The Trouble with Fate (40 page)

I’d claimed these paths as my own, but had I ever really seen them? Had the forest
always been this beautiful? Had the air always smelled this good?

Dawn leaned in and said, “Welcome home, mutt.”

Ahead of me, Scawens and the kid sweated as they half carried, half dragged Trowbridge
between them. It hurt my eyes to see him suffer while I walked free.

I concentrated on the path. It was narrower, and not as often used as when I was young,
when the earth had been worn smooth and the leaf mulch broken into tiny fragments
that felt soft under the feet. As I listened to the hollow echo of our footsteps,
I imagined moles and mice, scurrying down dark passages beneath our feet.

Run, little animals. The wolves have come.

Too soon, the forest starting thinning. The setting sun sent streaks of light between
the well-spaced trees, brilliant gold. My mouth got drier. I could smell the pond.

I don’t want to die.

My feet slowed as we passed the last cluster of trees. “Hurry up,” said Dawn, pushing
me into the small clearing at the top of the Trowbridge ridge. Everyone paused, as
Mannus walked to the edge and brooded at the pond below.

He turned and gave Lou a bittersweet smile.

She didn’t return it.

I forced my gaze past her to search for familiar things. Trowbridge’s favorite tree
was still there, but the worn spot beneath it where he once strummed guitar was gone.
Missing too were the twin pines that had hugged the edge of the cliff. Mannus turned
from the pond, and our entourage followed. But as we made our way to the rock-studded
trail that twisted down the hill, I glanced quickly down over my right shoulder to
the pond, and found it too altered. What did I expect? Nature never stops to mourns
us. It carries on, conscious only of its own cycle of growth and death. The thought
slipped in, unwanted.
Where would they bury me?

A finger of cold ran down my spine.

Three Weres waited by the pond. Young. Muscled. Shifting on their feet with badly
disguised anticipation. I revised the bad guy count to six Weres and one old Fae.

Oh Goddess, we didn’t stand a chance.

“The last part’s too steep for you, Louise,” said Mannus, sweeping her off her feet.
Lou turned her head and looked at me, expressionless, as he carried her down the cliffside
path.

*   *   *

At first I thought it was blood.

The pond water was red. Not all of it. Just the part near where I stood.

I studied the oily rust-colored film polluting the water. The pond smelled wrong.
Metallic, and somehow cold. At the marshy edge, the bulrushes’ submerged stems were
stained brick red.

I drew in a sharp breath as I realized what it was.

Iron. Bleeding from the ferrous-rich rocks that the new Alpha had used to make a retaining
wall for his hill. It had held back erosion, but poisoned the water.

I could feel the cold pull of it.

The sounds of animal life—birds tweeting, frogs croaking, ducks quacking, all the
stuff that belonged in the pond trailed off into silence as Mannus walked over to
its edge. He stood facing it, his lips pulled down.

Lexi would have been pissed off too. The northern end of his watering hole had been
taken over by his personal bêtes noires, lily pads. In his absence, they’d spread
out, leaf over leaf, crowding each other so that their fat saucer leaves tilted sideways.
The only thing that had checked their proliferation was a half-submerged log—the last
visual remnant of the tree that had once grown at its edge. All that remained of the
once-tall pine was its toppled trunk, bark stripped and sun bleached. It floated at
the pond’s midpoint, still anchored to the land by the weight of its twisted roots.

I wanted my brother beside me so bad, my knees felt weak.

Don’t look. You won’t find him there.

I couldn’t stop myself. I turned my head toward the opposite ridge, half expecting
to see some part of our old home still standing. There was nothing for my eyes to
linger on. The gray-shingled roof was gone. Whatever walls had been left after the
fire, had fallen. The hill path had been overtaken by an infestation of cockleburs.

My brother didn’t stand under the tree, beckoning to me. Scabby kneed, and twelve.

It was all gone.

Even the clearing that we’d affectionately called the beach had been swallowed up
by nature, shrunk until it was little more than a foot-wide strip of pebble-embedded
mud.

But near it, I finally found one surviving relic of our past.

