The details were lost to the tightening in my chest, the narrowing of my field of vision. All I knew was that I had to fight.
Bryn, stop. Callum’s voice—the alpha voice—irritated me, and I shook it off, intent on escaping, but then it came again, louder. And insistent. And, strangely enough, more Callum than alpha. Bronwyn, CEASE.
And so I did. I stopped. The haze receded. And it wasn’t until I froze in motion that I realized how quickly I’d come to cutting my best friend’s Achilles heel.
Dumbfounded, I went absolutely still, and Devon, his eyes dilated and beginning to yellow, shook his head, clearing his mind and pushing his beast down. Of the two of us, Dev recovered first, and—after rubbing his red-rimmed eyes—he leaned forward, blew a single puff of air at my face, and then mimicked my earlier action and smacked me in the forehead.
“Armani,” he said testily, “is for gentlemen.”
I wanted to grin, but with the knife still in my hand, I couldn’t quite do it. Devon wasn’t human. No matter what I’d done, his injuries would have healed faster than the bruise I’d given myself falling out of bed that morning. What scared me wasn’t what I’d almost done. It was the fact that I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.
What was wrong with me? What was I?
“Did the bond change me?” The words were out of my mouth before the question had fully formulated in my brain. “What you did to me when you Marked me, what I did to myself when I let the pack in … did that … am I …?”
“You’re human, Bryn. The bond connects you to us—it changes the way you think and the way the pack thinks about you, but it doesn’t have any physical effects.”
“What do you mean it changes the way I think?” I asked. “I just went all Tarzan wild-child there. Don’t tell me that’s normal.”
Don’t tell me that’s human.
“Bryn, Ali is bonded to the pack, once through Casey and once through me. Have you ever seen her go all ‘Tarzan wild-child’ on someone?”
Ali could wrangle kiddos with the best of them, but she wasn’t strong physically. She wasn’t a fighter—physically. And somehow, I couldn’t imagine her facing off in a death match against any Were and coming out of it on top.
Then again, my bond with the pack was open. Ali’s was closed.
I narrowed my eyes at Callum. “You swear you didn’t change me?”
He nodded. “You, my dear, are exactly what you’ve always been.”
I nodded back, but there was something in his eyes—faraway pupils oscillating in size—that made me wonder exactly what he meant by that statement.
But then Callum shook his head, like an animal trying to shake off a fly, and as his eyes settled, he said the word I’d grown to hate over all others. “Again.”
Training. School. Training. Sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Morning after morning, night after night, that was the way things went. With Devon, I fought using silver. With the others, steel. I went home with bruises. They went home bleeding. And somehow, each time I fought one of them, I felt closer to the pack. The bond that connected us was growing, and even though these training sessions were nothing like the way natural wolves play-fight as pups, the physical proximity and the intensity of it magnified my feeling that I belonged to and with the pack, the nagging sensation that I was one of them.
For the first time in my life, I felt like a two-legged, furless, wolf-less werewolf. As if being fifteen didn’t give me enough identity issues, Callum’s conditions were turning me into a giant ball of contradictions.
The bond told me that I was Pack; my physical limitations told me that I wasn’t a Were. I liked fighting. I liked the rush. I liked my knives. But at the same time, the old lessons had been too firmly ingrained to allow me to forget that I shouldn’t want to fight them, that it should terrify me, that my first and only prerogative when engaging a werewolf should be to create an opening and run. Hide. Climb something. Find protection.
Callum had spent my entire childhood teaching me that I wasn’t a Were, that my life was always in danger, that I would always, always be at a disadvantage, but now that he had his wolves jumping me at every turn, I felt safer and more protected than I ever had.
Clearly, I was insane.
Bizarrely, I was also happy. Ali, on the other hand, was not. She refused to look at me when I came back from training sessions. Until I’d bathed and bandaged myself, I was invisible—unless I tracked dirt onto her clean kitchen floors. She adamantly refused to ask me about the conditions Callum had laid upon me the night of the full moon, and I didn’t volunteer any of information.
Instead, the two of us got locked into a series of snappish fights about other things. She mandated that I spend more time at my studio, kept an irritatingly close watch on my grades as finals closed in, and outrageously threatened to ground me (again) if Devon and I didn’t spend at least one night a week kicking back and watching TV shows on DVD. The more I threw myself into my training, the more she forced my hand in day-to-day life. The two of us engaged in an epic screaming fight one Friday when she somehow got Callum to rearrange my sparring schedule so that she and I could drive to the city and shop after school.
She just wouldn’t let me be. Every step I took that brought me closer to the pack was countered with a move designed to pull me back. I never wanted this, Ali insisted on reminding me. There was more to life than fighting. I used to like doing other things. Did I want to miss out on life because Callum had decided to play God?
Personally, I wasn’t sure what her problem was. I was fine. I was happy. And pack or not, I was still me. Did she want me to pretend to be normal? Who was she kidding?
I’d never been a normal girl.
And then, one Saturday morning, I came down to breakfast, and it all came to a head when she flat-out told me that I wasn’t going to training.
