The Trouble with Fate

by Leigh Evans

  “You left me.” His voice was lethal soft.

  “Yes.”

  “No smart comeback?” He leaned against one of the arches cut into the passageway, with his arms folded over his chest, deceptively at ease, except his chin was up and his cheekbones seemed sharp and unforgiving. He’d had a chance to work on his beard before he discovered my absence. The edges were tidied into crisp outlines, and the rest was thinned down until it was a two-day shadow on his chin. There was a flush of heat across his cheeks and his eyebrows were drawn tight into those flying vees. He was holding it together, but he was on simmer.

  I was right. He is handsomer without the beard.

  All the noise faded away. It was just the two of us, in a courtyard for fairy-tale princesses and dispossessed princes, alone with frozen squirrels and muted trees.

  Just two hearts.

  For all its simmering anger, his heart rate was steady, maybe pumping a hitch faster, but still even—purpose driven, blood rich, a deep bass thump in his chest. Rage must be easier to contain with its edges and margins.

  My own half-breed Fae heart was skittering about in my chest. It felt like a pinball ricocheting off the posts, fighting gravity and trying not to fall into the hole waiting at the end of my run. Love, ping. Fear, ping. Sadness, ping. Yearning, ping, ping, ping.

  Say the right thing, Trowbridge. Find the right thing to make me stay.

  “You led a trail straight to the subway. It took me three trains to find the one you took. That’s all. Three trains. It didn’t take any effort to track your scent from the Internet café to here because you pushed the button on every fucking light pole.” His voice was too low, more growl than human. “You didn’t clear your browsing history. Do you know how damn stupid that was? A few clicks and I knew exactly where you were going. I didn’t even have to follow your trail. I’ve been on the campus for less than ten minutes. That’s all it took to find you.”

  Gravity always wins. The pinball slipped off the last lever, missed the grabbing hook of hope, and fell, plop, into the hole.

  I turned the broken utensil in my hand. “No one could have found me except you, Trowbridge. I don’t leave a scent trail.”

  “To me you do.” He exhaled his tension through his nose. A little bit more Were smell permeated the commons. The black squirrel abandoned his perch and scurried for refuge on the adjacent pitched roof.

  “Besides, Cordelia does, and you’re wearing her jacket.”

  “You want the jacket back?”

  “Don’t be stupid.” He came out of the shadows and crossed the landing to the stairs. He had on Cordelia’s slick shirt and sharply pleated pants, but he wore his own scuffed-toed boots. The untucked shirt was hanging on to him by two buttons, exposing the white T-shirt beneath it.

  “You think I’d let you wander off, Stronghold? You’re just a baby; you don’t even know what’s out there.”

  “Mortals and Weres. I’ll survive.”

  “You’ve just been lucky.”

  “Lucky.” The spoon slid off something hard in the small hole I was digging, grazing a white line across its muddy surface. I used my fingernail to pry the something out. A pebble. Worn and smooth. I tossed it on the pile I had growing by my knee. “Yeah, I guess I’ve been real lucky.”

  “Will you stop digging?”

  The only answer to that was to put a little more juice into my excavation.

  He walked across the grass until he stood beside me, his booted foot sinking into the turf. The soil hadn’t dried from last night’s rain. I could feel it clammy wet, soaking through my leggings. I shoveled another handful of dirt into my palm, and tossed it onto the molehill of dislodged soil. A clump of clay bounced off his toe.

  “Stronghold, knock it off.”

  I stabbed harder into my little pit. Faster, channeling a little bit of Norman Bates, and a little bit of Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction, and a lot from every other person with a battered heart and no hope left.

  He crouched beside me, his thigh brushing my hip. I leaned away from him, and kept going. I could hear the huh, huh, huh of my breath coming out of my chest. I could hear the scrape of the metal on the red clay. I could hear his breathing, steady beside me. He waited until my huh, huh, huhs started to slip into cracked he, he, hes before he caught my hand with his. Held it, bruised and shaking, in the safe cage of his own.

