The Thing About Weres: A Mystwalker Novel Page 4

  This was always a nasty part, the moment when my Were felt Bridge’s essence on my skin. She uncurled from her miserable huddle and stretched like an abused dog on the receiving end of a long, tender scratch.

  Were mates usually smell something like each other. Not exact copies, thank the powers that be—because it would suck to be a Were-bitch that smelled like a guy—but a new signature aroma, one with scent tones from both of them. I’d been scentless, thanks to my Fae heritage, all my life. After shoving my mate through the portal’s maw, I’d luxuriated in the novelty of smelling like Trowbridge. Foolishly, I’d thought it would be permanent, but that delicious olfactory brew of woods, and wild, and grasses, and Trowbridge had gone down the trailer’s rust-stained shower drain just five hours later. Now I smell like a bar of Dove.

  I put all his stuff back in the messenger bag then picked up my shirt off Samuel, my bra and panties off Absolom, and rescued my pants from Prudence.

  I turned to pick up the Royal Amulet.

  He wasn’t there.

  His Nastiness should have been there, right where I left him, on top of baby Jasper’s grave marker, but he wasn’t. Had he fallen off? I squinted in the half light. There was no ball of gold glittering among the pine needles and sparse tufts of grass.

  I’d kept my promise to Merry to care for the Royal Amulet as if he were as precious to me as Trowbridge. I’d found a rowboat and plucked His Royal Nastiness off his lily pad. And for the first couple of days he’d been easy to take care of, because at first, he’d been mostly dead. But as fate would have it, he’d thrown a few intermittent sparks of light from the depths of his blue stone so I—feeling very Dudley Do-Right—had made it my daily ritual to offer him a variety of shrubs and deciduous trees to suck the sap out of. It had been touch and go for a month or more, but he’d made a full recovery over time and eventually had developed a personality. Not a good one, but a soul of sorts. The sullen type. Permanently set on rebellion with intermittent fits of entitlement.

  He’d pissed me off so much I’d renamed him Ralph.

  In the faint hope of a cease-fire, I’d explained to him, “This isn’t some war flick. You’re not a POW and I’m not your captor. I’m doing the best I can for you.” How had Ralph rewarded me? With simmering silence and nighttime stealth attacks. Sneaky juvenile stuff. Pinches and scratches. And, might I add, completely at odds with his behavior during the day. Then, he seemed happy enough to peacefully coexist and hang from my neck. Either because he liked to be in the know about pack business, or more likely, and as I was just beginning to fully understand, he used that time to minutely sip from my essence.

  “An amulet will die, and its soul along with it, if you don’t take care of it,” Mum had said. The last thing she’d done before setting a ward on my cupboard was to place Merry around my neck. “Keep her safe.”

  She should have said, “Goddess, keep all of us safe.” Because in one night, the Fae had executed her, a Were had killed my dad, and my twin brother had been forcibly taken across the portal into Merenwyn.

  My skin goosefleshed as I craned my head and studied the trees. The Royal Amulet hadn’t had enough time to climb one, had he? “Marco,” I coaxed with false sweetness.

  I twisted to look behind myself.

  Huh. You don’t see that every day.

  Casperella crouched close to the ground on her side of the stone wall, a huddled shape of fluttering fabric and twisting hair. That was both unusual and noteworthy because to this point stalker-spook had basically been the hummingbird of ghosts. Flit, flit, flit. From one end of her enclosure to the other. Usually, spectacularly spectral—all shroud and serpent hair doing the swirling, obscuring thing around her vague glowing outline. Inner lit, just a bit, like the TV tube after you’ve held your thumb down on the power button. Face rarely glimpsed, and even then, it was little more than a rounded blur with dead gray eyes.

  But she had grown two things: intent and a stubby, semitransparent arm that was straining to reach for the baby-fist-sized ball of gold at the base of a nearby tree.

  Hello, Ralph.

  Ever hungry, the Royal Pest must have morphed into a sphere, and used gravity to roll down a hillock hoping to hit that sturdy maple. But, Karma being the bitch she was, he’d missed and landed by a pine instead.

  Ralph turns his nose up at evergreens; they turn his blue stone a tad greenish.

  “Hey,” I said. “You don’t want to touch him.”

