The Problem with Promises Read online

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  The swirls of color around me melted into one another and grayed. Shape was born. First, rough outlines. A square of dim light. A block of something solid.

  I blinked, and then my vision cleared.

  Lexi had conjured up a meeting room of sorts—a modestly sized room, cluttered and filled with curiosities. I’d visited the Old Mage’s wizard snuggery once before in a dream, standing a little to the right of where I was now, while I watched Mad-one’s heart break.

  My brother stood behind a lectern, studying the pages of the enormous leather-bound tome that lay open on the stand. Patently ignoring me, he flipped to another thick page in the Book of Spells.

  I studied my twin. Here, in the world created by his mind, Lexi required no natty bowler; he suffered no tattoo inked above his ear, any more than he sported an unfortunate, asymmetrical coiffure. His straight hair was uniformly long. He wore it unbound—a sheaf of wheat, the ends of which brushed the top of his hip.

  Like Mum’s, I thought, and my gaze swept the room. I half expected to see the Old Mage standing in the corner, arms crossed, cheeks mottled like the last time I saw him, but we were alone, Lexi and I.

  It’s so dim in here.

  Natural light struggled to pour through the thick panes of wavy glass. Shelves flanked the window, and they, like the rest of the room, were cluttered, filled with a hodgepodge of strange collections in earthenware pots and baskets. But the bottom shelf—the one closest to the oak table that had been pushed against the wall—was the single place in the entire room where there was precision and order.

  The shelf was lined with clear glass bottles. Feeling ill, I stared at those vials, noting that each one had been filled to exactly the same level with a colorless liquid, with the precision you might have expected from a factory.

  Sun potion.

  Had they been there the last time I’d found myself pulled here by a dream? I cast my mind back. No, I thought. They hadn’t been here. But evidently, they were still very much part of Lexi’s dreaming mind.

  I chewed the inside of my lip. “Are you free of your addiction now?”

  Sparks spat as he ran his palm over a page. “The wards still hold,” he murmured. “The Black Mage must be beside himself.”

  I watched him repeat the process. “Why here?” I asked. “Why bring me to the Old Mage’s den?”

  “These are the Black Mage’s quarters, though I suppose once they belonged to the old man.” He lifted his gaze. Cold eyes. Greener than mine but cast from the same mold. Slanted slightly and heavily lashed. “Why wouldn’t I bring you here? I spent more time here than anywhere else in my life. For the first ten winters, I rarely left this room, unless my mage did, and then I followed him. Never less than five paces behind him, never closer than two. That’s how I earned my name the Black Mage’s Shadow.”

  This room—the cold room with its stone walls and single narrow window? My gaze traveled, taking in the stone floors, the single chair, the door set in one of the walls. One wall was dominated by a large fireplace; its hearth was a dark hole that needed feeding.

  It’s a prison.

  “Where did you sleep?” I whispered.

  He nodded to the corner to his left. The thin, worn blanket that lay on the stone floor had been folded with exquisite care. On top of it rested a mug, a bowl, and a single spoon.

  “That’s it? In the corner?” Another press of grief and sorrow. I’d had a pink comforter—a prize that was plucked from the Goodwill charity drop container. My finger found the peak of my ear.

  He closed the book with a shrug. “I soon grew used to it.”

  I’m sorry—that’s what I wanted to tell him. For so many things, I couldn’t even begin to write a list. For the fact that the Fae had stolen him and not me. For his blighted youth under the Black Mage’s control, and for those lonely years spent in a Royal Court that had left him bitter.

  And finally, I was deeply remorseful for yesterday’s lies and deceptions. Filled with guilt that I’d held my twin in my arms and listened to his heart slow and then skip a beat, and I’d known what was coming for him. Feeling so damn sorry, but understanding, in a clear, cold way, that there was no choice.

  Lexi had been watching my face as I worked my way through my list of sins. That’s the problem with twins—we become such superb readers of each other’s facial cues.

  “Guilt is a useless emotion,” he remarked, closing the book.

