by Leigh Evans
Surreptitiously, I swiped at my damp eyes. “You and Lexi are the only two people who see my magic.”
“Really?” She busied herself with a thread on her skirt. “How odd.”
“Return to me,” I said. A moment later, my Fae sat sullenly in my gut, nestled close to my inner-Were. I felt marginally better. Spine stronger, belly full again. Merry slid down her chain and settled herself dead center over my heart.
Enough. I stood.
Cordelia observed, “Your niece is almost finished.”
I turned my head toward the female huddled on the floor in the final throes of her change. Hooray. Anu’s human form was going to be depressingly fit. Her shoulders were on the wide side, but since she was about as thin as a catwalk model, their width only served to make her waist look even smaller.
“She’ll need a blanket.” Cordelia headed for the stairs. “Stay with her?”
“Yup,” I said without much enthusiasm. “You got to admit, this is the perfect end to a perfect day.”
“Don’t get cocky.” Cordelia’s voice floated down the stairwell. “It’s only the morning.”
“Even Karma has got to know when to call it a day,” I called back.
Sucking in my lower lip, I leaned against the door frame and settled in for the rest of the show. Another forty seconds of moaning and leg jerking before Anu was finished. My brother’s daughter lay on the dusty floor, naked—a long-running Were theme I was getting more than a little tired of—and protectively curled into a ball. She gave a watery sniff. Then she pushed a heavy swath of hair from her cheek, knuckled away some eye goop, and lifted her gaze.
Oh Fae Stars. Green eyes, so pale they were almost translucent, widened and filled with tears. They’re the exact shade of mine. A minute comet of green fire spat at me—like a cat’s hiss—before it circled her dark pupil and faded.
“You’re nothing more than a kid,” I said in shock.
Lexi’s brat looked down on herself and uttered a bleat of dismay.
Yup, you’re naked. But it appeared my niece was definitely not comfortable with that concept because she executed a frantic scramble for a place to hide or something to cover her nudity. Which was too bad because there was nothing except a wall, a staircase, and a carpet runner nailed down to the floor.
“Hurry up with the blankie,” I hollered.
Cordelia leaned over the railing to toss me a wedding quilt. “Here.”
I caught it. “You couldn’t have found something that didn’t smell like Trowbridge?”
“I have an aversion to Mannus’s scent,” she answered. “Good God. Has she been weaned yet?”
At the sound of Cordelia’s drawling voice, Miss Woebegone uttered another wrenching cry then buried her wet head into her knees. Her shoulders shook and she began to cry, but quietly.
I grimaced and edged toward her. “What is she, twelve?” It was tempting to toss the thing over her like a dust sheet.
Cordelia frowned. “I’d say more like—”
“Fifteen,” piped up Biggs from the end of the hall.
“Shut up!” Our voices rang in perfect unison. Biggs pulled a face and melted back into the kitchen.
“Don’t bite,” I warned, crouching to drape it over her shoulders. My knuckles grazed baby-soft skin, and with that came a flea of a thought: Trowbridge would never touch a child. I verified that certainty with my nose. “Her skin doesn’t carry his scent.”
Cordelia huffed as she descended the stairs. “I can’t believe how long it took you to figure that out. Of course she wouldn’t have a scent. She has Fae blood in her, just like you do—which means—”
“She’d pick up whatever scent she’s been around. And since Lexi doesn’t have one, she’d smell like Trowbridge.” I sat back on my heels, thinking that life was a freakin’ scale in front of me. One side was already heavily weighted, and Cordelia kept tossing handfuls of pebbles onto the other. “You know you’re biased?” I said. “You’re definitely Team Trowbridge.”
“Of course I am,” she said simply, her tone gentle. “He’s beautiful, and I’ve always had a weakness for lovely things.” Her gaze grew penetrating. “But I gave you a promise six months ago that I’ll never take back. Come what may, I will always be your friend.”
You’re more than that, I thought. And Trowbridge isn’t pretty anymore, not the way he once was. Hard, yes. Honed, definitely. And maybe—my heart twisted at the thought—more than a little tortured. “Do you think everyone has One True Thing?”
