by Leigh Evans
“You’re a fairy, aren’t you?”
I rubbed my nose. “All right, let’s try combining the questions. What does your Alpha want with an old woman and an amulet?” I waved his BlackBerry under his nose. He didn’t like that; I did it again.
“I’m not telling you jack.”
I sighed and reached for a hank of his hair. The sigh was baloney, just a gloss over something vile inside me, because down there, the part that grew malice so easily was saying, “Go girl, go.” His greasy hair was short, and my blue rubber gloves slipped off when he twisted his head away. Merry quivered on her perch. I looked into his red-rimmed eyes and said in a low voice, “I’d rather you just told me. I don’t need to hurt you.”
Yeah, I know. Another lie.
Merry’s patience broke. She sprang across the eight-inch gap, leaves extended like pincers. His head thudded back in a futile effort to avoid her, and then all three of us danced. Merry dug into his cheek muscles, he thrashed his head against his duct-tape bindings, and my neck, anchored by Merry’s chain wound around it, echoed each of the Were’s savage jerks.
“Get it off, get it off,” he screamed, trying to scrape her off his cheek with his shoulder.
Merry dug in. Thin rivulets of blood streaked down his face in four distinct trails. Very red blood. Pungent and rich smelling. I readjusted my balance, both inner and outward, and came to rest on my knees beside him, so close his blood smelled like wet copper.
Merry was really freaking me out.
“I’ll ask, you’ll answer. Okay?” I took another deep steadying breath through my mouth. “What does your Alpha want?”
He braced for pain. Merry obliged, and tortured his cheek. Scawens held out until Merry sprouted another arm. It positioned itself a quarter of an inch from his wide, blue right eye. There it swayed, back and forth, its sharp tip promising a world of hurt and disfigurement. He stopped moving, maybe even breathing. She tightened the distance between the tip of her ivy leaf and his pupil. A spasm of pure horror rippled across his face.
“Okay, we’ll start with a smaller question. Which pack do you belong to?”
His jaw worked. The tip of Merry’s leaf brushed his eyelashes with all the tenderness of a ditched girlfriend. He said, “Ontario.”
“Which pack in Ontario, Stuart?”
“Ontario,” he said, carefully enunciating each word, “is only one pack.”
Not when I was a child. Back then the Alpha of Creemore had ruled his small fiefdom with vigilance and pride. If one of the Danvers kids tossed a ball through a glass window, he knew of it before the glazier had a chance to back his truck out of his garage. Yeah, Jacob Trowbridge had been Big Daddy all right, but his eyes had never strayed beyond his own turf. In a wolf’s world, personal territory was everything. It meant you got squinty-eyed with visitors, careful with your words around humans (even around those half-Fae mutts), and humorlessly insular. Possessive to the extreme. Put bluntly, you peed on every bush in your parish, and that pungent flag said, “Hey, don’t go any farther. This is my woods, my street, my woman.” That’s how they got along and avoided conflict—Weres respected one another’s boundaries. I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of all of Ontario being united. Why? Why would all those little packs living hundreds of miles from Creemere ever have chosen to relinquish their territory to another Alpha? Unless, of course, I realized with a start, it hadn’t been voluntary. There must have been bloodshed for that to come about, I thought uneasily. Lots of it. “So then who is your Alpha? If he’s so strong, it won’t make any difference if I know who he is.”
He weighed his answer before replying, but evidently his fear of his Alpha was greater than his fear of wearing an eye patch for the rest of his Were life. He clamped his lips shut.
“I’m losing patience,” I said.
“Bitch, you are so done. You’re so done. You’ve hurt one of the pack.”
The pack, the pack. I’d lost a family, reinvented myself, gone from burden to breadwinner, supported my aunt and myself over the last two years—and come to think of it, Merry—all without the help of the pack, and yet, here it was. The pack used against me like some sort of acid against my soul.
Stuart tried to sneer but it was a sad, lopsided effort, with Merry embedded in his cheek muscle, and blood coating the gums of his white teeth. There was a light shadow of a beard against the lower part of his jaw. I felt tired, looking at him with his Hollywood tough guy smile.
