by Leigh Evans
So that’s the game Lou was playing. She was going to lure him into the portal and then lose him on the way to Merenwyn. A little smile creased my lips.
“You find that amusing?” Mannus snapped. “What exactly do you find amusing?”
There’s times when you have to use a little crumb of truth, to hide a much bigger chunk of fact. “Lou won’t do it,” I said evenly.
“Lou won’t do it,” he mimicked. “Louise wants to go home. She’ll take me.”
“Going through the portal will break the Treaty,” I said, thinking of the Weres he would have led into Merenwyn. “The punishment for that is death.”
“That would be important only if I wanted to negotiate. I told you, I don’t negotiate. It will be war. We have surprise on our side, and access to something they haven’t had to worry about in fifty years.” He walked over to me and touched the dog collar around my neck, and then leaned down to watch my face as he said, “We have iron.” Using his thumb, he rolled the hanging locket up so it burned the underside of my chin. His eyes creased into slits when I flinched.
“One pound of iron filings in the royal house’s well and they’re done,” he said. “That’s just the beginning. When I’m finished with them, there won’t be a single living Fae left in Merenwyn.”
* * *
A car pulled up outside. Biggs opened the front door to shepherd in a tall, nervous Were still in his late teens. From the way his gaze darted around the hallway, I figured he thought he’d finally made it to the big time. He didn’t quite genuflect in the presence of Mannus, but he did perform an uncool head bob as he wordlessly passed a Ziploc freezer bag to his Alpha. Then he further solidified his geek status by jumping out of his skin when Dawn touched his sleeve to lead him to the back of the house.
Biggs sat on the bottom stair. His clever eyes watched us through the railings.
“This can’t be it,” said Mannus, looking at the large lump in the bag.
Lou had come down the stairs a few minutes ago. Whatever they’d done upstairs had made her a little stronger, and a lot less wraithlike. And that, somehow, was far worse. She stood beside her mate; anticipation contorting her face into a mask of greed and excitement. Under the hall’s light, she seemed even thinner, as if all the fat and muscle had been burned off until all that was left was bone and sinew. Combine that with the crazy-lady intensity, and … I wanted to cover my mouth at the awfulness of it, but couldn’t, so settled for sucking my lips inward and biting down on them.
“It has to be,” Lou said sharply. “I can sense Fae gold.”
Mannus swung the bag out of her reach. “Not till we’re at the fairy pond.”
“It’s the Royal Amulet. Ebrel can feel it.”
“Put your hand down. I don’t want Ebrel calling to it.”
She looked impatient, but she tucked her calling hand into her armpit. “Let me see.” She paused and then added, “Please.” Mannus dug in the bag and brought them out. He hung them off his finger so that they pirouetted in front of us. Lou inhaled sharply and then turned slowly to me. “You let your pet attach itself to my amulet?”
“What?” Mannus said.
“Her mother’s amulet is wound around the Royal Amulet.”
He frowned at them. “I’ll rip it off.”
“You may damage the Royal Amulet.” Lou’s voice developed an edge. “Leave it for now. I know how to get it off.”
“Is her mother’s amulet of any use?”
“No. It was keyed to my sister’s blood, not mine.” She sniffed. “Without my sister, it’s no more than a child’s pet.”
“I don’t like it,” said Mannus. “Take it off.”
“I need to be at the Pool to remove it.”
“We’ll see about that.” Mannus held them in front of me. The amulets rotated in the space between us. First a view of Merry. Then a view of the Royal Amulet. First her, then him.
My throat felt raw. I opened my mouth to say something to Merry, to explain, to say “I’m sorry” and discovered that there was nothing I could say beyond “Forgive me.” And how useless was that? I closed my mouth and watched her rotate until her spins petered out, and then she just hung there, facing me. Mud was embedded into the filigree of her gold. A fat streak of it dulled the smooth belly of her stone.
“Did you do this?” Mannus said.
My gaze rested on Merry clinging to the Royal Amulet. “I did.”
“Undo it. Now.”
“Can’t.” I looked at him and tried to smile. “It’s a done deal.”
