Mystwalker 01: The Trouble with Fate Read online

Things got blurry. I blinked and they got clearer.

  The Were girl had made it out from her corner. She was heading toward the door, half bent over, holding a broken hand to her ear. She was, in fact, glaring at me. I wondered how much more pain she could inflict. My vision went grainy again.

  Another blink. Trowbridge was prying her fingers off her ear. He held the sound blaster right up to her head, and waited until she fell down. Then he grabbed the back of her pants, and threw her into the bank of dryers with the same dispassionate enthusiasm a baggage handler uses on luggage. Her impact made me swallow hard. And for a second I could see with cold clarity.

  He was a Were. Furless, yes, but still a Were. Robson Trowbridge, the much loved youngest son of the Creemore Alpha, and beautiful Bridge, every girl’s grade school crush, and even the Trowbridge of my recent disappointment—those guys weren’t in the Laundromat. The Were was. His neck tendons stood out in long ropes, the lines beside his mouth no longer looked like laugh lines, but like lines carved for intimidation. He picked up the gun before moving toward Scawens.

  I closed my eyes. There would be more blood. I waited for a shot that never came. I opened them a crack.

  With a muttered curse, Trowbridge pulled back his leg and kicked him again. He must have aimed low. Scawens’s shriek was as high as the alarm.

  Things got dark.

  I thought I heard Biggs say, “You’ve got to hit me, man.” But that didn’t make sense. Nothing in this day had made sense.

  Then, Trowbridge was by me. I was too tired to lift my head. He stopped close enough that I could study his bare knees poking through the new rip in his jeans. There was a pause. He bent on one knee and yanked me up by one arm. I swayed. He had two faces, and both of them looked mad. I reared back. The double vision settled down to one very angry Were with gleaming blue eyes and black whiskers.

  He looked furious enough to chew up fairies and spit out their wings. He bent down, shoved his hard shoulder into my stomach and hoisted me up with a pained grunt. My braid flopped down over my hanging head. In protest, Merry lightly bit my skin, as she became squashed between his hard muscled back, and my flattened breasts. She’d grown in size, my protective friend. What had once been a smooth warm lump was now a big fat hot one. Was I destined to be burdened with two amulets now? One for each cup?

  I must have asked that out loud to Trowbridge, because I could hear him grunt something. “Never mind,” I muttered to his ass, moving my head to the side so that I wasn’t staring at the gun tucked into the hollow of his back. Things kept flickering in and out of focus. I made a fist around his T-shirt, and tried to pull myself more upright. Bad, bad idea. His shoulder pressed deeper into my stomach and the scent of his blood was already making it cramp. I sank down again to rest my bouncing head on the small of his back. With one eye, I watched his ass cheeks move in a smooth rhythm. He hardly broke stride for potholes. In the distance, I could hear sirens. The cops were coming.

  He stopped in front of the hood of Bob’s car. Roughly, he bent forward to roll me off. My head smacked down on the hood. “Watch the car,” I said, but what came out of my mouth was all muddled. He pulled Merry’s chain up from under my shirt, letting her dangle from his fingers for inspection. She spun slowly, one fat ball of crisscrossed gold protectively surrounding both amulets. He started to pull the necklace upward.

  “Don’t do that,” I said, but was too late. Merry spat electric fire down the length of her Fae necklace. Trowbridge hissed and sprang back as blue sparks jetted between his fingers and her gold. “Ow,” I said weakly, feeling the heated metal char my neck.

  Stars winked down on me. I twisted onto my side and heaved, but my empty stomach only produced a weak dry retch.

  “None of that,” he said, and grabbed me around the waist. My feet dangled as he carried me around to the open car door. One slipper teetered off my curling toes and fell to the pavement. He shoved me into the car. My head and ass bounced as I made a landing. His hip followed mine before I even had a chance to figure out how to mount the obstacle of the console. My backside received another impatient shove over it as he settled behind the wheel.

  “My shoe,” I complained.

  One swipe at the pavement and the shoe went flying over my head. It bounced off the window and fell between the door and the seat. “Put your seat belt on,” he said, clicking his own in place.

  “Huh?”

  “Cops.”

