The Thing About Weres

“He’ll be easier to handle that way,” I’d said.

A few moments ago, Trowbridge had taken my silent cue. As had Cordelia and Biggs, who’d taken a few steps back.

So here we were. Ninety seconds and counting for alone-time. And I had thought the right words for good-bye would come to me. My twin and I stood at the edge of the cliff, gazing at my trailer on the opposite ridge. From the Trowbridge property it really did look like a silver bug.

“Tell them to tow it away,” he said. “Mum would have hated it.”

“I will.”

He tapped his toe, once, twice. “I was beginning to think you were going to leave me there in that room … I thought…” His voice drifted off and he shrugged. “Never mind what I thought. In the end, you came through.” Then he gave me a rogue’s wink. “For you, runt, I’m giving a one-time, special performance.”

Lexi’s long fall of hair rippled down his back as he tilted back his head and closed his eyes.

I don’t think I can stand to listen to him sing—not like this.

Back when we’d been very small, Lexi had liked singing. Little tunes as he waited for his turn at the sink. Small little-boy ditties as he helped shell the peas. His voice had been girlish high. Fluting even. But when we hit school, one of our classmates had chosen the purity of his tone as a good tool for mockery and had hit him over the head with it, over and over again. “Celine Dion”—that’s what the boys of St. Hubert of Liege called my brother.

I never heard him sing again. Yeah, I’d listened to him making ch-ch-ch sounds for guns in his bedroom. I’d rolled my eyes as he hummed to pop songs played on the car radio. But after Brad Mosbergen taunted him in the halls after Miss Fitzgerald’s Christmas pageant, he’d never truly sung again. Not once.

And now I knew why he refused.

His true singing voice had never really broken. It was still pure and high as a choirboy’s. A clean falsetto. No slur, no funny trills. It was as if the sweetness of my brother had been distilled and saved for song. Kept shielded from all the ugly, completely untainted.

Does the portal retain the essence of those trapped Fae souls? Do they hear the music? Appreciate it? Value one voice over another? I’m not sure. All I know is that it took my aunt Lou over five minutes to lure the portal to her call and it only took my brother a few bars of song. Almost immediately, Fae magic starting sweetening the soup of pond smells. As his voice rose, the air began to swirl over the pond, clockwise. Next the mist began to show, pink-white, at first, then circling, circling. My brother sang all the way to the end—even that high and hard bit—eyes closed, head thrown back, and as he did, I saw the Weres straining to listen.

It was utterly beautiful.

When Lexi finished, the portal floated in midair some six feet below the crumbling edge of the ridge. Merenwyn beckoned through its hobbit-round window.

“I’ll love you forever, Lexi,” I said, staring at it. “Don’t ever forget that, okay?”

“Hey.” He gave me a shoulder bump. “Don’t get all sentimental on me. It’s a portal. I can come back.” Green eyes, two shades darker than mine. Winning and for once guileless. Bloodshot, though. “Matter of fact, I will come back. To check on—” His head rotated. “I can’t find her among them. Is she here?”

“No,” I said. “We thought it best Anu stayed low for a bit.”

Another lie. Anu had wanted to come and I’d put my foot down. She may not have known that Lexi was her father but I did.

That piece of information hit him hard—why, I couldn’t fathom. He’d barely looked at her. Never publicly claimed her. But the fact that she wasn’t there, watching him cross the portal? It hurt him. I could read his deep unhappiness by the very fact that his expression grew shuttered and remote.

Lexi, you complicated man. “Can I tell her about you later?”

A tiny shoulder lift as he gazed at Merenwyn. “I don’t know what you’d say.”

That once you were a good brother and a loved son.

“It’s time for me to go,” he said. “Which of the amulets do I get?”

“Someone needs to cut these ropes off my brother,” I said sharply.

A pause. Then I heard Trowbridge say, “Do it.”

Lexi slanted his head as Biggs came up behind him with a knife. “Easy, little guy,” he said insouciantly. “Don’t pinch.” When the knots were sliced and Biggs had stepped away, Lexi flexed his hands. He gave me his big-brother look, ruined somewhat by the fact that his face was a sheen of sweat and a nerve was tugging at the corner of his eye.

Give me strength, Goddess, so I can do what must be done.

“I’ll be back,” he lied.

I opened my mouth because it was time—hell, it was beyond time. The second hand was sweeping us toward the point of no return. Once that line was crossed? Even if I won—the Book of Spells destroyed, the Old Mage bested, my brother’s soul restored—I was going to lose.

Trust is an exquisitely valued thing to someone who’s had near every particle of it wrung from them. If you break it? There’s nothing left.

Suddenly, my brother said in a hard, flat voice, “I became a father because I was piss drunk.”

“What?”

“Listen, okay?” He swallowed, hard, giving me his profile. “I’d been taking potion all night and had topped that off with several glasses of mead. I’d left the table—just to get some air—because I’d suddenly felt like…” He knuckled the blood from his lip, his gaze downcast and unseeing. “Sometimes it was hard to breathe in that room. On the way out, I stopped to let a Kuskador servant refill my cup because I was out of the juice.”

“You don’t have to tell me this,” I said, reaching for him.

He twisted away from my touch. “I only want to say this once, so listen. My mage was making a toast—he’s always such an asshole with the toasts, they go on forever—and … I’m a good mimic, do you remember that?”

“I remember everything.”

“That’s what did it. I mimicked the Black Mage.” My twin shook his head, his face bleak. “The timing couldn’t have been worse. The room had fallen quiet and everyone heard me. They were still laughing as I was being dragged by my heels out of the Great Hall.”

Absently, he went to push back his hat. But it was missing, like his natty suspenders—both stripped from him before he’d been locked in the room in the basement. Instead he raked his fingers through his hair, from brow to nape, roughly twisting its length into a golden tail that he pulled over his shoulder.

His fist dropped. Tapped against his thigh twice.

“I spent a few days in prison. Then I was brought to the Spectacle field and thrown into the pen with the Kuskador servant who’d served me the wine.”

Lexi inside that pen, with the wolves in the field.

“I’d lived in the Royal Court long enough to forget that I really didn’t belong there,” he said. “You start believing that as long you’re careful and smarter than most of them … But that night I looked up at the spectators and saw the women I’d slept with, and the men I’d gamed with, making bets on how long I’d last.”

All expression left his face. “They’d given the Kuskador her ration of sun potion—so she couldn’t change— but hadn’t given me a drop in four days. I changed to my beast, half crazed from withdrawal, contained in that cage with no one but a small, terrified girl to fight me off…”

My hand went to my mouth.

“After my appetite had been satisfied, they dropped the sides of the pen and the Raha’ells moved in. You know what saved me? I flared. For the first time in my miserable existence, I flared.” His shoulders lifted in a huff of disbelief. “Saved by the Raha’ells’ prophecy—that one day the Son of Lukynae would come for them and they’d know him by his flare. I ended up fucking one of their bitches right under the viewing stand, a few feet from all my fine royal friends.”

“Was that Anu’s mother?”

“Yes, that was her mother,” he replied. “The Black Mage ‘forgave’ me the next day though he gave me something to remember my ‘error.’”