by Leigh Evans
“You can see them?”
“Of course I can.” She grimaced. “Get rid of them before he sees them.”
“He can’t see them; he’s blind.” I bent my head to inspect my hands. Broken nails. Fingertips stained sooty black in some spots, weeping red in others. Ugly with heat blisters. From each, a line of magic streamed down to my two well-fed serpents. Their heads turned back to me as if seeking a command. “These are part of me.”
“Hedi!” Trowbridge called. His voice sounded rough.
“You heartless fairy bitch, either you go to him right now, or I’ll bloody well carry you there.” Cordelia’s nails were ringed with red. She curled them into her palm, but she couldn’t hide the stain left on her by this night’s evil. Her first knuckle was grazed and puffy.
Some things could never be washed clean. Like blood traces and kin.
A heartless fairy bitch … The wind from Merenwyn streamed through the portal’s gate, indifferent to my mortal cares. Come to us, it urged with sweet seduction. Leave your mortal troubles here, it promised. There is sun in Merenwyn, it promised, and deep pools too, waiting to soothe your hurt.
Water to soothe your hurts. The kernel fell. Germinated and grew.
“He’s dying,” I heard myself say tonelessly.
“What?” she snapped.
“Bridge will die because Weres have no cure for silver in the gut.” My voice was flat, rendered clean of hurt and want. “That’s what Biggs said. No cure.”
“Well, aren’t you a bleeding heart,” she said.
“And so … Bridge will die.”
A pause. Her scent got sharper. Then, a rough growl. “Yes.”
I lifted my gaze to study Merenwyn again. “But the Pool of Life would save him.”
Another pause, during which her grief ebbed to let something warmer in. But just as suddenly, the warmth melted away and the scent of her grief returned, sharp as aged cheese. She said harshly, “It would break the Treaty. He’d never agree. He’d die first.”
“We don’t ask. We wait till he’s hardly conscious.” I kept my gaze on the portal. Merenwyn’s daylight streaked a path of gold across the pond. “He needs to have my blood in his veins to pass through the gate. If he doesn’t have it, the gate will reject him.”
“What do you mean, ‘reject’?”
“I think she would have lost them in the ‘world in-between.’ I know this—my aunt never had any intention of bringing Weres to Merenwyn. The only part of the pack she had to worry about was Mannus. He was her mate, and she’d brought him through once before.” In my mind’s eye I saw her rubbing a thoughtful thumb across her emerald ring.
“How?”
“She gave him her blood.”
“The mating bond,” she said, a faint thread of awe in her voice.
I watched one of my serpents roll in the shallow water. “When Trowbridge goes through the gate, he’ll have mine in his veins.”
“You can’t make that choice for him.”
“Watch me.” I stood. “Cut,” I said. There was a splash and then another, as I turned and walked to the mate of my heart.
* * *
Trowbridge was no longer beautiful. What wasn’t streaked with blood and mud was tinged putty gray from the poison in his veins. No longer untouchable either. Scars had failed to crust over the residue of silver left in his wounds. He still bled, which Weres never do for very long, as witnessed by the thin line of red streaming from the gash across his abdomen. Trowbridge was slumped against my pirate rock, but as I walked to him, he put his good hand down for balance and rolled on his hip. His bicep bulged, but he couldn’t lift himself to his feet. “Take it easy, Bridge,” Biggs soothed. “She’s coming.”
He’d been beaten, broken, and yet not.
Mine.
“Is that you?” Trowbridge said as I knelt beside him. Merry slid into my shirt as his left hand searched for my shoulder. Long fingers slid up my neck, and wove under the loose strands of my hair. He pulled me close until our foreheads touched.
“It’s me.”
“I thought I’d lost you. I couldn’t feel you anymore.” His lips were a bruised purple-blue. I lowered my gaze, past his blood-speckled chin, down his muddy chest, all the way to his lap where his mutilated hand lay, palm turned upward. My eyes followed the blood-caked lifeline running deep across his palm.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His metallic breath warmed my nose.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
Trowbridge’s forehead grated against mine as he shook his head in denial. “Don’t know why I didn’t do it. I should have just done it and died with you.”
“Done what?”
