Trial by Fire (Raised by Wolves #2)(23)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

We were home, and underneath the familiar pack scent, my senses registered something else.

Something foreign.

Close.

Still in wolf form, Chase leapt out of the car and came to a halt a few feet in front of us, glancing back over his shoulder, as if to tell us to stay where we were. Undaunted, Lake sauntered forward, Devon on her heels.

“Looks like Lucas is feeling better,” Lake said pithily. “Because unless my nose is mistaken, he’s not in Cabin thirteen.”

Maddy glanced at me and then slid out of the backseat. I followed, concentrating on my pack-sense and trying to pinpoint who among our pack was inside the Wayfarer restaurant and what they were feeling.

Lily. Mitch. Three of the older Resilient kids.

They were in there, with Lucas. The same Lucas who’d lied to me. The one who was currently topping the Not Just Humans’ Most Wanted List.

For once, the constant chill on the back of my neck that told me there was a foreign wolf nearby was drowned out by another feeling.

I was now officially pissed.

The first thing I saw when I stepped across the threshold of the Wayfarer was Lucas, his hands wrapped around Lily’s tiny frame. The first thing I heard was the three-year-old’s scream, shrill enough to shatter glass.

Lily, I thought, my heart jumping into my throat. I was already moving for the shotgun behind the counter when I realized that neither Devon nor Lake was reacting like Lucas was threatening one of ours. A split second later, I registered that on the other end of the bond, Lily wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t hurting. She was ecstatic.

“No, no, no!” she shrieked, trying to escape Lucas’s grasp but holding back just enough that she couldn’t. “No more tickles!”

In response, Lucas hooked his arms around her body and flipped her upside down.

“She throws up, you’ll be dealing with it,” Mitch told him, but his lips twitched, like he was trying to keep from smiling at the picture that Lily and Lucas made.

“That dastardly fiend,” Devon whispered. “She’s never going to wind down in time for her nap.”

Lily made a sound halfway between a giggle and a bark and kicked her feet. Beside me, Chase bristled, and I felt the hair on the back of my own neck rising in tandem with his hackles.

Whatever Chase had learned when he went to see Lucas, the feeling I was getting, loud and clear, through the pack-bond was that he didn’t trust him, and now that Chase was in wolf form, his instinct to protect our territory was sharper, his bond to the rest of the pack harder to deny and his brain incapable of understanding human thoughts—or recognizing that, red-faced and screaming in the hands of the enemy, Lily was fine.

He leapt forward, teeth bared, growling.

I reached out to him with my mind but was met with the uncompromising certainty of the wolf. Lily was ours. Lucas was foreign. He was touching her, and the pup was screaming.

“Chase!” I yelled at the exact same moment that Mitch took a casual step forward and grabbed Chase by the scruff of his neck. Bearing down on him, Mitch forced wolf eyes to meet his, and slowly, Chase sank to the floor.

Lily, seeing further opportunity for mischief, wriggled her way out of Lucas’s arms and leapt to land on Chase. “Wrestle!” she declared.

Before I could do a thing, the jumper she was wearing went the way of many play clothes before it. Shifting was simpler for the younger wolves: they melted from one form to another with liquid ease, and all it had taken to trigger Lily was seeing Chase in wolf form.

Now in animal form herself, Lily bobbed her furry head slightly and then grinned, an expression that looked eerie on her puppy face.

Slowly, awareness dawned on Chase. The human part of his brain realized that Lily was fine, that she was happy, and his wolf instincts recognized the unmistakable signal that she was ready to play. In the wild, play fighting was nature’s way of preparing wolf pups for the real thing. At the Wayfarer, it was par for the course.

Lily pounced on Chase’s paws, and I looked toward the other kids, all of whom were valiantly holding on to their human forms, just to show that they could. Most of our pack were right at that age when they tried very hard not to want to be kids, even though they weren’t quite adolescents.

“Go ahead,” I told them. “Somebody has to watch out for Chase. Lily’s going to decimate him.”

For a moment, none of the kids moved, but I flicked my gaze over to them and made it an order, and that was all it took. They were off and running before they even switched forms, and as much as Chase didn’t want to leave my side, a silent please convinced him to lead them out to play.

Or, more to the point, out of harm’s way.

I pulled my mind away from Chase’s, but not quickly enough to keep from picking up that while Chase and his wolf would guard the pups, neither wanted to turn his back on Lucas, and neither wanted to leave me there with him.

Luckily, Chase’s human half seemed to know that I could take care of myself, and his wolf half knew, on a bone-deep level, that I was alpha, and together, those things were enough to buy me some time alone with Lucas—if alone meant “with Lake, Devon, Maddy, Mitch, and Keely standing by.”

Lucas took one look at my face, and he knew. I couldn’t smell fear, not the way the Weres could, but I knew what it looked like, etched into features that were trying desperately not to show it, and when I took a step forward, Lucas went as still as a corpse. I could see his pulse jumping in his throat, but he closed his eyes and stood there, waiting.

Just like that, I was back in the woods behind Callum’s house, my lips bleeding, my ribs cracked. It had taken everything I had not to fight Sora as she came at me again and again. I’d swallowed every instinct, and with each blow, I’d lost a tiny bit of myself, of the life I’d always thought that I’d lead.

I’d broken the rules, Callum had ordered me beaten, and I’d stood there, just like Lucas was standing now.

Pissed or not, betrayed or not, I wasn’t going to be the kind of alpha who inspired that kind of fear.

“Maybe we should sit down,” I said. On all sides of me, I felt my backup fighting their own internal battles, their wolves crying out for retribution, and their human halves seeing what I saw and thinking that there had to be a way, some way, for it to be different.

Sitting down at a table felt like fitting a noose around my own neck, but I forced myself to do it anyway and waited for the others to do the same. One by one, the Weres came to join me: Devon first and Lucas last, with Mitch, Maddy, and Lake spread out in between.