The Trouble with Fate

by Leigh Evans

My Were-bitch was with me on the raft. She was whining because she didn’t like the rough water. I could feel my jaw opening to echo her cry, but all that came out was a low broken mewl.

  “Okay, on the count of three. One.”

  Heat was on my breast. Almost too hot. Just in one spot. Right over my heart. Hot. I twisted my head, and felt the burning around my neck. I was going to drown going over the falls. I was too tired to swim.

  “Two.”

  So hot. Burning.

  “Three.”

  * * *

  “The thing’s dangerous,” said Trowbridge.

  Water was dripping off my chin. “Give Merry back right now, or I’ll hex you and you’ll never turn into a wolf again.”

  “Stronghold, I know when you’re lying.”

  He was holding Merry by her chain with one pink rubber-gloved hand. Cordelia’s arms were crossed, but the dripping pail she’d used to douse me was right beside her on the dining room table. “The thing is dangerous,” he repeated. “I shouldn’t have to use a pail of water to wake my lover.”

  “Merry is not an ‘it.’” I was wet, naked, and furious. And kind of shaky on my feet. “Your amulet may be an ‘it,’ but not Merry. She’s a soul, Trowbridge. She’s a thinking, feeling being. She needs to be around my neck. Without me, she’ll fade and die. I haven’t given her a real meal in twenty-four hours, and she’s done a lot of healing over the last day. She’s worn herself down trying to revive your amulet.” I yanked the blanket off the floor, and wrapped it around myself. “Take a hard look at that thing she’s clinging to. You starved it to death. That’s what happens if you don’t feed a Fae Asrai.”

  Merry had thrown caution aside. Resolutely hanging on to her corpse-friend, she kept throwing charges up the chain, while she tried to haul both of them up the chain to get near Trowbridge’s fingers.

  “You let this thing feed off you?” His eyebrows arched in disbelief. “Like a freaking parasite?”

  “Don’t call her that.” My eyes were starting to flare.

  “My amulet—”

  “Stolen Fae amulet.”

  “My former pendant,” he continued, “never did anything except hang around my neck.” He gave her chain a violent shake, and Merry fell back down to its end. She extended two thin strips of herself and latched onto her chain again and started, once more, painfully, to pull herself up, but the other amulet’s weight seemed to be draining her. “It’s like a freakin’ bug. It was over your heart. It was throwing colors and I swear it was throbbing. You were whimpering in your sleep.”

  “Merry doesn’t feed off me. She’s never fed off me. Fae Stars, she’s a vegetarian.” I stopped as his eyebrows rose at my lie. “Okay, she needs and prefers the taste of plants and trees, but she can borrow from me in a pinch. It’s only happened twice before. Both times, only because it was too difficult to get to a food source, and I offered. And she only did it because I insisted. I offered, Trowbridge. She’d never feed off me in my sleep.”

  “She did this time.” Blue-white lights were beginning to spin slowly around his pupils. “You wouldn’t wake up no matter what I said or did. It was like you were drugged. Your breathing slowed until your chest was barely moving. We had to douse you with a pail of water to wake you up. Look at you now, for God’s sake. You can’t even stand straight. You’ve got one hand on your blanket and the other holding on to the wall. All I’d have to do is blow, and you’d fall down.”

  Just to prove how wrong he was about my general wobbliness, I removed my hand from the drywall, and reached out for Merry. “Give her to me, Trowbridge. For heaven’s sake, you don’t need a pair of gloves.”

  “You didn’t see it when it was feeding on you,” he said. He shook her down again and put her into a white pillowcase. “You have a hammer?”

  “In the kitchen, bottom drawer,” said Cordelia. Her gold earrings brushed her shoulder as she tilted her head toward the doorway behind her.

  “Don’t do this, Trowbridge.” I followed, tripping on the blanket.

  Trowbridge was “au natural” except for the pink rubber glove on his right hand. Cordelia’s head swiveled to watch his ass as he stalked into the kitchen. I pushed past her. He was crouching by the drawer, rummaging beneath the Tupperware.

