The Thing About Weres

I bit down on a whimper as I fumbled to place her over my head.

My brother closed the door to the trailer with a violent tug, which could have caused real damage to Biggs’s lupine snout if his wolf hadn’t been nimble enough to jerk back in time.

“You’re embarrassing me,” I hissed to my twin. “Those are my friends out there. They’ve been good to me. I don’t how I could have gotten through these last months—”

His head very slowly turned my way, and his gaze fell on Merry, hanging from my neck, and for some reason, I got that feeling again—like I should cover her up and be afraid—and that annoyed me and deflated the general esprit de corps, so I muttered, “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” he asked, with a thread of challenge in his voice.

Geesh. He’s sounding as territorial as a Were. Merry scuttled up to my shoulder and gave a bleat of orange-yellow. “Looking like that,” I said, a tad snappishly.

Lexi’s gaze roved, swiftly assessing the cheap oak cabinets, the stained carpeting, the narrow curtains with their fussy little tiebacks. “And that is?”

“Like you’re a cowboy in a wanted poster wearing a bowler. It’s already weird enough. The long hair, and —” I blew some air out of my nose. “Like right now. You’re doing it again. Stop being so…”

He walked down the short corridor toward Cordelia’s room. Three seconds spared on examining it from the doorway, before he turned, wiping his nose. “What?” he said, passing me to go check out the other end of the trailer.

Calculating and scary looking. Different. But everything was different for him here, wasn’t it? And he hadn’t had ten years to get used to it, or a friend like Merry. “Forget it.” I shrugged, forcing my amulet to tighten her grip on my bra strap.

My brother’s eyes were greener when they rested on Merry.

I’m not sharing. Not Merry. “Why don’t you put down your knapsack and relax? I put out some food.”

He nodded, but I recognized the onset of trouble in the set of his shoulders as he brushed past me to head for the other end of home-sweet-home.

Yup. Trouble.

There was a frozen quality to the way he stood staring into my bedroom, oddly similar to the way I sometimes stared at the numbers on the bathroom scale.

I stifled a sigh. Who dressed him? If that was what they wore in the Fae realm, somebody better send a fashion rescue team to Threall, stat. Unlike Mad-one’s vaguely medieval garment, there wasn’t even a trace of Middle Earth in my brother’s clothes. His couture was a bastardized blend of sixties pop culture—I was forming a definite hatred for his hat—and swashbuckler movies. And it was devoid of color. Everything was either gray, or white, black.

A muscle worked in his jaw.

I sucked in my cheeks and opened the fridge. “You want anything to drink? I’ve got some Coke, and there’s some apple juice left.”

“Do you have anything stronger?” he asked, disappearing into my room.

“No, I don’t.” Cordelia didn’t drink. Worrying my lip, I poured two glasses of Coke and replaced the bottle in the fridge. What the hell is he doing in there? There wasn’t that much to look at. My room was small and regrettably short of sparkly things. The only personal touches were my books—oh crap, he wasn’t thumbing through my books, was he? I grimaced at the thought. Some of them naturally fell open to the racy sections.

“Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you come back into the living room?”

A beat later he did, offering me a fleeting, cool smile—one that felt as authentic as a diplomat’s—before saying, “I need to use your sink. Have you got any shampoo?”

“I left hot water in the tank.” I squeezed in my stomach as he passed me. He sucks up more space than Cordelia.“Why don’t you take a shower?”

“I don’t need one now.” Lexi placed his knapsack beside the sink and frowned at the kitchen’s nickel tap and faucet.

“I used up a whole bottle of Cordelia’s clear nail polish covering the areas where the finish had worn down,” I told him, recognizing his concern. “There’s not much iron in the steel. You won’t feel a thing.”

He gave me an approving smile and set to unwinding the string wrapped around the closure on his satchel. The bag was large and made of supple black leather, with an embellished design on the front. Before he lifted the flap, he muttered something.

Then I felt a shock. Just a little one. A tiny zap.

“What was that?” I asked.

A flash of pure devilment—possibly mixed with a soupcon of pride—lit Lexi’s face and made him appear, if not young, then younger. I smiled at him and asked, with a naughty-naughty voice, “Spill. What did you just do?”

“I used my talent to break the ward on the bag,” he said, giving me a lopsided grin that melted my heart. “I can see magic, and if I can see it—”

“You can steal it,” I said, with wonderment. “That’s how you nicked my magic.”

“It’s what I do. Not another Fae in Merewnyn can see magic like I can.”

A stench filled the room.

“Fae Stars!” I pressed my hand to my nose, then gasped as the bag flexed. “What have you got in that bag?”

“Shh,” he muttered. “Don’t scare her.”

“You traveled through the Gates of Merenwyn with a living creature tucked in your knapsack?” I said, awed.

“No, I leaped through the portal with the Black Mage’s bag,” he said with a grin. The flap lifted, and a nose twitched, scenting the air. Flesh pink, small. “His ferret, Steellya, just happened to be inside it.”

The Black Mage. The hair stood up on the back of my neck at the way he said that name so casually. “Have you given any thought to what happens if her owner decides to follow you and reclaim his personal property?”

“He’d need an amulet to do that.” Lexi cradled the ferret in his arms. An inquisitive face—white muzzle, black ring around the eyes, highlighted by another band of white—tilted sideways to examine me. “And she smells because she hasn’t been bathed.”

“He keeps a ferret in his bag? Who keeps a ferret in his bag?”

Lexi’s expression grew harsh. “The bag’s an improvement on her usual quarters. A little cage, filled with soiled straw. Never enough water or food. Rest easy, Steellya,” he said, putting the plug in the sink. “Let me wash that filth off you.”

“Cordelia’s going to have a fit,” I murmured, watching him squeeze a dollop of detergent into the filling sink. “What does the Black Mage do with a ferret?”

“She can squirm into places that Fae can’t. Is Cordelia the animal whose scent fouled the bedroom back there?” he asked, in a neutral enough voice.

I felt my spine stiffen.

Then he cast me a glance over his shoulder and softened me with another authentic Lexi smile. “Thanks for putting the food out, runt. But do you have any hot dogs? You wouldn’t believe how I used to dream about those.”

Which is how I found myself kneeling in front of our tiny refrigerator, pawing through the cold-cut drawer looking for hot dogs while listening to my brother’s husky, soothing murmur as he bathed the Black Mage’s ferret in the sink that Cordelia daily scoured with a soft scrub brush and a little bleach.

A familiar feeling—Lexi and I breaking a couple of rules.

With a wash of tenderness, I remembered again the last thought picture Lexi had ever sent me—the one with the flea-shampoo-doused Were in the tin bath—and without pausing to think twice, I gave my brother a mental nudge, thinking he’d enjoy the symmetry.