by Leigh Evans
And all the time I’d tracked the sounds of his snooping, I marveled that he was here, alternated with worrying about his reliance on the happy juice and the curl of his lip when he’d spoken about mystwalkers.
I’d wanted to blurt out, “I’m one! I’m a mystwalker.”
But I hadn’t because I kept thinking about the look of disgust on his face and the expression of fear on my mum’s when she’d begged me not to tell anyone I was a mystwalker. “Not anyone. Not even your brother,” she’d warned me.
And now my mystwalker-hating brother was above me—he’d come out of the shower wearing the pants he’d worn before and a braid, fastened with one of Cordelia’s expensive hair elastics. I’d been right about the muscles. My brother’s upper body bordered on the impossible. A whole bunch of “ceps”—bi, tri, whatever—had been added onto his former stick-boy body.
He got ab, and I got flab.
I couldn’t find a good position in bed, either. A worry festered in me that he’d fall asleep before me, and somehow, I’d end up pulled into one of his dreams. That concern wasn’t a new one—I used to dread being dream-napped every night back when we slept in adjoining bedrooms, and then there had been a thin wall between us. And now there was only a mattress between us. Not even a wall. Worse was this stark fear—what if he turned around and asked, “What are you doing in my dream?”
And finally, of course, there was the other issue—the Trowbridge-scented bitch outside. I had two problems with the little brown wolf. Problem one: I wanted to kill her. Problem two: my instincts—usually guaranteed to lead me into trouble—were preaching caution. Yeah, yeah. I know romantic hogwash can hijack a girl’s intelligence and innate caution.
But let’s not forget I’m part Were.
My wolf was talking to me. Stay, she kept repeating. Stay.
Sometimes you have to listen to your inner-bitch. Besides, there was a part of me (a huge, honkin’ part) that totally wanted the pink, heart-shaped box of chocolates. It kept going back to that moment when Trowbridge’s shaking fingers were pressed against my lips.
Impossible to resist dwelling on the tremor in his hands. The conflict in his eyes.
Wait until tomorrow for the explanation.
There has to be one.
I sighed as my twin sat up. Again. Thunk. Yeah, the ceiling is exactly where it was the last time you hit it. “Totally-undecipherable-string-of-Merenwynian-curse-words!” he exclaimed. Another whack of the pillow, another shake of its polyester fill. Another thump as his body collapsed back down.
I shouldn’t have let him have that shower. Especially not with the ferret. He came back out of the bathroom more alert, smelling of shampoo, and somehow, indefinably Lexi again. Now the ferret was out cold, curled into a ball in a nest of one of Cordelia’s sweaters by his feet. It smelled of lemon and oranges, too.
“Lexi,” I whispered. “You know Mum loved you as much as me, right?”
Worry and trouble curled around me.
Silence from my brother. A quiet, thoughtful, pregnant one broken only by the sound of a cap being unscrewed. I listened to my brother swallow another mouthful, before he sealed the flask again. He lay back with a sigh. Then I smelled something different over the various layers in the room. A faint tendril of scent—woods and ferns. I inhaled sharply, trying to pinpoint it.
It was nice, whatever it was.
“Hell,” said my brother.
“Yeah?”
“Be careful with Trowbridge in the morning. They gave him sun potion for the moon before last. He wasn’t able to change into his wolf, and the urge to be a wolf, to run under the moon … Once it’s thwarted like that…”
I strained my ears. Did he sigh?
“The need builds up inside the beast. When it’s finally allowed release, it has a hard time sinking back down inside the man. Trowbridge will still be feral in the morning. Even if he stands on two feet, not four.”
Great.
“Lexi?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happened to the original Lukynae?”
“He was captured and tried. Since they didn’t want him to become a martyr, they sent him into exile.”
I struggled to remember what Mum had told us about the Weres in Merenwyn. Then I gasped, and said, “Do you mean—”
“Yes. They sent Lukynae to this realm. Which is why the Raha’ells call Trowbridge—”
“The Son of Lukynae.”
“Now go to sleep, runt,” he murmured. “I’ll keep watch.”
* * *
I knew it.
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.