Straw met camel’s back. Breaking commenced.
“You have no right to tell me—”
“You do not want to finish that sentence, missy. You want to sit down, close your mouth, and eat.”
“How am I supposed to eat with my mouth closed?”
“Bryn, that’s enough.”
Even Alex and Katie would have had the good sense to respond to the vein throbbing in Ali’s forehead, but sense was not a quality with which I had been overly endowed, and I was sick of her telling me what I could and could not do. Sick of her trying to make me something I didn’t want to be anymore.
“I’m going to training.”
She raised a single eyebrow, and my heart stopped beating. Throbbing forehead veins, raised eyebrows … I was treading on dangerous territory here. Physically, Ali wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of opponent I’d gotten used to facing off against on a regular basis. But she was Ali.
So I tried to be reasonable. “I have to go, Ali. I don’t have a choice.”
And neither, I hoped my words communicated, do you.
“There’s always a choice, Bryn—even if you’ve already made it. And if you want to unmake it, if there’s ever a moment when you’re not sure that you want this anymore, or when it gets to be too much …”
“There’s not.”
She put her face right next to mine. “But if there is, you tell me. You tell me, and I will fix this.”
Pack business didn’t work that way, but it would have taken a braver soul than I to tell Ali that.
“I don’t want to take it back. And I really do have to—”
She didn’t let me finish. “You have to eat, you have to make your bed, and you have to run a brush through that hair of yours before you leave this house, but at the moment, that’s all you have to do.”
“That’s not the way permissions work, Ali.”
Her eyes narrowed, and my pack-sense backed my common sense in telling me to roll belly-up and let her have her way on this one.
“You’re not the first person in the world to deal with the pack, Bryn. I know how permissions work.”
The things she didn’t say hung in the air between us: what she’d asked for, what she’d been forced to give. Whether she’d bargained on her own behalf, or—more likely—if she’d sacrificed bits and pieces of her autonomy over time to buy me mine. The questions were on the tip of my tongue, but Ali preempted my words by slapping some eggs on the plate in front of me.
“I know what you have to do to survive here, Bryn. I’ve been doing it for both of us for a very long time, but for the record, when I said that you didn’t have to go to training today, I wasn’t trying to start a fight with you.” She sat down in the chair next to me and stared at my eggs, refusing to meet my eyes. Her voice went very soft. “Callum called. He’s joining us right after breakfast, and then the two of you are going back to his place.”
“Just the two of us?” I asked, trying not to tip my hand and let her see the flicker of hope building inside me.
“Casey will be going as well,” Ali said. “Sora and Lance might be there, too.”
Three wolves.
Three babysitters.
Three bodyguards.
“I’m going to see him?”
The tone in my voice left no question as to who the “him” in question was.
“Yes, baby. You are.”
Ali hadn’t called me baby in so long. All of a sudden, I felt like the world’s most ungrateful brat for fighting with her.
“I’m going to see him.”
The words weren’t the apology I’d been aiming for, but Ali seemed to understand. “Yeah.”
It felt like I’d be working toward this for so long that somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that there was an end goal. Now that it was here and real, I couldn’t believe it. Not at all.
“You’re going to see him. You’ll ask him what you need to ask him. You’ll do what you need to do. And then, this will all be over. No more permissions. No more conditions. Just us.”
No more fights.
No more bond.
No more running with the pack when the moon was full.
I’d be me again. The me Ali wanted me to be. I thought of the ball I’d visualized before I’d let down my shields that night at the Crescent and given myself over to the pack-mentality. The things I’d wanted and been before.
Were they still there, safe where I’d left them? Could I go back? Did I want to?
“Go on,” Ali told me. “Get dressed. Make your bed. And for heaven’s sakes, Bryn, brush your hair. You’re starting to look like a cavegirl.”
“Bryn want kill dinosaur,” I said, pantomiming what I thought passed for a decent dinosaur-killing motion.
For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed. “Go on. And if you’re very good, Ali show Bryn big heaping secret. Fiiiiiirrrre. Make tasty warm dinosaur meat.”
I snorted. “Dork.”
“Right back at ya, kiddo.”
The exchange felt so normal. So human. So far from whatever it was that I was becoming, day by day. Now that I was going to see Chase, an insane part of me wanted him to see this Bryn—the one who laughed with Ali, not the one who Callum had molded into a paragon of self-defense.
“I’m going to see him,” I said, testing out the sound of the words, wondering which me Chase would meet. “Today.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“CASEY, IF THERE’S A HAIR ON HER HEAD OUT OF place when you get back, you’re sleeping on the couch for the rest of your life.” Ali kissed her husband as she said those words, but he didn’t take her any less seriously for it. She moved to turn her threats on Callum, but he shook his head at her.
“Have I ever returned her to you in worse shape than I took her?” he asked.
Ali opened her mouth to answer, and my sarcasm barometer sensed an oncoming change in pressure, but Callum just gave Ali the eyebrow arch that she’d given me.
“Alison.”
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who got the full-first-name treatment. “You’ve never brought her back irreparably harmed,” Ali admitted grudgingly. “This better not be a first.”