  “So I’ve heard.” I inhaled slowly through my nose, in an effort to make the burning sting go away. I turned my head left, right. “Where is the Old Mage?”

  “He’s left us alone so that we can speak in private.” He nodded toward the window. “He’s waiting out there.”

  I squinted at the window. Was that him out there, that dark shadow, underneath the tree on the hill? Stay there. I needed time to explain, to make my twin understand. “It broke my heart to send you back into that portal, knowing that he was waiting for you.”

  Lexi shrugged and moved to the nearby table. Its top was as disorganized as the rest of the room, but a space had been cleared in the middle of the muddle for a large copper container. In the shadow of that sat a mortar and pestle. My twin ran a pale finger around the stone lip of the heavy bowl, his eyes downcast. “So you say.”

  My stomach clenched. “I did what I had to do.”

  “And you did it so well.” He sorted through a bunch of dried flowers and settled on a sprig of faded lavender. “You let me believe that I was facing my own trial. I keep wondering,” he said, using his blunt nail to strip the stem, “if that scene was really necessary.”

  I swallowed. “The pack needed to believe that you were tried and executed.”

  “Why?” He swept the leaves into his palm, then tossed them in the mortar’s bowl. “Who cares what the pack thought?” He picked up the pestle. “Are you still measuring yourself against the pack? You’ll never please them. You’re not one of them.” He flicked me a hot glance. “Nothing will ever change that. I keep telling you, but you’re so—”

  “The deception was necessary,” I cut in, my tone getting hard.

  “Careful, Hell, you’ll start sounding like me. You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve done because someone told me it was ‘necessary.’” He started to grind the flower petals. “What you really needed was a limp body. You could have had that easily. After a few hours sitting in that holding room, sweating through my withdrawal, I would have swallowed a bottle down without any coercion from you. It would have ended up the same way. I would have been unconscious and the wolves could have witnessed my departure.” He gave the crushed lavender one more go with the pestle, and then added a drizzle of fine oil. His movements were easy, fluid almost. He’d performed the same task many times before. “So, my question is, why am I here, and you are not?”

  “I went to Threall to solve a problem and I messed up,” I said baldly. “The Old Mage’s cyreath was supposed to be merged with mine, but once he discovered we were twins, and that you were addicted to sun potion…” I gazed at him helplessly. “If there had been any other choice, Lexi. You must believe I’m—”

  Sorry, I was going to say, but he cut me off. “You were the mage’s nalera for the length of time it takes a cock to crow in the morning. I don’t think you can compare your … association … with him to what I’ve been going through.” My twin dipped his finger in the oil and lifted it to his nose. His nostrils flared. “Strange, I can’t smell a thing.”

  “I never do while I’m dreaming either.”

  With a fastidious grimace, he wiped his finger on a rag. “So tell me. Did you walk in my dreams when we were kids?”

  “Only a couple of times.”

  “And here I thought we shared everything.” He pulled the stool over with his foot and rested his hip on the edge of its seat. “You know what I can’t forgive you for? When you sat down beside me on the hill and said, “Go to sleep, Lexi, I’ll wait with you.”

  “You re
member,” I whispered.

  “Of course I do. It’s the type of thing you don’t forget. For the first time in a long time I thought I was in control of my own destiny.” He crossed his arms. “It was finally over … I was going to go to sleep and never wake up. Imagine how surprised I was to find myself trapped in one of the portal’s passages.”

  Lexi.

  “The tunnel was barely tall enough to stand up in,” he said. “No door. No exit. No way out. Then I started hearing this voice inside my head. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t get him to shut up. I was hot, and shaking … on my hands and knees puking and still he kept talking.”

  “He said he’d cure you. You needed to be—”

  “You sent me to a fucking mage,” he said, bitterness an acid edge to each word. “I’ve been raped by one of those mothers before … but this has been…” His lips curled and he gave me an awful laugh. “So much more intense.”

  Raped.

