Trial by Fire (Raised by Wolves #2)(27)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I think you’ll find us reasonable, Caroline had said.

“Yeah, right,” I muttered, turning over in bed. Despite the risks, I needed to get some rest. A sleep-deprived alpha was nobody’s friend.

Closing my eyes, I let my alpha-sense take over, reached out through the bond, and found the others. I let their thoughts and senses flood my own.

Alex. Lily. Katie. Mitch.

Devon, Maddy, Lake, and Chase.

The peripherals at the very edge of our territory. The rest of the kids at the Wayfarer.

We were safe. We were together. We were fine.

The dream started with Callum. He was standing in my old workshop—the one place in Stone River territory that I’d carved out as my own. Callum was watching something, a soft smile creasing a face that had never aged past thirty, relaxed, but leaking power all the same. I followed his gaze and saw myself standing there—a younger Bryn, though not by much, peeling dried glue off her fingertips as she stared with nearly comical concentration at the result of an afternoon’s work: a sculpture, maybe, or a mobile. What I was working on was fuzzy. It didn’t matter.

The look on Callum’s face did.

I couldn’t put words to the emotion, couldn’t describe it, except to say that during the course of my childhood, I’d caught him looking at me that way a hundred thousand times: like I was a puzzle, like I was precious.

Like he didn’t want me to grow up, because things would change forever once I did.

As if he could hear my thoughts, the dream Callum turned to look at me—the real me, not the memory of the girl I’d been a year or two before. He moved his lips, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t make out the words or the familiar tone of his low and steady voice.

I wanted to so badly it hurt.

He took my shoulders gently in his hands, bent down to my level. I opened my mouth but could not say a word. Everything began to go dark and fuzzy, but I held on, fought to hear what he was saying, wished he could look at me like I was little, like I was his—just one more time. But Callum faded away, to darkness, to nothing, leaving me staring at my younger self, this dream Bryn so caught up in things that didn’t matter. She turned, saw me. She pointed.

She smiled.

I glanced down to see what she was smiling at, and that was when I realized—I was bleeding. There were three deep wounds in my side, parallel lines.

The Mark.

I watched in horror as the gashes spread across my torso, leaving me unable to move until the sound of clapping broke me from my stupor. Young Bryn faded away, the way Callum had, and a new form took shape on my workbench.

Archer.

“Bravo,” he said. “Encore, encore! The angst. The drama. The symbolism. You’re first-class entertainment, little Bryn.”

Little Bryn should have sounded like an improvement over mutt-lover, but it didn’t.

“What?” The trespasser smiled sardonically. “No she-wolf this time?”

I found myself looking for her, even though I didn’t want to. The dreamworld shifted on its axis, the workshop giving way all around me to the forest, the snow. My body rebelled against the sudden change, nausea taking me down to my knees. The snow was wet and cold under my fingertips.

It melted under Archer’s feet.

So much for a cease-fire.

“Hey now,” he said, looming over me and sounding almost offended. “I’m not doing anything unsavory here. This is a dream of your making, not mine, wolf girl. I’m just along for the ride.”

Pain chipped away at my temple, like a metal pick striking ice. I fought my way through it, getting to my feet, fists clenched and thirsting for this psychic’s blood, but suddenly and without warning, I couldn’t breathe.

I looked down and realized with mounting horror that the gashes in my side were still growing—bigger and bigger—and they weren’t even bleeding anymore. I could see through them, all the way through my body and out the other side.

Beneath my skin, where there should have been fat and bone and muscle, there was nothing.

No organs. No blood.

I was hollow.

I woke with a start, and in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the darkness, my other senses flared to life. The room didn’t smell right. It didn’t feel right, and the scratching sound of inhuman nails against wooden floor told me that I wasn’t alone.

A silver knife was in my hand before I realized I had reached for it. I put my back to the wall and like a wild thing, I crouched slightly, holding my blade at the ready, right next to my ear.

The wolf at the foot of my bed backed up slowly. It took me a moment to recognize him, and a moment past that to push down the compulsion to throw the knife at the spot directly between his light brown eyes.

“Lucas?” I said, trying to process that he was there on my bedroom floor. He made no move to attack, and I returned the favor, but my fingers tightened around the hilt of the blade, ready to buy me whatever time they could.

In human form, Lucas was unassuming. Small. As a wolf, he was scraggly, with ribs poking out under matted fur and eyes that I could describe only as hungry.

“Change.” My voice shook slightly as I said the word, and I narrowed my eyes, allowing my own pack’s power to flow through me, banishing the kind of fear that the wolf in front of me might be able to smell. “Change, or I’ll call for the others, and we’ll hand you to the coven wrapped up in a little bow.”

At the word coven, the wolf went very still, and then I heard the first crack of bone. The shudder that went through Lucas’s body in the instant before the Change whetted my own appetite—for running, for hunting, for something—but I kept myself from moving, from approaching him.

I didn’t lower the knife.

By the time Lucas finished Changing, my own brow was covered with sweat, and my senses were heightened. My heart made itself known with uncompromising force beneath my rib cage, and my ears caught the muted sound of Lucas’s ragged breaths. He was hunched over on the floor, but he lifted his eyes to stare just over my left shoulder. The moonlight caught his irises.

He was naked.

Modesty warred with my survival instincts and lost. I knew better than to take my eyes off a predator, naked or not.

“I would never hurt you,” Lucas said, his voice breaking. “I needed … to run … I needed … to Shift.…” He shivered, eyeing the knife in my hands. “I needed …”

Me.

My mind finished the sentence for him, and I prayed he wouldn’t say it out loud.