Trial by fire(28)

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.”