The Problem with Promises Page 7

  The long grass at the edge of the field still struggled to bounce back from the trampling of Elizabeth’s boot heels. Some of it looked a little seared and dry, which was odd—almost as if someone had dragged a lit torch along it.

  My gaze followed it all the way to—

  That’s when I had one of those moments. Edison with his lightbulb. Newton with his apple. Lady Gaga the first time she saw a pair of fake, bling-studded eyelashes. There are coincidences and coincidences. If Elizabeth was truly following the leylines, then they were extraordinarily conveniently placed. What are the odds that these magical underground ribbons of power would just happen to coincide with a path through the woods, and more extraordinarily, the only gap in the long line of the living fence created by old cedars?

  That was no natural break in the shrubbery. I’d cut the hole myself, with a hedge trimmer I’d permanently borrowed from Home Depot. Aleezahbet wasn’t following leylines.

  So what was she laying a trail down of?

  * * *

  I turned off my flashlight as I entered the cemetery. I didn’t need it anymore. Ghosts are inner-lit. Between my glow-stick arm and Casperella there was enough light.

  The Fae ghost hovered near the edge of the cliff, where she could monitor the witches’ progress. Judging how the tatters of her gown were weaving nastily around her, she wasn’t happy about it. I crept to one of the pine trees, and using its trunk to hide my presence, took a quick peek. Trowbridge and Cordelia had just placed one fallen log over the two-foot span, and were heading back to forage on the incline for another.

  I’d better hurry.

  “Pssst,” I whispered to the ghost.

  She turned. Her face was a vague smear. Her hair, definitely unappealing, dark Medusa ropes that floated in a current I could not see.

  I cut to the chase. “Before the sun rises, we’re going to summon the gates to Merenwyn. It will be open for a short time and then it will be closed.” I put enough finality in my tone to infer that it will never be opened again. “If you want to return home, that will be your chance to go through.” I pointed to the crumbling edge of her wall. “You’ll need to cross this wall, though, before the ward the witches are setting is complete.”

  She silently regarded me.

  Being mute has it drawbacks.

  A quick glance toward the pond. Trowbridge, face set in a snarl, was entering the water. Expression grim, he bent over and scooped up some mud. He waded back toward the improvised bridge he was fashioning.

  He’s going to need a shower after this.

  “Come on, Casperella. Here’s your chance. Just go.” I gave her a little quick off-you-go wave to spur her on her way, and then when she didn’t do much more than hover in front of me, I added my tight, Starbucks-barista’s smile. The one that was shorthand for “Here’s your drug-of-choice. Now, please, go swill it elsewhere while I prepare the next addict’s drink.”

  It’s uncomfortable to find yourself being studied by a ghost. And a little disquieting when the apparition decides to come closer for a better look-see. I backed up until my hip brushed a pine tree. “Well, you can make up your own mind. I’ve done my good deed for the day.”

  I thought she might touch me, or worse, try to steal some of my magic again. If so, I was going to do something. Punch her. Or run. Whatever worked.

  But all she did was float past me, leaking sadness and longing, until she came to the edge of her wall. There she hovered, rags flapping around her, her back turned toward the pond and potential freedom, with her gaze fixed on the cemetery.

  What on earth was she so focused on? Escape was in the opposite direction.

  I pivoted. The cemetery was exactly that—a cemetery. Past the paint-flaking staves of the rotting picket fence that served as an additional barrier to this forgotten end of the graveyard there wasn’t much out of the ordinary. We had a few trees—the oldest being at least a couple hundred years old. And the older tombstones—the first wave in a sea of them—thin and narrow, pocked with green moss now graying in the fall’s chill. Beyond those relics, we had the circular road that led in and out of the cemetery. Two Were ghosts, who usually kept to themselves. And then a whole bunch more markers—a wavering line that followed the swell of the land.

  I chewed the corner of my lip.

  Merry got it before me. She delicately shook one of her vines free from the nest of gold surrounding her amber heart, and tapped me on the face. Lightly at first, then with enough pressure to turn my head in the direction she wished.

  Look down, she silently urged me.

