Trial by Fire
Page 53

Think, I told myself, my breath coming quickly and my chest tightening. Think, think, think!
But I couldn’t. There was nothing to think. There was no answer. There was only me—human and breakable.
Meat.
I remembered, suddenly, what it had been like growing up in Callum’s pack, knowing that if he hadn’t protected me, one of the Weres might have killed me. I remembered knowing how dangerous werewolves were, but life as the Cedar Ridge alpha—in their heads and out of them—had undone a lifetime of lessons.
You’ll never be as strong as they are.
You’ll never be as fast as they are.
If they lose control, you’re dead.
I’d forgotten. I’d let myself forget, and now there was nothing to be done.
I couldn’t run. I couldn’t hide. I had to stay and fight and die, because I’d wanted to help. Because I loved Maddy. Because I couldn’t let myself believe that some people were too far gone to save.
In an ideal world, I would have had time—to think, to prepare—but this wasn’t an ideal world; it wasn’t even a human one, and any challenge to the alpha had to be settled at a breakneck pace.
Sometimes literally.
I tried not to think about all the ways this could end, tried to concentrate on the here and now, but the more I concentrated, the direr the situation seemed.
Lucas was already on one side of the circle. He took off his shirt, and any remaining hope I’d had that he might fight me as human evaporated from my mind. He was going to Shift, and he was going to devour me whole.
I turned to walk to the opposite end of the circle, my head held high. Damn him for doing this to me. Damn him to hell and back, but I wasn’t going to die crying. Given half a chance, I’d take out his eyes.
Devon caught me roughly by my good arm as I walked by, and I turned to glare at him. This was hard enough without thinking about all the people I was leaving behind, all the people I was letting down. This was hard enough without looking at Devon’s face and realizing that he was going to have to watch me die.
“You’ll challenge Lucas,” I said softly, my voice full of knowing. “The second this is over.”
That was the real tragedy here, the thing that made this whole exercise pointless. Absurd. The moment Lucas had issued this challenge, he’d signed his own death warrant as much as mine. It didn’t matter if he was stronger than I was. There were plenty of people in my pack who were stronger than him, and they wouldn’t allow him to lead. They wouldn’t let him kill me and live another day.
Lucas was so far gone he couldn’t see it, and somehow, I doubted that Shay had pointed out the inevitability when he’d planted this suggestion in Lucas’s head.
Layers upon layers upon layers.
Shay had known that Lucas was going to do this. He’d broken him and sent him, broken, to me. He’d played me—the bet, the stakes, scratching on the eight ball when he must have always intended to lose. This was his fail-safe.
This was the endgame.
“You’re not going to die.” Devon spat the words right in my face. “You are not allowed to die.”
“Fine,” I said. “You win. I’ll just—oh, wait. I don’t have a choice.”
I didn’t want to be doing this—not with Dev, not with any of them. I didn’t want to say good-bye.
“There’s always a choice.” Dev tightened his grip and pulled me up onto the tips of my toes. “Do you think for one second that if all of this was going to end with you dead, Callum would have taken a hands-off policy and just let you die? Don’t you think he saw at least a hint of this coming? And if so, do you think he would have let you accept Lucas into this pack if he’d thought there was even the remotest chance that you might die over something so preventable, so useless?”
I thought of Callum telling me on the phone that I might die, never indicating, even for a second, that the danger extended past the coven per se.
Something caught inside me, like a breath catching in my throat.
“He must have seen it, Dev. He must not have cared.”
Devon let go of my arm, but he leaned down, bringing his face very close to mine. “You,” he said, “are the most impossible person I have ever met. You’re bulletproof and self-sacrificing and beautiful in ways that you will never understand. You are Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. You turned the entire werewolf Senate upside down. You laugh in the face of danger. You are the alpha of this pack, and you are not going to die.”
As far as pep talks went, it was a good one, but Dev couldn’t stay there next to me. He couldn’t fight my battles for me. There was a mandate buried deep in the biology of his species that said he had to step back and watch.
So he did. He faded back into the circle, next to Maddy and Lake, next to Mitch, next to Chase, who was trying to get to me but couldn’t quite get his body to move.
I could feel his anguish, sewn into the air all around me, and the hum of the pack’s acknowledgment that a challenge to the alpha had to be met.
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Were; the mandate was there in my head, too. I felt it in the marks Callum had left in my skin. I felt it in the bond that made me who and what I was.
Fight. Fight. Fight.
It would have been so easy to give in to the instinct, to let the world go red and go out fighting without feeling a single instant of pain, but this time, flashing out seemed like giv- ing up.
There had to be another answer.
There had to be.
The sound of Lucas Shifting tore me from my thoughts. How could I ever have thought he was scraggly or malnourished? He was hungry—there was a difference.
I felt the pain of his Shift as an echo in the bond that I’d thrown at him, and an image came to mind, of an old woman standing in front of three grown Weres, forcing them to halt mid-Shift.
I’m the alpha, I thought. Until he kills me, I’m the alpha.
Physically, I might have been the weaker party, but mentally, I was dominant. I always had been. There was a reason the Cedar Ridge Pack had chosen me as their leader, and it wasn’t my physique.
I pictured the bond that tied Lucas to the rest of the pack. I pictured the portion of it that tied him to me. I’d done that. Me. I couldn’t take it back, but there was a chance I could use it.
Lucas came toward me, and I stepped forward to meet him. I caught his eye, and I pushed. His lip curled and he leapt forward.
Stop! The command snapped out of me like it had been shot from a cannon and traveled through the pack-bond to Lucas, who jerked back suddenly to land a foot in front of me, just short of his goal. His teeth flashed and he let loose a sick and bone-crunching bark, but his body didn’t move. I could see the nails on his feet digging into the frozen ground as he strained against my hold.
Somebody hadn’t realized that to take down an alpha, you had to be able to fight them in more ways than one.
For a few seconds, I stood there, staring at him and willing him to lie down, belly up. He fought me. He pushed back, and as he lost himself to animal rage, to panic, it got harder and harder to hold him.
Keeping him from killing me wasn’t enough.
I had to end this, but I didn’t know how. Even as my own instincts surfaced, even as I threw everything I had—Resilience included—into the bond, I couldn’t fathom the idea of ordering someone to die.
If I could keep him still enough, if I was sure I could hold him—
No.
It wasn’t working. I was fighting, fighting, fighting, and it wasn’t enough. I needed more. More power. A stronger will. Something.
An image began to form in my mind, a ridiculous image that I didn’t have time for, one of me and Chase lying in Callum’s cage, looking up at the stars. I heard Devon’s voice telling me that when Chase had been on the brink of death, somehow I’d taken everything I might have used to heal myself and given it to him.
The stronger the pack, the stronger the alpha.
That was the way it worked. That was why Shay wanted greater numbers. That was why the rest of the alphas would have sold their souls for what was mine.
I was Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare. I was impossible. And I was not giving up. My body started to shake with the strain of holding Lucas off. He inched closer. I gritted my teeth. I pictured the pack-bond that connected me to Chase, to Lake, to Devon and all the rest.