The Trouble with Fate (36 page)

“What about the fag?”

“Bring it too.”

They pulled us apart. The wrong arms cradled my broken back, and let my broken foot
brush against the iron gate. That was the last I remembered.

Please, Goddess, don’t ever let me remember more.

Chapter Nineteen

But I do remember.

Some part of yourself allows you to forget the details—the little stuff that niggles
you afterward—because the weight of the absolute horror would flatten everything else
into unrecognizable roadkill. And so, there’s much I have forgotten: blurred scent
memories and warm-up details to the horror, but there’s one thing I’ll always remember.

The first of the worst.

I gave up Merry when they held the knife over the last remaining finger on Bridge’s
mutilated hand.

*   *   *

I woke to a room that smelled of blood, Weres, hamburger, and dope, feeling iron-sick
and battered. Hands, face, ankle, ribs, heart. They all hurt.

“Biggs, tell the witches to hurry with the wards. I want this place sealed tight in
under an hour.”

I fought to place the man’s voice as I struggled up from the swampy pool of not-here,
not-there semiconsciousness.

Mannus’s goons had propped me on a chair. I tried to move, and discovered my body
had been played with. My arms felt constricted. My legs awkwardly splayed. Worse,
there was something tight tied around my neck, securing it to the high back of my
seat. My chin could move a few inches up, a few inches down, and another few left
and right. I blinked to clear my eyes, and started with down. Silver duct tape had
been wrapped around my torso, binding my arms to my ribs. My shirt was open and bunched
up under the tape, exposing my left nipple, in all its beaded worry. I rolled my bare
feet and felt the pressure of bindings around my ankles.

I was in the living room of a house I didn’t know. There was a set of long windows
to my left flanked by dark blue curtains that hung perfectly straight in the stale,
airless room. A brass lamp sat on a spindly side table and cast a golden circle around
Mannus’s easy chair.

The girl from the Laundromat cocked her head. “Her eyes are open,” she said to her
Alpha. Mannus nodded. Beside her, Stuart leaned against the fireplace, still wearing
gloves, drumming his leather-clad fingers against his thigh.

My mate’s scent called to me, but its rich copper smell had been altered. I rolled
my eyes to the source and found devastation.

Goddess, what have they done to him?

Trowbridges’s head was slumped down on his naked chest. Dried blood had glued a few
strands of his black hair to the side of his face. He’d been secured to his kitchen
chair with lengths of chain wrapped around his chest, thighs, and ankles. More of
the same bound his arms behind his back. Scawens had made sure his chair wouldn’t
move by driving nails through each chair leg straight into the plank floor. Someone
had cut Bridge in several places: just above the chain on his chest, below it on his
belly, and across his thighs. Straight lines, no hesitation, just pragmatic prep work
for more chains—these thin and filigreed, the blood-glazed silver set like a natural
seam of the precious metal running along the crevasses of these wounds. The Weres
had used padlocks to secure his ankles to the chair legs. His foot was naked again.

I worked some saliva into my mouth. “Trowbridge?”

Don’t be dead
.

I tested my bonds. At the slightest movement of my hands, pain came in nauseating
waves, so unexpectedly savage that my shoulders hunched against it. I counted to eight
real fast—just enough to hold back the panic—then peered down. My left hand resembled
raw meat. The right hand was worse. A piece of skin hung from the thumb.

I was crispy again.

And misfiring. Where was my magic? It should have surged up from my center like venom,
but it hadn’t. I probed inside. It was usually right there. Almost tangible to feel.
A little ball low in my gut that sparked if probed. There was no ball. No sense of
being. Empty.

My Were shivered near the bottom of my spine.
Don’t panic. Keep breathing. Count to yourself … one thousand, two thousand, three …
Impossible. Panic stampeded through the thin barrier of my self-control and took with
it every shred of common sense. I flailed. I wriggled. I tried to run, but that was
useless, because I was bound to a kitchen chair, and four wooden legs never work as
well as two human ones when terror tells you to flee. My frantic thrashing sent my
chair crashing to the floor, and once there, it seemed to poltergeist on its own across
the oak floor to my mate.

“Where do you think you’re going, you ugly, little half-breed?” Scawens’s heavy foot
came down to pin my chair in place, two feet from Bridge. The young Were smelled worse
to me. More musk, more dope, more anger. What happened to the silver spike that Lou
had melted into his core? How come Scawens was hale and hearty, and strong enough
to pin me to the floor with his stinking boot?

