Trial by Fire (Raised by Wolves #2)(37)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Again.

A plan began to form in my mind, and it occurred to me that maybe I’d been a little hasty in swearing off my human education forever.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE BEST THING ABOUT HAVING FRIENDS WHO KNEW me as well as Devon and Lake did was that they recognized from the moment I told them my plan that trying to talk me out of approaching Caroline was futile.

The worst thing about being alpha was that on some level, all three of us knew that even if they hadn’t been inclined to go along with the plan, I could have forced it.

Forced them.

I wouldn’t have done it, but the fact that I could seemed so much more noticeable now. Hierarchy was like breathing: the only time you thought about it was when something went wrong. With the presence of an outside threat, every instinct we had was amped up to the nth degree.

I couldn’t help thinking that did not bode particularly well for Caroline, hunter or not.

“Ali suspect anything?” Devon asked once he, Lake, and I had put sufficient distance between us and the Wayfarer.

“Does she find it highly suspicious that the three of us are going back to school when there’s a psychic army looming threateningly in the background?” I leaned back in my seat. “Of course she does. But given that she helped me play psychic bait yesterday, she can’t really complain about us doing the same thing today. Besides, Callum forbids it.”

Devon and Lake snorted in unison.

“Bryn Rule number twenty-three,” Devon intoned, “whenever someone tells you to do something, make it a point to do the exact opposite.”

“I’m not that bad.”

Lake grinned. “Plausible deniability is a girl’s best friend.”

“Rule twenty-seven?” Devon guessed, wrinkling his brow, deep in the throes of mock thought.

“Fourteen,” Lake interjected. “If I remember correctly, Bryn Rule twenty-seven involves the evils of werewolf bodyguards.”

“Present company excluded, of course,” Devon added, eyeing me reproachfully.

“You guys aren’t here as bodyguards,” I said, eyeing him right back. The last thing I needed was for Devon or Lake to feel obligated to throw down with Caroline in front of our Weston High fan club. “Shay made a deal with the coven. Caroline’s mother is the head of the coven. Ergo, we need Caroline to start talking.”

Lake smiled.

“We need her to start talking of her own volition,” I clarified. “No violence. No scenes. No ‘but I’ve been watching NCIS reruns and I think I’m really getting a hang of this interrogation thing.’ ”

And no Keely, I added to myself. If anyone could recognize her knack for what it was, it would be another psychic, and we couldn’t risk word of Keely’s knack getting back to Shay.

“No interrogation? Why don’t you just come right out and say ‘no fun’?” Lake grumbled.

I shrugged. “No fun. The coven gave us one week to hand over Lucas. Today is the third day. The last thing we want is to prod them into early action.”

“So if we can’t threaten Caroline, and we can’t interrogate her, how are we supposed to get her to say a darn thing?” Lake’s question was a good one, and I didn’t reply—mostly because my plan didn’t have much nuance beyond “poke it with a stick and see what happens.”

Luckily, this situation seemed to fall under Devon’s area of expertise, and he obligingly picked up the mantle. “Now, don’t shoot me, ladies, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you two, as lovely and endearing as you are, might not be terribly well versed in the art of making friends and influencing people.”

Lake snorted. “And you are? Seems I remember you wanting to rip Miss My Family Can Be Very Patient’s aorta out her nose, same as I did.”

Devon executed a delicate shrug of his massive shoulders. “The thought might have occurred to me once or twice, but you know what they say, Lake—you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

I could feel Devon’s Gone with the Wind impression coming on, but since it seemed to be a step in the right direction compared to disembowelment, I decided to let it slide.

“You should have seen the way the other members of the coven talked about this girl, Lake.” I paused, letting my words sink in. “They’re scared of her—the kind of scared that involves pupils twice as big as they ought to be.”

Lake gave me a look that said I wasn’t doing a very good job of convincing her that playing nice with Caroline was the answer.

I tried again. “Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe we’ll try to talk to her and she’ll shut us down, but my gut is telling me that she’s used to living on the fringe. She’s used to people being afraid. She might even like it, but deep down, she has to be lonely or angry or bored.”

If watching Ali assess the trio the day before had taught me one thing, it was that you didn’t need supernatural powers to play off other people’s emotions. Whatever Caroline was hiding beneath that unbothered, uninvolved exterior, I was willing to bet that it ran deep, and given that she’d explicitly threatened the lives of everyone I loved, I wasn’t going to feel guilty about using that.

Using her.

It took me a moment to realize that Lake had stopped driving and that both of my friends had gone still beside me. It was several seconds more before I realized that if my alpha status had been noticeable before, I was practically bleeding dominance now.

Pack was what mattered.  Protecting them.  Destroying threats.

For a few seconds, I stayed there, in that distinctly alpha frame of mind where nothing and no one else mattered but protecting my pack, and then, like a drowning man coming up for air, I managed to pull myself back. We were just going to talk to Caroline, try to get some answers.

That was all.

Devon in full-on charm mode was a terrifying thing. Caroline must have thought so, too, because she avoided him, evaded him, and glared brutal, bloody murder in his direction right up until the moment the three of us sat down at her table at lunch.

“Mind if we join you?” Devon slung one arm over the back of his chair and stretched his legs out, looking for all the world like some kind of larger-than-life male model smoldering on the side of a city bus.

“It’s a free country.” Caroline met his eyes with an unnatural, absolute calm. “You can sit wherever you want.”

Most people’s bodies telegraphed their thoughts in ways that run-of-the-mill humans never noticed, but Caroline was like a blank slate. She wasn’t hiding her fear. She wasn’t deliberately communicating that she wasn’t afraid. She just sort of was.