The Thing About Weres

relationship shifts—preferring to look at him than cast my gaze toward Trowbridge’s wolf.

Watching the Fae’s mouth, I understood that Trowbridge’s wolf and the Fae were in the grip of a silent, nasty conversation.

It seemed that whole telepathic thing wasn’t limited to dogs.

The Fae flinched, and then said sharply, “That would be impossible. You have not fulfilled your part of the bargain.”

Trowbridge had made a bargain, had he? With a “cold-blooded,” murderous Fae?

I ran my thumb gently over the blister forming on the tip of my index finger, thinking about escape scenarios. I’d need money or a credit card. And a car. A fast one. While I plotted, the standoff between Fae and wolf stretched, until one of the ravens watching from the tall pines grew tired of the impasse, and broke the tension with a sharp caw.

The Fae sighed and removed his hat, sliding it into the curve of his elbow. “There. I am hatless. Are you satisfied?” His lip curved, and he insolently added something in Merenwynian.

Trowbridge wolf bristled. The bitch beside him groomed her paw.

But the Fae turned to me and bowed.

And then, I got that feeling you get before a thought is fully formed—that wait-a-minute, here-it-comes prickle. Now that he’d doffed his chapeau, I could see him fairly well. Not perfectly—moonlight will never show things as clearly as a good old hundred-watt bulb—but well enough. The hat was a shield, I thought. Without it, he looked curiously vulnerable. His hair was strange, shorn to the skin on one side of his head, the other side covered by a long fall of sun-bleached hair. And his face seemed longer. His nose had been broken once and not properly reset.

But it was the expectant quality in his eyes—deceptively sleepy, tilted up at the edges—that scratched at a scab almost healed.

“I will fulfill my part of our agreement once you’ve proven to me that they accept you in mortal skin,” he said, turning his head slightly toward Trowbridge. “Think twice. If you kill me, no one wins. Those most in need will never find their way to the Safe Passage.”

I don’t know what the Shadow said after that. My gaze clung to his long, wide mouth, fixated on the way his lip puckered at the corners. Then he rolled his neck, as if he were getting ready to do something really dangerous.

Oh heavenly stars.

Bowler-hat glanced back at me, and our gazes locked.

The final, axis-spinning shift.

Once the Fae had been thin—too much so, a slenderness born of nervous energy, and high expectations, as if he burned off food faster than he could eat it. Like he yearned to move fast enough to outrun the restlessness that was always part of him. That was gone. Now he was solid the way men get when they mature. Still lean legged, but the upper part of his torso was well developed, his neck no longer sapling thin.

He was so damn old.

How is that possible?

My Were turned around inside me in an anxious circle, and with each restless circuit, she brushed her flank against my Fae, who kept sending sparks of malicious glee up my spine. I wanted to tell them both to buzz off—for once just leave me the hell alone—this day had been a day beyond all days.

My world kept reeling.

I’d like to faint, I thought, resting the back of my wrist hard against my churning gut. If only I was the fainting sort.

He was still handsome in a battered-beauty sort of way. But then I’d always suspected he’d taken the lion’s share in the looks category, hadn’t I? Hell, he’d always been a thief—sucking the good genes right out of the womb we shared. He got the courage I lacked. The gift of gab that I longed for. The brightness and light of my mother, mixed with an adventurous streak that was, perhaps, his alone.

The other half of me.

Once, half of my soul.

My brother, my twin.

Chapter Eleven

Trowbridge’s wolf leaned his dog head into my personal space and gave me a look. Don’t ask me what it meant. I was beyond decoding canine body language, and no one, not one damn flea-infested mangy one of them, had given me a copy of Visible Pooch Cues for You: What They Mean, and How to Deal.

“Don’t you have places to be?” I asked, darting another disbelieving glance at my twin.

If a dog could huff, he did. Then he turned his muzzle up to the night sky and howled.

As howls go, it was the trumpet call.

Long ago, when I was just a little Fae-mutt asleep in my bed, I’d heard a similar bay. A song to the moon. A ring-out to the clan. “Come,” it said. “Run with me.” Trowbridge’s wolf did it again—a true Alpha calling to his pack—and the response from the gathered kin was fervid. Yips, yaps. You didn’t have to be a canine to recognize their joy. He trotted through the center of the pack, and those closest to his passage sank low onto their front legs and tried to lick his muzzle as he passed.

The King is passing. Kneel.

He gave them no heed. Head high, ears forward, he trotted to where Cordelia and the boys waited. Gave homage to their loyalty with a thorough inspection of their snouts, their necks, and their wounds. A conversation —probably telepathic—occurred.

A chuff of agreement from Harry and a slower one from Biggs. The two of them came over close to where I sat and settled. Backs turned to the pack. Gazes fixed on the Fae.

Lexi’s guards, or perhaps mine.

Hurt curdled my stomach, barely appeased by the fact that the little brown wolf was next to receive a set of orders. She slunk over to join Harry and Biggs, tail drooping, Ralph a glimmer of gold about her throat.

Yawned and sat.

Three guards then.

My One True Thing turned and gave another piercing howl—one that said, “You and me, moon, let’s get it on”—and then, the natural-born Alpha of Creemore, my grade-school crush, and the ghost that I had carried in my heart for the last six months, turned for the woods. He stopped one shrub in. Directed to me another piercing command … this one I had no trouble interpreting, a furred promise for “I shall return,” before he melted into the forest.

I watched, feet numb, mouth flat, heart—well, Goddess knows where that was, I was hardly conscious of the loss of its usually comforting thump—as the rest of his newly claimed pack fought for rank and file. Nipping and snapping, growling and yelping, each one struggling to be first, or second, or perhaps third to follow his exalted ass down the trail. Rachel Scawens won second place. Then another jostle and a yelp, and a stiff-tailed wolf—they all looked the same to me—secured third best. The middle ranks sorted out their relative positions. Some of those discussions were downright ugly, all fangs and crinkled snouts, throat growls and yips.

I was conscious of Lexi standing behind me, watching me watch them. I felt … uncomfortable. Suddenly shy. I didn’t know what to do, except sit there, with my hands resting on my thighs, palms upward and fingers throbbing; my brain was curiously numb.

Cordelia’s white wolf was the last. By choice, I knew. She made a whine of distress, her gaze flitting back over her shoulder to the brother I knew stood nearby, and then back to the path down which the pack had disappeared.

Yes, Cordelia, our boyfriend’s back.

“It’s all right,” I told her, lifting my shoulders. “He won’t hurt me. Go now.”