The Trouble with Fate (18 page)

“You said a wolf killed your family. How do you know for sure?” I asked him.

“From the wounds and his tracks,” Trowbridge said. “I woke up maybe fifteen minutes
after he ambushed me. My hand was hurting, and there was blood everywhere.” He gazed
ahead into the dark night, his eyes hooded. “That’s all it took. Fifteen minutes.
Dad’s body was in the living room, on the floor by his chair. My brother’s was on
the stairs.” He slowly shook his head. “There’s no way a strange wolf should have
got the drop on either of them. Not unless he was someone they knew and trusted …
I tried to find the wolf’s scent, and that’s when I realized … the bastard hadn’t
left one.” He slanted his eyes toward me. Fierce, blue. “It’s impossible. Everything
has a scent.”

Except me,
I thought.
Or a Were who’d visited Merenwyn
.

“The bastard used my own blood to frame me. There was some of it in the hall, on the
stairwell, on my brother’s face … One day, I’ll hurt him for what he did to them.”
A horrible smile, white teeth against the dark night. It faded slowly. “He planted
my fingers under my brother’s body and upstairs…” A pause during which he stared blindly
at the gearshift. Then he continued, his voice a monotone.“I picked up his tracks
outside the house, but the trail died out on the side road—too much gravel—so I backtracked
them to the fairy pond. What’s the name of that flower?”

“Freesias,” I said softly.

“You couldn’t even smell the pond over it. I counted five fairies crossing back to
their own side. Two of them had a Stronghold kid between them. As soon as they were
through, I went down there. The fairy portal was still floating over the water … I’d
thought I’d seen a lot of shit in life, but nothing like that. I couldn’t find any
more tracks from the wolf; his prints seemed to start at the water.” He inclined his
head toward me. “I found yours and your dad’s there too. A minute later, I found the
Fae amulet caught in some bushes nearby. Then I saw the flames shooting out of your
window.”

He lapsed into a brooding silence.

I shivered. Trowbridge reached for the heater control and turned it to high. A tear
dribbled down my cheek.

He turned the key in the ignition. “Do not start crying. The time for that is long
gone.”

“I’m not crying; my eyes are burning again.”

“Here.” He tossed my glasses in my lap.

I started looking over my clothing for a dry spot.

Trowbridge glanced sideways at me. Then his lips thinned. In what? Frustration? Exasperation?
“Jesus,” he snapped, jerking the gearshift back to neutral. He took my glasses out
of my hands, pulled up a corner of his shirt, and started cleaning them.

“I’m twenty-two, not seventeen,” I protested.

He rubbed the lens harder, gave it one last polishing swipe before passing my glasses
back to me. His skin brushed mine as I reached for them.

And then I flared.
Oh Sweet Stars, no, not him. Not now.

“Shit,” he said. “Your eyes.”

Instinctively, I slapped my hands back over them.

“They’re glowing green,” he said in awe. “I can see it right through your fingers.”

Yes, of course my eyes were glowing green. I’d waited all my life for my first flare—that
pivotal moment in life when everything shifts, and you accept the full weight of your
destiny. For some Fae of noble birth, it happened when their magical talent kicked
into high gear, for others their flare sparked at the sight of the child, the grandchild …
their lover. It was that instant in time when you realized your one true thing—the
thing you were born to do. I had flared. I’d finally done it, and the bright light
beaming from my eyes wasn’t Mum’s cerulean blue, nor even Alpha-dog blue. I lowered
my hands. Oh Fae Stars, the inside of the whole car was lit neon green.

“Only Alphas have the flare,” he said slowly.

“Well, as it happens, so do Faes, born of royal blood.” I turned to him. “I am Fae.
See me flare.”

As soon as my eyes locked on his, an answering white-blue flame deep within his eyes
sparked to life. Wicked light, seductive and abrasive.
Yield,
it demanded. I stretched my eyes open, and held them wide, resisting the gut-deep
urge to let my gaze drop before his.

I’d wasted too many hours coming up with words to describe just what shade of blue
his eyes were. Mediterranean blue is how I remembered them. Deep set. Surrounded by
a thick ring of stubby black eyelashes. They weren’t Mediterranean blue; they were
Trowbridge blue. Right now, they were lit with the Alpha-blue flame of his blood kin,
and were beyond my ability to describe.

