Destiny and Deception (3 page)

I’d only been in once before, so it took me a minute to find their sparse stock of bread. Studying my choices, I was startled by the sudden appearance of someone else in the aisle. Slender, with close-cropped red hair, the guy approaching me had pinched features and a nose that pointed in a way that made me think he was as much fox as anything. I froze, and he looked in my direction as if he’d overheard my thoughts. He cocked his head. “Hey.”

I nodded and snagged an anonymous loaf, my eyes stuck on him.

He locked gazes with me and reached over to the opposite shelf. He grabbed three candy bars.

And shoved them into his coat pocket with a sly smile and a look that clearly dared me.

My eyes must’ve widened because as soon as my mouth opened, his smile slid to one side of his face and he whispered, “You wouldn’t rat me out, would you?” He tilted his head in the opposite direction and studied me, eyes bright. Taunting. “We all have our little secrets.” With a wink he spun on his heel and walked back down the aisle and out the door.

“Dammit.” Why’d I hesitate? I took three candy bars myself and headed to the refrigerator section.

Milk, bread, and candy bars in hand, I set everything on the counter in front of the cashier and paid.

“Want a bag?”

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes lingering on the door. I wondered where he’d disappeared to. “Oh, wait.” I pulled the candy bars out. “Put those back on the shelf for me?”

“Uh—okay.… You wanna return them?”

“Yeah.”

“Hold on, lemme do a return.” He groaned at the effort even the thought of doing a return evidently took.

“No. You don’t have to do that. Just put them back—and leave the money in the till.”

He squinted at me, confused.

“Please?”

“Yeah, whatever.” He placed the candy bars behind the counter, and I headed for the door. “You meet all sorts of weirdos in this place,” he muttered even before the door began to shut behind me. “Shoulda stayed in Farthington. Nice and normal there.”

Alexi

Dealing with death, every family faces unique problems. Some war over possessions the dead left behind. Some squabble about unanswered questions and fight out their inner turmoil, wondering if there was something they still should have done, if there were words left unsaid.

There always are.

My family was no different in those things. We all had doubts and questions. Worldly possessions came into none of it—they never had mattered when we thought Mother was dead before, so why should they now?

But the unique problem we—
nyet
,
I—
was faced with was how to dispose of the body of a woman who never seemed to truly exist. Even in life, Mother had been more ghost than alive—at least when it came to open and public government documentation.

Pietr did not want to think about it—not any of it. Having seen his haggard expression after the cure took hold, I could only imagine what it was like to lose two such amazingly important things so close together. I dared not ask him to help. The mere idea of suggesting we get rid of Mother’s body, not give her the burial, the respect, she deserved, would be too much for my youngest brother.

I raked my hand through my hair, tugging at its roots; For nearly a month I had not wanted a cigarette like I did now. But Cat found every last one of them and emptied the last of the vodka, saying so many things had changed so fast, perhaps a few more dramatic changes were in order.

It seemed wrong for my little sister to be smarter about life than I was.

Standing before Mother’s carefully wrapped corpse, I decided there was nothing left to do but make a call.

“Allo?”
a voice rich as the finest cognac said, and I was too easily drunk on the mere sound of Nadezhda again.
“Allo?”
she repeated, this time the cognac slipping away and the word sharpening like the sting of a wasp. “Alexi, I know it is you. Talk to me or hang up. I am a busy woman.”

“Nadezhda,” I whispered. “I need you—” I coughed and stuttered out a more acceptable truth. “I need …
your help
.”

“Of course you do,” she snapped. “Everyone needs my help. ‘Day in and day out,’ as they say. I am a popular girl.”

I envisioned her in some fancy hotel, checking her meticulously managed blond hair in a gilt-framed mirror far away from me. Far away from the trouble her associations with me brought.

The distance did not matter so long as she was safe. I had to remember that and believe that.

“Alexi,” she said again. “I have no time to chat. If you have merely called to hear the sound of my voice…”

“
Nyet
.” It was true, but it felt like lying, listening as intently as I did.

