by Leigh Evans
The payback pain was starting to make itself known. Throbbing to my heartbeat, swelling with the misery in my shoulder. “I could have saved Trowbridge,” I whispered, lifting my eyes from the rough ground. “If I’d known how to open the gates, Whitlock would have done business with us and—”
“Only until it suited him,” Cordelia whispered back. “Only as far as that. In the end, he would have destroyed you both. Men like him are—”
“Users,” I finished for her.
My heart dropped when we reached the pond. Merry should have been clinging to a thick bough hanging over the water. Merry was not. No amulet bleated red flashes of belligerence. No glint of a Fae-gold chain. “She should be right there,” I said, fear starting to crawl up from my gut again.
But she wouldn’t have stayed there, would she have? Not with the water below her. She’d have climbed through that thicket of yellow branches, moving along that serpentine limb toward the heart of the tree.
“Merry?” I called. “Where are you?”
Cordelia chewed her lip as she scanned the tree with me. She didn’t have to say anything; my imagination had already grimly leaped there. Without its summer skirt of hanging fronds, the willow was all thin whippets of drooping branches. Navigating toward the trunk, moving past the crisscrossed branches, finding a good grip—particularly when you didn’t have opposable thumbs—it would be a definite challenge.
I should sense her. Fae gold calls to me. Was the bulk of the trunk interfering? Blocking the signal? I circled the tree. No such luck.
“Hedi,” said Cordelia softly.
I turned to see her pointing to the mud slick my knees had left when Liam had dragged me up the hill. Three-quarters up the incline, just beside the gray-brown trail, stood Merry. A stick figure, with a belly flushed orange, bristling with prickly ivy, half hidden by a tuft of a small weed.
My eyes got wet because I was tired, okay?
I trudged—okay, wove—my way to her. “So, mounting a rescue attempt, huh?” As slowly as a dowager removing her gloves, she shook out the arm she’d fashioned from one length of ivy. The gold flowed, flattening the stiffly articulated ivy leaves, until her limb appeared surprisingly muscled. She left one leaf at the tip of her appendage. The end of it sharp as a needle.
I looked down at her, my fingers digging into Anu’s waist. “Pissed with me, are you?”
A blast of orange light lit her up.
“Sorry for the pond,” I said. And then because the ground was coming up to meet me, I let myself fall to one knee.
The bolt bobbed. And the ground swayed.
Kind of nauseating.
I gritted my teeth—don’t puke on Merry—as my amulet pal climbed up my thigh. Said not a word as she hooked pincer-sharp leaves into my T-shirt to clamber up to my left shoulder. I did hiss through my teeth when she grabbed one wet hank of hair and did a running walk across my collarbone. (She could have smoothed the points on her leaves before her rescue charge to the bolt site.)
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said.
She tested that whopper by resting a tendril of ivy on the bolt.
“Okay,” I said, when the urge to whimper like a little girl had passed and it was safe to unlock my jaw. “It’s exactly as bad as it looks.”
Merry picked up her chain and offered it to me. Quietly. The color inside her softening to gold. Wear me. We belong together. I dipped my chin. Hands—large, square—helped me draw Merry’s chain over my head.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
Cordelia cleared her throat. “So, do we have a plan?”
“First I’m going to rescue Trowbridge.”
“Of course.
“And then I’m going to waste them all—”
“Well, obviously,” she drawled. “Though I want to be the one to finish Liam.”
“You can kill Liam,” I said as my amulet pal reworked her vines from stick appendages to a nest of articulated gold, surrounding a belly of beautiful glowing amber. “But Whitlock’s all mine.”
“You’re very generous.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Cordelia slid a finger underneath her wig for a thoughtful scratch. “How are we going to do all this?”
I knew where Trowbridge would be in a few hours. I knew what was waiting for him. I had to be there. With evidence to prove that Whitlock wore a black hat.
“Here’s what we’ll do.” Well, listen to me. All Hedi-knows-best. I’d finally figured out how to make a plan. It begins with a simple statement. Not a hazy “I want” but a firm “I will.” Funny that I should realize that here. Life lessons, compliments of the Peach Pit.