  “What are you doing? You know you can’t break Fae gold.” He shot me a thunderous glance. “I need you to calm down. She wasn’t going to truly hurt me, she—” I ducked as a plastic container went flying past my shoulder. “Trowbridge, stop.” I touched his shoulder, hoping to calm him, but contact seemed to make it suddenly worse. He shot to his feet, holding the hammer in a murderous grip. My words dried up, and without thinking, I took a step backward.

  He laid the writhing bundle on the black granite counter.

  “Four dollars a linear foot, I don’t think so,” said Cordelia, pulling out a chopping board.

  He was not going to pulverize my amulet in front of me. I ducked under Bridge’s arm, and covered Merry with both my hands. “She’s been my friend for a long time.” My voice was steel. “I’ll protect her against even you.”

  The hammer was poised high.

  “The only way you can kill her is to starve her,” I continued, speaking slowly. “And if you do that, you’ll not only kill her soul, but you’ll do something to mine.” In the shelter of his arm, I could feel the heat of him. Merry tried to curl a finger of gold around my thumb through the cotton pillowcase.

  He breathed hard over my head. “It was feeding off you.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the glove, the bubble-gum pink stretched to soft rose where it pulled over his knuckles. The pinkie and the ring finger of the glove stood out empty.

  “She is important to me. A friend when I had none.” I looked up at him. Jaw, stubble, tight mouth, and a cheek muscle that kept flexing. A quick dip of his chin, and a flash of blue as he returned my gaze. I could feel my own eyes burn, and knew that they had begun to glow. I kept my gaze even, neither demanding nor yielding.

  I waited, holding my breath until my chest felt tight.

  Some of the wildness went out of his eyes. He lowered the hammer slowly, but even so, with his Were strength it landed with crack. A tiny piece of silica chipped up and landed back down askew on the resulting divot.

  “You bloody girl, see what you’ve done,” said Cordelia, sounding a lot like Carl.

  I let out my breath slowly through my nose. I could feel his warm chest against my arm.

  “I’ll fix it, Cordelia,” he said.

  “Yes, you bloody well better,” Cordelia said. “You might want to rethink your girlfriend material. This one’s the plague.” She turned on her heel and left us alone. A few seconds later a door was pulled closed. Obviously it hadn’t made enough noise, because it was opened and pulled closed harder the second time.

  Alone and naked again.

  Trowbridge rubbed a finger into the gouge on the counter. He’d had a Coke; I could smell it, and us, mixed together, on both our skins. “Why can’t you give up on this stuff?” he said in a low voice. “Destroy the amulets. Let your aunt go. You’re as much Were as Fae.”

  “I need to see Lou one last time.”

  “Doing that will get you killed. For what? She’s going to die anyhow. You’ve got to harden up, Stronghold. Cut your ties.”

  “How do you live like that?”

  “You just do.” He took the granite chip I’d been using to finger-skate over the counter, and put it back into the divot. “You can’t stop people from dying. The only thing you can do is fight to stay alive.”

  “What if she’s innocent?”

  “Let the Weres decide for you.”

  “No,” I said sharply. “I’ll decide for myself.”

  He stepped back from me and went to lean against the kitchen doorway, to study me with a set expression.

  I put my hand up when he opened his mouth to speak. “Lou didn’t have to come for me. She didn’t have to feed me or keep me safe all these
years. For that, I owe her. It would be wrong to let her die alone and frightened. I don’t want to live with the guilt of that. I don’t think I can.”

  “Sure you can,” he said in a hard voice.

  Oh shit.

  I might as well have asked him point-blank how he could bear to live after his mate had died. He read my mind, and gave me a smile that wasn’t one, before slipping away.

  Merry started winding around my finger the moment he cleared our space. “Let go, Merry, so I can get you out of the bag.” I opened the pillowcase to peer inside. Her stone was dull; the residue of her fear had left a faint brown streak in the middle. “You need food.”

  The sun was rising. I rubbed a hand over my eyes as I came out of the kitchen, Merry and her pal curled in the palm of my hand.

