The Trouble with Fate

by Leigh Evans

  I hang back. It’s too small. Impossible to imagine crouching in. Mum’s arms are cruel with haste as she shoves me in. I have to duck my head and fold in two. “Keep this safe,” she says, putting Merry around my neck. She shuts the cupboard door. I press my eye to the cutout, and watch her face twist with fear and desperation as she casts a protective spell on my hiding place. Then she turns, calling for Lexi.

  The outer ward set on the kitchen door breaks.

  Five Fae slide through the door. Three have short hair, while the other two have long, straight hair, black as their jackets. Their clothing is foreign. “You’ve lost much of your talent, Rose,” the cold-looking one says.

  The dream jumps ahead.

  The same man says, “Roselyn of the house of Deloren, you’ve violated our law. You broke the Treaty of Brelland, and allowed one of the unclean to bathe in our sacred Pool.”

  Her face is as white as her nightgown as she denies it. One of the short-haired Faes glances down at my father and says, “He’s dead.”

  Another Fae, very thin and dark, comes up behind my mum. He grabs her hair and pulls her head back. The knife in his hand glints under the overhead light.

  “According to the laws of Merenwyn, and the Treaty of Brelland, your life is forfeit.” Her gaze flies to my cupboard.

  I say, “Mummy,” in a little voice, but the sound echoes back to me.

  The ward on my cupboard is strong. I am invisible, both by sound and sight, as he drags the blade across her throat. Her blood makes a noise when it sprays the cupboard.

  I’m too scared to even breathe.

  They drag Lexi out of his bedroom. He’s fighting them with everything he has, but he’s just so little. We’re both little. I know I can’t bear to watch what will follow, so I cover my eyes, but open them when I hear one of them say, “No, don’t kill him. I’ll claim him as payment for my loss.” The long-haired Fae studies his new acquisition with a coldness that frightens me to the depths of my soul.

  The man who cut Mum makes a ball of fire erupt between his hands. He tosses it at the kitchen curtains and sends another flying into the living room. Next, he purses his lips and blows. I hear a whoosh, and then the wall color changes from cream to red from the reflected fire’s glow.

  They walk out. Calmly. My brother is a squirming burden over the cold one’s shoulder.

  Lexi’s gaze catches mine, as I squint through the hole. His eyes get smaller, and for a second, I think he’s going to cry, but he slants them away.

  I can hear Mum’s heart, still beating. And so I hammer the cupboard door with my fists. I scream and call for help, and shriek some more, but have to stop to catch my breath. I keep it in my chest, and press an ear to the hole, straining to hear the slow thud of her heart.

  She’s still alive when Trowbridge comes through the door.

  Chapter Four

  “Merry, don’t,” I said sometime later, startling myself into full consciousness. Oh Stars, I wished I were out cold again. The shark had chewed its way through my ass cheeks and was gnawing on my bones. Merry had tunneled up and over my boobs to perch on my collarbone. A strand of gold ivy pressed against my cheek. It lifted, pressed, lifted, and pressed again. “Merry, don’t pat me.” She stopped patting, but stayed put, cupping an ivy leaf around the curve of my chin.

  “You might want to get out of the line of fire,” I mumbled. To prove my point, my stomach did one last housecleaning squeeze, sending up another mouthful of bitter bile. The Taurus windows were of the roll-up variety. No freakin’ way. I looked for something to spit in, but Bob kept his relic clean. Merry skittered to my shoulder as I twisted around to spit into the backseat. I did it again, and then added “clean Bob’s car” to my to-do list.

  It was bad, this payback. Worse than anything I’d ever lived through. My body would gradually absorb the pain, given enough time. Headaches lifted. Fatigue was conquered by a good long nap. Finger soot got brushed off, revealing perfectly normal skin. But this was a first. I’d gone straight past soot to crispy. What would be revealed when the outer skin fell off? What do they call that? Degloving. Oh please, no degloving.

  How long would it take to heal? Twenty-four hours? I didn’t have twenty-four hours. The digital clock read 9:53 P.M. I’d already wasted an hour out cold. The car was still running. All I had to do was steer.

