by Leigh Evans
“Do you honestly think I had any control over those dreams? That I liked standing there, watching you—”
“Learn how to swim the hard way,” he said grimly, picking up the scissors. “Remind me never to really piss you off.” He chose a dreadlock, hesitated long enough for me to worry that he might actually think he looked good with all that Rastafarian nonsense, then set the blades to it. Snip. One fourteen-inch length of twisted hair fell to the floor.
Downstairs in the kitchen, the League of Extraordinary Bitches were filling their pails with hot water in the kitchen while discussing us in voices pitched low. “How much do you really remember of the dreams?”
He scowled at me in the mirror, scissors poised. “Well, the diving into the freezing pond was hard to forget. The rest is just bits and pieces.” Snip. “Most of it was gone by daylight.”
So it was forgotten. The minutes—sometimes a full hour—before the arrows flew. The intimacy of just him and me, talking and arguing. Along with the tenderness sandwiched in between the fear, and the tears.
Then we were to start as strangers again.
An Alpha and a half-breed Fae.
Impossible.
He lifted a dread from the back of his head. Pulled it tight then went for the chop. And so it went. Thirty-two more snips and he was near shorn, heaps of hair littering the floor by his callused heels like small dead rodents. “But I do remember a few things,” he murmured as he considered his Grizzly Adams beard.
“What?” I flexed my fingers, wondering how long it would be before I could actually fold them into a clumsy fist.
“You spend too much time overthinking the little stuff. And when the chips are down, you run on courage and instinct.”
Startled, I looked up and found his reflected gaze fixed on me.
“I missed your dreams last month,” he said softly.
“How could you? You kept dying at the end of them.”
“Did you ever see me really die? Did you ever see an arrow get me?”
I thought back. “No.”
“All I had to do to end the dream was dive into the water. I knew that. I was never in true mortal danger.” His gaze was bleak. “Please don’t go to Threall again.”
My eyes burned. I’m not going to cry. I heard a lawn mower start up and turned my head toward the sound and found peace outside the window in the hypnotic movement of the swaying trees. After a bit, I whispered, “I’ll try.”
“Shit,” Trowbridge cursed. “Got myself.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back on the chair. A couple minutes later, I heard the bath curtains being pulled, the taps turned, the beat of water pattering on an acrylic tub.
I imagined him slipping off the jeans. Standing under the spray.
Soaping his chest.
Don’t think. Don’t feel.
Back in May, he’d asked, “Promise me that I’ll never come out of a shower and discover you gone again.” I told him that I wouldn’t, and I’d made him make the same pledge. Because we were equals. That’s what I thought back then, when I’d believed that taking a blind leap into love required nothing more than sucking up your courage and following your instincts.
I hadn’t tallied up the negatives. The possibilities. The sheer cruelty of Karma.
There wasn’t six years between us anymore. There was a daunting fifteen. No matter how fast I tried to speed-mature, I’d never match him in experience. I’d always be too young, too soft, too fluffy. The girl with the traitor brother. The Were with the Fae inside her.
Not a battle-hard Raha’ell.
But still, I had given my word, hadn’t I? That afternoon in the courtyard?
I opened my eyes and listlessly watched the young Were mowing the grass come to the end of the lawn and turn. He had light brown hair. Maybe he’d gone to school with me. He looked about the right age.
I still couldn’t remember his name.
* * *
Likely, I should never have given in to the urge to rest my eyes when I felt worn down to gristle and bone. Nor should I have dug myself deeper into the comfort of the chair. But I forgot, didn’t I? There were two other Fae in the house. Both as tired as me.
I opened my eyes in Anu’s dream and discovered that fear is a thing with a threshold that moves ever higher. We were back inside the pen within the pen. The moon was heavy and full in the night sky. Wolves slunk along the dark shadows near the forest’s edge.
Anu looked through the bars to the grandstands. Lexi was there, standing on the platform to the right of the seating, his bowler worn at a jaunty angle, his body canted toward the row of spectators.
