Destiny and Deception (10 page)

“Then we shall have a grand and glorious game of Dungeons & Dragons,” Smith proclaimed, his small eyes, greatly enlarged by his thick glasses, wide with anticipation. “Friday at seven?”

Pietr nodded. “At our house. I’ll e-mail you details.”

“Excellent. If we don’t see you before then, Jessie, I hope to see you then.”

I just snuggled more tightly against Pietr’s side and nodded politely as they turned and walked away.

It was then I realized what was bothering me.

Pietr had surpassed settling in as a student and had tumbled right into being content as a … My mind balked at the term that kept presenting itself. I swallowed and thought of my frequent flirters club—the smartest and most well-intentioned guys at school. Hascal, Jaikin, and Smith held doors open for me all the time. Not a bad thing. And they took excellent notes (this I knew from having borrowed from the best). And just because they all had their little—quirks …

That was it.

My Pietr, the ex-werewolf with special tattoos marking him as a captain in the Russian Mafia, was now studious, polite, and concerned—to the extreme? My hot, dangerous Russian-American boyfriend who’d finally taken the cure I provided had flown right by
normal
on his way to embracing
nerd
.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Marlaena

I’d picked my way down the slopes surrounding the small town to better investigate what Gabe had led us into. And create a little havoc.

Everyone needed a hobby.

Running through town was more invigorating to me than loping through the wooded parks. Racing across streets and dodging down alleys in daylight meant I might be seen—I might get caught.

It kept my feet swift and my senses sharp.

I zipped down side streets and jumped over fences. I prowled yards and dodged down alleys. If the area around Junction seemed relatively quiet at night, it was nearly as dull in the daylight. The most exciting moment came when I was greeted by the shout of a child proclaiming, “Doggie!”

At least, I thought that was all the excitement the town had to offer.

Until I smelled
him
.

Along the edge of town, where one railroad ran, I stopped short. There was a scent I recognized. Not intimately, so this wasn’t my family, but the scent of pine was clearly out of place in the nearly naked deciduous forest.
One of these things is not like the other,
my mind sang as I pressed my nose to the snowy ground and I began tracking.

Yes. It was a wolf. Big. Male.

And not running with a pack.

We didn’t always run as a pack—I sometimes preferred being alone.

Maybe he was wired the same way.

So … I snuffled around, following the trail until it muddied outside of a pool hall on the outskirts of town.

Interesting
.

I eyed the place, reading a bit difficult in my wolfskin.
JOHNNY BEY’S
.

A wolf who knew his way around a pool cue.

I stared at the business hours scrawled hastily on a sign hanging on the door.

We might meet if I started showing up. And if he was
truly
alone … A new recruit who understood the lay of the land—such as it was—could be beneficial.

Could at least give me a view of the area beyond Gabe’s.

But a wolf who couldn’t be recruited…?
That
would be trouble.

Either way, I needed to meet him.

And deal with him.

Alexi

“A family meeting?” Max grumbled. “How very civilized.” The last to join us, he scraped his chair out, sat heavily, and glared in my direction.

I ignored his attitude and set the stack of bills and their corresponding envelopes on the dining room table before them all. “We have an issue, you see? All of these bills
must
be paid—in order for us to continue living here.”

Pietr and Cat nodded in agreement—but not yet in understanding the crux of the problem or, as my people would sometimes say,
the place where the dog is buried
.

Max just watched me, daring me to teach him something.

“But there is a problem. We have nearly no income now the company has been—”

“Blown to bits?” Jessie asked from the doorway.

I smiled at her sudden intrusion despite our predicament. “You and Amy are certainly best friends—that sounds like something she would say.”

“We share a brain from time to time,” Jessie confessed.

Amy grinned, then rolled her eyes and said, “Yesss. You can borrow the communal brain for tomorrow’s quiz.”

“What’s a BFF for?” Jessie asked with a laugh. “So. All this…?”

“Family meeting,” Max pouted.

Amy patted his head and
tsk-ed
at his grumbling.

“And I wasn’t told?”

I shrugged. “I did not think either of you needed to be involved.”