“All right, last time. This woman.” I shuffled back to Lou’s photo, pausing to push my glasses back on my nose, before turning the BlackBerry toward him. “Where is she?”
“Why don’t you look in the hospitals?” He shook his head as if I were the dumb one. “My Alpha’s going to come looking for you after this.”
“Merry,” I said coldly. “Do your worst.”
He wasn’t strong enough to hold back a scream, or to stop his bound feet from drumming on the ground. If my parents had seen me watch him writhe, with that horrible little smile I could feel on my mouth, they would have disowned me.
“Stop,” I said when bile started to rise in my throat as his shrieks became piercing. Scawens took a few harsh shudders of breath. Under that I could hear his heart beat, fast and hard, even harder than mine, which was trying to pull itself free from the monster I’d become.
“It can be worse,” I whispered to him, trying not to look at the right side of his face. “She’s nothing more than a frightened old lady. She has no power left anymore. She can’t do anything with an amulet. Why don’t you tell me where to find her? You don’t have to suffer like this.”
He swallowed and then looked at me, hate making his eyes too old, and too bright. “He’s going to rip your head off when he gets you.”
“You’re very fond of ripping things, aren’t you?” Merry’s chain sawed on my neck as I lifted my shoulders to ease the ache between them. We were still tied together, Scawens and I, by an Asrai without human or even Were morals.
“Merry, let him go.” She held on for five more seconds, and then released her grip to fall in a hard lump of gold and amber against my chest. I brought a tentative hand up to her, before cupping her in my cold palm. She was sticky with blood.
I picked up his phone and opened it to Trowbridge’s photo. “Last question. What do you want with this guy?”
He spat again.
“So, not a friend.”
He stared at me with silent hatred.
“I’m going to let you go, Stuart Scawens,” I said. “Go back to your Alpha. Tell him that I don’t have it, but I know where to get the amulet.” I stood up, keeping my eyes steady on him. I could feel payback creeping up on me. You can’t use Fae power in this realm without paying its price of pain, nausea, and fatigue. The adrenaline that had kept them at bay was wearing off.
I leaned into his face. “I’ll call him in twenty-four hours or less. You tell him to keep Lou safe. No harm should come to her. We’ll trade. She’s a crazy old lady with no special powers to her at all. If he gives her back, I’ll give him the amulet he wants. And Scawens? Tell him that you’re my last messenger. After this, he’ll be picking up body parts. Make sure he gets the message before anything happens to her.”
Scawens braced his legs and heaved upward, fighting to stand upright. Stupid male, get a hernia, why don’t you? The radiator was solid iron, pure enough that I couldn’t have touched it without the gloves (even if its metal was coated with five layers of paint), and it was connected to yards of pipe.
“You don’t have to run off now. Ladies first.” I tucked his cell into my pocket.
He made one more effort, his teeth clenched, his muscles bunching, his thin lips drawn back to expose his bloody teeth. The pipe made a mournful betraying sound, and he lunged as it snapped.
Freaking iron.
There was no time for finesse. I called and my power answered. It hit him with everything in the room. Books, tables, DVDs, knitting work, chair, faux wood shelvin
g, even the dog poker poster flew around him like the wings of a devil. He swung about, trying to use the radiator that dangled from him as a shield, but then something hit his unprotected head again with a thunk, and he slumped, slow motion over the twisted metal. It wasn’t enough though. The mix of anger and fear sank low, picked up any remaining viciousness sitting deep inside me, and threw it back, bringing everything that had fallen airborne again into a terrible vortex that spun around him in a black cloud. His mouth was wide open when the cloud exploded over him in another smothering rain of debris. I didn’t drop my hands until the last book dropped onto the heap piled on top of his still body. A knitting needle was impaled in his chest. It shivered when he breathed.
I snatched up my backpack and ran.
Down the stairs. Around the landing. Through the door. Across the parking lot. I didn’t even bother with the flimsy lock on the garage’s side door, I just strong-armed through it. Then I was in the driver’s seat, fitting the key into the ignition of the Taurus.
I heard a loud “Bitch!” from the stairwell. I shoved the car into gear and hit the gas before the car door even closed.