“Biggs is going to tell us where to find Brenda Pritty.”
I looked up, searching the sky for a dark winging shape. “Liam will follow us.” I knew that in my bones. “He’s up there somewhere. We are his prey, and his anger is his hunger. He will hunt us. We’ve got to get out of here and find some secluded place where I can…” Don’t say “interrogate.” At least not now when I can see Biggs through the rear window. “Where Biggs and I can talk,” I said, resting my hip against the back end of Rachel’s truck. “I need two more things from you.”
“Name them.”
“Keep an eye on Merry’s color.” I glanced behind me, estimated the distance to the rear bumper, and allowed myself to slide ass-first toward it. “When it starts to muddy and turn brown, you take her off me, okay? Then you get Rachel to drive us as fast as possible to a stand of hardwoods. You find a tree and you put Merry on a branch. Stand guard, okay? I don’t want some raven on an amulet hunt coming tearing down from the sky.”
“Shall do, darling,” she said.
I manufactured a smile for Anu and gave her a “go sit” head wave. Once she was perched in the backseat, I turned my chin back to Cordelia.
“What’s the last thing?”
I sucked in my breath. “Catch me?”
That’s when I grabbed the bolt and jerked it free.
Chapter Seventeen
The gas needle had trembled in the red long enough. Cordelia had decreed that I needed something sweet so she’d instructed Rachel to take the exit for the next service station. In terms of quenching impulse buys, this place had it all—from sunglasses to diesel fuel, from chocolate bars to celebrity magazines, from rolls of chalky Tums to tacky T-shirts. As Rachel was the only one who’d thought to bring her credit card, she was elected to gather supplies while Cordelia pumped our gas.
I’d swum back to consciousness on the 400 Highway, somewhere after exit 85. The first thing I’d done was to cry out Trowbridge’s name; the second to ask for Merry. Once she’d been placed in my puffy hands I’d quieted. Cordelia told me they’d fed her until she’d indicated she was full. Merry had been foolishly hasty on that one. Even after her feeding, her color was one shade off burned butter. I’d slid her clumsily into the confines of my left bra cup. Nuzzled against my warm boob, she had fallen into an immediate dreamless sleep.
(Okay, I don’t know if my amulet pal dreams or not, but she didn’t move. And since I was forcing myself not to think of her twitchless nap as a coma, I was going for dreamless.)
By the time the tank was full, Trowbridge’s sister had returned to the vehicle and I’d done a quick inspection of the area below my left clavicle. The puckered scab was larger than I’d anticipated, but, then again, I had nothing to measure it against. Just how large a hole should a feathered fletch leave?
I wasn’t completely healed. Yellow fluid weeped from the site. I’m going to scar. That would make Trowbridge and me a matched pair of oddities among the Weres because wolves don’t as a rule carry mementos of past injury unless we’re talking complete amputation. A leg hanging by a thread? No problem. Just jam it back in place and ride out the healing.
Trowbridge really likes my skin. He’s always stroking it as if it’s fine silk. Now it’s damaged. I’m no longer perfect.
Rachel handed me the shopping bag, and turned the key
. “Where to?”
Goddess, I hadn’t even got my arms and legs moving properly and Trowbridge’s sister was asking me to think.
Welcome to life as a leader.
“Somewhere private off the main road.” I found the smallest T-shirt and passed the rest over the seat to Cordelia. “I want to speak to Biggs.”
The accused was not innocent in my eyes. He was guilty as hell, which is why he didn’t get a place of comfort to recuperate inside the vehicle. Rachel had offered him the cargo area at the back of the enclosed cab. It couldn’t be comfortable, but I had a hard time drumming up any sympathy.
Trowbridge had been tossed into Whitlock’s trunk wrapped inside a plastic tarp. Biggs should count himself lucky. I was not a betrayal novice. My aunt Lou had screwed me over, and the pack had done it to me twice. Sweet heavens, Karma had done it more times than I could count. But this—it was worse than Lou.
