Bargains and Betrayals (12 page)

“Who else can we turn to?” he asked, tilting his head to examine me in his canine way. “What other option do we have?”

“We will find another option.” I jabbed a finger at the door and pulled up every ounce of alpha I had in me. “I will not let my brother indebt himself to the mob.”

His nostrils flared and he raised his chin in defiance, but he left my room, slamming the door behind him.

“
Allo
, ladies,” I whispered, gathering the magazines up carefully and replacing them in the box underneath my bed: a box again starting to accumulate dust. As I closed them away once more in their cardboard tomb I realized, as beautiful as they were, they paled to nothing but aging paper beside Nadezhda.

Alexi

While I hurriedly researched options and contemplated the ulcer probably festering in my gut, Max had taken some initiative.

“Come on, beautiful,” Max coaxed from the door that opened into the Queen Anne foyer.

I looked up from the newspaper in a mix of curiosity and disgust. Watching Amy and Max together was a reminder I had the full legal right to get blind-drunk on cheap vodka and crawl into a dark corner in my own home. Full legal right and frequent motivation, the way they went at it.

I snapped the newspaper up to block my view of their flirting. And kissing. And inevitable pawing.

“CIA RECORDS SHOW EXPENDITURES DOWN—PUBLIC APPROVAL UP”

Expenditures down? How was that possible if they’d expanded operations with things like the bunker they’d built in Junction? Maybe Wanda was right.

What if …

“I don’t know why we had to go so far out of Junction just for me to run,” Amy complained. “I like the trail that goes out by the college.”

“Your ex knows that course. He used to run it,
da?
”

“Daaa. Yesss,” she hissed. “But that doesn’t mean he still does.” Her jacket rustled as she hung it up. “I want to be able to run in my hometown.”

“I want you to be able to run safely.”

“Jesus, Max! You’re making this into such a big deal. Yes. I dated Marvin. Yes. He hit me—”

Max hunched his shoulders, glowering at the thought.

“But I
know
that. I was there!” Her foot stomped against the rug. Not loud enough, she took a step and stomped it again on the bare hardwood.

I shook the paper again, a reminder I was still present. Even trying to read.

They ignored me, pressing on.

“I don’t know what you expect, but you need to stop dragging me farther and farther from town just to get my running in.” A telltale creak warned the basement door was opening. “And,” her voice lowered. “I have no frikkin’ clue why you felt the need to pee every couple hundred yards—”

I bit my lip, realizing why Max was dragging Amy out so far from our normal perimeter.

“But maybe you need to—
uhm
—get that checked. There may be something—
wrong
.”

I choked.

The door closed and she retreated down the stairs, alone.

Folding the newspaper, I glanced at Max. “When are you going to tell her the truth?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and widened his stance.

“You are going to tell her the truth.
Da?
”

He collapsed into a chair across the table from me. “I can’t find a trace of any others,” he confessed. “We’ve followed the main road out of Junction. I even took her to our old hunting grounds. There’s no scent. No sign.”

I forced myself to keep looking in his eyes. “We knew it was a very good possibility there’d be no more of us.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Of
you
,” I corrected. “With all the news coverage of the Phantom Wolves of Farthington I would have thought if others
wanted
to find you … maybe none want to find you because that equates to
them
being found.”

“We need backup. We can’t do this alone.”

“You think I don’t know this?”

“What other options do we have?”

My brow wrinkled. “None I want to consider.” I had been thinking a lot about options, wild possibilities, and dramatic failures resulting in multiple deaths. The one option I still toyed with in the darkest hours of early morning was the one I was least willing to utilize. Numerically it was plausible. But to win with the numbers meant losing something irreplaceable.

Mother would never agree if she knew.

“No connections spring to mind.…”

He was testing me.

“What would you have me say? Who would you see me sacrifice?” My thumb smudged the newsprint. “I am no longer worthy—you understand? They don’t want
me
.” I raised my eyes to his again, heart hammering as we locked gazes. “And you,
dear brother
, are not known to be the self-sacrificing type.”

