The Problem with Promises

by Leigh Evans

  “You coldhearted bitch,” accused Cordelia.

  We’d arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously. “You’re using Bridge as a place warmer,” I said incredulously. “You want everything lined up for Petra so that she can step into the role of the Alpha of Creemore. So much for Trowbridge collecting an old age pension.” I didn’t even have to glance back to Cordelia. Her scent broadcasted a swift shift from banked caution to flat-out aggression. “Are you nuts?” I asked Rachel. “Hello? I’m his mate. Do you think I can’t read between the lines? When the time is Petra-ripe, you’re going to wipe out your brother.”

  Her glance was swift and without any expression. “I won’t have to do anything to Robbie. He makes enemies as easily as you do. Sooner or later one of you will cross the wrong person. I thought Mannus was going to bring the council down on us before I was ready, but my kid brother is twice as bad … Bridge got everyone’s back up so quickly.” The paved segment of the road ended and the car coasted onto a gravel road. “What I’m giving you is time.”

  “That’s why you asked Bridge to come home,” I said.

  “Mannus was sick,” she said reflectively. “As much as I loved my son, he never had it in him to be leader. No one in the pack could step into the job like my daughter. But she wasn’t ready and if she stepped up too soon…” She shrugged. “I needed Bridge.”

  “Even though returning to Creemore was as risky for him as wearing antlers during hunting season.” I stared hard at Trowbridge’s sister. “Don’t you have any real feelings for anyone other than your daughter?”

  “I loved Robbie once,” she said stiffly. “I half raised him. But he screwed up. He should have been there the night the Fae crossed the gates, instead of in a bar drinking.”

  “He returned home in time but he was knocked out.”

  “He was impaired and easy prey,” she said, her tone inflexible. “You never saw the house after the massacre. You didn’t fill up bucket after bucket with hot water and bleach. You didn’t scrub the walls. Don’t you make excuses for him. He was a party boy. Always looking for a way to escape his duties. My son turned out to be no better.”

  “Your brother is not the man he was. The things he’s gone through have changed him. He’s—”

  “I am not interested in hearing you talk about my brother.” She hissed through her teeth as the car hit a pothole. “I kept my ear to the ground. I listened. Robbie the rogue wolf behaved exactly like Robbie my spoiled kid brother. Irresponsible. Drifter. Drank too much.”

  The ferret chattered in distress.

  “Robson Trowbridge may have been all those things you said he was,” I said, holding on to my temper with both hands. “Maybe he was an alcoholic with serious commitment issues once, but he’s not like that anymore.”

  “I don’t see any change!” she shouted. “He chose you for his mate!”

  “We belong together!” I shouted back. “And I’m damn well not going to apologize for being Fae or his mate anymore! Not to you. Not to the pack. Not to anyone.”

  Or to myself. That ends now.

  The air in the vehicle was too close—a swirl of anger from Cordelia and Rachel and a hovering question mark of fear and misery from Biggs. I rolled down the window, and breathed through my mouth, silently counting to myself. One Mississippi … don’t hurt her … two Mississippi … I need all the muscle I can muster … three Mississippi … I have to deal with Biggs yet … four Mississippi … lunging at her throat would be a bad, bad thing …

  Goddess, I was exhausted. I leaned my aching head against the door frame just in time for the truck to hit a particularly deep pothole.

  I straightened. Slowly, like my temple wasn’t going “ow, ow, ow.”

  She’d aimed for the rut deliberately. A person with borderline Asperger’s could figure that out with one glance at the satisfied curl of her lip. The pure childishness of her action should have enraged me—I’d been trembling on the edge of a good flameout—but all it did was make me look at Trowbridge’s sister with detachment. Emotional bitch, is she? Given to pinches and the like?

  “Let me hit her,” Cordelia bit out. “Just one good slap.”

  “One of us needs to drive,” Rachel said. “One of us needs to watch the traitor. And she can’t drive because the steering wheel will burn her hand.”