  Casperella’s head rolled in my direction. A glimpse of a black eye, a flat bleak slash for her mouth. I scratched at the mosquito bite on my arm, frowning. Was he in any danger? As I contemplated, the Royal Pain in the Ass reverted to his default shape; a round gold pendant, Celtic in appearance, lots of openwork, flattened bands of gold in four trinity knots surrounding an icy blue jewel that was big enough to make any self-respecting rapper’s heart go pitty-pat. He casually propped himself against the pine tree, his necklace of Fae gold in a lazy loop near his feet. “Who, me?” his body language screamed. “I’m harmless.”

  The little imposter.

  I shook out my panties. Practically speaking, this situation couldn’t be counted as reckless endangerment. Casperella was a twisting shadow of rags who’d sprouted an arm devoid of a hand. (Can we spell i-n-c-o-r-p-o-r-e-a-l?) He was a solid Fae amulet loitering under a pine a good five feet beyond that.

  Thieving required fingers. Light ones.

  And opportunity.

  Also, I think it probably helps if you were born with smarts. The type of cool, calculating common sense that allows you to look ahead in the future, and ask yourself, “Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?”

  Because hindsight is a bitch who never knows when to call it a day.

  I was fumbling with the hooks of my bra thinking how much I missed stealing when Casperella gave a massive shudder that made all her floaty bits snap in the air. Interesting. I adjusted the girls, watchful as the blob at the end of the arm struggled to morph into something that resembled a hand. Apparently growing mitts required a whole-body effort. She contracted with a sharp inhale—yeah, yeah, I know that’s impossible, but that’s what it looked like—that flattened her tattered shroud into a long sheet of ragged edges. Then, with a soundless sigh, she exhaled.

  Must add that to my rule book. Ghosts remember how to breathe.

  Pop! A hand formed—if that’s what you could call a thumb and flipper of melded fingers. Unlovely, but adequate, I guess, if you’re a spook thinking of pinching a pretty piece of something sparkly.

  “You should stop and think about this,” I warned. “He’s nice to look at, but he’s got a temper.”

  Oblivious to my tidbit of wisdom, Casperella added a little more ghost juice to her Pilates and succeeded in extending herself until she was an inhuman U-shape curved over her stone barricade. Her flipper-fingers chewed the dirt in an effort to get to Mr. Sparkle.

  It looked painful.

  Was it worth telling her that all the stuff that spoke to her worst instincts—his loops of Fae gold, his intricately cut jewel, his long, glittering diamond-cut chain—amounted to nothing more than glitzy ornamentation? The real deal was the rice-sized shadow in the center of the blue topaz.

  That was the mind and soul of the Royal Amulet.

  I’m thinking he was an Asrai before he’d been imprisoned in the jewel set in the middle of the pendant, because that’s what Merry had been. She’d recognized him, and I figured then and still did now, that like recognizes like. My amulet friend had fought for the jerk’s life, just as I had fought for Trowbridge’s.

  You don’t do that shit unless you have a reason.

  Some evenings, before I put Ralph to bed in his brand-new terrarium, I hold him up to the moonlight with a pair of tongs, and speculate whether he’d ever been Merry’s lover.

  Hey, it could have happened.

  Back in the day, he’d had legs, arms, a head, and in his case, probably a dick. I know because I checked. The day after I resc
ued him, I’d borrowed a magnifying glass from the librarian’s drawer, duct-taped his chain to the dinette’s table, and studied the dark smudge in the center of that near-perfect stone. I’d arrived at the firm conviction that the imprisoned sentient being was male; it was something about the way he stood, like a toy soldier with one little sticklike appendage out—I’m thinking his arm, not his dick, in case you’re wondering—as if he’d raised it to ward off the magic, but the curse had struck first, and now he was frozen, his hand forever poised to halt the evil speeding toward him.

  His Royal Nastiness was probably an enchanted prince.

  Oh, put away your hankie. It’s just as possible that he could be a dumb Asrai peasant who got too close to a Fae bent on mischief. Possibly that’s why he dislikes me—he was cursed by one of my kind to live eternity in a hunk of blue stone. Or maybe it’s because of my Were—its hot blood is disappointingly thin in terms of required Fae magic.

