The Trouble with Fate (10 page)

Lou’s version of child-rearing. I never reached out to her so intimately again.

Last summer, I’d been chewing on a peanut butter sandwich while watching a cop show.
And out of nowhere, I got that feeling—like a nudge, but on the inside. Then I’d seen
a thought-picture of a garden, clear as crystal in my mind. I’d never seen a garden
like that, with so many intense shades of green. And the flowers—nodding, trumpet-shaped
bells in shades of blue never witnessed in this realm.

Merenwyn.

At first I believed Lexi had found a way of contacting me. There are no words for
the feelings I had. It was a cocktail of joy and happiness and relief and eagerness,
swallowed down on an empty stomach. Rollicking glee lasted a night, maybe a day, before
it fizzled out, and was replaced by a bitter sadness that made me want to weep. I
spent an anxious month, replaying the picture in my mind, searching for clues about
how to open the door from here to there. He wouldn’t just send me any picture, would
he? There had to be something important about that garden. And then one day, I got
a deluge of thought-pictures, flickering and stuttering in my mind like one of those
silent movies. A hand fumbled with the cupboard door in our kitchen and pulled out
a can of maple syrup.

I walked into our kitchen. Lou turned and looked at me, confused. “I can’t remember
how to open this,” she said, turning the tin over in her hand.

As her mind softened, so did the grip on her thoughts. At first it was unpleasant,
like reading someone’s diary and understanding for the first time that you only knew
them on the surface. Sometimes, there were tantalizing glimpses of the Fae world,
dredged up from her memory, but most of the thought-pictures were increasingly depressing
distortions of the world we lived in now. She brooded a lot about the Werewolves.

“Lou,” I said experimentally, trying to search for her in my own mind. “You there?”
The Taurus ticked over. I heard a small animal burrow under the leaf mulch. I counted
silently in my head all the way up to twenty-six Mississippis. Nothing. Merry curled
a tendril through my buttonhole, and pulled herself high onto my shoulder.

“I can’t feel her, Merry. She’s not around anywhere close.”

I wished I were home, making Kraft dinner while Lou wandered the apartment sucking
on a spoonful of maple syrup. I flipped down the visor. The face staring back from
the mirror was too round, too pale. In the darkness, my light green eyes seemed to
flicker. In terms of beauty, they were the only thing I got from Mum. Her eyes had
been light like mine, almost translucent, embellished by tiny specks of yellow and
blue, and a deep outer rim of soft green. But her eyes hadn’t flickered. She’d had
control over it. Averting my gaze, I pulled my hair out of its ponytail, and braided
it, not looking at myself again until I fastened the end with the rubber band. I slipped
on my glasses and flipped the visor back up.

They say when you’re in a skid you should look in the direction you want to go. My
life had hit the mother of all skids. I went looking for a curly-haired Were.

Chapter Five

I knew where to go. I’d done a lot of walking in this town. Some of it because I had
to, some of it because there are only so many romance novels you can read, and so
many hours of television you can endure, before you need to see real people, even
if they’re not
your
people. Watching them go about their daily lives makes you feel normal.

Which is how I knew what corner in our town has three different fragrances: car wash,
Laundromat, and Burger King—the same scent signatures I’d noticed on Trowbridge’s
van.

The Easy Court Motel sat in the epicenter of all three aromas. It was flat, and long,
and mostly brown, with a parking lot poorly hidden by a patchy growth of low bushes.
The front office was lit, and an
OPEN
sign reassured all those with an itch that needed immediate scratching that the Easy
Court Motel was ready for business.

Trowbridge’s red van was parked in front of the unit closest to the manager’s office.

The last time I’d spied on Trowbridge, it had been from the safety of the woods that
bordered our home. I’d been twelve, and he’d been a guitar-playing eighteen-year-old,
celebrating the last exam he’d ever have to take with his friends and a few bottles
of cheap pink wine.

Mum had found me before my brief stint as a voyeur became educational. She’d pulled
me back home, her long soft fingers hard on my arm, and then I’d had an argument with
Lexi that had dragged on and off for two days. We fought a lot that last spring, my
twin and I.

I drove slowly past the motel’s entrance, eyeing the parking lot. I couldn’t see any
Weres but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. To be on the safe side, I drove past
the motel, and pulled into the adjacent strip mall. The fluorescent light from the
interior of the twenty-four-hour Laundromat shone through its plate-glass windows,
spilling a weak circle of light onto the two cars parked in front of it. I went farther
down the lot, until I found a dark place to park, and reversed into it.

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.