Her terror flooded into me, drying my mouth.
Beside Lexi’s elbow was a lever that was attached to a hook and a rope strung between the stands and the ceiling of her cage. She understood that when the Shadow pulled on that lever, the hook would open, the rope would fall lax, and the walls of her pen would collapse.
No longer would she be the prey safely caged.
Lexi barely glanced at her. His attention was fixed on the tall man with the long face who sat in the choicest seat. The Black Mage’s vanity extended to his clothing. It was all funereal black, embellished with silver buttons, and lacing at his throat. And when he smiled—both ends of his long mouth turned up, his teeth bright white, his eyes wicked and sly—Anu’s grip on the bars tightened.
“Dearest Mother of the Goddesses, hear my final prayer,” she whispered.
The ladies in the stand tittered when the mage lifted his hand and held it in the air.
“Forgive me for—”
A noise behind us. Another surge of acid-mouthed terror.
I heard her thoughts, as clearly as my own. Should she close her eyes, and let the end come? No. Not she. Anu turned her head, but slowly, so as not to frighten the beast.
She expelled her breath. He was not in the throes of his moon-change.
He was in man form, with no distortion of limb or jaw. A dark beard covered his lower jaw, ropes of his black hair hung down to his waist. He stood swaying, and then he cocked his head, eyes narrowed on hers. “How fast can you run?”
“Like a deer,” she whispered.
“Then stay close behind me,” said the man. “There will be an opportunity.”
The Black Mage waggled his hand at my brother, coyly, extending the moment of truth.
“We will live through today and tomorrow,” said the beast.
“How do you know?” she dared to ask.
My Trowbridge gave her a feral grin. “Because I’m the Son of Lukynae.”
Chapter Twenty-one
I woke up with a gasp.
It was quiet in the Alpha of Creemore’s bedroom. Too quiet. Technically, if you’ve got any Were in you at all there is no such thing as near silence. You register the hum of the appliances over the sound of the lawn mower chewing up the grass, the discreet vibration of the heater under the chatter of the women working in the kitchen below. But if you stay motionless and let the outside world fall away, so it’s just you, and this room, and this man whom you thought you knew but didn’t … You might perceive the absence of breath. You might notice, as you stand there, feeling somehow naked again, that the person with whom you shared the bedroom has stopped breathing. That he is holding his breath, so that he can measure the hard hammer of your heart in your chest.
Without lifting my gaze, I knew he stood at the door’s threshold, watching me.
I can’t look at him. I really can’t.
“What is it, Tink?”
I wanted to howl. I wanted to pound my fists.
Feathers protested as I hugged the pillow to my chest. “I was in Anu’s nightmare … She was in a cage set inside a field. There were grandstands and wolves watching from under the trees.”
“You always going to walk through people’s dreams? If I go to sleep right now, are you going to do a drive-by?”
“I don’t know,” I said bleakly, staring at the floor. “She was so
terrified of those wolves…”
A moment of silence, then he said, “Of course she was—she was scheduled as prey for the night’s entertainment. The kid wouldn’t have stood a chance against a pack of half-starved wolves.”
“Why didn’t she change into her wolf? Why didn’t you?”
He drew in a long breath and released it. “I could hold my transformation off. Not forever—no wolf can do that—but long enough for me to figure out the lay of the land. They’d given Anu a double dose of sun potion to make sure her wolf couldn’t break through.” His tone was flat. “The kid was defenseless. She’d been raised as a Kuskador—that pack chose to submit to the Fae following the Treaty of Brelland. Most of them have been on sun potion from puberty. They’ve never met their own wolf.”
“But Anu was wolf when she came through the portal.” The horror was spreading, spreading. Like water coming through the dam. Finding crevices to widen, cracks to pry open.
“I wouldn’t let your brother give her another dose while we were on the run—I didn’t want her going through the gates with that shit in her veins. The kid went through her first transformation two hours before we made it to the portal.”
