The Trouble with Fate (7 page)

With a quick flick of my hand, I unleashed my talent and it sprang out in an invisible
fat thread to attach itself to my television. Another twist of my wrist, and the old
heavy RCA lurched from its stand, electric cord trailing like a serpent’s tail as
it flew upward to smack the Were hard on his head.

He didn’t see it coming. They never do—they’re always too busy staring at my hands.

His skull made a wet squelch, and then the back of his broken head met the wall behind
him. For a heartbeat he held himself upright, until his eyes lost focus and he slid
down the wall, leaving a long smear of bright red blood as he went. He didn’t get
back up.

It was almost quiet in the aftermath.

Silent except for my own uneven breath, coming quick and hard through my parted lips.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Hold on
.

Merry pulled herself free of my blouse, her stone turning orange with all the red
shot through it, to slide down her chain like Tarzan on a handy vine. She had morphed
again, this time into her favorite stick figure: two golden arms, fashioned from long
tendrils of elegant golden ivy, and two legs, which ended in feet that looked like
tips of an ivy leaf.

“We’re in a shitload of trouble, Merry-mine,” I said thinly. I couldn’t pull my gaze
from the trail of blood down the wall. I would not panic. I would not panic. Even
if the sight of the red stuff makes me panic and think of things I don’t want to think
about.

In an instant, I was back in the kitchen of my old home, watching my mother’s blood
splatter the wall, smelling the sweet Fae scent of it mix with the Were and copper
tang of my father’s. That’s the only time they smell, the Fae—when they bleed.

That was my last conscious thought before my brain shut down.

I probably would have just sat there, right by the mess of vomit I deposited on the
carpet, if not for Merry. She found my ear, gripped the sensitive tip and squeezed
the shit out of it. We went into the kitchen, and found blue plastic gloves which
I slid over my shaking hands. I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. Merry
gave me about thirty seconds’ rest before she slunk up the chain to my shirt collar.
She made a grab for either edge, then planted her feet firmly on my collarbone, and
hauled on it backward as if she were the Pekinese with the Saint Bernard’s leash in
its mouth. I pushed away from the wall.

Turns out it’s really hard to kill a Were.

Until I had touched his throat and felt the beat of his sluggish pulse through my
rubber glove, I had been thinking more along the line of tarp than tape. You see whitish
flecks of brain matter floating in a pool of blood and that’s where your mind goes.
Tarps and shovels and ponds.

I had no corpse, but I had a body. Damn Weres. They’re a bitch to kill. Straight out
of a horror flick, the freak started healing. His blood loss slowed to ooze instead
of a steady drip, while underneath his skin the bones began to knit themselves back
together. It’s not something you want to watch, even if you don’t get girly about
blood.

I went back to the kitchen and got some duct tape. I circled his torso with it, binding
his arms tight to his chest, until he looked like a twenty-first-century mummy. I
did the same to his legs. As an additional precaution, I manhandled him into a sitting
position, and then secured him to the old radiator near the window. It was hard to
do. He was heavy and bloody, and yeah, he scared the shit out of me, even gory-headed
and unconscious. I could smell my own fear leaking out from my sweating pores, and
that was enough to turn my fear into a cold rage that gave me the juice to get up
close and personal with that gory head and its sticky-sweet blood. I made a collar
of duct tape around his neck, and then ran a loop of it around a radiator coil, so
that he was drawn back into a pugnacious chin-jutting position that suited his sunny
nature so well.

It took some contortions to get his wallet and BlackBerry out of his pocket. His wallet
revealed eighty dollars, which I pocketed, and a license for one Stuart Scawens, age
eighteen, living on Walnut Street in Creemore. I riffled through the rest; a health
card, a Visa—
he’s just a kid, how’d he qualify?
—and a folded-up piece of paper that turned out to be a grocery list written in a
woman’s flowing script.

Pretty thin in the wallet for an Alpha’s “top boy.” That used to be a prestigious
title, filled by a guy who cracked a smile about as frequently as the woman in the
pastry shop went on a diet.

I pushed my glasses up on my nose, and turned my attention to his phone. Before I
had conceded that there wasn’t any phone my woo-woo Fae genes wouldn’t eventually
screw up, I used to steal people’s phones regularly, so I didn’t have a lot of trouble
navigating my way around the BlackBerry. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a nasty, terrible
thing to steal someone’s cell. All those contacts and phone numbers. Let me get a
hanky.

