by Leigh Evans
Holding Larry’s sign over his head, he plowed right into the scummy pond, each thundering step sending water spraying up.
Fool. My hailstorm could find him in the water.
“To him,” I cried.
I should have said it silently. Because that’s when the bastard played dirty—chopping at the water with the side of his Alpha paw, effectively blinding me with a spray of cold, stinking pond water. Merry received a wave of water and shuddered hard.
“Don’t freak out,” I hissed to her. “There’s no iron in it.”
But my usually fearless friend scuttled upward, taking herself up, up, up away from the evil water. Her chain shortened until it was uncomfortably tight around my throat.
Whitlock kept coming at us, smacking the water hard, sending sheets of scum into my face. Blinded, I twisted away from him and we retreated, heading deeper into the pond. It was a desperate, sloshing retreat, made complicated by the fact that my disembodied magic was looking for a target, and not finding it. Bottom line, if I was blind, so was she. And since my magic couldn’t find the intended target—she swooped back home to me, dropping pieces of gravel in her agitation as she did. Overloaded, she whirled around me in cloud of chattering stones. Directionless. Volatile. Freaking out, Fae-style.
“Bitch, surrender to me!” shouted Whitlock as he fired his gun. Something very hot, and very angry, streaked past my bicep, stopping just long enough to take a searing nip before it zinged through the screen of my cyclone of gravel.
“Do you need me?” called Liam.
“I can handle one little bitch,” shouted Whitlock. “I speak to your wolf, Hedi Peacock. Come to your Alpha. Lay down your arms.”
I would have told him to go fuck himself but I was too busy choking. Mindless with terror, Merry had tightened to a strangling noose around my throat. Back I went, nails tearing at my skin, trying to loosen her stranglehold. Deeper I staggered, until my feet could barely touch the bottom. There wasn’t much I could do, but stay en pointe, keep my balance with a one-arm dog paddle, and hunker over my amulet, offering my back to my enemy.
If Whitlock had known how close I came to blacking out, he would never have ceased his splash efforts. But he couldn’t see that, could he? A tornado of stone still spun around me.
I don’t know how long it took me to figure out that the deluge had stopped—possibly two seconds longer than it took Merry. She’d loosened enough for me to inhale.
I really thought I had a chance. You know? I really did.
But first, I needed to get Merry out of the water and beyond Whitlock’s reach.
“I’m going to throw you to safety,” I told her as I pulled her over my head. I dried my eyes as best I could with a forearm, and won my Fae and me partial sight.
“Make a hole!” I screamed to my Fae. My magic—still feeding off my emotions—puzzled over that command. “I need to see!”
Aha.
She reshaped her cloud to create a small opening. Through the gap, I focused on the massive willow growing at the edge of the pond. I made a short prayer that for once my aim would be true, did a quick high-speed flutter kick that raised me in the water, and threw.
Make it, make it … Oh Goddess, I threw too short, she’ll never make it. She hit the crotch of one of the limbs that stretched out over the pond, with a hollow thunk, then free-fell for the count of two, bounced, slid for another terrifying half second, until a vine caught one of the slippery, trailing yellow branches.
She held, her Fae gold chain swaying.
Safe.
Now, to summon up a cyclone of dirty water that will drown Whitlock.
My back was turned. I didn’t even see the bolt coming.
* * *
Pain. Hot, searing, stabbing. It tore through my right shoulder. So unexpected, so awful.
“Iron!” screamed my Fae. I heard her, as if she were me, wailing, loud and high inside the confines of my own head. Then with one broken sob, she gave up her outward shape—no longer a cyclone protecting me, no longer a tornado promising doom … no longer a tangible thing.
She was misery. She was fear.
Stones started to fall, pitter-patter, into the water, onto me. Pea gravel pinged, on my face, on my nose, cutting into my soft lower lip. I should lift my arm to cover my face, I thought groggily. I could taste the essence of sweet peas. I could taste me.
Semimortal, semi-Fae.
