And whatever it was, whatever he asked me for, I knew I’d say yes.
I met Callum halfway between Ali’s house and his, in an area of the forest where the trees thinned out and the ground leveled off in a semicircle. Tonight, the Crescent would be filled, our pack’s numbers spilling into the forest proper. Callum’s house was where the pack conducted its human business. Here, they were wolves, and I avoided this patch of land the same way I eschewed dominance scuffles, disapproving lectures, and werewolves like Marcus who would rather see me dead than claimed by their alpha.
“Bryn.” Callum greeted me with a single word and a slight smile. And then, without warning, he attacked. In a blur of motion, he was upon me, his leg snaking out to kick mine out from underneath me. Stunned, I moved entirely on instinct, twisting to angle my shoulder to the ground.
If you’re going to fall, it’s generally a good idea to control the way you do it. Using my own momentum, I rolled out of the fall, and instead of sprawling out on the forest floor, I bounced to my feet, my hands in loose fists, pulled tight to my chest. Automatically, I scanned the surrounding area for weapons. Holes into which I could trick my enemy into falling. Rocks that I might be able to crack a skull with. Sticks wide enough that I could channel Buffy and do the stake-through-the-heart routine, which was guaranteed to irritate a Were, but might also slow them down enough for me to get to higher ground.
Safer ground.
All of this happened in a fraction of a second—a half moment, or not even that. If I’d been thinking rationally, I would have realized that werewolf or not, official business or not, this was Callum, and I might have guessed that he was attacking me for a reason. I might have noticed that though he was going full speed, he’d pulled back to quarter strength, or less.
But I didn’t.
When a human fights a Were, she doesn’t have the luxury of thinking things through. You’re stuck in slow motion against an enemy who moves so quickly that your eyes can barely follow the movement. You don’t have time to think. You don’t even have time to react. You have to anticipate. You have to be ready. You have to react to the things your opponent hasn’t done yet, but will.
And you have to be lucky.
You’ve been very lucky, Bryn. That doesn’t mean you have to press your luck.
Ali might have seen things differently, but at the moment, I would have sworn that I wasn’t pressing anything. It was pressing me.
Callum feinted left, but I was already moving the other direction and backward, and when his hand reached out to knock me to the ground, I’d already jumped. His blow threw me off center, but I managed to catch the limb I’d been aiming for anyway, and swung myself—slightly lopsided—up to stand on the branch.
As fast and strong and darn-near-invincible as they seem, werewolves aren’t much for climbing trees. Their bones are denser than humans, and they don’t have preternatural balance to go along with their stealth. Callum wasn’t quite six feet tall, but he was muscular, male, and much heavier than I was, and there was no way this tree would support his weight.
For that matter, I had no guarantees that it would support mine for much longer, but beggars really couldn’t be choosers. And mid-morning snacks can’t afford to be finicky about the methods with which they attempt to avoid being eaten.
“You’re getting faster,” Callum said, “but you need to be more aware of your surroundings.” And with those words, he shot into another blur of motion, running up onto a nearby stone and catapulting himself off it.
Incoming werewolf, zeroing in on me like a missile. Not a good thing. Not a good thing at—
“Ooomph.” Callum tackled me off my perch. I braced myself for contact with the ground, but at the last second, he twisted, putting his body in between mine and the ground, cushioning my fall.
Thankful for the reprieve, I nonetheless elbowed him in the gut, somersaulted forward and out of his grasp, and threw a rock at his head before I even realized I’d armed myself.
He caught the rock and smiled. “Good girl.”
The tension melted off his body, and his posture changed utterly, a signal meant to tell me that this portion of our little meet and greet was over.
“Forgive me if I’m skeptical,” I said, and like magic, I had more rocks in each of my hands.
“The only way I wouldn’t forgive you is if you weren’t,” he said, and moving with a speed that fell more into the realm of impressively human than typically Were, he managed to disarm me completely, and he chucked me under the chin.
“You’re a strong, smart girl, Bryn, but it’s not enough. You’ve been slacking on your training.”
If by “slacking,” he meant “up at dawn every day for my entire life going through katas and self-defense moves and running like I’m prepping for a triathalon.”
“If you want to see the boy, you’ll have to do better.”
And there it was: the first condition. I wondered if Callum’s attack had been a test, if there was anything I could have done that might have convinced him that I was ready to see Chase now, or if he was just using my unusual willingness to comply with his wishes as an excuse to achieve a cog in some master plan. If the next condition involved me acing algebra, I was going to be very suspicious.
“I’ll do whatever I need to do.” I gave Callum a look that I hoped conveyed “you know I mean it,” with shades of “don’t toy with me.”
“You’ll see Chase once you’ve convinced me that you can defend yourself from him should things get out of hand. Until then, I’ll expect you to double your normal training regimen, and I want you sparring with partners of my choice on a regular basis.”
The idea of fighting someone who wasn’t Callum didn’t sit well with me. I would have been lying if I said that I’d never fought anyone else—I had, on occasion, handed touchy, grabby humans their butts on a variety of platters, but I was too smart to go around fighting Weres.
