Tom waited that way until a change to a less popular song prompted several people to push to the edges of the floor, probably headed for drinks. One of them decided to shove between Felicia and Enrique rather than beside them. The moment she and Enrique were apart, Tom stepped in close enough to be heard. He kept his body angled away like he wanted no chance that they’d touch accidentally. “Silver wants me to take you home.”
Several excellent arguments for why Felicia wasn’t going to be escorted home like a naughty child occurred to her, but they lost most of their effect when she imagined shouting them in short phrases near his ear. If she was going to talk him out of it, she would probably have to do it outside. She gestured him toward the door. Enrique slung an arm over her shoulder and she shoved it off. It was hard enough to weave through the crowd alone without being tethered to someone else who would get caught on obstacles.
The noise trailed off slowly as they approached the door, but silence as well as cold hit them like a slap when they finally squeezed outside. Felicia shivered and allowed Enrique to keep his arm over her shoulders when he tried the move again.
“You aren’t planning on going back inside, are you?” Enrique said, voice too loud at first after the noise inside. As he got it down to normal, his tone turned lightly teasing.
A scowl flickered on Tom’s face for the first time that night, and it took Felicia several seconds to trace it to the Spanish. Now the shock of the temperature differential had faded, it wasn’t actually that cold out here, but she still felt light-headed. That was the annoying thing about drinking: before Enrique had shown her how to do it properly, she usually got maybe fifteen minutes of fun buzz before she dropped back into the light-headed unfun part. She suppressed a laugh as she remembered her earlier solution: drink more.
“I was thinking of going back, yes. The night is young.” Felicia drew a breath of Enrique’s discomfort in the open air and suddenly felt guilty. She hadn’t realized he minded it that much. Or had she? She’d been drunker at that point. It still seemed to her the new experience should be good for him, but now her judgment was a little steadier, it didn’t seem particularly likely to make him more enamored of North America and the Were culture here. “I suppose we could call the hunt finished for the night, though.” At least with Tom around, she wouldn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of the playing chase question again.
Enrique turned them both in the direction of the car, but Tom increased his pace to get in front of them. “Unless you’re going to tell me someone spilled a drink—several drinks—on you both, you’re not driving anywhere. I’ll drop him off and take you home, Felicia.”
Felicia started to correct Tom, that Enrique hadn’t had as much, he’d been perfectly fine on the way out here, but then she remembered the drinks he’d had upstairs. He might have caught up with her.
“I’ll need my pack from her car,” Enrique said, so thickly accented he had to repeat it in the face of Tom’s blank look. Tom nodded and fell in behind them. Neither of them was the quickest or most steady walker at the moment, so when Tom spotted the car in a lot a block away, he strode ahead and waited there impatiently for them.
When Enrique leaned into the backseat, he rescued not only his pack but his unfinished bottle as well. He made sure the brown paper was pulled right up onto the neck and handed it to Felicia with a grin. She swigged from it as they walked back to where Tom had parked his pickup on the street. The taste wasn’t that bad, really.
The pickup had a couple sideways-facing tiny jump seats behind the main seats, and Felicia climbed in back to sit behind the driver without waiting to be asked. Enrique could probably have fit half of himself in one of those seats. She propped her feet on the opposite one and finished off the bottle. That should hopefully take care of the light-headedness. She didn’t bother with her seat belt.
“Have you ever been properly drunk?” Felicia thumped her hand on the back of Tom’s seat. He just grunted, so she supposed he was concentrating on his driving, but she couldn’t see out the windows very well from her angle, so she got bored quickly. She repeated the question to try to get him to talk to her.
“Yes,” Tom said shortly. “Not with a random stranger, though.”
“He’s not—” Felicia put her hand over her mouth. Lady. She’d almost screwed that one up royally. Even if she hadn’t already lied to Silver, Enrique should have a clean slate if he decided to stay here, so people needed to get to know him without judging him as an evil European. “—a stranger anymore,” she finished after a bit of thought.
“I noticed,” Tom said, dryly.