  Trowbridge was leaning against the dining room table, gazing out the window.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to say—”

  “You need to feed that thing now?” He pushed himself away from the table with a slow flex of his hips. “You want a plant or a tree? Take your pick.” I followed the direction of his eyes. Cordelia had a green thumb. There was a bowfront window area, beyond the curved back of the upholstered dining room chair. In it was her garden: a lot of potted plants in all the same stone bisque-colored containers, two shrubs that flirted with the idea of being trees, and three potted orchids on a small table positioned out of direct light.

  “Won’t she mind?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Most of them were presents from me. I’ll buy her new ones tomorrow.”

  I laid Merry down on the top of the orchid’s roots, and then stood, in my blanket, with my arms wrapped around myself as the pink-shell sky tried to turn blue. “Don’t you ever get cold?” I asked him.

  “Were blood.” He raked both hands through his hair, his thumbs curling to tuck a heavy wedge behind each ear. “We’re always warm.”

  My mouth had gone dry. “And naked, mostly.”

  “That too.” He went into the kitchen. The tap ran, and he returned with two glasses filled with water. “But this time, I have an excuse. I have no clothing left.” He passed me a glass. “Cordelia is going to get us some this morning.”

  “She won’t be in a hurry to do that. I think she’s enjoying watching you walk around buck naked.” I chugged down the water. “How do you know her?”

  “There are a lot of Weres out there who couldn’t fit in. Things were hard for Cordelia. My dad found her a safe place while she healed. I always liked her. She was so different from everything in Creemore. I always admired the way she wouldn’t bend, you know? Though she was too smart to put on a dress when she was around the pack, she found subtler ways to flaunt her femininity. She didn’t just grow her hair; she styled it … she’d come to a meeting in a peach-colored shirt, and a sweater only a girl would choose.” His lips curved into a bittersweet smile. “I think she probably always understood how it was going to go down, and yet, she wouldn’t change for anybody. She knew who she was. In her head, she was always Cordelia. I kept in touch, and when I was in need, she answered. She helped me get back on my feet. We’re business partners now. And friends. She knows that I spark sometimes,” he said, pointing to his eyes.

  “Then why wouldn’t you let her see them flare last night?”

  “I don’t know. I only felt right with you being there.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “But I do trust her.”

  Music started again.

  “Who’s that singing?”

  He shrugged, crinkling his eyes against the sun. He must have done that a lot because the sun had left its mark. He had three lines running across his forehead, and a fanwork of them radiating from the corner of each eye. His skin was too naturally golden for him to appear off-color, but there were blue smudges beneath the sooty line of his lower lashes. He didn’t wake up with flyaway hairs and rooster bed head. He woke up looking pretty much as he went to bed, with Pre-Raphaelite curls and scrub of beard. But the daylight showed what the night had hidden: the glints in his dark hair weren’t from the sun.

  “After Candy died, I never thought I’d see another spring. That night, when my sister told me to run, I went, not because I was afraid of dying, but because I wasn’t going to let the pack take me out for something I didn’t do. If I couldn’t pick the time, I’d pick the place. I went to the mountains and waited for the mate bond to take me. But I never got sick … never got weak. I was as strong six months after her death as I’d been the day I married her.

  “Candy and I got married the first Saturday the week after high-school graduation. That’s what we Weres do, isn’t it? We marry our boys off young, hoping the mating bond will bind us to the pack.” He lifted the glass to his lips, took a long swallow. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It works for most people. And my parents were good about it. They saw that I liked Candy, and they encouraged the match, even though her line wasn’t known to be prolific breeders. Too much intermarriage. Fertility rates were really low. Marriages that led to more than one child, like my parents’ match, were rare. Sometimes I felt like I was hitched to a post in a stable, waiting for my turn to buck and fuck. Not a Were. Not a wolf. Just a small cog in everyone else’s plans.” The sun was creeping up over the top of a distant black-lined roof. It peeped at us, winking, sending fingers of light toward him.

  “So I married her. And she loved me. Right away. Sometimes I wondered why. How can you love someone so easily?”

  I pulled my blanket closer.