The girl beside him said, “She looks like a rabbit on a spit.”

Scawens stared down the length of his nose and smiled as I fought for my breath. And
for a bit, that’s close to all we heard in that room. Me rasping away on the floor
like a fat girl at a cycle spin class, and crickets doing the mating call somewhere
outside.

“Pick her up,” ordered Mannus. The tape bit into my flesh as Scawens righted my chair
and positioned me to face the Alpha. In real life, without the gauzy filter of Lou’s
dream recollection, my enemy’s jowls were longer, and his nose a little more bulbous.
For an Alpha, he wasn’t even that big. I’d have called him rawboned, except for his
waist, where he had the obligatory middle-age paunch. The flare in his eyes was low
and weak, like a blue flicker around a gas element just before it goes out. The handsome
peacock of Lou’s dreams had aged into an unremarkable man, except for the intermittent
glint in his eyes.

“Robson is alive for the moment.” Wrinkles hung in crepe folds over Mannus’s eyelashes.
He tested me with a little flare, a feeble flash of turquoise blue, translucent, almost
spent. Returning his gaze, I felt a light tug, a little over-here, a soupçon of down-on-your-knees.
I’d spent the last twelve hours flare-sparring with a natural-born Alpha. Mannus was
no Trowbridge.

I shifted my gaze to the bookcase behind him.

“Well, that would be the Fae in her, I guess,” he murmured to Stuart. “Her mother
never knew her place either. Look at me when I speak, Helen.”

One shelf on the bookcase was devoted to books about music. Theory books, music books—Stuart’s
hand lashed out before I could steel myself for the blow. Pain bloomed on my mouth;
hot and savage. I stuck the tip of my tongue out, and tasted blood.

“Slow down,” Mannus said. “She hasn’t got the stamina of a full Were.”

Chains chimed as my mate stirred. Trowbridge lifted his head, and then shook it, slow
like a stumbling boxer who’d gone one round too many. He worked his jaw, then spat
out some blood, but his lip was fat, and the spit didn’t clear. It ran down my mate’s
lip to his chin, and then hung for a moment, a glistening tear of red, before slipping
to join the other splatters on his chest.

“Hedi, don’t talk.” Trowbridge tipped his head back, and I swallowed a gasp as I took
in the full horror of his misshapen profile. His straight nose wasn’t aristocratically
straight anymore, and the eye closest to me was bruised and swollen. He cleared his
throat. Spat some flux out again. “Don’t say
anything
to him,” he said in a stronger voice. Then my Trowbridge turned his chin in the general
direction of Mannus and said relatively clearly, considering the state of his lips,
“Fuck you and fuck the entire pack.”

Scawens coiled a fist.

“Stuart,” said Mannus.“When will you learn that you can’t squeeze anything out of
a corpse?” The Alpha pointed a finger at me. “Yesterday, you offered a trade: an amulet
for your aunt. Stuart claims he saw you take the Royal Amulet off Robson’s neck. Which
was interesting, as we’ve checked you over very carefully, and we can’t find it.”
He crossed his leg. “What have you done with it?”

“I don’t make trades when I’m tied to a chair.”

“Does it appear that we’re negotiating?” asked Mannus.

“What do you
want
from us?” I cried. “Can’t you see Lou’s dying? Whatever you think she can do for
you, she can’t.”

“Louise is not dying.” He held up a hand. “Yes, she is weak, but that will soon be
fixed. And you’re partly to blame for that. You’ve let her get into a terrible state.
You should have come to me the moment she started to fade.”

“Excuse me for not dialing 911-Were, but I had reasons. Like maybe we’ve spent ten
years
hiding
from Weres. Or how about this? Lou
hates
Weres. And here’s the kicker—I had this crazy idea that Weres were bloodthirsty and
prone to violence. Reality sucks, eh?”

“Lou hates Weres,” he repeated. “Why don’t I send someone to fetch her, and she’ll
tell you how she really feels about our kind?” He said to the girl from the Laundromat,
“Dawn, go tell my mate that her niece is awake.” As Dawn turned for the stairs, he
added, “And this time, find something for her to wear before she comes downstairs.”