They didn’t kill me. Or pull out the knife and start on Bridge again. I got another bruise on my face, but that was from Mannus doing the eyeball-to-eyeball flare thing. He seemed big on grabbing chins and squeezing them as he stared into your eyes.
“You said you’d stop that,” Lou said, from over his shoulder. His head turned, and I was treated to his profile. “I know how to remove it. I can do it at the pond.”
“It better be all right.” He slid them back into the Ziploc bag, and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he stepped behind me. His knife blade pinched my cringing back as he sawed through my duct-tape bindings.
“Now,” he said, into my ear, in his soft, lethal voice. “You’re going to come with us to the fairy pond. And if there’s any problem with these amulets, I’m going to personally cut my nephew’s throat while you watch.” He paused to let me absorb that. “Then we’ll start on your fingers. You got that? Stuart,” he said. “Bring Robson.”
Chapter Twenty-two
There was still light outside the Trowbridge home, but it was dying light. Grayed down except for the western sky, where the sun was now turning an unlikely pink-red. Shutting the homestead’s door, Stuart said, “Alpha, what do you want done with the fag?”
Mannus gave an indifferent shrug. “It’s no longer useful.” His attention was on the sweater he was fussily draping over Lou’s shoulder.
Stuart said to Biggs, “Take care of it. Then come down to the pond to help watch the prisoners.”
Kill the prisoners, I thought.
Biggs disappeared into the house.
Trowbridge was crumpled on the paint-blistered porch, unable to stand after Dawn teased the silver chains from his wounds when it’d become evident that he was too weak to walk on his own and too much of a silver-festering problem to carry. She’d got them all, except the one across his belly. There the skin had tried to knit itself whole, burying the silver chain under a scarred seam, and had mostly succeeded, except for a place at the right edge, where his flesh had refused to bond. It had left a small weeping hole. Blood and pus oozed from it, dyeing his shorts’ once-white waistband.
He was so weak.
They kept us apart, which angered Dawn, as it had fallen to her to look after me. I wasn’t that difficult to guard. I’d stopped weeping. I stood, head slightly bowed, hands hanging limply by my side. Frightened to my core.
“It’s going to be a beautiful night.” Mannus pulled Lou’s arm through his. He gave her a quick charming smile. “Perfect for travel.” They started across the lawn.
Scawens cupped a hand to call. “Kid!” When the teenager appeared in the doorway, Stuart cocked a thumb at Trowbridge and said, “I’ll need help bringing this prick down to the pond.”
Dawn pushed me forward.
Trowbridge’s dad would have never recognized his property. When I had been a child, the home’s landscaping had been fastidious, and in my personal opinion, fussy. Sometime since, the pack had stopped using the mower and now the once carefully tended lawn was hinterland, filled with the disorder of prickle weeds and the pod-stippled stalks of last year’s milkweed. Scawens and the kid hoisted up my mate, and I followed them as they led the way across Trowbridge’s lawn, all of us funneling into a single file, picking our way through the nettles toward the line of trees that marked the beginning of the untouched forest that ringed the Trowbridge home. I knew, even without looking up, where we were headed. But I did glance up, and
felt another dribble of dread. In the waning daylight, the path to the pond seemed like a dark tunnel, the trees black and forbidding over it.
Bad things waited at its end.
“Let’s go,” said Dawn to me.
I fell down, elbows first, healing hands tucked protectively into my chest. Dawn grabbed my shirt and tugged me back onto my feet. I took a few more weaving steps across the weed-choked lawn then sank to my knees. Her boot hit my ass. I curled up into a defensive comma. She hit me again. It struck me on the third kick that I was doing a pretty good job of looking ill. It wasn’t that difficult—every time the iron touched the hollow of my throat I had to swallow down bitter bile. And truth be told, it didn’t hurt much. Somewhere my body had cut the ties to the neural pathways, overwhelmed by the horror and cold conviction that if I walked into the throat of the forest with the iron bell tinkling at my throat, I’d never walk out again.
