by Leigh Evans
She’d gone from dime-store workmanship to the type of jeweled artistry that belonged in a store that I’d never have the courage or the money to walk into. I peered into the heart of her pendant to the place where my true friend lived. She was an Asrai, like Ralph, bewitched like him, and shrunk until she was little more than a smudge of something dark in the interior of a semiprecious stone. Cursed to stay in a prison by Lou.
Merenwyn had been good for her. Even her amber stone appeared to have undergone an upgrade in the look-at-glorious-me sweepstakes. It seemed more polished, more lustrous.
Why, Merry? Why come back? Couldn’t anyone be found over there to break the curse that keeps you imprisoned? You’ll never find it here. I have no mages, no Book of Spells, no inside knowledge. No matter what Cordelia says, I’m still very much me.
Maybe that’s what she was looking at, inhaling the lack of differences—the depressing same-old, same-old sight of me on my knees, shoeless, with hair a mess—and maybe, just maybe, she was wondering exactly the same damn thing.
Should she really have braved the winds of the portal for this?
My feet had fallen to sleep under my rump. A wink of orange from her heart, as if she could read my thoughts and enjoyed the joke.
“I kept my promise, you know,” I whispered. “I’ve worn the Royal Amulet every day. I’ve fed that miserable sod and kept him clean and dry. I didn’t smash him against the wall when he tried to choke me a week ago … in my sleep,” I emphasized, just to make sure she understood how difficult the job had been. “I’ve renamed him. Unless you’ve got a better name for him, I’ve been calling him Ralph.” I chewed the inside of my lip. “I know you expected to see me wearing him, and I have. Really. But Trowbridge put him around the neck of that guard-bitch over there—if I hadn’t been woozy at the time, I would have seen it coming and fought him off. Tomorrow morning, when Trowbridge is human again, I’ll get Ralph back. I promise you. I’ll…”
My voiced dwindled to nothing.
And then, my friend chose me.
An unfurling of vines, a quick readjustment of her Fae gold, and she was as I knew her. A stick figure with two legs, and two arms, fashioned of ivy and impudent spunk, marching across the battlefield that separated us, trailing a golden rope of chain behind her. She marched right up into the crater of my cupped paw and straight back into my heart.
I bit down on a whimper as I fumbled to place her over my head.
* * *
My brother closed the door to the trailer with a violent tug, which could have caused real damage to Biggs’s lupine snout if his wolf hadn’t been nimble enough to jerk back in time.
“You’re embarrassing me,” I hissed to my twin. “Those are my friends out there. They’ve been good to me. I don’t know how I could have gotten through these last months—”
His head very slowly turned my way, and his gaze fell on Merry, hanging from my neck, and for some reason, I got that feeling again—like I should cover her up and be afraid—and that annoyed me and deflated the general esprit de corps, so I muttered, “Stop it.”
“Stop what?” he asked, with a thread of challenge in his voice.
Geesh. He’s sounding as territorial as a Were. Merry scuttled up to my shoulder and gave a bleat of orange-yellow. “Looking like that,” I said, a tad snappishly.
Lexi’s gaze roved, swiftly assessing the cheap oak cabinets, the stained carpeting, the narrow curtains with their fussy little tiebacks. “And that is?”
“Like you’re a cowboy in a wanted poster wearing a bowler. It’s already weird enough. The long hair, and—” I blew some air out of my nose. “Like right now. You’re doing it again. Stop being so…”
He walked down the short corridor toward Cordelia’s room. Three seconds spared on examining it from the doorway, before he turned, wiping his nose. “What?” he said.
Calculating and scary looking. Different. But everything was different for him here, wasn’t it? And he hadn’t had ten years to get used to it, or a friend like Merry. “Forget it.” I shrugged, forcing my amulet to tighten her grip on my bra strap.
My brother’s eyes were greener when they rested on Merry.
I’m not sharing. Not Merry. “Why don’t you put down your knapsack and relax? I put out some food.”