  “I liked her. A lot. At first, we just had a lot of fun. Most of it in the sack.” He grimaced and rubbed a hand over his belly. “But … well, you know how we do the civil ceremony for all the humans, and do the mating ritual later in front of friends and family? Well, we did it. I said the words. She did too … But something went wrong. It didn’t take. I didn’t feel any different and I don’t think she did either, because she looked at me like I’d … But everyone was smiling at us, offering me a beer, so we didn’t say anything.” He didn’t turn. He kept studying the sky ahead of him. “Candy didn’t want us to tell anyone. We kept going, day after day, like everything was perfect … She kept hoping … But it was me. I couldn’t stick, you know? I always felt like I needed to roam. That there was someplace out there calling to me. And I wanted to be a musician. I loved playing the guitar. Wrote a few songs. Thought myself a fine little rock star.” His voice turned hard. “So that was where I was the night my family was being butchered. I lied to my wife and family, and drove myself into the city. There was a band looking for a guitarist. In my head, I had it all worked out. I was going to blow them away with my music, and Candy and me would hit the road with the band. I put my cell on silent, and then I went into the bar.

  “Joke was on me. The band sucked.” He tipped his head to the side. “Maybe I did too. Too late to know. So instead of going back, I thought, ‘Hey, I’m here, I might as well have a good time.’ The band left, but I stayed, talking to the bartender, and drinking and flirting with a girl who thought I was hot. Getting away from the pack, being in the bar—it left me with a taste, you know? A taste of how it could be. I thought about it a lot as I drove home. Didn’t look at my cell until I was at the lights on Main and Water. There were six missed calls from Candy. I was already thinking up a lie as I drove up the drive.

  “I didn’t smell or see him. I didn’t hear him until it was too late. When I came to, the house was dark, and silent. My fingers were missing.” He stretched his right hand and held it up, holding back the sun. “That seemed like a big deal, for a second. How could I ever become a rock star?

  “And then I smelled the blood. Their blood.” He paused, looking blindly ahead. “I found Candy’s body in our bedroom closet. I pulled the cell phone out of her hand, and put her on our bed.

  “You’re supposed to die. Mates are supposed to die. That’s what I was thinking as I ran away. That maybe the mate bond had taken hold of us, and I had been too shit-stupid and stubb
orn to recognize it. That I wouldn’t have to live with the shame long, that I’d just die. But in the end, I didn’t do that either.” He turned to me, watching me from under hooded eyes. “Here I am. I didn’t die—I just got old before my time.”

  Blue sparks around the swirl of light in his eyes. “I’m not sure if I’m capable of bonding. But I do know this. I can’t stand to see harm come to you. I can’t bear to watch you hurt. And I want you. Even if our first time sucked, I want you. There’s something about the scent of you and the feel of your skin.”

  He frowned. Blue sparks faded. His eyes turned back to Trowbridge blue.

  “I’m not much of a bargain, Tink.” His gaze flicked away to linger on Cordelia’s plant collection. “I keep telling you that I’m tired of saving you, but I’m starting to think you believe the shoe’s on the other foot. I’m not looking to be saved. I am what I am. It is what it is.”

  The orchid had shriveled up, its flowers soft and spent. I picked up Merry and put her on the next one. The sun was warm on my shoulders, and I did something I never thought I’d do. I let go of the blanket, letting it pool by my feet. There I was. All ins and outs. Naked as my jaybird lover, standing in front of a full-length window in the light of day. Seeing how he’d bared his soul with his life story, I’d thought the grand gesture warranted another one, but now I felt exposed and I didn’t know what to do with my arms.

  I said, “Fae Tears are probably like the first time a Were changes. It’s a rite of passage. I wish Mum had told me how much it hurts. I would have been a better kid.” I reached for the small pouch dangling from Mum’s bride belt, loosened its ties and spilled out a few pink diamonds into my palm. With a finger, I sorted them. “These two are our birthstones. This was after a fight between Mum and Dad. This was when Lexi was lost, and your dad brought him back. This one,” I said, pushing one that was longer and thinner than the others. “This one was her last Tear.” I felt a chill, remembering why she cried it, and the expression of despair and futility in her eyes as it spilled. I turned away.

  Trowbridge came up behind me, putting his arms around my waist. I felt his chin brush my hair.