“You were there in her dream.” I’ll never be able to rid my memory of the whip marks marring his flesh. Ugly red hatch marks. Rivulets of his blood staining the backs of his naked thighs. An ache in my throat, tearing, hurting pain. “Oh Goddess.” The pillow fell as I stood. “What did I send you to? Your back was so torn up…”
“Forget it,” he said harshly. “It was just a dream.”
“No it wasn’t!” I hissed, my gaze jerking to him.
Fae Stars, look at him.
The elements that had so distracted me—the dreads, the beard, the foreign quality to him—had been mowed away by a pair of clippers, and now it was easy to appreciate again the cut of his cheekbones, the length of his long nose. He’d wrapped a towel around his hips, which made him look like one of those male models who, between stints of hawking man-perfume, filled in time alternately starving or bench-pressing fat people. Now his eyes dominated, and they glowed with a fire that wasn’t bred of an Alpha’s dominance but of a fine-edged human hatred. Deep inside them, I read a deadly, relentless loathing.
My heart sank to my belly.
“It was real,” I said, my voice hollow. “I’ve learned the difference between a dream made of fiction and one made of memories … They whipped you.”
“Not ‘they,’” he said harshly. “Say it. The Fae.”
I wanted to rock myself, I wanted to wail. “What was that place?”
“It’s called the Spectacle.” A muscle tightened in Trowbridge’s jaw. “Not every Raha’ell is shot for their pelt—the ones worth sport are brought to a field surrounded by twelve-foot walls. Less than half an acre for more than thirty wolves. Never enough food or water. When the moon is full, the Fae come to watch us tearing at each other for a share of food. To those bastards the Spectacle’s a morality play about the beast hidden within. But for us … it’s a choice of death or hunger.”
“My brother was there,” I said thinly. “And the Black Mage.” Shutting my eyes didn’t help. I kept seeing the field, those shadows slinking along the edge of the woods. “Those wolves—were they part of your pack?”
“Some of them.” Trowbridge turned, yanked an appliquéd coverlet from the quilt rack, and gave it the sniff test before he tossed it on the bed.
I shook my head. “How did you escape from that?”
He threw a pillow on the bed then bent for another. “Your brother set up an explosion that destroyed a section of the outer fence. My wolves saw freedom and went right for it, just like he intended them to. It was a bloodbath. Half of them never made it through the gap in the wall.”
“You could have been killed,” I said in horror.
And I wouldn’t have known.
“The Shadow used the diversion to lead us to another exit. When I saw what was happening, I tried to go back to lead my brothers to safety, but he pointed his hand at me, like you did downstairs at Anu, and I felt this thing, like a band of something invisible…” A look of disgust. “It felt alive. And when I tried to claw it off me, I could feel the burn of magic. It wrapped itself around my chest, binding my arms.”
Goddess, like Dawn Danvers. That’s what he meant by “Fae shit.”
“I couldn’t pull myself out of it. It was like being caught in the jaws of the wolf trap all over again.” He swallowed. “One of my pack got hit in the flank, he was dragging himself toward me … and I couldn’t go to him. I wanted to. I tried. But I couldn’t. I followed your brother out of the field like a whipped puppy on the end of a leash.” Mouth sealed, he ran his tongue over his top teeth, then gave a shrug that strove for indifference, but failed. “When the magic wore off, I almost killed him. But he kept saying, ‘You can make it up to them. I know the location of the Safe Passage. I’ll take you to it, once we get back home.’”
“I thought I was sending you to paradise. I just wanted you to live. To heal.” My voice cracked. “Not to spend nine years—”
“I did heal. I did live.” Comet trails spun around his pupils.
What was it? The faint eau de Mannus? The knowledge that I’d done to Dawn Danvers exactly what Lexi had done to him? Whatever the impetus, all I knew was that I needed to be out of that room as fast as possible. To find a place to hide, to think, to rock myself as I mourned for all those stupid happily-ever-afters that had kept me afloat for the last six months.