“Yes.” Her mouth twisted into a sad smile. “And no.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it’s time for tea.” She pushed me toward the kitchen. “Come along. My tolerance for babysitting is limited to one hour. Let’s see if I can rustle up anything sweet before the meter runs out.”
“I’d kill for a piece of chocolate.”
“Wouldn’t we all, darling. Wouldn’t we all.”
Chapter Eighteen
Cordelia poured boiling water into the old china teapot.
Biggs was on the job. Cheeks sucked in, he attempted to level Lexi with a De Niro. I was hoping it would be sooner rather than later before he gave up on his glower. His “You looking at me?” only added more tension to a room already swollen full with it.
I was hungry and there was nothing sweet in the cupboards except sugar for the tea. We were making do with hot English Breakfast mixed with as many spoonfuls of the sweet stuff as we could tolerate.
Yay.
Lexi’s head had lifted when I entered the room, but since then he’d retreated inside himself. Yes, on the surface, he appeared to be relatively content to sit at the table, his hand slowly stroking the ferret he’d freed from the Black Mage’s bag. But inwardly? Another story. His booted foot kept rocking against the chair rung.
Annoying.
The only living creature in the room who wasn’t irritated, depressed, stressed, or pissed off was the ferret. Biggs hadn’t wanted it to be released from its captivity—which Cordelia had ridiculed. “Oh, shove off. What’s he going to do with the animal? Throw it at you? Besides, the Fae won’t do anything that could cause his sister harm.” Then she’d given Lexi her patented sneer. “Now, will you, darling?”
There it was again—no one wanted to hurt me. But my throat was still so tight it felt like an aching sore. Things had been said. Promises and threats had been made. Family lost and found. Cordelia placed a mug in front of me, then filled it with tea. “Chin up,” she said severely.
“You betcha,” I muttered, reaching for it with my left hand—my right being temporarily out of action, thanks to the blister forming on the web between my thumb and my pointing finger.
She gave my twin the same then pushed the sugar bowl closer to me.
“Don’t you have anything stronger?” Lexi examined the contents of the mug with disgust. “Something with a kick in it?”
“No,” Cordelia said flatly.
A lie. Two minutes ago, she’d opened a cupboard and closed it fast, but not quickly enough to keep me from catching a glimpse of a liquor bottle. I killed the sigh birthing in my chest and added five teaspoons of sugar to my tea. Merry rested on my shoulder. Her movements were slight—I doubt if either Biggs or Cordelia had noticed it—but I was conscious of how she kept herself oriented in Cordelia’s direction. Wherever Ralph traveled, so did her interest. How am I going to reunite them?
I swiveled in my chair to check on my niece—not because I felt responsible for Miss Woebegone, but because the wholesome Norman Rockwell kitchen with its old stove, pine cupboards, and blue and white curtains was making me uncomfortable. Anu had edged herself to the doorway. Another foot and she’d actually be in the same room with us.
“Does she know who you are?” I asked.
“Of course, I am the Black Mage’s Shadow.” His voice was bland, but there was a line of sweat on his upper lip. “The Fae who creeps into his mistress’s boudoir each night and leaves before daylight.”
“She’s got green eyes.” I herded a few granules of spilled sugar into a miniature molehill. “They’re almost as pale as mine.”
“They’re exactly the same shade.”
“That eye color standard issue in Merenwyn?”
“No.” He’d said it in a clipped fashion as if the subject bored him, but my twin radar lit up. Something more there, I thought. Twelve years of sharing meals and fighting for homework space at the Strongholds’ cramped kitchen table had cued me to detect the slightest weak spot. I waited until he’d torn his gaze from the 2002 calendar tacked to the bulletin board, before asking in a casual voice, “Who’s her mother?”
He inspected the metal teaspoon as if it might bite him before adding three measures of sugar to his tea. “A Raha’ell bitch.”
I winced at the coldness in his voice. “She couldn’t come with you?”
“She’s dead.” He took a cautious sip and grimaced.
“Oh, Lexi, I’m sor—”
“I fucked her, not loved her,” he said with a faint lift of his shoulder. Cordelia made a noise at the back of her throat that could have been classified as a refined growl. Seemingly oblivious, my brother reached for the sugar bowl again. He tipped a thin stream of the sweetener into his cup. “You were always such a romantic, runt.”