I checked his phone history. Scawens’s last call had been to Eric, who—judging from
the thumbnail photo—was about twenty-five and spent a fortune on hair gel. The call
before that was from the Alpha. Annoyingly, the Alpha was listed under “The Alpha”
in his address book, without any additional info that I might find useful, like a
name, address, or a picture.

They’d taken Lou? Where? And how in the hell had Scawens known where to find us?

Trowbridge. It had to be Trowbridge.

I kept scrolling, glancing up periodically to see how well Were-boy was doing in his
slow crawl to consciousness. I was congratulating myself on my inner fortitude when
I found the photos attached to the e-mail titled “Wanted.” I opened the first image.
Just like that, my anxiety spiked from tolerable to unbearable. I clamped down on
it, before I did something stupid, like kill the healing Were just because he was
there.

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand …
I hit twelve thousand before my breathing leveled out.

It was a picture of an amulet. It appeared that someone had blown up a much smaller
photo, because the details were indistinct and all the edges were pixalated. But I
recognized it. I’d seen it once before.

“Old sacred wood,” my mum had said as Dad secured the pine cupboard, with its fancy
heart-shaped cutouts on the doors, onto the kitchen wall. “Keep it off the ground,
and it will hold a spell.” Fourteen months later, I was hiding inside it, safe from
the Weres and the Fae, but helpless to go to her as she lay dying on the floor. I
had hollered, I had shouted. I had beat on those panels until my palms were hot and
puffy. Her protective spell still held. No one could see me. No one could hear me.
Even after the Fae left, and the fire started licking the kitchen table.

When Trowbridge broke through the door, I thought I was safe.

It’s a picture frozen in my mind’s recall, seen through a heart-shaped hole. The kitchen
wall was in flames. Dad’s body was sprawled on the hooked rug, right beside Mum’s.
Blood still leaked from the red line cut into her throat, but her heart was slowing.
Thump, thump
. I could hear it over the flames. Robson Trowbridge was kneeling beside her, and
he had that amulet in his hand.

She died. And then he left, even as I screamed, “Come back, come back.”

Thirteen thousand, fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand …
I took a deep breath, and scrolled to the next image. It appeared to be a screen capture
from a grainy video of Lou, initially recognizable only by the clothes I had laid
out that morning. Her hair partially obscured her face, but I knew it to be Lou in
full rage, with a clutch of books held pressed to her chest, and her outflung hand
frozen, as if they had caught her just after she sent a book flying.

The last picture was an old one of a young Robson Trowbridge, wearing an ill-fitting
tux, standing beside an even younger-looking girl in a poufy white wedding dress.
Why was he on the wanted list?

The Were came awake slowly, groaning and twitching spasmodically before blearily opening
his brown eyes. “What the—”

“Duct tape. A whole roll of it.”

“You bitch,” he began, and then he lapsed into a string of increasingly frustrated
grunts as he tried to thrash free.

“Where did they take the old lady?”

His reply to that was to try to spit a mouthful of blood in my direction. Not so smart,
our Stuart. His missile of woe arced up and then fell, splat, on his shirt.

“I’m going to ask you again: where did they take her?”

He lashed out with his feet, but taped as they were, his flailing was as productive
as a fish flopping on land.

I tried a different tack. “So, how’s your eyesight? Any better than your IQ? Let me
show you something.” I pointed the cell phone in his direction. “This is the amulet
you’re searching for, right?” I tapped the photo. “It’s got a round stone in the middle
of it. Perfectly round. It’s a light blue, not a brownish yellow. And around the stone,
what do we have? Ah, let’s see … it’s got all this Celtic crap twisting around the
stone. Kind of a distinctive piece of jewelry, right?”

Merry slid down the length of my chain to take a peek for herself. I almost palmed
her, before remembering that Were-boy had already had an up close and personal moment
with her Fae gold vines. She minced her way along my arm to perch at my wrist.

Scawens’s gaze flicked from Merry to me. “What the fuck are you?”

“Ever seen it before?” I asked Merry, tilting the screen so she could get a better
view. All of a sudden, her leaves flattened around her body.

“So I guess that would be a yes.” I felt like I should pat her or something. I snapped
my fingers at the Were, who seemed preoccupied trying to wipe blood off his chin with
his shoulder.