The silence between us hung thick as the mist that cloaked Junction’s hills each late autumn morning.

Max looked away.

I took a breath, not realizing I’d been holding it. “You understand. There is no answer to give.”

His brow lowered, giving his features a brutal edge.

“She thinks something’s wrong with you.”

“And you did me a great service by not agreeing.”

“What are brothers for?”

He snorted.

“We are brothers, Max.”

He stood. “You can change your”—he wrinkled his nose— “your cologne. Now that we all know, the imitation of our natural scent only annoys me.”

“I like the scent. It reminds me of our parents.”

“None of it’s yours to like.” He turned and left, stomping up the stairs as angrily as Amy had stomped down the others.

It was as our people said:
It takes two boots to make a pair
. And they were quite a match.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jessie

Pietr didn’t visit that night. As glad as I was that he was safe, I missed seeing him. So as soon as I could stretch and yawn enough to seem convincing, I curled up with my back to the camera and, shimmying the cell phone out from under my pillow, turned it on.

With no charger, I felt a glimmer of what Pietr must have felt regularly. Time was short. I had to make each moment count.

Pietr,
I texted.
I <3 u. Miss u. Don’t come here. But know I’ll dream of u.

I turned off the cell and flipped it shut, slipping it back beneath my pillow and curling into a ball, ordering sleep to give me dreams of Pietr.

Jessie

The forest was dark, cold, strangling in the grasp of an unseasonably cold autumn unwilling to commit to winter’s snowy and muffling blanket. I stumbled forward, heading for the few creaking swings that spun off the old park’s swingset’s belly, twisting and squealing in the wind.

I grabbed a swing and sat; the seat creaked beneath me. I waited. My heart pounded in my chest, recognizing the fact but unable to define what I waited for in words that could drift to my brain, carried by my pulsing blood.

Something skimmed the shadows, something dark and grim and beautiful, ghosting along and teasing the dappled moonlight as it stayed just beyond reach—just beyond the brush of starlight’s subtle fingers.

“Pietr,” I breathed, something deeper than physical recognition pushing his name from my lips as it pushed my heart into my thickening throat.

And then he was before me, lean and lovely, cloaked in night’s skittering shadow. At once too beautiful and wild for moonlight to dare touch him and yet so proud and powerful, how could even cool moonlight resist? Before me, his image stuttered; one moment wolf, the next moment not—his spirit equally both and none at the same time.

I stood, releasing the swing’s chains, my hands numb from where my fingers had pressed the links so deep they’d engraved my palms.

Behind me the swings screamed, metal grating and howling as chains twisted in the same breeze that tugged my hair out around my face, teasing my vision with Pietr’s image and then nothing. I wrenched the hair back from my eyes, hunting and hungry for another glimpse of him.

He filled my vision and I gasped at his nearness, heat washing across me, radiating off his smooth skin. The frigid sting of fall was forgotten, winter but a weakly whispered rumor as Pietr wrapped me in his arms and crushed his hungry lips to mine.

Jessie

The morning shuffle to breakfast was agonizing. My head throbbed and my mind raced. I cheeked my pills, got jabbed for blood, and my stomach rebelled when faced with what passed for food. I pushed it around my tray, building strange shapes with it.

“So. Jeremy. Fred,” I addressed the silent hulks. “Fred. Jeremy.” I switched the faces the names corresponded with. Not so much as a blink of reaction. Did names matter to zombies? They were like—undead, right?

Maybe living impaired? Life-abled? There was bound to be a politically correct, self-affirming term for every brand of strange thing prowling Junction.

The fact I wondered made me even more certain I needed to get out of Pecan Place. Fast.

But who else was there to talk to—uh—talk
at
?

“Are you happy? I mean, seriously happy? When you look at your life—erm—your
existence
—do you say—yep. This is where I want to be right now? Because, honestly, this”—I waved the bastardization of a spoon and a fork around to symbolize encompassing the entire facility—“was not a stop I’d scheduled on the agenda of my life.”

“You neither, huh?” A tray clinked down on the table.

