by Leigh Evans
Just say the right thing, Trowbridge. It’s not difficult. All you have to do is tell me that you don’t mean to kill my brother.
But he surprised me. He gazed at me for a second in consideration, then firmed his shoulders and told me the truth, flat and unvarnished. “You needed to hear him lie. You needed to see him as he was.”
Did I? Everyone was telling me what I should be hearing, what I should be thinking, what I shouldn’t dare do. It didn’t change the inside of me. It didn’t stop me from wanting to fix things, or change things, or do something, anything, to stop things from going to hell.
“But now what?” I probed. “Lexi can’t return home—you won’t let him cross the gates with an amulet. Unless you’d let me…” My voice trailed off, because Trowbridge had lowered his head. “You can’t,” I said to the top of his dreads. “The pack has seen him steal from you. You can’t let that go without doing something. What are you going to do? If you hurt him, Trowbridge. If you kill him anyway—”
“Hasn’t he hurt you enough?” His chin lifted. “Can’t you see he’s no good?” That’s what his expression asked.
I chewed the skin on the inside of my mouth rather than answer either question.
Trowbridge shook his head in silent frustration—man-style—ear cocked toward the ceiling, eyes downcast and hooded, mouth thinned. “You can drive me right up the wall and back again.” He exhaled, long, slow, measured. Then he cautiously reached to touch my hair—just lightly, not quite a stroke, or a pat—as if he just wanted to make sure this time he could without me biting.
His voice was regret-heavy and sincere. “I promise you that I won’t kill him.”
There must be a special on promises today.
It should have been enough. I should have thrown myself into his arms right then, smothering his hairy cheeks with thank-you kisses. But there was something about the way his expression momentarily darkened after he’d made that vow, as if my happiness were something sharp sticking him in the ribs.
“Tink,” he said softly.
Damn you. Don’t you dare look like the weight of the world is on your shoulders.
“I haven’t slept for days. Or bathed for a week. Let me get some rest, and then I’ll think up something.”
There were blue shadows under his eyes to rival Lexi’s. “Will my brother be all right?”
“He’s locked in a room. No one will enter without my consent.”
Is there a loophole in that?
“Come upstairs with me. Keep me company,” he coaxed, his faint, hopeful smile half hidden by his heavy beard. “Promise me that for the next ten minutes you won’t worry and you won’t think. At least give me that.”
I let him pull me to my feet and gently tug me down the hall. At the living room’s threshold he paused. He lifted his chin in the direction of Harry, who stood by the open bay windows. “Do you still have contacts with people inside the NAW?”
Harry pruned his mouth. “I know one that could be bought.”
“Tell him there’s ten thousand dollars in it if he gives you a heads-up about any movement from the NAW.”
“He’ll want more,” warned Harry.
A sour look fouled Trowbridge’s face. “Of course he will.”
Anu shot out of her chair as he pulled me toward the stairs. Biggs had given her the shirt right off his back and her legs looked dainty and trim beneath its hem.
“Verstaler,” the Alpha of Creemore murmured. Lexi’s daughter broke into a brilliant smile and fell in behind us.
I balked. “Sharing a bedroom with her falls into the ‘In Your Dreams’ category.”
“Kid, I’m too tired to dream.” His fingers bit into my wrist as I stumbled on the first stair and again on the third. On the fourth step, he slid me a glance—a slant of Trowbridge blue through sooty lashes.
Your eyes are the only thing I still recognize of you, wild man.
His grip gentled. I knew that if I truly wanted, all I needed to do was slip my hand free of the manacle of his fingers. When I didn’t, his expression lightened—I hadn’t even realized he’d been worried—then he gave me an almost imperceptible nod and put his foot on the fifth riser. That’s how I followed him up the staircase, always lagging a step behind, my legs of jelly trying to keep up with his long muscular ones, a little Raha’ell breathing down my neck. Is this going to be my place now? One step behind the Alpha with another bitch at my heels?
Daylight streaked through the dirty window on the landing.
One step behind inevitably led to two steps behind.
I can’t do that.
