The Trouble with Fate (16 page)

Four stop signs and one light later, I tested my mouth. “Trowbridge?”

“Shut up,” he replied.

Take the man out of the Were and what have you got? Were. I closed my eyes and let
the darkness come.

Chapter Eight

The sun is shining on the water. Lou watches the same man, but this time, she’s closer
so that bud-swollen branches frame him. His hands are on his hips. His back is turned,
as always.

But then the memory sequence changes. The fish doesn’t leap out of the pool. The wind
doesn’t ruffle his hair. He twists around, glancing at her over his shoulder; his
smile is full and satisfied.

Her lover looks at her and she
knew
. All the light went out, the picture fading dark around the gleam of his feral smile.

*   *   *

“Wake up, kid,” I heard from far away. Deep voice. Harsh and butter-soft to my ears
all at the same time. Black claws were reaching for me. I could smell the copper-rich
scent of his blood.

I attack. “You stupid Were-bastard, you left me! You could have saved me!”

“You ungrateful brat! What do you mean I could have saved you? I
did
save you.” He ducked a flailing fist. “Keep it up, and I’ll glue you to your seat,”
he said. “And stop calling me a stupid Were.”

He waited for me to explode again, and when I didn’t, he used his two fingers on my
forehead to ease me back into my seat. “You are one crazy-ass Tinker Bell,” he said,
returning his attention to the road.

I barely heard him because I had made another discovery.
Oh Sweet Stars, I’m blind.

Everything was blurry and dark—except him. His outline had a yellow-white halo that
made him stand out in a world that looked mostly gray. I looked about, disbelief churning
in my gut. Everything was horribly out of focus. The buttons on my shirt. My hands
on my lap. The view through the windshield was worse; everything outside was an indistinct
smear of black and gray shadows.

I can’t be blind. I can’t be a half-Fae/half-Were, blind, homeless person.

“I should have left you to those Weres, just like you left me.” I turned on him again,
and got in a few good clubbing blows to his body—he woofed out some air once—before
he brought the assault to an end by catching my wrists.

“Are you nuts?”

His touch felt pulse-hot on my skin. I wanted his throat, but settled for his shoulder.
I leaned in and bit him.

“Son of a bitch,” he howled. Undeterred, I bore down with the single-minded intensity
of a pit bull coming off a long veggie kibble diet. The car went into a sideways skid
as he grabbed my braid to haul me off. I heard the brief
rah-rah-rah-rah
noise as the Taurus tires bumped over the breakdown lane’s skid-resistant grooves,
and then the car dipped sharply to my side, and he let go to steer. The wheels caught
hold on the soft gravel shoulder, and rolled to a stop.

I struggled with the lock, shoved the door open and tumbled out before the wheels
had stopped turning. There was no firm footing, just a broken cable barrier, and past
that a whole bunch of down. The ground gave way under my feet, and I found myself
rolling down a sharp incline, picking up bruises and twigs as I flattened shrubbery,
flew over a log, and finally came to rest, stomach down in the sludge of one of the
town’s protected heritage wetlands.

For a moment it was enough just to breathe. The door slammed. I heard him walk across
the pavement, his boot heels clicking on the asphalt, and then heard the soft scuff
of the gravel as he came to the lip of the ravine. There was a long pause. “Anything
broken?”

It was tempting to pretend that I was dead, but you can’t play possum with a wolf,
and just the sound of his deep voice was enough to make my stomach roil. Nothing was
broken, but my eyes were burning as if someone had splashed hot pepper juice in them.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my watering lids.

“You going to sit there all night?” he asked.

“Go away.” Somewhere, I had lost a shoe.

Where were my glasses? Hanging off one ear. I ripped them off, and concentrated on
slowing down my breathing while I knuckled sludge off my cheek. Blinking didn’t do
much for the burning sensation in my eyes, but it made the world look clearer. I felt
for the tail of my shirt to clean my glasses. It was wet. Ditto the other tail. After
a brief search, I found a clean spot on my sleeve that would do. Once done, I held
my glasses up to the night sky, and instead of a blob of goo on one lens, I had made
a smear of pond slime on both. I hooked my glasses through Merry’s chain.