“You stupid bitch,” said Dawn. “Stop doing that.” She grabbed me by the hair and pulled upward. I felt my eyes slit as my skin stretched.
“Take her collar off,” Stuart said to her. “She’s slowing us down.”
Dawn sneered. “She’s just pretending.”
I brought a hand up to my mouth and gave Stuart a guileless look.
“Take it off,” he said. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
Her fingers fumbled at my neck and finally I was free. I hid my relief with another feigned fist-covered burp. She grunted, irritated, and gave my shoulder a shove.
A gnarled root snaked across the path of beaten earth. I hesitated and was rewarded by another hard shove. Fear ahead, and fear behind. I inwardly shrugged, and took my first step into familiar woods. Ten years of absence collapsed under a deluge of memories. Once, I’d wandered here at will. I’d learned which branch of the track led to the field where the pack gathered for their moon runs. Memorized which turns would take me to the crop of sunsweet berries. I’d spent hours on this footpath, trailing after Lexi, half listening to his boy-proud boasts.
I’d claimed these paths as my own, but had I ever really seen them? Had the forest always been this beautiful? Had the air always smelled this good?
Dawn leaned in and said, “Welcome home, mutt.”
Ahead of me, Scawens and the kid sweated as they half carried, half dragged Trowbridge between them. It hurt my eyes to see him suffer while I walked free.
I concentrated on the path. It was narrower, and not as often used as when I was young, when the earth had been worn smooth and the leaf mulch broken into tiny fragments that felt soft under the feet. As I listened to the hollow echo of our footsteps, I imagined moles and mice, scurrying down dark passages beneath our feet.
Run, little animals. The wolves have come.
Too soon, the forest starting thinning. The setting sun sent streaks of light between the well-spaced trees, brilliant gold. My mouth got drier. I could smell the pond.
I don’t want to die.
My feet slowed as we passed the last cluster of trees. “Hurry up,” said Dawn, pushing me into the small clearing at the top of the Trowbridge ridge. Everyone paused, as Mannus walked to the edge and brooded at the pond below.
He turned and gave Lou a bittersweet smile.
She didn’t return it.
I forced my gaze past her to search for familiar things. Trowbridge’s favorite tree was still there, but the worn spot beneath it where he once strummed guitar was gone. Missing too were the twin pines that had hugged the edge of the cliff. Mannus turned from the pond, and our entourage followed. But as we made our way to the rock-studded trail that twisted down the hill, I glanced quickly down over my right shoulder to the pond, and found it too altered. What did I expect? Nature never stops to mourns us. It carries on, conscious only of its own cycle of growth and death. The thought slipped in, unwanted. Where would they bury me?
A finger of cold ran down my spine.
Three Weres waited by the pond. Young. Muscled. Shifting on their feet with badly disguised anticipation. I revised the bad guy count to six Weres and one old Fae.
Oh Goddess, we didn’t stand a chance.
“The last part’s too steep for you, Louise,” said Mannus, sweeping her off her feet. Lou turned her head and looked at me, expressionless, as he carried her down the cliffside path.
* * *
At first I thought it was blood.
The pond water was red. Not all of it. Just the part near where I stood.
I studied the oily rust-colored film polluting the water. The pond smelled wrong. Metallic, and somehow cold. At the marshy edge, the bulrushes’ submerged stems were stained brick red.
I drew in a sharp breath as I realized what it was.
Iron. Bleeding from the ferrous-rich rocks that the new Alpha had used to make a retaining wall for his hill. It had held back erosion, but poisoned the water.
I could feel the cold pull of it.
The sounds of animal life—birds tweeting, frogs croaking, ducks quacking, all the stuff that belonged in the pond trailed off into silence as Mannus walked over to its edge. He stood facing it, his lips pulled down.
Lexi would have been pissed off too. The northern end of his watering hole had been taken over by his personal bêtes noires, lily pads. In his absence, they’d spread out, leaf over leaf, crowding each other so that their fat saucer leaves tilted sideways. The only thing that had checked their proliferation was a half-submerged log—the last visual remnant of the tree that had once grown at its edge. All that remained of the once-tall pine was its toppled trunk, bark stripped and sun bleached. It floated at the pond’s midpoint, still anchored to the land by the weight of its twisted roots.