“You’re thinking again,” he muttered as if he read my mind.
Yes. I was. Fate had propelled us willy-nilly to this point. And that was a problem. Because I suddenly didn’t know if I wanted to go or I wanted to stay. Whether I needed to be with him or needed to leave him. He came with so many problems. A pack. A hatred for my brother … Let’s not forget that “Fae shit” attitude.
We crested to the second floor. A layer of grit marred the soft golden gleam of the old oak floors. And the air—it smelled dead up here, too. Under Mannus’s squalid scent layer, there were faint signatures of lives lived before his tenure. The Trowbridge family had once slept here. Lived. Fought. Loved. And died.
Yes, I could smell their stale blood, too.
Despite that, my Were’s tail started to thump. She recognized a familiar scent, faded now, and mixed with other, less wonderful things. But she’d been searching for something to ease the growing anxiety inside her, and now, here in this dark passageway, she’d finally found it. There—coming from the bedroom to our right—Trowbridge’s old scent, so faint it was hard to catch, mixed with the scent of his dead wife, Candy. Mortal-me faltered. He’d called me by her name once. Did he still love her? A muscle moved in his cheek as he towed me past that door, but he kept his eyelids lowered, shielding me from whatever grief his gaze might reveal.
At the third bedroom, he said something in Merenwynian to my niece. She gave him melting eyes, a hard thing to accomplish when your irises are such a pallid green, but heaved a heavy sigh, and walked over to the bed. “Good night,” he said in English. She sank down on the mattress, all woebegone, as he firmly shut the door.
My Were’s tail thumped against my tailbone: happy, happy, happy. He’s all ours.
But mortal-me? Not so happy. I was one of the following: angry, heart-bruised, or confused.
When in doubt, opt for anger.
Chapter Twenty
The master bedroom was a corner room, one door down the hall, dominated by a king-sized bed. The room had been frozen in time, its hour hand unmoving beyond the night Mannus lost both his empire and his head. The pale green sheets were still twisted from the activities of its last occupants; a dark sage comforter was kicked to the floor. Mannus’s scent lingered—a corrosive layer over older, half-buried ones.
Trowbridge’s hold slackened on my wrist, and I pulled free, pivoting in place, sniffing delicately. Ah—there. It was little more than a thin thread of woodland wafting from the easy chair in the corner—but it was there, part of the olfactory composition of the room. This cozy room with its fussy wallpaper also smelled faintly of Trowbridge’s father and his mother.
A muscle tensed in the current Alpha’s jaw as he stared down his nose at a pair of jeans lying in a discarded puddle on the floor between the massive bed and the doorway. At the sight of those abandoned Lees, my stomach roiled. Was it always going to be like this? I wondered, curving my arm around my belly. I’d run into a Mannus memento and find myself wanting to hurl as I remembered the night when my aunt’s mate turned me into a whimpering pile of woe?
I’d rather stay mad than feel small and lost.
Trowbridge hissed through his teeth and strode over to open the windows. The first double-hung resisted, and he said something harsh and sharp under his breath in my mother’s tongue as he tried to force it up without breaking it. “Shit!” he cursed, slamming the he
el of his palm on the sash. Success. The window screeched upward, and cold fresh air poured through the opening.
He braced his arms on the windowsill and bent to stick his head outside. The man’s too thin. The skin over his taut belly pleated as he sucked in a deep breath. “Your brother said a lot of stuff downstairs,” he said gruffly. “Meant to destroy whatever we have going between us. Don’t let him.”
I hooded my eyes. Another don’t.
He half turned and froze—just like that—twisted at the hips, his mouth a little open, ugly hair brushing his sharp cheekbones. “I used to dream of you. Looking like you do right now.”
My heart stopped for a beat, then picked up.
He said slowly, “For nine years, I had the same dream. I stood buck naked in the Pool of Life. You stood under the apple tree.”
My breath caught. “It was a cherry tree.”
You died. Every night you dived under the water and never came back up.
“The nightmares started petering out this year,” he said tautly. “I haven’t had one in a month.”