A stupid exercise, description. It’s a memory game for a yearning, dreaming heart.
It’s something you play, waiting for a light to change, trying to find the right word,
as if that would somehow return you to that moment, help you live that feeling again.
Maybe one day, I’d go back to finding the right word, but right then, caught in the
heart trap of pure feeling, I was only aware of what the blue flame in his eyes meant
to me. It was power, it was desire, it was a fight and a promise.

It was everything.

My gaze dropped.

Chapter Nine

“Do all Faes have the flare or just some?”

“Don’t say that,” I said sharply. “Don’t use the term ‘the flare.’ It’s a very personal
thing to a Fae. It’s wrong to hear a Were say it. Just wrong.”

He’d taken my chin in his fingers to examine my eyes. They’d stopped burning, and
I was fairly sure that they’d stopped flaring because the interior of the car was
dark again. Trowbridge had lines around his eyes, and a blue vein under his skin,
right on the top of his cheekbone. That’s the sort of stuff you wouldn’t normally
see in the dark. My eyesight seemed keener than before.

“Put your glasses on,” he told me, putting the car into drive.

“Where are we going?”

“Toronto.” He glanced at his side-view mirror. “It’s damn hard to track anything in
the city. Not impossible, but it will take them some time and a lot more trackers
to find us.”

“I don’t want to go to Toronto.” Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe I flared because he
was
part
of my destiny; not my “one true thing”? Perhaps he’d been sent by the Goddess of
Fate to help me find Lou? I tested the thought, feeling a little relieved. Surely,
rescuing a fairy princess had to fall under the title “Great Destiny Options for You”?

“You don’t have a choice.” He hit the accelerator and the back wheels spun on the
gravel, shooting up a spray behind us.

He drove well, but too fast. It made my Were-bitch restless. I kept changing positions
in my seat as she squirmed inside me. Trowbridge rolled down the windows and turned
off the heat, which cheered my Were. Her general-doggie-happiness sent goose bumps
popping up on my arm. There were other physical differences. My spell-casting hand
wasn’t crispy, and it should have been, considering I had propelled a commercial washing
machine across the floor. My fingers felt fat and sore, but not sausage-fat and third-degree-burn
sore. More like the sore you got when your hands froze slightly, when the blood came
back. I held them to my nose. Definitely no scent of recent charring. No scent at
all, except swamp, and the lingering woods-and-whiskey scent of Trowbridge still marking
my hands.

I’d released my inner Were, and she was making herself known. Healing me, while Merry
was busy cuddling up to her boyfriend. But for my Were, life was all good, right?
Open window, open road. Prime mate material by her side. Free at last. There was a
flutter, a stretch, low in my belly as the Were-bitch tested the walls again.

I turned sharply to him. “You said that my Were ‘answered.’ That means you called
it. Stop calling my Were.”

“Trust me, I’m not calling your Were.” His voice was clipped, but a smile played at
the corner of his lips. “Weres don’t call to Faes. And by the way, that’s a personal
thing, ‘answering the call,’” he drawled. “It just feels wrong to hear a Fae say it.”

That’s an Alpha thing, isn’t it? Calling to the Were?

I touched Merry, and then jerked my hand away. Wrapped around the other amulet, she
was twice her usual size, and foreign feeling, contaminated by the heavy, dead weight
of the other amulet. The other didn’t have her suppleness, or the intelligence that
I always sensed when I held her. I don’t know how she could stand being twined around
it, her stone pressed hard to its center. Was she so lonely for her own kind that
she was willing to spoon with a corpse?

*   *   *

The highway was better lit. I could see every nuance of expression on Trowbridge’s
face. “Tell me about the Treaty of Brelland.”

He turned to me sharply. “How do you know about the Treaty?”

“That’s what the Fae said before he executed my mother,” I said. “‘Roselyn of the
house of DeLoren, we have found you guilty of breaking the Treaty of Brelland.’”

Trowbridge shot me a look out of the corner of his eye. “So she was in on it. She
took a Were to Merenwyn.”

“My mother would never have done anything to endanger us. We meant everything to her.”

He didn’t appear convinced about that. Silence filled the car, except for the windshield
wipers slapping away at the rain. He merged into traffic, encouraging a less confident
driver into yielding. “It’s a treaty written hundreds of years before you and I were
ever born,” he explained. “In the beginning, the Weres and Fae shared the same realm.”

