The Thing About Weres: A Mystwalker Novel Page 15

  I’m not stupid. There was only one reasonable check box on my list of options at that moment. So, I played dead, and it wasn’t too much of a stretch. I was a corpse, except cold rage blinded my eyes, and black, biting hurt gnawed at my insides.

  He’d tricked me. He’d asked for my word—promise me you’ll stay—knowing, knowing that I would give it. Knowing the moment I caught the scent of him stamped over that little brown wolf I would yearn for the right to break it.

  I don’t share mates.

  Trowbridge’s wolf removed his paw from my chest, though he continued to straddle me, head up proudly, like some snout-to-the-breeze statue the pigeons use for target practice. One of his back claws dug into my thigh.

  I welcomed the pain of it.

  Distance, I wanted—no—I needed distance.

  Not the fake and fleeting, fuzzy pink detachment I’d experienced when I swallowed a few mouthfuls of that Fae go-go juice. No, the real type. The permanent kind. Involving miles and screw-you declarations. Even if I could hear his heart. Right over my head. Steady, a little faster than usual. Beating from inside his massive canine chest that was covered with a deep thicket of coarse gray fur.

  He dipped his head. Blue eyes—icier and less forgiving than his mortal ones—examined me.

  It was six months, I condemned him with my eyes. Six lousy months.

  You found my replacement that fast?

  At the count of eighteen of the longest seconds of my life, he stepped neatly off me and allowed me to sit up. Stiffly, I rolled up to my knees. From there, I stood, slowly, because my sense of gravity was off—my inner-bitch was careening inside me—and somewhat carefully, because payback pain sent a louder message of retribution to my hands. They felt fatter, hotter. I curled them into claws. They would throb in earnest soon.

  “Dissension in the ranks so soon?” Bowler-hat drawled, plucking a piece of dog hair off his pants leg. The gray wolf didn’t bark anything in reply—hell, even the crickets had lost their voices in the sudden oppressive silence. I shifted my glance toward the Fae—today was all about shifts: eye shifts, direction shifts, fortune shifts, relationship shifts—preferring to look at him than cast my gaze toward Trowbridge’s wolf.

  Watching the Fae’s mouth, I understood that Trowbridge’s wolf and the Fae were in the grip of a silent, nasty conversation.

  It seemed that whole telepathic thing wasn’t limited to dogs.

  The Fae flinched, and then said sharply, “That would be impossible. You have not fulfilled your part of the bargain.”

  Trowbridge had made a bargain, had he? With a “cold-blooded,” murderous Fae?

  I ran my thumb gently over the blister forming on the tip of my index finger, thinking about escape scenarios. I’d need money or a credit card. And a car. A fast one. While I plotted, the standoff between Fae and wolf stretched, until one of the ravens watching from the tall pines grew tired of the impasse, and broke the tension with a sharp caw.

  The Fae sighed and removed his hat, sliding it into the curve of his elbow. “There. I am hatless. Are you satisfied?” His lip curved, and he insolently added something in Merenwynian.

  Trowbridge’s wolf bristled. The bitch beside him groomed her paw.

  But the Fae turned to me and bowed.

  And then, I got that feeling you get before a thought is fully formed—that wait-a-minute, here-it-comes prickle. Now that he’d doffed his chapeau, I could see him fairly well. Not perfectly—moonlight will never show details as clearly as a good old hundred-watt bulb—but well enough. The hat was a shield, I thought. Without it, he looked curiously vulnerable. His hair was strange, shorn to the skin on one side of his head, the other side covered by a long fall of sun-bleached hair. And his face seemed longer. His nose had been broken once and not properly reset.

  But it was the expectant quality in his eyes—deceptively sleepy, tilted up at the edges—that scratched at a scab almost healed.

  “I will fulfill my part of our agreement once you’ve proven to me that they accept you in mortal skin,” he said, turning his head slightly toward Trowbridge. “Think twice. If you kill me, no one wins. Those most in need will never find their way to the Safe Passage.”

  I don’t know what the Shadow said after that. My gaze clung to his long, wide mouth, fixated on the way his lip puckered at the corners. Then he rolled his neck, as if he were getting ready to do something really dangerous.

  Oh heavenly stars.