I wanted my brother beside me so bad, my knees felt weak.
Don’t look. You won’t find him there.
I couldn’t stop myself. I turned my head toward the opposite ridge, half expecting to see some part of our old home still standing. There was nothing for my eyes to linger on. The gray-shingled roof was gone. Whatever walls had been left after the fire, had fallen. The hill path had been overtaken by an infestation of cockleburs.
My brother didn’t stand under the tree, beckoning to me. Scabby kneed, and twelve.
It was all gone.
Even the clearing that we’d affectionately called the beach had been swallowed up by nature, shrunk until it was little more than a foot-wide strip of pebble-embedded mud.
But near it, I finally found one surviving relic of our past.
Lexi’s pirate rock sat where the last ice age had left it. Five feet high and almost as wide, it had withstood everything nature had thrown at it. When we were finally allowed to roam free, we’d done so, both with our minds and our bodies. And then, we’d discovered the rock. Something larger than my brother. Harder than his sharp nails. With his usual blithe insouciance, Lexi began his summer siege, determined to wrestle dominance from a hunk of granite. At first it was enough to just climb to the top. We’d jammed our sneakers’ toes into the crevasses and pulled ourselves up, fingers scrambling for handholds, and for the space of a week had thought ourselves both very fine, sitting high above the dragonflies. But that had paled. And then it had become a prop for Lexi’s stories. For the rest of the summer we’d been pirates. Explorers sometimes too, as we pretended we stood on the deck of a tall-mast ship. Our marine battles had been long and bloody. Together we’d withstood sail-tearing storms and grapeshot. We took turns dying; being the victor and the victim—mock battles with broken hockey sticks and horrific injuries that were painless and invisible.
There was a twin of the boulder beneath the pond. We’d found its rounded edge with our toes. Lexi had grinned. The pond had no secrets left for him to uncover. The siege was over.
By the next summer, the boulder sat alone. No children to crow from it. Abandoned not by youth’s natural transition from fascination to boredom, but by the fact our childhood had been broken, cut in two in one terrible, bloody night. Yet, the rock still stood, silent witness to
what once had been.
The keening sense of loss rubbed against me, painful and invisible.
Trowbridge grunted as they let go of his arms. Dawn checked my instinctive start as he fell to his knees. For a moment my mate just rested, slumped on his heels. Then he lifted his head. His nostrils flared. His battered face turned in my direction. Higher went his nose. He pinpointed Scawens. Another head tilt and he’d fixed Mannus’s location.
“Where do I have to stand?” Mannus asked, reaching into his pocket for Merry’s Baggie. “Here, wasn’t it?” He checked himself against the landmark of different trees, shuffling until he was about mid-center on the beach, a foot back from the water’s edge.
“I must wear the amulet to summon the portal.” Lou cast him a sideways glance from under her lashes. “The amulet and the caller must be one.”
“Don’t try anything rash, mate,” he warned. “Open your hands.” He tilted the bag and spilled the golden mass into her waiting palm.
Her mouth became a thin slash as she inspected the contents of her hand. “Think you’re clever, do you? Twisted yourself around the Royal Amulet, did you? Ugly thing … useless, cursed thing,” she said, poking Merry. Lou’s lip lifted in the way it did before she did something cruel. “Bring me some pond water.”
“Don’t, Lou,” I whispered.
The kid brought her some red-fouled liquid cupped in his hand. She dampened the sleeve of her sweater with it, and then held it, poised over Merry. A long tear-shaped drop hung and then fell, splat, dead center on Merry’s belly. She cringed, spat a defiant spark of purple and wove her vines tighter around the Royal Amulet. Lou smiled. With casual cruelty, my aunt swiped the sodden wool over Merry’s belly, laying another thin layer of corrosive water over my amulet friend.
A tiny rivulet of the ferrous-strong water trickled into Lou’s palm. “Yes,” she said, with a horrible teeth-baring smile. “It burns, doesn’t it?”