The other Weres in the room, including Casey, narrowed their eyes at her, their backs stiffening. My pack-sense told me that they didn’t like the challenge to our alpha’s authority. It was unnatural. Ungodly. Impertinent. When Ali married Casey, she should have adopted his status in the pack, but she’d lived among them for too long without a place in the hierarchy to settle into one now, and her challenge rankled. At the very least, Casey should have known what he was getting into with Ali; she’d never made even the least effort to hide her lack of respect for pack tradition.
“Ali—” Casey started to say something, but the look on her face stopped him cold, and a wave of calm—originating from Callum—went through the room.
“I’ll take care of her, Alison,” Callum said, dispelling Ali’s worries even as he calmed the wolves.
I always do.
Ali nodded, and then without another word, she walked out of the room. Callum turned his attention to me. “From the moment we leave this house, I’m invoking the second condition of your permissions. Sora, Casey, and Lance are dominant. You are not. Whatever they say, you do it. Whatever they tell you, you comply. There is no room for argument, no room for discussion, and there will be no leniency for disobedience. You’re Pack and you’ll act like it. Am I clear?”
In retrospect, it was a really good thing Ali had left when she did. And probably also not a coincidence that Callum had waited for her to leave before laying down the law, because I saw in his eyes that he wasn’t guaranteeing my safety, not in all things. Chase wouldn’t lay fang, claw, or hand on me, but I knew what happened to subordinate wolves who challenged dominance.
It wasn’t pretty.
“You’re clear, Alpha.”
Callum nodded, and we left, the five of us. I took a page from Lance’s book and didn’t say a word, and the others followed suit. Understanding passed between us, though—silent words and thoughts and feelings. The rumblings of their wolves; the butterflies in my stomach. I fingered the knives strapped to my side, seeking comfort in the familiar.
I don’t know what I expected when we got to Callum’s house, but it wasn’t to see Chase sitting on Callum’s couch, playing Grand Theft Auto, his fingers moving the controller with frightening accuracy, even when he turned away from the screen and looked directly at me.
“Hi, Bryn.”
He was a far cry from the boy I remembered, caged in the basement, shadows in his eyes. But when I looked at him, really looked at him, I could almost see them. Almost, but not quite.
He just looked so normal.
Then again, so did I.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Callum said. “You have an hour.”
I realized with a start that Callum was leaving. To give us privacy? Or as much privacy as anyone with three lupine nannies could have?
No. There must have been another reason for it. Callum didn’t do anything without a reason, but I decided that I could debate his motivations and intentions later. Right now, I had an hour.
“Ummm … can I sit down?” I wasn’t sure who I was addressing the question to—the other wolves, or Chase. The latter nodded and brought his legs down off the couch. I started to move forward, but a deep rumbling from Lance’s lips held me back.
Apparently, this was the kind of thing that a submissive needed permission for.
I paused, and the three guards exchanged a look. “Chase, move to the chair. Bryn, stay on the couch. You’re not to touch each other.” Sora spoke each word with an emphasis that made me think that she was considering the way she verbalized the orders very, very carefully.
I ingested them, internalized them, and let my pack-sense get a grip on them. Obey. Obey. Obey. I had to obey.
Moving swiftly and with what I hoped passed for some amount of grace, I took up the spot Sora had indicated, and Chase slid over to the chair. His movements were so smooth that they were nearly liquid. He didn’t move. He flowed. Chase may have made progress in le
arning to control what he was, but he still wasn’t able to hide it. I didn’t think anyone could look at him and not know that there was something different. That he was more.
“So … ummmm … how’s it been?” I asked.
I cursed Ali for snapping me back into myself enough that the words didn’t come automatically, that my first instinct was entirely human: to make small talk. I wanted answers. I wanted to push at his bond with the pack, to explore it, to get inside his head and absorb everything he knew, but I didn’t.
I pushed down the desire and absorbed what my instincts were telling me instead. At some point, Callum had made Chase Pack. He was Stone River the way Lance was Stone River, the way I was, but until we were here, in the same room with each other, I’d never felt him. I hadn’t realized Callum had brought him into the pack at all.
“I can’t complain.” Chase’s voice was completely dry as he answered my question. “There’s food. There’s a television. We run through the forest at night. I have superhuman strength and don’t particularly miss the foster-care system.”
“You were in foster care?”
Focus, I told myself. Ask the important questions. But the human in me insisted that these were the important questions. That I’d been right all along to feel that Chase and I were the same.
“From the time I was eight. Dad took off. Mom died when I was little.”
“My parents did, too. They died, I mean.”
“You don’t need to talk about that, sweetheart,” Casey said, and for a split second, the fact that he’d used an endearment masked his words enough that I didn’t realize that he meant them as an order. “Leave that subject alone. You don’t want to get upset,” he explained.
Part of me wanted to point out that in the time that Casey and Ali had been married, he’d pretty much steered clear of playing Daddy. Now was an awfully convenient time for him to suddenly become concerned with my mental well-being. Especially considering the fact that I had to obey.