  Bowler-hat glanced back at me, and our gazes locked.

  The final, axis-spinning shift.

  Once the Fae had been thin—too much so, a slenderness born of nervous energy, and high expectations, as if he burned off food faster than he could eat it. Like he yearned to move fast enough to outrun the restlessness that was always part of him. That was gone. Now he was solid the way men get when they mature. Still lean legged, but the upper part of his torso was well developed, his neck no longer sapling thin.

  He was so damn old.

  How is that possible?

  My Were turned around inside me in an anxious circle, and with each restless circuit, she brushed her flank against my Fae, who kept sending sparks of malicious glee up my spine. I wanted to tell them both to buzz off—for once just leave me the hell alone—this day had been a day beyond all days.

  My world kept reeling.

  I’d like to faint, I thought, resting the back of my wrist hard against my churning gut. If only I was the fainting sort.

  He was still handsome in a battered-beauty sort of way. But then I’d always suspected he’d taken the lion’s share in the looks category, hadn’t I? Hell, he’d always been a thief—sucking the good genes right out of the womb we shared. He got the courage I lacked. The gift of gab that I longed for. The brightness and light of my mother, mixed with an adventurous streak that was, perhaps, his alone.

  The other half of me.

  Once, half of my soul.

  My brother, my twin.

  Chapter Eleven

  Trowbridge’s wolf leaned his dog head into my personal space and gave me a look. Don’t ask me what it meant. I was beyond decoding canine body language, and no one, not one damn flea-infested mangy one of them, had given me a copy of Visible Pooch Cues for You: What They Mean, and How to Deal.

  “Don’t you have places to be?” I asked, darting another disbelieving glance at my twin.

  If a dog could huff, he did. Then he turned his muzzle up to the night sky and howled.

  As howls go, it was the trumpet call.

  Long ago, when I was just a little Fae-mutt asleep in my bed, I’d heard a similar bay. A song to the moon. A ring-out to the clan. “Come,” it said. “Run with me.” Trowbridge’s wolf did it again—a true Alpha calling to his pack—and the response from the gathered kin was fervid. Yips, yaps. You didn’t have to be a canine to recognize their joy. He trotted through the center of the pack, and those closest to his passage sank low onto their front legs and tried to lick his muzzle as he passed.

  The king is passing. Kneel.

  He gave them no heed. Head high, ears forward, he trotted to where Cordelia and the boys waited. Gave homage to their loyalty with a thorough inspection of their snouts, their necks, and their wounds. A conversation—probably telepathic—occurred.

  A chuff of agreement from Harry and a slower one from Biggs. The two of them came over close to where I sat and settled. Backs turned to the pack. Gazes fixed on the Fae.

  Lexi’s guards, or perhaps mine.

  Hurt curdled my stomach, barely appeased by the fact that the little brown wolf was next to receive a set of orders. She slunk over to join Harry and Biggs, tail drooping, Ralph a glimmer of gold about her throat.

  Yawned and sat.

  Three guards then.

  My One True Thing turned and gave another piercing howl—one that said, “You and me, moon, let’s get it on”—and then, the natural-born Alpha of Creemore, my grade-school crush, and the ghost that I had carried in my heart for the last si
x months turned for the woods. He stopped one shrub in. Directed to me another piercing command … This one I had no trouble interpreting, a furred promise for “I shall return,” before he melted into the forest.

  I watched, feet numb, mouth flat, heart—well, Goddess knows where that was, I was hardly conscious of the loss of its usually comforting thump—as the rest of his newly claimed pack fought for rank and file. Nipping and snapping, growling and yelping, each one struggling to be first, or second, or perhaps third to follow his exalted ass down the trail. Rachel Scawens won second place. Then another jostle and a yelp, and a stiff-tailed wolf—they all looked the same to me—secured third best. The middle ranks sorted out their relative positions. Some of those discussions were downright ugly, all fangs and crinkled snouts, throat growls and yips.

  I was conscious of Lexi standing behind me, watching me watch them. I felt … uncomfortable. Suddenly shy. I didn’t know what to do, except sit there, with my hands resting on my thighs, palms upward and fingers throbbing; my brain was curiously numb.