  Not mine. Never mine.

  I curled my bleeding knuckles into a fist. “Let go.”

  “Stop, Hedi.” His voice was soft. “You’re hurting yourself.”

  “No.” I yanked my hand out of his. “Why do you have to make this so hard?”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “Yes it does.” I pressed my hand against my chest, and felt Merry. She was still warm against my fingers. “It’s always been hard. It’s never going to be easy. I left you, why’d you have to come find me?”

  He rubbed his chin and turned his attention to the hole. “How deep does it have to be?”

  “I have to find a bigger root. These small ones aren’t good enough.”

  He picked up the bolt cutters. “I can dig faster.”

  It was ungraceful work, chipping away at the hard-packed earth. His short, hard jabs were more effective than my scraping, so I sat back and watched as the small grave grew.

  “Is this good enough?” Trowbridge asked.

  I tested the cavity he’d created beside a taproot the diameter of my wrist. “No. It has to be wider. It’s got to be big enough for both of them.”

  He tilted his head at the hole, and then at me. I hated the compassion I saw in his eyes.

  “Don’t. Don’t you dare pity me.”

  He made the hole deeper, and wider, and then sat back on his heels.

  “I couldn’t do it,” I said, staring at the bolt cutters in his hand, telling myself to get it over with. “I tried. I thought if I took those cutters, I could clip him away from her, like he was some sort of vine wrapped around her. But she’s the vine, holding on to him.

  “I can’t hurt her. She needs to go in with him. That’s what she wants.” My throat seized up in pretear pain.

  I lifted Merry over my head.

  “Are you sure about this? It doesn’t have to be both of them,” he said. “I can pull them apart. You can keep Merry.”

  Merry and her lover swung like a pendulum from her chain. She wrapped around him; he nestled within her embrace. I cradled them in my palm. “No, I can’t.” She sent some warmth into my hand then shot a starburst of orange-red from deep within her amber heart. I told myself to remember the last sunset I’d ever hold in my palm. I knelt to lay them in the hollow. Him first, her on top.

  My face would be the last she’d see.

  The Fae Tear I’d been holding squeezed out through my tear ducts, and ran a straight course down my cheek, and fell, glittering as it went, to land in the middle of her stone. As I knelt there, watching it harden, Trowbridge’s hand found a place on the small of my back. He backed away as I filled in the hole, and patted the ragged circle of sod flat again.

  It took no time. None at all.

  I left the two lovers in the root embrace of a hundred-year-old oak, covered by a layer of this realm’s dirt. It wasn’t good enough. It would never be good enough. But it was the best I could do.

  There were a couple of wooden benches overlooking her grave. I made my way to them with the slow steps of an old woman. Sat, held my stomach and rocked a bit against the pain.

  He watched me, his hands jammed into his pockets.

  “I’ve got a Were loose inside me. I don’t think she’ll ever go back to sleep again.” I waited for the numb to come back. “I used to think of myself as a Fae, but I’m not, am I? I’m both.”

  His boots left a dew trail on the grass as he came to me. He considered me, and then his face softened. “You are what you have always been.”

  “Is that supposed to cheer me up? I’m part Fae. And when I’m around you, I feel like I shoul
dn’t be.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you feel like that.”

  “Tell me that everything is going to be different.” I crossed my arms under my breasts as if I were cold, but I wasn’t. A tearing hurt was deep inside, and it was spreading … oh Goddess, it was filling me up. “Tell me that we’re not going to be destroyed because we want to be together. Tell me that you can make it hurt less.”

  “I can promise that it will be different.” He sat down beside me, carefully, like I might bolt or hit him. Slowly he extended his arm until it curved around my slumped shoulders. He pulled me to his chest. Hesitated for a second, as if he were selecting a choice from a new menu, before he settled on stroking my back. “I can promise to kill any Were who wants to hurt you.”

  I could hear his heart beat in his chest. Thump, thump against my ear.

  “Does it hurt less now?” he asked.

