by Leigh Evans
Mate? “Lou would never mate with a Were.” But what if she had? She wouldn’t. She’s hated and feared Weres for as long as I’ve been with her. She’s loathed the fact that Were blood pulsed in my veins. But the little niggle of doubt grew. I thought back to her dreams, and the young predator who’d stared at the Pool of Life as if he’d soon own it.
“You’re so sure of yourself, aren’t you? Youth,” he mused. “You think you know everything when you’re young, but you don’t. You think you have all the time in the world, but you don’t. Things happen. Choices are made.”
“Like marrying a Fae?”
“Oh, I didn’t marry a Fae. That’s for romantics, like your father. You don’t need to be married to choose your mate. The mating rites can be done within three minutes, maybe two if you’re in a hurry. You don’t even need witnesses. I don’t think more than four people knew that I was mated to Louise.”
I wondered if my mum and dad were two of those people.
“It was a dumb idea, but I was a kid, and I thought I could turn it to my advantage. But it wasn’t as easy as I anticipated. We fought a lot. We’ve been mated for twenty years, but if I stopped to add up all the days we’ve lived together, I doubt they’d total more than a week.” He brooded at the family picture on the mantel. It was too dark for me to make out the details, but it appeared to be a wedding photo. The girl in the center wore a long white dress. “One week in twenty years. When it’s your turn to choose your mate, Stuart, weigh the pros and cons, and then weigh them again, because your fate will be tied to hers for the rest of your life. Even something that looks good on the outside can come back and bite you on the ass. I thought Louise’s life force would keep me strong for another hundred years. I never imagined she’d go through an early fade.”
Mannus ran a thumb over the sagging skin at his jaw. “I was fading as fast as she, and I didn’t even know it. It didn’t matter how much sleep I got, I never felt rested. My joints ached. Food didn’t taste good anymore.” He glanced at Scawens. “For a while I wondered if I was being poisoned.” The Alpha studied his second for another beat. “Then one evening, in the midst of explaining to me why we needed to consolidate the pack’s debt, Roy Talbot keeled over. He was gone in two minutes. By the time the cops came searching for Monica Talbot’s next of kin, we’d already dug two graves. It’s our way. One goes, the other follows.”
Mannus watched me over the rim of his mug as he took a sip of his peppermint tea. “That’s what I was thinking as I watched the cops go back to their cruiser. And then—bam! Just like the proverbial bolt of lightning, it hit me. Louise was dying.” He made a face. “Which was a bit of a pickle, because as far as I knew, my mate was still in Merenwyn. Had been, ever since the night they closed the gates.”
Mannus put down his cup and blotted his lips with the side of his hand. “I thought, ‘This is it, this is where you lose everything. The pack, the future, it’s all going to go and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ All the sacrifices I made, all the plans—it amounted to nothing. No matter how much land I bought, the humans were squeezing us out of our own territory. I’d emptied our bank accounts trying to match the offers developers were throwing at the locals. Bills were mounting. Everything was turning to shit just because my mate was in Merenwyn being forced into an early fade and I had no way of getting to her.”
“That makes no sense, even if I believed you,” I said. “You can’t connect my aunt’s illness to your financial issues.”
“You have your father’s belligerence, do you know that?” Mannus smiled at me, but there was a bleak edge to the set of his lips. He made a vague motion with his hand. “My mind was clouded, and I made some bad decisions because of all of the—”
“Confusion,” I supplied, unimpressed. “We lived in the same apartment since I was fourteen. You guys can track a deer over kilometers, but you can’t track down one dying Fae living in the suburbs?”
“As I told you, I didn’t know Louise was on this side of the portals.”
I pointed out what seemed obvious. “Mates don’t lose track of each other.”
“You have an idealized concept about mates,” he said shortly. “Louise and I argued, and we separated. She was in Merenwyn when they closed the gates.”
Now that was interesting. How’d he known she was in Merenwyn? She could have been anywhere, couldn’t she have?
