Mystwalker 01: The Trouble with Fate Read online

  I don’t have large Were ears—I can hear just a bit better than the average mortal—but I do have a Were’s nose, which I used to test the air. When I was sure that there wasn’t a new scent to worry about, say that of a hair-gelled Were named Eric, I rolled the window back up. The sweat I’d broken out in during the healing had dried, leaving me feeling itchy and chilled. I’d be warm soon. Boosting something always made me feel warm and alive.

  Merry climbed down to the vee of my white shirt and slid quietly into my left cup. I tightened my bra strap so that she was safe and snug. From my backpack, I pulled out the hoodie. It was too big, and I needed to roll the sleeves up twice, but once it was zipped up to the neck, I smelled of coffee and human.

  There was a gap in the bushes between the two businesses. I pushed through it, chewing the inside of my lip as I tried to conquer my pregame jitters. The trembling would stop when it was go time. I had no plan. I never have a plan. Usually, I just count on opportunity.

  My Fae Goddess was looking out for me. Just as I passed the first room on the end, opportunity hitchhiked on a stiff breeze that blew down the narrow catwalk in front of the rooms. Three more scents. Febreeze, cigarettes, and alcohol. I followed the trail to room 6.

  He’d chosen the woodland version of the room deodorizer. By laying a sickly sweet commercial scent over his own pure wild natural one, he’d almost gotten away with it. Almost.

  I kept walking, thinking. Trowbridge was obviously cautious. He’d disguised his scent in room 6, but he’d parked his van outside a room near the manager’s office. He must have rented that room as well, and stowed something personal there because Were fumes were seeping from that room through the aluminum window frames. In the room, a television was flickering behind drawn curtains.

  Two rooms. One as a decoy, and one for sleep.

  The night manager wasn’t in the motel’s office. From the adjacent room, I could hear someone hawking exercise equipment; guaranteed to transform flabby bellies into rock-hard abs. The spare key to unit 6 hung from the brass hook.

  “Be there in a minute,” a man said. It took less than that to lift the key from the hook and pocket it. I wasted three minutes cooling my heels around the side of the building before the manager waddled back to his shopping channel.

  Two people were having sex in room 3. I slunk past it, my nose crinkled against the scent. I put my ear to Trowbridge’s door. Someone—hopefully Trowbridge himself—was breathing deeply, his exhales loud enough to almost qualify as a snore.

  The curtains had been yanked together too enthusiastically, creating a slit between the window frame and curtain, which made recon easy. Not much in the room. A dresser, a chair, and one long lump on the bed, facedown, feet dangling over the edge. The television was on, but muted. A light had been left blazing in the bathroom. I could see a sink and an empty bathtub.

  Measure twice, steal once. I did another visual survey of the room before putting the key to the lock. It turned with a little snick. The hand tremors were gone, and now I just felt that focused rippling pleasure I always got from taking something. As if everything else were gone, and nothing else mattered except that thing I wanted.

  The thing I would take.

  I put my hand on the knob and then paused, instinct hissing caution. Weres were almost as tricky as Faes. I checked the room one more time, straining to see into all the corners. No one was standing behind the door, waiting to bash me over the head with a baseball bat, but there was something strange about the door handle. It took three beats to figure it out.

  The bastard. He’d balanced an empty liquor bottle on it.

  Well, that’s a roadblock. Driving here, I’d considered the probability that I’d need to use magic. Weres have ears, and they’re possessive. I couldn’t just tap him on the shoulder and say, “Can I have that?” I figured I might need to use my talent. But it was going to hurt. And to be honest—which I rarely am—I wasn’t altogether sure how much of my Fae magic was left inside me. I rubbed my thumb over my fingers, feeling the new soft tender skin.

  I counted to ten, stretching the eight, nine, and ten out as long as possible in case I could come up with a reason why I didn’t have to use my talent, before I forced my two fingers into position and pointed at the liquor bottle through the window. “Lift.”

  It levitated, a little less smoothly than normal, but hey, working through glass was trickier than it appeared. The empty pint of Canadian Club swung gently through the air until it hovered over the dresser. I lowered my fingers. The bottle landed short and trembled on the edge.