  I did. Just beyond Casperella’s reach, nestled amid the ruins of the picket fence, were five pint-sized monuments. The inscription of the closest read, “Absolom (1746–1747 Lamb of God).” My gaze went to the other names. Prudence, Samuel, Anne, Earnest. Five little graves. One for each infant loved and lost.

  Merry climbed closer up her chain, so that the warm roundness of her belly fit in the hollow of my collarbone. “These are hers,” I whispered to my friend. Merry dipped in agreement, and the heart of her stone turned the color of bruised peaches.

  I glanced at Casperella, and then once more at the stone wall that surrounded her final resting spot. “You’re trapped here, aren’t you? You can’t reach your babies even if you wanted to.”

  The taunting cruelty of it. Is this how a pack treats a Fae?

  Goddess, I’ve had my fill of trapped souls.

  “I’m coming closer, so you don’t need to do one of your spook flutters,” I warned Casperella, shuffling closer. “I want to check something.” I held out my bandaged arm over the remains of the wall.

  The moment I held my dandy new magic-sensitive limb over the wall, it went weak.

  I mean, weak.

  Ever tried to use your arm after it’s gone to sleep? Know how it just hangs there from your shoulder and says “nah” to all your body’s demands to move? Well, whatever kept Casperella chained to the confines of her stone prison caused my whole arm to go limp and lifeless.

  I stepped away from the stones, and almost immediately felt pins and needles revive my damn near useless appendage. What crime had Casperella committed to justify the pack walling in her mortal remains in this little spit of land? And furthermore, what kept her from doing a spook-float out of this tiny spit of land?

  Intuition prickled.

  Mouth dry, stomach hurting, I aimed my foot at the wall and started kicking. Hard and fast as if each one had a name inscribed on it. Here be injustice. Here be intolerance. Here be cruelty. I attacked the wall until it lay plundered, and then I scuffed the ground until the long line of spent pine needles that had accumulated at the heels of that terrible wall were gone too. When the ground lay bare to me, I grimly found a sturdy branch, and used it to begin to dig.

  Within moments, I spotted the rusted, riddled misery hidden beneath the soil.

  Pure iron.

  Poison to a pure-blooded Fae. Proximity to it will cause most to feel like they’ve been tipped naked into an arctic sea—they’ll writhe in the teeth of terrible cold until they’re lucky enough to fall insensible and drift away into the endless sleep. But I’m a half-breed, and for me, up to this moment, my reaction to the ore was milder. Close contact produced a sense of biting cold—the swift shaft of numbing hurt you’d experience if you were dumb enough to touch a steel flagpole in the dead of winter with the tip of your bare tongue—followed by a drugging wave of deep fatigue that fortunately never sank me into anything more than a dazed slumber. Past experience had taught me that touching iron didn’t kill me, or take me into the dreaded never-never land.

  So, unlike Casperella, I wasn’t terrified of iron. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t wary around it.

  Filthy stuff. I tried to pry the piece from the ground, but the rusting chunk was awkward to lift—what with my right arm being so inconveniently weak around it. With a smothered curse, I found another sturdy stick, and fashioned myself a pair of clumsy chopsticks. Teeth clenched, I set mys
elf to the task of teasing that festering misery out of the ground. I’d got the pointed edge of one stick under the piece of ore, and was fumbling to lift it with my improvised chopsticks, when my bite wound started whimpering again.

  I glanced down at it. Yup, right through the bandage, each tooth indent was radiating an eerie light, just an increment less brilliant than a green glow stick. Lovely.

  “Move to the side, Casperella,” I said. “I’m going to toss this thing.”

  I suited action to words, and watched with grim satisfaction as the iron piece flew a few feet closer to the cliff, showering flakes of rust. A curious skunk watched me repeat the process twice more—plucking the cold poison from the ground and chucking it to the side—until there was a path two feet wide of clean earth, untainted by iron.

  “There you go,” I said to Casperella, sitting back on my heels.

  It was like someone had pulled the trigger on the starter’s pistol.

  The cemetery’s ghost didn’t gracefully glide to the objects of her desire—she streaked toward them, a gray, shimmering blur that almost outpaced the speed of light. “Geez!” I hissed when I realized that I was in her direct flight path. With a grimace, I huddled tight over my knees and winced against the blast of chill that ran along my curved spine as she flew right over me.

