Trial by Fire (Raised by Wolves #2)(36)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I nodded, afraid that if I said a word, she’d stop talking and wouldn’t start again.

“My mother was like that, with emotions. She always knew what everyone was feeling, and whenever she smiled, it made you want to smile, too. If she was sad, I was sad. If she was angry, I was angry. I loved her so much, because she was my mother, and because she wanted me to.”

Ali’s eyes were completely dry, but mine were stinging, because I knew already that this story wasn’t going to end well. Ali had cut off contact with her human family to join Callum’s pack and take care of me. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that she might have had other reasons for leaving her old life behind.

“When I was six, a group of people came through town, and one of them realized what my mother could do. They told her she was special. They offered to train her. They took us in.”

I digested that information. “You grew up in a coven?”

Ali nodded. “Until I was twelve.”

I tried to process, but couldn’t keep up with her words.

“There were twenty or thirty of us, lots of children, and everybody fell at that far end of the spectrum—the gifted end—except for me. It would have been hard, growing up with other people poking around in my dreams and my head, sneaking up on me, playing cat and mouse with me even when I didn’t want to play, but my mother wanted me to be happy, so I was happy.”

Suddenly, I could understand why Ali had always kept her pack-bonds closed. Why she’d never let the others in, never risked losing herself to the pack mentality and—up until I’d broken with Callum’s pack—encouraged me to do the same.

“We used to move around a lot. One person with a knack is subtle. A couple dozen aren’t, and one day, when I was twelve, we’d been staying at an RV camp near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, and I went out to run an errand someone had told me to run. When I came back, everyone else was gone. It took a couple of days for my head to clear. I used to get these headaches, and these nosebleeds, and I remember looking in the mirror at social services and seeing my pupils, and they were small enough that you could tell that my eyes were hazel and not just brown.

“I don’t think I’d ever actually seen my eyes look like that before. I was twelve years old, and that was the first time I could ever remember being able to feel something just because it was the way I felt. I went through eight foster homes in six years, then I went to college, and one of the girls I’d kept in touch with from one of the group homes disappeared. The rest of the story, you know.”

“You went looking for the girl and found a pack of werewolves,” I said.

“And the pack’s alpha had just taken in a little girl, a human girl, and he told me that she’d need somebody to take care of her, because the rest of the pack would always be bigger, and they’d always be stronger, and she’d be alone.”

To someone who’d grown up as the only normal kid in a coven of psychics, Callum’s words must have really hit home. My whole life—or at least Ali’s part in it—suddenly made so much more sense. She’d loved me and protected me and taught me to be my own person because no one had ever done that for her.

“The coven in town. Is it the same one you—”

“No.” Ali didn’t even wait for me to finish the question. “I thought it might be. That’s part of the reason I went with you today, but I didn’t recognize any of the people we just saw, and if I had to guess, I’d say this coven is much smaller than ours was. Their knacks are ones I’ve seen before, but that’s to be expected. For every million people who have a way with animals, there’s one who can influence them; for all the people who can sing lullabies that put babies to sleep, there are a handful who can put normal people into a trance. Entering dreams just means you’re really good at getting inside other people’s heads, and I’d lay ten-to-one odds on this coven having an empath, because the hatred the three in town felt when they talked about werewolves wasn’t just theirs. Their pupils were the size of marshmallows.”

I hadn’t been paying attention to pupil size, but I’d seen an alien depth to the emotion and recognized it as unnatural, dangerous. On some level, I’d felt the same thing when Bridget had spoken about Caroline. If someone was manipulating the psychics’ emotions to make them hate werewolves, it seemed like a fair assumption that the same person might be nudging them into being scared of Caroline.

Or at least more scared than they otherwise would have been, given the whole “I was born to hunt” thing.

“You said that most powers are just extensions of natural abilities—like the way Keely is really easy to talk to, and the way that people like me are … scrappy.” I paused. “But you heard how quiet Caroline was when she was tracking us. She got within an inch of us without me hearing her, smelling her, anything. At school yesterday, none of the Weres could catch her scent, and she says she has a way with weapons, that once she takes aim, she never misses a shot. That she can’t.” I decided to stop beating around the bush. “She feels like a predator, Ali. That’s not just a knack, and it really doesn’t seem that mental. Even the other psychics are scared of her. So is she one of them, or is she … something else?”

I really was not ready to deal with a something else. Psychics and werewolves, and mind games from both, were more than enough for me, thank you very much.

“She’s a psychic,” Ali replied, “but knacks with physical manifestations are rarer, and having a set of skills, instead of just one, isn’t what I would call common.”

Whole lot of good that did us.

“In most covens, the person with the most power is usually the leader.”

I heard the stress Ali put on the word usually, and responded, “And when they’re not?”

“Then they’re the odd one out.”

The same way a normal human would be. The same way Ali had been. I thought of the way she’d introduced herself to Caroline, the way she’d accused the adults of using a child to do their dirty work. The rest of the coven had approached us as a group, but twice now, they’d sent Caroline after me alone.

They talked about the things she could do like she wasn’t quite human.

In the werewolf world, the easiest way to get information on any pack was through the peripherals. That was why we kept the Wayfarer restaurant open to people passing through from other packs, and that was why step two of my reconnaissance plan might involve trying to get the coven outsider alone.