Trial by Fire
Page 16

Chase, I called out to him. Someone might see you.
In wolf form, Chase didn’t speak back to me in words. Instead, I got pictures—mostly of me—and the distinct sense that if the wolf had had its way, he and Chase would never have let me out of their sight in the first place. I was what mattered to them, and my urge to find this threat and tear it to pieces was nothing compared to how much Chase and his wolf wanted to see me, smell me, protect me.
Fine, Chase, I said silently, giving in because if he had been the one under attack, I probably would have done something a lot rasher than standing guard at the edge of the woods. Just stay hidden.
This time, I caught a hint of Chase’s human side in his reply, something that told me that he was good at blending in to the background, that he’d spent most of his human life trying not to be noticed.
“Hey, sleeping beauty.” Lake tried for nonchalance in her tone but couldn’t quite sell it, and her voice quivered as she pressed on. “Want to tell us what’s going on, and why exactly you look like you’ve seen the wrong side of a barbeque?” She plopped down next to me and stretched out her legs.
You guys remember that thing we weren’t going to tell Devon? I asked Lake and Maddy silently. They both shifted slightly in response. Devon narrowed his eyes, and Lake batted her eyelashes in a show of innocence that was just this side of terrifying.
I think we’re going to have to tell him, I continued. Any volunteers?
“Not it,” Lake said out loud.
“Not it,” Maddy chimed in quickly.
I sighed. “Hey, Dev, funny story …”
Shockingly, Devon didn’t find the story of the previous night’s events very funny, and none of them—not Lake, not Devon, not Maddy, not Chase in wolf form, lurking in the distance—was overly amused by the morning’s development.
“You had a dream that someone was trying to set you on fire, and when you woke up, your skin was burned,” Lake repeated humorlessly.
I leaned back on my wrists and blew out a breath, watching it take shape in the winter air. “That about covers it.”
“Except, of course, for the part where my brother sent you veiled threats about someone else coming after Lucas, and the part where our gentleman visitor looked you straight in the eye and told you the threat was human.”
When Devon got irked, he had a tendency to over-enunciate, and by the end of that sentence, his pronunciation was sharp enough to draw blood.
“Lucas wasn’t lying.” Maddy was the only one willing to speak up and voluntarily step into Devon’s line of fire. “I was there. Lake was there. We would have smelled it.”
“There’s lying and there’s not-lying,” Lake replied, mulling over each word. “If you ask me, Lucas was not-lying. His words weren’t exactly false, but for someone who wants our help, the boy isn’t really what you would call forthcoming.”
Lucas hadn’t ever explicitly said that the people after him weren’t a threat. He’d never said that they weren’t dangerous. He’d said that they were human, and I’d filled in the blanks on my own. The irony of the situation—that I of all people had assumed that by virtue of being human, a person couldn’t possibly be a threat—did not escape me.
Devon leaned over and pressed two fingers deliberately against my cheek, watching the skin go pale and then pink again. After a moment, he repeated the action.
“Are you done yet?” I asked, shoving him, to absolutely no avail.
“Depends. Is my bestie done lying to me and pretending things are okay when they aren’t? Hmmmmm?”
Devon poked me again. I was on the verge of giving in and promising him that whatever happened next, I would tell him, whether I thought hearing it would be good for him or not, but before I could say the words, our conversation was interrupted.
At first, the interrupter didn’t say anything. She just walked up to us—right up to us—so close that the tips of her black leather boots almost touched my jean-clad legs. She didn’t kneel to our level to speak. She didn’t even look down. Instead, she stared off into the distance.
Into the forest.
At Chase.
“Hello there,” Devon said, shifting position to move a fraction of an inch closer to the intruder. “Is there something I can help you with? Directions to the gymnasium? Personal tutoring on Hamlet? Predictions on this year’s Oscar favorites?”
Personally, I thought he was laying the drama geek vibe on a little thick, but the girl—the same one I’d seen in the cafeteria the week before—didn’t so much as bat an eye. In fact, I would have gone as far as to say that she paid less attention to Dev than any female had in a very long time.
When she did shift her gaze from the forest, the girl had eyes only for me.
“I’m Caroline,” she said, “and you’re the wolf girl.”
I’d certainly been called worse, but my breath caught in my throat the moment she said the word wolf.
I stood up and looked down at her. Humans didn’t know about the existence of werewolves, and they especially didn’t know about the existence of my pack here, in my territory, at my high school.
“Who are you?” I took a step forward. If we’d been anywhere near the same height, my face would have been right in hers, but she was so small that the top of her head didn’t even reach my chin.
“I’m Caroline,” she repeated. “Keep up.”
Caroline. Looked like a porcelain doll, felt like a threat.
My brain absorbed the information and fed it automatically to the rest of the pack, a transfer as simple and reflexive as taking a breath and then breathing out.
“I believe you have something that belongs to us.”
Us?
I glanced over Caroline’s shoulder, half expecting to see an army of pint-sized leather-clad divas, but as best I could tell, she was alone.
“Define something,” I said, pushing down the urge to place a hand on each of her shoulders and force her, belly up, to the ground.
Not here, I told myself. Not now.
“I believe its name is Lucas.” Caroline scuffed the heel of her boot into the ground, and it took me a minute to realize that she was etching a symbol into the snow. “On the off chance that you’ve had multiple Lucases show up at the home front in the past couple of days, ours should have been fairly clearly marked.”
For a split second, it was like I was staring right at the back of Lucas’s neck again, and the scar I’d seen there, ugly and puckered, was an exact reflection of the shape in the snow: a four-pointed star laid over a half circle.
“You recognize it,” Caroline said. “Very good. You get a sticker. Sadly, you won’t be able to really enjoy that sticker if we’re forced to put you down like a rabid dog.”
The second the threat left her mouth, Devon, Lake, and Maddy were on their feet, and I could feel the hackles rising on Chase’s back in the distance.
For the first time, Caroline flicked her eyes around the rest of our little group, and she held one gloved hand out to Devon. “Down, boy,” she said, not even bothering to reply to Maddy or Lake. “That wasn’t a threat. It was a conditional statement. If we get back what’s ours, everyone lives to howl at the moon another day. If we don’t …”
Caroline shrugged delicately. A low growl ripped its way out of Maddy’s throat. I glanced at her, and she swallowed the inhuman noise, but not without taking a step closer to the little blonde girl with the great big mouth.
“Who’s we?” My voice gave no hint of the deafening barrage of thoughts in my mind. I was cool, calm, collected.
So was she.
“My family.” Caroline dragged her eyes up and down my body, and they settled on my sunburned cheeks. “I see you’ve already met Archer. He has an uncanny way of getting under your skin, wouldn’t you say?”
She gave me time to reply, then smiled when I didn’t say a word. “You’ll have to excuse his manners, though. Archer’s all about the hunt.”
Hello, mutt-lover. The voice echoed through my memory, and my temples throbbed just thinking about it.
“My mother told him to wait, but Archer was anxious to meet you in person. If she tells him to pull back, though, he’ll listen. My mother can be a very persuasive woman, and she has no desire for bloodshed, especially not yours, Bryn.”