The Thing About Weres: A Mystwalker Novel Read online

  I didn’t need to stop and count to know I was way up on eyeballs.

  Maybe eighty pairs of eyes swung in my direction as I came to a stop by Cordelia. There she was—the only white wolf in a huge patchwork gathering of buffs, grays, and browns. Untouched by them. Sitting distant, aloof. I resisted the urge to run my fingers through her white fur and maybe steal a little of her aplomb.

  Concentrate, I told myself. Try to exude confidence. Or failing that, strive to look balanced and centered. Most importantly, ignore that which cannot be ignored: the presence of my personal Fae, now sitting bolt upright near my spine. Aware. Awake. Like she’d swallowed five cans of Red Bull without pausing to wipe her mouth.

  Talk about lousy timing.

  The Hunter moon is recognized as an opportunity for representatives of the smaller packs to join their Creemore brethren, so that they can socialize and put forward whatever petitions they feel need to be answered. But mostly they come to party and look for a mate. At the end of the last run of the change, they buy a couple of cases of Creemore Springs beer and head home the next day with a hangover and some happy memories.

  But these visitors weren’t just coming to socialize. They were coming to see if all the back-fence talk was true. That the mate of the missing Alpha couldn’t actually change into her wolf. That she was round, and small, and young looking. That she didn’t have the right smell to her because she was part Fae.

  They’d come to sniff out the truth.

  Goddess, if they could smell my Fae …

  Rumors had spread about me. I don’t know how. Within an hour of Ralph’s Great Lily Pad Rescue, Harry had suggested that I put a gag order on the pack. So, as the Alpha’s proxy, I’d banned any mention of our pack business or Trowbridge’s ascension on all methods of communication—no phone calls, letters, e-mails, text messages, or forum messages. Not even a tweet. Nothing at all sent to the outside world about the interesting state of affairs of the Ontario pack.

  But there are other ways of saying things without actually moving your lips, aren’t there? Raised eyebrows and expressive hands. Lips pursed when a certain question is posed. Some silences are more condemning than a crowd of chanting protestors.

  Acceptance of Bridge’s rightful ascension—and as his mate, mine—wasn’t limited to the approval of the assembled pack. Weres have been in this realm for a long, long time. Long enough to form affiliations and associations. Long enough to breed that dreaded plague known as the political body. The hierarchy is simple. The wolves of North America fall under the aegis of the Council of North American Weres, who in turn genuflect to the Great Council of Weres.

  As our immediate concern was the NAW, a letter had been carefully crafted to its leader, Reeve Whitlock, containing several carefully worded statements of fact.

  Item one: Robson Trowbridge, once a rogue suspected of murdering his wife and family, had been exonerated by the truths revealed before the death of the last Alpha—his uncle Mannus Trowbridge. As is required by Pack Law, Robson Trowbridge’s right to the crown was undisputed, as several pack members were there to witness his Alpha-flare and the subsequent flare from his chosen mate. (See attached witness statements by Cordelia LaRue, Harry Windcombe, and Russell Biggs).

  Item two: Robson Trowbridge is recuperating from severe wounds inflicted on him during the ascension. His mate is acting in his stead until such time as he is ready to resume his duties.

  This letter, the placement of each comma and period argued at length over our dinette table, was a fluid piece of chicanery, because the devil was in the things not said. No mention of the mating deception, no hint of my Fae blood. Not a peep to indicate that Bridge’s recovery was taking place in a freakin’ different realm. Nothing whatsoever revealed that could connect me to the person who actually killed the old Alpha.

  Under normal conditions, sending an “everything’s fine over here” letter would have been a joke. The NAW would have sent someone up here posthaste to do their own investigation, and very likely our heads would have ended up on a pike beside Mannus’s. What saved us was the fact that Reeve Whitlock was in a pissing contest with the Great Council.

  No one outside of the inner circle knew exactly what the issue was, though the common consensus was that it was far more significant than the usual snarlfests about territory disputes or implied disrespect. Harry had tried to winkle out the facts from his sources, but all he’d been able to unearth was the rumor that the Great Council had hired forensic accountants to study the NAW’s coffers.

  Oooh, death by audit. Scary.

