Mystwalker 01: The Trouble with Fate Read online

  Move, I told myself, as everything inside me stiffened into want. Move. I fastened the belt around my own waist and let it fall low. Mum was taller than me, but I’m sure I’m rounder; despite my curves, the chain hung low on my hips.

  Merry unfurled a strand of gold. The chain around my neck tightened with her weight as she slipped free of my bra. I ignored her, tucking the belt inside my cargo pants as I headed for my bedroom mirror. For the first time, the cost of the pants was justified. No matter which way I turned, the belt was invisible, the pouch nothing more than one more wrinkle amid a mind-boggling number of wrinkles.

  Merry’s head popped free of the V of my blouse as I made my way to the kitchen. If she wanted out, she could do it herself—I was still pissed about her silent routine at the hospital. I bent to retrieve some garbage bags from under the sink, and fast as a snake, she took advantage of gravity, snapping out another strand of ivy to catch the other side of the chain. She was already efficiently twining herself around both sides, each revolution hiking her higher until she was hanging from the hollow of my throat like a goth choker.

  I crossed the threshold to Lou’s bedroom. “It’s too late to talk,” I told Merry, tossing Lou’s clothing into a bag. “I’m not leaving her there. So, we’re going to take her, and then we’re hitting the road. We’ll start over again somewhere else.”

  Merry’s stone slowly warmed as I found Lou’s shoes and coat. I stripped the bed and threw her pillow and comforter in another bag. Then I did a slow turn. A bed, a lamp, curtains, and one chair. Lou wasn’t leaving much.

  My room had fewer clothes and more clutter. I was standing there, thinking hard, when someone knocked on the apartment door.

  Shit. Was it Bob? Or Lyle? Or, just-shoot-me-now, the police?

  I went up on my toes and squinted through the door’s peephole. He’d been smart enough to tuck himself to the right of the doorway so I couldn’t see him, but he hadn’t taken the time to have a bath. The Were who stood out of sight in the hall needed to be spritzed with boy cologne. I didn’t know him, clean or dirty: his scent didn’t trigger any recall.

  So I had to ask myself, was this a T-rex situation—you’re only on the menu if you move? How soundlessly had I tiptoed to the door? If I stayed frozen, with my nose flattened against the door panel, not making any noise, would he decide I wasn’t there and go away? As my air ran out, I began hoping he had a short attention span.

  He did.

  I saw a flash of a gray shirt through the peephole; I jerked backward as his fist exploded through the door. A bloody hand shot through the jagged hole, showering wood splinters onto the carpet, and started to fumble for the lock.

  I turned and ran. Behind me the door thudded against the wall. I sped up, running as fast as my size sixes could take me to the kitchen and its knife collection. I didn’t make it far. Size twelve always trumps size six. He grabbed the back of my shirt, I heard a whoosh of air close to my ear, and then my head exploded.

  * * *

  I hurt. Merry felt hot and anxious against my chest, and the dog in the apartment downstairs was barking “danger, danger.” I rolled my head experimentally, and then moaned at the resulting spear of pain.

  Dimly, I began to separate the smells into three different cues: Rover’s fear, seeping like natural gas up the stairs, cheap carpet, and Were. This one had an unpleasant layer of musk over the usual woods-and-fields smell I associate with Weres. His boots had walked through some nasty things. I kept my eyes closed and faked dead.

  “Get up,” he growled, unimpressed. I worked a little harder on being limp.

  “Up.” He kicked me. I curled tight as a hedgehog, one hand pressed against my ribs, as pain and shock ran up and down my side. Merry shot out an alarmed spike of heat.

  “No,” I grunted. Merry stilled but her tension furled her gold into furious prickling spikes that bit into my cleavage. “Not helping,” I muttered to her.

  Then he pulled back his boot and did it again. In the same freaking spot. “Don’t make me tell you again, bitch.”

  When I got my breath back, I raised a hand. Past his scuffed heels I could see the curved leg of my easy chair. I crawled to the chair to brace a hand on the seat cushion. With its help, I heaved myself up as far as my knees. That was as far as I could go.

  I’d been hit. By a Were. He’d hit me. And I hurt.