Jessie pointed at Amy as if to say,
But she’s here
.

“She all but stalks Max.”

“Hey, I’m just doing what I do best.”

I raised my hands. “Okay, okay. Let us get back to business. We have a serious problem. We do not have the income to continue our current lifestyle—or
any
lifestyle—after next month concludes. We need a game plan.”

“Aren’t you still…?” Max left the question dangling in the air, giving only a faint hint as to the unsavory moneymaking method I occasionally indulged in.

Americans called it
hustling
.

I called it building a nest egg.

Jessie and Amy pinned me with their gazes. Neither of them knew how I traveled from pool hall to pool hall and card game to card game—there were a remarkable number of both in the area, considering the relatively small size of the population—but then, too, there were numerous bars, an understandable surge of gambling and alcohol following the recent rise in unemployment. I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I am a gambling man.”

“Remember how he gambled with our lives?” Max added in a way that was both cold and casual. “This way at least he’s the only one at risk.”

“Unless you tag along,” I retorted. “Then the entire establishment is at risk.”

Amy looked at Max, the pressure pouring on. “Explain yourself.”

“I have not
tagged along
in several weeks.”

Her left eyebrow arched, and he raised his hands between them to erect a wall, surrendering. “You need to stay out of trouble, mister,” she said, the serious set of her mouth sliding into a slow grin.

“
Then
what will I do for fun?” Max asked, one of his eyebrows rising to match her own as his voice lowered, softening into a faint rumble.

Instantly Amy stiffened, her flirting cooled, and she abruptly spun back to face me.

Max’s gaze fell from her face, the arm that had rested across the back of Amy’s chair dropped, and he stared at the table, more uncomfortable than I’d seen him act in years.

If Marvin hadn’t already been dead I would have
wanted
him dead just for
that
moment—for the awkward space his violence against Amy put between her and my little brother.

I cleared my throat and pushed past the thought. “We must all now pull our own weight—contribute to the family cause and work together, if we intend to stay.”

Max leaned back in his chair, his eyelids heavy. “So what do you suggest, brother?”

Before I could say a single word, Amy had turned on him, her head cocked, eyes flashing. “That you get a job.”

I nodded, holding back the smile edging at my lips.

“A job?” Max mused. “And what are werewolves—ex-werewolves,” he corrected snidely, “good for?”

“Bussing tables,” Amy quipped.

“Waiting tables,” Jessie suggested.

“Taking tickets or working the concession stand at the theater, or sweeping up in the theater.”

“Retail.”

“Fast food.”

I crossed my arms and watched Max, Pietr, and Cat grasp the seriousness of our predicament. They had never held jobs before, but then, we had never been in one place long enough to hold jobs. I picked at the tablecloth. This might require more paperwork—more forgeries—unless they all worked, as they said, “under the table.”

Cat gave a long, slow blink. “Dear god,” she whispered. “Retail?
Pravda?
”

Jessie and Amy snorted and said in unison,
“Pravda.”

“I’d offer to try and get a job, too, but I’m as busy as I can be with the farm…,” Jessie apologized, reaching out a hand to Pietr’s.

He nodded. “I’ll keep doing odds and ends at the farm,” he offered. “That is a small something.…”

“
A small something
will not pay the bills,” I said firmly.

Amy toyed with a fork left on the table from lunch. “I’m living here now, so I should contribute. I think I can get something—maybe even temp work with one of the local agencies.”

“Temp work.” Jessie nodded. “Probably filling in at Aphrodite, but a temporary gig at a factory’s still better than nothing.”

“Okay,” Amy said with the groan that meant she’d made up her mind, “I’ll put in as many applications as I can—hit everything. And you”—she punched Max in the arm, the most physical affection I’d seen her easily display in front of us for quite a while—“will fill out every application I give you. Happily.”

“Gladly,” he muttered.

“Gleefully,” she added.

“Gleefully?” His eyes slid to catch hers and he groaned. “Must it be gleefully?”

“Yes,” she said, all serious. “I’m afraid gleefully is the least I’ll accept.”

“There is something above gleefully?” he asked her, a hint of fear coloring his tone. This was how they played now: carefully. Awkwardly.