“Here or in Merenwyn?”
Weres once lived in the Fae realm?

“Merenwyn,” he replied. “They’d been fighting for God knows how many generations.
Blood was being spilled by both sides; a lot of it—to the point where more people
were being killed than being born. Then it stopped being a race war, and became an
economic issue. Declining population meant less people to work the fields. So, the
two sides brokered a deal. Three of the four kin packs negotiated with the Fae for
safe passage to this world. In exchange, no Were from those packs, or any of their
succeeding generations, would be able to use the portals to pass back to the Fae realm.
To back that up, the Alpha of each gave a blood sample, which the mages used to alter
the portal’s magic. From that day on, so the story goes, no Were could either call
or cross the Gates of Merenwyn. But something changed. Ten years ago, a Were did pass
through the portal, and after he’d butchered my family, he was able to change into
his mortal shape, and melt away.” His eyes narrowed to little squints. “One day I’ll
find him.”

“Why didn’t the Creemore pack hear the portal open?” I said. “Why didn’t they feel
the earth tremble?”

“That confused me. They should have sensed the passing of the Alpha, before that …
I tried to use my phone to call for help, but it wouldn’t work. I sent up a howl,
but no one came. It was like I was inside a bubble that broke once I left the property.
The only logical explanation for that was someone had set wards. Around the pond,
and your family’s place.” He shot me a speculative look. “Someone with some magic.”

“It wasn’t my mother, Trowbridge.”

“Weres can’t open a portal on their own and they don’t have the magic to set wards.
So who set a protection spell around the Alpha’s house and the pond? It wasn’t a mage
or a witch. I would have scented that. It needed to be a Fae familiar with the pack.
There was only one Fae woman who fit that bill.”

“It wasn’t my mother,” I repeated hotly. “Don’t blame her or the Fae for it, Trowbridge.
It wasn’t just any wolf that came through the portal. It was one of yours.”

His skin released a surge of angry Were musk. It filled the car and tickled the hairs
on the back of my neck. “Explain,” he bit out.

I told him about seeing the wolf come through the portal. About the confrontation
on the beach. About the scentless Wolf running up the hill toward the Trowbridge house.
About Dad dying and Mum being executed. I used small words and no adjectives. I didn’t
cry.

“Why didn’t your dad
just shoot
him? Just pull the fucking trigger when the wolf leaped through the portal?”

“He was a friend.”

“What was his name?” His voice was low, focused.

“I don’t know.” I lifted my shoulder. “But I’d seen that wolf before. Sometimes he’d
come during the moon time. He’d stand at the edge of the forest and wait for Dad.
Not very often. But some moon runs he would wait for Dad.” I rubbed the mud off my
hand onto my thigh. “I don’t think he was supposed to run with my father. Just a feeling.
My dad would never answer any questions about the pack.”

“But you saw him. Describe him to me.”

“He was gray. Big.” I made a helpless gesture in the air. “He had a white streak in
his fur.”

“Where?”

“On his shoulder. High across a shoulder.” I brought to mind the image of the wolf,
waiting for Dad, at the forest’s edge. “His left shoulder.”

Trowbridge grew so still, that even the air around him seemed to freeze.

“You know him.” I sat up tall in the seat. “Tell me his name.”

He was studying his hands on the wheel, all the skin on his face so tight that those
fine lines became slashes. Then he shook his head, once, and then once again, both
times so slowly, I could have said, “What? What?” but I was afraid to break the silence.
Afraid to move. He kept driving, sitting right beside me but a universe apart from
me as he worked something out in his head.

With dull eyes, I watched the cars as we passed them. All those unknowing drivers
heading for their destinations, all so unaware of what can happen in just a few minutes.
There are no guarantees in life. None at all. My head felt like someone had split
it down the middle with an axe.

My ride-along companions weren’t happy either. Were-bitch had finally stopped moving,
but she kept dribbling more anxiety into the stress pool I had swelling in my gut.
And Merry kept moving, back and forth, rubbing a tendril along my skin, like I was
the dry twig, and she was the person intent on starting a fire. I knew she was hungry.
I touched her with a finger, grimacing as I felt the hard, cold metal of the other
amulet entwined with her own gold
. I will find you food soon,
I silently promised. She wrapped a tendril around my thumb, and I felt a burst of
warmth, a feeling of almost comfort.