“Should have been there to protect you,” he muttered.
“You did protect me.” He had, in every way he could. “You were wonderful.”
“Wish I’d been a different guy.”
“I don’t.” I could smell death leaking from his lips. Hear it in the rail of his lungs; in the slowing thump of his heart. Through my numbness, a tiny spot of bleeding hurt bloomed. My voice dropped to a whisper. “Don’t leave me here to die alone.”
“Never again, sweetheart.” His voice was tender. “Love you.”
Tears welled.
His eyelids drooped to half-mast. “So tired, baby.”
“You can’t sleep yet. There’s something you have to do.”
“Just a little nap, Candy.” His lashes fluttered close. “Just a little nap.”
* * *
I stopped breathing, while the thinking part of me got caught in a loop, like a scratched CD that plays four chords before it skips, burps out some static, and then replays the same damn chords. Except, there weren’t four chords. Just two syllables, Can-dy. Karma had waited until I believed myself too frozen to feel injury; too numb to flinch from pain.
Clever bitch, Karma.
Biggs was pretending he’d missed the exchange. Cordelia wasn’t bothering to dissemble. I could feel her eyes on me, sorting and sifting, weighing and measuring.
I bent my head and hid my face behind a curtain of hair.
Then I started to turn the hand crank on my old friend, rationalization. It was a name. That’s all. A name. He got confused. Trowbridge loved me, didn’t he? He’d said so.
No, he hadn’t. He’d said it to her.
And with that, a flood of hurt broke through the sagging levees of my self-deception.
Oh Goddess. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep reshaping sharp things into round things—refashioning hard truths into soft, palatable half-lies.
Trowbridge still loved her. Me, perhaps not.
Bitterness welled.
This was what all the last ten years had led me to? All that jumping from one wobbling rock to another, just to get back here? All those wasted years spent smiling to humans, hiding the tips of my ears, and steadfastly turning my nose from the sweet scent of fellow Weres? It had all boiled down to this moment here—on my knees by the fairy pond in Creemore. Losing again. But this time to a freakin’ ghost named Candy.
There was something almost sniggerworthy about it, if I’d been a bitch named Karma. I felt a weak trembling of my lips and damned myself for it.
So how about it now, Hedi? Do you still want to give him your blood?
The alternative was to watch him die.
Could I do that? Add this loss to the others, and live with the sharp-clawed remorse tucked within my chest, nibbling away at me from the inside, without … without what? I wanted to say “without dying, too” but the word that sprang to my mind was “hemorrhaging.”
It kept coming back to the blood, didn’t it?
I considered my wrist. It was unmarred. Baby soft. Beneath my white skin, my Fae-Were heritage ran in a blue crooked line to the heel of my palm. It defined me. Neither Were nor Fae, but both. Was there enough Fae in it to keep him safe from the “in-between”? I thought back. Remembered, with an inward flinch, how I’d sensed that separate soul—curious
, detached, and alive. Yes … I had enough Fae in me.
With a measure of my Fae essence pumping through his veins, Trowbridge stood a chance of making it to Merenwyn and healing. Without it? He would die here, slumped against Lexi’s pirate rock.
A chance. Not a certainty. And if I gave it to him, and he died … the mate bond would claim its tithe. Could I risk my life on a nebulous instinct?
“Biggs, go watch the Fae,” said Cordelia.
“Why?”
“Do it,” she said sharply.
I looked away from her, thinking hard.
I’d claimed him as my mate. Said that I wouldn’t give him back.
But that was twelve hours ago! Before I was old enough to comprehend that this mate thing was so much more than just desire and a promise to endure. It was a three-sided business—the good, the bad, and the oh-so-fucking-ugly.
I can’t do this.
Yet even as I thought that, my ears were evaluating the wet rail in Trowbridge’s chest. Counting the seconds between his inhales.
A movement out of the corner of my eye. Cordelia’s hand touched the silver-hued vein on Trowbridge’s face. Old hands, shaking like mine.
Two broken hearts, then.
I’ll be old like her one day. Alone like her.
Cordelia and I reached for Trowbridge as he buckled over in a rib-racking cough. When his horrible, hacking spasms were finally done, and another splatter of something tarnished-black had been added to the blood-soaked ground, I touched his cheek with my charred fingers, and said, “Shhh, Trowbridge. It’s going to be okay now.”
