The Trouble with Fate (9 page)

I can’t make a sound. I’m mute as a hare.

I hear a scream, high and thin, quickly followed by another. The wolf scrambles off
Dad, his jaws smeared with blood. Dad’s fingers find the shotgun. I hear the gun go
off, but I don’t see the wolf fall. Instead, he pivots, and runs up the path that
leads to the Trowbridges’.

For a few moments all I can hear is Dad’s breath coming out fast.

“Daddy?”

Part of me cringes from him. He’s dropped the gun, and rolled onto his side. Blood’s
streaming down his neck. He’s holding his stomach together with his hands. “Help me
to the house.”

Mum’s face crumples when she sees him.“Oh, Ben, oh, Ben.” It takes both of us to drag
him into the house. He leaves a wide trail of blood on the linoleum. She runs to the
oak cabinet and flings open its door. “Get in. Hurry.”

I hang back. It’s too small. Impossible to imagine crouching in. Mum’s arms are cruel
with haste as she shoves me in. I have to duck my head and fold in two. “Keep this
safe,” she says, putting Merry around my neck. She shuts the cupboard door. I press
my eye to the cutout, and watch her face twist with fear and desperation as she casts
a protective spell on my hiding place. Then she turns, calling for Lexi.

The outer ward set on the kitchen door breaks.

Five Fae slide through the door. Three have short hair, while the other two have long,
straight hair, black as their jackets. Their clothing is foreign. “You’ve lost much
of your talent, Rose,” the cold-looking one says.

The dream jumps ahead.

The same man says, “Roselyn of the house of Deloren, you’ve violated our law. You
broke the Treaty of Brelland, and allowed one of the unclean to bathe in our sacred
Pool.”

Her face is as white as her nightgown as she denies it. One of the short-haired Faes
glances down at my father and says, “He’s dead.”

Another Fae, very thin and dark, comes up behind my mum. He grabs her hair and pulls
her head back. The knife in his hand glints under the overhead light.

“According to the laws of Merenwyn, and the Treaty of Brelland, your life is forfeit.”
Her gaze flies to my cupboard.

I say, “Mummy,” in a little voice, but the sound echoes back to me.

The ward on my cupboard is strong. I am invisible, both by sound and sight, as he
drags the blade across her throat. Her blood makes a noise when it sprays the cupboard.

I’m too scared to even breathe.

They drag Lexi out of his bedroom. He’s fighting them with everything he has, but
he’s just so little. We’re both little. I know I can’t bear to watch what will follow,
so I cover my eyes, but open them when I hear one of them say, “No, don’t kill him.
I’ll claim him as payment for my loss.” The long-haired Fae studies his new acquisition
with a coldness that frightens me to the depths of my soul.

The man who cut Mum makes a ball of fire erupt between his hands. He tosses it at
the kitchen curtains and sends another flying into the living room. Next, he purses
his lips and blows. I hear a whoosh, and then the wall color changes from cream to
red from the reflected fire’s glow.

They walk out. Calmly. My brother is a squirming burden over the cold one’s shoulder.

Lexi’s gaze catches mine, as I squint through the hole. His eyes get smaller, and
for a second, I think he’s going to cry, but he slants them away.

I can hear Mum’s heart, still beating. And so I hammer the cupboard door with my fists.
I scream and call for help, and shriek some more, but have to stop to catch my breath.
I keep it in my chest, and press an ear to the hole, straining to hear the slow thud
of her heart.

She’s still alive when Trowbridge comes through the door.

Chapter Four

“Merry, don’t,” I said sometime later, startling myself into full consciousness. Oh
Stars, I wished I were out cold again. The shark had chewed its way through my ass
cheeks and was gnawing on my bones. Merry had tunneled up and over my boobs to perch
on my collarbone. A strand of gold ivy pressed against my cheek. It lifted, pressed,
lifted, and pressed again. “Merry, don’t pat me.” She stopped patting, but stayed
put, cupping an ivy leaf around the curve of my chin.

“You might want to get out of the line of fire,” I mumbled. To prove my point, my
stomach did one last housecleaning squeeze, sending up another mouthful of bitter
bile. The Taurus windows were of the roll-up variety. No freakin’ way. I looked for
something to spit in, but Bob kept his relic clean. Merry skittered to my shoulder
as I twisted around to spit into the backseat. I did it again, and then added “clean
Bob’s car” to my to-do list.

