The Thing About Weres: A Mystwalker Novel Page 3

  “How can I guard you guys if my eyes are straight ahead?” Biggs made a hole in the greenery and grinned through it. He could well be cocky; he was on the other side of the hedge that separated the cemetery from the pack’s gathering field. “Someone could sneak up along the cliff path and ambush you.”

  Cordelia reached for her hoop earring. She could have been getting undressed for the moon-call, but it was equally possible she was getting ready to inflict a course correction on my pack’s third.

  “No one is going to ambush us,” I said, with more optimism than I felt. “Biggs, keep your eyes peeled for any Were who somehow managed to misinterpret my warning not to show up until the moon has completely risen.”

  “I am.”

  “Not if you keep spying on what’s happening on this side of the hedge.”

  “A good Were should have eyes and ears on the back of his head,” he intoned. “He should sense when a—”

  “That wasn’t a suggestion, Biggs. That was an order.”

  There, the Alpha-by-proxy had spoken. All hail Hedi.

  Biggs subsided behind the screen of cedars. He was the only Were I felt comfortable ordering about. If they were all as simple to control as my friend on the other side of the bush, I’d be—

  “Clothing,” repeated Cordelia.

  It was nippy. Not quite cold enough to frost my breath—mouth breathing being required because Biggs was smelling kind of funky. Blame it on the moon. On a regular day, Weres have a distinctive aroma to them—fresh air, woods, earth, maybe with a touch of fox—but during the three nights of the full moon their scent turned nose-twitching raunchy.

  Fae don’t have a scent.

  This is just one of the many distinctions between Fae and Werewolves. Those born two-natured change at the moon’s call. Fae do not. We make ourselves a cup of cocoa and go to bed early. We may even clamp a pillow over our head so that we don’t hear all those dog whines and choked barks escaping from the morphing snouts of the young cubs who don’t know any better. I guess because I’m half Were I should admit that once in his wolf state, a Werewolf is not the fiend over which picture books dwell and little children quail. No one in my pack is the type of slathering beast dreamed up by the special-effects department on a Hollywood lot. Once turned, my Weres actually look like large wolves. Some of them are pretty, some of them are sort of ratty looking, but all of them are furry.

  Fae are never furry.

  And here’s a final fact: we don’t walk around nude in public. Did I say that already? Well, let me say it again. We do not prance around buck naked no matter what stage the moon is in.

  I’ve got to stop thinking of myself as a Fae.

  Cordelia stood tall, her head tipped back, allowing the moon’s light to touch her face with silver fingers that must have felt damn good, judging by the discreet shudder that went through her bony frame.

  A cool wind whistled through the trees.

  My roommate flicked a glance toward the three pines that anchored the edge of the ridge, and then visibly recentered herself.

  “Go away,” I mouthed to the glowing shadow flitting from pine tree to pine tree.

  Stalker-ghost melted behind the nearest pine. But half a second later, her head—nothing more than an indistinct, wavering bluish blur capped by floating serpent trails of long hair—popped out from around the trunk.

  “Are you paying attention?” said Cordelia, a tetch acidly.

  “A hundred percent,” I said.

  “The more light you let on your skin, the faster you will change.” Cordelia began to unbutton her shirt. For the last few months, I’d shared a twenty-seven-foot trailer with her, but this was the first time I’d seen her disrobe. I didn’t want to be able to report on whether or not she had a full package, even if there was three hundred and seventy-five bucks riding on it. But she’d offered to show me the ropes. Or maybe it had been another group decision. I tried to remember. She cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes at me, bringing me back from yet another mental detour.

  I didn’t have any buttons. I hauled my cotton sweater up and over my head, and then looked for a dry place to place it. Suppressing a shiver, I bent to drape it over poor little Samuel’s thin, worn marker (1744–1745, BELOVED SON).

  “Are you hurrying?” Biggs’s voice was strained. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”

  “He’d bloody well better hold,” Cordelia muttered as she unzipped her skirt. “One of us needs to be in two-legged form to escort you back to the trailer if this doesn’t work.”