Trowbridge’s voice was damnably cool. “I’m not going anywhere until I get my amulet
and some answers.”

“Come down and try to get them, you stupid Were.”

“I’m on my last pair of clean jeans, so I’ll wait for you here.” He moved and a pebble
of gravel bounced down the hill. “Besides, there’s nowhere for you to go but up, Tinker
Bell.”

My vision surged in and out, which felt kind of nauseating. But he was right. There
was
nowhere to go but up. I was at the bottom of a soup bowl of wetland. All around me
was hillside. A thick wedge of bulrushes was behind me, and beyond them, a sharp hill
covered by an impossible tangle of wannabe trees. The only feasible place to start
climbing my way out was four or five yards to the right of where he was standing.
I chose the other way, the one through the dense thicket of bulrushes.

Point of fact: bulrushes don’t yield. They sway to the wind, but they don’t bend to
the two-footed. One stiff broken end left a bleeding gouge on my cheek, before another’s
thick ball root caught my toe and tripped me.

“Hurry up, kid,” he said. “We haven’t put enough distance between us and the bad guys.”

“I’m going to kill you when I get to the top,” I promised.

“Well, there’s something for you to work toward.”

The top of the ravine was about three times my height. Not too much of a climb, but
the mud-slick slope was steep, and covered in rough growth.

He’d stopped the car right on the edge, and I could make out the long, dark rectangle
of the Taurus. Trowbridge was the candlelit ghost figure turning to open the passenger
door. A burst of light illuminated the inside of the car as the overhead light kicked
in. He sat down sideways, facing me, as the open-door alarm started to ping.

“When I woke up and found you in my bed, you had me stumped for a minute.” Trowbridge
lifted a foot and jammed it in the door spring. Immediately, the annoying pinging
stopped. He slouched in the passenger chair, one leg stretched out toward me, and
the other bent at the knee. “Were you a thief who likes to steal amulets? If so, who
hired you? You knew about Weres, but weren’t one. You wore a Fae amulet, but the last
of them died a decade ago. My next guess was witch, but once I got that hoodie off
you, I realized you don’t have much in the way of a personal scent—”

I don’t have any.

“I should have picked up on that before, but I was distracted by the lap dance, the
puking, and the bunch of Weres on my tail.”

“And you were drunk,” I reminded him, jamming my knee in a hollow between a root and
a flat rock. I tightened my grip on a root, and heaved myself upward.

“Detail.” He paused and then continued. “You pick up aromas that you’ve been around,
but it’s all surface stuff. Underneath that, you’re virtually scentless. You have
the softest, whitest skin I’ve ever touched. It actually gives off a little
brr
of magic when you stroke it. So, you have to be a fairy.” He stretched a glowing
hand outside the car. “Is it starting to rain? Yeah, I think it is. I kept going back
to the fact that you know about Weres and you’re still walking and talking, so I ran
my hand over your throat again. You’re not full blood, but I can feel your Were answering—”

“You can feel the Were inside me?” I asked, horrified.

“Which makes you a half blood that no one has got around to killing. Considering your
personality, that’s this side of a miracle.”

He can feel
her
underneath my skin. Oh, someone just shoot me.

“You’re about the right age. What are you, seventeen? And there’s your build. You’re
small and…” He consulted his brain for a suitable word. “Curvy. A short, chubby kid
could grow up to look like you. I lifted your eyelids at a stoplight. You’ve got exceptionally
light green eyes—”

“It’s too dark to see the color of my eyes.”

“Were vision.” He pointed to his own baby-blues. “And then I knew. The last time I
saw eyes like that, they were staring at me from the face of this little blond-haired
kid who was crushing on me. Every time I looked up, there she was, staring right at
me. Spooky little kid.”

“Why don’t you just f—”

“That is when I knew you were one of the Stronghold twins. Hilda? Helga? Hermione?”

I craned my head to glare up at him. He was sitting in Bob’s passenger seat, his dark
hair shimmering with its bright white halo, his head bent as he buttoned up his shirt.
I’d always thought the big reveal would be my personal apocalypse. Instead, he was
up there, fussing with his shirt, and I was down here, too far away to give his jaw
a good jab.

“So, Helga, when did they open the portal again?”