I should have guarded myself from sleep. Pinched my arm when my lids felt heavy. Squirmed out of my sleeping bag and taken a cold shower. Maybe bounced up my sugar level with a liter of Coke and a Kit Kat. Too late. I could feel that strangeness, that sense of being inside a foreign skin. My eyes were open, but the things I saw, the way my gaze roved and held—that’s not the way I look at the world. Not the way I examine a place, an object, a scene. I’d been dream-napped, caught in the web of a drowsing Fae’s memory.
But not, I thought, Mad-one’s—or the Old Mage’s. That nightmare always played to its miserable end in the same room.
The trees are huge, massive. Merenwyn, then. But whose dream? Not Lexi’s. I remember sharing his dreams from his perspective—his lens view was always tighter, focused on something with the intent to seize. Not this searching, frantic hip-hop from one focal point to another.
Whose eyes am I seeing through?
Concentrate. Listen. See. Dark woods through the slats of a wooden fence. Not a fence, I realized as he or she tilted their head. A pen. With wooden bars for walls, a dirt floor, and stars and a moon for a ceiling. The Fae stared at the latter for a long time—it was a brilliant yellow-orange, and so full and close it felt like it was going to fall and smother us with its weight.
I hate the moon.
Then the Fae pivoted, small fists still curved around the bars.
A girl, I thought. Small fingers. Slightly chapped. Nails chewed down to the quick.
“Merciful Goddess,” I heard her whisper, “don’t let them eat my body before I’m dead.” Her gaze roamed, offering me a glimpse of an elaborate grandstand—the type you see in period movies, where knights tilt lances and ladies favor them with secret smiles. Behind that, a palisade. Many smooth pine trunks, stripped of bark, aligned vertically. The fence of wood went as far as she could see—too tall to scale.
She’s in a pen within a pen.
The girl swung her head, and I realized that she was not alone in her cage. A large male lay facedown, unmoving and half hidden by shadow. His calves were muscled swells below the tattered edge of his trousers, and his torso—though striped with blood—was well developed.
He’s been lashed.
She watched him for a count of three, then turned back to press her forehead to the bars. Her breath rasped in and out of her chest. I studied the woods as she did and was rewarded for my vigilance when a shadow parted itself from a tree. And then I understood, before a howl pierced the night, exactly what she feared.
Wolves. Lots of them. More than twenty, less than fifty.
One of them broke from the cover of the trees and loped along the forest’s edge, ears pricked forward, nose lifted to scent the wind. He stopped and turned. A flash of amber eyes telegraphed a predator’s message: “I know you’re there. Soon.”
I want to wake up now.
There was no horn. No general call. Just the clattering of swords and the drum of feet. The guards lined themselves up in front of the grandstand’s lowest tier then stood at attention, their weapons crossed over their chests.
The fine ladies of the Court entered on the cue of laughter. They mounted the stairs, filing into the seating on the second tier. All of them wore light gray cloaks of the same material and weight. The girl’s gaze—and thus mine—clung to one woman whose beauty was carefully cultivated. Uncomfortable under our scruti
ny, the lady glanced at the empty seat beside her and then took particular interest in the arrangement of her sleeve.
She will not rescue you.
Next, the men. Again, wearing cloaks. Why? They filled the topmost tier by order of seating. Most wore a look of haughty privilege, but it was the fifth man who caused a chill to run along my spine. How well this realm fits him. The Black Mage’s hands were long, and white, and when they rested on the arms of his chair, they hung over the edge slightly curled, like the talons of a hawk as it cruised the sky looking for defenseless prey.
He has such pitiless eyes.
Our gaze moved along the rest, indifferent, searching for—
Lexi.
My brother stood aside from the rest, on a landing between the first and second tiers. Wearing the same bowler hat and boots. No cloak. His expression blank, neither filled with anticipation nor boredom. Beside him, a lever. Our gaze moved from it to follow the pulleys, the hemp rope, the line strung between the grandstand and our pen.
A male moan, low in the throat, from behind us. We spun—so fast, the bars a passing blur—as the man in our pen rolled onto his back. His foot scraped the earth, his leg bent at the knee.
Carefully—oh so slowly—we bent.