  Did they really think it had come to that? Unseen danger all around me? Ever since that damn letter arrived, I couldn’t even walk to the compost pile without an escort.

  Cordelia was down to her underwear. She had no waist. None. I could count her ribs under her dead-white skin. She looked at me steadily, and then her lip twisted into a lopsided sneer as she reached behind her back for her bra fastenings.

  I partially turned away from her and stared at a tree as I fumbled with the rest of my clothing. I owed her more than I could ever repay. The least I could do was grant her privacy as she shed her adopted sexual identity. As I slid my jeans down to my ankles, I heard the soft friction of fabric on skin and out of the corner of my eye I saw something light and lacy land by Cordelia’s feet.

  A few feet over to my left, beyond the cedar hedge, I could hear Biggs bouncing on the balls of his feet in jittery anticipation. “You’ll have to hurry, the Chihuahua is getting anxious,” Cordelia said. I shed the rest of my clothing, with the last item—one medium pair of Hanes pink cotton panties—landing on Absolom (1746–1747, LAMB OF GOD). Folding my arms over my chest, I turned back to Cordelia.

  She was facing the moon. Her raised arms were outstretched, as if she were trying to embrace it. “You can feel its call inside you,” she said in a husky murmur. “The moon will summon your inner wolf. Let its warmth run over your skin. Trust your body. Trust your instincts. Trust the moon.” My roommate snapped me a look over her shoulder. “You have to surrender to it, Hedi. You can’t go through another moon without showing your other nature. You have to give it to us. Or there—”

  “Won’t be any ‘us,’” I filled in.

  “Come hold my hand. Feel it through me.”

  Sometimes I wondered just who was the minion and who was the Alpha-by-proxy. I tiptoed over, readjusted one arm to cover my boobs, and reluctantly bared my nether regions to reach for the large, well-manicured hand extended my way.

  Cordelia lifted our clenched hands to the moon. “Can you feel it?”

  I could feel the cold. I could feel the dampness of the ground under my bare feet. I could feel embarrassed and incompetent and all sorts of esteem-lowering thoughts, but I couldn’t feel the moon.

  “Yup.”

  “Good.” She tipped her head really far back, so far I could see her Adam’s apple. “Now, let it happen.”

  She held my hand tight, even as she started to change, as if, what? As if she could pour a little of her Werewolf essence into me? I felt her skin start to move, courtesy of the bones beginning their stomach-churning, morph-into-a-canine thing. Kind of gross. She pulled me down with her as she fell on her knees.

  I slid my hand out of hers, my skin crawling in an all too mortal way at the feel of hers moving under my grip.

  A light low moan slipped from her lips, just before she thudded onto her side in her chosen bed of fragrant maple leaves. The tight, well-moisturized skin stretched across her cheekbones began to look like a pot of bubbling cream of chicken soup. Blip, blip. Blip, blip. Things were twitching underneath. I’d seen that before, when Trowbridge had started his change. Cordelia’s bones started to chitter as they broke and shortened and lengthened and narrowed and did all that horrendous skeleton-shifting stuff they needed to do to accommodate a two-footed being turning into a four-legged creature.

  I turned my head away. She’d only just begun if her bones sounded like castanets.

  Join them
, I told myself. Be one of them.

  My inner-bitch was restless. She kept pacing inside me and leaking distress into my bloodstream. I heard a whimper. A small whine. I looked around for its source, and then—oh Goddess—realized it was me. That was good, wasn’t it? I’d whined. Was the change going to start with my jaw? Was it elongating? I opened my mouth wide—another deep-throated whine slipped out—and tested it, contorting my jaw from its habitual position of just hanging there below my lip waiting for the next cookie to come its way into something more resembling a hungry alligator. I held it like that until my saliva dried on my teeth.

  Sea-slurping noises came from Cordelia’s bed of leaves.

  I am Were.

  There, thinking that wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be.

  I am Were.