  Whatever. If he was the fair lost prince of the Asrais it would explain his sense of entitlement. How many people had a “the” in front of their names? It had to mess with your head. Keeping half an eye on Casperella’s flipper-paws progress, I picked up my socks. The Alpha. That worked. The Alpha-by-proxy. Weak. The Fae. A tad nonspecific because I was the only Fae—well, half Fae—on this side of the portal. The Mystwalker. If the pack knew what that meant they’d be horrified, given how they felt about the supernatural. I imagined bringing it up in casual conversation. “Hey, do you know I use my mind to travel to a different realm? Uh-huh, sure can. And you know what I can do while I’m there? I can sort through a Fae’s memories like they’re a deck of playing cards. Rearrange them, too, if I felt like it.”

  Yeah, that would go down well.

  I flicked a glance over to the Royal Asshat as I slid the white cotton anklet over my heel. His reaction was covert, but I recognized his interest in the ghost. Where once there had been slack in his chain, now there was an indefinable tension.

  “You’ve got a whole bunch of Napoleon syndrome going on tonight,” I told him. In response, the Royal Amulet flashed a blip of light twice—a piece of communication I’d witnessed enough times to recognize as an insolent FU.

  “Nice language.” But the oak tree shivered behind me, and I did, too.

  He set out a lure: a string of white blips brightened the dim gloom under the tree. White blip (see me sparkle), white blip (ain’t I pretty), white blip (uh-huh, I’m so damn fine).

  Fascinating. He was coaxing her closer. But why?

  What was the worst that could happen if I allowed them to interact? Could he drain her dry of whatever supernatural essence she had? I tried to imagine Ralph with more attitude, which almost immediately led to the thought of me standing in front of Merry with an apologetic expression, explaining how I watched disaster unfold while I fumbled with my socks.

  No, thank you.

  “Hey, Boo,” I said. “Beat it.”

  She didn’t even turn her little Medusa head my way. Her mincing hand inched forward.

  Annoying.

  Plan B. Remove Ralph from danger. I plunged my hand into my bag. Where are my tongs? The damn messenger bag was crammed full of stuff. Trowbridge’s shoe. A soft leather pouch attached to a pool of golden chain. An almost empty roll of duct tape. Crap, crap, crap. Where are they? My fingers delved past the empty coin purse. Brushed against a romance novel with the cover torn off. Hit the bottom seam of the bag where the orphaned Skittles lolled. Did a hurried and rough exploration of its contours.

  And came up tongs-empty.

  When he was in a pissy mood, tongs were kind of essential amulet-handling equipment. I popped the red Skittle in my mouth, and sucked on it for a soothing half second, considering my options. You know when you know something bad is going to happen and you just can’t figure out how, or why? A certainty of impending doom corkscrewed through me. But even as a little voice said to me, Perhaps you should take a brief moment right now for a spot of reflection, I’d already swung my messenger bag at Casperella. Because in my book, that’s what you do.

  You act. You don’t think.

  I charged.

  The messenger bag was a twelve-inch nylon rectangle, heavy enough to make my shoulder ache. Theoretically, it should have batted her smoke right to the nearest ashtray.

  It didn’t.

  On impact, she half turned toward me, her head arched and tilted sideways in an all too mortal WTF as my messenger bag sliced through her fluttering shroud. It made dust rags out of her garment, and then, curiously, its momentum slowed markedly, too.

  Not something you see every day: a ghost with a Nike shoulder bag planted in her middle. She seemed to buckle over it, and then she heaved—the way a cat does before it throws up a hairball—and my bag broke through her, curved in a sharp arc, and walloped me hard enough on my naked thigh to make me spit out my Skittle.

  To top it off, she’d graced my messenger bag with a thin layer of her ectoplasmic goo.

  Why are people always messing with my stuff?

  As my foot sliced through her and she became a Rorschach test around me, I realized something interesting and potentially important. Casperella was not smoke. In fact, she was more like dark ink. I registered this, and my automatic ewww, as something liquid-cool and syrup-thick started sliding down my throat.

  How can something that smells that good feel so bad inside? While I choked and spasmed to cough her up, she reassembled the rest of her inky bits and dove for the amulet, in a graceful, arched column. Like the St. Louis Arch, except dark and planted over a crumbling stone wall.

  Without a sound, she enveloped him.

  No, no, no.