Lexi’s pirate rock sat where the last ice age had left it. Five feet high and almost
as wide, it had withstood everything nature had thrown at it. When we were finally
allowed to roam free, we’d done so, both with our minds and our bodies. And then,
we’d discovered the rock. Something larger than my brother. Harder than his sharp
nails. With his usual blithe insouciance, Lexi began his summer siege, determined
to wrestle dominance from a hunk of granite. At first it was enough to just climb
to the top. We’d jammed our sneakers’ toes into the crevasses and pulled ourselves
up, fingers scrambling for handholds, and for the space of a week had thought ourselves
both very fine, sitting high above the dragonflies. But that had paled. And then it
had become a prop for Lexi’s stories. For the rest of the summer we’d been pirates.
Explorers sometimes too, as we pretended we stood on the deck of a tall-mast ship.
Our marine battles had been long and bloody. Together we’d withstood sail-tearing
storms and grapeshot. We took turns dying; being the victor and the victim—mock battles
with broken hockey sticks and horrific injuries that were painless and invisible.

There was a twin of the boulder beneath the pond. We’d found its rounded edge with
our toes. Lexi had grinned. The pond had no secrets left for him to uncover. The siege
was over.

By the next summer, the boulder sat alone. No children to crow from it. Abandoned
not by youth’s natural transition from fascination to boredom, but by the fact our
childhood had been broken, cut in two in one terrible, bloody night. Yet, the rock
still stood, silent witness to what once had been.

The keening sense of loss rubbed against me, painful and invisible.

Trowbridge grunted as they let go of his arms. Dawn checked my instinctive start as
he fell to his knees. For a moment my mate just rested, slumped on his heels. Then
he lifted his head. His nostrils flared. His battered face turned in my direction.
Higher went his nose. He pinpointed Scawens. Another head tilt and he’d fixed Mannus’s
location.

“Where do I have to stand?” Mannus asked, reaching into his pocket for Merry’s Baggie.
“Here, wasn’t it?” He checked himself against the landmark of different trees, shuffling
until he was about mid-center on the beach, a foot back from the water’s edge.

“I must wear the amulet to summon the portal.” Lou cast him a sideways glance from
under her lashes. “The amulet and the caller must be one.”

“Don’t try anything rash, mate,” he warned. “Open your hands.” He tilted the bag and
spilled the golden mass into her waiting palm.

Her mouth became a thin slash as she inspected the contents of her hand. “Think you’re
clever, do you? Twisted yourself around the Royal Amulet, did you? Ugly thing … useless,
cursed thing,” she said, poking Merry. Lou’s lip lifted in the way it did before she
did something cruel. “Bring me some pond water.”

“Don’t, Lou,” I whispered.

The kid brought her some red-fouled liquid cupped in his hand. She dampened the sleeve
of her sweater with it, and then held it, poised over Merry. A long tear-shaped drop
hung and then fell, splat, dead center on Merry’s belly. She cringed, spat a defiant
spark of purple and wove her vines tighter around the Royal Amulet. Lou smiled. With
casual cruelty, my aunt swiped the sodden wool over Merry’s belly, laying another
thin layer of corrosive water over my amulet friend.

A tiny rivulet of the ferrous-strong water trickled into Lou’s palm. “Yes,” she said,
with a horrible teeth-baring smile. “It burns, doesn’t it?”

“Stop it,” I pleaded.

“Let me do it,” said Mannus, in irritation.

Lou turned away from him, hunching her shoulders over her prize like a truculent child.
Her blistered fingers found a weak strand. She pinched it. Tried to use a nail to
pry it up. Then she took another dollop of water, and let it sit. “Patience,” she
said to Mannus, watching the shuddering ball in her hand. Suddenly Merry exploded
in a flurry of awful contortions, colors sparking from her center. Red. Purple. Blue.
“Now, watch.” And then my aunt succeeded in accomplishing something I thought could
not be done. With a smile to match her twisting fingers, she broke a strand of Fae
gold in two. What followed was a quick ravishment, an unleashed spit of Fae cruelty.

And finally, when tiny splinters of broken gold lay glinting at her feet, my aunt
stopped. Lou extended her open hand to the Alpha, imperious and proud. “I told you
I could do it,” she said.

What had been one clump, was now two.