  Inside, my inner-bitch grew frantic. She kept bouncing off the ball of Fae magic that sat in my gut beside her, and each time she did, my magic sparked, adding sharp exclamation points of Fae annoyance to the internal writhing that was going on. I pressed both hands flat across the swell of my stomach. Goddess, now that I’d given her full leave to explode, my inner-Were was past mortal logic, past even rudimentary communication with me, her half-bred host. She was all panting “go, go, go” like a pooch who’d spied a squirrel.

  “Let’s do this without smacking my Fae, okay?” I whispered, darting an anxious glance at Cordelia. “Leave her alone.”

  “Hedi?” asked Biggs in a strained voice from the other side of the hedge. “Is there trouble?” Two shaking hands parted the shrubbery. The moon was working its mojo on him. His jaw was longer and his mouth a misshapen, stretched thing.

  I slapped my hand on his forehead and shoved his heated face back through the cedars. “Stay there!”

  “Okay,” he mumbled.

  My Were did another lunge inside me. This time she hit my ball of Fae head-on, and I experienced the sudden exhilarating leak of its magic into my blood. My mother’s gift raced up through my heart, built into a pressure at my throat, divided at my collarbones, and then ran hot, a stream of sizzling glee surging through my veins until it came to my hand where it split into fragments that fattened the ends of my fingertips.

  “Crap,” I said, flexing my swollen digits. I hadn’t accessed my Fae magic once over the summer. No, not because of the threat of payback pain, or even my halfhearted promise to Cordelia to “keep it canned, darling.” It was the fear that I would hear my Fae in my head again. Feel her inside me, functioning like a separate entity.

  She’d been curiously quiet, too. Not like gone-fishing quiet. More like she’d been drowsing, with one eye open; a dragon trying to figure out if it was worth rousing itself from its warm hearth. I’d felt her faint interest, but she’d been acquiescent.

  Now, she was alive in me.

  Was she jealous because I’d given my Were full leave?

  Wait a minute—was I seeing things differently? I blinked. Yes, things were sharper, no longer being admired for their relative shiny qualities. They were being judged, rapid fire, with pitiless eyes—useful or not?

  Cordelia’s wolf yawned.

  Thin threads of speculation swirled in my consciousness as my cool gaze lingered over the Were finishing his transformation on his bed of leaves. I found myself looking at him with—what’s the word? Objectivity? Acuity? Like a smart person intent on untangling a knot. A conscious being trying to—

  Oh Goddess, trying to figure out how to become top dog in Hedi Incorporated.

  Magic, magic, mine, crooned a voice inside me.

  Aw shit, Fae-me was articulating now.

  “Shut up!” I muttered as I probed inward, searching for my Were-bitch, hoping—okay, beyond hoping—that she might give her gut-living roomie a good bite on the butt. But no, she didn’t come loping to my rescue. Hear-me-howl slunk off and curled herself into a shivering ball low in my belly. “Hey!” I hissed. “You woke her up, you help me deal with this.”

  “Heeddii,” moaned Biggs. “You neeeeed me?”

  “No!” My dominant Fae magic sang in my blood, impatient for release. Gone—if there had ever been enough—was the shape-shifting magic I needed to release my inner-Were. I pressed my hands to my belly and felt my muscles tense under their soft layer of padding.

  “Come back,” I whispered to my wolf. “We’ll fight her together. We need to push past this.” I ran my hands upward, past the dip of my belly button. Birthed by a Fae, sired by a Were. You’d think I could do both. Shift when the moon called, even as my Fae magic leaked into my bones. Yet it always seemed to go the other way. Fae trying to overwhelm the Were. And now the Merenwynian entity was trying to strong-arm a Stronghold.

  Tune the Fae out. Focus on the change.

  But there were so many distractions—the aftersmell of Cordelia’s change, and now all around me in a Were cloud, the new scent of her wolf. More like a he, now that she’d shed her perfume-drenched clothing and changed into her wolf form. And Biggs. The shrubbery was no screen against his sharp anxious stink.

  But worse was the fear. My damn fear.

  It whispered to me. What if my Fae took control of all my functions? Gained the ability to walk? To talk? To kill?

  Never again.