But I dreamt of you the other night, I almost protested. Then I thought of how a single day in this realm equaled many in Merenwyn, and remembered how the dreams always ended—with arrows raining down on the pond.
Yes. For both of us they were nightmares.
A light flickered in his eyes. “We always—”
“Argued.”
I looked down at my blistered sooty fingers. Silence stretched. When I glanced up, I caught him staring at me moodily. The front of his pants was tented. He blinked then his features rearranged themselves back into his new default expression. Broody Alpha with a touch of Neanderthal.
“Yes,” he said, adjusting his jeans. “We always fought.”
“But the dreams stopped. Maybe that’s the problem with fairy tales in the real world,” I said quietly. “Sometimes the princess doesn’t get the right frog, and sometimes the prince is having too much fun slaying dragons to come back home.”
Irritation thinned his mouth. “You know why I didn’t accept your brother’s first offer.”
“Right. Obligations to your Raha’ell and all that.” Then I cocked my head. “You just vowed to this pack that I would stay here forever. Knowing that they tried to kill me.”
“Yes, I did,” he said flatly.
“What if I don’t want to play housemother to a bunch of murderous wolves?”
“Well, that’s the thing about vows,” he said, his tone hardening. “Sometimes other people can make them for you.”
To bring up the mate issue so casually. My cheeks heated as I searched for a good comeback. There wasn’t one. Instead, I studied his body and face, searching for ammunition. Some men were meant to walk around barefooted and shirtless. He was one of them.
So I said, “I hate your hair.”
“I’ll add that to my list,” he drawled.
Fraud, I thought. He was shooting for cool and detached but his frustration was evident in the glitter of his eyes and the flush across his upper chest. It had sharpened his scent, too—if his had shape and form, it would be curling into a fly swatter.
He blew air through his teeth and muttered, “No one can push my buttons like you.” Then he jerked his chin at my swollen hand. “Can’t Merry fix that?”
That would be a “yes,” except Merry hadn’t offered.
“I’ll heal on my own,” I told My One True Thing.
“Hmph,” he replied.
But I heard him mutter, “Stubborn as a mule,” before he set to a bit of energetic housecleaning. He tore the sheets off the bed, wadded them into a ball, and tossed them through the window without so much as a heads-up. A second later, the jeans went sailing after them. From the side table, he grabbed a book, a mug, and a yellowed newspaper. Those were pitched, too, with more force than required—the I ♥ CREEMORE mug bounced along the roof of the portico before it fell to hit the walkway with a sharp crack.
I stalked over to the bedroom chair and picked up the woman’s blouse that had been left draped over its arm. My aunt Lou had worn one like it—I frowned. Was it this shirt? If so, remnants of my lying aunt could go with the detritus of his land-obsessed uncle. “Here, chuck this, too,” I told Mr. Clean, tossing it to him.
He caught the shirt, balled it, and made a free throw. “So, this place Threall, it exists? The fog, the big motherfucking trees, and all the lights in the sky?”
“Not lights, soul balls.” I ruthlessly banged the seat cushion free of dust and then collapsed into the chair, curling my legs under my ass. “Yes, Threall definitely exists.”
Evidently, the correct answer for that would have been “no.”
Grim-faced, he strode to the bathroom, where he continued his ruthless eradication of all things Mannus. Cabinets were emptied, shelves ransacked. When he was finished, he’d filled an entire drawer with rejected personal-care items. He exited with it balanced on his hip. For a second he stood there—Suzie Homemaker in blue jeans and a beard—eyes choosing his next target. Aha. The cherrywood dresser. One quick swipe of his forearm swept all the surface litter—a beer bottle, a stack of road maps, another mug, and probably an inch of dust—on top of the now brimming drawer, before he padded barefoot over to the windows for another purge.
Good-bye, Mannus. The new Alpha shook the contents of the drawer outside.
Outside someone said, “What the hell—”
“It’s the Alpha,” answered another.
Trowbridge stuck his head out the window. “Hey, you. What’s your name?”
“Jeff,” came the answer.