The Taurus took wing, clipping the side of the garage in one long tearing crumple of metal as we hurtled away. I made the turn onto the street, heart banging away under my bruised ribs, and then we were free, running straight up the narrow street away from the lake, and away from the danger that was still spewing curses from the parking lot of Twice Read Books. We blew through the first red light.
Halfway up the second block, I looked in Bob’s rearview, fully expecting to see an angry wolf taped to a radiator charging after me. But the road was empty, save for a nimble pedestrian who’d leaped out of the way. He stood frozen on the pavement, his face a WTF pictogram. I lifted my foot from the accelerator, reached painfully out and snagged the handle of my car door. When it clicked shut, I hit the gas again, hard.
* * *
I’d convinced myself, during that white-knuckle drive to the hospital, that Scawens was full of crap, and that when I walked back into the emergency room, I’d find Lou sitting upright, her dark gray eyes alive and snapping.
What I found were three cop cars in the emergency bay. I drove past the hospital’s parking lot in search of an empty space on a side street, since I didn’t need spidey sense to know it would be faster to use the ER’s doors, but smarter to go through the hospital’s lobby and worm my way back to the treatment area. My rubber heels squeaked as I followed the signs for the radiology department. I walked past it, and found the unmarked corridor that led back to the ER treatment rooms. No cop gauntlet to pass this time. The hallway was almost empty, save for a couple of paramedics filling out paperwork.
All the cops were clustered outside Lou’s cubicle. Her bedsheets had been discarded on the floor. One end of the curtain had been torn off its track. A cop nodded, fingering his belt, as he listened to an agitated nurse. Two more cops were beside an orderly, who was rubbing his shoulder while looking suitably heroic.
Scawens’s goons had hurt her. I could smell the sweet scent of a woodland Fae blood over the ER’s usual perfume of pain, illness, and disinfectant. Were scent was there as well, though the smell felt off to me, like a sweet piece of fruit that had spent too long in the vegetable drawer.
I turned on my heel. No one stopped me with a “Hey you.” No one followed.
* * *
I don’t remember getting into the car or driving past all those dark homes where families slept. For all I know, Merry drove. When I came back to myself, the car was in the middle of Sears’s empty parking lot, and my foot was on the brake, while the engine rattled as it ticked over. My glasses were on the dash, beside the rubber gloves.
Adrenaline was gone, leaving behind shock and payback pain. I threw open the door and heaved. Technically, you can’t throw up a cookie twice, but my stomach gave it a try. Each time I convulsed, my foot jerked off the brake pedal, making the car bunny-hop forward. We were going places, the Taurus and I. One hop at a time.
Eventually I stopped heaving. With a shaky sigh, I leaned against the padded headrest and listened to the Taurus’s indignant ding. I tried, but it is virtually impossible to ignore a dinging door alarm, even if you know that it is going to hurt like a bitch to close the door. I wrapped my arm around my rib cage in a self-hug and then reached out, biting down on my lips as my ribs had a tantrum. I felt for the handle blindly, too afraid to catch a glimpse of my crispy fried hand. A few shits and fucks later, my fingers brushed pebbled plastic.
Shock was receding, but the throbbing misery in my hands was growing.
Geez Louise. Now I knew why Mum came down hard if we even flirted with using our talent for anything other than mild amusement. They could have spared us all the “stay low/don’t show” lectures and told us the unvarnished truth: you stick your head out of the foxhole, and someone is going to take a shot at you. Use your magic with a dark heart, and it will turn around and bite you on the ass with teeth as sharp as a hungry shark’s.
I hurt, really hurt. And the pain was worse, getting hotter and more horrible with each breath. The black dots dancing in front of my eyes joined together into one huge black hole and I start spinning toward a place I dread.
Of all the dreams, my own were the worst.
I dreamed of the old cupboard and the last time I saw Robbie Trowbridge.
* * *
It starts with the memory of us doing normal stuff. That’s usually how I slide into my personal nightmare, each time seduced by the sweet comfort of our family’s routine. We eat dinner, the four of us sitting at the round oak table. Then it’s homework, and some TV. Mum tucks me into bed, and tells me lights out. I can hear Lexi on the other side of the wall, playing with his G.I. Joes. He’s making chuh-chuh-chuh noises for gunfire.