Biggs had been part of my new family—one of the misfits who I’d thought had been irreversibly tied together. He’d had his place at our roundtable. I’d been well on the way to developing fond and possibly deep feelings for him. I might have even grown to love him if he hadn’t taken his sweet-ass time coming around to rescuing Trowbridge and me when Mannus and Stuart Scawens took turns hurting us.
Though my heart was never going to open wide enough for another brother, Biggs had been the equivalent of an irritating cousin. Alternately frustrating and amusing. Part and parcel of my daily life.
Here I’d been, thinking he’d had a seat on the same screaming roller coaster, and instead he’d been … what? When it all boiled down, what had he got out of betraying us? Two bullets. One of which came close to severing his spine, Cordelia had reported without expression.
I said that I’d kill every person who led to the hurt of my mate. Did he count as one of them?
Could I? Did I need to?
Why had he done it? Who was Brenda Pritty to him? How did he really know her? How deep was his connection to sun potion and Knox?
I glanced over my shoulder. Anu listed against the backseat door, the ferret wrapped around her neck like a fur stole. Cordelia, having tossed a water bottle and some bandages over the seat to Biggs, was methodically using a hand wipe to remove all traces of blood and smoke from her person.
“There’s a good road.” Rachel slowed the car. “Hardly any scent of human to it. Doesn’t look like it’s been used much.”
“Take it,” I told her, with a glance to the dashboard’s clock. It said 4:57 A.M. How was time slipping through our fingers? How’d I lose another hour?
Here was another question—why was Rachel helping us?
I wasn’t feeling the love.
Half turned in my seat, I assessed Trowbridge’s sister. She had the same hair color but that was about it in terms of a sibling resemblance. His nose was long; hers retrousé. Her features were long like a fox, his were sculpted. But on the other hand? She won in the guess-my-age contest. Every hour of the thirty-seven years my man had lived was written on his face. While Rachel, despite the fact that she had to be in her early forties, could easily pass for her mid-twenties.
She’d reaped the rewards of the easy life. See? Changes in perception. I’d always thought Creemore Weres didn’t show their age because they had Fae in them. Mom never looked a day over thirty, and she’d lived a full, long life before she ever laid eyes on my dad’s twinkling eyes.
But now I was wondering how much of aging is part of the genes and how much is part of your life experiences. Trowbridge, my beautiful man, was still strikingly handsome, but he was no longer too-pretty-for-words. Nine years in Merenwyn—that’s all it took to make him careworn.
I stroked the pointed tip of my ear, thinking about the life of a wolf in the Fae realm.
“Do you have to do that?” Rachel snapped. “You’re always calling attention to your…”
Fae.
“We’re never going to be besties, are we, Rach?” I asked, my tone idle.
Her glance was disgust-tinged. “The very sight of you makes me want to hurl.”
“Well, dear sis, I’d pass you a hankie but I need it for the tears streaming from my eyes.”
“You’re never going to be my sister-in-law. You might have sweet-talked him into mating with you, but he’ll never stand in front of the others to marry you. You’re not one of us.”
“Old news, Bestie.”
“Must we?” said Cordelia wearily.
“Let her get it out,” I murmured. There were answers I needed from Rachel and this was the first time she’d exchanged more than two words with me.
“I hate the Fae. They’ve ruined my life. I lost my family, piece by piece, because my father allowed a Fae to live on pack land.” Spigot open, words streamed from Rachel. “Every time I see you, I’m reminded that my son is dead. If you weren’t my brother’s consort, I’d have claimed my justice.”
“I didn’t go looking for Stuart,” I said. “He came for me.” Her darling son had broken down the door to the apartment I’d shared with my aunt. Then he’d beaten me up, and promised to do pretty much the same things she’d just threatened me with. In the end, I’d unleashed my magic on him. But I’d left him alive, though he’d been duct-taped to a water radiator, and had lost a few, much needed, brain cells.
If I’d only known how much trouble he’d turn out to be, I’d have … No. I wouldn’t have killed him then. I hadn’t crossed the line into murder then.