  I smothered a curse. “Up.” The empty rose again. “Back.” It slid backward. “Down.” The brown bottle landed with a slight thump. I clipped the line of magic, and felt the sting on my fingers.

  Sometimes I wish I had a personal remote control for my life; whenever things got bad I could just put my thumb on rewind. Instead of getting up and going to work, I would have rolled over and slept the day away. Lou wouldn’t have wandered, the Weres wouldn’t have found us, and I wouldn’t be standing with my hand wrapped around the doorknob of a motel room, waiting for a bad-tempered Were to go all vengeful and possessive when he realized I wasn’t there to make an Avon delivery.

  I opened the door.

  On the surface, the room smelled of air freshener, Were, alcohol, sex, humans, and cigarettes, but below that were other, more disturbing subtones of emotions that I couldn’t decode. It takes training to identify scents into subsections of motivation, and I had no training. I toed aside a bottle of Febreeze. There was a debris trail leading to Trowbridge’s bed. Jacket, shirt, boot, another boot, jeans, one single white sock.

  He lay facedown on the bed, with his head turned away from the door. Some of his curls were smooched up onto the pillow, the rest lay draped over his shoulder. I picked up the bottle of Canadian Club whiskey by the neck. Swung it in my hand thoughtfully and waited. Thirty-seven Mississisippis later, I came to the conclusion that if he was going to jump me, he would have done it by now.

  It was a temptation to hit him with the empty flask, just to even up the score. Instead, I picked up the sock and tossed it at him. It landed on his hairy calf. He didn’t flinch, nor did the slow, deep tempo of his breathing change. Each exhale filled the room with a little bit more recycled whiskey. Light a match in the room, and we’d both go kaboom.

  The Were seemed to be out cold. I pulled my glasses down my nose and studied him. A man probably doesn’t look his best when he’s facedown on a bed, wearing a pair of shorts, a rucked-up gray T-shirt, and one sock on his foot. The gray T-shirt was half on and half off, as if he’d paused to reconsider taking it off halfway through the job, and then just gave up on it, once he’d got his left arm free. It was bunched up to his throat, which left three quarters of his back bare.

  Trowbridge had the pillow hugged to his face, which didn’t do much for his appearance, but did a lot to show his impressively lean and muscular back. Take off his head, and he was a perfect triangle—wide shoulders, tapering down to a waist probably only a little thicker than mine, and hips that were indecently narrow, and then, oh yes, all that leg. A single white sock hung from his foot.

  His ass was covered by a pair of low-riding black briefs. Not tightie-whities, the other type—the ones I don’t know the name for. They clung to his glutes, and the long muscles of his thighs. He had runner’s thighs. All Weres have runner’s thighs.

  But like his? A traitorous thought. I gave myself a well-deserved bitch slap and moved on. His wallet lay on the dresser, along with a cell phone, an empty can of Coke, and a package of cigarettes. Beside that was what looked like a little black box camera. It was sitting up on its end like a tower, which struck me as strange. People usually lay cameras flat which makes them a lot easier to palm. When I picked it up, I felt a twinge of current. On closer inspection, it didn’t have a lens, but did sport a weird little pull pin on top.

  A new toy. I grinned at myself in the mirror as I thrust it into the
hoodie’s pocket.

  Merry pulled her head up out of my neckline. Her gold seemed to pulse with nervous energy, which just felt all wrong. No one wants a vibrating necklace. The analytic part of me, that little tiny segment of brainpower that wasn’t caught in the moment, earmarked her tension for later examination. She was usually bored or disapproving of my thefts, not anxious. Never so nervous that she hummed like a tuning fork.

  Other than my half-naked Were, there wasn’t much in the room. No luggage, no books, no iPod, nothing personal beyond the wallet and cell phone I picked up and examined. I’m never greedy. I put the wallet back. Then I slid the dresser drawers open and felt around inside them, all the time keeping an eye on the lump on the bed.

  I checked the bathroom. He didn’t even have a toothbrush. I came out and studied him again. A thick wedge of dark hair covered most of his long nose. His chin was scruffy with a beard, not the type that said metro, but the type that spelled unemployed. What do you do for a living, Trowbridge? I tried to imagine him wearing a Creemore Springs Brewery uniform like my dad’s and failed.

  The amulet was still probably around his neck.

