The Problem with Promises Read online

  But I can’t. That’s the malodorous statement that hovered over us like a stink bomb.

  Biggs’s chair squeaked as he shot to his feet. He went to the sink, turning his back on us to stare blindly through the window. His scent leaked angst and tragedy.

  “What’s up with Biggs?” I mouthed to Cordelia.

  She flattened a manicured hand over her heart. Brows raised, she mouthed back, “The Chihuahua loved a halfling.” I shouldn’t have been able to follow that—that’s a lot of silent speak—but all those years of lip-synching to Donna Summer tracks had left their mark on Cordelia.

  Oh.

  I’d attributed Biggs’s lack of dates to his fashion choices—tonight’s shoelaces were red. It hadn’t occurred to me that he was nursing a broken heart. My memory stirred. “That’s for Becci!” he’d shouted before pulling the trigger on Stuart Scawens.

  I’d forgotten he’d said it until now—it was a detail that had been hazed over by bigger tragedies. But now, I felt a flicker of shame. I should have asked him about Becci.

  One day, I will.

  The door opened, and Harry walked in. He took in the scene, face carefully neutral. “So, what are the two of them going on about now?”

  “Life, liberty, and—” Cordelia paused for an eye roll that set her fake eyelashes fluttering. “Love with a capital L. Our two lovebirds seem to enjoy sparring with each other as much as they do making those bloody bedsprings squeak.”

  “It’s not the bed,” said Trowbridge. “It’s the chair.”

  Someone shoot me.

  “What did you do with Fatso?” I asked.

  Anu’s head turned as Harry said in his low rumble, “He’s hanging from a hook in the back of a refrigerated trunk that’s on its way to Montreal.” The pack’s second gave me a reproving head shake. “Now, Little Miss. I didn’t kill him. He’s mostly alive and trussed up like Big Bird. The driver said he’d put pedal to the metal until he’s over the provincial border. I told him to leave our friend somewhere inconvenient.”

  “Good,” said Trowbridge, his voice clipped.

  “Super,” I added, rubbing my eyes. They burned. With fatigue. Not at all because the little comet in Trowbridge’s baby blues was calling to my flare. I picked up the bag, opened the seal and took a whiff. To me, the contents smelled of Knox, blood, leather, sun potion, and … fudge. If we wanted to be specific about it, maple flavored.

  Trowbridge tossed Harry the bag. “Take a whiff of this and tell me if you can recognize the scent.” Harry sampled it, and shook his head before passing it to Cordelia. She didn’t have any better luck and passed it across the table. Biggs rubbed his nose before he took a delicate snort.

  “Well?” asked Trowbridge.

  Biggs put the bag down on the pine table and stared at it. Silently, he shook his head.

  “I hate thinking of a kid being around Knox,” I said.

  Trowbridge nodded, his eyes focused on the bottle of sun potion. Absently, he flattened his hand over the scar hidden beneath his T-shirt. His thumb moved, side to side it swept, following the rough ridges of the now-healed wound.

  Chapter Three

  Both of the witches had long, thick auburn hair. That’s where the obvious similarities ended. The older of the two was about Cordelia’s age and perhaps four inches shorter than Trowbridge. She had an air of command to her, possibly because she was on the hefty side and her girth spoke all on its own.

  Smart too, I thought, watching her size me up.

  The other witch was a little taller than me. Small-boned, thin. When she’d got out of the car, I’d noticed that she’d forgotten to do up at least three of the top buttons of her chic white blouse, and somehow the way she’d arranged her arms made the cleavage of her high firm breasts look like a line that needed to be traced with someone’s tongue.

  But with any luck, she’d age like her mother.

  “We’re not related,” said the older witch, regarding me with some amusement. “Folks see the red hair and they generally think Elizabeth and me are kin. We’re not.” She flicked a hard glance at the younger witch. “We just haven’t resolved who has the rights to Garnier’s Deep Auburn. Tell me, who do you think looks better in it?”

  I’m a liar. Part of being a successful one is knowing when to bring one out and when to shut the hell up. I did the latter.

  “I’m Natasha Sedgewick,” said the older witch.