  I couldn’t help it—I laughed. “You’re talking about cold iron, right? Well there, you’re partially right, Miss Misinformed. Pure Faes can’t tolerate contact with cold iron. But I’ll bet you my last Cherry Blossom against your entire stack of outdated encyclopedias that a Fae could sit in this truck and not feel much more than a tad faint-headed. You know why? Because the iron used isn’t a pure cold element anymore. It’s been melted—gone through a fire hotter than hell—and been mixed with stuff like carbon and sulfur and manganese. It’s come out of the fire wearing a different name. Steel.”

  My tone hardened. “Your brother has walked through fire in Merenwyn. Whatever he saw and did there turned him into who he was always supposed to be—an Alpha of the most extraordinary kind. One with steel in his blood. So don’t you ever speak negatively about him in my presence again.” My heart started slamming into my chest. “You may be taller, you may be older, and God knows you’ve got more wolf in you. But I’ve got an inner-bitch who’s fed up to her canines with hearing shit spewed about her mate, and a Fae who’d gleefully squeeze you until every single one of your ribs was broken.”

  Merry’s chain bit into my neck as she pulled herself up out of my cleavage. My pal was still the color of burned butter, still cool to the touch, but she was mad enough to muster a rapid pulse of angry red light from the center of her amber belly. Blip, blip. Asrai for “Screw you, Wolf-bitch.”

  With a nod to the pendant looking about ready to self-ignite, I added, “Not only that, but I’ve got a personal bodyguard who has a personal prejudice against anyone named Scawens.”

  “And a surrogate mother,” drawled Cordelia, “who has chewed through more chicken-breasted, bandy-legged divas than Elizabeth Taylor chewed through men.”

  Rachel stopped smiling.

  We drove another thirty feet, a family road trip gone decidedly wrong.

  She braked in front of a driveway that hadn’t seen a set of tires for a good long time. “I will help you find Brenda and then I’m gone,” she said. “The rest is up to you. If you fail, I need to be with Petra.” All business, she took a snootful of the night air. “Kids come here. But only at night. No fully grown human has visited this place for a while.”

  “It will do,” I said.

  * * *

  Beech trees had tried to embrace the boarded-up house. Their long boughs stretched over the tin roof, offering whatever protection gained by its leafless branches. Kids had partied here—teenagers who’d left the burned-out fire pit and several dust-filmed wine bottles stacked into a tower.

  Biggs sat on the backdoor stoop. Sweat trailed down either side of his throat. His body had expelled one slug and was working on the other. “I didn’t mean to betray the pack.”

  “You withheld the fact that you were acquainted with Knox’s girlfriend,” I said flatly. “You think that doesn’t qualify? And you lied to your Alpha.”

  I didn’t even know you could.

  “She’s not his girlfriend.”

  My hands fisted into two plump and swollen boxing gloves. “When Knox had zero seconds to send the most important video of his life, he sent it to Brenda Pritty, not his boss. Her scent is all over his wallet and that bottle of sun potion. She was his girlfriend.” Bile in my gut, rising, rising. “Damn your hide. While we were running from the NAW, you were texting Knox’s woman. You led them right to us.”

  “You think I was just going to hand her to Bridge on a plate?” he said, with traces of his usual beleaguered belligerence. “She was tied up with Knox, and the Alpha of Creemore is not the type of guy who forgives people. You saw what he did to Fatso.”

  “So you chose some girl you h
ardly knew over your own pack.”

  His expression hardened. “Isn’t that what Bridge did?”

  Cordelia sucked in her breath sharply.

  “Believe what you want,” he said after a beat. “When I met her two summers ago, she used a different name. I didn’t connect the dots between Becci and Brenda until tonight.”

  A lie. Or a rationalization so deep that he couldn’t see the light of truth from the bottom of the hole he’d dug for himself. He had to have known who she was. He was a wolf and their nose can recall every person they ever crossed paths with.

  Rachel let out a snort of disgust. “What is it with you people? Don’t any of you use your real name?”

  “Only if absolutely forced to,” retorted Cordelia. With a stage grimace, she turned from a bush she’d been inspecting. Near its base, a used condom hung from a spindly branch.

  “Brenda Pritty’s scent was on the bottle of sun potion, Biggs,” I said. “And her personal perfume was all over Knox. That didn’t twig your scent recall?”

  “She’s been drinking that sun potion shit. Her signature has changed,” he replied, his eyes downcast. “Not a lot but…” He paused to lift shoulders that appeared to be heavily weighted with remorse. “Enough for me to doubt what I was smelling.”

