Taken by Storm (Raised by Wolves #3)(61)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Then there were the newest members of our pack. Maddy—and baby Rose—and a handful of adult males, handpicked by Devon for their fighting prowess and their loyalty. Before I accepted them as part of Cedar Ridge, I’d run their names by Mitch. Having interacted with them more than once over the years, he’d given the transfers his stamp of approval, and Callum had sent me e-mails, encouraging me to accept Devon’s offer of extra muscle.

I hadn’t replied.

There were twenty-five of us now—enough to cover a wider territory than we’d held before. With a civility unobserved in any alphas before us, Devon and I had split the former Snake Bend territory the way we’d split candy bars when we were little. North Dakota was mine; the lower states his.

Together, we had more people, more land, and more females than most other packs could ever even dream of. I didn’t kid myself that the other alphas were unaware that the Cedar Ridge and Snake Bend packs, though separate, would fight any enemies as one.

I also didn’t ignore the obvious, that this was the future Callum had been aiming for all along. This was the reason he hadn’t warned me that Shay might come after Maddy. This was why he hadn’t prevented Chase’s death, why I woke up each day alone, feeling like half my body was missing and a chunk of my soul had gone dead inside.

Callum had his reasons. I understood—I did. I saw his thought process with crystalline clarity; I recognized that the outcome—Shay dead, Devon the alpha of his own pack, the other alphas sufficiently warned about what might happen if someone came after me—was the best any of us might have hoped for.

But Chase was still dead, and that, I couldn’t forgive. Not now. Not ever.

You can’t trade a human’s life for a wolf’s.

If Callum had Changed me when I asked him to, Shay would have had to go through me to get to Chase. I would have had the option of offering my life up for the wolf Caroline had killed. With my life on the table, Shay wouldn’t have been able to go after anyone else.

You need to be human for this, Callum had said, and I was. I’d waited. I’d been patient. But Chase was the last person who would die because of what I was—and what I wasn’t. He was the only one who might have been able to talk me out of it.

He was my why.

I went back to the house and dressed in simple clothes: a light sweatshirt, cotton shorts. I told Ali I was going out.

“Won’t you get cold?” she asked. Summer had given way to early fall; already, there was a chill.

I shrugged. “You know me,” I said. “I’ll survive.”

There was a pregnant pause as she looked at my face, really looked at it. There was nothing to see there, no hint of things to come.

She let me go.

I drove to the border and waited. I didn’t call Callum, didn’t give him an ultimatum, but if he didn’t show, I’d order one of the new Weres to attack me. Loyal or not, protective or not, they wouldn’t be able to disobey.

“Five minutes,” I whispered. “You have five minutes.”

I didn’t, wouldn’t say his name.

I sat down on the ground. I offered my face up to the sky. It was dark and overcast, but I basked in it, the same way I would have if there were sun. These were my last human breaths.

My last human sky.

A hundred years from now, would I look back and remember the way the colors looked? Would I recall what it was like for goose bumps to dot my flesh, to hear nothing, smell nothing, to know that there was no one and nothing in my body but me?

I didn’t care.

What good was being human, if it meant watching the people I loved die? What good was it pretending that I was human, when life just kept peeling my humanity off in strips?

Crunching gravel alerted me to Callum’s approach. I looked at him, expecting to feel a stab of betrayal, anger, hurt, but for the first time in memory, I met Callum’s eyes and felt nothing.

Whatever we’d had, whatever bond we had forged, whatever memories we’d shared, however much of the person I’d become that I could trace back to him—he’d killed it, as dead as Jed and Chase.

“Bryn.” That was all he said, just my name. Everything else went unspoken, evident only in his tone. From the day he’d found me until now—every interaction, every time he’d dried my tears, the times he’d been the one to make me cry. I’d loved him, and I’d hated him, and it had all been leading up to a single moment in time.

Now.

“You made me a promise once,” I said, my tone as flat as his was brimming with everything that had passed between us in the past thirteen years. “I’ve come to collect.”

He didn’t push me. He didn’t reach out to touch me. His eyes locked onto mine, a perfect match for the tone in his voice.

“You’re certain?”

I stood, faced him, held my arms out to my side.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Kill me.”

Kill whatever humanity I had left.

He turned his back on me and began Shifting. I heard each snap of bone, as flesh rendered itself into something new. I thought of my parents, the scars on Caroline’s arm, Lucas trying to rip out my throat.

I thought of the chunk the Shadow had taken out of my flesh. I thought of a thousand cuts on my body, needles digging into flesh, the smell and taste and feel of blood.

Callum turned back around. On four legs, he padded toward me. His eyes met mine. I nodded.

He leapt.