“No one opened any portal, you smug bastard. I’ve been right here, living in Deerfield
for most of the last ten years. Didn’t you ever wonder, just once, what happened to
Benjamin Stronghold’s kids?”

“I didn’t have to. I knew exactly where they were—I saw the Fae carry you through
the portal with my own two eyes. So you want to cut the crap and tell me exactly why
they sent you over here? What do the Fae want?”

He’d thought we were already on the other side. He hadn’t realized I was locked in
the cupboard.
The world swam for a bit. I hugged the trunk of a scraggly cedar, and rested my stinging
eyes on my arm. All this time, I’d pinned the blame on him. Every time I’d seen kids
waiting for a school bus, and known I had to stay in the apartment, I’d held him responsible.
It was his fault. If he’d rescued me from the fire, my life would have been different.
I don’t know why I thought it would have, but I did.

I’d kept the memory of his betrayal festering, feeding it teaspoons of loneliness,
mouthfuls of bitterness, and tidbits of self-pity every time the red-hurt began to
flag, all because I was so unwilling to let that old grief die. Why? Brooding about
the past wouldn’t change it. Why couldn’t I let it—no,
him
—go?

I gazed upward at him and saw the bright glow of him—the halo of light that deceived
my eyes, and knew the truth. If I hated him and held him accountable for every piece
of misery in my life, I could dwell on him. Keep the memory of him, beautiful and
ten fingered, alive in my mind. Fantasize about the moment when we’d meet again. Why
would I dream of even considering forgiving him? Resenting him was better than the
fear of emptiness that would follow once I made peace with my losses.

“You still down there?” he asked.

I worked to keep my voice level. “You saw the portal?”

“It was hanging over the pond. Glowing lights. Pink fog. Smelled like flowers.”

“Freesias.”

“Like I said, flowers.” He ran a thumb over the bristles on his chin, irritated. “I
saw them carry you across, and then it closed. There was this god-awful sound as it
did, like a—”

He
really
had been there. There had been a noise as the gates sealed—a horrifying wall of sound;
terrible and frightening. It had been loud enough to be heard over the crackle of
the fire eating its way through our kitchen. I’d feared the world was ending, had
worried for Lexi … “You saw my brother! Was Lexi okay?”

Trowbridge said slowly, “Lexi?”

“You didn’t see the Fae carry me through the Gates of Merenwyn, you saw my twin, Lexi…”
Just saying Lexi’s name out loud caused my throat to thicken. “We used to joke he’d
sleep through the end of the world. He was asleep when the Fae broke in; he didn’t
have time to get to our hiding spot.” A lie. There had been time—if his sister had
gone and got him when her mother told her to. Goddess, was I even lying to myself
now? In my mind’s eye I saw my brother as he’d been that night, sweat-faced and defiant.
“He didn’t go easily—he fought back. I could hear the scuffles … him cursing them
out. They dragged him into the kitchen and then…” Lexi had seen me hiding in the cupboard;
I know he had. But he’d turned his head, and looked away, so they wouldn’t know I
was in our hidey-hole. “The Fae carried him out of our house, and I haven’t seen him
since.” So inadequate. Such a terrible postscript to the worst night of my life.

I swallowed. “Did he look okay to you? Was he hurt?”

“I don’t know whether he was hurt or not, all I could see really was the top of his
blond head. One of the Fae had him wrapped up in a blanket. He was conscious though,
judging by all the squirming.” Trowbridge squinted and cocked his head to one side,
obviously replaying the scene in his mind. “He was so little. I thought he was you.”

“He was twelve.” And small for his age.

“Well, you Fae are pretty small.”

The words slipped out, unbidden. “You could have saved him.”

“You’ve got this fixation about me saving people,” he said. “There were five of them.
All armed. Besides, I was hunting something else.” He brooded for a bit, while I paused
to stretch my sore calf muscle. “So you’ve been here all this time. The Fae didn’t
reopen the gates to Merenwyn?”

“No.”

He lifted his nose and took in a long deep breath.

“You’re trying to scent a lie, aren’t you, Trowbridge? It doesn’t matter if you’re
standing on two feet, you Weres really are nothing more than—”

“Ah, ah, ah.” He shook his head reprovingly. “Don’t say something you’ll regret.”