I fall asleep, listening to him.
I wake with a start, feeling frightened. “Mum?” She doesn’t answer, so I get out of bed, and go down the dark hall to the kitchen. Mum’s standing in her nightgown by the table, an expression of dread on her face. Dad has his arm around her. “Are you sure?”
She rubs her arm and nods. “I can feel it on my skin.”
“I’ll stop them,” he says.
“Don’t go out there. Promise me you’ll stay here with us.” But as Mum pulls out her ward stuff from the top drawer—some herbs and that long lariat that she uses to make her magic set—he takes the shotgun off the rack, and starts down the path to the pond. She bites her lip and begins casting protection spells on the windows, chanting so fast the words all run into each other.
When she speaks, I jump; her hands don’t even pause. “Hedi, go wake your brother.”
I don’t. I should, but I don’t. Instead, I follow Dad outside.
He’s by the pond, with his weapon in his hands. I can feel a shiver running right up my spine and goose bumps rise on my skin. Daddy raises his gun and points it at the water.
The first thing I see is a mist, not a fog, but a mist that curls upward. It’s colorless at first, and then the mist tints to a purple that softens to violet. And I smell flowers. Sweet, like freesias. The air has cleared in the middle of the gate, so I can see the other side, shimmering through a thin veil. I hear a wolf yip from Merenwyn. Dad shifts his balance, and bends his head so he can squint down the site on his shotgun.
A gray wolf is running toward us, hardly breaking stride before he leaps through the barrier. From Merenwyn, I hear the shiver of bells, silver-sharp and sweet, and for a moment, just long enough for me to suck in a breath, he is frozen in the air separating this world and that, before he lands on our side. Dad lowers the gun, and swears. Paws splayed, the wolf skids right off the end of the portal’s edge, and lands in our pond with a splash.
A Were falling into our swimming hole. Everyone knows Weres can’t swim.
I cover my mouth, but don’t laugh, because right away, Dad wades in after him. He pulls the wolf out by his ruff, and starts cursing him. “Do you know what this w
ill do to Rose and the kids? Did you think? Did you ever stop and think?” The wolf wobbles over to a patch of weeds and collapses. Dad’s shoulders slump. When he speaks his voice is flat. “If they come after you for breaking the Treaty, I won’t stand in their way. I won’t lose my family over this.” He looks at the portal. It’s daylight on the other side. I can see the sun shining off the water there.
“You just had to do it,” Dad says, still watching the portal with narrow eyes. “Why’d you go there? Do you really think you’re a better Were now? You don’t even smell like pack anymore. It’s not moon time, and you’re in wolf form. You better hope that you can change back.” He scowls at the Were. “You’ve crossed the line. The Alpha has to know.”
Mum was wrong. The portal does accept Weres.
My foot slips on the shale. Dad turns. His face fills with blood, and he yells, “Get back up to the house. Now!” I don’t like it when Daddy’s so mad. It freezes me, like he’s a predator, and I’m something with a soft white belly. He says it again, louder. “Now!”
Behind him, the wolf surges to his feet, taking advantage of Dad’s divided attention. He charges, hitting Daddy square in the back. The gun goes off as they fall. Then, they’re rolling, and grappling, twisting on the ground, churning up weeds and last year’s leaves in a to-the-death struggle.
I can’t make a sound. I’m mute as a hare.
I hear a scream, high and thin, quickly followed by another. The wolf scrambles off Dad, his jaws smeared with blood. Dad’s fingers find the shotgun. I hear the gun go off, but I don’t see the wolf fall. Instead, he pivots, and runs up the path that leads to the Trowbridges’.
For a few moments all I can hear is Dad’s breath coming out fast.
“Daddy?”
Part of me cringes from him. He’s dropped the gun, and rolled onto his side. Blood’s streaming down his neck. He’s holding his stomach together with his hands. “Help me to the house.”
Mum’s face crumples when she sees him.“Oh, Ben, oh, Ben.” It takes both of us to drag him into the house. He leaves a wide trail of blood on the linoleum. She runs to the oak cabinet and flings open its door. “Get in. Hurry.”
