The Thing About Weres

NAW was not sure how many of the charges leveled in the letter of complaint were accurate, but now, looking at the evidence—”

“What letter of complaint?” asked the insurance guy.

“What evidence!” I howled.

“I don’t believe he was ever mated to her,” Rachel insisted.

“It’s easy enough to prove.” Knox’s brown eyes were calm and nerveless, shielded as they were behind the magic-coated lenses of his glasses. “If she’s truly mated to your Alpha, she will bear his scent, correct?” He pulled something out of his back pocket—black, plastic—a box cutter? No, not that, it’s too … I blinked as he hit a button and a knife blade flicked out.

A switchblade. I took a half step back—but really, there’s only so far you can retreat when you have a tub of lard behind you.

What is Knox going to do with that knife? Peel my skin off?

The thought flashed—it would be a good time to turn into Buffy. Maybe lean back against Fatso, lift my legs and deliver a Jackie Chan double kick into Knox’s tight gut. But you don’t absorb that type of stuff watching reality TV or reading historical romances; you learn that in a dojo. Since I’d spent ten years either gazing out of an apartment window or reading yet another bodice ripper boosted from the bookstore, it wasn’t part of my first- response options. Instead, I did what felt natural. I cringed—shoulders hunched, chin tucked into my neck—as the knife-happy Were stepped forward for the kill.

Try not to cry out.

Knox sketched a smile, victorious and black hearted, and caught my chin with his fingers, forcing it to lift until we were nose to nose. His gaze roved over my face and then his brows knitted together. He visibly stiffened, intent—like a wolf’s sudden interest in a limping elk—on the heavy gold chain around my neck.

“She wears a fairy amulet.” He reached for the necklace around my neck.

Someone howled into the night. Eerily animallike though not as yet changed.

“You don’t want to do that.” I sketched a taunting smile.

Knox ignored me, and started hauling the Royal Amulet upward: an extraction that turned out to be a little more difficult than he might have imagined because Ralph didn’t want to leave the valley of the boobs. Not that way, anyhow. Not because some dumbass wolf was yanking his chain. Furious—as anyone could see by the purple bleats of indignation throbbing from the center of his stone—he rappelled up his chain in a superblur, shortening it behind him as he did—don’t ask me how he did that, but I can tell you that Merry used to do the same weird maneuver when she was trying out different looks—until he’d morphed from a twenty-inch necklace to a too-tight choker. Then, with a savagery to match the most feral wolf, he went for the Were in Black’s fingers.

Chomp. Knox’s mouth dropped open, and he took a quick step backward, which gave my amulet all the time he needed to burrow back under my T-shirt. Once under its meager cover, Ralph tore down his chain— zing!—swung over to my boob, and scuttled for cover inside my bra cup.

Knox snapped to Fatso, “Hold her tight!”

My heart began to beat like a cornered bunny’s as the Were in Black reached for the sleeve of my T-shirt. Grimly, Knox funneled his thumb underneath the fabric and kept going—his ragged nail scoring a line of pain along my bicep and shoulder—until he’d pleated the fabric all the way to my neck. The shirt dug into the back of my neck as he pulled the wad of jersey taut.

He lifted the knife then paused.

He’s teasing me with it. I registered that and, absurdly, that the skin over Knox’s flared nostrils was potted with big pores and that—oh look at that—moonlight can make a silver blade gleam in a deadly and beautiful way. My belly tensed as he pointed the tip at my shoulder. It’s going to hurt, it’s going to—

It didn’t.

Because it wasn’t my Fae blood he wanted—not right away, not yet. First he wanted me to curve my tail in shame. His sharp, moon-bright blade sliced through the T-shirt’s bunched material before I even had time to finish the thought, Oh my Goddess, he’s really going to stick me with that thing. My shirt fell apart. At least the right side of my bodice did. It flopped down like it was the bib of a pair of overalls, folding over itself, exposing my shoulder and a good part of bra.

Someone laughed.

My skin goosefleshed, since it was, as I’d said before, a particularly cold night—not because I was twenty- two years old and it was becoming painfully evident that next year, when my birthday passed, it would remain uncelebrated, but because the air suddenly felt frigid, as if death were passing its fingers over me, pinching me to see if I was done yet.

People keep wanting to kill me. Why is that?

Poor Ralph didn’t know where to go. There was no place to hide, because with another fabric fold and a quick slash of Knox’s blade, there went the other side. Two more slashes and my shirt wasn’t a shirt anymore. The shredded garment slid down to my hips, paused at the curve of my ass long enough to sign the separation papers, and then split in two. One tattered scrap ghosted down the back of my legs, hell-bent on kissing the earth. The other, Knox held aloft, speared on the tip of his shiny blade.

“Let those who doubt her guilt smell this,” he said, offering my white flag of shame to Rachel Scawens. “She doesn’t carry Trowbridge’s scent on her skin like a true mate should. She has to wear his clothing to fake you out. Test it! His signature is there, but it’s old. Didn’t anyone notice that? What did she do? Conjure up your obedience? Cast a spell on the pack? Mislead you through her magic?”

Rachel brought the scrap of fabric up to her sharp little snout with both hands, closed her eyes and inhaled. She kept it there, for one long second, and then her lids lifted. A dark hope—the type that hones cruelty until it’s dagger sharp—had swelled in her heart during that deep breath. Without comment, she passed the shredded bit of Trowbridge’s shirt to her daughter, and then stalked toward me, hips swinging. Her face was alight, no longer pulled down by gravity and sorrow. She leaned in, took a long, insulting sniff. “She has no scent of her own!”

The cheering ranks opened up for Rachel Scawens. She accepted the scrap of T-shirt from her daughter, and held the shredded T-shirt over her head as she walked deep into the throng. As Weres go, she was only moderately tall. Her head disappeared as they clustered closer. I heard her shout, “Smell it!”

The hair went up on my nape as one of the pack unleashed a howl.

It turned into a wolf mob. They crowded her, pushing at each other in a frenzy of eagerness to have their turn at the prize. Their humanity—that thin veneer over what they really were—fell. From deep within their midst, I heard her yell, “It’s my brother’s shirt! See, it belongs to Robbie!” She must have tossed it up high—I saw it flutter in the air—and someone caught it and tossed it again, and then it became a game, my white flag of shame flying over the heads of the gathered pack

“The Fae will come!” a man bellowed

“Chain her to the tree!” someone else yelled.

I spun my head toward Cordelia—her mouth was open, she was shouting something to me. Biggs’s head was doubled over his chains, he was visibly writhing in pain. Harry is head was thrown back, the tendons on his neck strained.

“Let them go,” I said to Knox. “They’re not part of this.”

“Too late,” he said.

“Magic, come to me!” I screamed.

Knox nodded to Rachel, and Fatso gave me a shove in the mob’s direction. It was like tipping a fox out of her cage at the start of a hunt. Five or six of Trowbridge’s pack rushed me. I flailed out blindly, and then gasped as Lucy Danvers’s elbow caught my head. Stunned, I found myself being lifted by a group of angry pack members. My body was turned, and I was carried facedown—my head spinning—right over to the old oak tree.

“Cover her eyes,” someone hissed. Hard hands pinned me to the tree as another’s stinking shirt was thrown over my head. They still think I have a flare. I heard the clink of the chain, and then someone went around and around the tree with it, like a reveler circling a maypole, painfully binding me to the tree at three points; once around my hips, another loop cutting into my waist, and the final spot a hard pressure across the top of my chest.

It was hard to breathe again. This is how Bridge must have felt.

“She is your Alpha’s mate,” Harry yelled. “She doesn’t—” His voice broke off into a sudden grunt.