My Fae-Were vein was a twisted road map along the inside of my arm.
Let it be enough.
“How is it done?” I asked her.
Cordelia’s face was bleak. “He needs to bite you.”
“Here,” I said, pressing my arm to his flaccid lips.
“That’s not how it’s done.” Cordelia pointed to my throat. “Pull your hair from your neck. No, the other side of your neck. You’ll have to put this part—” Her nails skimmed the area just above my collarbone where my neck muscle was soft and tender from the attention Trowbridge had lathered on it, just twelve hours before. “Right up to his mouth. He’ll bite down until he draws blood. As he draws your essence into his mouth, you have to say ‘Heart of my heart. Mate for all my years. I offer you my life.’”
I gazed at her with agony. Not like this. Not in front of her. Wasn’t it enough to read my face? For all the tears in heaven, I’d loved him since I was twelve … despite what I thought he’d done. Goddess, even when I’d sworn to myself I loathed his wicked heart, I’d never been able to scrape him from mine. Did I have to say those words in front her, kneeling in the pebble-strewn mud?
Yes, Cordelia’s hard eyes said.
There was no choice. There never had been.
“Trowbridge,” I said, as I pushed my hair back. I guided his mouth to the spot he’d tenderized the night before. “Take my blood.” His lips softened into a kiss on my skin. “Trowbridge, bite me.”
But he wouldn’t.
He turned his head.
“Bite me!” I said brokenly. “I can heal you. Take my blood.”
He was dying. Thump, thump. His heart slowing. Thump, thump.
It was my father again. My mother once more.
Thump, thump.
No. I wasn’t that girl anymore. Crouching in the cupboard again, watching everything that mattered to me slip away. I wasn’t going to sit there and listen, useless tears dripping down my face, as the mate of my heart breathed his last.
I steal. It’s what I do.
I wiped my face with my elbow. Cleared the hurt with a deep, shuddering breath, and then I found a spot: a silent, safe place inside me. I gathered up all that was left breakable in Hedi, and told it to stay there. Cover its ears and close its eyes. I’d come back for it. I’d come back for me.
Then I stepped outside of myself, and became what I needed to be.
Face shuttered, I softened my voice as if I were soft, and sweetened my tone as if I were as toothsome as Candy. My sooty fingers left smudges as I stroked his skin. “You never made me your mate.” My throat—it ached. “You said that you wouldn’t let me die alone again. Never again … Remember?… You promised me.”
His eyes were milky and blind, but his face—oh Goddess, his face-brow pleated, lines bracketing his mouth, bruised and bloody—none of it was as bad as the look of tormented guilt I’d just carved into it.
“Wife?” he asked weakly.
“Mannus has come. Do it now.” I bent closer and pressed my counterfeit flesh to his lips once more. “Make me your mate.”
An endless moment before his mouth opened. His teeth settled on my tendon. He touched it once with the flat of his hot tongue, and then suddenly, I felt a tearing pain. Hot, burning, and fiercely welcome. He sucked my blood into his mouth, and I said the words, my eyes on Merenwyn. “Heart of my heart.” … My Fae essence flowed into him … “Mate for all my years.” A joy-filled quiver from my Were … “I offer you my life.”
“Quickly,” said Cordelia. “Take his.”
I am a thief.
I set my teeth. I broke his skin. I swallowed his silver-tainted blood.
And as I drank, and felt a strange, soul-soothing warmth spread over me, Cordelia roused him back to consciousness and forced him to say the vows, giving him a pat of encouragement at the end of each one.
It was done. The heat inside me kept growing, growing. Were-hot, love-warm.
Trowbridge’s face grew calm and peaceful. When he spoke his voice was so soft I had to ask him to say it again. “Don’t know why … I waited.”
“You’re a stubborn man.” I tucked his curl behind his ear. “Do you feel stronger?”
A pause. And then he said, “Yeah.” This time I could smell his lie. His fingers reached blindly for mine. He twined his gently around my blistered ones. “Don’t cry, kid.”
And with that, his eyes closed one final time.