  “This is bullshit.” Rachel hissed, leaving the truck where Anu waited. “That one there”—she jerked her chin toward Cordelia—“can spritz himself all he wants but I can still smell the man under his French perfume. A scent is a scent.”

  A flush spread across Bigg’s cheeks. “I couldn’t believe my nose, okay?”

  “Have you been sleeping with her?” I demanded. “Working with her and Knoxs?”

  “No,” he said sharply. “I told you. I haven’t seen her in two years.” A silent plea flitted across his face. “The girl I knew as Becci was supposed to be dead—don’t you understand? The halfling I loved died two years ago. All this time, I thought she was gone. All this time I’ve been…” His expression turned to wood and his voice trailed off.

  Mourning her, I thought, watching the shadows grow in his eyes.

  “Who was Brenda Pritty to you, Biggs?”

  “A really pretty blonde,” he said, chin up, trying for flippant and failing.

  So very badly failing.

  His gaze sank and he bent his head to study the ground. Evidently, he didn’t find any life answers carved in the dirt by the toe of his Keds, because he reached to pluck a small stone from the weedy base of a clump of crabgrass. “She was a halfling. And a runaway.” He straightened, rolling the piece of granite between his fingers. “A girl who didn’t know that she had wolf blood in her.”

  His mouth worked, making him look both bitter and broken, and then he shook his head. “I met her in Toronto. Two summers ago. I fell in love with her. We had a couple months together and she disappeared. Since then, I thought she was dead.”

  With a huff of self-disgust, he flung the pebble into the brush.

  “I’ve been asking myself all day—why didn’t she call me? She knew where I was. My cell number’s never changed. She didn’t even try to contact me to let me know that she was all right.” He winced suddenly, victim to another muscle spasm. When he could talk, he said, “When I caught her scent … I couldn’t believe what my nose was telling me. Becci was alive. And then I realized that if my Becci was alive, she’d been living with Knox under the name of Brenda Pritty. And that she’d been with him for a long time. Probably since the night she disappeared.”

  Truth, I thought.

  “That’s why it took me so long to accept what my nose was telling me.” His voice was rinsed of all emotion. “That’s why I didn’t really want to believe it was her until I saw her first text on his phone.”

  “When was that?” Cordelia asked. “Last week? Last month?”

  “Last night,” he said. “Before Trowbridge interrogated Newland. You guys were upstairs. I was checking Knox’s cell to see if it was fully charged when her message came in. I was going to call you but…”

  Arms folded, Cordelia said dryly, “You stopped to read it first.”

  A rough nod from Biggs. “Brenda didn’t know Knox was dead. Her message said, Where r u????” He examined his sweating palms with a fierce frown, then dried them methodically on the legs of his jeans.

  “Biggs!” said Cordelia sharply.

  “I was still telling myself, ‘It can’t be her,’” he said, staring blindly at the wet drag marks on his denim. “Then I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” I asked.

  “She ended the message with…” He sighed with exasperation then grabbed the rickety railing and painfully hoisted himself to his feet.

  “Careful,” said Cordelia. “No sudden moves.”

  “I have to show you,” Biggs muttered. He shambled across the yard to drop to his knees in front of the fire pit. He gathered a handful of ash, which he carefully sprinkled on the ground. Then, using his finger, he traced “^-+-^” in the dust. “I saw that and then I knew. Brenda Pritty was the halfling I fell for two years ago in Toronto.” He gently touched one of the symbols resembling a pointed roof. “She always signed off with this. Her wolf was calling and she just didn’t know it. Those roof peaks are ears.”

  Rachel let out an impatient huff. “He betrayed the pack for some slut who didn’t even give him her real name. Either kill him or make him tell us where she is.”

  “Shut up,” I said, my gaze fixed on Biggs’s perspiring face. We were moving both too slowly—what time was it now?—and too fast. Rushing toward a point where the winds of fate would collide in the perfect storm.

  Cordelia cleared her throat. “God knows I hate to agree with Rachel but—”

  “Don’t make me tell you to shut up too,” I said softly.