I spun for the door—
“Don’t.” That’s all he said. “Don’t.” Spoken so softly—not an order, but a request, maybe even a plea. And it stopped me—that faint underlying thread of “please”—right in my tracks.
The door’s glass knob cut into my palm. “I wasn’t running.”
“You sure?”
Forehead against the door, I nodded miserably. “I just need some space for a bit.”
“I’m done with that,” he growled. “No more space between you and me.”
The air stirred between us. “If you touch me,” I quavered. “I’m going to break down.”
A man-sigh. Then, softly, “I hate it when you cry.”
“I’m not crying,” I said through my teeth. Not yet, anyhow. Even if it meant locking my knees and blinking like a caution light that never was going to turn green. Don’t fold, I told myself. Hang on. Count to seventy, then turn around and face him.
Because sooner or later, I knew I had to do that.
And I would. In a minute or two.
“Forget that,” grumbled his scent. Just when dry land was virtually in sight, an invisible stream of Trowbridge yum stretched out and touched me. With delicacy, at first—a deft brush over my white knuckles, followed by a sweet “steady, girl” caress along the back of my hand. Then, ever possessive, it wound itself around my wrist, pausing to give a soothing and apologetic stroke to the bruise beginning to form on my skin. Onward it spread over my skin—fondling and touching the things it considered its possessions. “This is mine,” it said, licking the inside of my elbow. “And these are two of my most favorite things,” it crowed, as it made a quick and impertinent detour to graze my breasts.
It slid up my neck. “Remember me?” it asked.
My chin crumpled when his scent touched my cheek—tender-sweet.
“I’m walking now,” Trowbridge told me. “You don’t have to move. I’ll come to you.” And he did, crossing the distance between us faster than I could think. “All the honeyed words in the dictionary aren’t going to get us out of this mess.”
Because that’s what “this” was. A huge hodgepodge of daydreams and nightmares; sun-spun myths and gritty facts; bleeding wounds and toughened scars.
And now—thanks to the consequences of my desperate decision revealed to me in a Goddess-cursed dream—it felt like our fate was written four ways, the answers hidden within the folds of a paper fortune-teller. There were no easy choices written on
those wings of paper; instead there were symbols—a Fae, a wolf, a black walnut tree, and a twin.
I still wanted him. I couldn’t be in the same room with him without my body reacting to his. But how could he get past this? How could I?
Guilt.
It swarmed over me, biting like fire ants.
His heat warmed my back. I knew all I had to do was lean back a little, and I’d fall into his arms. But unspoken words were the Hoover Dam between us.
My One True Thing leaned into my ear and whispered, “Listen, I got over hating you.”
And with that—bang! The Hedi floodgates flew open.
“Aw shit!” He cursed as a sob broke through my control. “Don’t cry, sweetheart.”
There went my chin; there went my knees.
Trowbridge said, “Aw shit,” again, then suddenly, I was being swept into his arms and carried—a rigid, half-curled ball of sobbing woe—five paces across the floor. He paused, possibly to consider—chair or bed?—and went for the safest choice.
I cried into my hands as he sank into the easy chair and tucked me into his lap. I shuddered as he coaxed my head toward the convenient hollow below his collarbone. I sobbed into his neck when he wrapped a comforting arm around me.
The man, not the Alpha, rubbed my back. “You cry it out, okay?”
And I did, long and hard.
* * *
“I like your hair when it’s loose,” he observed, after the storm had passed. A tug from him, a wince from me, and then my hair was free of the elastic’s hold. He threaded his fingers through the uncombed mess and fanned it down on my shoulder. “I like it just like this.”
Thousands wouldn’t.
“You going to listen to me now?” When I gave a silent nod, he pressed his chin on the top of my head. “That first month in Merenwyn was so fucking hard, it would have been easier to die. I thought if I ever got my hands on you…” He stretched to reach for his mother’s crocheted pillow, then passed it to me. “Here, wipe your nose with this.”