  “And who are you?” I asked the younger witch.

  “Elizabeth,” she replied, but she pronounced it in the French-Canadian way—Aleezahbet. And she directed her answer to Trowbridge with the side dish of a well-practiced courtesan’s smile.

  I didn’t like her.

  “There’s only the two of you?” I folded my arms over my chest. That served two purposes. Hopefully it made me look like a badass while at the same time it applied pressure to the bite mark on my arm, which had started burning again.

  “The rest of our circle is already formed,” said Natasha. “Once I know exactly what your pack is interested in, I’ll phone it in.” Trowbridge lifted his brows and she explained. “Our power comes from a community of minds concentrating at the same time.”

  At my cough of disbelief, she waved a vague hand toward the ground. “We use the earth’s leylines to channel our magic.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. What balderdash—that’s what I was thinking. If there had been a spiderweb of sorcery underneath the ground, wouldn’t Mum have told me about it? She was after all a Fae, and that trumps any mortal with aspirations of conjuring greatness.

  Natasha blew some air through her nose. “So, what do you need?”

  “A ward set on the property,” said Trowbridge curtly.

  She lifted her shoulders. “Then how about we do a walk around the premises? I need to get an idea of exactly how large an area we’re talking about.”

  The Alpha of Creemore nodded, started to lead the way, and then stopped. “Harry, you and Biggs go now,” he said.

  My old second stepped out of the shadows. Rifle balanced over his arm. “You sure, boss?” It was clear that he didn’t want to leave us with the witches, but one of the sentries along the route had rung in to say that they had bikers at Cash Corners. Why that made them all nervous, I hadn’t figured out, nor did I want to know. There was only so much I could take.

  Trowbridge nodded.

  Harry swallowed his unease down. “Biggs,” he said, tossing a set of keys to the younger Were. “I’ll head east, you head north.”

  I looked up at the second-floor windows. Backlit was the shadow of a girl.

  How will I say good-bye? What will I tell Lexi? That I left his daughter in the hands of one of my best friends?

  Anu yanked the curtain closed. Trowbridge had told her to stay low. I wondered how long that would last. Her father would have taken that caution as a personal challenge to his general dislike of rules and regulations.

  I have to stop looking for the Lexi in her.

  * * *

  The fat witch stood on the little wedge of cliff, overlooking the fairy pond. “It’s larger than I remembered,” she said when Trowbridge shone his torch toward the end of it where the lily pads and bulrushes grew.

  I’d stood here, not six hours ago. Sat underneath the tree to my left and held my dying brother in my arms. Unbelievable.

  This will work. It will all work.

  Across the way, past the still water, past this place, and this patch of earth, was the Stronghold ridge, where once a home of gray brick and faded blue siding had stood. The pack had removed most of the traces of it. Someone had carted away all the brick and taken away the burned timbers of the home that once housed me, my brother, my mom, and my dad. All that was left of that family home was a foundation and the tall dried bones of an old maple tree that once was alive and thick with leaves and now was dead and bare.

  A trailer sat beneath that old tree. Its silver skin gleamed under the waning stars. I had the sudden cowardly wish to slink back
to the sanctuary of that silver bug. To shut the door to the little room I used to find claustrophobic. Zip myself up into the sleeping bag and cover my head with my old pillow.

  The one that didn’t smell vaguely of dust mites and Mannus.

  Cordelia must have read my face, because she whispered, “Buck up, buttercup.”

  And least that’s what I thought she said.

  “Ça sera très cher,” murmured Elizabeth, her head swiveling as she took in the area we wished enclosed. Then for us Anglophones, she enlarged. “Magic over water?” She garnished that inconceivable problem with a very Gallic shrug. “It is very difficult. This will cost you much.”

  All said in a charming Francophone accent.

  I really don’t like her.

  A thought that grew when Elizabeth’s gaze flitted from the terrain to my mate’s damaged hand. Her attention focused on it for a beat, telling me in no uncertain terms that in her books, a man with blue eyes, a fairy pendant, and a few scars was a hell of a turn-on.