  “All the way up.”

  One glance at him and I was inspired to stand. I wobbled to my feet, feeling my broken ribs scream. He’d hurt me. I’d never been hit before, unless you counted Lexi, but he was my twin. Twins do that, fully expecting to be hit back.

  Lou was right. There was no upside to being around Weres.

  A couple of days ago, when his clothing was still clean, and his eyes didn’t look like he’d been smoking crack, he might have been hot. He was young, he was built, and he was good-looking, in a sort of studly, teenage way. Too young for me, but still, a great body is a great body, until the owner of it uses one of his body parts to kick you. Then you change your first impression, and start noticing things like red-rimmed eyes, and scent; in his case, a ripe, unpleasant combination of unwashed Were, male musk, and hot emotion.

  Downstairs, Rover was trying to scratch his way through his door. “You stink of coffee and you live around dogs,” he said, thumbing open his phone. Loser, his gaze said, as he waited for the phone to be answered.

  It was short and sweet, his phone conversation. It went like this: he had the amulet. Some girl had it around her neck, but he’d encountered some problems taking it from her. Should he just take her head off or should he bring her in too? Both of us waited for the answer, but I bet his heart was still beating, whereas mine stopped somewhere after the phrase “take her head off.”

  “Right,” he said, nodding as if he were right in front of the guy on the other end of the phone. “We’re on our way.” The man on the other end hung up first.

  “What do you think you’re going to do with my amulet? You’re a Were. It won’t do a thing for you.”

  “Doesn’t have to do a thing for me. My Alpha wants the amulet, and I’m the Alpha’s boy. His top boy. I get the job done,” he added with a superior smirk. His phone chirruped again, startling Rover into another chorus of “danger, danger.”

  “What?” The Were’s voice grew testy. He yanked the lamp cord out of the wall socket as he listened. “No, tell them not to wait. Take the old lady straight to the Alpha.” Casually, he tore the electric wire from the base. “Rolled her right past the nurse, eh? And the cops? What did you do … yeah, that was smart. So, what about Trowbridge? Not yet?” He started advancing toward me, the wire swinging from his grip. “What’s your problem? Just follow his trail.” He stopped to adjust his jeans and roll his eyes. “Yeah. No problem. I’ll toss this bitch into the trunk and swing by.” He closed the phone.

  “Good luck getting me into the trunk, asshole,” I said.

  He flexed his hands. The fingers on the right one were blistered, as if he’d seared them on a hot frying pan.

  “You couldn’t even get my amulet off without burning your hand.” My mouth twisted into a smile I knew I was going to regret. He growled, low in his throat, and shifted on his feet. “And now you have a sore paw—” His hand swung out and slapped me hard, and I went flying across the room. It wasn’t a big room; I didn’t have far to go before I hit the wall and slid down it into an awkward heap.

  Enough.

  My power was waiting for me. It had been coiling inside of me ever since that first boot to the ribs, waiting for me to mean business. Waiting for me to use it in a way my mum never let me do. No more half measures.

  I meant to hurt.

  I gave that churning mass leave of its fetters, and it surged up my arm in an exultant stream to collect at the ends of my fingers. Hot. It was like I had fire ants trapped beneath my skin, which goes to show—malice burns hotter than mischief.

  With a quick flick of my hand, I unleashed my talent and it sp
rang out in an invisible fat thread to attach itself to my television. Another twist of my wrist, and the old heavy RCA lurched from its stand, electric cord trailing like a serpent’s tail as it flew upward to smack the Were hard on his head.

  He didn’t see it coming. They never do—they’re always too busy staring at my hands.

  His skull made a wet squelch, and then the back of his broken head met the wall behind him. For a heartbeat he held himself upright, until his eyes lost focus and he slid down the wall, leaving a long smear of bright red blood as he went. He didn’t get back up.

  It was almost quiet in the aftermath.

  Silent except for my own uneven breath, coming quick and hard through my parted lips. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Hold on.

  Merry pulled herself free of my blouse, her stone turning orange with all the red shot through it, to slide down her chain like Tarzan on a handy vine. She had morphed again, this time into her favorite stick figure: two golden arms, fashioned from long tendrils of elegant golden ivy, and two legs, which ended in feet that looked like tips of an ivy leaf.