  I tried, but my hands blazed trying to fit the two pieces together. He muttered something uncomplimentary under his breath, and then batted my hands away. That hurt. I told him exactly why he was a misbegotten son-of-a-Were but my rant came out in another incomprehensible jumble of words. He clicked the pieces of the buckle together, then he turned the key in the ignition, and we were smoothly exiting the parking lot. We made a left at the first light. We were traveling at posted speeds as the cop car blurred past us, its roof flashing red warning lights.

  Four stop signs and one light later, I tested my mouth. “Trowbridge?”

  “Shut up,” he replied.

  Take the man out of the Were and what have you got? Were. I closed my eyes and let the darkness come.

  Chapter Eight

  The sun is shining on the water. Lou watches the same man, but this time, she’s closer so that bud-swollen branches frame him. His hands are on his hips. His back is turned, as always.

  But then the memory sequence changes. The fish doesn’t leap out of the pool. The wind doesn’t ruffle his hair. He twists around, glancing at her over his shoulder; his smile is full and satisfied.

  Her lover looks at her and she knew. All the light went out, the picture fading dark around the gleam of his feral smile.

  * * *

  “Wake up, kid,” I heard from far away. Deep voice. Harsh and butter-soft to my ears all at the same time. Black claws were reaching for me. I could smell the copper-rich scent of his blood.

  I attack. “You stupid Were-bastard, you left me! You could have saved me!”

  “You ungrateful brat! What do you mean I could have saved you? I did save you.” He ducked a flailing fist. “Keep it up, and I’ll glue you to your seat,” he said. “And stop calling me a stupid Were.”

  He waited for me to explode again, and when I didn’t, he used his two fingers on my forehead to ease me back into my seat. “You are one crazy-ass Tinker Bell,” he said, returning his attention to the road.

  I barely heard him because I had made another discovery. Oh Sweet Stars, I’m blind.

  Everything was blurry and dark—except him. His outline had a yellow-white halo that made him stand out in a world that looked mostly gray. I looked about, disbelief churning in my gut. Everything was horribly out of focus. The buttons on my shirt. My hands on my lap. The view through the windshield was worse; everything outside was an indistinct smear of black and gray shadows.

  I can’t be blind. I can’t be a half-Fae/half-Were, blind, homeless person.

  “I should have left you to those Weres, just like you left me.” I turned on him again, and got in a few good clubbing blows to his body—he woofed out some air once—before he brought the assault to an end by catching my wrists.

  “Are you nuts?”

  His touch felt pulse-hot on my skin. I wanted his throat, but settled for his shoulder. I leaned in and bit him.

  “Son of a bitch,” he howled. Undeterred, I bore down with the single-minded intensity of a pit bull coming off a long veggie kibble diet. The car went into a sideways skid as he grabbed my braid to haul me off. I heard the brief rah-rah-rah-rah noise as the Taurus tires bumped over the breakdown lane’s skid-resistant grooves, and then the car dipped sharply to my side, and he let go to steer. The wheels caught hold on the soft gravel shoulder, and rolled to a stop.

  I struggled with the lock, shoved the door open and tumbled out before the wheels had stopped turning. There was no firm footing, just a broken cable barrier, and past that a whole bunch of down. The ground gave way under my f
eet, and I found myself rolling down a sharp incline, picking up bruises and twigs as I flattened shrubbery, flew over a log, and finally came to rest, stomach down in the sludge of one of the town’s protected heritage wetlands.

  For a moment it was enough just to breathe. The door slammed. I heard him walk across the pavement, his boot heels clicking on the asphalt, and then heard the soft scuff of the gravel as he came to the lip of the ravine. There was a long pause. “Anything broken?”

  It was tempting to pretend that I was dead, but you can’t play possum with a wolf, and just the sound of his deep voice was enough to make my stomach roil. Nothing was broken, but my eyes were burning as if someone had splashed hot pepper juice in them. I pressed the heels of my palms against my watering lids.

  “You going to sit there all night?” he asked.

  “Go away.” Somewhere, I had lost a shoe.