Some of my disbelief must have shown. He raised his brows. “I didn’t know that she’d found a way over,” he said. “The last time I saw my mate she was in Merenwyn. I have heard nothing from her for the last ten years until a few days ago. I had no idea she was in this realm, or that she’d spent ten years hating me…”
It was starting to sound more like my aunt. It explained the bitterness, the fear of Weres. But why? I asked him, and to my surprise, he answered.
“Because I left her in Merenwyn, when I had to.” He saw my reaction, and his lips firmed. “We were discovered in the Fae realm and it came down to my wolf’s choice … if I’d been fully human, I wouldn’t have abandoned her.” His face lost expression, as his eyes unfocused, remembering. And that scared me even more, because there was truth, not deception, in the way all those smile-induced lines, now empty of manufactured mirth, scored his face with deep slashes. “We were at the Pool of Life. I’d become wolf, and you just don’t think the same when you’re in your moon-called nature, as when you’re fully human. Particularly over there. I felt more wild there, less mortal … The guards shouldn’t have found us. We’d taken so much care to be stealthy. We’d made it to the Pool, and were sure no one had seen us. Lou stood guard as I walked up to my neck in their sacred water.”
He grimaced. “It took some courage to dip my head under the water, but I did it. And that’s pretty much all I remember. I came out of the Pool as a wolf, and saw the Royal Guards riding hard through the forest. So many of them. Armed with bows and arrows.” The corners of his lips drooped, and his eyes grew sad under his heavy brows. “If they captured me, it meant a life of enslavement. For her, not much more than a public censure, and maybe a week or two in the tower. They don’t hurt their own kind … so my wolf chose. We ran for the gates and left Lou to the guards.” His restless eyes kept returning to the photo on the mantel. “I’ll always regret that. But my other nature saw the hunters with their weapons, and instinct is so hard to deny. If it had been just me, in mortal form…” He shrugged after a moment of reflection, and gave us a self-deprecating smile. “We’ve gotten off track somehow. You asked about the pack’s financial issues.”
His sigh was lengthy and somewhat overdone. “In some ways, I hold myself to blame for all the debt incurred. I should have just calmed down and waited for the powers that be to bring forth a solution. I’ve always known my destiny was to rule this pack. But things had gotten so bad … and I didn’t know that Louise was here, right under my nose all this time. If I’d known that…” He spread his hands. “I’ll never doubt my fate again. The universe has returned my mate, and soon I’ll have the Royal Amulet. She’ll call the portal, and a new chapter will begin for my pack.”
“We have friends,” I said, flexing my feet against the tape’s hold. “People will be searching for us.”
He uncrossed his legs. “Your aunt never mentioned your bounty of friends. Should I be frightened? Summon the pack to protect us from a horde of your friends?” A fragrant curl of steam rose from his cup of tea. “Here comes my mate.”
Lou entered the room wearing a shapeless gray T-shirt, and a pair of yoga pants; an incongruous clothing selection for my haughty aunt. The overlarge T-shirt hung from her shoulder, exposing her collarbone, sharp and thin as the wing of a primed crossbow. She shuffled in, and picked a spot on the carpet between me and Mannus.
Yes, I should have spat at her. I should have denounced her too. Instead, my eyes watered at the sight of her. “Oh Lou.”
She didn’t rush to me, arms outstretched, seeking assurance. Nor did she gasp at the sight of
me silver-wrapped, and bound to a chair. Lou didn’t do much except stand there, her face devoid of expression—no tears, no sorrow or fear. The canvas of her lined face was flat, except for the spark in her eyes. Though her flare was little more than a fleck, I could see it clearly in the gloom—a tiny flash of amethyst fire deep inside her brown eyes. Her first flare in months.
The Were part of me noted something else. She’d presented her back to our enemy.
“You are mates,” I said. Feeling sick, I turned over cards that had always been facedown, and tallied up their values. “That’s how you got a Were through a Fae portal. It sensed your Fae blood in him and let him through.”
Chapter Twenty
I don’t know what happened after that. Did I lunge for Lou? Did I lunge for Mannus? I was on the floor again, panting like I’d hit mile twenty on a marathon. The chair and I lay sideways. Stuart didn’t need prodding. He dragged me and my chair back to upright position and stood, too close for my nose, behind me. “We should have nailed her chair to the floor,” Stuart said.