“Says the guy who used to stand on top of our pirate rock and holler, ‘I’ll save you, my lady.’” I stroked the peak of my pointed ear for a moment or two, watching my brother play catch-the-paper-towel-ball with the ferret. “How old is Anu?”
“She’s seen thirteen winters.”
One year older than he’d been when the Black Mage had taken him away. “Her eyes do that thing mine used to do. You know…” I slid a shy glance toward Lexi. “The spitting light, the miniflares. Has she produced a full flare yet?”
“No.”
“So she hasn’t found her One True Thing,” I murmured.
Lexi rolled his eyes. “Do you still believe everything that Mum told us? A full flare isn’t as common as she said it was. Believe it or not, it’s considered a mark of high nobility among the Fae. I didn’t even know I could do it until I was well into my manhood, and even then what I have is more of a flash than a full flare.”
Aha, that’s another thing I do better than Lexi.
Cordelia filled a mug with tea and lots of sugar and placed it on the floor a few feet inside the kitchen door. My niece gazed at it with a longing that spoke of a dry mouth and hunger. “She hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since she got here,” I said, feeling an unpleasant twist of guilt.
“She wouldn’t have accepted anything from either one of us.” He turned a spoonful of sugar into a serving of sugary tea paste then offered it to his pet. Not something you see every day. A ferret eating from a spoon.
“I thought they were carnivores,” I said.
“Ferrets like sweet stuff like any other Fae. Don’t you, Steellya?” Yellow wolf eyes seemed to blink at me as he absently rubbed his tattoo. “You know what I was thinking about?”
“What?”
“How we used to cheat in school.”
I smiled.
“Permission?” his hooded gaze inquired.
A thought picture? Here? I let my gaze innocently roam. My niece’s attention seemed focused on the pink coffee mug, Cordelia’s on the sink, and Biggs’s on Anu (I knew he’d waver from the job). I bit my lip and nodded. A slip, and a slide, and then the real world—the back door with its four-paned glass window and old-fashioned door handle—disappeared. A moment of haze, then ta-da! I received Lexi’s thought picture in vivid, full color.
Huh. I’d expected something that would stir my heartstrings, maybe a picture of the four Strongholds, prefire, prekidnap, preheartbreak. Sitting at our own table—Dad, Mum, Lexi, and me—happy. Instead I got this: Knox’s minibottle of sun potion. Not going to happen. The skin around his eyes tightened when I mouthed my reply.
He let Steellya have the spoon. A small smile then another image. But this time, transmission was faster and harder—more of a mental shove. I pressed my hand to my forehead, and waited for the picture to settle. Lexi and me, sitting in the front seat of a car—me at the wheel with him holding a map.
I blinked to erase it then glanced at the clock. Less than an hour left till noon. Did Lexi really think that it was as simple as stealing a car and hitting the road? Fae Stars—what about his daughter? How about Ralph and Merry? And here’s one that was at the top of my list: what about me? And the long-held fantasy of mates-forever that was poised on a knife’s edge?
“Promise me you won’t leave with him,” Trowbridge had asked. “Let me explain.”
Could anything get us past this? Brother gone bad? Mate bond fractured? Trowbridge coming back so foreign he barely matched the man of my memory?
And really, could he—the man of few words—find the right ones to “explain” all this?
I thought back to that slow stroke of his thumb on my knuckle as we stood in front of the assembled pack/would-be Hedi murderers and wondered if he’d been dumb enough to think a touch, a feel, a press of skin was the equivalent of a talk. I had a growing sense that he’d been trying to bypass the awkward necessity of speech, cagily trying to speak to me with his skin and his heat.
Cheater. Some words are important. Strung together, they can save people a world of hurt. For instance, “No, Hedi, I never told your brother to sweeten the pot.”
My twin drummed his fingers on the table, impatient for my response.
I answered with a vehement headshake.
“Why not?” he said out loud.
Cordelia turned, sponge in hand. Biggs straightened from his slouch against the door.
“Because I’m not ready to,” I snapped.