  “I’m sorry beyond words for what you suffered,” I said, meaning it from the bottom of my leaking heart. “If I could change your past I would. If I could beat the Black Mage senseless for the pain he’s caused you, I’d do that too. But I can’t, Lexi. Any more than I can go back to the night when Mum and Dad died and you were stolen. I wish I could—you have no idea how much I wish I could—but I can’t.

  “Right now, we are here because of your addiction. Not mine. Not Trowbridge’s. Yours. You were a couple of bottles away from overdosing. I saved your life. The mage said that he could pull the threads of your addiction from your body and mind.”

  “Threads,” he repeated incredulously. “When a man has taken the juice for as long as I have—when you’ve depended on it for decades upon decades—it’s not something that can be pulled from you. It is part of you. The Old Mage took a piece of me and he threw it away. I’m not whole anymore. There’s no peace anymore,” he said brokenly. “The juice used to give me that—for a few hours everything was numb and…” He closed his eyes. “I used to feel like shit when I came down. But even that low was better than this.” The tip of his tongue wet his lip. “There’s no high, no low, there’s only this sense of grinding weight on my chest.”

  “The weight will be gone when I remove his cyreath from yours.”

  His face went blank, absolutely still.

  “Lexi?”

  My twin blinked—slowly, like a sleepy tortoise—and gave me a strangely cold smile. “I do not wish you to do so,” he told me. “In fact, I forbid you to.”

  My mouth, already dry, went arid. “I have to—and soon, or the union will be permanent. It must be done before the waning of Merenwyn’s next full moon.”

  He gave me the faintest reproving headshake. “You presume too much. What right have you to make decisions on my behalf? I will live and die by my own choosing.”

  “Even if you take me and Trowbridge with you?”

  “That is no longer of immediate concern.” Lexi went to smooth his cuffs, but he did it strangely, prefacing the motion with an odd flick of his wrist as if he was wearing a shirt with very long and heavy sleeves, not a piece of clothing that skimmed his body and buttoned at his wrists.

  I stared at him, intuition stirring.

  “My mage has returned my health to me,” he said, “and my circumstances have changed. I have found myself presented the most glorious opportunity.”

  Dread was a worm inside me. My twin’s posture was wrong, his speech pattern kept flexing between the familiar and the formal. Sweet heavens, no …

  “Who am I talking to?” I asked. “My brother or the mage?”

  “I am your brother,” he said stiffly.

  No you’re not. You’re a terrible mixture of both.

  I started across the room, wanting to shake him, to slap him, to do something—anything—to bring my twin back to me. But before I’d taken two paces, hot pain tore through my right temple. Horrible, acute, piercing. I moaned, pressing a palm hard over the place where an invisible spike was slowly being driven through my skull.

  “Stop,” I heard Lexi shout. “You said you’d wait.”

  Two more pulses of agony, the point of the blade digging deeper, before the torture ebbed.

  It took everything I had not to cry out in relief. Do not give the mage the satisfaction of seeing you humbled. Shakily, I straightened. Lifted my chin. Clenched down on my molars so that my lips wouldn’t tremble.

  Raw anguish briefly twisted Lexi’s expression before he turned away. He studied the scene outside the window. “Don’t come any closer, Hell. I don’t think I can take it.”

  My touch? Or watching the mage punish me?

  “Try not to let him in, Lexi,” I whispered. “Don’t listen to him. Keep yourself safe until I can free you.”

  “Don’t listen to him?” The slim control he had on his anger broke. He swung around. Weak light haloed his hair. Bright color flagged his cheeks. “I can’t stop hearing him! You tell me how to drown him out, and I will. What you just felt? That dagger through your thoughts? That’s only a fraction of what I’ve gone through.”

  The tear that had been clinging to my lower lid spilled, scouring a hot warm trail down my cheek. “I’ll bring you home. I promise you, I will.”

  He shook his head. “I told you before, Hell. I have no place in your world. I want to live as a Fae, not as a wolf.”

  “You can be both.”