He nodded, but I recognized the onset of trouble in the set of his shoulders as he brushed past me to head for the other end of home-sweet-home.
Yup. Trouble.
There was a frozen quality to the way he stood staring into my bedroom, oddly similar to the way I sometimes stared at the numbers on the bathroom scale.
I stifled a sigh. Who dressed him? If that was what they wore in the Fae realm, somebody better send a fashion rescue team to Merenwyn, stat. Unlike Mad-one’s vaguely medieval garment, there wasn’t even a trace of Middle Earth in my brother’s clothes. His couture was a bastardized blend of sixties pop culture—I was forming a definite hatred for his hat—and swashbuckler movies. And it was devoid of color. Everything was either gray, or white, or black.
A muscle worked in his jaw.
I sucked in my cheeks and opened the fridge. “You want anything to drink? I’ve got some Coke, and there’s some apple juice left.”
“Do you have anything stronger?” he asked, disappearing into my room.
“No, I don’t.” Cordelia didn’t drink. Worrying my lip, I poured two glasses of Coke and replaced the bottle in the fridge. What the hell is he doing in there? There wasn’t that much to look at. My room was small and regrettably short of sparkly things. The only personal touches were my books—oh crap, he wasn’t thumbing through my books, was he? I grimaced at the thought. Some of them naturally fell open to the racy sections.
“Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you come back into the living room?”
A beat later he did, offering me a fleeting, cool smile—one that felt as authentic as a diplomat’s—before saying, “I need to use your sink. Have you got any shampoo?”
“I left hot water in the tank.” I squeezed in my stomach as he passed me. He sucks up more space than Cordelia.“Why don’t you take a shower?”
“I don’t need one now.” Lexi placed his knapsack beside the sink and frowned at the kitchen’s nickel tap and faucet.
“I used up a whole bottle of Cordelia’s clear nail polish covering the areas where the finish had worn down,” I told him, recognizing his concern. “There’s not much iron in the steel. You won’t feel a thing.”
He gave me an approving smile and set to unwinding the string wrapped around the closure on his knapsack. The bag was large and made of supple black leather, with an embellished design on the front. Before he lifted the flap, he muttered something.
Then I felt a shock. Just a little one. A tiny zap.
“What was that?” I asked.
A flash of pure devilment—possibly mixed with a soupçon of pride—lit Lexi’s face and made him appear, if not young, then younger. I smiled at him and asked, with a naughty-naughty voice, “Spill. What did you just do?”
“I used my talent to break the ward on the bag,” he said, giving me a lopsided grin that melted my heart. “I can see magic, and if I can see it—”
“You can steal it,” I said, with wonderment. “That’s how you nicked my magic.”
“It’s what I do. Not another Fae in Merenwyn can see magic like I can.”
A stench filled the room.
“Fae Stars!” I pressed my hand to my nose, then gasped as the bag flexed. “What have you got in that bag?”
“Shh,” he muttered. “Don’t scare her.”
“You traveled through the Gates of Merenwyn with a living creature tucked in your knapsack?” I said, awed.
“No, I leaped through the portal with the Black Mage’s bag,” he said with a grin. The flap lifted, and a nose twitched, scenting the air. Flesh pink, small. “His ferret, Steellya, just happened to be inside it.”
The Black Mage. The hair stood up on the back of my neck at t
he way he said that name so casually. “Have you given any thought to what happens if her owner decides to follow you and reclaim his personal property?”
“He’d need an amulet to do that.” Lexi cradled the ferret in his arms. An inquisitive face—white muzzle, black ring around the eyes, highlighted by another band of white—tilted sideways to examine me. “And she smells because she hasn’t been bathed.”
“He keeps a ferret in his bag? Who keeps a ferret in his bag?”
Lexi’s expression grew harsh. “The bag’s an improvement on her usual quarters. A little cage, filled with soiled straw. Never enough water or food. Rest easy, Steellya,” he said, putting the plug in the sink. “Let me wash that filth off you.”
