“Caroline,” the girl said shortly.
There was a moment of silence while the two of them appraised each other. Ali had several inches and sixteen years on Caroline, but for a split second, the two seemed disturbingly well matched.
“We didn’t know the wolf girl had human friends,” Caroline said.
Ali shrugged. “I didn’t know your coven was on good enough terms with the people in town to risk pulling a knife on someone in broad daylight—unless, of course, you have someone running interference, showing them something else.”
Caroline blinked once when Ali said the word coven and once when my foster mother called that Caroline probably hadn’t come here alone. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think that if Archer could enter my dreams, the coven might have someone who could make the rest of the people in town think they were seeing something they weren’t.
“You have no idea what you’re up against,” Caroline said, and for a second—a single second—she sounded almost sad. “Don’t tell me the two of you would die for one of them. Don’t tell me they’re worth it. They’re monsters, and you know that, same as me.”
A reply was on the tip of my tongue, but before I could press Caroline to tell me how she could call my pack monsters, given what her coven had done to a battered teenage boy, a single note, haunting and low, made its way to my ears, and suddenly, whatever I was going to say didn’t seem nearly so important.
Caroline turning and walking away didn’t seem important.
Nothing did.
Objectively, I knew that another person might describe the sound as a whistle, compare it to the product of blowing a steady stream of air into a hand-carved woodwind. But to me, it wasn’t just a sound. It was a song.
It was paralyzing.
I knew what was happening, knew that there was a person making this sound, and that when she’d made it for Lucas, he hadn’t been able to move or scream or even care that he was being tortured.
I knew, I knew, I knew—and I didn’t care.
My hands fell to my sides. My lips parted slightly, the tension evaporating from my face and jaw. All my other senses receded, because nothing mattered as much as the sound.
The sound.
On some level, I realized that Ali had gone still beside me, her muscles as liquid and useless as mine. I saw people approaching, recognized Archer, noted the old woman standing beside him, looking every inch the storybook grandmother but for the snake coiled like a scarf around her neck. And then there was the third in their little trio, the one whistling that one-note song that snaked its way through my brain, around my limbs, in and out of my blood, my skin, everything.
Archer and the old woman closed in on me from either side, the snake slithering from Grandma’s neck down her shoulder, poised to strike.
For a second, a split second, the sound stopped as the woman who was whistling took a breath, and I had a moment of clarity, a moment when I could think and move and realize exactly how bad this situation was, before the sound started again.
A feeling, alien and familiar all at once, crackled through my body. The sound pushed back against it, willing me to relax, to forget, to just stand there and let the psychics have their way with me, but this time, I heard a lower sound, an older one, a whisper from the most ancient part of my mind, from my gut, from the core of what it meant to be me.
Threat, threat, threat, it seemed to be saying. Survive.
My body was relaxed, my limbs frozen in place, but that single word was enough to free my mind. My vision blurred. Darkness began to close in from all sides, and even before I saw red, I tasted it, the color tinny and electric on my tongue.
This was what it meant to be Resilient. The taste, the color, the rush of adrenaline into my bloodstream. The fury and power and uncompromising need to escape. To fight back.
To survive.
Instinct took over. One second I was standing there, and the next, the roar inside me was deafening, drowning out anything my external senses had to offer. I leapt forward, the world colored in shades of black and blood, blood-red, and by the time I came fully back into myself, the sound had stopped, and everyone who wasn’t me and wasn’t Ali was on the ground.
I couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there, or what I’d done, but whatever it was must have sent a message, because as they climbed to their feet, the woman who’d been whistling kept her mouth closed, and the other two kept their distance.
“Easy there, mutt-lover. If we wanted to fight, you’d be dead right now.” Archer gave me a genial smile. Like he knew me. Like we were friends. “I’m not much of a fighter, but even I could have slid a knife between your ribs in the time it took you to fight off Bridget’s hold.”
Having said his piece, Archer glanced pointedly to his left, at the old woman, who was stroking her snake’s triangular head like it was a kitten. The suggestion was clear—if Grandma had wanted me dead, her pet could have seen to that just fine.
“You should know what you’re up against.” Bridget’s speaking voice was absurdly plain compared to the sound she’d made before. For some reason, that didn’t surprise me, but the note of kindness in it did. “If we fight you, really fight you, there will be casualties on both sides, but we will win. Your people will fall, some of them”—she glanced at Ali—“without ever realizing there’s a battle they should be fighting.”
Bridget’s warning sank in.
Being Resilient meant being resistant to dominance and having a knack for escaping even the direst situations. If I could fight my way through Bridget’s hypnotic hold, chances were good that Chase, Maddy, and the other Resilients could do the same.
Eventually.
I tried not to think about what the rest of Bridget’s coven could do in the time it took us to combat her ability. I tried not to think about the fact that Ali, Mitch, Devon, and Lake might not be able to fight it in the first place.
Lucas hadn’t.
“You’ve seen Caroline,” Bridget continued softly. “You know what she can do.”
Darkness flecked across Bridget’s eyes when she said Caroline’s name. Fear, thick and uncompromising, with a life of its own.
For a moment, the same expression descended over the others’ faces, like Caroline was their bogeyman as much as she was ours.
Archer recovered first. “This shouldn’t be your fight, Bryn,” he said softly. “Sometimes, backing down is the right choice. The smart one.” Archer reached out to tweak the end of my hair, but Ali caught his hand in hers.