Frowning, Lou lifted Merry by two fingers and then dropped her, as if she were a soup
bone that had lost its flavor. She placed the Royal Amulet’s heavy chain around her
scrawny neck. Her voice was reassuring. “I don’t think any harm has come to the Royal
Amulet.”

“It doesn’t look right.”

“It is fine,” she said. With tender care she inspected her pet. “Yes, it is well.”
Her shoulders were relaxed. She had what she wanted. And true to form, she cared little
of the destruction she’d left in her wake.

It was her way.

I watched with lowered eyes, and hatred seething and churning, as Merry stabbed two
torn ends into the soft ground, and painfully pulled herself toward the sanctuary
of the tall weeds.

“I will summon the portal now,” Lou said, and stepped to the edge of the pond. She
shook the tension from her hands.

How many times had I watched Lou perform her precall rituals? Each time, hoping as
hard as she, that she’d find a way. That the gates would come. That I’d find my twin.

One last open-squeeze session with her hands before she raised them chest high.

Goddess, I loathed the sight of her now. Hated her for what she’d done, hated the
pitiless hunger in her eyes.
Take a good look, Hedi. That’s Lou’s true face.

She stiffened as Mannus put his hands on her waist. Then she tossed her head and opened
her mouth to begin. The rite always started with a seven-second hum, followed by the
first real note, so low it sounded like a moan, and then on the same breath, the low
flat would climb, and the true melody would begin. She’d sing in the language of her
home, which sounded nothing like English, or any other language spoken on Earth. It
was a difficult dialect to decode; capable of sounding harsh and heated when she said
it under her breath and sometimes, when I’d done something stupid, relentlessly hectoring.
But when she sang for the portal? I wish I could call it something else. Ugly. Horrible.
Discordant. But it wasn’t. The melody was haunting—perhaps because as she sang, Lou’s
voice softened from her usual grievous tone. The sound that spilled from her mouth
was sweet, tender, and yearning. She’d lift her voice to the wind and patiently repeat
the song from beginning to chorus, and all the time, her hands would be outstretched,
as if she were hoping to absorb energy from the air. She could do it for hours. She
had
done it for hours. She’d warble until her hands trembled and her voice was gone.

But this was ten years later, months after the start of her fade. Would her voice
crack? Falter?

At eight seconds, she abandoned the warm-up and went for the first low note. It was
too much of a temptation for Scawens and Dawn. “Watch them,” Scawens said to the kid,
as they turned in the direction of the pond, transfixed, like the other Weres who
stood in a ragged line around the pond; their eyes were trained on the pond as if
they expected the portal to suddenly appear with a flourish of horns.

The kid cast an anguished glance toward us. As his eyes met mine, I lowered my own
submissively. I kept my head down and watched his feet, and then when those size elevens
finally turned in the direction of the pond, I held my breath and soundlessly backed
away.

Four steps, five steps. Each one taking me farther away from Bridge, but one step
closer to Merry. The kid never turned around. I let out my breath, and kept going,
my eyes darting between three compass points. Trowbridge in the east. The kid in the
north.

And in the south … Merry’s muddy trail.

Her painful retreat had dredged a path between the weeds and left a wavering line
into the shrubbery. It disappeared under the base of a dogwood. I knelt, and parted
the low branches. In the gloom beneath the shrub, I searched for the gleam of her
gold in the dark, and couldn’t find it. Where
was
she? I sat back and looked for another trail, some indication that she’d only stopped
here for a moment, before she’d crawled painfully to another spot. But there was nothing.
I roughly parted the branches and scanned the area again … and … Oh Goddess … found
her.
Oh Merry-mine.
She was a ball of brown. Mud-streaked, dull. Covered in swamp slime that camouflaged
her gold, and muted her amber warmth. Quivering against the trunk of the little shrub.
Naked. One of her vines trailed behind her in the mud, like a small bent root.

“It’s me,” I said. But she flinched under my gentle touch. Shivered and tried to pull
that trailing vine up to hide her nakedness. “It’s
me.
” I touched her just with my knuckle. She shivered under it. “Let me dry you,” I said.
“It will hurt less.” She allowed me to scoop her up from the dirt. Oh Goddess, she
was trembling in my palm. I blotted up every drop of that water I could see. Blew
tiny beads of it from her crevasses. Gently patted as worry swelled. She was too dull.
Too unresponsive.