The Thing About Weres

look bad, you know? The Old Mage was really good at training his mystwalkers.” Then, with a contented sigh, “He’s so fucked.”

“How?” Tension set my teeth to the ragged edge of my thumbnail.

“The Court hasn’t got a seasoned mystwalker and his apprentices keep dying on him.” He rubbed his chin on his shoulder, then looked at me with a sly smile. “And now, he’s having a hard time finding new recruits. Every time he hears about some kid who walks in dreams, he sends me out, but most of the time, it turns out to be nothing. Just some villager starting a false rumor. Maybe the talent for it is dying out among the Fae.” He shook his head. “Good riddance. No one should be able to fuck with your mind like that.”

I tore off my nail and spat it out. “How does he train them?”

“I don’t want to talk about them anymore,” he mumbled.

“Just—” I reached over and gave him a prod. “Answer that last question.”

“Mind exercises.” Lexi tried to rub his nose, and missed. “The hard part isn’t teaching them to cut their soul free from their body—it’s getting them to return home. He sends them to Threall and they never come back.”

Lexi’s eyes drifted shut.

My mouth opened and then slowly closed.

Four hours later, I found myself in my bed, listening to Lexi search for a comfortable position in the bunk over my head. He’d taken a long nap on that narrow dinette seat—mouth open, neck bent awkwardly—and had roused only when I scolded the ferret for key theft. After rescuing his new pet, he’d wandered down to the bathroom. There, he’d stayed in the shower until the hot-water tank was dry and the ferret had knocked over every single thing on the counter. Then I’d heard the medicine cabinet open and close, the drawers slide open, my brush (or for that matter, possibly Cordelia’s) clatter in the sink.

And all the time I’d tracked the sounds of his snooping, I marveled that he was here, alternated with worrying about his reliance on the happy juice, and the curl of his lip when he’d spoken about mystwalkers.

I’d wanted to blurt out, “I’m one! I’m a mystwalker.”

But I hadn’t because I kept thinking about the look of disgust on his face and the expression of fear on my mum’s when she’d begged me not to tell anyone I was a mystwalker. “Not anyone. Not even your brother.” she’d warned me.

And now my mystwalker-hating brother was above me—he’d come out of the shower wearing the pants he’d worn before and a braid, fastened with one of Cordelia’s expensive hair elastics. I’d been right about the muscles. My brother’s upper body bordered on the impossible. A whole bunch of “ceps”—bi, tri, whatever—had been added onto his former stick-boy body.

He got ab, and I got flab.

I couldn’t find a good position in bed, either. A worry festered in me that he’d fall asleep before me, and somehow, I’d end up pulled into one of his dreams. That concern wasn’t a new one—I used to dread being dream-napped every night back when we slept in adjoining bedrooms, and then there had been a thin wall between us. And now there was only a mattress between us. Not even a wall. Worse was this stark fear—what if he turned around and asked, “What are you doing in my dream?”

And finally, of course, there was the other issue—the Trowbridge-scented bitch outside. I had two problems with the little brown wolf. Problem one: I wanted to kill her. Problem two: my instincts—usually guaranteed to lead me into trouble—were preaching caution. Yeah, yeah. I know romantic hogwash can hijack a girl’s intelligence and innate caution.

But let’s not forget I’m part Were.

My wolf was talking to me. Stay, she kept repeating. Stay.

Sometimes you have to listen to your inner-bitch. Besides, there was a part of me (a huge, honkin’ part) that totally wanted the pink, heart-shaped box of chocolates. It kept going back to that moment when Trowbridge’s shaking fingers were pressed against my lips.

Impossible to resist dwelling on the tremor in his hands. The conflict in his eyes.

Wait until tomorrow for the explanation.

There has to be one.

I sighed as my twin sat up. Again. Thunk. Yeah, the ceiling is exactly where it was the last time you hit it. “Totally-undecipherable-string-of-Merenwynian-curse-words!” he exclaimed. Another whack of the pillow, another shake of its polyester fill. Another thump as his body collapsed back down.

I shouldn’t have let him have that shower. Especially not with the ferret. He came back out of the bathroom more alert, smelling of shampoo, and somehow, indefinably Lexi again. Now the ferret was out cold, curled into a ball in a nest of one of Cordelia’s sweaters by his feet. It smelled of lemon and oranges, too.

“Lexi,” I whispered. “You know Mum loved you as much as me, right?”

Worry and trouble curled around me.

Silence from my brother. A quiet, thoughtful, pregnant one broken only by the sound of a cap being unscrewed. I listened to my brother swallow another mouthful, before he sealed the flask again. He lay back with a sigh. Then I smelled something different over the various layers in the room. A faint tendril of scent—woods and ferns. I inhaled sharply, trying to pinpoint it.

It was nice, whatever it was.

“Hell,” said my brother.

“Yeah?”

“Be careful with Trowbridge in the morning. They gave him sun potion for the moon before last. He wasn’t able to change into his wolf, and the urge to be a wolf, to run under the moon … Once it’s thwarted like that…”

I strained my ears. Did he sigh?

“The need builds up inside the beast. When it’s finally allowed release, it has a hard time sinking back down inside the man. Trowbridge will still be feral in the morning. Even if he stands on two feet, not four.”

Great.

“Lexi?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever happened to the original Lukynae?”

“He was captured and tried. Since they didn’t want him to become a martyr, they sent him into exile.”

I struggled to remember what Mom had told us about the Weres in Merenwyn. Then I gasped, and said, “Do you mean—”

“Yes. They sent Lukynae to this realm. Which is why the Raha’ells call Trowbridge—”

“The Son of Lukynae.”

“Now go to sleep, runt,” he murmured. “I’ll keep watch.”

I knew it.

I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.

I should have guarded myself from sleep. Pinched my arm when my lids felt heavy. Squirmed out of my sleeping bag and taken a cold shower. Maybe bounced up my sugar level with a liter of Coke and a Kit Kat. Too late. I could feel that strangeness, that sense of being inside a foreign skin. My eyes were open, but the things I saw, the way my gaze roved and held—that’s not the way I look at the world. Not the way I examine a place, an object, a scene. I’d been dream-napped, caught in the web of a drowsing Fae’s memory.

But not, I thought, Mad-one’s—or the Old Mage’s. That nightmare always played to its miserable end in the same room.

The trees are huge, massive. Merenwyn, then. But whose dream? Not Lexi’s. I remember sharing his dreams from his perspective—his lens view was always tighter, focused on something with the intent to seize. Not this searching, frantic hip-hop from one focal point to another.

Whose eyes am I seeing through?

Concentrate. Listen. See. Dark woods through the slats of a wooden fence. Not a fence, I realized as he or she tilted their head. A pen. With wooden bars for walls, a dirt floor, and stars and a moon for a ceiling. The Fae stared at the latter for a long