  Where were my glasses? Hanging off one ear. I ripped them off, and concentrated on slowing down my breathing while I knuckled sludge off my cheek. Blinking didn’t do much for the burning sensation in my eyes, but it made the world look clearer. I felt for the tail of my shirt to clean my glasses. It was wet. Ditto the other tail. After a brief search, I found a clean spot on my sleeve that would do. Once done, I held my glasses up to the night sky, and instead of a blob of goo on one lens, I had made a smear of pond slime on both. I hooked my glasses through Merry’s chain.

  Trowbridge’s voice was damnably cool. “I’m not going anywhere until I get my amulet and some answers.”

  “Come down and try to get them, you stupid Were.”

  “I’m on my last pair of clean jeans, so I’ll wait for you here.” He moved and a pebble of gravel bounced down the hill. “Besides, there’s nowhere for you to go but up, Tinker Bell.”

  My vision surged in and out, which felt kind of nauseating. But he was right. There was nowhere to go but up. I was at the bottom of a soup bowl of wetland. All around me was hillside. A thick wedge of bulrushes was behind me, and beyond them, a sharp hill covered by an impossible tangle of wannabe trees. The only feasible place to start climbing my way out was four or five yards to the right of where he was standing. I chose the other way, the one through the dense thicket of bulrushes.

  Point of fact: bulrushes don’t yield. They sway to the wind, but they don’t bend to the two-footed. One stiff broken end left a bleeding gouge on my cheek, before another’s thick ball root caught my toe and tripped me.

  “Hurry up, kid,” he said. “We haven’t put enough distance between us and the bad guys.”

  “I’m going to kill you when I get to the top,” I promised.

  “Well, there’s something for you to work toward.”

  The top of the ravine was about three times my height. Not too much of a climb, but the mud-slick slope was steep, and covered in rough growth.

  He’d stopped the car right on the edge, and I could make out the long, dark rectangle of the Taurus. Trowbridge was the candlelit ghost figure turning to open the passenger door. A burst of light illuminated the inside of the car as the overhead light kicked in. He sat down sideways, facing me, as the open-door alarm started to ping.

  “When I woke up and found you in my bed, you had me stumped for a minute.” Trowbridge lifted a foot and jammed it in the door spring. Immediately, the annoying pinging stopped. He slouched in the passenger chair, one leg stretched out toward me, and the other bent at the knee. “Were you a thief who likes to steal amulets? If so, who hired you? You knew about Weres, but weren’t one. You wore a Fae amulet, but the last of them died a decade ago. My next guess was witch, but once I got that hoodie off you, I realized you don’t have much in the way of a personal scent—”

  I don’t have any.

  “I should have picked up on that before, but I was distracted by the lap dance, the puking, and the bunch of Weres on my tail.”

  “And you were drunk,” I reminded him, jamming my knee in a hollow between a root and a flat rock. I tightened my grip on a root, and heaved myself upward.

  “Detail.” He paused and then continued. “You pick up aromas that you’ve been around, but it’s all surface stuff. Underneath that, you’re virtually scentless. You have the softest, whitest skin I’ve ever touched. It actually gives off a little brr of magic when you stroke it. So, you have to be a fairy.” He stretched a glowing hand outside the car. “Is it starting to rain? Yeah, I think it is. I kept going back to the fact that you know about Weres and you’re still walking and talking, so I ran my hand over your throat again. You’re not full blood, but I can feel your Were answering—”

  “You can feel the Were inside me?” I asked, horrified.

  “Which makes you a half blood that no one has got around to killing. Considering your personality, that’s this side of a miracle.”

  He can feel her underneath my skin. Oh, someone just shoot me.

  “You’re about the right age. What are you, seventeen? And there’s your build. You’re small and…” He consulted his brain for a suitable word. “Curvy. A short, chubby kid could grow up to look like you. I lifted your eyelids at a stoplight. You’ve got exceptionally light green eyes—”

  “It’s too dark to see the color of my eyes.”

  “Were vision.” He pointed to his own baby-blues. “And then I knew. The last time I saw eyes like that, they were staring at me from the face of this little blond-haired kid who was crushing on me. Every time I looked up, there she was, staring right at me. Spooky little kid.”

  “Why don’t you just f—”

  “That is when I knew you were one of the Stronghold twins. Hilda? Helga? Hermione?”