Without permission or delicacy, my brother shot one final image through the open channel between us. It surged into me like a tidal bore, too fast to repel, too powerful to outrun. A small pack of wolves—maybe seven or eight of them. Viewed from some vantage spot above them. Freeze-framed in the moment of their bloody victory. Prey had been felled—a man, legs akimbo, arms flung out, mouth open in a soundless scream—and the wolves were clustered, shoulder to shoulder, around his body. Slick smears of red on the grass. One large, gray wolf tearing a sinew from the man’s neck. The others’ lips curled into snarls, poised at the point of a rumble for the choicest meats.
I gasped and tried to rinse the image out of my head, but the vision was so ugly, so sickening. “Don’t ever do that again,” I said in a shaky voice.
His face was sweaty and pale, his eyes bruised. “That’s who they are.”
Cordelia moved to stand between us. “What’s going on?”
I focused on slowing my breathing, clearing my mind.
“You’re a fool if you ignore that.” His Merenwynian accent was back. “Can’t you see them for what they are?” Then he dared to send another mental nudge.
I stood up so fast, my chair overturned, and Merry tumbled off my shoulder. She swung from my chain, flashing yellow-orange in alarm. “I’ve had enough of being pushed around today,” I said in a raw voice. “If you ever try what you just did again—I swear I’ll level you.”
Lexi lifted his lip in a superior sneer that pushed buttons I’d thought long buried, then said, “You needed a few home truths delivered.”
I did, did I?
“I’ve had enough truths to last a lifetime.” I flattened my palms on the pine table and leaned into his space. “Why don’t you take a turn? Here’s a home truth for you. Our father would be ashamed of you. He would have been horrified by what you’ve done.”
“Move away from him,” Cordelia murmured to me.
But I couldn’t. Lexi’s eyes had widened with a hurt that somehow had turned around and bit me. Oh Goddess. What had I done? “Lexi. I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry. I’m just tired and—”
“You think you’re fit to judge me? You?” Lexi rose slowly, cradling the ferret. Sweat dotted the sh
orn side of his scalp. “You have no fucking idea what it’s like to find yourself in another realm, cut off from everybody. Look at you.” He flicked a dismissive hand. “You’ve never gone hungry. You’ve never been too afraid to shut your eyes. You haven’t got a clue.”
No. I didn’t know what life in Merenwyn was like, and for that, I owed him. Ten years ago, when the Fae had carried him through our kitchen, Lexi’s gaze had swung to me. He’d seen me, sitting hunched in my hidey-hole, and then, he’d deliberately looked away. He’d done it to protect me. And because of his sacrifice, I’d had a life of sorts. Boring and quiet, and yes, equipped with my own set of nightmares. But nothing like the horror his life had been.
His ferret looked at me with accusing eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shamed. “I’m so—”
“Save it.” Lexi cocked his head to the side. “You know what I see when I look at you? Just another one of the Son of Lukynae’s well-trained bitches. Sit,” he said, his tone set on hurt. “Come on, ‘sit.’ Or do you only answer to your master?”
And bam. Just like that my emotions heated right back to simmering rage.
“You have magic,” he taunted. “Do you know what I could have done with that back home? Even gifted with a minor talent like yours, I could have made something of myself with it. I would have taken it, shaped it into something useful, honed its edge every night until it was sharp as a blade, and it would have protected me!”
“You were given a magical gift,” I said through my teeth.
“Being able to see magic isn’t a gift. It’s a fucking curse!” he shouted. “Sure, I can see it—even steal it and use it for an hour or two—but it won’t stay with me. It’s not mine. I have nothing of my own except my wits and my balls. The rest of it—my clothing, my food, my bed—it’s all a short-term loan. One misstep, one stupid gesture—it’s gone and so am I. No one except the Black Mage knows that I have a talent. The men of the Court give me a nod, but I know what they’re really thinking behind their masks—that I’m just another of the Black Mage’s pets and it’s only a question of time before he loses interest. As far as they can tell, I butt-fucked my way out of the kitchen, and sooner or later, my protector’s going to tire of me, and then all his little bonus gifts—like the temporary magic I sometimes demonstrate, or the right to eat at table—will be taken away. The bets are already being laid about his newest acquisition.” His mouth curled into a smile of self-derision. “You know what the worst part of it is? I’m the dickhead who brought that little mystwalking freak into the castle—”