But it was something.

“Of course there’s something above gleefully,” she said, her voice somber and low. She spun to face Jessie, startling her just enough so she jumped in her chair. “Jessie,” she hissed melodramatically. “What’s above gleefully?”

Jessie’s head hit the table in response. “I used up all my words with the lit assignment,” she apologized. “I could add Sarah to your speed dial, though…,” she offered slyly, her hand creeping across the table toward Amy’s ever-present phone.

Amy smacked it definitively, grinning at Jessie’s overacted yelp, and whipped back around to Max. “I’m sorry to report that although I am absolutely certain there is something above gleefully, I have no current means—and want no
new
ones,” she added over her shoulder to her best friend, “to tell you what it is precisely.”

“So I have to take your word on it?” Max asked, reaching up to stroke his stubbly chin in thought.

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” he conceded, but the subtext between them was much deeper than a discussion about linguistics and job applications. I had the definite feeling he was promising her something more. That he was promising to take her word on everything—every question he asked.

Relieved by his reply, a certain tightness in her shoulders released and she leaned back in her own chair, peering at Max a moment.

“Excellent strategy, Amy,” I congratulated her.

“And I’ll help Cat get some applications in at places that’ll suit her tastes,” Amy offered. “Think clothing stores, Cat,” she said with a wink.

“Oh! The shoe department,” Cat replied.

“
Da
, there is hope for everyone,” I muttered.

Marlaena

We’d been bedded down in the same place for two days when the sharp scent of woodsmoke filling the old house and leaking past its tattered curtains and out broken windows woke me. A welcome smell until my nose pricked and my eyes watered. Uncurling, I stretched and swallowed up my wolfkin side, feeling the fur pull back into my flesh like a million tiny pinpricks that woke my human senses more fully.

They stared at me, eyes stroking along my naked form, some curious, some hungry as I stepped to the fire’s side. They’d stacked firewood hastily in the center of the tile kitchen floor and lit it as safely as they could.

“Is there no fireplace?” I asked the group resting with snouts on their paws, my voice still gruff from both waking and the change.

Most of them were younger—timid things I’d picked up along the road, lost, wounded, or abandoned and still shy in their human skins and barely playful in their furs. Shyness was a luxury. The hard fact was the quiet ones had less chance of survival in our world than those of us who learned to be bold.

Gabriel’s mouth stretched in a long canine yawn and he changed from the boy in the nearly fox-colored wolf pelt to the man he kept trying to prove he was. He stood before me, as naked as I was, his shoulders back and head held high, green eyes glinting. Bold and as unmarred as he was now, I’d seen him at his lowest—whimpering in a ditch, bullets from his adopted father’s handgun riddling his flesh.

We were the lucky ones.

Survivors.

“Flue’s blocked—can’t unjam it,” he explained coolly.

“So building the fire in the kitchen—”

He sat slowly down, his eyes never leaving mine and full of the spark of challenge and hunger. “Allows a better way to circle and enjoy its heat. The smoke can’t be helped.” He stretched out, lounging—basking—in the warmth and glow of the fire.

It was weird how easy it became to ignore nudity once you’d seen so much of it.

Crouching, I thrust a nearby stick into the fire, holding its tip in the flame until it kindled, fire licking greedily along its end. Standing, I held the burning brand before them. “What does this fire have in common with us?”

There was quiet from my pack as they shifted to forms more capable of speech, some reaching for their scant clothes or the moth-eaten blankets Gabe had rummaged for us.

“Stop,” I commanded. “Be not ashamed of your forms, either human or animal. We are made in the image of God—doubly so because we admire both Fenrir, the dark and dangerous wolf destined to devour the sun, and Loki, the light-bringer and trickster, his father.”

They paused, hands sliding away from cloth for the moment. At my bidding. My command. Perhaps listening to Phil preach hadn’t been a total loss after all. They were hungry for the Word—even if the Word was mainly of my own construction. Wasn’t the Bible made by ordinary men supposedly inspired by God? Why couldn’t
I
be likewise inspired if it helped empower others?