His grip loosened.
Thump, thump.
My fingers lay in the cradle of his open palm.
Those were his last words.
* * *
Little snatches of it will forever haunt me. Cordelia leaning down to pick up Bridge. Her red hair sweeping over her shoulder, her white face set as she carefully gathered him up. Trowbridge’s limp form hanging from her ropy arms. His head thrown back, exposing his throat, vulnerable and naked, and the teeth marks I’d left on his skin.
The slow thud of his heart. So much slower.
We had so little time.
“Hurry!” said Cordelia, shifting him higher in her arms. “Biggs, grab the Fae!”
And then, indeed, it seemed we flew. Cordelia kicked off her shoes, clutched him like her baby, and ran. I followed her, Merry bumping on my chest, running for my life and his. Close behind us, Biggs followed, Lou thrown over his shoulder.
“George,” he yelled, passing the sniper. “We’re gonna need a hand.”
The water sheeted over the floating log as the five of us peeled down its length. It started to roll. “Go!” said Machete-guy, bracing his hands against it. “I’ll hold it.”
We reached the midpoint. The portal floated over our heads. A hint of Fae magic streamed through the gate, ghostly and fragrant, carried by its soft wind. Strengthening me. Sharpening me. Could Trowbridge feel it too?
“You’ll need to go up first,” Cordelia said harshly to Biggs. “I can’t make the jump with him in my arms. I’ll pass him to you.”
The diminutive Were emptied Lou into George’s grip. Then he lifted his chin and squinted at the curling mist above him. What was Cordelia thinking? Biggs couldn’t be strong enough to haul Trowbridge up. Why not Machete-guy or George?
Biggs rubbed his hands on his jeans, crouched, and suddenly sprang for the sky, arms flexed. Up he flew, light as a dancer, straight up and over the lip of the portal. Gone for a second from sight, and then his lean face
appeared over the edge. He extended his arms. I watched, biting my lip, ears straining to measure the sluggish thumps in Trowbridge’s chest as Cordelia gently lifted him high. Biggs caught my mate’s shoulders, and hefted him over the ledge with supple, breathtaking strength.
Cordelia turned to me. “You next.”
Her face was half man, half woman. Tired. The face of a fifty-year-old survivor who understood tomorrow she’d wake, feel the pain, and somehow, get out of bed, make the coffee, and go on. A life of compromises and buried dreams … “He knew,” she said shortly, as if the words hurt her to say. “He knew it was you.” Cordelia’s eyelids dropped and her lips twisted. Then her hands bit into my waist, and I was tossed high. Biggs plucked me from the air, and deposited me on a floor that shouldn’t have felt solid, but did. Mist swirled around my ankles.
I knelt, shaken, beside my mate.
Oh Sweet Fae Stars. The closer I was to the gate, the better I felt. Was it my imagination or was Trowbridge’s heartbeat a little stronger? I flattened my ear on his chest. Yes, not by much, but perhaps by just enough. Merenwyn’s wind reached for my hair, tugging it with coaxing fingers, urging me to turn my head and follow it to Merenwyn. Its touch enslaved. Seduced. Beckoned.
Merry made a sudden, sharp movement against my breast. A short spiked strand shot out seeking a handhold. She found it, twined herself around the rope of gold, and rappelled upward, frantic and clumsy in haste. “Careful,” I said, reaching for her. She swarmed over my hand, evaded my grimy fingers, and scuttled onto my shoulder. I tucked in my chin and twisted my head, so we could be eye to eye, and then said, “We’re going to make it. I can feel it.”
The light inside her amber core flashed orange.
Danger. “What? Where?”
She stabbed a bristling leaf over my shoulder. I turned my head. Behind us, Biggs was crouched over, his hands reaching down for Lou.
My stomach tightened. “If I could, I’d kill her for what she has done to you … if I had ever thought she was that dangerous…” My voice trailed off. A lie. I’d always known she was deadly, but I hadn’t anticipated her hurting me or mine. So I mixed a morsel of truth with a tidbit of false promise and fed it to my friend. “I can’t do anything to her because we need her. Once we get to Merenwyn…” A weak threat. Lou would be stronger in the Fae realm.