  I didn’t waste time pushing my Fae back into my bowels. I brought the shields down on her with all the fear and desperation I had, and encased her with a layer of my will.

  Hold, Hedi. Don’t let go.

  Then I started counting. Because that’s what I do.

  By the time I hit forty-two, I was mortal-me again. Just plain, somewhat detached, Hedi Peacock-Stronghold. Looking around me, noting that the scent of flowers had faded to a thin melancholy note, listening to that not-so-helpful internal voice yapping away. I almost let her out again. What havoc would my Fae have done around all these unsuspecting animals?

  It wouldn’t have been pretty.

  I stared down into the honey-brown eyes of Cordelia’s wolf. Her fur looked damp. I shrugged, and tried to tack a smile on my face. Her head canted to the side. She was very steady on four feet. Her massive sleek white head was just a few inches below mine.

  “Still me,” I said.

  The silver-white wolf woofed in reply. I don’t speak wolfish, but still, I got it. A definite “no shit.”

  “Biggs, shift,” I said, getting to my feet. I heard him whine, and then a series of rips, indicating he’d forgone stripping down before his change. It didn’t take long. When he’d finished and come to nudge my fingers with his wet snout through the cedars, I said, “I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen. Not ever.”

  Cordelia barked at me. Sharp. One bark. Just a warning salvo; a reminder that later, if we survived this night, I’d hear a longer string of human words, which would accumulate into one long-assed speech about perceived threats and my slacking off in pack responsibilities.

  “Once I’m dressed, I’ll send the pack off for their moon-run. Then I’ll go straight back to the trailer.”

  The white wolf stared at me.

  “Come on, Cordelia. The pack’s not going to hurt me. It’s the guys outside Creemore we have to worry about and we’ve got a few days before they come and mess with us.”

  For the space of another dog pant from Biggs, she considered me—and part of me wondered if she could see the shadow of my Fae. Then she turned, and streaked through the Hedi-sized hole in the hedge. A second later, a short dark wolf erupted out of the dark and gave chase. Biggs got in one nip to her tail before he shot past her and disappeared over the ridge.

  They knew what I had to do next.

  I was grateful that I’d been given privacy to do it.

  Chapter Three

  Crickets would chirp at the end of the world. They wouldn’t know better. They’d just keep rasping their back legs together, going about their business, right up to the final cataclysmic jolt.

  I felt ancient just listening to their “go us!” chorus.

  Somewhere in the last minute or two, th
e pack had entered the field on the other side of the hedge. I could hear them. Sighing and shivering. Waiting to change. Pawing the grass with the toes of their shoes as if they were racehorses, not Werewolves, as if this were a sprint to the finish tape, not a thing that happened every month.

  Some of them had already changed. I could smell their wolves.

  Another whine, camouflaged behind a cough and a cupped hand. Soon all of them would be furry. Then they’d expect to be led. Combined, they smelled like one entity, a pack. A family beyond family. Instinct and blood, and what? Would I ever know?

  I breathed deep once, twice.

  Do it now.

  I went down on my haunches to unzip my Nike messenger bag and pull out the bundle wrapped in plastic. Trowbridge’s signature scent—woods, grasses, sex, and salt—that indefinable combination of aromas that spoke of him hit me in a wave of longing. I pulled out his clothing, piece by piece. One old running shoe, a battle-scarred T-shirt with a sleeve ripped off, a white shirt with a mysterious stain on it, and his last torn-up pair of jeans. Articles that Bridge had discarded and Cordelia had saved. There was hardly any hint of him left on the items, even though we’d kept them double-wrapped in plastic. I throttled everything down—all those stupid wishes, and equally dim desires—and picked up the jeans.

  Holding the waistband in one hand—the little metal snap biting into my palm—and the pant leg in the other, I rubbed his dirty Levi’s all along the back of my thighs, across my well-padded butt, and then up the knobs of my spine to my neck. I abraded the skin there, making sure that whatever scent molecule lingered in the denim’s weave was transferred to my nape, before I scrunched the pants into a ball, which I dragged hurriedly and ruthlessly over my breasts and belly.