The Trouble with Fate (30 page)

The color of the mesh changes from uniform to mottled as the grid sweats pinpoints
of shiny liquid silver. Her hands quiver as the mesh becomes slick with a top coat
of the precious metal. It’s hers, now ready for the taking.

One dot of wet silver begins rolling toward her fingers, pulled by the magnetism of
her call. Drips turn to rivulets. The silver rolls in a thin molten river, following
the path laid by the trail of her fingers. Down the smooth surface of the metal door.
A leap in space, before landing with a wet splat on the floor into a pool accumulating
by her small feet.

Stupid, ignorant Were fools.

They had put a Collector in a room fortified with silver—debilitating to Weres, but
utterly harmless to the Fae.

Can she hear me? As I hear and feel her? I can’t just be a spectator to her dreams
anymore, they were too dangerous to me. I call to her.
“Where are you, Lou?”

She raises her eyes, and considers the mesh-covered ceiling.

“Soon,” I hear in my head. “Wait.”

*   *   *

Even in my sleep, I was so tired I could barely move. That struck me as funny in a
sad way, though I couldn’t figure out why. Another wave of lethargy swept over me,
and my dreams twisted from Lou’s to my own. I was no longer standing beside her in
that prison. Instead, I was on a raft, drifting down a stream, sloth happy in my nakedness.
The sun was warm on my skin. I could feel it right over my breastbone, lulling me
into a deeper sleep.

Then a flicker of irritation intruded. Something was jiggling my raft. I was no longer
drifting, I was being bounced. There was an annoying babble in the background. And
the sound of water. Falls? Were we going over the falls? I turned my head from it
all and tried to find a way back to that warm peace of indifference, but the stupid
raft kept bouncing and shaking, and the annoying dribble of words was getting louder
and louder.

Words sharpened. Turned into sentences and opinions.

“Darling, I’ve heard of difficult women, but really, gloves?”

“Get the water ready.”

My Were-bitch was with me on the raft. She was whining because she didn’t like the
rough water. I could feel my jaw opening to echo her cry, but all that came out was
a low broken mewl.

“Okay, on the count of three. One.”

Heat was on my breast. Almost too hot. Just in one spot. Right over my heart. Hot.
I twisted my head, and felt the burning around my neck. I was going to drown going
over the falls. I was too tired to swim.

“Two.”

So hot. Burning.

“Three.”

*   *   *

“The thing’s dangerous,” said Trowbridge.

Water was dripping off my chin. “Give Merry back right now, or I’ll hex you and you’ll
never turn into a wolf again.”

“Stronghold, I know when you’re lying.”

He was holding Merry by her chain with one pink rubber-gloved hand. Cordelia’s arms
were crossed, but the dripping pail she’d used to douse me was right beside her on
the dining room table. “The thing is dangerous,” he repeated. “I shouldn’t have to
use a pail of water to wake my lover.”

“Merry is not an ‘it.’” I was wet, naked, and furious. And kind of shaky on my feet.
“Your amulet may be an ‘it,’ but not Merry. She’s a soul, Trowbridge. She’s a thinking,
feeling being. She needs to be around my neck. Without me, she’ll fade and die. I
haven’t given her a real meal in twenty-four hours, and she’s done a lot of healing
over the last day. She’s worn herself down trying to revive your amulet.” I yanked
the blanket off the floor, and wrapped it around myself. “Take a hard look at that
thing she’s clinging to. You starved it to death. That’s what happens if you don’t
feed a Fae Asrai.”

Merry had thrown caution aside. Resolutely hanging on to her corpse-friend, she kept
throwing charges up the chain, while she tried to haul both of them up the chain to
get near Trowbridge’s fingers.

“You let this thing feed off you?” His eyebrows arched in disbelief. “Like a freaking
parasite?”

“Don’t call her that.” My eyes were starting to flare.

“
My
amulet—”

“Stolen Fae amulet.”

“My former pendant,” he continued, “never did anything except hang around my neck.”
He gave her chain a violent shake, and Merry fell back down to its end. She extended
two thin strips of herself and latched onto her chain again and started, once more,
painfully, to pull herself up, but the other amulet’s weight seemed to be draining
her. “It’s like a freakin’ bug. It was over your heart. It was throwing colors and
I swear it was throbbing. You were whimpering in your sleep.”

