The Thing About Weres

limited to one hour. Let’s see if I can rustle up anything sweet before the meter runs out.”

“I’d kill for a piece of chocolate.”

“Wouldn’t we all, darling. Wouldn’t we all.”

Chapter Eighteen

Cordelia poured boiling water into the old china teapot.

Biggs was on the job. Cheeks sucked in, he attempted to level Lexi with a De Niro. I was hoping it would be sooner rather than later before he gave up on his glower. His “You looking at me?” only added more tension to a room already swollen full with it.

I was hungry and there was nothing sweet in the cupboards except sugar for the tea. We were making do with hot English Breakfast mixed with as many spoonfuls of the sweet stuff as we could tolerate.

Yay.

Lexi’s head had lifted when I entered the room, but since then he’d retreated inside himself. Yes, on the surface, he appeared to be relatively content to sit at the table, his hand slowly stroking the ferret he’d freed from the Black Mage’s bag. But inwardly? Another story. His booted foot kept rocking against the chair rung.

Annoying.

The only living creature in the room who wasn’t irritated, depressed, stressed, or pissed off was the ferret. Biggs hadn’t wanted it be released from its captivity—which Cordelia had ridiculed. “Oh, shove off. What’s he going to do with the animal? Throw it at you? Besides, the Fae won’t do anything that could cause his sister harm.” Then she’d given Lexi her patented sneer. “Now, will you, darling?”

There it was again—no one wanted to hurt me. But my throat was still so tight it felt like an aching sore. Things had been said. Promises and threats had been made. Family lost and found. Cordelia placed a mug in front of me, then filled it with tea. “Chin up,” she said severely.

“You betcha,” I muttered, reaching for it with my left hand—my right being temporarily out of action, thanks to the blister forming on the web between my thumb and my pointing finger.

She gave my twin the same then pushed the sugar bowl closer to me.

“Don’t you have anything stronger?” Lexi examined the contents of the mug with disgust. “Something with a kick in it?”

“No,” Cordelia said flatly.

A lie. Two minutes ago, she’d opened a cupboard and closed it fast, but not quickly enough to keep me from catching a glimpse of a liquor bottle. I killed the sigh birthing in my chest and added five teaspoons of sugar to my tea. Merry rested on my shoulder. Her movements were slight—I doubt if either Biggs or Cordelia had noticed it— but I was conscious of how she kept herself oriented in Cordelia’s direction. Wherever Ralph traveled, so did her interest. How am I going to reunite them?

I swiveled in my chair to check on my niece—not because I felt responsible for Miss Woebegone, but because the wholesome Norman Rockwell kitchen with its old stove, pine cupboards, and blue and white curtains was making me uncomfortable. Anu had edged herself to the doorway. Another foot and she’d actually be in the same room with us.

“Does she know who you are?” I asked.

“Of course, I am the Black Mage’s Shadow.” His voice was bland, but there was a line of sweat on his upper lip. “The Fae who creeps into his mistress’s boudoir each night and leaves before daylight.”

“She’s got green eyes.” I herded a few granules of spilled sugar into a miniature molehill. “They’re almost as pale as mine.”

“They’re exactly the same shade.”

“That eye color standard issue in Merenwyn?”

“No.” He’d said it in a clipped fashion as if the subject bored him, but my twin radar lit up. Something more there, I thought. Twelve years of sharing meals and fighting for homework space at the Strongholds’ cramped kitchen table had cued me to detect the slightest weak spot. I waited until he’d torn his gaze from the 2002 calendar tacked to the bulletin board, before asking in a casual voice, “Who’s her mother?”

He inspected the metal teaspoon as if it might bite him before adding three measures of sugar to his tea. “A Raha’ell bitch.”

I winced at the coldness in his voice. “She couldn’t come with you?”

“She’s dead.” He took a cautious sip and grimaced.

“Oh, Lexi, I’m sor—”

“I fucked her, not loved her,” he said with a faint lift of his shoulder. Cordelia made a noise at the back of her throat that could have been classified as a refined growl. Seemingly oblivious, my brother reached for the sugar bowl again. He tipped a thin stream of the sweetener into his cup. “You were always such a romantic, runt.”

“Says the guy who used to stand on top of our pirate rock and holler, ‘I’ll save you, my lady.’” I stroked the peak of my pointed ear for a moment or two, watching my brother play catch-the-paper-towel-ball with the ferret. “How old is Anu?”

“She’s seen thirteen winters.”

One year older than he’d been when the Black Mage had taken him away. “Her eyes do that thing mine used to do. You know…” I slid a shy glance toward Lexi. “The spitting light, the miniflares. Has she produced a full flare yet?”

“No.”

“So she hasn’t found her One True Thing,” I murmured.

Lexi rolled his eyes. “Do you still believe everything that Mum told us? A full flare isn’t as common as she said it was. Believe it or not, it’s considered a mark of high nobility among the Fae. I didn’t even know I could do it until I was well into my manhood, and even then what I have is more of a flash than a full flare.”

Aha, that’s another thing I do better than Lexi.

Cordelia filled a mug with tea and lots of sugar and placed it on the floor a few feet inside the kitchen door. My niece gazed at it with a longing that spoke of a dry mouth and hunger. “She hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since she got here,” I said, feeling an unpleasant twist of guilt.

“She wouldn’t have accepted anything from either one of us.” He turned a spoonful of sugar into a serving of sugary tea paste then offered it to his pet. Not something you see every day. A ferret eating from a spoon.

“I thought they were carnivores,” I said.

“Ferrets like sweet stuff like any other Fae. Don’t you, Steellya?” Yellow wolf eyes seemed to blink at me as he absently rubbed his tattoo. “You know what I was thinking about?”

“What?”

“How we used to cheat in school.”

I smiled.

“Permission?” his hooded gaze inquired.

A thought picture? Here? I let my gaze innocently roam. My niece’s attention seemed focused on the pink coffee mug, Cordelia’s on the sink, and Biggs’s on Anu (I knew he’d waver from the job). I bit my lip and nodded. A slip, and a slide, and then the real world—the back door with its four-paned glass window and old-fashioned door handle—disappeared. A moment of haze, then ta-da! I received Lexi’s thought picture in vivid, full color.

Huh. I’d expected something that would stir my heartstrings, maybe a picture of the four Strongholds, prefire, prekidnap, preheartbreak. Sitting at our own table—Dad, Mum, Lexi, and me— happy. Instead I got this: Knox’s minibottle of sun potion. Not going to happen. The skin around his eyes tightened when I mouthed my reply.

He let Steellya have the spoon. A small smile then another image. But this time, transmission was faster and harder—more of a mental shove. I pressed my hand to my forehead, and waited for the picture to settle. Lexi and me, sitting in the front seat of a car—me at the wheel with him holding a map.

I blinked to erase it then glanced at the clock. Less than an hour left till noon. Did