Stunned, I looked down. The rounded nub of an iron bolt protruded below my collarbone. The tip of it, having pierced through shirt and flesh, was red-glazed. My head turned, very slowly, because even the slightest tensing of neck muscle yielded horrifying misery. The part sticking out of my back was out of comfortable vision range. But between eyeblinks, I could just see it—a long stick of metal, coated with iron—quivering with each of my panicked breaths.
Not again.
I’m not a voodoo doll. People have to stop sticking things into me.
My knees gave out. One moment I was standing, safe inside the eye of a cyclone of gravel, thinking myself protected, and the next? I was part of the water, my legs floating, my arms nerveless. My face skyward, pointed ears covered by the awful water, tasting foulness as water surged into my mouth.
Oh Goddess, I’m going to drown.
Again.
The iron’s poison had felt like fire on contact, but now its tentacles were hurting me with a different type of burn—numbing, biting cold. And the weariness.
Not a bad way to go, if one considered it.
My body weightless. The pain receding to a dull constant throb coming from my shoulder. Breathing took concentration. Thinking took more. The water lapped at the seam of my mouth, searching for entry.
My wolf let out a long mournful howl inside me.
Mate, she called for Trowbridge.
“Pull her out of there,” Whitlock said.
* * *
Liam stood over me, wet to his waist. I floated, eyes slit. Waves of cold streamed from him. Iron vested, iron hearted, he studied me, without his habitual half smile, or even the spark of curiosity. His attitude was one of resignation. I was the bump that refused to stay flattened; the button that kept flying loose.
It would have been equally practical to seize my floating arm or snag my collar. They were right there, for pity’s sake. Even my hair would have made a better handhold. But his focus traveled to the bolt that stuck out of me, and quivered with each one of my ragged breaths.
Don’t do it. My gut twisted in fear.
Without expression, he wrapped his hand around that slippery rod, and then he turned—without even a flicker of glance downward to his limp prize—and began to walk. Agony … agony. Dragging me toward shore with each churning step. I screamed. Water rushed up my nostrils and clogged my throat.
Choking. Thrashing. Crying. I spluttered and kicked, trying to turn my head, unmindful of anything but keeping alive to the next second and the one after that. No wily catfish was I; no great marlin capable of an inspiring leap. I was the sunfish wiggling on the curved hook, tail flapping. Truly caught. Weakly struggling, being pulled willy-nilly to a place I knew I did not want to go.
It’s tearing me apart. My shoulder will break in two.
“Let me go!” I screamed. “Stop!”
Liam dredged me through the slime of decomposing weeds, dragged me choking through the stiff and broken stalks of the lone clump of bulrushes. All of it was awful, but nothing compared to the great rasping horror when he reached the edge of the water and finally … let go of the bolt.
“You want her any farther, you get her,” he told Whitlock.
Maybe Whitlock planned to pluck me free a few chokes before the last sayonara. Perhaps, once I’d choked enough, he’d have reached for me and dragged me out of the water, and up the slope.
Whatever. He didn’t spring to my rescue.
I sank, jaw first, into the soft shoreline muck. Eating mud? It’s worse than swallowing water. It’s thicker; it’s slimier. You can�
�t expel it with a splutter. The mud creeps up your nasal passages, it slides past your teeth. And as it does, your panic level shoots upward faster than the red needle on a pressure cooker.
I can’t cough. I can’t lift myself!
Goddess, help me!
If ever there are moments in your life when you see the value of your existence in absolute clarity, this instant must count among them—that split second during which you are no longer a thinking person or a calculating entity; you are the animal on the brink of death. One who either wants to live or wants to die.
And by glory be—not to be redundant on this point—I wanted to live. I’d come all this way, never giving up, always ruled by two principles. Don’t die. Find your family. Well, by Goddess, I’d found and lost a family again. At least I could stick to point one.
Let go of the pain.
Ignore it.
Choose to live.