“
Horashow
. Then what is it, boy?”

I blinked. She did that sometimes, called me
boy
though we were nearly the same age.
Sometimes
, she had joked to me at a party in Moscow,
you surprise me by being the more mature one
. I sighed so deeply she had to hear. “She is dead, Nadezhda.”

“What?” Although she felt a million miles away, I heard the shock as plainly as if I had seen it on her face as her breath brushed out in surprise. “Who?”

“Mother.”

“Oh, Sasha—dear, sweet, Sasha…”

The back of my throat burned at the shift in her tone and attention. I coughed to keep from strangling the words fighting to get out. “It will be all right,” I assured her, though I knew I was bluffing.

“Shhh,” she soothed. She knew I was bluffing, too.

Damn it
.

“Breathe, baby.”

But how could I when she was being so gentle with me? Damn the woman. I needed guidance, not tenderness. I needed logic and calm, the cool of rational thinking and emotional distance.

How would she respect me if I let grief overwhelm me and I buckled now?

“I simply need to know how to…” My breath caught, wedged around a lump swelling in my throat. “… how to dispose of her body.”

Nadezhda sighed.

I pushed ahead, using the awkward momentum the words helped build.

“She cannot be found … by anyone.… Is there a place? A method?”

“Da,”
she whispered. “There is always a method.”

Carefully and quietly she explained the most efficient way to destroy all physical traces of the only woman who’d truly known me and still loved me—knowing all.

Jessie

I shoved the milk into the fridge and tossed the bread on the counter. Knowing all that I did still didn’t help me know how to help Pietr. I wanted to go home—back to the farm and the horses and the regular rhythm of what some people in Junction still called “city folk” presumed was a simpler life.

Normalcy
. The sweet lure of an average life.

I wanted that. And
now
.

But I couldn’t leave because the thought of going home so soon after Tatiana’s death made my stomach twist. I’d be abandoning Pietr.

And I couldn’t do that.

But I was no good to him as some shadow occasionally wrapping its arms around him and muttering soft and soothing noises. My contribution to his happiness was utterly lame. I’d lost my own mother and I still didn’t know what he needed now that he’d lost his.

Propping my elbows on the counter, I rested my head in my hands. It felt heavy—oddly foreign. Maybe something more was going on inside some deep recess of my brain.… The hairs on my arms rose in warning. Fumbling for my phone, I considered calling Sophie. Maybe she’d had some weird vision thing, too.…

The phone rattled in my hand.

New Message
.

Dad
.

I returned the call. “Hey.”

His tone made it clear that my greeting didn’t mask my worry. “How’s everyone holding up?”

“As well as can be expected?”

“Come home, Jessie,” he suggested. “You can’t do more than you’ve already done.”

“I know … but…”

“Would a curfew help? I can make one right now.”

I’d never really had a curfew—I’d never been enough trouble or been
in
enough trouble to need one. But that’d changed. Like everything else. “No, I don’t know what’d help. But I need to stick around a little longer. I’ll have Max or Alexi drive me home tonight, okay?”

Dad got quiet, considering my suggestion. “Give me a call when you’re on your way.”

“I will. I love you.”

I slid the phone back into my jeans and looked up the staircase and toward Pietr’s bedroom.

Resting my hand on the banister, I wondered what I still needed to do before going home. And I weighed that against what I
wanted
to do with my boyfriend in order to forget everything else.

To just forget for a little while …

I felt so stupid. I should have been exactly what he needed. And putting together the need and the want, I wondered if I could successfully combine the two and provide Alexi with the time he’d quietly requested for the removal of Mother’s body.

The Queen Anne–style house echoed with emptiness even as full as it was with inhabitants. Amy was tucked away in the basement; Cat had disappeared upstairs to her room; Alexi stood in the parlor as silent as the unmarked grave he prepared to fill; Max sat at the dining room table staring at the same glass that had briefly held the cure—the glass no one wanted to touch again.

And me?

I was as hesitant and heartbroken as the rest.