“Or maybe just her feet,” said Dawn.
Mannus said, “What did she mean by the gates recognized your blood in mine?”
Lou rubbed her ring with her thumb before she turned to him. “The child has always been obsessed with blood.” Hands clasped, thumb pressed hard on the emerald, she radiated innocence as she lifted one shoulder and said, “The gates do not recognize one type of blood from another.”
I felt like pointing a finger and shouting “Liar!” but I didn’t. She was playing a deep game, but I couldn’t work out what it was and how I figured into it. But one thing was clear: Mannus didn’t know that touching her ring allowed Lou to fabricate on the spot. She stood easy as her mate cocked his head to listen to her heart. After a beat or two, he said, “You speak the truth.” And just like that, her hastily crafted fib went sailing over the finish line, with a jaunty, “gotcha fool” flag fluttering from its mast.
Mannus said gruffly, “You can have your five minutes with her. After that, she’s mine.” He went to the desk and opened a drawer. I swear to the stars that I could literally see the cold air pour out. What the hell did he have in there? Mannus reached inside and brought out what appeared to be a short piece of leather. Not that scary. He tossed it, and it landed with a thunk on the dusty desktop. I felt another shudder of cold. Is it a whip? My skin did an obligatory crawl at the thought. They’re just trying to soften you up with your own fear. If so, full marks for them. Go ahead and label me intimidated. I’d have sold my soul to know exactly what artifact from hell he’d summoned from the bottom of the desk’s drawer. I was frightened but not in terror. But you see—I still didn’t fully believe that Lou wouldn’t step up, at the last minute. That everything wasn’t just a whisper away from destruction.
“Where is my Royal Amulet?” Lou asked in a querulous tone. When I wouldn’t lift my gaze past the logo on her shirt, her dry fingers touched my chin. The tape tightened at my throat as she lifted my face till I got the full impact of her little flare. “Tell me.”
“Tell me.” I felt the long familiar suck of depression just taking in the greed in her eyes. “It’s been the pattern of our life together, hasn’t it? Do this. Do that. Don’t cry. Don’t ask questions. If you’re frightened, count until you’re not. Stop sulking. Come find me. Does that sound familiar? It should, because I came running. But you were never in danger, were you? Scawens never got staked with a silver spike and you never were held captive in a room lined with silver. It was just another fabrication. You’ve been feeding me a buffet of lies as long as we’ve been together.”
“I warned you to stay out of my head.”
“Then why haven’t you stayed out of mine?”
“I am dying here. I need the Royal Amulet to open the portal and return home. I can’t die here among…” Lou paused, and reconsidered her word choices. Then she cut to the chase. “Tell Mannus where it is.”
“You know, that’s the part that really kills me.” Bitterness made my jaw ache. “You can’t open a portal. You tried. Remember? Over and over again. We spent weeks traveling from place to place, trying to summon one. Can’t you get it through your head? The gates to Merenwyn are closed!”
“Not to one who summons it with the Royal Amulet. And Mannus has made a pledge to me—”
“Do you actually believe—”
“If you tell him what he wants to know,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “He will release you. You may carry on with your life.”
“And what about Trowbridge?”
Her eyes turned scornful. “He is one of them.”
“No.” I stared her down. “He’s mine.”
Trowbridge shifted. The padlocks swung and sent a thread of his scent to my nose. “Don’t, Hedi,” he said. “You don’t know what he’s capable of.”
“This is going nowhere fast,” said Mannus.
A familiar expression flitted across my aunt’s face as she examined me. “You smell like them now,” Lou said with deep disdain. Her eyes sparked purple, a quick hint of amethyst before fading to flat brown.
How quickly love turns to hatred. Think of a way out of this. Think.
Someone knocked on the door. Scawens inhaled through his nose and said, “Biggs.”
“It better be good.” Mannus folded his arms. “Tell him to enter.”
I recognized Biggs as the dark-haired Were from the Laundromat who’d been reluctant to join the fight. He had clever eyes, and a flat mouth, but his most noticeable feature was his height. By human standards he was diminutive, by Weres’ he was Lilliputian. Help us, I silently pleaded. Biggs’s face didn’t soften, but his lips got thinner.