“Merry doesn’t feed off me. She’s never fed off me. Fae Stars, she’s a vegetarian.”
I stopped as his eyebrows rose at my lie. “Okay, she needs and prefers the taste of
plants and trees, but she can borrow from me in a pinch. It’s only happened twice
before. Both times, only because it was too difficult to get to a food source, and
I offered. And she only did it because I insisted. I
offered
, Trowbridge. She’d never feed off me in my sleep.”

“She did this time.” Blue-white lights were beginning to spin slowly around his pupils.
“You wouldn’t wake up no matter what I said or did. It was like you were drugged.
Your breathing slowed until your chest was barely moving. We had to douse you with
a pail of water to wake you up. Look at you now, for God’s sake. You can’t even stand
straight. You’ve got one hand on your blanket and the other holding on to the wall.
All I’d have to do is blow, and you’d fall down.”

Just to prove how wrong he was about my general wobbliness, I removed my hand from
the drywall, and reached out for Merry. “Give her to me, Trowbridge. For heaven’s
sake, you don’t need a pair of gloves.”

“You didn’t see it when it was feeding on you,” he said. He shook her down again and
put her into a white pillowcase. “You have a hammer?”

“In the kitchen, bottom drawer,” said Cordelia. Her gold earrings brushed her shoulder
as she tilted her head toward the doorway behind her.

“Don’t do this, Trowbridge.” I followed, tripping on the blanket.

Trowbridge was “au natural” except for the pink rubber glove on his right hand. Cordelia’s
head swiveled to watch his ass as he stalked into the kitchen. I pushed past her.
He was crouching by the drawer, rummaging beneath the Tupperware.

“What are you doing? You know you can’t break Fae gold.” He shot me a thunderous glance.
“I need you to calm down. She wasn’t going to truly hurt me, she—” I ducked as a plastic
container went flying past my shoulder. “Trowbridge, stop.” I touched his shoulder,
hoping to calm him, but contact seemed to make it suddenly worse. He shot to his feet,
holding the hammer in a murderous grip. My words dried up, and without thinking, I
took a step backward.

He laid the writhing bundle on the black granite counter.

“Four dollars a linear foot, I don’t think so,” said Cordelia, pulling out a chopping
board.

He was
not
going to pulverize my amulet in front of me. I ducked under Bridge’s arm, and covered
Merry with both my hands. “She’s been my friend for a long time.” My voice was steel.
“I’ll protect her against even you.”

The hammer was poised high.

“The only way you can kill her is to starve her,” I continued, speaking slowly. “And
if you do that, you’ll not only kill her soul, but you’ll do something to mine.” In
the shelter of his arm, I could feel the heat of him. Merry tried to curl a finger
of gold around my thumb through the cotton pillowcase.

He breathed hard over my head. “It was
feeding
off you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the glove, the bubble-gum pink stretched
to soft rose where it pulled over his knuckles. The pinkie and the ring finger of
the glove stood out empty.

“She is important to me. A friend when I had none.” I looked up at him. Jaw, stubble,
tight mouth, and a cheek muscle that kept flexing. A quick dip of his chin, and a
flash of blue as he returned my gaze. I could feel my own eyes burn, and knew that
they had begun to glow. I kept my gaze even, neither demanding nor yielding.

I waited, holding my breath until my chest felt tight.

Some of the wildness went out of his eyes. He lowered the hammer slowly, but even
so, with his Were strength it landed with crack. A tiny piece of silica chipped up
and landed back down askew on the resulting divot.

“You bloody girl, see what you’ve done,” said Cordelia, sounding a lot like Carl.

I let out my breath slowly through my nose. I could feel his warm chest against my
arm.

“I’ll fix it, Cordelia,” he said.

“Yes, you bloody well better,” Cordelia said. “You might want to rethink your girlfriend
material. This one’s the plague.” She turned on her heel and left us alone. A few
seconds later a door was pulled closed. Obviously it hadn’t made enough noise, because
it was opened and pulled closed harder the second time.

Alone and naked again.

Trowbridge rubbed a finger into the gouge on the counter. He’d had a Coke; I could
smell it, and us, mixed together, on both our skins. “Why can’t you give up on this
stuff?” he said in a low voice. “Destroy the amulets. Let your aunt go. You’re as
much Were as Fae.”