“Okay, Fido, pay attention.” I tapped my thumb on the screen. “This pendant is not
my
pendant. Take a look. Round stone versus oval stone. Blue stone versus amber.”

Merry started coiling a strand around the BlackBerry. “A little space, Merry. Let
him see.” She was starting to freak me out.

“So what,” he said.

“Okay, one more time for the remedial student. The stone on that one is blue. The
setting is different. Different design, so therefore, different piece of jewelry.”
I dipped my head at Merry. “You’ve gone and chased the wrong prey. Bad Fido. Sit here
while I find the newspaper.”

The Were spat again. He glared up at me, his teeth all bloody. “What are you?” he
repeated.

“Always the same question.
What are you?
Well, I’m a mystery, okay? I’m one big, fat mystery that your little, itty-bitty
brain is never going to figure out.”

“You’re a fairy, aren’t you?”

I rubbed my nose. “All right, let’s try combining the questions. What does your Alpha
want with an old woman and an amulet?” I waved his BlackBerry under his nose. He didn’t
like that; I did it again.

“I’m not telling you jack.”

I sighed and reached for a hank of his hair. The sigh was baloney, just a gloss over
something vile inside me, because down there, the part that grew malice so easily
was saying, “Go girl, go.” His greasy hair was short, and my blue rubber gloves slipped
off when he twisted his head away. Merry quivered on her perch. I looked into his
red-rimmed eyes and said in a low voice, “I’d rather you just told me. I don’t need
to hurt you.”

Yeah, I know. Another lie.

Merry’s patience broke. She sprang across the eight-inch gap, leaves extended like
pincers. His head thudded back in a futile effort to avoid her, and then all three
of us danced. Merry dug into his cheek muscles, he thrashed his head against his duct-tape
bindings, and my neck, anchored by Merry’s chain wound around it, echoed each of the
Were’s savage jerks.

“Get it off, get it off,” he screamed, trying to scrape her off his cheek with his
shoulder.

Merry dug in. Thin rivulets of blood streaked down his face in four distinct trails.
Very red blood. Pungent and rich smelling. I readjusted my balance, both inner and
outward, and came to rest on my knees beside him, so close his blood smelled like
wet copper.

Merry was really freaking me out.

“I’ll ask, you’ll answer. Okay?” I took another deep steadying breath through my mouth.
“What does your Alpha want?”

He braced for pain. Merry obliged, and tortured his cheek. Scawens held out until
Merry sprouted another arm. It positioned itself a quarter of an inch from his wide,
blue right eye. There it swayed, back and forth, its sharp tip promising a world of
hurt and disfigurement. He stopped moving, maybe even breathing. She tightened the
distance between the tip of her ivy leaf and his pupil. A spasm of pure horror rippled
across his face.

“Okay, we’ll start with a smaller question. Which pack do you belong to?”

His jaw worked. The tip of Merry’s leaf brushed his eyelashes with all the tenderness
of a ditched girlfriend. He said, “Ontario.”

“Which
pack
in Ontario, Stuart?”

“Ontario,” he said, carefully enunciating each word, “is only one pack.”

Not when I was a child. Back then the Alpha of Creemore had ruled his small fiefdom
with vigilance and pride. If one of the Danvers kids tossed a ball through a glass
window, he knew of it before the glazier had a chance to back his truck out of his
garage. Yeah, Jacob Trowbridge had been Big Daddy all right, but his eyes had never
strayed beyond his own turf. In a wolf’s world, personal territory was everything.
It meant you got squinty-eyed with visitors, careful with your words around humans
(even around those half-Fae mutts), and humorlessly insular. Possessive to the extreme.
Put bluntly, you peed on every bush in your parish, and that pungent flag said, “Hey,
don’t go any farther. This is my woods, my street, my woman.” That’s how they got
along and avoided conflict—Weres respected one another’s boundaries. I couldn’t wrap
my head around the concept of all of Ontario being united. Why? Why would all those
little packs living hundreds of miles from Creemere ever have chosen to relinquish
their territory to another Alpha? Unless, of course, I realized with a start, it hadn’t
been voluntary.
There must have been bloodshed for that to come about,
I thought uneasily.
Lots of it
. “So then who is your Alpha? If he’s so strong, it won’t make any difference if I
know who he is.”