  Put your hands on the wheel, I told myself. You don’t have to look at them; you just need to use them. They spat fire when I moved my fingers. I couldn’t help it—I held them up for inspection. Oh Goddess. My fingers didn’t even resemble fingers anymore. They were swollen fat and bent unnaturally. The skin had turned deep brown, and there were black spots of charred skin across three knuckles, two of which were nothing more than open red sores. Yellow liquid seeped from the cracks. Suddenly, the charred odor that I’d been trying to ignore was the only thing I could smell. Mother of Fae, how was I going to heal from this?

  You’re part Were. You’ll heal. Don’t be a coward, Hedi Peacock. I took a deep breath and tightened my hands on the wheel. Then I screamed.

  I woke up with a sense of déjà vu. Merry was patting my face again. The clock read 10:27. And my raw hands had fallen back to my lap. The pain was as bad as before, maybe worse. I knew what she was going to do before she started to move. Merry traversed my shoulder to the midpoint of my chest. She slid quickly down it, the polished surface of her stone sliding soundlessly across the fabric of my shirt, until her chain pulled prematurely short. She pivoted to see what was holding her back.

  Me. I couldn’t put my hands up to the chain, but I could use my chin to pin a length of it against my collarbone. Stubborn foolish Asrai. She’d take all my pain away and kill herself doing it.

  She strained and won another half inch. “No,” I said. She did her shimmy thing—the amulet version of a huff—before turning back to strain in the direction she wanted to go.

  “Give me a couple of hours, and I’ll be able to steer,” I whispered.

  One of her long strands disentangled itself from the nest of woven gold that framed her stone. It stretched toward me, the ivy leaves flattening back into the length of it, giving the searching tendril an extra inch to extend until its delicate point reached my jaw. She stroked my skin, once, twice, each stroke a soft caress. Then she pulled back and swatted me.

  “What if you can’t heal me, without—” I concentrated on keeping my voice steady, between my uneven breaths. “Without going too far? What if the healing of me is the death of you?” I stared through the window, noting the blossoms forming on the cherry trees.

  Another impatient tug. There was desperation in the way she grappled with the leash of her chain. Why? She knew eventually I’d heal and she absolutely loathed Lou, a reaction not unexpected considering that Lou had enslaved Merry in a piece of amber. I’d never seen Merry so vengeful, so bloodthirsty, and now so frantic. As a rule, she was bitchy, but never mad-dog focused. I thought back, trying to pinpoint the moment her attitude had changed.

  “It’s the other amulet. That’s when you got all ferocious. He’s something important to you.” I lifted my chin. She fell on her back. “That’s right, isn’t it?” She bobbed energetically, as if she were playing charades with a jackass who only now was on the cusp of getting the right word.

  “Just once, I wish you could talk back.”

  A bit of red winked in her amber belly.

  “Trowbridge has the amulet they’re searching for. I saw it around his neck today.” I shook my head. “It’s just too damn coincidental. Of all the Starbucks in this town, why would he walk into ours? We’re going to have to be so careful, Merry. It doesn’t smell right.” I thought for a bit. “All right,” I said slowly. “Heal me. But only enough so I can drive.”

  The chain slithered after Merry as she rappelled to the end of it, hanging beneath the curve of my breasts. I heard a rip and then felt cold air on my midriff.

  She found her spot, right over my heart. Her gold rippled and unrolled, pull
ing itself free of the braids and embellishing curls, until only a thin casing of gold surrounded her central core. The rest of it re-formed into four long slender limbs that spread out to hug my ribs. As they stretched and tightened across me, her stone remained flat, hard against my heart.

  Merry’s amber warmed to my body’s heat until I couldn’t feel the difference between her and me. As I watched, faint pinpoints of white started to flicker deep within her heart. A tiny dot of pure light here, another bright spark there, as mesmerizing as fireflies on a hot summer night. Those winking stars started moving, circling the dark smudge in the stone’s center, and as they did, they changed Merry’s golden-honey core to a brilliant orange-red, fierce as the sun before it slips beneath the horizon. Faster they swirled. White and pure, and so brilliantly incandescent I had to squeeze my eyes closed against their radiance.