  Cordelia’s white wolf was the last. By choice, I knew. She made a whine of distress, her gaze flitting back over her shoulder to the brother I knew stood nearby, and then back to the path down which the pack had disappeared.

  Yes, Cordelia, our boyfriend’s back.

  “It’s all right,” I told her, lifting my shoulders. “He won’t hurt me. Go now.”

  I watched, head turned, until Cordelia’s white tail was swallowed by the forest’s dark. And then the air was quiet, until the ravens spread their wings and left.

  * * *

  I wanted to break the silence that was stretching wire thin between my twin and me—to call out his name or to send him a thought picture—because he was walking toward me, and he needed to stop. Don’t come any closer. Just stay where you are so I can inspect you for changes first. You’re a stranger to me, you shouldn’t be, but you are. Still, he kept coming, eating up the ground between us, and I knew that I had only seconds to reconcile myself to this—this Shadow of a boy that had filled my memories with laughter and light.

  Why hadn’t I recognized him?

  Even though he’d donned his hat again there were obvious similarities between the brother I lost and the man crossing the field, if I’d only known to look for them. Lexi had grown tall, but then again, that should have been expected; my twin had always favored my father’s side over Mum’s. And lean—of course, he’d get the Were-lean gene. Then there was his jaw. I’d always thought the rest of his face would eventually grow into it, but, very obviously, it hadn’t. It was, as it had always been and likely always would be, the most dominant of his features; triangular and a little too long, finishing with a stubborn, solid chin—an upside-down pyramid with the top shorn off.

  Who could miss a jaw like that?

  But where was the wide Joker smile? The irrepressible, “I’ll do it first” twinkle in his green eyes? The man wearing a carefully blank expression—and he was a man, this Fae who’d long since shot past his twenty-second birthday—wasn’t the same kid who used to send me thought pictures during Ms. Webster’s history class.

  A game changer, that’s what the Shadow was.

  In one sweep, he’d destroyed the series of images I’d created in my head to comfort me when I felt my most twinless and alone: my brother at thirteen, a year after he’d been stolen away by the Fae, looking much as he had at twelve, except perhaps cleaner and better dressed; my twin at seventeen, his hair a little darker, his face filled out, sending a wink to a blushing female. Gone. All those imaginary head shots I’d created, envisioning him growing in tandem beside me, changing from a restless greyhound into something more languid and refined, perhaps an aristocratic Fae.

  I’d been wrong. This was no nobleman.

  The Shadow walked toward me, hip first—a street fighter balanced on the balls of his feet—until the gap between us could be bridged easily if either of us had the courage to reach out and touch the other.

  Leather and sandalwood teased my nose. He’d affected a perfume, a deliberately cultured one. “They smell like dogs,” my twin used to gripe. “I’m glad we have no scent.”

  Not Lexi, not Lexi, not Lexi.

  I studied the fawn stitching on his black boots, not yet ready to speak, turning words over in my head. Bad ones. Genocide. Manipulator. Thief. Liar. And he must have felt it, too—that distance, that perplexing turn on the map of reconciliations—because my brother didn’t choose to embrace me. Instead, he sank down onto the backs of his booted heels, then slid his suspenders off his shoulders, and pulled off his shirt.

  “Here,” he said gruffly.

  “Thanks.” I accepted the garment awkwardly. It was dove colored with an indistinct paisley design. Lustrous small gray buttons mocked my swollen hands. “It’s too nice. I’ll ruin it,” I said with a nod toward my midriff. “I’m a little…” My voice fell off. “Bloody” would be the best description. It was everywhere, coating my stomach, staining my bra, smearing my arms, graffitiing my jeans.

  Don’t faint.

  “Don’t mind that,” he said softly. “You’re fully healed beneath it.”

  But I couldn’t tear my gaze from the red smears. My brain shut down—there’d been too many axis shifts in one short night—and for a bit, all I could smell was the scent of my own blood, sweet and floral like crushed sweet peas.

  “Hell,” he chided, and when I didn’t respond—who calls me Hell anymore?—he touched my head. Just once. Very lightly. But a spark shot between us, and it startled me out of that blank place I’d sunk into.

  “No one calls me Helen anymore,” I told him. “It’s Hedi now.”

