by Leigh Evans
“Lexi, move back,” I warned. “You’re not helping.”
The Shadow remained where he was for another taunting second, then took a few jerking steps back, his hands spread. Lexi’s smile would have made Gandhi foam at the mouth. “Did you ever tell her about Wryal’s? Or of any of the dangers she’d face there?”
That sounded like a disease. “What’s Wryal’s?” I asked my mate.
My One True Thing’s gaze was still locked with my brother’s. “It’s an island,” he answered tightly. “Both the castle and the Spectacle grounds are on it.”
Of course they are.
Not only did we have to rescue the Raha’ells from freakin’ holding pens, but now we have to get them off an island? It wasn’t like the wolves could swim across—Weres can’t swim.
“Is there a boat?” I asked. “Or a ferry?”
“There’s a bridge.” Trowbridge’s nostrils flared in and out. A racehorse before the jockey dug in his heels. “Very long. Nice drop to the water.”
“I was playing up to now, wasn’t I?” I asked, my voice small. “Thinking that if I wore blinders and didn’t let my head turn left or right, kept my eyes on the prize…” No one leaped to the fool’s defense and I couldn’t blame them. I chewed the skin on the inside of my mouth. “This is all so much bigger than me.”
Trowbridge walked to where I sat. He stood over me, looking down. Expression inscrutable, except for the tiny sparks of blue glinting in his eyes. His scent was spiked and sharp with musk. It did not try to weave itself around me.
“I’m scared,” I told him.
Wordlessly he sank down into one of his graceful crouches, his weight balanced on his heels. Three inches closer and his knee would have grazed my elbow. He plucked at some creeping weed, then tossed it aside. Then he swept the sandy loam with the side of his hand to make a canvas. With his finger, he drew an elongated oval. “This is Dhesperal Lake.”
He drew me a map.
“Not a puddle or a pond,” he said, “but a lake.” The lines bracketing Trowbridge’s mouth seemed carved. Inside his “lake” he drafted another irregular shape. “This is Wryal’s Island.” He brooded over his diagram. “With me so far?” he asked without lifting his head.
“One lake, one island.”
He made a large four-sided box that took up most of the available space on the island he’d sketched. “This is the castle.” Then, so close to the castle it might as well be appended, he fashioned a far smaller square. “And these are the Spectacle grounds.”
I tried to make sense of the scale. The lake seemed oversized in comparison to Wryal’s. “Where’s the bridge?”
The tip of his finger added an L-shaped line from the castle to the shore. “There.”
Seriously, Karma? The crooked bridge was on the south end of the island. As far away from the place where they’re holding Trowbridge’s pack as possible.
Trowbridge had sat back on his heels. “The Spectacle’s a quarter acre surrounded by wooden walls that are too slick to climb and too thick to batter down. I’ve seen some crap in Merenwyn, but those holding pens…” He shook his head. “I’ve seen junkyard dogs kept in better conditions.” Gaze downcast, he said quietly, “The worst goes down in front of the viewing stands. The Fae watch shit happen and hoot like they’re at some fucking football game.”
Lexi stared at my mate through slit eyes.
I remembered the grandstands. Though I’d never physically been on Wryal’s Island, I’d visited the Spectacle grounds via my niece’s dreams. Through her eyes, I’d seen the Fae in the stands. Not a rabble, but an elegant and cruelly detached assemblage of those who believed themselves rightfully privileged. They wore cloaks and sat in high-backed chairs.
“There was a cage too,” I said. “They put you in it with Anu and she was afraid of you.”
My mate’s head jerked in surprise and I realized that he’d forgotten that I’d seen the Spectacle grounds through some dream-walking. Trowbridge studied me for a beat; then he said, “Yeah,” and his gaze returned to study the lines he’d drawn in Merenwyn’s earth. “I knew I was pretty much fucked when I woke up inside it.”
“You didn’t look frightened.”
“I was,” he said simply.