Our glance flitted anxiously between him and the dirt floor. A quick impression of small white hands—fluttering like frightened doves—searching, patting, feeling the ground for—ah! A small rock. She folded it in her fist.
“Merciful Goddess,” I heard her murmur. “Please let my aim be true.”
* * *
I woke from the dream with a gasp, heart hammering against the walls of my chest. Merry warmed against my breast.
“You okay?” Lexi asked. “Bad dream?”
I thought of the pen within the pen and my brother standing beside a lever. Whose dream had I been in? One of my own? Created by my anxieties? “Yes, I had a nightmare. Did I wake you?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about a way out of all this.”
What did he mean by that?
Out of what? He was home. Trowbridge was home.
“Get some sleep,” he added. “I’ll stay awake.”
I rolled to my side. Merry stiffened in the cup of my bra and then went limp. I placed a cold hand over her. She issued up a spark of warmth, the comfort of which made my eyelids feel heavy. But despite it, my brother and I were both half awake when the trailer’s door creaked open an hour later.
Chapter Fourteen
“What in God’s name has been done to my front door?” Cordelia asked, each word a miniature iceberg in the sea of her cold wrath.
“Not now, woman,” grumbled Harry. “Move back for the Alpha.”
Anticipation held the air captive in my chest, told my heart to get ready, get ready. Please, Trowbridge, find the right thing to say. Just this once. Make me believe that we can work this out.
Crash! Door met floor.
My eyes flew open as his hero leap into my trailer ended in a four-pawed skid. That can’t be right, I thought, tilting my head. Nails clicked on linoleum as My One True Thing made his way past my kitchen. Oh Goddess. Karma must be clutching her sides, bent over for a belly laugh. He hadn’t changed back into his human form at morning light? For the rest of my life, I’ll be buying dog chow. Making sure he’s had his shots. Picking up—
Another dip of the trailer, as another set of claws entered my home.
The bitch was with him? In my home? My hands tightened into fists on my pillow. Trowbridge’s scent was sharper than ever, woods, wild, and him—that thing I could never find a name for that always stirred me right down at gut level, and perhaps a little below that, as well. It floated down the short corridor toward me. You, me, us, it said, seeping under my bedroom door, speaking of destiny, and futures, and all of that stuff that I couldn’t stand to think about—not now with Anu’s stench slyly slithering in the wake of his. I squirreled deep into my sleeping bag until there was nothing above its open mouth but my tangled rope of hair. Yet still—still—a finger of his scent tunneled through the zipper’s teeth to touch my skin, soft as a kiss. A film of him was on my hair, an invisible lick of him on my flushed cheek.
A pause. What’s he waiting for? I peeked through the slit in my bag. Ah, the bedroom door. That shouldn’t represent a problem. Look what he did to the last one.
Hurry up, Balto. Come rescue me.
A long, impatient scratch down the faux-wood panel. The handle turned and— Bang! My bedroom door swung back with a thud on my closet.
Lo, the citadel has been breached.
The king of the Creemore wolfpack entered my boudoir slowly. I resealed my eyes and made like I was invisible. Just part of the mattress. A lump of something that should not be disturbed. Unless, of course, you were planning on placing a paw on the chest of said lump and pledging your eternal undying love with a heartfelt howl.
Dog breath warmed my face. Yup. Right through the sleeping bag. “Let me out, let me out, let me out,” whined my inner-Were, doing a bum-wiggle inside my belly.
An impatient huff in my ear. Almost immediately echoed by a feminine dog whine.
Fuck you and Toto, too.
“Who’s the bitch?” I asked through a double layer of poly-loft fill and nylon.
He didn’t answer—maybe because he was all Alpha-furry and a freakin’ wolf—and instead began a rude inventory of my aromatic history with his wet nose. Snuffle, snuffle down at my legs, pausing at my crotch. Hell, no. I curled myself into a protective ball. A double sniff over my hip, zeroing in on the exact place bruised by the chains. A huff, as he followed my curved form upward, pausing at the dip for my waist, and then over for a tour of the area where my boobs spilled above my tightly crossed arms. He spent some time there, during which sister-wolf paced inside me, leaking ho-hormones.
“He’s still feral,” said my Lexi, from the bunk above me. “Don’t make any sudden moves near him.”
