Trial by Fire
Page 7

I felt like Mitch had slapped me, like I was stupid and young and completely incompetent as an alpha and a person.
“Whose is he?” I asked quietly, trying to place the wolf’s scent but thrown off by the smell of blood and the mewling sound now making its way out of the creature’s monstrous hybrid mouth.
Mitch didn’t reply; instead, he pointed to the creature’s neck. “There’s what’s keeping him from Shifting.”
My eyes adjusted to the darkness on the porch, and I saw the object Mitch had referenced: a long, thin metal shaft that glowed in the light of the nearly full moon.
Silver.
“Dev?” I could have removed it myself, but impulsive or not, even I wasn’t stupid enough to think that my going that close to an injured Were was a good idea. Whoever he was, the mass of flesh and bones on our porch was out of his mind with pain, and pain had a habit of making Weres unpredictable.
If Devon got bitten, he’d heal in a matter of moments. If I got bitten, I might never heal, and if I got bitten badly enough, I’d end up either dead or Changed—and neither one of those was a future I would particularly relish.
Devon walked forward, and without waiting a beat, he knelt, closed a hand around the shaft, and pulled. Most werewolves were allergic to silver, but as in many areas of life, Devon was an exception. As he jerked the hated object out of the wound, the injured Were reared back, and I heard teeth snapping and the sound of flesh—though whose, I wasn’t sure—giving way.
Chase came to my side, and I thought of that moment of quiet in the woods—how fragile it had been, how fleeting.
Dev tossed the silver rod to one side. “We’ll want to pick that up,” he said, almost absentmindedly. “Wouldn’t want one of the kiddos to get ahold of it.”
Our visitor’s body registered the silver’s removal. It shuddered and finally gave way to one form.
Human form.
If I’d been horrified before, I was sickened now. There wasn’t a piece of flesh that had been left untouched, and for a moment, I thought I might throw up or cry or both.
The injured Were was a boy. Not a man, not a threat. A boy—maybe a year or so younger than me. All business, Mitch bent and hefted the boy into his arms, eliciting a high-pitched whine more lupine than not.
“Tell Ali I’ll need medical supplies,” he said. “Lake knows where they are.” With those words, Mitch turned to carry the boy away, leaving the rest of us standing there, slack-jawed and tense.
Lake was the first to snap out of it, and she hurried back to the kitchen to relay the message to Ali. Chase’s eyes followed Mitch’s progression, and I could see the gears in his head turning as he analyzed the situation. He ran a hand through my hair, assuring himself with every light touch that I was all right, convincing the wolf inside him to still.
Devon didn’t move, and this time, I said his name silently.
Dev?
After a long moment, Devon managed to drag his eyes away from the blood seeping into the wooden planks of the porch. His fists clenched, and he turned toward me. “Bryn.”
There was a wealth of information in that one word, and I knew that whatever Devon said next was going to send a tremor through our pack, like static feedback or a punch to the gut.
“I caught his scent, and it wasn’t pretty.”
I waited for Devon to make a comment about Calvin Klein cologne or something equally flippant, but he didn’t. Instead, he cut right to the chase.
“This kid is from the Snake Bend Pack, Bryn. His alpha is Shay.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I ONLY KNEW THREE THINGS ABOUT SHAY MACALISTER.
One: he was a purebred werewolf, one of a relatively small number in the country who’d been born to two werewolf parents instead of just one. Purebreds were larger, stronger, and faster and had fewer weaknesses than werewolves with human blood flowing in their veins.
Two: Shay wanted me dead. It wasn’t personal. I had something he wanted. More females in a pack meant more live births and stronger, purebred children, and the only thing standing between the other alphas and doubling their numbers—and their power base—was me.
And, okay, maybe it was a little personal for Shay, since I’d been responsible for destroying a Rabid who knew the secret to changing human girls into Weres. It was also possible that once I’d done so, I’d derived great satisfaction from putting the screws to the other alphas—and Shay in particular—flaunting the laws that forbid one alpha from taking wolves who belonged to another, even if that other alpha was a teenage, human female.
At the moment, however, it was Shay’s third distinguishing characteristic that turned my stomach to lead and blew a cold chill down the length of my spine.
Shay was Devon’s—my Devon’s—brother. He was everything Dev didn’t want to be, everything he’d spent his entire life rebelling against, and already the presence of one of Shay’s wolves on my land had sapped the mirth from Devon’s features and left something stone hard and formidable in its place.
“Hey.” I reached out for Devon’s arm. “You okay?”
Devon stood there, every muscle in his body tensed. He didn’t answer my question. Callum would have forced Dev’s eyes to his and repeated the query, but I nudged Devon’s shoulder with my head, a gesture of comfort far less human than I was and not particularly alpha in the least.
On instinct, Dev nudged me back, his muscles relaxing—but not by much. “Only you,” he said crisply, “would be worried about me at a time like this.”
Like Shay, Devon was purebred. Boy-band tendencies aside, he could take care of himself—physically.
“Seriously, Dev. You want to tell me this isn’t messing with your head at all?” I didn’t have to put even an ounce of my power as alpha behind the words. Best-friend privilege said it all.
“Well, of course it is,” Devon replied. “One of Brother Dearest’s wolves showed up on our land, beaten within an inch of his life and caught between Shifts. If you’d been the one to open that door instead of Mitch, the smell of human blood probably would have sent him rabid, and you’d be significantly less charming as a decimated pile of meat.”
Dev—do you think Shay sent him? I couldn’t make myself ask the question out loud, and Devon responded in key.
I don’t think anything is below Shay. He’s not like other people, Bryn. You know he’s not.
“If your brother wanted Bryn dead, is this how he’d do it?” Chase’s words took me off guard—not because I had forgotten that he was in the room (though I had), but because his tone, understated and detached, contrasted so sharply with the animal set to his features. His wolf wanted to touch me, to protect me, to tear Shay to pieces, but Chase’s human side wanted answers—whether asking the question was like driving an elbow into Devon’s gut or not.
“I don’t know,” Devon said shortly, his jaw turning to granite, his gaze averted from mine. “I’m not exactly an expert on the inner workings of Shay’s dark and twisted mind.”
By the time Devon had come along, his much older brother was already the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. They weren’t exactly what one would call close.
“Okay. I had to ask. If you think of anything, let us know.” With that, Chase turned his attention from Dev to me. “What do you need?”
The look in Chase’s pale blue eyes was still feral, the desire to protect me simmering just under the surface—but he’d grown up in a world very different from the one I’d known as part of Callum’s pack, a world where females weren’t shuffled off into a back room or given bodyguards at the first sign of trouble. Chase was asking, not telling; thinking instead of acting on instinct.
I’d never been so glad that Chase was Chase and that neither one of us had been born a Were.
“I need to talk to Mitch,” I said, following his example and trying to think this through, even though I wasn’t exactly known for an overdeveloped tendency to look before I leapt. “Whatever happens, our first priority is making sure that whoever this visitor is, he doesn’t die.”
I hadn’t been an alpha for long, but even I knew that having a Snake Bend wolf die on my territory wouldn’t look good. Until I knew exactly what was going on, and how to proceed, I couldn’t afford to give Shay any reason to come here, looking like the injured party and demanding something—or worse, someone—in return.