He rose and jammed his hands inside his back pockets, and those damn cutoff jeans slid low as he walked away from me. But this time I didn’t fixate on the patch of skin on his lower back. Instead I noticed those jutting hip bones and the hard, masculine planes of his muscles.
A warrior’s body honed to the bone.
His back pockets stretched as he made fists. “They have archers up on the castle’s towers whose only job is to keep their eye on the Spectacle grounds, and more men patrolling the pens. The Fae are armed; you’re not. Unless you can think up a miracle, you’re shit out of luck.”
“So you’re going to sacrifice yourself to be the Raha’ells’ miracle?”
Say no.
His back muscles tensed; then he slowly swung around to look at me. “It’s going to take a miracle and more just to get into the castle.” Blue sparks in his eyes. “But if we get that lucky, after I’m sure you’re on your way back to the Safe Passage I’m going to stay to do what I can to free them.”
“You’ll die.”
“I’ll try real hard not to get killed.”
I rubbed my temples.
Was this how it was going to go between us? I’d connive behind his back and then say, “Oopsy,” and then he’d do the same to me? Back and forth? An endless game of tennis without rules or even a winning number of points?
“We have to stop doing this,” I told him, and I was surprised at the sound of my own voice, because it was quiet and firm.
He tilted his head. “This?”
“This modus operandi we have of jumping first and then saying ‘sorry.’ This thing we do of only telling half-truths. It isn’t working anymore.”
“It isn’t working?” he repeated, his voice too soft, too low. “You’ve been playing that call since we met. You jump, I follow. What’s your frickin’ problem?”
“You should have told me what you were planning to do. Our destinies are entwined, Trowbridge. You know that.”
“I would have told you.”
“When?”
“When the time was right,” he said tightly.
“You mean when it was too late for me to stop you.”
“You really want to get into this? Now?” He jerked his chin toward Lexi. “I’m not doing this in front of him, so if you want to explore this topic,” he said, playing a biting emphasis on the verb, “I suggest you take your sweet ass to the cave.”
“Fine.” I stood up, weaved for a second because I momentarily saw spots, then stomped into the cave. Okay, it was more of a stagger-stomp, which, I devoutly hoped, hurt Lexi. Once inside, I didn’t explore Lexi’s cave. I went in as far as I needed to go to get a fraction of privacy and still be able to see the trees. But still, that put me a stone’s throw away from Lexi’s old campfire.
Trowbridge followed.
“What the hell do you want from me?” he said harshly.
It was a small, contained space. “Hell” echoed.
I snapped back. “I want us to be honest with each other. I want to know when you’re planning to risk your life.”
“Like you warn me when you risk yours?” he growled.
He’d never been that angry with me before. I took a step backward, and my good heel crushed one of the charred remnants of Lexi’s fire.
And whoosh. Trowbridge’s thin control splintered. “You want honesty?” he shouted. “It tore my guts out to stay on the ridge, and watch my people be mown down by the fucking Fae, and not do anything for them! I was their Alpha! I should have been there with them. Down at that shallow crossing fighting with them! But I put you and your fucking epic quest in front of my pack! I put you in front of everything! God dammit, I came back to Creemore for you!”
I took a step out of the fire. �
��You couldn’t have done anything to help the Raha’ells; they—”
“Also because of you!” he shouted over me.
My turn to draw in a sharp breath through my teeth.
Trowbridge spun around, presenting me his back. He pressed his hands against his temples and rocked as if his head were about to split open. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he repeated.
I breathed into the back of my hand. How did this fall apart so fast? “As I recall it, I didn’t stop you from going down that hill to their defense. You stopped me.”
With a sigh, he dropped his arms and turned around to face me. “You’d have died before you made it halfway down the ridge. I thought of telling you to stay, but you never stay. I thought of going to fight without you, but how could I? You don’t know how to survive here.”
“I have magic. You keep discounting how useful it can be.”
“Can it stop arrows?”
No, it couldn’t.