  Biggs bowed through another muscle spasm. When it was over, he lifted his shirt to study his chest. The bullet’s flattened point was visible just below the surface of his skin below his right nipple. It would break through soon. “I’ve got to take this off,” he said in a distracted voice. Fingers trembling, he worked the buttons. When he’d pushed the final one through the last hole he sighed like an old man who’d slipped off his shoes.

  He sank back on his heels, his shirt gaping. “We had sixty-three days together. A summer and a few days of fall as I watched her getting closer and closer to answering the call of the moon. I knew it was going to happen. Probably in the next cycle, her body would try to change into her wolf. And she was going to die. All torn up. I’d promised myself that I’d be there for her. That if anyone was going to take her to the woods, it would be me.”

  Almost impossible for me not to flick anxious glances at the flexing skin beneath Biggs’s nipple. “I loved her,” he said quietly. “I loved her more than any other girl I’ve met. I thought she was…”

  His.

  Biggs’s shoulders slumped. “But a couple days before the full moon, she disappeared. I couldn’t find her anywhere and I flipped out … When I couldn’t find her trail I went to him for help. The little prick … he drank the beer I bought him, ate the wings, wiped his mouth with a napkin. Then he told me he’d found out about my ‘skank’ and that since I didn’t have any balls, he’d done the right thing. He said, ‘I put her down like the mutt she was.’”

  “Who?” I broke in. “Mannus?”

  Hate flashed over his face. “You think I’d go to him?” His gaze swiveled toward Rachel. “No, I went to her son. He was always going on about what a great family of trackers he came from.” Loathing drenched his words. “Stuart said that he’d taken her up north and ‘put her down.’ The son of a bitch told me he left her body there for the animals.”

  “But Stuart was lying,” I said.

  He nodded. “I believed him. I should have made the prick suffer more before I killed him.”

  “It was you,” Rachel said in a shaking voice. “You killed Stuart. Not my brother’s bitch … you!”

  “I should have gutted him,” he goaded.
“He was a worthless piece of shit!”

  Words chosen to inflame. Rachel launched herself at him with a screech. He tumbled right over onto his back. She straddled him to choke the life out of him.

  “Don’t do that,” I shouted, starting to reach to grab her.

  My hands.

  Rachel looked up, from under her lashes, a lupine shadow across her face. Her posture that of a wolf protecting her kill. With murderous intent, she tightened her stranglehold until all ten of her knuckles shone whitely. Biggs didn’t fight back.

  Oh no he doesn’t. He doesn’t get to choose death-by-bitch.

  Faced with the fact that she was stronger than me and any attempt at hauling her off him was going to be an ow-fest, and about as effective as tearing a barnacle off the hull of a boat, I did what I had always wanted to do to Stuart Scawen’s mother. I kicked her.

  Hard as I could. Right in the ribs.

  She pivoted to bare her teeth at me. Go ahead, give me an easy target. The next kick was aimed for her pearly whites. She intercepted my swinging foot, twisted it, and down I went. Another face-plant. Has my Goddess got something against my face? Then she was on my back faster than I could shout, “Who has reflexes that fast?”

  Enough.

  Green light streamed from my right hand. “Get her,” I snarled. Spitting sparks, my magic swiftly formed itself into a cable of got-you-bitch, twisted over my shoulder, and—judging from Rachel’s strangled gasp—hooked itself around her neck.

  “What is that!” she got out before my magic turned itself into a twist tie. A second later, Rachel’s claws slipped from my throat, and she became the Were-bitch payload in my catapult. Right over my head she went in a blur. Thump! She landed right in front of me. Kind of like a meal. On her back, still uselessly clawing at the green coil squeezing her neck.

  “Kill her.” That’s what I heard from my inner-bitch.

  “Yes,” murmured my Fae.

  Eyes burning, I stood. “Release.”

  My serpent gave the Were one more squeeze, then sulked off to coil presumably over my head. I’m not sure. I was building up toward a well-deserved release. I let Rachel cough twice before I bent forward. “You want to know what that was? Tightening around your neck like a noose? That was me—my magic. You can’t see it, can you? It’s just above my head right now. Waiting for me to tell it what to do. Bam! You won’t even see it coming.” I leaned down until I could feel her breath warm my face. “And this, Bestie, is the other part of me. Say hello to my flare.”