Besides Callum, there were only a few that I’d tangled with physically, even as practice, and I tried not to think about what it would be like fighting someone who I trusted less than Callum.
“Consider it done,” I said out loud. “What else?”
We weren’t exactly using the formal language of permissions and conditions, but we were both on edge—Callum because sparring under the influence of moonlust was no walk in the park, and me because being sparred with by a werewolf under the influence of moonlust sent a cold chill down the length of my spine.
Come out, come out, wherever you are. …
“In addition to increasing your training regimen, I have four conditions for the permissions you seek.” Callum transitioned to alpha-speak, and I could feel the formality of it building a barrier between us.
“I’m prepared to hear your conditions, Alpha.”
My words, every bit as formal as his, solidified the wall that held us apart, and if this hadn’t been so important to me, that would have forced me to crumble. Losing Callum, even for a second, was worse than any condition he could possibly lay down.
Or at least, that’s what I thought at the time.
“Once I deem you ready for your visitation or visitations—the number and times of which will be set in accordance with me—I’ll select three members of the pack to accompany you and serve as chaperones.”
Chaperones … or bodyguards? It was so like Callum to insist that I kill myself preparing for defensive maneuvers that he had no intention of ever allowing me to make.
“You will not see Chase with fewer than three members of the pack present, and during the course of your visitation, you will yield to their dominance on all matters.”
Dominance. I hated the word. I hated everything it represented, and in that moment, I hated Callum for forcing it on me. The idea of letting three random Weres tell me what to do, of submitting to them in all things without an argument, made me consider blowing real chunky chunks right there on the spot.
“You’re selecting the members of the pack to
whom I have to submit,” I said, restating his words as my own.
Callum didn’t reply to the question in my voice, or say anything to assuage my reluctance. Instead, he just stood there, looking at me from the other side of that invisible wall.
“I agree to this condition, Alpha,” I said, forcing the words out of my mouth.
“My next condition …,” Callum started to say, and then he looked at me, for real. “You’re not going to like this one, Bryn-girl.”
Uh-oh. Being Bryn-girl was a magnitude worse than being Bronwyn. When I was Bronwyn, I was in trouble, but I was only Bryn-girl when Callum was cushioning an otherwise deadly blow. The last time he’d called me that, someone in the pack had accidentally eaten an injured rabbit I’d nursed back to health.
I waited for Callum to elaborate, refusing to let him know the effect his words had on me.
“For the duration of the permissions,” Callum said—and I took that to mean from the moment I started in on the extra training until my last visit with Chase was complete—“you’ll acknowledge the pack. The bond,” he clarified.
My adoption into the pack—though Callum had taken steps to make it legal in the human world—was more than just words on a sheet of paper. I smelled like Pack. I lived like Pack. And, if I had let myself, I would have felt like Pack. I would have been bonded to them the way they were bonded to each other—supernaturally, psychically, instinctually.
I cursed. Callum waited.
He thought I’d back out. He couldn’t imagine that seeing Chase meant enough to me that I’d give up being myself—and only myself—for any amount of time. But what Callum didn’t understand was that I wasn’t interested in seeing Chase the boy, or even Chase the werewolf. I needed to see Chase the hunted. And I needed that because without it, I was already incomplete.
I needed my memories back. I needed to know what it was like for Chase, so I could know what it had it been like for me, and I needed to know if there was a Rabid in our territory, because if there was, the only way I’d ever really be myself again was to know that he was dead and that he’d paid for doing to Chase what someone had done to my entire family.
Chase had survived. My parents hadn’t.
“I agree to this condition, Alpha.”
Callum visibly winced. If this had been any other power struggle between us, I might have felt victorious.
“Fine.” Callum hadn’t expected things to go this far. Or maybe he had, but he’d hoped very much that they wouldn’t.
“My penultimate condition is that, in service of making this interaction official, you accept my conditions in front of the pack, at our moonlight congregation tonight—”
“I accept—”
“I haven’t finished yet, Bryn. You have to stay for the Shift. You have to run with the pack.”
Humans didn’t run with the pack.
“You do realize that request is made of crazy, right?” I couldn’t help shedding the formal dialogue for this one. Weres maintained their faculties when they Shifted. Most of the time.
“I’ll have the pack in control, Bryn, but you can’t see the boy if you’re afraid of him. I’ve been working with him nearly every day, and his control is progressing rapidly, but he’s too young to deal with the smell of your fear. You’ll run with the pack tonight, and you’ll continue to do so until the bond is strong enough that there’s no room for your fear.”
I’d heard of psychiatrists treating phobias by making people do things like put their hands into a pit of snakes, but this was just ridiculous.
“The bond protects you, Bryn. Once you open it, none of the others will see you as human. You’re Pack and you’ll run as Pack.” He smiled, his lips quirking upward just the tiniest bit. “I think you’ll like it, once you get past wanting to kill me for it.”
“What’s the final condition?” I wasn’t agreeing to this one until I knew what he’d force on me next. For all I knew, he’d demand I cut off my foot, because if I couldn’t maintain my composure as one-legged human among four-footed Weres, I couldn’t possibly talk to one juvenile werewolf locked in a steel cage.
Callum said, “I’ll tell you the final condition tonight.”