“Cordelia’s going to have a fit,” I murmured, watching him squeeze a dollop of detergent into the filling sink. “What does the Black Mage do with a ferret?”
“She can squirm into places that Fae can’t. Is Cordelia the animal whose scent fouled the bedroom back there?” he asked, in a neutral enough voice.
I felt my spine stiffen.
Then he cast me a glance over his shoulder and softened me with another authentic Lexi smile. “Thanks for putting the food out, runt. But do you have any hot dogs? You wouldn’t believe how I used to dream about those.”
Which is how I found myself kneeling in front of our tiny refrigerator, pawing through the cold-cut drawer looking for hot dogs while listening to my brother’s husky, soothing murmur as he bathed the Black Mage’s ferret in the sink that Cordelia daily scoured with a soft scrub brush and a little bleach.
A familiar feeling—Lexi and I breaking a couple of rules.
With a wash of tenderness, I remembered again the last thought picture Lexi had ever sent me—the one with the flea-shampoo-doused Were in the tin bath—and without pausing to think twice, I gave my brother a mental nudge, thinking he’d enjoy the symmetry.
It was just a little one. Nothing really in terms of nudges.
I’d even call it tentative.
Terror—that’s what he poured into me in return. Sick, twisting dark fear. The type that makes your heart suddenly lurch into your throat. That fills you with panic. Oh Goddess! Is this the inside of my brother’s head? I screamed, hands covering my ears in protection. But from what? It was in me! An asp of horror, slithering and brushing against good memories and bad. Leaving a slime trail of utter ruin in—
And then it stopped.
“Shit,” cursed Lexi. “I didn’t mean it—”
“Get away from me!” I recoiled from him, my elbow up to shield my face.
“Hell,” he said brokenly. “It’s been trained into me. One of the first things you learn in the Fae realm is to fight back when someone tries to touch your mind.”
“What’s happened to you? You’re nothing like Lexi!”
“I am,” he said, sinking to his knees beside me. Then softer, “I am Lexi.”
The fridge door hit the cabinet as I scuttled out of his reach. “Trowbridge called you the Black Mage’s Shadow. He said you were responsible for genocide! Against Weres! That you were a cold-blooded killer—”
“Hell,” the Fae murmured, shaking his head. “Don’t believe everything you heard from the wolf.”
“No! My brother didn’t hate being touched. My twin wouldn’t have pulled away from me. My Lexi would never have sent a thought picture like that. Ever! You put that, that—” I stumbled for the right word. “Sickening shit in my head.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so—”
“You slammed the door on Biggs and made sure he heard you say, ‘Dogs don’t belong in a house!’ You don’t want my food, but you keep looking at Merry as if you want to steal her off me. You wear your hat in my home. You’re…”
And then … my words dried up.
Because in that spate of accusations Lexi finally found his way to protest. He pulled off his hat and held it against his chest as if it were a shield he didn’t want to drop, before he laid it on the floor. Then … he just stayed there. Waiting for my verdict. Immobile, his face carefully shuttered, his body language broadcasting acceptance of whatever came next. Or maybe, something even worse than that. Not acceptance so much as weary resignation.
Lexi, Lexi.
Merry was hot against my chest. A wolf was howling outside, while another threw himself against the flimsy trailer door. I knew all that. Dimly, I recorded all those things. Warnings and calls to arms. But all I could do was stare at his uncovered head, feeling my horror and confusion and rage slide away like the leftovers on a dinner plate being tipped into the garbage.
“Who tattooed that obscenity on you?” I whispered.
At first glance, the mark on his skin looked like a paw print. Obviously intended to be a wolf’s, based on the shape and claws. Not quite half the size of one of Harry’s prints, but pretty damn close. Turned sideways, so the tips of its claws looked as if they were stretching for the peaked tip of my brother’s ear. That alone would have been insulting, but it was the detail inked inside the five pads that really squeezed my stomach.
