Trial by Fire (Raised by Wolves #2)(62)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“Love you, too.”

The moment I said the words, his body gave in to the poison, and he began seizing. His limbs twitched, but he didn’t Shift. He didn’t blink. He didn’t take his eyes off mine. He just faded away, bit by bit by bit, until I was lying there alone, the ghost of his touch lingering on my fingertips, my lips warm and swollen with the kiss we hadn’t shared.

Bryn. Bryn. Bryn.

I sat up in the cage and willed myself to wake up so that I could go to him, save him, but instead, the world around me morphed, until the sky was nothing but stars, nothing but brightness, and I wasn’t alone.

“You.” The word ripped its way out of my throat, but I couldn’t coax my body into moving, couldn’t rip the intruder’s jugular out, the way I should have the first time we’d met.

“Me,” Archer said. The word sounded like some kind of confession. “It’s just me this time, Bryn.”

No nicknames, no gloating. This was a side to my psychic stalker that I hadn’t seen before. I glanced at his eyes and noted the ring of lighter color around the pupil, and then I realized what he was trying to tell me.

“Just you,” I repeated. That meant that Valerie was …

“Dead,” Archer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. He flicked his wrist with halfhearted showmanship, and images flashed into my mind, courtesy of his psychic interference. This time, there were no flames—just a series of still shots of the coven’s members, bleeding from the nose. “When Valerie died, her influence went with her. It was sudden. It hurt. But it was enough for the rest of us to realize that the monsters we were fighting weren’t.”

“Weren’t fighting?”

“Weren’t monsters.” Archer looked at me with an expression somewhere between pity and pain. “You’re just kids.”

He couldn’t have been more than five or six years my senior, but for a split second, I could almost see myself the way he did: sixteen, battered, old eyes, thin.

“I’d like to say that we didn’t know what we were doing,” Archer said, trying to sound like the words didn’t matter to him nearly as much as they did. “But we weren’t completely brainwashed. We knew. Valerie just made us feel like it didn’t matter, made us hate you enough that we didn’t want to question what that hatred was making us do. We let it happen. I let it happen.”

I shut Archer down before he could say the word sorry, because I didn’t want to hear it. “I need to wake up,” I told him. “Now.”

I didn’t have time for apologies. I didn’t need to be along for the ride as he worked his way through the question of whether he and the rest of the coven were villains or victims.

I needed to get out of here. I needed to wake up. I needed to protect what was left of my pack.

“Let me go.”

“I’m not the one keeping you here,” Archer said. “The fight’s over. It’s been over. You and some of the others—on both sides—were pretty beat up. You’ve been out for three days.”

That wasn’t possible. He had to be messing with me, playing with my mind, keeping me here when there was still something I could do to protect what was mine. I couldn’t afford to take his words at face value, couldn’t trust anything I’d seen through his mind—no matter how true it felt.

I had to make sure that the other psychics had stopped fighting when Valerie took a bullet to the head. For all I knew, while I was stuck in a dream with Archer, Caroline was out there in the real world retaliating for her mother’s death. She could be taking aim at—

Ali.

The memory of my last conscious moment came rushing back. I’d been facing off against Valerie, against Caroline, pushing my body past every limit and clinging to consciousness by a thread. Caroline had pointed her gun at me. Valerie had given the order—and Ali, my Ali, had shot the coven leader dead.

If Archer was lying, if Caroline was still out there …

I moved to grab Archer by the lapels, but my hands sank through his body, like one of us was a ghost. “Wake. Me. Up.”

Archer opened his mouth, then closed it. He took a step backward, his body solidifying once more. He held up one hand in invitation.

I didn’t have the luxury of debating whether or not to take it. This was  Ali we were talking about here.

The moment my hand touched Archer’s, images flooded my brain in rapid fire: things he seemed to feel he owed it to me to share.

Not lies.

Like a slide show, the images flashed through my mind, bits and pieces of things that Archer had seen in other people’s dreams, in reality.

I saw Devon Shifting from human form and Caroline’s knuckles going white around the handle of a gun.

Flash.

I saw a little blonde girl, covered in blood. I saw her scramble backward as a large wolf—Devon? No, not Devon, not quite—approached.

Flash.

I saw Ali lifting a gun and taking aim at a woman exactly her height. I saw her pull the trigger, saw Valerie go down.

I heard Caroline say four simple words: “You shot my mother.”

Flash.

I saw Ali releasing the clip on her gun. She lowered her hands to her sides. She met Caroline’s eyes and waited for the girl to shoot.

“For what it’s worth,” Ali said, her voice catching in her throat as she looked back at Valerie’s body, “she was my mother, too.”

I woke up stiff, with morning breath and a body that felt like it had been put through a blender. It was dark outside my window, night just beginning to give way to the last moment before the dawn. Before I even opened my eyes, my pack-sense went haywire, flooding my body with thoughts and emotions, locations, tastes and smells.

Instantly, I knew where each member of my pack was. I knew who was awake and who was sleeping, who was injured, who was dead.

“You’re awake.” The voice was quiet, female, flat. I reached for the knife I kept on my nightstand, but it wasn’t there.

“Devon didn’t kill my father.” Caroline said those words the way someone else might have said hello. “I didn’t kill that Were.”

That Were.

I knew who she was talking about. I could see his very human corpse in my mind—lanky and in desperate need of a haircut.

“His name was Eric,” I said.

He’d been a freshman in college. The oldest of the Changed Weres. Excited to go to dorm parties. The first to speak up when things went awry.