I sighed. “Rachel, I’m going to say this once. I did not kill your son.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“How very predictable. If you hate me—and all things Fae—why are you helping us now?”
“If I don’t, my brother will die.”
“Sisterly love,” I said slowly. “I can understand that. But I watched you yesterday. Where was all your family pride when Trowbridge asked the pack to pledge their loyalty? You should have been the first to step up—Trowbridges united and all that—but you were the last to take your vows, weren’t you?”
“I had to think carefully.”
I snorted. “About what? Me diluting your family bloodlines? Are you really such a—”
“I’m doing this for Petra,” she said.
“Your daughter?”
“She’s developing a flare,” she said, her tone pitched a half note below belligerent.
“Like your brother’s?” I frowned.
“Like an Alpha’s,” she replied. “Like my brother’s, and my father’s, and his father’s before him. Petra can already ignore the moon call longer than I can. At fifteen, she’s stronger than most males her age.” A cold smile. “Faster too. Every moon I have to force her to promise me that she won’t be the first to pull down the prey. She doesn’t understand. She thinks I’m trying to hold her back,” she said wearily. “She can’t help testing herself in other ways. She’s already proved that she’s a better tracker than me, and I’m one of the pack’s best.”
“Jealous of your own daughter, Bestie?”
“Never!” she snapped. “I am proud of her. She’s the finest thing I’ve ever done.”
And thus, Stuart’s hero-worship roots for Mannus were exposed. With Rachel for a mother, his odds of being deemed the prodigal son were as remote as one of those child actors breezing past their teens without paparazzi pictures.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re proud of your daughter but you don’t want her to become an Alpha. Doesn’t that strike you as a tad retro in thinking?”
“Have you ever met a female Alpha?”
I’m guessing my tenure as Alpha-by-proxy didn’t count in her recollection. When I didn’t reply, she said tersely, “There hasn’t been one in over seventy years.”
“So they’re rare.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t mean—”
“Edith ruled for less than half a year before she had an accident.”
Edith the Alpha? Now there was a name to inspire fear. I raised my eyebrows. “Did sh
e have a suspicious accident?”
“Very,” she said grimly. “They killed her.”
“Which they?” Her brain had more twists than a mountain road.
“They!” she snapped helpfully. “They—the men in charge. The NAW, or the Great Council. It doesn’t matter which one of them ordered it. It could have even been someone from within her own pack.” Her hands tightened on the wheel. “Our men are misogynist throwbacks. Each and every one of them.”
I thought of Trowbridge’s hands cupping my face. “Your brother isn’t.”
“How well do you know him?” Rachel shut up as a car driven by a mortal woman passed us, heading in the opposite direction, then added, “Humans have no issue with their women being equal.”
There were a few million women who might disagree with that sweeping statement.
“Their women lead troops, rule countries, head companies, and make important decisions all the time. But our men don’t want any part of it. They want us to keep to the pack. Stay home. Raise the kids. We’re allowed to work outside of the home, but if any of us want a real career…”
Rachel was one froth away from spittle flying.
“Stay where we belong—that’s what they all want. All we’re good for is to bring children into the world,” Rachel carried on, full rant. “And if we can’t turn out a litter of boys then their eyes start to roam.”
My gaze rolled toward Cordelia. She mouthed “TMI” before rolling her lips back into one of her trademark gum-baring grimaces.
Trowbridge’s sister’s hands were claws on the wheel. “Our men forget that we’re biologically engineered to protect. We can do the job because we know the value of what we’re defending. And they know it … that’s why there’s no room on their council for a strong woman.” Her gaze was fixed on some point ahead on the road. “Petra has everything required to be an Alpha. The bloodline and the natural ability.”
I went back to stroking my ear. “And you’re worried that if Bridge is gone, she’ll want to step into the role.”
Her nod was thoughtful. “She’s not ready. She needs a few years to refine her abilities and to form the right relationships inside the pack. She’ll need support when the opportunity is right.”