I growled at him, taking some satisfaction out of the way the inhuman snarl felt working its way from my throat to my lips.
“Most pack members wouldn’t have gotten forewarning on any of the conditions,” Callum said, and then he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. That simple motion was enough to completely pulverize the barrier between us.
“You’re doing this to me on purpose,” I said. “You’re trying to torture me because you’re still mad that I managed to ditch my bodyguards, break into your house, and uncover your secret basement boy.”
“I’m doing this,” he corrected, “because you’re mine.”
His.
Werewolves. They’re all about possession. Sometimes, I thought that parents—even human ones—were the exact same way. Your behavior reflects upon them. They want the best for you, because you’re theirs. Things that are okay for other people’s kids are out of the question for you, and no matter how old you grow, or how far you run, you can’t change where you came from.
“You’re doing this because you suck.”
Callum smiled charmingly, looking more like a boy than a thousand-year-old Were. “So I’ve been told, Bryn. So I’ve been told.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY NIGHTFALL, THERE WERE MORE WERES AT THE Crescent than there were students at my high school—an effect of living in a small town at the heart of a major werewolf territory. I knew every person there by name, though some had driven in from out of town, a commute they made, like clockwork, once every twenty-nine days. Callum’s territory extended from Kansas up to Montana and though the majority of Weres were drawn to be close to their alpha, a few of Callum’s wolves maintained peripheral status, living at the edges of our territory, away from Ark Valley and the rest of the pack. Of the peripherals, only two were missing from the Crescent, and their monthly absence persisted only so long as Callum allowed it.
Personally, I wished Alpha Dearest had required their presence tonight. Next to Devon, I had only one friend in our pack. Her name was Lake, she was my age, and she and her dad had spent summers in Ark Valley when the two of us were younger. Lake was one of our pack’s only female werewolves and the most outspoken person I’d ever met. I couldn’t help wishing that she and her dad had driven in from the edge of our territory for tonight’s meeting. Purebred werewolf or not, Dev wasn’t quite enough to counterbalance the members of our furry family who didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy feelings for the human girl standing in our midst.
“There’s no shame in turning tail and getting the Helen Hunt out of here,” Devon told me. “In fact, I would quite recommend it.”
Devon being Devon should have calmed my nerves, but I couldn’t manage so much as a smile. From the other side of the crowd, Callum began making his way toward me, and I could feel the sand slipping through the hourglass, each grain a punch to my stomach and a reminder that my time was running out.
Without a word, Callum placed his hand on the back of my neck, and though it was meant as a calming gesture, physical contact with the alpha had the hairs on my arms doing the wave, one after another.
To a normal girl, the energy in this place would have felt like an excess of adrenaline—something similar to the air in a locker room before a big game, or a math class in the moments leading up to an exam. But I knew better. This wasn’t adrenaline. This was preternatural. It was ungodly.
It was pure, undiluted animalistic energy, and the moment I opened the bond to the pack and joined their group mindset, it wouldn’t be an alien feeling on my skin, static in my arm hairs.
It would be inside of me, and I would be as lost to it as they were.
Callum’s grip on the back of my neck tightened just a bit, and I wondered if my face had given my thoughts away so clearly. In another few minutes, th
ey’d be clear enough to everyone, not in words, but in feel, as the bond let my emotions bleed onto them and into theirs.
Soon, Callum and I were standing at the center of the Crescent, Weres all around us. Sora, Casey, and Lance were the closest to me, with Marcus near the back, probably at Callum’s orders. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“Hello, brothers.”
If Sora objected to the fact that Callum’s greeting wasn’t gender neutral, she didn’t show it. I, for one, was feeling a little disenfranchised—not to mention outnumbered. There were easily a hundred of us in this clearing, and sleek, self-possessed Sora and I were the only females.
I was the only human.
One werewolf was dangerous. An entire pack was an immovable force, an unbeatable army.
I was outnumbered, unarmed, weak, and screwed. In that order.
“Hello.” The pack murmured the word back to Callum in unison, but I could barely parse the syllables into their meaning. There was a sort of melody to them, an inhuman, musical tone that made it sound more like a hum of energy than any kind of salutation.
“One in our number has requested our counsel,” Callum said. “Bronwyn, daughter of Ali, our ears are yours.”
Though he followed protocol to a T, his words were unlike any that this circle had heard before. First there was the fact that I was a daughter, and the fact that my familial allegiance was given by my mother’s name, and then there was the fact that everyone here knew that Ali hadn’t given birth to me, that I was an orphan.
That I hadn’t always been one of them.
The familiar sound of a spit bubble popping had me looking over my left shoulder, toward Callum’s guard, and sure enough, I noticed that Casey wasn’t the only member of my household here. The twins were present and accounted for: two babies among scores of men, a burly Were who I recognized as one of Casey’s coworkers gently cradling one in each arm.
Well, at least I wasn’t completely on my own. Though after a moment’s reflection, I wasn’t sure if that was a comfort or not. My allies in this circle consisted of a fashion-conscious teenage boy who believed in the holy power of the movie musical and two infants wearing shirts with little yellow and blue duckies on them.