  The inside of the car began to get warmer. My limbs grew heavy. The shark released his grip on my bones tooth by tooth. Then he swam away.

  * * *

  When I woke, she was a cold dull brown. I held her tight in the fist of my healed left hand, and shoved the car into gear with my right. The back end of the wagon went up and over a curb as we sped out of the parking lot. She needed food.

  At 11:43, there was no one on the heritage conservation trail, and thus, nobody to stop me when I maneuvered the Taurus up and over the sidewalk, around the vehicle barricade, and down the gravel path leading into the woods. I drove with my eyes trained upward, searching for a clump of trees that were already in bud or leaf. Twigs and dirt spun up in our wake.

  “Hang on, Merry,” I said, lowering the car window. The night air rolled in. My scent glands absorbed everything at once, overloading me with information. They noted the stagnant wetness caught between the fallen leaves, the rich earth, the trails left by the inhabitants of the woods—the rabbits mortals sometimes spotted, the foxes that were too sly, the mice and rats and moles—my nose sensed them all. I found one sweet note among all the others carried on the night breeze.

  I followed it to a narrow pedestrian bridge spanning a small creek, then shoved the car into park and lurched out the door. The scent led me off trail. I sprinted up a hill, and there they were—a colony of serviceberry trees growing in rangy disorder under the canopy of oaks, beautiful with their showy clusters of flowers, in horizontal drifts of pure white.

  I pushed aside some shrubbery, strained inward for one of the thicker trunks, and pressed Merry hard against it. There was nothing for the count of five. On six, she shuddered, her coils of gold rippling. First one coil flexed, followed by another, and then all of her unwound until each vine found a place to curl around the sturdy stem, until her heart was pressed close and tight to the source of life. The yellow-brown of her amulet flickered. A red light beat deep inside, small and rapid, like a baby’s heart. The brown became orange tinged. Orange led to yellow, and then yellow to green, and then, her center was overtaken by a brilliant blue light.

  Merry fed. And healed. And I came close to weeping.

  The car was still there, the door wide open, the engine rattling reproachfully, when we returned a half hour later. Emotion always makes me hungry. I popped open the glove compartment. Another thing about Bob was that he was always prepared. He had an emergency stash crammed into the compartment. The bottled water tasted stale, but it was wet. It washed down the eighteen unsalted almonds that were meant to stave off starvation if Bob and his Taurus ever went off the road, slid down an embankment, and went undiscovered for three days. He had a flashlight in there too, and a CAA card that had expired five years ago, two months after his license had. Sometimes I could tell by the seat position that he’d visited the Taurus. I never caught him sitting there in the dark behind the wheel, reliving the years when he was the menace of 401, and he never queried me about the thick new steering wheel cover, or how the car never got dusty during all the years it had sat waiting for Bob in the garage.

  While I chewed and Merry drowsed, I fingered my ear and worried over Lou. She hadn’t sent a thought-picture or dream in hours. And that was plain worrisome. Nothing? During these last few days, her dreams and thought-pictures had constantly dribbled into my mind, and now nothing?

  So strange, how quickly you got used to a turned-around world. For the first nine years of our life together, I hadn’t needed a barrier from Lou’s mind, because she never, ever shared it with me. Between us, there would be no easy communication of silent thoughts. Somewhere during that first terrible week after the fire, I sent Lou a thought-picture. Her response was a cheek-burning slap, right across the face. When my sobs wound down to hiccups, she said, “My mind is my own, just as your face is your own. I will not touch yours, if you do not touch mine.”

  Lou’s version of child-rearing. I never reached out to her so intimately again.

  Last summer, I’d been chewing on a peanut butter sandwich while watching a cop show. And out of nowhere, I got that feeling—like a nudge, but on the inside. Then I’d seen a thought-picture of a garden, clear as crystal in my mind. I’d never seen a garden like that, with so many intense shades of green. And the flowers—nodding, trumpet-shaped bells in shades of blue never witnessed in this realm.

  Merenwyn.