Stubborn desire knocked the stupor right out of me. My neck may have felt weak, and my head heavier than a cast-iron pot filled with cement, but I lifted my chin free from that soft bed of stinking sludge. As soon as I did, brown water filled in the depression left by my face.
It was a powerful motivator.
What did one monkey say to the other? Roll over. Ordinarily that meant using my right arm, but that particular appendage was full of pins and needles. Everything’s connected, right? The arm bone’s connected to the shoulder bone. And the area south of my clavicle had a bolt rimmed with iron sticking out of it.
Before you drop your head, heave yourself over to your back.
My flopping arm was nearly useless in terms of bracing, so I threw it behind my back, and did what comes so naturally to others—I used my head. In this case, as a dead weight that helped my entire body roll over to its side.
Good enough. At least I could breathe. And feel throbbing, stabbing, heated agony radiating from my shoulder. My arm felt numb. Useless.
Breathing an exquisite self-torture.
Don’t look at the bolt.
The hot knifing sensation in my shoulder had spread until my entire body pulsed with it. If you’re hurting, you’re still in the game. I tried to sit up. Couldn’t because my spine had dissolved. I wished for Trowbridge. For Merry. For Cordelia. For Harry and …
Get up. No one’s going to rescue you this time.
My world no longer included a six-foot mother hen who’d wade into the disgusting pool of stagnation, muttering under her breath about “Bridge’s bloody girl.” Cordelia would never complain again. Or fuss over my clothing, or tell me to eat some protein.
He killed her. He’s going to do the same to you.
Try harder.
Too difficult to coordinate raising myself to my knees. Then crawl like a commando if you must. I bent my left arm—Goddess, it weighs so much—and lifted it with the clumsy, fixed concentration of a baby attempting her first feat of self-locomotion. I won progress—one short foot, before it sank deep in the sludge.
Don’t think about it.
Shoulder screaming, pointed toes digging into the mud, belly catching on every sharp stalk there was, I used that arm like an anchor, and dragged myself to it.
So hard.
My shoulder screamed as I repeated the whole process again. Heave. Pull. Whimper. Drag. I lost count of how many reps it took to pull myself out of that water. But I did it.
* * *
They were side by side, two sportsmen standing over their catch. Whitlock wore a pair of brown slip-on loafers—the type that vaguely resemble boat shoes. Liam wore the same motorcycle boots as his club—square-toed, black leather.
I’d lost my shoes.
My face was half buried in the crook of my left arm, and I was near blinded by the muddy rattails of my own hair, but I could see them out of the corner of my right eye. Two shadows hazed by the vapor of my breath.
Whitlock swore. A long string featuring cocks doing things that probably weren’t physically possible, then he said, “Where’s the other girl?”
Liam’s voice sounded far away, and not at all distressed. “She took off through the fields.”
“Well, don’t stand there—go get her.”
Anu, have some part of me in you. Run.
“She won’t get far,” said Liam. “I’ll scoop her up when I’m ready to leave.”
Whitlock’s tone sharpened. “She’s a wolf; she can run fast, and the highway’s just over there. I don’t want to take a chance of her getting away.”
“She won’t head toward civilization, and she won’t get away. At least not from me,” he said with absolute certainty. “I will find her.”
“There are already too many loose ends. She’ll go to the first human—”
“I said she won’t,” said Liam. “You know what a good hunter I am.”
Whitlock let out a hiss, then said, “I keep getting fucked by the world.” I saw his foot lift. No! Before I could brace myself, he used the toe of his slip-on to heave me onto my side again. My back bowed into an anguished arch as tender abused tissue and muscle—and for all I knew, tendons too—screamed against the friction of the bolt. The world went gray, and all the shapes around me became wavering shapes.
Vertical ghosts, floating ghosts.
“You stupid bitch,” said Whitlock, prodding me again with his foot. “The next time I tell him to shoot, it won’t be soft tissue. The next time, I’ll tell him to hit bone.”
“Something to look forward to,” I said, my words slurring.
“Shut up,” snapped Whitlock. “Liam, go get the amulet.”
