Then he nodded to Callum—a solemn half bow—and ran back off into the forest.
Callum looked up at me. “You’d best be getting to school. We’ll run again tonight,” he said. “And tomorrow, you’ll fight Sora.”
“When can I see Chase?” I asked.
“When you’re ready.”
“When will I be ready?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Do the words straight answer mean nothing to you?”
“Enough,” Callum said, in his “This is the Final Word” voice of authority. I half-expected the bond between us to shake with the alpha-ness of it all, but it didn’t. It was almost as if this tone—which I associated with Callum putting his foot down in the most intractable way possible—had nothing to do with Callum being the leader of our pack, and everything to do with him being Callum and me being me.
“There was nothing in my permissions about not asking questions,” I told him, feeling rather secure in my perch.
“And there was nothing in your request about ending your grounding,” Callum countered.
I narrowed my eyes. “That’s Ali’s decision, not yours.”
Callum didn’t reply, and it occurred to me that the expression on Ali’s face when she’d reamed me out about my illegal adventure into Callum’s basement had looked disturbingly similar to the look on the alpha’s face now.
Okay, so maybe it had been a joint decision. And maybe the conditions of my permissions weren’t the only card that Callum had in his deck to hold over my head.
“Breakfast?” I asked, half as a peace offering and half to see if he’d take me up on the offer, or if he’d have other, more pressing pack business to deal with. “I could swing time for a Pop Tart if I skip out on my shower.”
A human probably would have found the notion disgusting, but Callum wasn’t human, and Weres didn’t much care about sweat. “You’d have more time to shower if you could knock yourself down from that seven-minute mile.” Callum’s lips turned up in a subtle, lupine smile and then he inclined his head slightly, accepting my invitation for breakfast. I let myself wonder, just for a second, if he was here for more than just training me. If I wasn’t the only one who remembered how much time the two of us had spent together when I was little.
“Are you coming, or do you intend to spend the entire day in a tree?”
The corners of his lips quirked upward, and I answered his question and his amusement by diving out of the tree, straight into his body, taking us both down to the ground.
Bit.
Bit.
I got bit.
I reminded myself that this was what my training was about. It wasn’t about Callum and me. It wasn’t about the pack—there, still, in the corners of my mind. It was about Chase. Chase and the Rabid, questions and answers. That was what mattered.
“You’re getting slow,” I told Callum.
He threw me back to my feet and was on his own an instant later, but his words belied the ease of that motion. “And you, little one, are getting big.”
CHAPTER TEN
THEY SAY NOT TO BRING A KNIFE TO A GUNFIGHT. Extend the logic, and it’s probably not much of a stretch to say that you shouldn’t be relying on basic self-defense and martial-arts moves in an altercation with a werewolf. You should be bringing knives. And guns. And as much silver as you can physically carry.
Not all of the Weres I knew were allergic to silver—Devon wasn’t—but the old myths about silver bullets weren’t completely off base, either. Bullets had the potential to cause major problems, because accelerated healing increased the likelihood of a werewolf healing around a bullet, and having a piece of metal firmly embedded in one’s innards had a way of leading to malfunctions. Beyond that, a good 80 to 90 percent of Weres were allergic to silver, the same way that most humans had a bad reaction to poison ivy. At best, it caused a rash and discomfort. At worst, if the silver got into their bloodstream, it could kill them. In any case, unless you were fighting a silver-immune wolf, like Devon, it ended up evening the playing field a little. They could kill you in an instant; you might, if you got lucky, be able to inflict some damage on them.
So I wasn’t overly surprised when, after weeks of sparring with a good dozen members of the pack, Callum changed up my training regime and gave me claws of my own. He’d taught me to throw knives around the same time I was learning to tie my shoes, so that was nothing new. My aim left a little to be desired—I could only hit a bull’s-eye about eight times in ten—but there was a decent amount of heat behind my throws, and if I could put enough distance between me and an opponent to make a long-range attack feasible, I stood a fighting chance of doing some damage—especially if the knife I was throwing happened to be made of silver.
Of course, werewolf communities didn’t exactly look kindly on humans who carried silver weapons, and Callum had made it clear from the time I hit my first bull’s-eye that unless I had very good reason to suspect that my life was in imminent danger, that particular alloy and any damage I might inflict with it were off-limits. Pack Law forbade werewolves from attacking humans, but humans who wielded silver weapons—or even carried them—were in a category of their own. The Senate was just as likely to put down a human intent on hunting Weres as vice versa.
So the fact that Callum had me practicing with knives and had actually mentioned the word gun in my presence was not altogether unexpected, but it was mildly disturbing nonetheless, because for the first time, I got the sense that he really did think that my life was in danger, or that it might be in the future.
Which, of course, made me wonder if there was something about Chase I didn’t know.
“All right, Devon. I want you to put Bryn in a choke hold.”
Those weren’t words I was particularly fond of hearing, but as Devon complied, Callum’s instructions to me proved even less welcome. “Bryn, I want you to break his hold and go in with the knife. You want to exact maximum damage in the short-term—disable him, but don’t inflict permanent injury.”
There wasn’t much I could do with a knife—silver or not—to permanently damage Dev, but still, there were two kinds of people in the world: people who liked making their best friends bleed and people who did not. I fell into the latter classification.
“It’s okay. Hurt me you will not, young Bronwyn.”
“You do a terrible Yoda, Dev.”
Even though the exchange between us was light and familiar, our bond to each other—and the rest of the pack—told me that neither one of us was comfortable with this. If the two of us had been inseparable before I’d opened my bond, there were times when I felt like we were practically the same person now. All of Callum’s wolves lurked in the recesses of my brain, their eyes tracking my movements wherever I went. But even as our age-mates pulled closer to me for the first time in memory, Devon stood as a barrier between us—a Slab of Werewolf, every bit as intimidating and significantly less silent than his dad.
Devon didn’t want to hurt me. His wolf gnashed its teeth at the very idea, and for a split second, my pack-sense surged, and it was almost like Devon’s beast was talking to me. Or something inside of me.
Females, it seemed to be saying, were supposed to be protected. Pups were to be cherished. The girl was his, and he did not want to be laying hands on her. He did not want to fight her.
Yeah, well, I’m not so hot at the idea of fighting you, either, I thought in Devon’s direction. His head flicked forward, and I wondered how clearly my words had come through. It was weird. I’d been talking to his wolf instincts, not his conscious mind, but both parts seemed to understand me just fine.
“Well, children?” Callum prodded.
Devon slumped slightly, in a show of submission, and then followed Callum’s directives to a T. He put one arm around my neck, and though he couldn’t have been using even a measure of full strength, his grip was like steel. Since I’d spent the better half of the past week being drilled on effective escape maneuvers, my body responded immediately, twisting my legs to the side and using the firmness of Devon’s grip to hold up my body as my right leg scissored up to kick him in the side of the face. His other arm went to grab my leg, but the movement gave me a window during which to butt my head into his elbow and flip out of his grasp.