The Thing About Weres

As far as the pack could tell, I’d just willed the old wolf into midair. They couldn’t see my magic, now arched over my head like a green serpent poised to strike.

Well, that’s not completely true. Cordelia could see it.

And of course half-bred me.

Oh, and Ralph, who chose that moment—oh thank you, Karma—to stick his head out of my cleavage. Glowing like a lit emergency flare, my would-be protector uncoiled a rope of gold and held it up menacingly, a mash-up of the Three Musketeers meeting Spaceballs.

So much for “stay low.”

The field emptied fairly quickly after that. I’m not sure if Cordelia even needed to herd some strays toward the path. Or if Harry had to stand jaws open in a snarl, pink gums showing above his sharp, fanged teeth, as they rushed past him. And absolutely, Biggs snapping at George’s back leg was completely over the top.

The last two to exit the gathering place were the Scawens wolves. The older female was delicately boned and more cream than the usual black, brown, and buff coloration of the average Creemore Were. The younger female was fairly sturdy. Rachel Scawens said something to her daughter. I don’t understand that nonverbal stuff, so to me it was a pantomime—nibble, nibble, nip, shoulder check, snuffle throat. Petra Scawens articulated a reply, which sounded almost like a sluggish car turning over in winter.

Then the two of them hung a left—so closely pressed together they seemed to be a six-legged dog—for the woods. Just before they slid into the forest’s welcoming shadows, Rachel Scawens’s wolf face turned to look at me.

“You are Fae,” her eyes said.

Then Trowbridge’s sister spun away.

Sometimes I needed to stand on the Stronghold point and stare at the fairy pond below. Usually, it calmed me. The Creemore pond was pastoral and pungent in summer, bird-busy and weed-sweet in fall.

It would be nice to say that I left my heart down by the pond’s pebble-strewn banks, but that’s just some dumb perversion of an old geezer song. I still had my heart, tucked away where it should be, under a layer of fat, inside a cage of bone, nestled near all the other organs I needed to survive.

But I had left part of me there.

My fingers found the pointed peak of my left ear. I stroked its tip, watching a white moth dance dizzily over the top of the cocklebur thicket near the water’s edge, willing my heart to stop its anxious pounding.

I think I screwed up.

“Whatever you do, keep your Fae canned.” That’s the first thing Cordelia had told me six months ago when we’d stood together outside the trailer and watched the last of the pack’s well-wishers leave.

My heart wouldn’t settle. It kept drumming away inside me as if I’d just completed a triathlon with a fifty- pound weight strapped to my back. Watching the mallard family perform figure eights around the bulrushes wasn’t relieving its frantic thump-thump one bit.

I’m like a pressure cooker, filled to capacity and forgotten. Now I’m rocking on the back burner. Sooner or later, I’m going to blow, spewing bits of Were and Fae all over the pack.

That would be bad.

I inhaled slowly, fighting for calm.

Back in spring, the fairy pond had been bisected in the middle by a pine log. Lily pads had grown in its northern end and only the lower half, near the beach on which my pirate rock held court, had been open water. But one night a couple of weeks ago—a night where a raging Goddess had lit up the sky with her thunder strikes —someone had pulled the log from the pond and left it up by the culvert on the road. They’d poured a half gallon of kerosene on it, but after all those years spent pickling in the fetid water, it hadn’t done much except smolder. I’d sent Biggs and Harry to track the vandals down, but they’d come back to report that the torrential rains had rinsed away the perpetrator’s scent signatures.

No one owned up to doing it. Nobody squealed.

Pack solidarity, you’ve got to love it, right?

I belonged here and yet I didn’t. These tree-covered hills, these grassy fields, this pine-scented air; they all felt so familiar to me. If I kept my eyes shut and didn’t take in the whole picture, I could pretend that the old path leading from the Stronghold side was the same mud-slick one my twin Lexi and I had flown down on our bikes when we were eight, grinning at each other and shrieking at the top of our lungs as our tires hit the little puddle near the end. I could remember how the water would shoot up, half translucent, half muddy, leaving a wake behind us as significant as any boat launch’s inaugural spray, and how we’d crowed at this visual statement of our superiority. Because in those days, in our naive arrogance, we’d assumed the splatter trail of mud that flattened grasses on either side of the trail was a statement. We had passed through and left evidence of our passage. Of course, in our triumph, we inevitably forgot that the bottom of one Creemore hill usually led to the start of another.

Not all fairy tales ended happily.

As witness Casperella’s final resting place—the edge of the bad part of St. Luke’s cemetery, surrounded by the crumbling ruins of a freakin’ stone wall.

Goddess, is that where the pack buries Faes?

“Wakey, wakey,” I said to the entity within me. She’d been feigning sleep, possibly tuning into the turn of my thoughts. But I’d felt her, dragon-ready, in my belly. Alert and interested. Pumped, as it were.

“Go,” I said.

Given release, she ran up my chest, gave my heart a big enough kick to make it skip a beat, and then surged to my shoulders and down my arms. A squeeze through the wrists and then she funneled a stream of Fae magic to the end of each of my fingers.

Then she waited. Patently obedient. Wholly gleeful.

I pointed my magic-hot hand to a broken branch that clung to the cliff. “Attach.” A line of green magic leaped from my fingertips, sizzled through the air, and landed with a soft kiss on a twisted branch. I raised my hand, and with that upward movement the piece of maple lifted, my magic a strong-armed extension for my will.

My Fae talent could not be faulted. It did exactly what I asked, transporting the stick across the open water to where I pointed and then lowering it, so gently, so tenderly, onto the bank of the pond.

She meekly waited for the final order.

“Detach.” The cables of magic slipped free from its burden. It hovered, a fat fluorescent cable, faintly undulating, perhaps expecting me to call it back. I stared at the green light extruding from my fingertips, and then imagined a pair of scissors cutting each strand away, severing me from my talent. Snip, snip, snip, cuticle-close to the nail. Hide all her traces. Make her disappear.

“Cut,” I said.

Instantly, the tether between me and my line of Fae magic broke. The floating string of magic rolled back on itself and formed a fat, green, translucent ball, bobbing slightly on a current of air. I watched, curious as to what it would do next, now that it had been given freedom.

Nothing, apparently. It hovered there, glimmering in the moon’s silver light, unreal as Tinker Bell’s fairy wings, alive as the dragonfly that had just zipped past it.

Busy as a hive. As inherently evil as … Oh hell. As me.

“Disappear,” I said flatly.

A moment of hesitation then poof, the ball of Fae-me broke apart into a starburst pattern of hundreds of brilliant bits of green. The sparks lingered in the air—dying remnants of a fire that refused to be quenched—before they slowly faded.

They’d find their way back to me, each and every spark. That’s when the full measure of payback pain would come. Those of Fae blood can’t use magic in this world without expecting to pay the price. My fingers were already fat and swollen. Painless now, but that soon would change.

A bit of a wind lifted the hair at the nape of my neck and sent shivers through the trees.

The air above the pond was motionless.

I had maybe fifteen minutes before the first wave of pain hit.