s scent with theirs and reminding myself that, alpha or not, I wasn’t in this alone.
“People do transfer packs,” Devon said slowly. “It’s a coming-of-age thing.”
I snorted. “Coming-of-age? Please, Dev. This isn’t Catcher in the Rye. Pack transfers happen when a wolf gets exiled from one pack and picked up by another, or after someone’s been peripheral for years. That’s how it happened when Mitch left Callum’s pack. That’s how it happened a hundred years ago when Shay transferred to Snake Bend. That’s how it works. It’s nature’s way of shaking up the gene pool—and it doesn’t happen like this.”
I wasn’t telling Devon anything he didn’t know, but in a show of grace, he didn’t call me on it. I took that as a sign that he knew how uncomfortable I was with Lucas’s coming here, looking at me like I was different from the others, like I could be his savior. Being alpha was one thing with my own pack—we were young, and we were family, and I would have died for any of them, no questions asked. I needed to protect them, more than I needed water or air or any kind of human connection.
But this?
Lucas wasn’t a member of our pack. I didn’t know him, didn’t love him, couldn’t see inside his mind or feel his emotions as my own. I knew from experience—first with Callum’s pack and later with the Rabid—that I had the ability to rewire pack-bonds, breaking another alpha’s hold over a wolf and psychically instating my own, but I also knew that doing so wasn’t something the powers that be in our world would let me get away with a second time. Mitch had said it himself—not all alphas were as forgiving as Callum had been when I’d claimed Devon, Lake, and Chase.
The same law that kept the other alphas from coming here and raiding our ranks for child brides forbade me from interfering with Lucas’s ties to Shay’s pack. I couldn’t just welcome him with open arms and say, “Hey, sorry your alpha has been torturing you on my account. Make yourself at home.”
“Shay has to agree,” I said slowly, realizing even as I did that I might as well be saying something about hell freezing over or pigs taking flight. “For Lucas to transfer from Snake Bend to Cedar Ridge, Shay would have to agree.”
Anything less could start a war—or worse, give the other alphas, Shay included, the justification they needed to take what was mine.
I wanted to help Lucas. I did. The idea of sending him back to Shay, knowing what Shay would do to him for running away, made me want to vomit.
But I couldn’t risk my pack’s safety for his.
—Maddy—
The part of me that was alpha felt her approaching, and I wondered how long she’d debated before joining the four of us in the woods. She was the newest recruit to our inner circle, and even though we were Pack, even though that made us family, I knew she was still getting used to trusting other people, to believing that they could care about her the way we did.
Being raised by a psychopath will do that to you.
“Hey, Mads.” Devon greeted her with a smile, and I knew he felt the same tug I did: to protect Maddy, to make her feel safe, to make sure she knew that on four legs or two, she belonged. Only this time, those mandates were in conflict with each other. Protecting Maddy meant telling her that everything was fine, that we would take care of this, that she didn’t need to worry about Snake Bend or Shay or the battered boy in Cabin 13. But doing that would put up a wall between her and the rest of us. It would be saying that Maddy was weak or broken, that because she’d been a victim, she’d never get to be anything else.