  Whatever, Whitlock’s problems had been a bonus for us. We’d been given a rubber-stamp approval for the change in leadership—at least for the interim. “But when they come, there won’t be any long-drawn-out inquiry,” Harry had said back in May. “If the Council’s investigator thinks the line of ascension was in any way shady…”

  And, oh Goddess, had it been twisted.

  Without the full help of the pack we’ll never be able to pull the wool over the Council’s eyes, when they come to investigate. Now, a thread of dread tightened around me. Even I couldn’t ignore the obvious. I may have taped the pack members’ mouths shut and rapped their texting fingers, but that cloak of silence was becoming as threadbare as Cordelia’s favorite housecoat.

  * * *

  Harry was right. If the pack energy had been a visible aura it would have been a purple cloud of something nasty. In the perhaps ten seconds it took me to recollect our problems with the NAW, a fight broke out. One of the visiting wolves snapped the air in frustration, stirring the aggression of another, who chose to respond by turning to mount one of the Creemore wolves. Well, no self-respecting, Maple Leaf–loving Were would stand for that. With a snarl, the offended wolf pivoted and lunged, jaws agape.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  It was like I hollered “Go!” instead. In the blink of an eye, the two-dog spat became a tail-bristling, teeth-baring, three-dog tussle as another wolf leaped into the fray. Before the fight instinct swept through the ranks, Harry barreled through the pack, cutting through the milling wolves like a hot knife through butter. He leaped—all one hundred and fifty pounds of graying fur and stringy muscle—bringing down one wolf who broke away with a yelp. Then, he spun for the next. They postured for a second. Noses crinkled, napes bristling. The other wolf was younger by decades, and leaner in a way that spoke of sly strength.

  Cordelia’s paws did a prelunge cha-cha.

  Time to flare, time to flare.

  Not for the first time, I wished flaring really were as easy as pulling a bunny out of a hat. It’s more complicated than that. First, you need to be stirred by a strong feeling. Fear, love, hatred, pain …

  Quickly, I pulled up Trowbridge’s face—sharp cheekbones and long curly black hair—and was rewarded by an almost immediate burn in my eyes. Almost there. I thought about his scent, wrapping around me, slipping along my skin, filling in my pores. Yes. I could feel the throb of the green comets spinning around my dark pupils. And now, for the presto! I remembered the moment I’d shoved his limp body into the Gates of Merenwyn. How his fingers had twitched as the portal’s suction had pulled him deeper into its maw.

  And I flared.

  Light—green-blue and electric—spilled from my eyes.

  Need a visual? Think Superman. Perhaps a little more diffused. His gaze is a pulsing beam complete with vibrating sound effects, right? Mine’s cone shaped and silent. Also, unlike the Man of Steel, I’ve never really found my talent particularly useful. It can’t do cool stuff like melt something into a puddle of metal, or lift a tank. Okay, come to think of it, my flare is nothing like Superman’s.

  Bottom line, my light amounts to the pack’s music—its touch soothed the savage breast. Or more literally, their savage beasts.

  I swept my gaze over the transfixed pack. The younger ones lifted their heads to my caress, as if it were a blessing from their favorite rock star. The rest did a collective canine shudder of plea
sure. Yup, puppy Prozac, that’s what my talent amounts to. I kept it moving, touching briefly on furry flanks, skimming tips of pointed ears. Never focusing directly, never landing too long on one spot. The trick was to wash their bodies with the gentle touch of my soothing blue-green light.

  Harry limped toward the woods.

  “The moon is calling you,” I said, in pretty much the same soft but firm tone my mum used to say, “Time for bed.”

  From the head of the trail, Harry issued an imperative bark. The wolves turned and funneled toward the path, tails lifted, tongues peeping through happy lips.

  Hurry up. My eyes are burning.

  This was the point they all were supposed to melt into the trees to chase a few rabbits and run down an unfortunate deer. Instead, they inexplicably lingered, a logjam of wolves near the mouth of the forest. Jostling each other. Milling about. Anticipation crackled in the air, the way it might before the hunt master lifts the lid on the fox’s cage.

  “Animals,” I heard my Fae murmur.

  My Fae is talking in my head again.