“I need to see Lou one last time.”

“Doing that will get you killed. For what? She’s going to die anyhow. You’ve got to
harden up, Stronghold. Cut your ties.”

“How do you live like that?”

“You just do.” He took the granite chip I’d been using to finger-skate over the counter,
and put it back into the divot. “You can’t stop people from dying. The only thing
you can do is fight to stay alive.”

“What if she’s innocent?”

“Let the Weres decide for you.”

“No,” I said sharply. “I’ll decide for myself.”

He stepped back from me and went to lean against the kitchen doorway, to study me
with a set expression.

I put my hand up when he opened his mouth to speak. “Lou didn’t have to come for me.
She didn’t have to feed me or keep me safe all these years. For that, I owe her. It
would be wrong to let her die alone and frightened. I don’t want to live with the
guilt of that. I don’t think I can.”

“Sure you can,” he said in a hard voice.

Oh shit.

I might as well have asked him point-blank how he could bear to live after his mate
had died. He read my mind, and gave me a smile that wasn’t one, before slipping away.

Merry started winding around my finger the moment he cleared our space. “Let go, Merry,
so I can get you out of the bag.” I opened the pillowcase to peer inside. Her stone
was dull; the residue of her fear had left a faint brown streak in the middle. “You
need food.”

The sun was rising. I rubbed a hand over my eyes as I came out of the kitchen, Merry
and her pal curled in the palm of my hand.

Trowbridge was leaning against the dining room table, gazing out the window.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to say—”

“You need to feed that thing now?” He pushed himself away from the table with a slow
flex of his hips. “You want a plant or a tree? Take your pick.” I followed the direction
of his eyes. Cordelia had a green thumb. There was a bowfront window area, beyond
the curved back of the upholstered dining room chair. In it was her garden: a lot
of potted plants in all the same stone bisque-colored containers, two shrubs that
flirted with the idea of being trees, and three potted orchids on a small table positioned
out of direct light.

“Won’t she mind?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Most of them were presents from me. I’ll buy her new ones tomorrow.”

I laid Merry down on the top of the orchid’s roots, and then stood, in my blanket,
with my arms wrapped around myself as the pink-shell sky tried to turn blue. “Don’t
you ever get cold?” I asked him.

“Were blood.” He raked both hands through his hair, his thumbs curling to tuck a heavy
wedge behind each ear. “We’re always warm.”

My mouth had gone dry. “And naked, mostly.”

“That too.” He went into the kitchen. The tap ran, and he returned with two glasses
filled with water. “But this time, I have an excuse. I have no clothing left.” He
passed me a glass. “Cordelia is going to get us some this morning.”

“She won’t be in a hurry to do that. I think she’s enjoying watching you walk around
buck naked.” I chugged down the water. “How do you know her?”

“There are a lot of Weres out there who couldn’t fit in. Things were hard for Cordelia.
My dad found her a safe place while she healed. I always liked her. She was so different
from everything in Creemore. I always admired the way she wouldn’t bend, you know?
Though she was too smart to put on a dress when she was around the pack, she found
subtler ways to flaunt her femininity. She didn’t just grow her hair; she styled it …
she’d come to a meeting in a peach-colored shirt, and a sweater only a girl would
choose.” His lips curved into a bittersweet smile. “I think she probably always understood
how it was going to go down, and yet, she wouldn’t change for anybody. She knew who
she was. In her head, she was always Cordelia. I kept in touch, and when I was in
need, she answered. She helped me get back on my feet. We’re business partners now.
And friends. She knows that I spark sometimes,” he said, pointing to his eyes.

“Then why wouldn’t you let her see them flare last night?”

“I don’t know. I only felt right with you being there.” He rubbed the back of his
neck. “But I do trust her.”

Music started again.

“Who’s that singing?”

He shrugged, crinkling his eyes against the sun. He must have done that a lot because
the sun had left its mark. He had three lines running across his forehead, and a fanwork
of them radiating from the corner of each eye. His skin was too naturally golden for
him to appear off-color, but there were blue smudges beneath the sooty line of his
lower lashes. He didn’t wake up with flyaway hairs and rooster bed head. He woke up
looking pretty much as he went to bed, with Pre-Raphaelite curls and scrub of beard.
But the daylight showed what the night had hidden: the glints in his dark hair weren’t
from the sun.