Wearily, he leaned against the wall. “You got us involved in what you keep calling an ‘epic quest.’ FYI, I don’t want to ever hear that phrase again.” He frowned at Lexi’s fire. “It’s not epic; it’s just fucking impossible. We haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of coming out of this. And if that’s what it is—if that’s what’s going to go down—then we’ve got to destroy that book before it happens.” He raised his head, stared at me, little flits of blue light sparking in the dim light. “If I can’t save the Raha’ells, I’ll damn well save my pack in Creemore. I can’t die knowing I let both of them down.”
“But you want to do both.”
“Of course I do.”
“You always going to be such a tough guy?”
“Tough guy?” He dug his fists into his pockets. “You’re killing me, Hedi. You keep walking into danger. Some bitch opens a portal and throws fire at you and you jump right through it after her. You didn’t take a gun. You didn’t take water, food, or shoes. You just … jumped.”
“St. Silas’s man had a gun on me.” I looked down at my feet and then away. Ash coated one of Varens’s moccasins; blood stained the other. “You should have told me about the prophecy. You should have told me that you always meant to fulfill it.”
“I can’t abandon my Raha’ells here without trying,” he said. “I won’t be that guy. It’s not who I am anymore. I fought to claim them as mine. I’m their Alpha. You don’t toss that back.”
I used my thumbnail to push back the cuticle on its twin. “You loved Varens.”
He nodded.
“And you love the Raha’ells.”
“Yes.”
“And you love me.”
“Yes,” he said with quiet emphasis, “I love you.”
I knew that.
“Being an Alpha is what I’m meant to do,” he said. “It fits. But you fit me too. You and me … it’s more than just sex and mating pheromones. You remember me the way I was before everything went to crap. You see the screwup I was and the man I’ve become. You don’t expect an Alpha, or the Son of Lukynae. You don’t even want them. You see me. And I see you.”
His gaze roved over me.
“Yeah, you fit me. The way your skin slides under my palm, the way you make me laugh. Even when you piss me off or scare me so bad I want to punch the wall.” Tiny flickers of blue light spun in his eyes. “I had a taste of you before I came here. And I wanted it back. Every night I’d go to sleep thinking how I could get back home. And every morning I’d wake up in my camp knowing I had to find a place for my Raha’ells so they won’t be hunted like fucking animals anymore.”
I folded my arms around my waist, hugging myself.
“Believe me,” he said. “I was never planning on bringing you here. I knew it would be dangerous, and I knew you weren’t ready for it. I was going to buy a few kilos of iron shavings, pack them in a backpack, and use the fairy portal in Creemore on my own. I thought I’d be back before you knew it. But then the witches screwed up that plan and you had to jump through the Safe Passage, while I was handcuffed to a fucking fence. I saw you going, knew what was waiting for you … Nothing could have stopped me. I would have brought the entire fence through the passage if I needed to.”
Wonderful words, but his back was still braced against the wall, his shoulders stiff, his fists hidden inside his pockets.
He rocked a bit. “I can’t go back to being just Robbie Trowbridge. And I can’t pretend I don’t know what I’m leaving behind me if I don’t try to make this better. You talk a lot about Karma and fate, and all that Fae stuff. Maybe this is my destiny.”
A wave of weariness did the obligatory wash.
Well, well, well.
There’s that stinking word: “destiny.” Seriously, seven months ago, standing by the apartment window, I would never have believed that my future would lead to anything other than a long stumble from one poor-paying job to another. But in those days, I didn’t like looking into the crystal ball. From what I could see, my life was going to be nothing but a wasteland of loneliness and wanting.
I couldn’t say that anymore.
Now I had the ingredients for everything I’d ever wanted. A mate. A brother. Friends. A place to belong in a pack—something I was never aware of how much I’d secretly yearned for.
But of course, having it, even briefly, came with a terrible price tag.
Because Trowbridge was who he was and I was who I was. He meant it when he said that he couldn’t live with himself if he turned his back on his pack. A year ago, I might have been incapable of understanding such a sense of duty, but my slacker conscience had been a bur under my butt ever since that day My One True Thing walked into my Starbucks.