  And bing!—I shuffled the little French witch out of my “dislike” column into my “despise” column.

  Oh. Joy. Apparently, besides walking around with a cue ball lodged in my vocal cords, within forty-eight hours of my mate’s return to kith and home, I was suffused by jealousy. Just another one of those wolf bitches who eyed every other female as a challenge to her claim to her mate.

  Swallow that down too. Maybe the instinct will drown in the stomach bile I’ve got going on.

  Cordelia placed her gas lamp on a stump. “Shall we get on with it?”

  “I want the ward to be drawn all the way around this pond.” Trowbridge illustrated what he wanted, using his scarred finger to trace the surrounding ridges. “It’s got to enclose it completely. Make it tall, too. Like a dome. And we’ll need a trapdoor that will open with a password.” Trowbridge thought for a moment. “We’ll use the word ‘strawberry’.”

  “Where?” Natasha asked.

  I shouldered between Elizabeth and my guy in order to slap the tree under which Lexi had fallen asleep. “Here.”

  The younger witch flicked me a disinterested glance, then bestowed upon my mate a charming shrug. “It can be done, but as I said, it will be very expensive.” She dragged out the r in “very” so that we could get just a feel for how pricey such a request would be.

  “How much?” I asked bluntly, already tired of them.

  Elizabeth’s blouse gaped as she used both hands to push her hair off her temples. “This is not of the ordinary, you understand?”

  “How much?” asked Trowbridge tersely.

  “Well…” The younger witch glanced again toward her silent companion.

  Natasha’s bonhomie disappeared so swiftly, so completely, that I realized that whatever pleasantry she’d offered us before had been of the false variety. Round and podgy can look surprisingly hawklike when the mask of good humor is tossed aside. “You don’t have enough money in the world to pay my coven to put a ward around this pond,” she said as if she was speaking the opening line of the dialogue of incoming doom.

  “Calmes-toi,” Elizabeth said in a soothing voice. “C’est une bonne idée de réfléchir avant de refuser.”

  Trowbridge’s expression darkened. “Speak in English.”

  “Allow me to translate,” Cordelia drawled. “This pretty bird wants the other one to stop and think before refusing our offer.”

  In response to Cordelia’s language skills, Elizabeth used a French word that caused my BFF’s right eyebrow to lift in a way that usually had me running for the hills. The contest of wills between Elizabeth and her was over in an eyeblink. Cordelia was a full-blown Were, and she’d held the title of Toronto’s Best Drag Queen for five years in a row back in the late eighties.

  A moment later, the young witch dropped her gaze and hid her loss by readjusting her collar with a quick jerk.

  Natasha’s chest had risen during this skirmish—almost impossible when one stopped to consider how massive a feat of engineering that was. “You have some gall,” she said.

  She’s going to blow, I thought, taking a cautious step backward. Merry slid out of my lace cup, and started hauling arm over arm for a peekaboo. She likes to witness a good explosion here and there. Always had, always will.

  And I didn’t even try to stop her—she had few enough perks in her life.

  A few scratches as she made her summiting move, then the top curved portion of her pendant crested the vee of my blouse in time for her to witness the fat witch jab a stubby finger at Trowbridge.

  “You want to think back, chum?” Blotches of red mottled Natasha’s cheeks. “When was the last time the Creemore pack asked for some assistance from my coven?” Her little digit trembled in rage. “Do you remember what happened ten years ago?”

  As a question, that one was right up there with who killed Kennedy. Of course he knew, just as I did, what occurred that night. We’d both lost our families in one swift hour of violence and blood.

  The real question was, what precisely had her coven to do with the events of that evening?

  Evidently, Natasha thought we knew. Because she was clearly insensible to the way Trowbridge’s eyes had narrowed until they were two blue slits above sharp, sharp cheekbones. And utterly dismissive of the way Cordelia removed both earrings.

  Natasha was having her moment.

  “When your uncle asked us to summon a ward for this pond, I thought the request was being made on behalf of your father, the Alpha of Creemore. So of course, we did as required—your pack had been our biggest source of income.”