A wolf’s face had been worked into the paw print, and the ink mixed with magic, so that the buffs and blacks, the greens and beiges would never fade. Forevermore, my brother’s skull would thus be adorned: above the peaked tip of his ear, a lupine face poised with predatory anticipation, frozen in ink—black nostrils, black fur, smiling lips—forever caged within the track of the wolf.
* * *
“This is good,” he said, spearing another piece of roast beef and putting it into his mouth.
My brother has a hard time looking me in the eye, I thought, watching his eyes flick away from mine. And he ate too fast, but then he always had. Gobbling down food as if it, too, were territory and he was in a hurry to go back and stake his claim to more.
It was quiet in our home.
In the way of most families in the midst of a horrible, soul-tearing fight, we’d hit pause, because that’s what you do when you have a two-ton rogue elephant in your living room. You hit that stop button, because admitting you have a pachyderm problem implies an obligation to do something about it. You start worrying that getting it out of the house might involve painful demolition. You start thinking about the ugliness of walls torn down to studs and the cost of reconstruction. Maybe, given the alternative, you could live with an elephant in your home after all.
Time out? my gaze had asked of my twin after he’d doffed his hat.
Absolutely, he’d nodded gruffly, a flush tinting his cheekbones.
So, first, we’d taken care of outside business. My brother rescued the utensil crockery from the ferret’s exploration, and I went to placate Harry—who’d broken through the door—before he huffed and puffed and blew the whole trailer down.
Harry, being Harry, was not inclined to being fluffed off, without a thorough inspection of the premises and my person. Once finished with that, he stopped, and eyed the ferret askance. “It’s why I screamed,” I lied to him. “I didn’t expect a ferret to come out of his bag.”
It’s a good thing a wolf can’t raise an eyebrow and drawl, “Bullshit.”
Merry had sparked a red blip when the ferret in question chose that moment to overturn a mug on the counter.
“The ferret’s not prey,” my brother had announced, sealing his silver flask. He wiped his lip with two fingers, and took a deliberate step in front of the animal. “Touch the ferret and I’ll take you out, wolf”—that’s what his body language told Harry.
I’d smothered a smile at that.
My brother, Lexi, the Ferret Defender of the Free World.
Harry had curled his lip at my twin. Then he’d given me one more weighted glance before he’d limped out of our twenty-seven-foot home on wheels. Lexi had picked up the door, and fitted it back more or less in place. When that was done, he’d leaned against the wall and filled in a bit of dead airtime by tying knots in a strip of sealant. Finally, he’d said tautly, “My master, the Black Mage. He ordered this … d
ecorative touch.”
“Master?” My hand had gone to Merry. “Was he the same Fae who stole you away the night Mum and Dad died?” She’d curled a tendril of ivy around my thumb.
“Yes,” he’d said simply, as if that reply were the answer to all the questions, the key to all the things I didn’t understand.
I remembered that Fae. Long rectangular face. Too much jaw. High wide forehead. Hooded eyes, their blue hue leached to something that chilled. The cold one. “Rose of the House of DeLoren, you’ve broken the Treaty of Brelland, and allowed one of the unclean to bathe in our sacred pool. According to the laws of Merenwyn and the Treaty of Brelland, your life is forfeit,” he’d said in a voice that sounded flat and bored. As if death and cruelty were just another job-sheet task he’d initialed. Then the cold Fae had examined my brother as if he were livestock. “I’ll take him as payment.”
For what?
For my mother’s sin of loving a Were? For my aunt’s folly of trusting a bad man?
“You’ve been staring at it for five minutes. Stop it,” Lexi murmured now.
Hard not to. One side of Lexi’s head was shaved clean, and under the kitchen light his white skin gleamed, an obscene and horrible contrast to the other side of his head, where a heavy mane of wheat-ripe hair fell. Lexi had told me that it was kept so by the Black Mage’s command, in order to better display the tattoo inked above my brother’s ear.
“Now will you tell me about your life in Merenwyn?”