Enrique choked on a swallowed laugh. “Stop here?” he asked, enunciating each word carefully to avoid an accent. He pointed somewhere Felicia couldn’t see. Tom pulled off into a parking lot and Enrique jumped out with his pack. He folded the seat down and offered her a hand in invitation. Felicia didn’t even really think about it before climbing out. Home was boring. Enrique looked like he had another idea for more interesting things to do.
She wasn’t sure what things they could be, though, since Enrique had directed Tom to one of the polite parks with lots of picnic tables and open space underneath scattered trees rather than proper underbrush with animals to hunt. In the darkness, it smelled primarily of charcoal smoke from a grill between two tables, now cold.
“Felicia—” Tom managed to rival her father for pure exasperation in his tone.
“Come on, I can’t just go home and stare at the walls now.” That sounded whiny without Felicia meaning it to, so she was more careful for the next part. “There’s nothing to do at home. You could join us.” She steadied herself on the doorframe. “I’m sorry I’m being frustrating, Tom. Just come have a little fun, and you can tell Silver it took you a long time to find us.”
“It’ll be lots of fun,” Enrique said and smiled. Felicia noticed he stood straighter, like he was showing off how much bigger and stronger he was than other men. He reached into his pack. He pulled out a whip, coiled tight for travel, and looped it more loosely for use. Memories of home in Madrid caught her like a hand squeezed around her voice. She knew that whip, nearly as intimately as she knew the one that had been hers. Enrique ran his thumb over the handle, where interlaced strips of leather formed a raised spiraling ridge down the length. It may have looked nice, but it was his fighting weapon, worn and well used with a weighted handle, not one of the ones for fancy tricks. Felicia had borrowed it sometimes to practice with the longer reach. She remembered the feel of that ridge.
Tom stiffened and took a few steps forward as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “What—”
“Don’t worry. Just target practice.” Enrique stepped to an overstuffed trash can beside a picnic table at the edge of the gravel parking lot. He rescued a juice and a water bottle, both with some liquid remaining, and set them up on the table. It took him several seconds to balance the heavier one on top of the other without it falling off. Felicia giggled. He wasn’t going to be very good when he was this drunk.
Enrique made a big production of rolling his shoulders, bracing his stance, and adjusting his grip on the handle. He cracked the whip a few times. Felicia jumped at the first, a purely reflexive reaction, then snorted. That was showing off, without the skill needed for targeting. Just when Felicia was sure he was too drunk to hit the side of a mountain, he used a sidearm stroke. The whip’s tip lashed out and the bottom bottle clattered onto the ground beside the picnic table. The top bottle clumped down onto the table and sat solidly, completely unaware of what had just befallen its friend.
“Even drunk you’re unfairly good at this.” Felicia stuck out her tongue and Enrique saluted her. This time, when he flipped the whip, he wrapped it around the remaining bottle, tugged it toward himself, and caught it. Felicia clapped.
Tom came out of nowhere and knocked her hands down. She hadn’t even seen him move. Lady, this being drunk thing kind of sucked sometimes. “How can you applaud that kind of—” He snarled, pure conte
mpt in the sound. “It’s disgusting.”
Felicia stared at him. She didn’t … she didn’t understand. “He’s knocking bottles around,” she said cautiously. And showing off how much manlier he was than Tom, but it wasn’t like Felicia was comparing the two of them. She hadn’t thought Tom was that insecure.
“Yeah, and you’re telling me he doesn’t practice bottle tricks to keep his hand in for using it on people?” Tom snarled again.
Enrique laughed and coiled his whip. “Pussy.”
“But—” Felicia’s voice died in her throat and left her feeling sick. She’d never been as good as Enrique or the older Were, and she was three years out of practice, but she’d been pretty good with the whip herself. Both for tricks and in practice bouts with other people. Madrid had trained her himself, and she still remembered the way he’d laughed the first time she scored him properly, right across the cheek. She’d been so proud, drawing the alpha’s blood.
Lady, what would Tom think of her if she admitted that? She took a deep breath and told herself sternly not to be dramatic. She’d been a kid, learning what they told her to learn. Tom would understand that.