“Tell Harry I want all this shit out of here in the next ten minutes. And Jeff? I want the downstairs scrubbed down right away. Also get him to send someone for a few of those candles that smell good, too. Something with sweetness to it like those flowers in the—”
He scowled and said, “Forget it. Get something spicy.”
“On it,” I heard Jeff reply.
Trowbridge moved to the closet. “The Raha’ells say that a trained mystwalker is the ultimate weapon. They can destroy people just by tapping into their dreams.” Hangers screeched then he stalked past me, his arms full of clothing.
“You think I’m a loaded weapon?”
“To the right guy, you’re kryptonite,” he muttered, dropping his armload outside. Someone said, “Ow!”, but Trowbridge was obviously feeling all kinds of honey badger—without any apology he returned to the closet and crouched to investigate the bottom of it. “So you’ve gone to Threall, where you’ve ‘thumbed through people’s memories like they were the yellow pages,’” he said. Viewed from the back, his dreads were an awesome mess—dusty and grizzled, sun damaged and discolored. Quite a bit of gray in them, too.
What would I do with such an old man as you?
“I’ve visited it twice.” I blew on my tender palm, hoping to cool some of its burning heat. The whole damn room felt hot, the air heavy and potent. “The first time right before I pulled you out of that strip bar.”
He twisted on his heels, a loafer in his hand. “You shot me in that strip bar, and I pulled you out of it before we both got thrown in jail.” A missile of brown leather went whistling past me and disappeared through the open window, without even grazing the sash. “And the second time?”
“After Knox used his blade.”
His mouth turned into a forbidding slash. “Why did you go there?”
“I don’t know. I just landed there.”
“You used to think about Threall sometimes—in those dreams we shared. I’d get flashes of a field. Big trees and lots of fog.” He sent a quick sideways glance in my direction. “You worried about the place. That it would get its hooks into you and you’d never return home.”
“Yes.” He remembered that, at least.
“But this time, you came back.”
“I did.” Emotions that I thought I’d quelled started to bubble inside me. For instance, I couldn’t seem to keep my attention from fl
itting to his body. No man should look that good balanced on the back of his heels. In Trowbridge’s case, the position only served to emphasize the swell of his shoulder, the tautness of his belly, the solid strength of his thighs. My gaze bounced from all those landscape delights and then settled on the curve of his ass.
Goddess, buns of steel.
I looked up and found him watching me, a corner of his mouth quirked.
Annoying. I feigned a deep interest in his mother’s decorative touches. There was ample evidence of her love of needlecrafts—a cross-stitched sampler on the wall (FAMILIES ARE FOREVER), a Log Cabin quilt folded over the quilt rack, a scattering of crocheted pillows. I rescued one that someone had dumped on the floor by my chair and gave it a good shake to rid it of dust mites before I hugged it to my chest, hoping it would hide the fact that my nipples were poking through my T-shirt.
He growled something unintelligible—I swear I don’t know if it was jumbled English or mumbled Merenwynian—before he headed for the bathroom. There he studied his reflection for a long, long time (eight to twelve seconds—depending on whether I started counting the moment his brows drew together in a WTF or after he’d placed both palms on the counter and leaned into the mirror for a closer inspection).
Don’t they have mirrors in Merenwyn?
“Jeezus,” he finally muttered, raking his fingers through his graying beard. Grimacing, he bent to open the cabinet’s bottom drawer. “So did you rummage through my memories? Plant anything in my head you need to tell me about?”
“No,” I said, truly affronted. “I’d never do that.”
He pawed through the hair rollers and brushes, until he found a pair of scissors and a set of hair clippers. “But you used your mystwalking talent to summon me at night to that damn Pool of Life—”
“I didn’t summon you,” I snapped. “We were both taken there every night. Blame Karma—”
“That bloody place was so damn—”
“Cold,” I said, thinking of the chill in the air.
“I was thinking wet, but you’re right; it was cold.” He plugged the clippers into the wall, and tested them. “You always stood under a tree, talking to me about books and stuff. Arguing with me. Both of us knowing what was going to happen.” Flicking off the electric shears, he asked, “Why’d you keep doing that to us?”