  “We’re in a shitload of trouble, Merry-mine,” I said thinly. I couldn’t pull my gaze from the trail of blood down the wall. I would not panic. I would not panic. Even if the sight of the red stuff makes me panic and think of things I don’t want to think about.

  In an instant, I was back in the kitchen of my old home, watching my mother’s blood splatter the wall, smelling the sweet Fae scent of it mix with the Were and copper tang of my father’s. That’s the only time they smell, the Fae—when they bleed.

  That was my last conscious thought before my brain shut down.

  I probably would have just sat there, right by the mess of vomit I deposited on the carpet, if not for Merry. She found my ear, gripped the sensitive tip and squeezed the shit out of it. We went into the kitchen, and found blue plastic gloves which I slid over my shaking hands. I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. Merry gave me about thirty seconds’ rest before she slunk up the chain to my shirt collar. She made a grab for either edge, then planted her feet firmly on my collarbone, and hauled on it backward as if she were the Pekinese with the Saint Bernard’s leash in its mouth. I pushed away from the wall.

  Turns out it’s really hard to kill a Were.

  Until I had touched his throat and felt the beat of his sluggish pulse through my rubber glove, I had been thinking more along the line of tarp than tape. You see whitish flecks of brain matter floating in a pool of blood and that’s where your mind goes. Tarps and shovels and ponds.

  I had no corpse, but I had a body. Damn Weres. They’re a bitch to kill. Straight out of a horror flick, the freak started healing. His blood loss slowed to ooze instead of a steady drip, while underneath his skin the bones began to knit themselves back together. It’s not something you want to watch, even if you don’t get girly about blood.

  I went back to the kitchen and got some duct tape. I circled his torso with it, binding his arms tight to his chest, until he looked like a twenty-first-century mummy. I did the same to his legs. As an additional precaution, I manhandled him into a sitting position, and then secured him to the old radiator near the window. It was hard to do. He was heavy and bloody, and yeah, he scared the shit out of me, even gory-headed and unconscious. I could smell my own fear leaking out from my sweating pores, and that was enough to turn my fear into a cold rage that gave me the juice to get up close and personal with that gory head and its sticky-sweet blood. I made a collar of duct tape around his neck, and then ran a loop of it around a radiator coil, so that he was drawn back into a pugnacious chin-jutting position that suited his sunny nature so well.

  It took some contortions to get his wallet and BlackBerry out of his pocket. His wallet revealed eighty dollars, which I pocketed, and a license for one Stuart Scawens, age eighteen, living on Walnut Street in Creemore. I riffled through the rest; a health card, a Visa—he’s just a kid, how’d he qualify?—and a folded-up piece of paper that turned out to be a grocery list written in a woman’s flowing script.

  Pretty thin in the wallet for an Alpha’s “top boy.” That used to be a prestigious title, filled by a guy who cracked a smile about as frequently as the woman in the pastry shop went on a diet.

  I pushed my glasses up on my nose, and turned my attention to his phone. Before I had conceded that there wasn’t any phone my woo-woo Fae genes wouldn’t eventually screw up, I used to steal people’s phones regularly, so I didn’t have a lot of trouble navigating my way around the BlackBerry. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a nasty, terrible thing to steal someone’s cell. All those contacts and phone numbers. Let me get a hanky.

  I checked his phone history. Scawens’s last call had been to Eric, who—judging from the thumbnail photo—was about twenty-five and spent a fortune on hair gel. The call before that was from the Alpha. Annoyingly, the Alpha was listed under “The Alpha” in his address book, without any additional info that I might find useful, like a name, address, or a picture.

  They’d taken Lou? Where? And how in the hell had Scawens known where to find us?

  Trowbridge. It had to be Trowbridge.

  I kept scrolling, glancing up periodically to see how well Were-boy was doing in his slow crawl to consciousness. I was congratulating myself on my inner fortitude when I found the photos attached to the e-mail titled “Wanted.” I opened the first image. Just like that, my anxiety spiked from tolerable to unbearable. I clamped down on it, before I did something stupid, like kill the healing Were just because he was there.