“Did you see your father after Madrid caught him at the Convocation?” Tom gestured several jerky slashes across his own chest. “He’d healed all the damage, but he hardly had any shirt left. You could tell what they’d done.”
Felicia pressed her lips together. Of course she’d seen what they’d done to her father. That’s why she’d sneaked in and set him free. Madrid had said they wanted to talk to him, not that they planned to hurt him like that. But a few quick strikes to defend yourself against an armed enemy, that was completely different from lash upon lash inflicted on someone tied up, as they had done to her father. The whip was the tool, not the method. “It’s different—”
Tom cut her off by seizing her shoulder and pulling her aside. “Skill like that with a whip … Is he Spanish? I thought you guys were suddenly very close. Has he threatened you so you don’t tell anyone?” He clasped her other shoulder too, and Felicia could see in his face that he was building up the story in his mind. “Whatever it is, I can help…”
“Well, I don’t know what weapons South American packs do or don’t use, but he’s not from Madrid.” Felicia lifted her chin and looked at Tom straight on. She was doing this to help Enrique, and it was none of Tom’s business. She’d explain to Tom later about weapons being tools, when he wasn’t so wound up.
Tom hesitated a beat, then let his hands slide away. “If you’re sure.”
“It’s not like I’d be unsure about whether I’d known someone since childhood,” Felicia snapped. The lie slipped out easily once more, but worse guilt twisted in after it. The alcohol on her breath should keep him from smelling it, but that wasn’t the point. She’d lied to Tom. Lied to him for a good cause, but she’d have sworn on the Lady this morning that she would never have lied to him by choice.
Tom shook his head and returned to his truck. “Fine. You can come or you can stay and watch his fancy tricks, but I’m leaving.” He slammed his door and started the engine. Felicia took too long trying to decide if it would be better to go with him or give him space to get over his initial disgust at seeing the whip, and by then he’d driven away.
Enrique came up to her with his whip tucked away and pack slung back over his shoulder. He leaned to kiss her hair. “Don’t let him get to you.”
Felicia jabbed an elbow into his stomach. She’d had to lie for him, and why? Because he wanted to show off. If he wanted to play chase so badly, he needed to earn it by being attractive himself, not by trying to make rivals seem less so. If he hadn’t brought out his whip in front of Tom, his nationality would never have been in question. Maybe later she’d be ready to give Enrique another chance and go back to convincing him to stay, but right now her head hurt and she was angry with him.
“I’m going home, Enrique.” She pulled out her phone. She’d call a Lady-damned cab and be done. If she didn’t have enough cash left, she’d put it on the pack credit card.
Enrique waited while she arranged the pickup without touching her, then he offered her an apologetic grimace. “If we go to your car instead, I will be fine for driving by the time we get there,” he offered.
Felicia scrubbed her face and calculated the cost in money to get another cab out to the car in the morning, or the cost in disapproval to get someone in the pack to drive her out. Enrique’s solution did seem the better one, even if she wasn’t very happy with him at the moment. “You can’t hang around once we get there. And I don’t want to see you again tomorrow, either. If you’re going to pull shit like this with my friends, I don’t want you around.”
“You might want to reconsider.” All traces of apology disappeared from Enrique’s face, and it took on a blankness that seemed to Felicia to be a reflection of one she’d seen often on Madrid’s face. He didn’t gloat, but you could sense the emotion below the surface when he let whatever he’d been pretending fall away. “I still need your help with something.”
Felicia shivered. Adrenaline flushed through her and pushed the fuzziness back for a few moments. What was this? “Enrique…”
He pulled out his phone and found what he wanted with a couple practiced swipes. He turned the screen toward her and smirked. That wasn’t a very Madrid expression—but that almost made it worse. Felicia could dismiss the resemblance as her imagination when it was too perfect, but this Madrid as interpreted by Enrique’s smugness made too much sense.