I don’t know how he did it—how he could be the catalyst for so much change in me. But he was. Loving him made me love more. And now I was thigh deep in a freakin’ epidemic of love: I loved him, I loved Lexi, I loved Merry and Cordelia, and given time, I’d probably be awash in gooey sentiment over Anu.
But damn if all that loving didn’t come with side dishes I don’t recall ordering, the most onerous being an inescapable feeling of responsibility. That sense of duty was getting out of hand, growing faster than Boston ivy over crumbling brick mortar. I felt culpable for Lexi’s fate, I felt an uncomfortable obligation about Mouse’s future, and—damn, damn, damn—I now freakin’ well felt answerable for an entire race of people.
Wow, someone hit the reset button.
I am so not the hero type.
And yet I couldn’t pretend the life of a wolf in Merenwyn wasn’t as bad as all that. I knew the truth. I’d seen the hunt. I’d spent a night in a trap. For crap’s sake, I wore Varens’s slippers. Could I walk away from the Raha’ells and still be me? Could I force Trowbridge, using my questionable skills with feminine tears and whimpers, to give up on them too?
No. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to live a life with a man who turned his back.
Crap.
All or nothing. A long life of nothing much special or a short life filled with—oh, someone just shoot me—higher purpose.
Crap.
Life without loving people isn’t much of a life, is it?
I performed a brief mental burial of me-first Hedi and walked over to my man. He watched me warily as I placed my feet between his.
“I can’t, Tink,” he said. “I just can’t.”
“Shut up,” I said, scraping some mud flakes from his throat. I pressed my lips against the beat of his artery. His blood was warm; his pulse, strong.
My blood runs in his blood. My life ends with his.
I turned my head to rest my cheek on his chest. “I’m no hero, Trowbridge. I don’t like being hungry, I don’t like being hunted, and I really don’t like feeling threatened all the time. It scares me to think what might be ahead of us. But it is twisted, what they do to the Raha’ells in this realm. I thought I could walk away from it—I really wanted to—but I can’t. I can’t un-see what I’ve seen. I guess I’m not that girl anymore either.”
“Tink,” he whispered.
I pulled back; then I cupped his face with my hands. “Listen up, Balto.” I tilted his jaw downward until his lips were out of easy kissing range and I was staring at him eyeball to eyeball. “You should know that if we make it through whatever hellfire is facing us, I intend to be a fully participating Alpha’s mate. I stand beside you.” He started to smile; I could feel his skin crease under my palms. “I’m not going to take every word you say as a done deal; I’m going to want to discuss.”
His arms slid around me. He pulled me until we fit together, my hips cradled by his, my chest crushed against his. “You mean situation normal.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass. So let’s discuss—and come up with a plan for breaking your pack out of jail in addition to doing everything else on our list. And let’s make it a good one, because I want at least a three percent chance of walking out of the castle relatively intact. My last breath is absolutely not going to be taken in a place called the Spectacle.”
A comet spun in his blue eyes. “Sweetheart, even if we survive—”
“Don’t like the word ‘if.’”
“There’s no guarantee you’ll ever see Creemore again, Tink.”
I called up a wavering smile. “Guess your mother’s wallpaper got a reprieve.” I brushed the corners of the Son of Lukynae’s firm mouth with my fingertips, then shook my head. “What a surprise package you turned out to be. I thought I was hooking myself up to rebel without a cause and what do I get? Maximus and Robin of Locksley, all rolled into one.”
Robbie Trowbridge lifted his brows. “You’re talking movies again, right?”
“Gladiator and Robin Hood.”
“Saw Gladiator. Crap ending.” He leaned to kiss me again, then he stopped and lifted his long nose. He sniffed, and sniffed again. “What the—”
I’m not sure what level of profanity my mate was going to tag onto that question and I never got to find out, because a dark form chose that moment to sprint past us for the relative safety of the outside of the cave.