  Oh crap. The Sisters had placed a ward over the pond that night? They’d been responsible? We’d always thought it had been my aunt Lou. And we’d asked them to come help us?

  Someone shoot me. Or better yet, shoot them.

  Cordelia pocketed her hoops.

  “But that wasn’t the case, was it?” Natasha said with magnificent outrage. “Your father—the Alpha of Creemore—died as a result of our spell and your uncle used the protection of our ward to pass through the Fae’s gates unnoticed.” Her tone slipped into the death-and-doom register. “Do you know how much trouble answering the call of Creemore wolves brought unto me and my coven?”

  Spitting with rage, she was. Air bubbles of spit collected by the corner of her mouth.

  Her fury was a sickening visual contrast to Trowbridge’s sudden stillness. So, he hadn’t known either. Did his hands itch to throttle her like mine did?

  “Good must be balanced with bad,” Natasha pronounced. “Your uncle connected us to deaths and destruction. For five years every member of my coven suffered. We had everything from cheating husbands to Revenue Canada coming after us for tax withholding. We lost our homes, our side businesses. Not only was our Karma screwed over but our livelihood went up in smoke. First your uncle Mannus threatened our lives, then he sent out word that we weren’t to be trusted. After that, no pack would come near us. It didn’t matter that for twenty-five years our magic had kept the wolves safe from humans’ eyes. All the cloaking spells, all the hide spells, all the wards we conjured to protect your private hunting grounds—forgotten. Suddenly we were too close to the dark side. All our contacts with the Weres—every single council we’d ever done work for—dried up overnight and the wolves started using another coven.”

  She lifted her double chin. “And now, you come knocking on our door, again, after all these years. You’ve got the nerve to ask us to make another ward for this fairy pond. You have balls of steel, wolf!”

  “Nastasha,” said Elizabeth in an undertone.

  But the fat witch was busy giving us the evil eye.

  Which was absolutely no match for the Trowbridge preflare, spinning-blue-sparks glare. “Then why’d you come?” he said, his voice too low, his body too tightly coiled.

  Natasha said, “Some messages must be delivered in person.”

  Trowbridge’s head reared back. Time for an intervention—no matter how much we both want
ed to ass-kick them to the curb, we needed them. We could strangle them later. I touched his rigid arm, felt the stone-hard muscles beneath his warm skin. “Let me,” I said.

  This type of woman, I well understood. My Fae aunt Lou had been prone to long, dark periods of deep sulking, followed by explosions of anger. When I’d been an easily spooked kid, those rages had scared the crap out of me.

  Not anymore.

  “Let’s be real blunt,” I said to her. For the first time in the last ten minutes, I felt on top of everything. I’d seen the view from this particular mountaintop before and knew how to navigate the way down. Easy peasy: ignore the bluster and carry on.

  “You’re going to give us the ward. Because no one in their right mind would come here—in the dead of night, to the wolf’s den—and dare to piss off the Alpha of Creemore, unless in the end, she meant to do business.” I folded my arms. “Both you and I know that this is your coven’s last opportunity to get back in favor with the Weres. And in the end, it all comes down to money, right?”

  See? I wasn’t above stealing Trowbridge’s words or logic.

  “If you don’t put a ward around that pond, there won’t be ‘further opportunities’ with the Weres. This is your chance to win back wolf approval and go back to sending your kids to private school.” And then, just to sweeten it, I said, blandly, “The money will really start to roll in after this.”

  Perhaps it was the bland that set me up. Or maybe it’s because I followed up with the slightly smug, “Let’s cut to chase. Tell us what you want.”

  Natasha’s smile was cruel. “Cry for me, Fae. Give me a Tear and we’ll call it even.”

  Whoosh. The air rushed out of my lungs.

  “Think again,” said Trowbridge.

  Natasha shook her head, sure of herself. “No. That’s what I want—a Fae Tear. About the size and shape of a tear-shaped diamond, but many times more valuable.” She smiled at me, the fat Persian cat thinking about moving itself for a spot of fun. “They say all you have to do is make a Fae cry and hold out your hand. Her tear will harden in your palm. Turn to a diamond before your very eyes.”