  Oh Fae Stars, shut up.

  Because we had problems. The pack wasn’t melting into the woods. Safely out of the range of my flare, the energy that had fouled the mood earlier started to percolate again. Golden eyes turned back toward the near-empty field, their feral attention centered on the group of four wolves who stood in a tight shoulder-to-shoulder wedge. George Danvers was in the lead. He lifted his snout, and let a little lip show.

  Oh no he didn’t.

  “The moon is calling you,” I said more firmly.

  A low growl, from deep in his throat.

  Oh yes he did.

  Up until then, I’d never been frightened around the pack. Well, not since the first night when I watched them back up the trailer on the Stronghold ridge. And though, over the last six months, I’d intuited an evolution of emotions from them—curiosity, unease, distaste, and more recently, faint flashes of cloaked dislike—the slow diminishment of their good opinion hadn’t really impacted me. My feelings had been simple. They exist, I exist. We try to exist together as we wait for Trowbridge to return.

  Until now.

  The first faint stirring of real fear trailed icy fingers down the knobs of my spine and poked a hooked nail at my shivering Were. No help from my inner-bitch. Hoping to crank up the wattage on my flare, I pulled up a memory—one that I usually tried to stifle—of Dawn Danvers, the girl I dispatched to doggy heaven six months ago. Not of her face as she lost her life—that was a thing of my nightmares. Instead, I thought of the way she wanted to hurt me and mine. Of the anger and naked aggression in her face as she stalked over to where I held my lover braced in my arms. And how I’d grimly vowed, “None will hurt this man.”

  The recall of it stirred my own aggression, perhaps a little better than I anticipated. My flare sharpened, no longer a gentle hand smoothing their pelts. Claws extruded. Languid strokes turned into a heavy hand pressing on those who dared to challenge.

  “Yes,” hissed my Fae.

  Danvers’s muzzle crinkled but he stood firm under my censure, stiff-legged in front of his wolf brethren. Submit. Despite a few growls of disapproval from the watching pack, I didn’t dare soften my focus. I kept my angry eyes resting on that group until they trembled and every last one of them sank to their bellies, including the oh-so-aggressive George.

  Mutiny quelled. I released a bit of the inner heat and let my cooling gaze drift over them, waiting until their scents joined into one collective aroma of forest and wild, then I let my flare peter out, softly, like the last flicker of a blue flame before the fire turned into a spiraling wisp of gray smoke.

  Turns out, my relief was premature.

  No sooner had my light dribbled away than George rolled upright. He stood, feet firmly planted, his eyes steady on my own watering ones. Tail fat, and quivering. From where I stood, the thought bubble over his head either read “Chew” or possibly “I shall rend the Fae-bitch’s flesh into itty-bitty pieces.”

  Whoops.

  George charged.

  It was instinctive. I’ve looked back at it over and over again, and it’s always come down to that. As the old wolf with more balls than brains streaked for me, three things happened relatively simultaneously.

  My Were screamed “Danger!”, my Fae magic hissed “Murder!”, and my right hand sprang out. Without pausing, without asking, without even waiting to be told, the essence of my Fae self streamed from fingertips in a long coil of fluorescent green. Before Cordelia or Harry could run interference, it surged across the field and intercepted George Danvers with a bitch-slap of purely epic Fae proportions.

  The impact lifted the brown and buff wolf off his feet. Back legs pedaling, he dangled some five feet in the air, held aloft by my invisible rope of magic.

  “Detach!”

  My Fae serpent of doom gave one last squeeze then tossed the wolf. Old George did an undignified tuck and roll in mid-space then landed on his left flank in the clover with a high piercing whine.

  Amazing how fast an old wolf can move when motivated. He scrambled onto all four paws then tore across the field toward the safety of his brethren, followed by his wife, his son, and some other wolf whose identity I never did nail down.

  Oh crap.

  As far as the pack could tell, I’d just willed the old wolf into midair. They couldn’t see my magic, now arched over my head like a green serpent poised to strike.

  Well, that’s not completely true. Cordelia could see it.

  And of course half-bred me.