  I shook my head, and felt his designer stubble catch in my loose hair. “It hurts worse.” His hand paused mid-stroke as I sniffled. “I don’t want to fall in love with you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “You suck as—”

  “A therapist. I got that.” He turned me to him. Bent his head so he could gaze directly into my eyes. I’d never seen his face so quiet, and I wanted to put my hand to its nakedness.

  “Stay with me.”

  The black squirrel chittered a warning from the tree, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the pull in his. “You’re making it hard again.”

  “Stay.”

  His expression softened as he read the warring want in mine, and I thought for a dreadful second he was going to say something wonderful. Instead, his hands left my shoulders and cupped my face. His lips settled across mine, as if they’d been born to land there. Cherish and worship there.

  Oh Sweet Stars.

  “I know what will happen,” I mumbled, turning my head, three kisses too late. “The Weres will—”

  “Shut up,” he said. Four more kisses. Sweet to the soul. Acid to the conscience.

  Just tell him. About Threall. About your doubts. Instead, I said, “I know where Lou is.”

  He pulled his lips back from mine, pausing to breathe. “I know.” He caught the wisp of hair that kept straying across my lips, and tucked it behind my ear. “I was pretty sure you knew where she was before I went into the shower, but I was going to give you time to tell me on your own.”

  “I’m going to save her.”

  “I figured that.”

  I frowned. “How would you know that?”

  “You ran.” He brushed his thumb over my lower lip. “What we have is … unique. I don’t think you would have left if it hadn’t been for a prior obligation.”

  So he thought what we had was special, did he? It was kind of drugging, that thumb of his on my lip. “I won’t let you give her to the Council. I’ll nurse her right through to the end of her fade.”

  “Okay.” He leaned in and kissed me again.

  I felt tears burning again, which interfered with my breathing and sort of took away from the whole wonderfulness of the moment. He kept his warm lips pressed to my brow as I cried human tears into his jawline. Messy. A whole lot of snuffling, quite a bit of dripping, and one or two shudders. Trowbridge bore it well. He never stopped stroking my back, and he let me cry without once shushing me, even though he grew a little rigid when my sniffs into his collar turned into wet sniffles. I pulled away to wipe my nose clean on the sleeve of Cordelia’s jacket.

  He pulled me to his chest again, and then tunneled his thumb up underneath the mess of my straggling hair to find my ear. He found the point of it and started to roll his thumb over the peak and down, and back up, over and over again, until my breath settled, and my eyelids fell to half-mast.

  His voice was whisper-soft. “Promise me I won’t ever come out of a shower to find you gone again.”

  “I’ll never leave you while you’re in the shower again. But how can I be sure that I won’t wake one morning and find you packed and gone? We should both be required to pledge that we won’t leave, without…” I shrugged, and stared sightlessly at my knee. “Without saying good-bye.” I raised my head, and searched his face.

  A flicker of a smile crossed his lips. “It’s a deal.”

  We sat for a while without talking.

  Finally, Trowbridge twined his fingers around mine and pulled me to my feet.

  I’d say the earth moved, or something equally grand, but my moment of revelation was smaller than that. I looked up at him and saw the truth. His hair was too long. A piece of it was flying across his cheekbone, flirting with the wind. He was too tall for me. I’d always have a crick in my neck just looking up at his beautiful face. He was prettier than me, and no man should be prettier than his girl. His track record as suitable mate material was disastrous.

  And he sucked at declarations. Let’s face it, “Stay with me” does not equal “I worship you, my beautiful Princess, and claim you forever as my mate.”

  It isn’t even close.

  He would never fully appreciate the splendor of my Faeness. It would never be easy. The Weres would still come gunning. He may never say he loves me. But here’s the thing: even habitual liars get tired of the habit of lying. It was time to admit a piece of self-truth that the twelve-year-old Helen Stronghold had understood without question.

  He was nonrefundable. I’d claimed him twice. Once when I was a child, and the second time on my knees in another woman’s bathroom. It was a done deal.

  “You’re probably going to break my heart,” I said, craning my head back to look up at him.