  I inched to the bed, crinkling my nose as I got closer, because the nearer I got, the clearer it was that he’d sprayed the entire bottle of Febreeze in a circle around it. It pretty much obliterated his own natural scent, which was tangled up in the air freshener, and the other things leaching out of his pores—alcohol and some emotion that I couldn’t place. It wasn’t happiness and it wasn’t anger. Those two opposites I understood and remembered from childhood. It wasn’t fear either. I knew that smell. But the emotion scent was strong, and it tickled the back of my mind, as if I should remember it, but just couldn’t.

  Enough. His emotions weren’t my problem. I was bent over him thinking that the amulet was probably underneath all that swaddling cotton bunched up around his neck when Merry suddenly high-dived off her perch on my bodice to land with a plop on his pillow.

  I reached for her, but she pivoted like a scorpion, one stinging tendril poised. I shook my head, and tapped her chain with my finger, but she obstinately hooked herself into the cheap cotton pillowcase. She was going to get us killed.

  I let her go. Her chain dug into the back of my neck as she streaked over the thin pillow toward the folds of T-shirt bunched by his neck. She worked a piece of gold free from its coil around her setting. It thinned and stretched, until it was no wider than a pencil lead.

  Of the two of us, I was better at the sleight of hand because I was the only one who actually had two hands. “No,” I mouthed, with a small shake of my head. What was with her?

  She rolled the end into a hook and slid it smoothly under the crumpled cotton. I used a hand on the wall to steady myself, and concentrated on keeping my breath shallow and light as the material quivered under her examination. If Trowbridge sat up, he’d be discovering the ceiling was a lot lower than it had been when he went to bed. Providing he could remember going to bed.

  I don’t remember my father ever drinking. Or smoking.

  Merry backed out, empty-handed. Crap. I reached down to scoop her up, and as I did, my braid slid over my shoulder and fell onto his pillow. For a comatose drunk, he was pretty damn fast. Before I could stand up, his hand had snagged my hair. Sure, an ambulatory amulet lands on his pillow and he’s out cold. A woman’s braid comes within his reach and suddenly he’s Freddy the Wonder Dog snatching a Frisbee out of midair. There were a lot of painful things he could do with my braid. I was working on the short list when he did something unexpected. He sighed into his pillow and rolled his thumb over the bristled end. Eyes still closed, he played with it for a few seconds, until the corner of his mouth pulled into a weary smile. He shifted onto his side toward me.

  My hair fell from his lax grip. Straightening up, I held my breath and took a half step backward. I flinched as his hand reached out and surrounded my thigh. Panic started to flutter at my throat. Sleepily, he ran his palm up to the swell of my ass and then back down to the sensitive back of my knee in a gentle motion that probably was meant to be soothing, but wasn’t in the least. It was distracting and uncomfortable, particularly when the Were-bitch inside me raised her head from her sleep, and said, “Is that a Were, fondling my leg?”

  The bitch had been struggling to get out since puberty. She could keep on yipping until she was hoarse. I wasn’t letting her out. Ever. And not for him. He left me in a burning house.

  “Sorry,” he said. He dug his head into his pillow and sighed. “Sorry I was so late. Come back to bed.”

  His hand slid slowly up to my bottom to cup its curve. Stop touching me! He gave my butt an affectionate squeeze. Then to my relief, he yawned wide, and rolled flat onto his back, the bedsprings creaking in protest. His T-shirt didn’t roll with him, which judging by the scowl that turned his face from cover-boy pretty to something wolf-sharp and harsh, really pissed him off. Snoozing Beauty growled low in his throat—and they called me a mutt—then grabbed a handful of the offensive T-shirt and tore it in two. He tossed the shredded jersey onto the bed. I held my breath in my chest, scared to so much as twitch, but he simply cleared his throat, dug his head deeper into the thin pillow, and covered his eyes with his forearm. His neck was red from where he’d torn the T-shirt away, but his throat was bare.

  He wasn’t wearing the amulet.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said drowsily.

  What the hell had he done with the amulet? I was turning to reinspect the room when Merry squeezed my thumb. She pointed to his fist with one trembling leaf. Well, bless my Fae Stars. He wasn’t wearing the amulet. He was holding it tight in his palm, the chain wrapped around his knuckles. Merry scrambled for a handhold on my cotton sweatshirt as I leaned in to take a closer look.