Pitiful
.

We had been so close to success.…

A shiver shook through me, and I forced my feet into action. As quiet as things had become, I had the nagging sense trouble wasn’t far away. And that at least part of that trouble was the filthy film lingering over my brain with Derek’s fingerprints all over it.

Marlaena

I vaulted over a broad rock dusted with winter’s white and gasped at the way my shoulder clenched on landing. Locking my jaws, I fought past the pain and whipped down a deer trail, my pack close behind.

Dodging between the bare bushes, my sluggish humanity stuttered over the first lines of books I loved. J. K. Rowling’s Dursleys would’ve gotten along great with my parents—though Phil and Margie were as much my
parents
as the Dursleys were Harry Potter’s.

Yeah, so, not at all.

That book kicked off a great series, but a totally unrealistic one, if you asked this particular werewolf. Far too optimistic. No one ever came to
my
rescue. Living under a staircase? I’d be left there until I clawed my way out. Suffering with whiny, neglectful relatives on a windswept island? I’d be abandoned to my fate until I built my own damned boat and sailed away.

But I was no
chosen one,
so who’d blame a hero who never arrived?

I was nothing special. Phil and Margie made sure I knew that.

Springing across a busted tree trunk, the breeze ruffled my fur, leaves crunching crisply under my paws as I landed on the log’s other side and I spun in a tight half-circle, determined no one would spot my weakness or my pain. I paused for a breath and a few heartbeats on the pretense of watching them catch up. Absorbed by the sight of them—beautiful beasts, glorious monsters—
my pack
, the throbbing in my shoulder dulled to a slow pulse of pain.

They
were my family—spelled with a capital F. And they were
so
much better than blood.

The adults—Justin, Terra, Tembe—came first, trailed by the pups, all younger than I was: Kyanne, a tawny thing who in her human skin was blond and dreamed of being an author—the stories she’d write after time with us; Noah, one of the few boys; Darby, a polite redhead sparking with attitude; Londyn and Jordyn, the blond twins; Beth, the youngest, a clever brunette; and Debra, whose fur was as springy as her coffee-colored hair.

Bringing up the rear was Gareth. Almost always last, he made sure everyone was taken care of. He’d quoted some Scripture to me—something about the
last being first and the first being last.
… It hadn’t been a first line of anything and certainly not from any of
my
favorite books. I’d barked out a laugh saying I was looking out for
number one
right now and I’d worry about how things’d reorder themselves later.

He hadn’t been impressed.

Gareth muscled up beside me, carefully keeping a few inches between our heaving sides. He stretched his legs, each ending with a broad paw that swallowed the ground when we ran. His dark coat was full and thick—a chocolate color as rich as his human voice and as smoky as his howl. That coat of his was so luxurious you’d never guess the structure of the wolf beneath—how much lean muscle and broad bone built him up.

He was all powerful shoulders and sleek hips, with a thick neck, heavy snout, and ebony nose, his nostrils flared to drink in the night. And his eyes—lavender snarled with red—glowed with the promise of something like the sanctuary I sought.

He was by far the prettiest of all of us. And the most noble. Amazing what a little prison time had done for him.

Gareth paused beside me, knowing the others panted nearby, for a moment watching anything but us and our classically awkward interactions. Boldly he stepped forward and nuzzled my shoulder. I blinked and snapped my teeth at him—the only warning, and
answer
—he needed. I was still wounded. He whined so softly only my ears caught the sound, translating it to
sorry,
and I hardened my heart against him, reminding myself he’d show the same affection to any pack member.

I couldn’t afford to mistake his tenderness as anything else but Gareth being Gareth. And giving to the extreme like some saint.

Sainthood was only good for two things: pissing me off, and making the saint a target for sacrifice.

I stared him down and counted the milling wolves. Twelve of us jumped that rotting log—only one was still absent.

Gabriel. No angel.

I tasted the air, skimming their scents and appraising their vitality. Everyone was in good health. In good spirits? What could be expected when you were running for your life?