It was bad, this payback. Worse than anything I’d ever lived through. My body would
gradually absorb the pain, given enough time. Headaches lifted. Fatigue was conquered
by a good long nap. Finger soot got brushed off, revealing perfectly normal skin.
But this was a first. I’d gone straight past soot to crispy. What would be revealed
when the outer skin fell off? What do they call that? Degloving. Oh please, no degloving.

How long would it take to heal? Twenty-four hours? I didn’t have twenty-four hours.
The digital clock read 9:53
P.M.
I’d already wasted an hour out cold. The car was still running. All I had to do was
steer.

Put your hands on the wheel
, I told myself.
You don’t have to look at them; you just need to use them
. They spat fire when I moved my fingers. I couldn’t help it—I held them up for inspection.
Oh Goddess. My fingers didn’t even resemble fingers anymore. They were swollen fat
and bent unnaturally. The skin had turned deep brown, and there were black spots of
charred skin across three knuckles, two of which were nothing more than open red sores.
Yellow liquid seeped from the cracks. Suddenly, the charred odor that I’d been trying
to ignore was the only thing I could smell. Mother of Fae, how was I going to heal
from this?

You’re part Were. You’ll heal. Don’t be a coward, Hedi Peacock.
I took a deep breath and tightened my hands on the wheel. Then I screamed.

I woke up with a sense of déjà vu. Merry was patting my face again. The clock read
10:27. And my raw hands had fallen back to my lap. The pain was as bad as before,
maybe worse. I knew what she was going to do before she started to move. Merry traversed
my shoulder to the midpoint of my chest. She slid quickly down it, the polished surface
of her stone sliding soundlessly across the fabric of my shirt, until her chain pulled
prematurely short. She pivoted to see what was holding her back.

Me. I couldn’t put my hands up to the chain, but I could use my chin to pin a length
of it against my collarbone. Stubborn foolish Asrai. She’d take all my pain away and
kill herself doing it.

She strained and won another half inch. “No,” I said. She did her shimmy thing—the
amulet version of a huff—before turning back to strain in the direction she wanted
to go.

“Give me a couple of hours, and I’ll be able to steer,” I whispered.

One of her long strands disentangled itself from the nest of woven gold that framed
her stone. It stretched toward me, the ivy leaves flattening back into the length
of it, giving the searching tendril an extra inch to extend until its delicate point
reached my jaw. She stroked my skin, once, twice, each stroke a soft caress. Then
she pulled back and swatted me.

“What if you can’t heal me, without—” I concentrated on keeping my voice steady, between
my uneven breaths. “Without going too far? What if the healing of me is the death
of you?” I stared through the window, noting the blossoms forming on the cherry trees.

Another impatient tug. There was desperation in the way she grappled with the leash
of her chain. Why? She knew eventually I’d heal and she absolutely loathed Lou, a
reaction not unexpected considering that Lou had enslaved Merry in a piece of amber.
I’d never seen Merry so vengeful, so bloodthirsty, and now so frantic. As a rule,
she was bitchy, but never mad-dog focused. I thought back, trying to pinpoint the
moment her attitude had changed.

“It’s the other amulet. That’s when you got all ferocious. He’s something important
to you.” I lifted my chin. She fell on her back. “That’s right, isn’t it?” She bobbed
energetically, as if she were playing charades with a jackass who only now was on
the cusp of getting the right word.

“Just once, I wish you could talk back.”

A bit of red winked in her amber belly.

“Trowbridge has the amulet they’re searching for. I saw it around his neck today.”
I shook my head. “It’s just too damn coincidental. Of all the Starbucks in this town,
why would he walk into ours? We’re going to have to be so careful, Merry. It doesn’t
smell right.” I thought for a bit. “All right,” I said slowly. “Heal me. But only
enough so I can drive.”

The chain slithered after Merry as she rappelled to the end of it, hanging beneath
the curve of my breasts. I heard a rip and then felt cold air on my midriff.

She found her spot, right over my heart. Her gold rippled and unrolled, pulling itself
free of the braids and embellishing curls, until only a thin casing of gold surrounded
her central core. The rest of it re-formed into four long slender limbs that spread
out to hug my ribs. As they stretched and tightened across me, her stone remained
flat, hard against my heart.