  “Everything’s okay now,” he said.

  “Mmm-hhhm,” I murmured, eyeing the prize. My blood started humming in my veins.

  Trowbridge’s heel rasped on the rough cotton sheets as he straightened his leg. Then he exhaled through his nose, and I found myself suddenly fascinated by the way the hand resting on his flat belly rose and fell with each of his deep breaths. A little trail of dark hair ran south of the dip of his belly button, in a straight, come-on-it’s-this-way line that disappeared under the elastic waist of his underwear.

  Okay, he was a fine specimen of Were. Bodywise, anyhow.

  He hadn’t been burdened with the excessive hair that made some of my father’s kin look like extras for I Was a Teenage Werewolf. He had some fur between his two small nipples, but it was soft looking.

  Temptation bit. I tested it with my finger.

  It was soft. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  His hand left his taut belly, and slowly traveled northward. Over the edge of his rib cage. Up, past his heart. Up, to where my finger lightly teased his chest hair. He touched my finger with one of the two calloused ones left on his scarred hand, and then circled my whole hand with his. I forced myself to let my fingers lie there calmly in his palm.

  Warm. Rough. Large and gentle.

  “Come to bed,” he said, tugging on my fingers.

  “Soon.” I put a knee on the bed, and with that his eyelids flickered and began to lift. No! I yanked my hand free. His shredded T-shirt was by my knee, and then it wasn’t; it was in my hands, and then it was stretched over his eyes. I’d gone and blindfolded a Were. With a T-shirt. Now what?

  He reached for the T-shirt, but I blocked his hand with the first thing that was available. His palm slapped my forehead. I turned my head and pressed a kiss on his warm knuckle. “Let’s play,” I whispered, urging his head up.

  His face froze. And then the right corner of his mouth lifted. He gave a huff of laughter. “Cute.”

  “That’s me,” I said in that same toneless whisper as I tucked the tails under his head.

  His long arm came out and swept me down on top of him. Heart, brain, breath, muscles—all of my vital organs temporarily forgot their duties and I froze rabbit-sc
ared for one time-splintered second.

  No one had touched me for such a long time. No one had held me in forever.

  “Fun, but I’m tired,” he said drowsily, rubbing his bristly chin on the top of my head. “I’m so tired.”

  A blindfolded almost-naked man pulls me into his arms, and all he can think of is his fatigue? I was so going to die a virgin.

  But I wasn’t in Joan of Arc pain, was I? Trowbridge’s clutch was heated, because Weres are hot, that’s just a fact. Hot looking, fiery tempered, and bone-meltingly warm to the touch. Your own personal hot water bottle in winter. A little too steamy in the summer, but air-conditioning took care of that. Trowbridge’s embrace didn’t hurt. For the first time since I was a kid, someone was cuddling me and I wasn’t writhing in pain and breaking out in heat blisters. By a monumental oversight, Weres were exempt from the burn-her-flesh curse that some miserable sod of a Fae mage conceived to keep Fae travelers from mixing with mortals who had dangly bits.

  I wished I were naked, just to explore how much this cuddling didn’t hurt.

  My right leg was between his. My breasts were mashed against his chest. So this is what it was like to be pressed thigh and hip tight with a man. I felt deliciously small, and decidedly feminine. There was no give to his muscles, no softness to the flesh beneath the skin. Unless you’re talking that mound down there. Poor devil, he really was tired. Very softly I nudged his manhood with the inside of my leg.

  Down there approved. My eyebrows rose as his penis twitched against my leg. I gave it another coaxing rub, and it started to rise like the warning gate at a railroad crossing. Okay, I know—it’s politically incorrect and probably illegal to tease a comatose male, but I’d never experienced the thrill of sexual power before and I’m not ashamed to admit I liked it. Suddenly I knew exactly what sort of smile Eve had when she turned to Adam with an apple in her hand.

  I lifted my head to look at him.

  Trowbridge had two deep lines running vertically between his brows, visible over the strip of T-shirt blindfolding him. Merry squirmed impatiently in my grip. “Okay,” I mouthed to her and started to roll off Mr. Hard-body. His arm tightened around me.