Mate?
“Lou would never mate with a Were.” But what if she had?
She wouldn’t. She’s hated and feared Weres for as long as I’ve been with her. She’s
loathed the fact that Were blood pulsed in my veins.
But the little niggle of doubt grew. I thought back to her dreams, and the young
predator who’d stared at the Pool of Life as if he’d soon own it.

“You’re so sure of yourself, aren’t you? Youth,” he mused. “You think you know everything
when you’re young, but you don’t. You think you have all the time in the world, but
you don’t. Things happen. Choices are made.”

“Like marrying a Fae?”

“Oh, I didn’t marry a Fae. That’s for romantics, like your father. You don’t need
to be married to choose your mate. The mating rites can be done within three minutes,
maybe two if you’re in a hurry. You don’t even need witnesses. I don’t think more
than four people knew that I was mated to Louise.”

I wondered if my mum and dad were two of those people.

“It was a dumb idea, but I was a kid, and I thought I could turn it to my advantage.
But it wasn’t as easy as I anticipated. We fought a lot. We’ve been mated for twenty
years, but if I stopped to add up all the days we’ve lived together, I doubt they’d
total more than a week.” He brooded at the family picture on the mantel. It was too
dark for me to make out the details, but it appeared to be a wedding photo. The girl
in the center wore a long white dress. “One week in twenty years. When it’s your turn
to choose your mate, Stuart, weigh the pros and cons, and then weigh them again, because
your fate will be tied to hers for the rest of your life. Even something that looks
good on the outside can come back and bite you on the ass. I thought Louise’s life
force would keep me strong for another hundred years. I never imagined she’d go through
an early fade.”

Mannus ran a thumb over the sagging skin at his jaw. “I was fading as fast as she,
and I didn’t even know it. It didn’t matter how much sleep I got, I never felt rested.
My joints ached. Food didn’t taste good anymore.” He glanced at Scawens. “For a while
I wondered if I was being poisoned.” The Alpha studied his second for another beat.
“Then one evening, in the midst of explaining to me why we needed to consolidate the
pack’s debt, Roy Talbot keeled over. He was gone in two minutes. By the time the cops
came searching for Monica Talbot’s next of kin, we’d already dug two graves. It’s
our way. One goes, the other follows.”

Mannus watched me over the rim of his mug as he took a sip of his peppermint tea.
“That’s what I was thinking as I watched the cops go back to their cruiser. And then—bam!
Just like the proverbial bolt of lightning, it hit me. Louise was dying.” He made
a face. “Which was a bit of a pickle, because as far as I knew, my mate was still
in Merenwyn. Had been, ever since the night they closed the gates.”

Mannus put down his cup and blotted his lips with the side of his hand. “I thought,
‘This is it, this is where you lose everything. The pack, the future, it’s all going
to go and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ All the sacrifices I made, all the
plans—it amounted to nothing. No matter how much land I bought, the humans were squeezing
us out of our own territory. I’d emptied our bank accounts trying to match the offers
developers were throwing at the locals. Bills were mounting. Everything was turning
to shit just because my mate was in Merenwyn being forced into an early fade and I
had no way of getting to her.”

“That makes no sense, even if I believed you,” I said. “You can’t connect my aunt’s
illness to your financial issues.”

“You have your father’s belligerence, do you know that?” Mannus smiled at me, but
there was a bleak edge to the set of his lips. He made a vague motion with his hand.
“My mind was clouded, and I made some bad decisions because of all of the—”

“Confusion,” I supplied, unimpressed. “We lived in the same apartment since I was
fourteen. You guys can track a deer over kilometers, but you can’t track down one
dying Fae living in the suburbs?”

“As I told you, I didn’t know Louise was on this side of the portals.”

I pointed out what seemed obvious. “Mates don’t lose track of each other.”

“You have an idealized concept about mates,” he said shortly. “Louise and I argued,
and we separated. She was in Merenwyn when they closed the gates.”

Now that was interesting. How’d he known she was in Merenwyn? She could have been
anywhere, couldn’t she have?

Some of my disbelief must have shown. He raised his brows. “I didn’t know that she’d
found a way over,” he said. “The last time I saw my mate she was in Merenwyn. I have
heard nothing from her for the last ten years until a few days ago. I had no idea
she was in this realm, or that she’d spent ten years hating me…”