  At first I believed Lexi had found a way of contacting me. There are no words for the feelings I had. It was a cocktail of joy and happiness and relief and eagerness, swallowed down on an empty stomach. Rollicking glee lasted a night, maybe a day, before it fizzled out, and was replaced by a bitter sadness that made me want to weep. I spent an anxious month, replaying the picture in my mind, searching for clues about how to open the door from here to there. He wouldn’t just send me any picture, would he? There had to be something important about that garden. And then one day, I got a deluge of thought-pictures, flickering and stuttering in my mind like one of those silent movies. A hand fumbled with the cupboard door in our kitchen and pulled out a can of maple syrup.

  I walked into our kitchen. Lou turned and looked at me, confused. “I can’t remember how to open this,” she said, turning the tin over in her hand.

  As her mind softened, so did the grip on her thoughts. At first it was unpleasant, like reading someone’s diary and understanding for the first time that you only knew them on the surface. Sometimes, there were tantalizing glimpses of the Fae world, dredged up from her memory, but most of the thought-pictures were increasingly depressing distortions of the world we lived in now. She brooded a lot about the Werewolves.

  “Lou,” I said experimentally, trying to search for her in my own mind. “You there?” The Taurus ticked over. I heard a small animal burrow under the leaf mulch. I counted silently in my head all the way up to twenty-six Mississippis. Nothing. Merry curled a tendril through my buttonhole, and pulled herself high onto my shoulder.

  “I can’t feel her, Merry. She’s not around anywhere close.”

  I wished I were home, making Kraft dinner while Lou wandered the apartment sucking on a spoonful of maple syrup. I flipped down the visor. The face staring back from the mirror was too round, too pale. In the darkness, my light green eyes seemed to flicker. In terms of beauty, they were the only thing I got from Mum. Her eyes had been light like mine, almost translucent, embellished by tiny specks of yellow and blue, and a deep outer rim of soft green. But her eyes hadn’t flickered. She’d had control over it. Averting my gaze, I pulled my hair out of its ponytail, and braided it, not looking at myself again until I fastened the end with the rubber band. I slipped on my glasses and flipped the visor back up.

  They say when you’re in a skid you should look in the direction you want to go. My life had hit the mother of all skids. I went looking for a curly-haired Were.

  Chapter Five

  I knew where to go. I’d done a lot of walking in this town. Some of it because I had to, some of it because there are only so many romance novels you can read, and so many hours of television you can endure, before you need to see real people, even if they’re not your peopl
e. Watching them go about their daily lives makes you feel normal.

  Which is how I knew what corner in our town has three different fragrances: car wash, Laundromat, and Burger King—the same scent signatures I’d noticed on Trowbridge’s van.

  The Easy Court Motel sat in the epicenter of all three aromas. It was flat, and long, and mostly brown, with a parking lot poorly hidden by a patchy growth of low bushes. The front office was lit, and an OPEN sign reassured all those with an itch that needed immediate scratching that the Easy Court Motel was ready for business.

  Trowbridge’s red van was parked in front of the unit closest to the manager’s office.

  The last time I’d spied on Trowbridge, it had been from the safety of the woods that bordered our home. I’d been twelve, and he’d been a guitar-playing eighteen-year-old, celebrating the last exam he’d ever have to take with his friends and a few bottles of cheap pink wine.

  Mum had found me before my brief stint as a voyeur became educational. She’d pulled me back home, her long soft fingers hard on my arm, and then I’d had an argument with Lexi that had dragged on and off for two days. We fought a lot that last spring, my twin and I.

  I drove slowly past the motel’s entrance, eyeing the parking lot. I couldn’t see any Weres but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. To be on the safe side, I drove past the motel, and pulled into the adjacent strip mall. The fluorescent light from the interior of the twenty-four-hour Laundromat shone through its plate-glass windows, spilling a weak circle of light onto the two cars parked in front of it. I went farther down the lot, until I found a dark place to park, and reversed into it.

  I don’t have large Were ears—I can hear just a bit better than the average mortal—but I do have a Were’s nose, which I used to test the air. When I was sure that there wasn’t a new scent to worry about, say that of a hair-gelled Were named Eric, I rolled the window back up. The sweat I’d broken out in during the healing had dried, leaving me feeling itchy and chilled. I’d be warm soon. Boosting something always made me feel warm and alive.