  I craned my head to glare up at him. He was sitting in Bob’s passenger seat, his dark hair shimmering with its bright white halo, his head bent as he buttoned up his shirt. I’d always thought the big reveal would be my personal apocalypse. Instead, he was up there, fussing with his shirt, and I was down here, too far away to give his jaw a good jab.

  “So, Helga, when did they open the portal again?”

  “No one opened any portal, you smug bastard. I’ve been right here, living in Deerfield for most of the last ten years. Didn’t you ever wonder, just once, what happened to Benjamin Stronghold’s kids?”

  “I didn’t have to. I knew exactly where they were—I saw the Fae carry you through the portal with my own two eyes. So you want to cut the crap and tell me exactly why they sent you over here? What do the Fae want?”

  He’d thought we were already on the other side. He hadn’t realized I was locked in the cupboard. The world swam for a bit. I hugged the trunk of a scraggly cedar, and rested my stinging eyes on my arm. All this time, I’d pinned the blame on him. Every time I’d seen kids waiting for a school bus, and known I had to stay in the apartment, I’d held him responsible. It was his fault. If he’d rescued me from the fire, my life would have been different. I don’t know why I thought it would have, but I did.

  I’d kept the memory of his betrayal festering, feeding it teaspoons of loneliness, mouthfuls of bitterness, and tidbits of self-pity every time the red-hurt began to flag, all because I was so unwilling to let that old grief die. Why? Brooding about the past wouldn’t change it. Why couldn’t I let it—no, him—go?

  I gazed upward at him and saw the bright glow of him—the halo of light that deceived my eyes, and knew the truth. If I hated him and held him accountable for every piece of misery in my life, I could dwell on him. Keep the memory of him, beautiful and ten fingered, alive in my mind. Fantasize about the moment when we’d meet again. Why would I dream of even considering forgiving him? Resenting him was better than the fear of emptiness that would follow once I made peace with my losses.

  “You still down there?” he asked.

  I worked to keep my voice level. “You saw the portal?”

  “It was hanging over the pond. Glowing lights. Pink fog. Smelled like flowers.”

  “Freesias.”

  “Like I said, flowers.” He ran a thumb over the bristle
s on his chin, irritated. “I saw them carry you across, and then it closed. There was this god-awful sound as it did, like a—”

  He really had been there. There had been a noise as the gates sealed—a horrifying wall of sound; terrible and frightening. It had been loud enough to be heard over the crackle of the fire eating its way through our kitchen. I’d feared the world was ending, had worried for Lexi … “You saw my brother! Was Lexi okay?”

  Trowbridge said slowly, “Lexi?”

  “You didn’t see the Fae carry me through the Gates of Merenwyn, you saw my twin, Lexi…” Just saying Lexi’s name out loud caused my throat to thicken. “We used to joke he’d sleep through the end of the world. He was asleep when the Fae broke in; he didn’t have time to get to our hiding spot.” A lie. There had been time—if his sister had gone and got him when her mother told her to. Goddess, was I even lying to myself now? In my mind’s eye I saw my brother as he’d been that night, sweat-faced and defiant. “He didn’t go easily—he fought back. I could hear the scuffles … him cursing them out. They dragged him into the kitchen and then…” Lexi had seen me hiding in the cupboard; I know he had. But he’d turned his head, and looked away, so they wouldn’t know I was in our hidey-hole. “The Fae carried him out of our house, and I haven’t seen him since.” So inadequate. Such a terrible postscript to the worst night of my life.

  I swallowed. “Did he look okay to you? Was he hurt?”

  “I don’t know whether he was hurt or not, all I could see really was the top of his blond head. One of the Fae had him wrapped up in a blanket. He was conscious though, judging by all the squirming.” Trowbridge squinted and cocked his head to one side, obviously replaying the scene in his mind. “He was so little. I thought he was you.”

  “He was twelve.” And small for his age.

  “Well, you Fae are pretty small.”

  The words slipped out, unbidden. “You could have saved him.”

  “You’ve got this fixation about me saving people,” he said. “There were five of them. All armed. Besides, I was hunting something else.” He brooded for a bit, while I paused to stretch my sore calf muscle. “So you’ve been here all this time. The Fae didn’t reopen the gates to Merenwyn?”