  “In what realm? Not here. Not even in your world. When you go back to your realm, do me a favor and take a good look around you. Just how well are you accepted into the pack? Do you and the other bitches braid each other’s hair? Meet for coffee and cake? Can you walk into Pederman’s bar and know yourself welcome? Stars, do you wear blinders? There’s a wall between them and us, and it will never come down.”

  “It can come down.” It had to because otherwise…? What life would I have, providing I had one to look forward to at all?

  “Really?” The corner of his lip curled. “When you go back, ask your lover about the council’s kill list.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I overheard Mum and Dad one night. Mum was crying,” he said. “Some woman from the pack told her about the halfling kill list. Dad was reassuring her, telling her that we weren’t on it. Children born of Faes were exempt.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Ask your mate about that. Then you tell me what you have in Creemore that’s better than the old man’s offer.”

  I have a mate who loves me in Creemore. A mother-that-wasn’t. An old geezer Were who calls me “Little Miss.” I have everything.

  And then I remembered what else I “had.”

  “I have your daughter entrusted in my care,” I said quietly. “Why would you bring her to our world if there was a kill list for half-breeds? Why did you bring her to me?”

  His mouth tightened. “She is exempt—she has Fae blood. Besides, she was facing an execution. Saving her was a whim.”

  No, it wasn’t a whim. It was an instinct. Even a man as broken as my twin could be surprised by the unexpected pang of paternal interest.

  “What has the Old Mage promised you?”

  “The moon and the stars,” he drawled.

  That probably wasn’t too far off the mark. What could I offer my twin that would come close to the unearthly powers that the old wizard possessed? Did all roads lead to my brother being a mage’s shadow?

  Only if you let it. Hedi, the mouse-hearted.

  Only if you lack the courage to save him.

  “I can’t give you those,” I said, staring into his green eyes. “But I can offer you my word.”

  “Your word,” he repeated incredulously.

  “I’ve lied to you a hundred and more times, twin. But I’m not lying now. And I won’t lie to you in the future. That’s another promise.” I steeled myself as his gaze turned from cool to mocking. “When we were kids, I could tell when you were fibbing just by the expression on your face. Has it been so long that yo
u can’t read mine?”

  He cocked his head.

  “Look at me, Lexi,” I demanded. “Am I lying?”

  My twin’s brows arched in consideration.

  “I can’t promise you that we’ll succeed. But I do promise that I won’t give up. Do you understand? Whatever happens over the next few days, I won’t give up. Come hell or high water I will meet you at Daniel’s Rock and we will destroy that book. Then I’ll bring you home—”

  “I have no home in your world,” he spat.

  “Then we’ll find you a new one in my world,” I said, without missing a beat. “It might not be a castle but…” I caught myself before I began embroidering his future with butterflies and posies. “No, it will definitely not be a castle. And you may never be rich—not in the way you measure wealth.” My gaze traveled from him to his surroundings, taking in the pestle and mortar, the flagons of sun potion and the thick doors. “You’ll never be ‘the’ mage either.”

  “No money, no talent, no prospects,” he scoffed. “How could any man pass up such an opportunity?”

  A thin ray of light penetrated the window’s grime. It lit on a strand of his long golden hair, gilding it.

  “You will be what you are meant to be—Lexi Stronghold, son of Benjamin and Rose,” I said, my tone hard and unflinching. “Which means you’ll be no man’s puppet. No man’s lackey. You will never be a mage’s shadow again. You’ll be free.”

  He inhaled sharply.

  “Lexi,” I whispered. “Don’t give up. Not on yourself. Not on me.”

  “Already done, sister of mine.”

  “Then why did you come back through the portal to find me?”

  He walked to where the Book of Spells sat on the wooden lectern. Mouth set, he touched the leather binding. “Come hell or high water?”

  “Pinky swear.”

  He lifted his chin, then stared long and hard at me. “Hell, if I could—”

  Suddenly, all his features tightened into a spasm of pain. The struggle was horribly brief. The wizard shouldered past my brother’s defenses that fast—one moment I was measuring the modicum of hope blossoming in my brother’s body language, and the next, I was staring at an arrogant man who wore my brother’s face.