  I threw myself into the stream of her and got in a couple of flailing ink-smearing bitch slaps, but soon found myself sinking to the ground. Because, as it turns out, the burden of a writhing body of ink can be soul-wearying.

  Her sadness weighted my limbs.

  “Home,” I heard her say in my head. “Let me go home.”

  The slightly foreign cadence to her voice threw a chill down my ribs. And with that, I forgot all about protecting Ralph. And the gathering Weres. Even the damn letter that sat under the bowl of oranges on the dinette table. The accent was unmistakable. I’d grown up listening to it, first with my mum then with my aunt Lou.

  Oh, sweet heavens, I thought, clawing for air. Casperella’s not a Were.

  She’s a Fae.

  The ghost from Merenwyn was over me, fluid and intangible. I felt like I was drowning under the smothering blanket of her. Picking up flickers of thought and broken bits of a life once lived.

  So tired.

  A blip of light shone in the murky ink. White, sharp.

  Followed by a sparkling flash of gold.

  Ralph had unwound his trinity knots into rapiers and gone all Three Musketeers. His blades flashed. They may have been thin and short but they were made of Fae gold—stronger than titanium—and were thus neither as soft nor as fragile as mortal precious metal. Also, and more importantly, they weren’t being wielded by a lily-livered popinjay. Merry’s boyfriend was lightning fast, using one rapier to thrust and slash, the other to cut and slash. He really must have been a prince once upon a time, back in the day when they wore feathers in their hats and swordplay was a way of life, because the arc of each slashing cut was precise in a way that bespoke long hours of training.

  Casperella surged back in retreat, a contorted, whirling whisper of smoke and ink. I caught a glimpse of her eye, black and tragic. An open mouth and a pale thin jaw. I could feel her yearning for home like a sad song in my heart.

  “Enough, Ralph,” I said.

  Unappeased, Merry’s lover sprang up, a veritable Jack in the Box of doom, and jabbed both swords into her throat.

  Casperella moaned one word. Low, piteously.

  And then she broke into fragments of ink. The blue-gray droplets hung in the air, impervious to gravity. Another groan, this time from the wind sawing through the oak tree on the ot
her side of the picket fence. And then, slowly, in a way that kind of hurt me, I watched those floating bits of ghost turn the color of ash.

  October’s breeze breathed through them and they were gone.

  I rolled and reached for Ralph. He swung his rapiers my way, ready to slit my wrists.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  He retracted his blades and hopped on my palm. I snatched up my bag, abandoned my running shoes, and then I dove again, this time for the hole in the cedar hedge.

  “Mystwalker.”

  Had she really called me Mystwalker?

  Chapter Four

  The Hedi-sized gap in the line of cedar shrubs guarding the boneyard hadn’t been there in the spring, but after I’d realized it was faster to take the footpath along the ridge around the pond than use the public road to the Trowbridge land, I’d gone to the local Home Depot and liberated an electric hedger. Ralph and I blew through that aperture like a watermelon seed through wet, pursed lips.

  The air eddied around me. Were-fragrant.

  Casperella’s a Fae.

  “You ready?” called Harry from the crest of the little hill. My second was tall, really tall, and would have stood out in a crowd even if he weren’t playing school monitor to a bunch of morphing Werewolves. Long, white, shoulder-length hair, hooded eyes. Slow to talk.

  For instance, he could have said, “So, you couldn’t change into your wolf?”

  But he didn’t.

  Sweat glistened on his forehead. “I can hold off long enough to see you back to the trailer.”

  I gave him a Starbucks smile. “Then who’d lead them on the run?”

  “You’re right.” His forehead pleated as he lifted his brows in wry agreement. “Watch out, though. Some of the brethren have come for the Hunter moon run.” Harry’s voice grew muffled as he pulled off his denim shirt. “Their energy has changed the feel of the pack.”

  Oh joy. Dog whines greeted me as I walked down the incline toward the wolves milling about in the green dip of flat field between one hill and the other. Most of those assembled turned at my approach. Some briefly, others whipping their heads back and forth between me, and the line of trees, with the same keyed-up excitement a dog displays for his leash and master. A few spared me so brief a glance, so indifferent, it almost bordered on a challenge. And some—the happy-go-lucky ones—occupied their time by either licking things they’d wish they hadn’t in the morning, or just standing, visibly trembling, their gaze everywhere except on me.