The Thing About Weres

a second. I can hardly think anymore.”

Karma gave a toothy grin to her friend Chaos.

And suddenly Anu cried out and did a drunken sprint toward the back door. She got about three feet before her paws went out from under her, and she slid, belly-first, down to the floor.

“Damn,” said Cordelia, moving the hall table out of the way. “I’d hoped to get her to the mudroom before she fell into her change.”

Un-freakin’-believable. I had to witness my replacement’s transformation?

“That’s it.” I turned my back on Cordelia and the she-wolf from Merenwyn. “I’ve had it. You need to shovel Anu-the-new-dog-treat from the floor, and take her elsewhere. I don’t care where, just get her out of my sight.” Fingers hooked, I sketched an angular figure eight in the air with the marker, watching with grim fascination as my magic rolled through the loops with exquisite precision.

Silence from my ex-roomie, a guttural groan from my new niece.

I shot a glare over my shoulder. Cordelia studied me with pursed lips. “I perceive your feelings have been hurt.”

“Ya think? The Alpha of Creemore raised my hand and said, ‘We’ll stay forever.’”

“And you take issue with that.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Have you forgotten that the pack tried to kill us last night?”

“They won’t try it again.”

“Everybody keeps on saying that.” My Fae floated over toward the bad corner, touching first this and then that bad stain. Tasting them with a shiver. She turned her blind head back toward me, as if to say, “Mmm, wolf blood. May I have more?”

No. You can’t. I jerked her away from it.

“You know,” Cordelia drawled. “Bridge didn’t have any other choice than to do what he did. The man returned home last night, and found what? A welcome banner? No, he found you—presented in a wonderful homage to The Perils of Pauline—and a leaderless pack in a positive agony to tear something apart. And from that moment onward, his choices were whittled down to kill or be killed. Dominance or death.”

The end of my fingers ached from the strain of my curious Fae. “Stop it,” I told my magic savagely, fighting to bring her back to heel. She resisted briefly then acquiesced, returning to undulate above my head.

I twisted around to frown at Cordelia. “Who the hell is Pauline?”

“The quintessential damsel in distress.” She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead to whine. “Oh! Oh! Save me. Oh please. Someone save me.”

“You take that back,” I hissed. “I am not a damsel in distress. I’ve never been a—”

“Have you once stopped to think about the fact that Bridge has been on Hedi’s Train to Hell from the moment you found him in that motel room?” She jabbed a finger at me. “And you don’t know what choices were offered to him in Merenwyn.”

“I know what he passed on!” My magic whiplashed over her head as I whirled to face her.

Cordelia flicked her head upward and gazed at its coiled menace for a long, steady moment, then slowly lowered her chin. She gave me a poisonous smile. “Go ahead. Try it again.”

Oh, I wanted to. I did indeed.

Six months she’d been riding me. Pick up your clothing. Eat some protein. Do something about that amulet, he’s looking sulky. She’d taken the better bed because “I’m bigger than you.” She’d hissed, and hummed, and driven me three-quarters batty. Even now, when any other idiot would have walked away, she stood there, daring me.

She knew no fear, my six-foot mother hen.

For a beat, we had a stare-down. I shook my head. “Maybe Trowbridge did what he had to do. But you heard what he said before the pack arrived. He hates my brother, grieves for his Raha’ells—he’s willing to travel back to a realm where they hunt wolves with bear traps just to bring those wolves to freedom—and it seems he’d rather have faced more torture than come home to me.”

I gestured with my chin to where my blood relative writhed on the floor, one quarter human, three quarters woof. “To top it all off, I’m pretty sure he’s slept with my niece, who has absolutely no problem turning into her wolf.”

“If she’s a threat, then kill her,” she said softly.

“I can’t,” I replied automatically. “She’s my brother’s daughter.”

Another fact that Lexi hadn’t shared with me last night.

Cordelia’s gaze was scathing—a bristling hedge of fake black lashes around an angry shimmer of blue-gray. “You’re giving her more importance than her presence warrants. She is a nobody. He didn’t even properly introduce her to the pack. You are the mate of the Alpha of Creemore. It’s simple. If you can’t bloody your hands then just kick her ass out of your bedroom.”

“You don’t get it,” I said in frustration.

“What don’t I get?”

“It’s all messed up!”

“Of course it is,” she replied. “It’s life. And life is inevitably messy.” She tilted her head to study me. “Darling, what did you think was going to happen if he came home?”

Bored of the conversation, my serpent of doom drifted to the fireplace’s mantel. There, it slid along the smooth pine until it met the obstacle of a family photo. This object was briefly investigated, a curious tongue testing the rounded contours of its brass frame. Evidently, not tasty. It brusquely knocked the picture off its perch. Glass shattered on its impact with the slate hearth.

I gave it a hard leash correction and pointed to a spot near my feet. “Stay there.”

“That’s a good idea,” Cordelia said, brushing past me. “Your feet are bare and your temper’s up.”

Got that right. My Fae wrapped itself around my ankle—feigning remorse—as Cordelia bent to pick up the broken frame. She tapped it on the floor to rid it of clinging glass slivers, then replaced it on the mantel.

We both stared at the family group shot—Trowbridge in the center, wearing a rented tuxedo and an uneasy smile, standing beside his new bride, Candy. Two teenagers married too young with no idea what was coming their way.

Without comment, she flipped it facedown.

Fatigue. It had been hovering in the distance, a dark threatening thundercloud, and now it hung over me. Pressing down on me. I need to sit. The couch was behind me but with it came the memory of Dawn Danvers’s sly smile as Stuart Scawens nuzzled her shoulder. Were they the last to sit on those cushions?

I chose the floor instead, and rested my back against the side of the sofa, watching my Fae nose dust balls while thinking about would-haves and could-haves.

Those “could-have” thoughts are dangerous things. They can live forever in your daydreams, untested and lovely, unless you pull them outside of your head and give them a good shake in the light of the real world. I should know. I’m a real champ with dreams.

Tell her.

“We were going to fill up the gas tank in the old red van that Harry’s got in his garage, and head west for British Columbia,” I said quietly. “You and Biggs were going to argue all the way across Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Once we got there, Trowbridge and I were going to find us a farm or a house—someplace we could all live together in peace. Then, you were going to coach pageant brats and Biggs was going to get a girlfriend who was shorter than him. Harry was going to keep us neck-high in kindling. And I was going to get a job—one I wouldn’t have gotten fired from…”

My voice trailed away. “None of it’s going to happen, is it?”

“No.” Cordelia’s eyes were sad and knowing.

“How did it get to be such a mess?” I whispered. “I can’t abandon Lexi. He’s my brother. I won’t—I can’t— leave him to fend for himself while he tries to get over his sun potion addiction.”

“Some would think your mate should come first.”