  A ghost flyby. That’s a new one.

  I counted to two, then lifted my head.

  Casperella weaved through her children’s headstones, helpless to embrace them. It hurt, seeing her do that. Her tattered gown and her long ropes of hair—I’d seen them flutter wildly around her, I’d seen them snap to an invisible wind, but I’d never seen emotion expressed like this.

  This grieving flow of faded fabric and dark tresses.

  “You’re free now,” I told her softly.

  She turned toward me. Mouth, an indistinct gray slash. Eyes, dark holes.

  “You can stay with them—and I’ll make sure no wolf imprisons you again—or you can go. Do what you will.”

  She thought about that, then, to my amazement, she floated deeper into the cemetery, moving toward the old ancient oak that brooded, alone and somehow miserable, in the oldest part of the graveyard. She touched it with her hand. Like Mad-one did with her old beech tree in Threall. Probably like I had during my first soul-ball commune in the land of myst.

  As if that gnarled and ancient tree contained a soul.

  “She’s a mystwalker, Merry,” I whispered, feeling all sorts of awful.

  Oh Goddess, she’s like me. If I made it to old age, this is the prize at the end of the rainbow? I’d end up here? Stuck forever in the segregated part of the pack’s final hunting ground?

  Past me the grave markers rose and fell like buoys on the swell of an ocean bay.

  That’s when I heard a loud, long metallic groan that made the hair at the nape of my neck stand up.

  * * *

  Merry flashed two pulses of red light.

  “It could have been a trick of the wind,” I whispered. But there was no breeze. No movement of air. Nothing except the stillness before a storm. I canted my head to the side so I could listen, trying to isolate the sound. Another long screech. The sound of the cemetery gates being pushed wider open—distinctive and discordant.

  Normally, those cast-iron gates were padlocked, firmly sealed until yet another brief internment service. Merry, frustrated by her inability to see, unwound a strand of ivy, nabbed the end of my blouse, and did a quick hip-hop toward my shoulder. She braced herself against the wind, straining to see through the gloom.

  Was that a car engine idling?

  “Try to make like a pendant,” I told Merry tersely, as I picked my way over the ruins of the picket fence. Strangely obedient, she slid down her chain until she dangled from its end, then doused her light. We headed up the hill toward the dirt road. The old soft stone markers gleamed in the night. I tilted my head back and let the aromas come to me. Eyes sealed, I concentrated, shuffling scents like a woman going through her mail. New stuff. Old stuff. Wolf stuff—a lot of that from the nearby field. But then—hello—fresh scents. Pungent and real. Two males. One brought with him the stink of body spray, leather, and weed. The other was musty with old sweat.

  Neither bore the slightest whiff of wolf.

  Humans, then, not emissaries from the NAW.

  My ears picked up the sound of a car being set into drive, then the soft whisper of grass hitting the underbelly of a vehicle. Thinking to warn Trowbridge that we had unwelcome company, I started to backtrack. The vehicle was moving faster than I’d calculated. Before I’d gotten to the end of the road, headlights swept around the bend.

  I dove for cover, which in that section of the graveyard amounted to two narrow and tall markers. Both leaned to one side. I went for the straightest one and hunched behind it. Fae-me curling into a tight coil around my waist. Merry’s gold, a stiff sea urchin against my throat.

  My Asrai friend was upset. She felt I should not have investigated.

  I was starting to agree with her.

  Particularly once the driver took his foot off the gas and doused his headlights. The big truck passed us slowly, gravel crunching under its tires. A newer model, pricey even to my inexperienced eyes. Dark—either black or navy blue. Tinted side windows. A lot of chrome on the grill. Overall—oversized in every way.

  The foolish part of me—the section of myself that could rationalize anything, and pray for the most unlikely—was hoping beyond hope that the vehicle would keep going and follow the curve of the road all the way back out of the cemetery.

  The truck braked three feet past our hiding spot.

  Crap. Who were they?