“I don’t climb trees,” replied Liam, intent on wiping his boot heel clean on the grass. “And the more distance you keep between yourself and a Fae amulet the safer you are.”
“What are you? An authority on fairies?” Whitlock stalked over to what was left of the Were we’d pummeled with our hailstorm of gravel. He bent, picked up the weapon, then returned to his muddy catch. He stood over me. The gun hung from his grip. Black. Square looking. Lethal.
Why is it that whenever someone has a gun, they feel compelled to point it at me? Do I wear a sticker? Shoot me, I’m a deer.
“You are a pain in the ass,” he said. “Frickin’ fairies. I hate them.” There was a perfectly round hole at the end of the perfectly round barrel. So dark. So lethal. You had to wonder if you’d see the bullet coming.
The hurting will stop then.
Whitlock’s toe tapped in irritation. “You told me you needed the song, well, we played the song. Where is your magic?” he shouted. To emphasize my sad lacking in all things Fae, he toed me again. “Why can’t you call the portal?”
So many questions. Where was my magic? Where was the portal? Before I had a chance to inhale, the gun did a slow menacing bob—the type of slow cocking motion a guy makes with his thumb and index finger. My stomach did an upward climb. The gesture looks dumb when some suit does it. It earns gravity when the scary guy actually has a weapon in his paw.
“This is not a game,” he said in a low savage voice.
No shit.
When it’s down to microseconds, you notice certain things in perfect clarity. The shape of a knuckle, and the three deep lines bridging it, and the blood flow or lack of it. His finger tightened on the trigger.
He’s going to shoot me now.
“Where is the portal?” he said in a low forced voice.
Wherever the passage was, it wasn’t over the pond. The song had been sung. The air would have stirred instead of whispered. My bite mark should have reacted to the magic, shouldn’t it have? Before I could form a lie, Whitlock grabbed my shirt, and hauled me up—bolt bobbing and grinding through skin and tendon and bone.
I screamed, the high shrill sound of a creature being tortured.
“You’re dead, do you understand?”
Sweet merciful Goddess, why? What have I done?
Whitlock gave me another shake then said in disgust, “She doesn’t know where it is.” He released me, and I slum
ped, my elbow raised to block another blow. “Dammit! Dammit all to hell!”
Don’t sob. Don’t throw up.
Liam walked to the edge of the pond, and stared up at Merry. His crossbow lay balanced over his arm. “Do you want me to kill her?”
“No. Not now. She’s Bridge’s mate and I need him alive for the Great Council. I need him to take the heat for sun potion. It will be over for her as soon as they serve their justice on him. You’ll know when it happens. She’ll start to fade and die within a few minutes.” He tucked the gun in the back of his pants and jerked his coat to cover it. “Fairies. Freakin’ fairies.”
“What do you want me to do with her?”
Frustration laced Whitlock’s voice. “Just take her somewhere and keep her stashed until…” He glanced at his watch and did some rapid calculations. “One o’clock.”
“Then what?”
“Find a place to bury her.”
* * *
Whitlock went away. He was there right beside me by the pond. And then his loafers moved and he was not there. I wanted to follow him. Because where he went, so did Trowbridge.
But Liam reached for the back of my shirt, and started dragging me up the hill, with his arm outstretched as if I was a garbage bag leaking sour stuff. The bolt grated at my shoulder. Within a few feet, the slow cold drain of his iron vest numbed the worst pain. I was Scott in the Antarctic, slowly freezing to death. My eyes kept closing, my heart slowing.
Fight to stay awake.
I blinked against sleep’s seductive pull—but could only scrounge up a slow droop of my eyelids. Liam and his iron were too close.
Whitlock said, “I’ll need your help. I want to move Trowbridge to my truck.” I opened my eyes, tried to pin the voice to location, but everything was blurring. Liam didn’t drop me and leap to Whitlock’s call. Stubbornly, he dragged his burden—the inconvenient Fae—all the way to Ryan’s SUV. He opened the door, then swung me face-first onto the backseat.