The Thing About Weres

Lexi’s nudge had been well timed. I’d opened my mind (all you have do is to allow that searching blankness to extend) in invitation.

A slip, a slide, and he was in.

Ta-da!

My brother’s thought picture—the first in what I knew would be a series—was as clear as if I were squinting through a View-Master. His debut image was of the Jock stripped down to his tighty-whities followed by a close-up of a bottle of flea shampoo, succeeded by a snapshot of a garden hose—I’d started smirking by that point—then, an old-fashioned galvanized tub.

My twin waited a beat or so to raise my anticipation before he offered me his piece de resistance. It was a doozy—all the visual elements combined—a picture of the same Were, no longer smutty and smug, sitting bowlegged in a tiny tin bath, his head lathered with flea soap, a stream of tears streaking his flushed cheeks.

Okay, it was crude. But it worked.

I broke into a guffaw that made Ms. James drop her chalk.

Smiling in recollection, I glanced out of the window then bolted upright.

“Wolf,” Lexi threatened. “I will wear your pelt.”

The deep rumble coming from the lanky old wolf’s chest spoke of no good things coming to pass. Head lowered, shoulders stiff, Harry stood his ground. Biggs flanked him, hackles raised.

“It belongs to my family,” snarled Lexi. “Drop it. Now.” And then, proving that he truly was my twin, he flared. Green, just like me. A little weaker in terms of intensity—I didn’t see any of the three wolves prostrate themselves under its light—but maybe he hadn’t put his all into it.

“Calm down,” I soothed as I walked toward them. “Harry’s part of my inner circle, like Cordelia. He doesn’t expect to be challenged while on Stronghold land.”

“He is not my friend,” gritted out Lexi. “And I’m a Stronghold, which makes this my land, too.”

“No one is challenging your right as a Stronghold,” I said. “But Harry’s my friend and he’s welcome here.”

Lexi’s back stiffened. Then, with a deliberation that I’d spend some time thinking about later, he turned, and gave me a dose of my own medicine. Green light washed over me and just about bowled me over. Sit, bow, crawl, it said to me. Oh Goddess, the urge to go on my belly was almost overwhelming. I locked my knees. With a sneer, I asked, “You done now?”

His flare flickered out.

With a sigh, I sank to one knee, and leaned toward my former second-in-command. “What is it, Harry? What have you got?”

The old wolf gave my brother one last “any time” growl before limping his way over toward me. A string— no, not a string, a gold chain—hung looped from his black-rimmed lips.

I tilted my head, hope stirring.

Please let it be her. Please.

Harry stopped, lowered his head, and placed what he carried so gently in his mouth with exquisite care onto the ground.

It was many things—this lovely object that gleamed so wetly.

It was magic and valuable beyond words—a pendant, smaller than Ralph, made of amber and Fae gold.

And once, she’d been my only friend.

Chapter Twelve

“Merry, you came back.” My whisper broke in two; no, three; no four pieces—one for each word; a broken shard of one big fat crock of misery with a piece for my friend, and one for me. Another for the hope I’d held in my heart that she’d find a way to end the curse that kept her imprisoned in that hunk of amber, and the last for the future that we were going to live after this miserable night was done.

Because she’d come back when she should have stayed in Merenwyn with her own kind. Not here among wolves and humans. Not returned to the care of someone who didn’t have anything to offer her. No hope, no sweet life, no promise of anything except the same old miserable Hedi mess-up.

A wink of red glowed from within her amber belly. Warm red, the kind that spoke of love and comfort.

That’s what Trowbridge had told Harry before he left on the run, “Go find Merry.”

Biting my lip, I opened my palm.

Waited.

If Merry came back to me—it would be for me. Not because I demanded it. Not because I reached for her. It would be her choice. No more greedy fingers.

She’d be my equal.

I forced my mouth into the shape of an indifferent smile and held it there. But I am greedy, and sometimes, horribly needy, so I let my watering eyes feast on the sight of her. Before I sent her across the void she’d been brutalized by my aunt, but it seems that she, too, had found a measure of healing in Merenwyn. Her Fae gold seemed to glow, and the entwined ivy vines set around her amber stone had been recast. Each leaf was daintier —definitely smaller—and each one appeared vastly more articulated and accurately rendered than before; graduating from her old, flat, grade-school-artist version of an ivy leaf to something distinctly five lobed and well shaped, detailed enough for me to see a fanwork of veins running from the heart point near the base to the end of each fine tip.

She’d gone from dime-store workmanship to the type of jeweled artistry that belonged in a store that I’d never have the courage or the money to walk into. I peered into the heart of her pendant to the place where my true friend lived. She was an Asrai, like Ralph, bewitched like him, and shrunk until she was little more than a smudge of something dark in the interior of a semiprecious stone. Cursed to stay in a prison by Lou.

Merenwyn had been good for her. Even her amber stone appeared to have undergone an upgrade in the look-at-glorious-me sweepstakes. It seemed more polished, more lustrous.

Why, Merry? Why come back? Couldn’t anyone be found over there to break the curse that keeps you imprisoned? You’ll never find it here. I have no mages, no Book of Spells, no inside knowledge. No matter what Cordelia says, I’m still very much me.

Maybe that’s what she was looking at, inhaling the lack of differences—the depressing same-old, same-old sight of me on my knees, shoeless, with hair a mess—and maybe, just maybe, she was wondering exactly the same damn thing.

Should she really have braved the winds of the portal for this?

My feet had fallen to sleep under my rump. A wink of orange from her heart, as if she could read my thoughts and enjoyed the joke.

“I kept my promise, you know,” I whispered. “I’ve worn the Royal Amulet every day. I’ve fed that miserable sod and kept him clean and dry. I didn’t smash him against the wall when he tried to choke me a week ago … in my sleep.” I emphasized, just to make sure she understood how difficult the job had been. “I’ve renamed him. Unless you’ve got a better name for him, I’ve been calling him Ralph.” I chewed the inside of my lip. “I know you expected to see me wearing him, and I have. Really. But Trowbridge put him around the neck of that guard-bitch over there—if I hadn’t been woozy at the time, I would have seen it coming and fought him off. Tomorrow morning, when Trowbridge is human again, I’ll get Ralph back. I promise you. I’ll…”

My voiced dwindled to nothing.

And then, my friend chose me.

An unfurling of vines, a quick readjustment of her Fae gold, and she was as I knew her. A stick figure with two legs, and two arms, fashioned of ivy and impudent spunk, marching across the battlefield that separated us, trailing a golden rope of chain behind her. She marched right up into the crater of my cupped paw and straight back into my heart.