  I could smell the spicy grease of the burritos they’d eaten earlier right through the glass, and there were no taco stands within a dozen kilometers of Creemore.

  A low brrr as the passenger’s electric window was pressed. “This is it?”

  The speaker’s chin sported a soul patch that was thinking about branching into a goatee. His eyebrows were mean and dark, and absolutely flat like someone had balanced a ruler on the bridge of his nose, and then used a permanent marker to make two thick bristling lines.

  Biker or ex-con—it was written all over him.

  “Yeah.” I saw the dark shadow of the driver’s silhouette give a nod, and watched him drape his arm over the steering wheel. The star’s weak glow picked up the silver gleaming on every knuckle. Rings. Ugly and gothic.

  Another rumble of thunder. The sound of the storm was bearing down on us, moving too swiftly to be natural. Now it no longer rumbled, it rolled: one continuous sound, its volume rising and falling, like an argument overheard from a great distance.

  And yet, still, no wind, no rain. Just the peculiar feeling of a vacuum slowly being strengthened.

  “I hate this shit,” complained Mean-eyebrows. The passenger door opened, and a booted foot flattened some grass. The silver-toned buckles on the side of his boots were scratched and gouged.

  Shit kickers.

  “Why couldn’t we have used the main road and come in directly?” He cleared his throat and spat a wad at a nearby grave. “This sneaking through the woods makes me feel like Daniel-fucking-Boone.”

  “Shut up, Itchy,” said the other guy. “They’ve got good hearing.”

  “Not even Rin-Tin-Tin could hear us over this storm.” A jagged white line of lightning flashed in the sky as Itchy made his way to the back of the truck. “Man, this place gives me the creeps.”

  The biker was right. My hearing was more enhanced than theirs, but I could hear little over the sound of the storm bearing down on us. Not the witches’ chants. Not Cordelia’s sighs. Not even the slap of mud being thrown on the chink between two fallen logs.

  Bad magic was being drawn from the elements.

  My ears hurt with pressure, and my arm was blazing, casting a here-be-magic glow right through the bandages. Inside me, my Fae positively vibrated with the need to come out and explore.

 
; Now I recognized the night of the witches for what it was. The knife edge—that moment between before and after.

  Itchy double-tapped the truck’s bed cover. “Unlock the tail, Gerry,” he called to the driver.

  Gerry did.

  Itchy quickly lowered the back gate to access the truck’s bed. The interior light flared as the driver shoved open his door. “Watch out, man. That rollback cover isn’t even a week old. I’ll kick your ass if I find a scratch on it tomorrow.”

  Gerry was what mortals called middle-aged but that felt optimistic. He had cadaver written on his basset hound’s face, and each inhale was a wheeze.

  “What are you going to do if she starts kicking the shit out of your cover from the inside?” Itchy asked as he pushed back the truck bed’s cover.

  Gerry said in a faintly bored voice, “I’ll shoot her.”

  Chapter Five

  Her? I hate that word. When it’s said in that negative tone, it almost always ends up meaning “Hedi.” Geez Louise. Exactly what is it about me that made a person think, “I’m going to smack her upside the head and kidnap her. No, I’ll knife her. Hell, forget that, I’ll just shoot her.”

  That was it—I needed help.

  I cast a quick glance to my right. The nearest cover was about fifteen feet away. I’d have to run fast, stay low.

  Get to Trowbridge. Warn him and the others.

  “I can’t see squat,” said Itchy, feeling around in the truck bed.

  I tensed for the sprint, then froze as light played over the nearby headstones, narrowly missing me. Gerry heaved a big sigh and slid out of his truck. “I should have brought someone else,” he said, lumbering to the back of the vehicle, his flashlight in hand. “Because you, my friend, are a big pain in the ass.”

  Itchy grunted. “Don’t blame me because the fucker moved. I told you we should have kept the weapons in the backseat.” A smothered curse, then another as he stretched to reach deep inside.

  The wind, which had been so still and absent despite the rumbling sky, returned. A fitful stir of the tops of the cedars. Then, as if an angry God leaned down to blow a mouthful of hot temper, the current of air suddenly grew hard and vengeful, shaking the sumacs, until their bare branches chattered in distress.