  One thousand, two thousand, three thousand … I hit twelve thousand before my breathing leveled out.

  It was a picture of an amulet. It appeared that someone had blown up a much smaller photo, because the details were indistinct and all the edges were pixalated. But I recognized it. I’d seen it once before.

  “Old sacred wood,” my mum had said as Dad secured the pine cupboard, with its fancy heart-shaped cutouts on the doors, onto the kitchen wall. “Keep it off the ground, and it will hold a spell.” Fourteen months later, I was hiding inside it, safe from the Weres and the Fae, but helpless to go to her as she lay dying on the floor. I had hollered, I had shouted. I had beat on those panels until my palms were hot and puffy. Her protective spell still held. No one could see me. No one could hear me. Even after the Fae left, and the fire started licking the kitchen table.

  When Trowbridge broke through the door, I thought I was safe.

  It’s a picture frozen in my mind’s recall, seen through a heart-shaped hole. The kitchen wall was in flames. Dad’s body was sprawled on the hooked rug, right beside Mum’s. Blood still leaked from the red line cut into her throat, but her heart was slowing. Thump, thump. I could hear it over the flames. Robson Trowbridge was kneeling beside her, and he had that amulet in his hand.

  She died. And then he left, even as I screamed, “Come back, come back.”

  Thirteen thousand, fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand … I took a deep breath, and scrolled to the next image. It appeared to be a screen capture from a grainy video of Lou, initially recognizable only by the clothes I had laid out that morning. Her hair partially obscured her face, but I knew it to be Lou in full rage, with a clutch of books held pressed to her chest, and her outflung hand frozen, as if they had caught her just after she sent a book flying.

  The last picture was an old one of a young Robson Trowbridge, wearing an ill-fitting tux, standing beside an even younger-looking girl in a poufy white wedding dress. Why was he on the wanted list?

  The Were came awake slowly, groaning and twitching spasmodically before blearily opening his brown eyes. “What the—”

  “Duct tape. A whole roll of it.”

  “You bitch,” he began, and then he lapsed into a string of increasingly frustrated grunts as he tried to thrash free.

  “Where did they take the old lady?”

  His reply to that was to try to spit a mouthful of blood in my direction. Not so smart, our Stuart. His missile of woe a
rced up and then fell, splat, on his shirt.

  “I’m going to ask you again: where did they take her?”

  He lashed out with his feet, but taped as they were, his flailing was as productive as a fish flopping on land.

  I tried a different tack. “So, how’s your eyesight? Any better than your IQ? Let me show you something.” I pointed the cell phone in his direction. “This is the amulet you’re searching for, right?” I tapped the photo. “It’s got a round stone in the middle of it. Perfectly round. It’s a light blue, not a brownish yellow. And around the stone, what do we have? Ah, let’s see … it’s got all this Celtic crap twisting around the stone. Kind of a distinctive piece of jewelry, right?”

  Merry slid down the length of my chain to take a peek for herself. I almost palmed her, before remembering that Were-boy had already had an up close and personal moment with her Fae gold vines. She minced her way along my arm to perch at my wrist.

  Scawens’s gaze flicked from Merry to me. “What the fuck are you?”

  “Ever seen it before?” I asked Merry, tilting the screen so she could get a better view. All of a sudden, her leaves flattened around her body.

  “So I guess that would be a yes.” I felt like I should pat her or something. I snapped my fingers at the Were, who seemed preoccupied trying to wipe blood off his chin with his shoulder.

  “Okay, Fido, pay attention.” I tapped my thumb on the screen. “This pendant is not my pendant. Take a look. Round stone versus oval stone. Blue stone versus amber.”

  Merry started coiling a strand around the BlackBerry. “A little space, Merry. Let him see.” She was starting to freak me out.

  “So what,” he said.

  “Okay, one more time for the remedial student. The stone on that one is blue. The setting is different. Different design, so therefore, different piece of jewelry.” I dipped my head at Merry. “You’ve gone and chased the wrong prey. Bad Fido. Sit here while I find the newspaper.”