  Oh, and Ralph, who chose that moment—oh thank you, Karma—to stick his head out of my cleavage. Glowing like a lit emergency flare, my would-be protector uncoiled a rope of gold and held it up menacingly, a mash-up of the Three Musketeers meeting Spaceballs.

  So much for “stay low.”

  The field emptied fairly quickly after that. I’m not sure if Cordelia even needed to herd some strays toward the path. Or if Harry had to stand jaws open in a snarl, pink gums showing above his sharp, fanged teeth, as they rushed past him. And absolutely, Biggs snapping at George’s back leg was completely over the top.

  The last two to exit the gathering place were the Scawens wolves. The older female was delicately boned and more cream than the usual black, brown, and buff coloration of the average Creemore Were. The younger female was fairly sturdy. Rachel Scawens said something to her daughter. I don’t understand that nonverbal stuff, so to me it was a pantomime—nibble, nibble, nip, shoulder check, snuffle throat. Petra Scawens articulated a reply, which sounded almost like a sluggish car turning over in winter.

  Then the two of them hung a left—so closely pressed together they seemed to be a six-legged dog—for the woods. Just before they slid into the forest’s welcoming shadows, Rachel Scawens’s wolf face turned to look at me.

  “You are Fae,” her eyes said.

  Then Trowbridge’s sister spun away.

  * * *

  Sometimes I needed to stand on the Stronghold point and stare at the fairy pond below. Usually, it calmed me. The Creemore pond was pastoral and pungent in summer, bird-busy and weed-sweet in fall.

  It would be nice to say that I left my heart down by the pond’s pebble-strewn banks, but that’s just some dumb perversion of an old geezer song. I still had my heart, tucked away where it should be, under a layer of fat, inside a cage of bone, nestled near all the other organs I needed to survive.

  But I had left part of me there.

  My fingers found the pointed peak of my left ear. I stroked its tip, watching a white moth dance dizzily over the top of the cocklebur thicket near the water’s edge, willing my heart to stop its anxious pounding.

  I think I screwed up.

  “Whatever you do, keep your Fae canned.” That’s the first thing Cordelia had told me six months ago when we’d stood together outside the trailer and watched the last of the pack’s well-wishers leave.

  My heart wouldn’t settle. It kept drumming away
inside me as if I’d just completed a triathlon with a fifty-pound weight strapped to my back. Watching the mallard family perform figure eights around the bullrushes wasn’t relieving its frantic thump-thump one bit.

  I’m like a pressure cooker, filled to capacity and forgotten. Now I’m rocking on the back burner. Sooner or later, I’m going to blow, spewing bits of Were and Fae all over the pack.

  That would be bad.

  I inhaled slowly, fighting for calm.

  Back in spring, the fairy pond had been bisected in the middle by a pine log. Lily pads had grown in its northern end and only the lower half, near the beach on which my pirate rock held court, had been open water. But one night a couple of weeks ago—a night where a raging Goddess had lit up the sky with her thunder strikes—someone had pulled the log from the pond and left it up by the culvert on the road. They’d poured a half gallon of kerosene on it, but after all those years spent pickling in the fetid water, it hadn’t done much except smolder. I’d sent Biggs and Harry to track the vandals down, but they’d come back to report that the torrential rains had rinsed away the perpetrator’s scent signatures.

  No one owned up to doing it. Nobody squealed.

  Pack solidarity, you’ve got to love it, right?

  I belonged here and yet I didn’t. These tree-covered hills, these grassy fields, this pine-scented air; they all felt so familiar to me. If I kept my eyes shut and didn’t take in the whole picture, I could pretend that the old path leading from the Stronghold side was the same mud-slick one my twin Lexi and I had flown down on our bikes when we were eight, grinning at each other and shrieking at the top of our lungs as our tires hit the little puddle near the end. I could remember how the water would shoot up, half translucent, half muddy, leaving a wake behind us as significant as any boat launch’s inaugural spray, and how we’d crowed at this visual statement of our superiority. Because in those days, in our naïve arrogance, we’d assumed the splatter trail of mud that flattened grasses on either side of the trail was a statement. We had passed through and left evidence of our passage. Of course, in our triumph, we inevitably forgot that the bottom of one Creemore hill usually led to the start of another.