Merry’s amber warmed to my body’s heat until I couldn’t feel the difference between
her and me. As I watched, faint pinpoints of white started to flicker deep within
her heart. A tiny dot of pure light here, another bright spark there, as mesmerizing
as fireflies on a hot summer night. Those winking stars started moving, circling the
dark smudge in the stone’s center, and as they did, they changed Merry’s golden-honey
core to a brilliant orange-red, fierce as the sun before it slips beneath the horizon.
Faster they swirled. White and pure, and so brilliantly incandescent I had to squeeze
my eyes closed against their radiance.

The inside of the car began to get warmer. My limbs grew heavy. The shark released
his grip on my bones tooth by tooth. Then he swam away.

*   *   *

When I woke, she was a cold dull brown. I held her tight in the fist of my healed
left hand, and shoved the car into gear with my right. The back end of the wagon went
up and over a curb as we sped out of the parking lot. She needed food.

At 11:43, there was no one on the heritage conservation trail, and thus, nobody to
stop me when I maneuvered the Taurus up and over the sidewalk, around the vehicle
barricade, and down the gravel path leading into the woods. I drove with my eyes trained
upward, searching for a clump of trees that were already in bud or leaf. Twigs and
dirt spun up in our wake.

“Hang on, Merry,” I said, lowering the car window. The night air rolled in. My scent
glands absorbed everything at once, overloading me with information. They noted the
stagnant wetness caught between the fallen leaves, the rich earth, the trails left
by the inhabitants of the woods—the rabbits mortals sometimes spotted, the foxes that
were too sly, the mice and rats and moles—my nose sensed them all. I found one sweet
note among all the others carried on the night breeze.

I followed it to a narrow pedestrian bridge spanning a small creek, then shoved the
car into park and lurched out the door. The scent led me off trail. I sprinted up
a hill, and there they were—a colony of serviceberry trees growing in rangy disorder
under the canopy of oaks, beautiful with their showy clusters of flowers, in horizontal
drifts of pure white.

I pushed aside some shrubbery, strained inward for one of the thicker trunks, and
pressed Merry hard against it. There was nothing for the count of five. On six, she
shuddered, her coils of gold rippling. First one coil flexed, followed by another,
and then all of her unwound until each vine found a place to curl around the sturdy
stem, until her heart was pressed close and tight to the source of life. The yellow-brown
of her amulet flickered. A red light beat deep inside, small and rapid, like a baby’s
heart. The brown became orange tinged. Orange led to yellow, and then yellow to green,
and then, her center was overtaken by a brilliant blue light.

Merry fed. And healed. And I came close to weeping.

The car was still there, the door wide open, the engine rattling reproachfully, when
we returned a half hour later. Emotion always makes me hungry. I popped open the glove
compartment. Another thing about Bob was that he was
always
prepared. He had an emergency stash crammed into the compartment. The bottled water
tasted stale, but it was wet. It washed down the eighteen unsalted almonds that were
meant to stave off starvation if Bob and his Taurus ever went off the road, slid down
an embankment, and went undiscovered for three days. He had a flashlight in there
too, and a CAA card that had expired five years ago, two months after his license
had. Sometimes I could tell by the seat position that he’d visited the Taurus. I never
caught him sitting there in the dark behind the wheel, reliving the years when he
was the menace of 401, and he never queried me about the thick new steering wheel
cover, or how the car never got dusty during all the years it had sat waiting for
Bob in the garage.

While I chewed and Merry drowsed, I fingered my ear and worried over Lou. She hadn’t
sent a thought-picture or dream in hours. And that was plain worrisome. Nothing? During
these last few days, her dreams and thought-pictures had constantly dribbled into
my mind, and now nothing?

So strange, how quickly you got used to a turned-around world. For the first nine
years of our life together, I hadn’t needed a barrier from Lou’s mind, because she
never, ever shared it with me. Between us, there would be no easy communication of
silent thoughts. Somewhere during that first terrible week after the fire, I sent
Lou a thought-picture. Her response was a cheek-burning slap, right across the face.
When my sobs wound down to hiccups, she said, “My mind is my own, just as your face
is your own. I will not touch yours, if you do not touch mine.”