“What is it?” asked Mannus.
“The witches won’t accept the check,” said Biggs.
“Tell them there won’t be any trouble with this check.”
“I told them that, but they’re insisting the outstanding balance be cleared before they set the final ward on the eastern end of the property.” Biggs’s eyes roved from Mannus to Dawn, Scawens to me, and then back to Mannus. What he didn’t look at—didn’t even glance at—was Trowbridge. “The coven wants to speak to you and only you.”
“Without that last ward, I’ll be up to my ass in Weres as soon as the fairy portal’s scent floats over the pond.” Mannus scratched the bristles on his chin. “It always comes down to money. My kingdom for a stack of bills.” Suddenly his fingers froze mid-scratch. His head slowly pivoted to me. Turquoise lights spun slowly around his pupils, like blue comets with tiny green tails. “Dawn,” he said in the same sort of voice I’d use if I found twenty bucks in my winter jacket. “Bring me the thing you took off the mutt’s waist.”
Bile rose in my throat as Dawn pulled Mum’s bride belt off the shelf. Mannus took it from her and untied the pouch’s soft leather fastenings. He peered inside. “So,” he said, pouring the Fae Tears into his hand. He held them under the lamp’s light. Six stones winked from the wrinkled plain of his palm. Mannus settled on one—the smallest and brightest—and put it aside. He let the others roll down the funnel of his fingers back into the soft leather pouch.
“How priceless is priceless?” He turned the Tear I’d shed for Trowbridge between his blunt fingers.
“The witches will recognize its value,” said Lou, in a flat voice. “They’ll pretend it’s almost worthless, but they will want it enough to agree to anything you request.”
His face turned sour. “I hate wasting resources.” He stood. “My patience is almost gone, little mutt. I’ll settle this and then I’ll settle you.”
There would be no “settling” of me. A cold thought, but a clear one, cutting through all those half-formed expectations based on a relationship that has expired. Once he came back, I had no future to moon over. Lou wasn’t going to help me. Hell, there was hardly any present left. My heart turned as hard as the stone inside his fist as the Alpha walked to the door with my Tear in his hand. Just the thought of a witch reac
hing for it. Fouling it with her touch.
Fury.
“Don’t you remember the old Alpha?” I shouted in defiance. “Trowbridge’s father flared electric blue. Bright blue. Just like Trowbridge does.” I was bulletproof in my rage. “Mannus doesn’t flare like a Were, he flares like a mated Fae. He’s nothing more than the second son of an Alpha who had to trick a Fae into believing he loved her, just so he could go to Merenwyn to steal some power and a blue-green flare.”
“Shut up,” said Mannus.
“Trowbridge’s got jack in his eyes,” said Stuart to Biggs. “He doesn’t flare.”
“That’s because you’re poisoning him with silver,” I said. “Real Alphas have a pure blue light, not a green-blue one. Can’t you see you’ve got the real Alpha chained up? Ask Trowbridge who killed the old Alpha.”
Mannus grabbed the leather thing from the desk and started over the bloodstained floor in my direction. I spat out the rest rapid-fire. “It was Mannus. I saw his wolf come through the portal—” Mannus pressed the thing in his hand against my skin. It was colder than the Atlantic in January. Cold enough to feel like a flame.
Oh my Goddess.
I looked down at my chest. Held flat against my flesh was a leather dog collar, and from it hung a long bell of iron.
I screamed.
“You bastards, you bastards,” I heard Bridge hoarsely shout.
The lights went out, and I was walking the dark halls of my mind again, calling for my Trowbridge, but finding nothing except dark curtains waving in a cold killing wind.
* * *
Weak. I’m so weak.
Fingers pinched my chin. My head was wobbling on my shoulders now, no longer held immobile against the high back of the kitchen chair by a choker of duct tape. That had been torn off, and tossed to the ground, replaced by a length of leather that Mannus had fastened around my neck. The dog collar’s iron pendant rubbed against the hollow at the base of my throat—right in the place Trowbridge had kissed with soft lips near dawn. My shoulders jerked against the cold burn of its contamination.
