The Thing About Weres

“Oh shit,” muttered Cordelia.

More of a misfire, really, I thought in dismay. A lot like my miniflares before I found My One True Thing.

“Boys, put on your glasses,” said the Were in Black, sounding bored. His goons whipped out dark-rimmed glasses identical to his, and put them on. “If that’s all she’s got, I don’t think we have anything to worry about, but we may as well be armed. The Council paid the coven a good chunk of change for these things. Guaranteed protection against any strong flare.” The NAW’s main man thought that was funny, he did. His shoulders shook, before he remembered his role as a professional goon and reined in his amusement. With firmer lips, and a voice deepened to reflect the gravitas of the moment, the Were in Black said, “The following people have also been charged: Harry Windcombe, Russell Biggs, and Frank Evers.”

Frank Evers? I flicked a WTF toward Cordelia.

Knox nodded toward the west where the sun was beginning to follow a downward arch toward the western, ragged line of trees. “You’ve got an hour until you meet all your jury. Full restraints, boys. Gag and bind ’em.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

He opened the door on Harry’s truck, and then with one foot on the running board, smiled. “They call me Knox.”

And that’s how Plan B ended. With a hiss of air from my lungs, my early dinner waiting for me on the dinette’s table, and the stiff edges of the yellow Cherry Blossom box cutting into my sweating hand.

Chapter Six

This house will be the death of me. For all its gabled grandeur, the Trowbridges’ cream-colored Victorian looked abandoned. One of the shrubs under the bay window was leafless. The portion of the front lawn that hadn’t gone to seed had given way to weed. A memory came unbidden: Bridge, eighteen and shirtless, pushing the lawn mower around his home. Headphones on. MP3 player jammed in the front pocket of his faded cut-off jeans.

I should have asked Biggs to look after it better but I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone walking through the rooms. It was not a place for the curious. It was the place of my deepest hurt.

That’s where I’d lost another part of me.

The hour had passed achingly slowly. Knox’s minions had let me sit and stew in silence while they’d passed the time watching one of those television shows featuring a new mom, a boyfriend, and a paternity test. At the end of the program (the paternity test proved negative), the beefier of Knox’s minions had blindfolded me with a dirty red bandana while the ferret-faced one had riffled through our mail.

Just to make conversation, I’d said to Fatso, “I thought all Weres were lean.”

“Shut up.” It hadn’t been a cordial response, but then again, we weren’t destined to be friends, Fatso and I. After my observation, he’d taken care to make sure my blindfold was tied tight enough to make my eyes pound and my head feel like it was in a vise.

That’s when it had occurred to me, admittedly a little late, that my personal understanding of Weres might have been woefully limited, because bowlegged Fatso was living proof that not all Fur-boys were clever, tall, and lean. Who knew? I’d thought all wolves looked like the Creemore Weres—long-distance runners versus weightlifters.

I’d been wrong.

As they drove me to my inquisition, managing to hit every pothole on the rutted dirt road, I kept mentally playing that Bobbie McGee song. Not the whole song, because I don’t know the whole song. I know most of the melody and fragments of the lyrics because Cordelia’s head is crammed with old songs, like the one about Bobbie McGee and his dirty red bandana—a tune she’d taken to singing as she scrubbed at the lime deposits around the trailer’s chronically leaking taps. Here was another truth: while facing bad guys is tough, facing them without your friends is tougher. All of a sudden, I was so keenly aware of everything. I was busted flat—in the wrong car, on the wrong road, traveling to the wrong place, without the comfort of my personal Bobbie McGee, Cordelia.

They’d hustled her and the boys into the open bed of Harry’s truck and driven them away not long after Knox got into his truck. Her last comment to me had been uttered while she stood beside me on the trailer’s meager front steps, the delivery pitched low. She’d meant it for my ears only, and she delivered it in a tone of grim certainty, as if she’d looked into the future and figured out all the options and likelihoods, and had done so in one quick flutter of her fake black lashes.

“When the chance comes, don’t wait for us,” she said. “Run.”

I’d worried over that suggestion all the way to the Trowbridge place. Puzzled over the gap between who she thought I was and who I thought I was, as Knox’s goons shoved me down to the floor in the back, and told me to “stay.” And oddly, for someone who found living by rules difficult, I’d done just that—I hadn’t tried to get up, or kick anyone, or hissed anything nasty to Ralph when he chose to burrow into the cup of my bra. I’d been silent— thoughtful even—quietly taking advantage of the rough nap of the carpet to rub the blindfold as high as my left eyebrow as I tried to figure out who, what, and why.

I needed to see.

A minor rebellion. Fat-guy had yanked me out of the truck before I’d worked myself free of the blindfold, and when I’d lifted my hands to tug it away, Knox’s voice had come out of nowhere. “Leave it!”

Oh really? Enough.

But before I could do what I meant to—yank that damn thing off and toss it in Knox’s face—Fatso had pinned my arms behind me. Mutiny quelled.

Still, my efforts in the truck had won me a spy hole if you will. Light glimmered through the tiny crack over my left cheekbone. The sky was not yet black. Gray-blue in the west, indigo blue where the moon hung low in the sky. If I tilted my head, I could see well enough to note that there were a lot of cars illegally parked on the Alpha’s front lawn.

So, the pack was already here. Waiting.

My Were paced. Back and forth, forth and back. On every circuit, she brushed the spot where my Fae talent usually lolled, and each time she did she uttered another rumble of deep distress. We—Hedi Incorporated— weren’t firing on our usual three cylinders, she told me. We weren’t we anymore.

Well, tell me something I didn’t know. My gut felt hollow without the reassuring weight of my Fae bobbing inside me. But it occurred to me, right then, that if I kept listening to my Were unravel, I would soon be leaking her despair through my skin, making me, in effect, as obvious a snack choice as meat-on-a-stick.

I need to stop listening to my Were.

Knox led us through the backyard. “This way,” he said for the benefit of his guards, as he veered off for the worn trail. The light was dim in the woods. No one talked. The urge to make a dash for it was almost overpowering, but the fat guard Knox had appointed as my personal companion never loosened his grip on my arm. And besides, I don’t do that anymore.

That’s the thing I don’t do, Cordelia. Hadn’t you noticed? I don’t run anymore.

The old Hedi would have; the new and improved version couldn’t. Not after seeing Trowbridge take my beating. And yet, had it changed anything? Here I was, right back to where I’d been six months ago, future looking grim, being shoved down a trail through the woods by someone who really, really didn’t like me.

Fine time to develop a moral code.

“Hurry up.” The beefy goon was a mountain of a man, given to double negatives. Fat and stupid; Fatso’s life had to be a bitch.

Remember to use that against him.

I bowed my head, and under the guise of complete submission, used the time to experiment with a combination of grimaces and forehead pleats. By the time we emerged from the trees into the gathering place, I’d eyebrow-shrugged my blindfold up so that it sat crookedly over the bridge of my nose. Fat and stupid hadn’t noticed. But I felt a tiny smidgen of hope. I was getting closer to full vision. Left eye open and recording the sights as I trudged to my destiny. Right eye operating at fifty percent capacity, which was both good and bad. I wasn’t