Raised by Wolves (Raised by Wolves #1)(26)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

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.”