Trial by fire(13)

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.



It was two days before they let me anywhere near the injured boy—two days for his injuries to heal enough that he was in control of his wolf, two days that I spent gnashing my teeth and trying to unravel the tangled web of political possibilities surrounding his entry to our territory.

Had Shay sent him here, on the verge of death, with the hope that he’d attack me? Would the other alphas blame Shay for the action of a wolf who was clearly Rabid? Had someone attacked one of Shay’s wolves on our land—and if so, who? A member of one of the other packs, crossing into our territory to make trouble? A Rabid, gone rogue or mad and hunting anyone and anything in his way? Or, God forbid, one of my own peripherals?

By Senate law, our peripherals could attack trespassers, but what had been done to this boy wasn’t animal retribution.

It was torture.

I had to talk to him, and after two days of letting Mitch—and more importantly, Ali—tell me no, I was done listening to the word. In a happy coincidence, they also appeared to be done saying it, so I didn’t have to go through the awkward and unquestionably ill-fated process of trying to pull rank on the woman who’d been my mother since I was four.

“I want to go with you.” Devon’s voice was perfectly pleasant, but I recognized the look in his eye, because the exact same expression had been staring out at me from the mirror for days.

“Can you behave yourself?” I asked mildly.

Devon did a good impression of someone who was offended. “Moi?” He ruined the effect somewhat by brushing invisible dust off the tips of his fingers, a motion as close to popping his knuckles as someone with Devon’s sensibilities could come.

I reached out to him with my mind but hit a smooth, blank wall. Of all the wolves in my pack, Dev was the one most clearly poised to become alpha himself someday. The promise of his future dominance made him an ideal second-in-command, but there was power there, too, and that power meant that if he wanted to, Dev could guard his mind from me absolutely, in a way that no one else in our pack could.

“Dev.”

“What do you expect me to say, Bronwyn?” he asked, adopting Callum’s habit of calling me by my full first name when he was irked. “This boy—who belongs to Shay—came here, to our territory, half mad and out of control of his Shift, and plopped himself down more or less on your front porch. He could have killed you, and accident or not, that’s not the kind of thing you can expect me to shrug off like a hideous hair day.”

Challenge.

There was a whisper of it in the bond between us, and I brought my eyes to Devon’s in a staring contest that neither one of us wanted to be engaging in. For several seconds, we stood there, locked in something we didn’t completely understand, and then Devon blinked.

Literally.

He didn’t avert his gaze. He didn’t round his shoulders, but he blinked, and that was enough.

I’d won.

“I’m still coming with you, you impossibly irritating little wench.”

From Dev, that was a term of endearment, and I took the degree to which he sounded on the verge of slipping into an exaggerated British accent as an indication that he was in control of himself—and that unless my life was in immediate danger, he’d behave when cross-examining Shay’s wolf.

“Yeah,” I said, punching him lightly in the stomach, “I love you, too.”



Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door of Cabin 13, where Mitch had been tending to the injured wolf.

Lake answered the door and pulled me inside. “ ’Bout time you got here,” she said. “Now would you please tell him I can stay and to stop picking at me to take to the hills?”

Based on the mutinous expression on her father’s face, I inferred that the “him” Lake was referring to was Mitch.

“Well, go on. Tell him.” Lake folded her arms over her chest, the expression on her face an exact mirror of the scowl on Mitch’s.