  “The sun potion heals wounds, even almost mortal ones, if given in time.” Then the man Trowbridge had labeled bankrupt of kindness tentatively stretched out a hand, and held it in the air between us, a fragile bridge hoping to span a turbulent sea.

  Permission to touch? his eyes asked.

  They’re greener than mine. I’d forgotten that.

  He took my silence for approval. “Stay still,” he ordered, leaning on one knee to squeegee the gross stuff off my belly. “See? Nothing there. All healed.”

  I bent my head. Smooth, unmarred skin. No hole. No gash.

  He sat back on his heels, resting his arm on his knee. His hand was large, long fingered, big knuckles like Dad’s. Not pretty. Capable. Smeared with my blood. “Raise your arms,” he ordered. My brother talks with a Merenwynian accent now. I lifted, and held them like that, curiously obedient, as he threaded arms through sleeves, and head through hole.

  Gently, he eased the gray shirt down to my hips.

  I shook my head. “It’s ruined.”

  “Not a problem.” A glimmer of a smile. “It’s not mine.”

  “Then whose is it?”

  But he didn’t answer, because his expression had grown tight again, and … frightening. “Give me the name of the beast who hurt your hands.”

  “No one did this to me,” I said, thinking guys with wide mouths can flatten them awfully fast. “It’s just payback pain. It always happens after I use my talent. When my magic returns to me—by the way, that was my magic you pinched—my hands do this.” I held up one flaming paw. “It’s only temporary. It’ll blister, and then eventually heal, if I give it enough time.”

  “Payback pain,” he repeated in an odd voice, stretching his fingers.

  “You don’t get payback pain?” Why not?

  “Not the type that hurts my hands,” he said, with a bittersweet smile at the moon. “You don’t change into one of them, then?”

  “No. I can’t transform into a wolf,” I said flatly. Can you?

  Look at me, Lexi.

  A small animal plucked up its courage and waddled for deeper cover. Leaves rustled, a twig cracked. He twisted toward the sound, nostrils flaring.

  “Raccoon,” I said. “Creemore is overrun with them.”

  “Possum,” he murmured, still staring at the dark forest. �
�Your nose was never as strong as mine.”

  “Who says?” I responded instinctively.

  “Your brother does.” Just as quickly, he’d fallen back into the old rhythm, finishing the volley as he’d done back in the day when he’d been only a few minutes older and two inches taller than me—with both eyebrows raised, as if to say, “You challenging me, shrimp?”

  And there it was. My brother’s left eyebrow had always been lazier than the right. The sight of his right brow lifted slightly higher than its twin scored a sharp nail over the glacier holding my heart hostage.

  Love welled.

  “Hey,” I said, wishing my hands weren’t hot and swollen fat so that I could do something, anything, with them—fold them over my heart or maybe touch that long sweep of wheat-colored hair—to show him, to tell him—

  Now I recognize you.

  “Welcome home, Lexi,” I said softly.

  He blinked before allowing a wonderful, big huge Lexi grin—his mouth so wide that his top teeth gleamed—to warm his face. “You haven’t grown much, runt.”

  “You said I’d never pass five feet.” I grinned back. “You were wrong.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m five two. Three, if I wear shoes.”

  “And you consider that grown?” My brother’s smile faded, and his voice grew serious. “Hell, how old are you?”

  “I turned twenty-two in August,” I said softly.

  That was … a blow. A long, dead interval passed before Lexi’d collected himself enough to speak. “Eleven years? That’s all it’s been?”

  Ten and a half, I thought, resisting the urge to correct him. “We don’t look like twins anymore,” I whispered. You look so old, Lexi.

  A muscle flexed in his jaw. With a rough nod, “No, not anymore.”

  “How long have you been gone?”

  “The Fae don’t count years,” he said tonelessly. “But it seems time passes faster there than here.” He looked over to the Stronghold ridge, and asked, “Mum and Dad?”

  “They both died the night the Fae took you across the portal. Dad first.”

  He nodded as if he’d known, and I reached for him, but that made him abruptly lift his arm as if to cast a spell or maybe to ward off something—a blow? A curse? “Sorry,” he bit out. “I don’t like being touched anymore.”