The Thing About Weres

It was just a little one. Nothing really in terms of nudges.

I’d even call it tentative.

Terror—that’s what he poured into me in return. Sick, twisting dark fear. The type that makes your heart suddenly lurch into your throat. That fills you with panic. Oh Goddess! Is this the inside of my brother’s head? I screamed, hands covering my ears in protection. But from what? It was in me! An asp of horror, slithering and brushing against good memories and bad. Leaving a slime trail of utter ruin in—

And then it stopped.

“Shit,” cursed Lexi. “I didn’t mean it—”

“Get away from me!” I recoiled from him, my elbow up to shield my face.

“Hell,” he said brokenly. “It’s been trained into me. One of the first things you learn in the Fae realm is to fight back when someone tries to touch your mind.”

“What’s happened to you? You’re nothing like Lexi!”

“I am,” he said, sinking to his knees beside me. Then softer, “I am Lexi.”

The fridge door hit the cabinet as I scuttled out of his reach. “Trowbridge called you the Black Mage’s Shadow. He said you were responsible for genocide! Against Weres! That you were a cold-blooded killer—”

“Hell,” the Fae murmured, shaking his head. “Don’t believe everything you heard from the wolf.”

“No! My brother didn’t hate being touched. My twin wouldn’t have pulled away from me. My Lexi would never have sent a thought picture like that. Ever! You put that, that—” I stumbled for the right word. “Sickening shit in my head.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so—”

“You slammed the door on Biggs and made sure he heard you say, ‘Dogs don’t belong in a house!’ You don’t want my food, but you keep looking at Merry as if you want to steal her off me. You wear your hat in my home. You’re…”

And then … my words dried up.

Because in that spate of accusations Lexi finally found his way to protest. He pulled off his hat and held it against his chest as if it were a shield he didn’t want to drop, before he laid it on the floor. Then … he just stayed there. Waiting for my verdict. Immobile, his face carefully shuttered, his body language broadcasting acceptance of whatever came next. Or maybe, something even worse than that. Not an acceptance so much as weary resignation.

Lexi, Lexi.

Merry was hot against my chest. A wolf was howling outside, while another threw himself against the flimsy trailer door. I knew all that. Dimly, I recorded all those things. Warnings and calls to arms. But all I could do was stare at his uncovered head, feeling my horror and confusion and rage slide away like the leftovers on a dinner plate being tipped into the garbage.

“Who tattooed that obscenity on you?” I whispered.

At first glance, the mark on his skin looked like a paw print. Obviously intended to be a wolf’s, based on the shape and claws. Not quite half the size of one of Harry’s prints, but pretty damn close. Turned sideways, so the tips of its claws looked as if they were stretching for the peaked tip of my brother’s ear. That alone would have been insulting, but it was the detail inked inside the five pads that really squeezed my stomach.

A wolf face’s had been worked into the paw print, and the ink mixed with magic, so that the buffs and blacks, the greens and beiges would never fade. Forevermore, my brother’s skull would thus be adorned: above the peaked tip of his ear, a lupine face poised with predatory anticipation, frozen in ink—black nostrils, black fur, smiling lips—forever caged within the track of the wolf.

“This is good,” he said, spearing another piece of roast beef and putting it into his mouth.

My brother has a hard time looking me in the eye, I thought, watching his eyes flick away from mine. And he ate too fast, but then he always had. Gobbling down food as if it, too, were territory and he was in a hurry to go back and stake his claim to more.

It was quiet in our home.

In the way of most families in the midst of a horrible, soul-tearing fight, we’d hit pause, because that’s what you do when you have a two-ton rogue elephant in your living room. You hit that stop button, because admitting you have a pachyderm problem implies an obligation to do something about it. You start worrying that getting it out of the house might involve painful demolition. You start thinking about the ugliness of walls torn down to studs and the cost of reconstruction. Maybe, given the alternative, you could live with an elephant in your home after all.

Time out? my gaze had asked of my twin after he’d doffed his hat.

Absolutely, he’d nodded gruffly, a flush tinting his cheekbones.

So, first, we’d taken care of outside business. My brother rescued the utensil crockery from the ferret’s exploration, and I went to placate Harry—who’d broken through the door—before he huffed and puffed and blew the whole trailer down.

Harry, being Harry, was not inclined to being fluffed off, without a thorough inspection of the premises and my person. Once finished with that, he stopped, and eyed the ferret askance. “It’s why I screamed,” I lied to him. “I didn’t expect a ferret to come out of his bag.”

It’s a good thing a wolf can’t raise an eyebrow and drawl, “Bullshit.”

Merry had sparked a red blip when the ferret in question chose that moment to overturn a mug on the counter.

“The ferret’s not prey,” my brother had announced, sealing his silver flask. He wiped his lip with two fingers, and took a deliberate step in front of the animal. “Touch the ferret and I’ll take you out, wolf”—that’s what his body language told Harry.

I’d smothered a smile at that.

My brother, Lexi, the Ferret Defender of the Free World.

Harry had curled his lip at my twin. Then he’d given me one more weighted glance before he’d limped out of our twenty-seven-foot home on wheels. Lexi had picked up the door, and fitted it back more or less in place. When that was done, he’d leaned against the wall and filled in a bit of dead airtime by tying knots in a strip of sealant. Finally, he’d said tautly, “My master, the Black Mage. He ordered this … decorative touch.”

“Master?” My hand had gone to Merry. “Was he the same Fae who stole you away the night Mum and Dad died?” She’d curled a tendril of ivy around my thumb.

“Yes,” he’d said simply, as if that reply were the answer to all the questions, the key to all the things I didn’t understand.

I remembered that Fae. Long rectangular face. Too much jaw. High wide forehead. Hooded eyes, their blue hue leached to something that chilled. The cold one. “Rose of the House of Deloren, you’ve broken the Treaty of Brelland, and allowed one of the unclean to bathe in our sacred pool. According to the laws of Merenwyn and the Treaty of Brelland, your life is forfeit,” he’d said in a voice that sounded flat and bored. As if death and cruelty were just another job-sheet task he’d initialed. Then the cold Fae had examined my brother as if he were livestock. “I’ll take him as payment.”

For what?

For my mother’s sin of loving a Were? For my aunt’s folly of trusting a bad man?

“You’ve been staring at it for five minutes. Stop it,” Lexi murmured now.

Hard not to. One side of Lexi’s head was shaved clean, and under the kitchen light his white skin gleamed, an obscene and horrible contrast to the other side of his head, where a heavy mane of wheat-ripe hair fell. Lexi had told me that it was kept so by the Black Mage’s command, in order to better display the tattoo inked above my brother’s ear.

“Now will you tell me about your life in Merenwyn?”

“Not yet.”

Mouth pulled down in a faint half frown, my twin studied Anu-the-wonder-bitch through the window. She, in turn, was favoring us with a piercing, unstinting stare. It’s unnerving, the way she doesn’t blink. The little brown wolf sat alone, ears pointed toward us, Ralph’s chain half buried in her fur.

“Can she understand English?” I asked Lexi.