The type on the screen was too small for Felicia to read at that distance, but she could see by the arrangement of text that it was an e-mail. She took it and adrenaline left sharp cold in its wake as she read. It was an e-mail from her address to Madrid. It talked about how she didn’t fit in, how she was thinking about coming home, about how she missed her friends in Spain. It sounded just like something she’d have said. A niggling at the back of her mind finally broke through her confusion to point out she had said that, or nearly that. Three years ago, when she’d first decided to stay with her father, she had e-mailed one of the other teens in the pack. She hadn’t said exactly this—it was all twisted up somehow, reflected wrong like a flawed mirror. But she’d said she missed them. And she didn’t feel like she fit in here.
She kept reading and suddenly couldn’t breathe. SOMEONE NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT SILVER. SHE’S NOT WORTHY TO LEAD. IT WOULD BE EASY ENOUGH. SHE HATES NEW PLACES, THEY CONFUSE AND UPSET HER. AND NOW IS THE TIME, WHILE MY FATHER IS AWAY SO SHE CAN’T LEAN ON HIM.
“I didn’t … how did you—?” She’d thought panic had cleared her head, but now she still couldn’t think right. Felicia clutched at the phone and flicked back up through menus to find that the e-mail she’d read was only the latest of half a dozen apparently from her address. She hadn’t sent that e-mail, or any others. She hadn’t written anything of the kind, anywhere. She’d only just told Enrique about Silver and new places …
In the park before they’d gone running, and then to the club. The club where he’d vanished upstairs for a drink. Had he really been panicked at all, or had that all been an act so he could get time alone to send the information he’d tricked out of her? Send it to—
“Madrid.” Felicia returned to the full text of the latest e-mail, tried to match it to her faint memory of her e-mail three years ago. It truly was a work of art, and while she’d never seen anything of any length Madrid had written before, he was artful enough with spoken words. He must have been the one who had created this forgery. “Madrid may have sent you to get me alone, to get … material out of me for this stupid forgery, but it won’t work!” She was yelling by the end. She shoved at the phone violently back at Enrique’s chest. If only smashing it would have destroyed the e-mails. “No one will believe you! Everyone knows Papa’s gone. And I must have the original e-mail somewhere, I can show them…”
Enrique took the phone away from her and tucked it back into his pocket with exaggerated gentleness. “But
you were so helpfully specific about Silver’s weaknesses. You told me they were already trying to get rid of you; why would they see this as anything other than a Lady-sent excuse?”
He tried to take her hand, the soothing gesture spoiled by his continuing smirk, and she slapped him away. “Why would I write you guys in English, then, purse dog?” She had the feeling of snapping after a retreating prey’s tail, forever just too short, but she had to try.
Enrique raised his eyebrows. “But you did.”
Felicia slashed her hand. “Three years ago, yes, I guess I did. But that was because I wanted to prove that even if I was whining about missing home, I was committed to Papa and English and my new home. If I’m your coconspirator, that’s stupid.”
Enrique pulled his phone out again and reread the screen with pretend deliberation. “I don’t know. It sounds awfully bad. Do you think they’ll even think about the language? You lied to hide me. Twice.” He looked up at her and smiled with too much teeth. “Perhaps your father is desperate to try to keep you, but he’s not here.”
Felicia pressed shaking hands over her face. She could imagine everyone’s reaction. She could imagine it perfectly well. She’d lied, and she had told Enrique everything he’d put in the e-mail. And the e-mail sounded like her because it was her words, just twisted.
Felicia’s stomach heaved, perhaps more from the alcohol than anything, but she swallowed it down. She needed to think about this later, with a clear head. Maybe a way out would be visible then. Meanwhile—“Why? I know this isn’t just revenge, fucking with me to punish me.”
Enrique patted her cheek and pulled away before she could bite at him. “We can talk about that tomorrow. I told you, I need your help with something. Don’t worry, no one will get hurt, we’re just going to change the balance of power a little.”
Change the balance of power: translation, get her father and Silver out of it. Felicia could guess that much. She thought about demanding more details, but a headache was gouging painful fingers into her head, and maybe tomorrow she’d see a way out of it and it would all be moot anyway. She let jagged silence fall. Enrique smiled and didn’t break it either.
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