Crap. As dream reunions go, this one was about as successful as the 2010 Spice Girls World Tour. I had a bitch in my house and it wasn’t me. My brother was up in the cheap seats, critiquing my every move. My mate was panting-hot and happy to see me, but—I cringed as Trowbridge’s wolf inhaled a little too sharply, and sneezed out a few billion dust mites—that happy thought was offset by the fact he was going to need a dog license.
My mate rubbed his muzzle against my mattress.
Not another word, Lexi.
Then the Alpha of Creemore did something sort of … nice, and I forgot all about my twin, and a smidgen about the bitch that waited in the hall. The big gray wolf pushed his nose through the open mouth of my sleeping bag and tunneled his snout toward me. His soft, warm nose nuzzled the nape of my neck. Rather sweetly for a savage, wild, and feral thing. And he kept doing it, until the instinct to bop him on his black nose turned to something boneless and accepting. Oh Fae Stars … worse than accepting. I hunched my shoulders as my jubilant inner-wolf sent oh-yum sparkles of happiness up my spine.
The bunk over my head creaked.
“All you have to do is ask, and I’ll clear this room,” said my brother. “Let me deal with him.”
Oh, for a magic wand. I slit my eyes open a fraction. Trowbridge’s gaze was fixed on Lexi in a way that spelled war. His rigid tail fat and quivering. With a sigh, I slid my hand free from my safe cocoon to touch his pelt and said (in what I still maintain to this day was a nice, soft, pacifying whisper), “This would work better if you weren’t a wolf.”
At the sound of my voice, Anu-the-mate-stealer poked her canine head through my door. I sat up fast and snapped, “What is that bitch doing in my room?” Possibly it was my tone, or the way I heaved myself upward—whatever. My distress jarred the exhausted ferret back to life with a start and a squeak of alarm. Look, as squeaks go, it was tiny. Nothing more than a ferret’s version of WTF?
But that, as they say, was that.
Wolf-girl leaped for the little animal, jaws stretched like a bear tra
p. Then it was a blur—a Marx Brothers scene of utter chaos—as my brother shot off his bunk, hands out reaching for an interception, and the ferret ran for its life.
Enough. I pulled the covers back over my head.
Well, as it happens, Trowbridge didn’t give a rat’s ass about his bitch, my brother, or the freakin’ ferret. He cut to the chase, because he’s an Alpha at heart, and always will be. Without a warning huff or a “pardon me,” he grabbed a mouthful of sleeping bag and hauled me and it right off my bed. Thud! I gasped as hip and elbow met linoleum then winced as someone—I’m thinking it was Lexi—stepped on my hair. Didn’t stop my guy. With dogged determination, he kept right on backing up out of the room, hauling Hedi-and-bag down the hall, around the bend in the wall for the kitchen—ouch—past the debris left by the shattered door—ow, ow, ow—and right out of the trailer.
And that’s how Trowbridge coaxed his mate from the safety of her silver bug.
* * *
I fought with the zipper but I could only wriggle one arm free.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Knock it off!”
Either his wolf’s linguistic skills were limited or he didn’t take well to commands when he was on four paws. The Alpha of Creemore kept going, ruthlessly dragging me and my red sleeping bag right across the dirt scrubland Cordelia had taken to calling our front yard, then around the big old dead tree that me and Lexi used to climb, and finally down the path leading to the pond.
How sweet. He was carrying me home. Kind of like a newspaper from the end of the driveway or a bone dug up from the neighbor’s garden.
Not so fast, Lassie. I saw a thick root and grabbed it.
The big, gray wolf kept going, tail high.
So did the sleeping bag.
A quick twisting moment later, I was shucked free of it.
Forehead resting on my extended arm, I took stock. My inner-bitch’s ho-hormones were flooding me with feral heat, and frankly, it was making my stomach puke-queasy. Beyond that, there was definitely going to be a bruise on my hip (the corner of the kitchen cabinet), another on my right butt cheek (top step), and one high up on my shoulder (bottom step). Also, a graze on my ribs (friction from the bag’s zipper), and a small patch of road rash on the inside of my forearm (inflicted when we hit that smudge of gravel).