  “And maybe you’ll break mine.” His eyes were somber. “Are you ready?”

  The stinging wind was at it again. It blew cold air over Merry’s grave and brought moisture to my eyes. I nodded.

  “It’s time I met your aunt Lou.” He pulled me toward the courtyard’s exit.

  “Be nice.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he did do that one eyebrow lift thing. He waggled them, and I found myself smiling into his eyes.

  “I mean it, Trowbridge, you can’t kill her.”

  His eyes went from playful to alert in the space of half a second. He cocked his head to listen. I strained my ears a moment longer and then heard it too. Running feet. Staccato taps more than heavy Were thuds. We turned in unison across the commons, toward the same set of doors that Trowbridge pushed through.

  A Were was coming. Trowbridge lifted his nose to the air, and tested it. He pushed me behind him.

  “What is it?” I asked, trying to strain to see beyond his wide shoulder.

  “Trouble.”

  The heavy mullioned-glass doors opened for Cordelia, who, it turned out, could actually run at a pretty good clip in two-inch court shoes. She skidded to a halt and thinned her lips at the sight of our joined hands. “They’re coming. Mannus is right behind me.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Trowbridge slid a glance toward Merry’s grave and said, “We’ve got to lead them away from this place. Now.”

  And then we were running—sprinting across the flagstones, down another set of stairs, steeper and shorter. I felt a shiver of cold as we ran past an alley. We entered a cloistered passageway. He pulled open the first of several heavy oak doors lining the cloister and then snapped a quick question to Cordelia. “How many?”

  “Mannus, two pups, and a young bitch,” she replied, catching up to us.

  “No adults?”

  She shook her head, her mouth curled. “Not a one.”

  If my mate had planned on taking us to a large classroom, he was out of luck. Behind door number one was nothing more than a small stairwell. In front of us were eight steps, each riser’s edge capped by metal, leading to a three-foot linoleum landing and from there on to another set of stairs that ended at the second floor. Trowbridge put a hand on the creaky, wooden banister and cocked an ear to listen. “Where the hell are all the students?”

  “Over there!” shout
ed a Were from the quad.

  Trowbridge’s head whipped around. He stared out at the courtyard, and then yanked the door closed. His eyes were feral slits. “There are too many,” he said to Cordelia.

  “I’ll slow them down,” she replied. She turned and took a position at the foot of the staircase.

  Trowbridge grabbed my hand, and then he propelled me up those narrow stairs at a reckless speed, pulling me hard with his hand and his will. I glanced behind us in time to see Cordelia pocket her earrings. Her shoulders were braced.

  There was no choice but to turn right at the top of the second floor. A squeak of hinges echoed up the stairwell as the outer door opened again, and then I heard Cordelia drawl, “Hello, darlings,” followed by that first smack of flesh hitting flesh.

  Trowbridge yanked me down the short corridor. On the right, two small classrooms, on the left a series of doors with names on them. He booted open Dr. Reznikoff’s office door with one kick.

  I had an impression of books, papers, and shelving, and the stale smell of old sweat. There was a high-pitched scream from downstairs, and Trowbridge brushed past me to struggle with the window. When it didn’t slide up, he leaned back and kicked it to pieces. Wood and glass flew.

  There was another scream, this one as piercing as my father’s cry when the wolf slashed his belly, followed by the sound of people running up the stairs.

  Trowbridge looked at the door and then at me. Blue lights spun around his pupils, then his jaw hardened. “I’ll find you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but he already had his hands on my waist and was lifting me to the window.

  “No!” I locked my hands behind his neck. “I’m not leaving you.”

  But his hard fingers plucked them free, and then he picked me again, saying grimly, “Yes you are.”

  From behind me, I felt something sickening—waves of freezing air were coming through the doorway. Numbing cold.

  “Trowbridge?” I asked, suddenly feeling faint.

  “I promised to protect you, remember?” he said, the blue comets in his eyes sharper and brighter than ever before. “Put your legs through the window, sweetheart.”