Fred and Jeremy bristled a moment, then relaxed. The same guy I’d seen watching me stood just across the table from me. “May I?” he asked, motioning to the seat.

“Yeah. Whatever. I’m almost done.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “I was hoping to talk.” He looked around the room, eyes pausing on the gradually increasing number of people who sat, either tranq-ed up or restrained, aides spooning almost the same amount of food in that spilled out of their slack-jawed mouths. “You seem most likely to be capable of holding up your end of a conversation.”

I blinked at him.

“I’m Christian.”

“Congratulations. I’m Undecided.”

He chuckled. “My
name’s
Christian.”

“Ah. I wondered why you were announcing yourself according to religious affiliation but here”—I glanced around the room meaningfully—“you never know exactly
what
people think’s most important.”

His smile widened into a grin. He appeared nearly sane.

Appeared
. Appearances weren’t everything … and I still got that vibe that something just wasn’t quite right with him.

Go figure. It was like I was in an asylum or something. So should I adjust my standards based on location? I paused, listening to the warning buzzing in the back of my head.

“I’d say nice to meet you,” I concluded, “but I’d prefer to reserve judgment on that until the statement seems justifiable. Jessica.”

“Charming,” he said with obvious sarcasm. “But very logical considering location and circumstances. I’ll bridge the gap and give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s nice to meet you, Jessica. I’ll even go so far as saying I hope to see you later today.”

“That’s only because I don’t drool on myself. Normally.”

He shrugged. “We all adjust our standards here.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. No. Not me. Adjusting my standards felt like letting my guard down.

“Let’s go, boys,” I said to Fred and Jeremy and we headed down the hall so I could start laundry detail.

Jessie

Back in Dr. Jones’s first-floor office—I had to presume she had something similar in the basement, too—I was bored with the same line of questions every session. More than some therapeutic retreat, Pecan Place felt like a holding tank of some sort.

“How are you doing today, Jessica?”

I stuck with our plan, behaving and waiting on Dad’s lawyer. “Pretty well. I’ve been trying to think things out better. To have more faith that what people are trying to do is in my best interest.”

Dr. Jones nodded.

“I’ve been journaling. Since there’s nothing to read,” I hinted, thinking about the fact she still had the book Pietr had intended for me,
Bisclavret
.

She scribbled down a note.

“You’ve been quite prolific with your writing.” She pulled something out of her drawer. “Jeremy and Fred brought this from your room.”

My journal. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Did you read it?”

“Of course.” She paused, looking up from my journal to stare straight into my eyes. “You don’t like me.”

I paused. “If you actually believed my writing you’d figure I don’t like many people.”

“Except Pietr.”

Oh. God. Every bit of my exposed skin turned sunburn red. I’d been very—liberal—colorful—
passionate
—about expressing my feelings for Pietr. “I love Pietr,” I said, justifying my writing with the blanket admittal.

“Are you missing mental stimulation here?”

“Yes. And my family. And friends.”

She slid the journal out of her way and flipped a page on the clipboard. “Fred and Jeremy also reported that you spoke to one of our newest clients: young Mr. Christian Masterson. What are your impressions of him?”

“Why? Are you looking for a new diagnosis?”

“Sometimes clients who aren’t a good mix will mix, anyway. It’s best if we identify potential problems immediately.”

“I don’t foresee us mixing.”

One of her perfectly sculpted eyebrows rose. “Hmm. Here’s the book the boy left for you. And your journal. I want you to write about your feelings regarding the death of your mother for a few entries. Since
that
is our focus here.”

“Fine,” I said, taking
Bisclavret
and the journal and heading for the door.

“And Jessica, if you do well these next few days, I’ll arrange for you to have a more private room.”

“Without a camera?”

“Yes, Jessica. Camera-free.”

Jessie

That evening I sat on my bed, closed my eyes, and visualized shooting, rolling Wanda’s weapon advice around in my head. I would be out of here soon. And we’d put the plan to free Pietr’s mother into action. Whatever the plan was now. I needed to be ready to help the people I loved.