The Thing About Weres

sweetness to it like those flowers in the—”

He scowled and said, “Forget it. Get something spicy.”

“On it,” I heard Jeff reply.

Trowbridge moved to the closet. “The Raha’ells say that a trained mystwalker is the ultimate weapon. They can destroy people just by tapping into their dreams.” Hangers screeched then he stalked past me, his arms full of clothing.

“You think I’m a loaded weapon?”

“To the right guy, you’re kryptonite,” he muttered, dropping his armload outside. Someone said, “Ow!,” but Trowbridge was obviously feeling all kinds of honey badger—without any apology he returned to the closet and crouched to investigate the bottom of it. “So you’ve gone to Threall, where you’ve ‘thumbed through people’s memories like they were the yellow pages,’” he said. Viewed from the back, his dreads were an awesome mess —dusty and grizzled, sun damaged and discolored. Quite a bit of gray in them, too.

What would I do with such an old man as you?

“I’ve visited it twice.” I blew on my tender palm, hoping to cool some of its burning heat. The whole damn room felt hot, the air heavy and potent. “The first time right before I pulled you out of that strip bar.”

He twisted on his heels, a loafer in his hand. “You shot me in that strip bar, and I pulled you out of it before we both got thrown in jail.” A missile of brown leather went whistling past me and disappeared through the open window, without even grazing the sash. “And the second time?”

“After Knox used his blade.”

His mouth turned into a forbidding slash. “Why did you go there?”

“I don’t know. I just landed there.”

“You used to think about Threall sometimes—in those dreams we shared. I’d get flashes of a field. Big trees and lots of fog.” He sent a quick sideways glance in my direction. “You worried about the place. That it would get its hooks into you and you’d never return home.”

“Yes.” He remembered that, at least.

“But this time, you came back.”

“I did.” Emotions that I thought I’d quelled started to bubble inside me. For instance, I couldn’t seem to keep my attention from flitting to his body. No man should look that good balanced on the back of his heels. In Trowbridge’s case, the position only served to emphasize the swell of his shoulder, the tautness of his belly, the solid strength of his thighs. My gaze bounced from all those landscape delights and then settled on the curve of his ass.

Goddess, buns of steel.

I looked up and found him watching me, a corner of his mouth quirked.

Annoying. I feigned a deep interest in his mother’s decorative touches. There was ample evidence of her love of needlecrafts—a cross-stitched sampler on the wall (FAMILIES ARE FOREVER), a Log Cabin quilt folded over the quilt rack, a scattering of crocheted pillows. I rescued one that someone had dumped on the floor by my chair and gave it a good shake to rid it of dust mites before I hugged it to my chest, hoping it would hide the fact that my nipples were poking through my T-shirt.

He growled something unintelligible—I swear I don’t know if it was jumbled English or mumbled Merenwynian—before he headed for the bathroom. There he studied his reflection for a long, long time (eight to twelve seconds—depending on whether I started counting the moment his brows drew together in a WTF or after he’d placed both palms on the counter and leaned into the mirror for a closer inspection).

Don’t they have mirrors in Merenwyn?

“Jeezus,” he finally muttered, raking his fingers through his graying beard. Grimacing, he bent to open the cabinet’s bottom drawer. “So did you rummage through my memories? Plant anything in my head you need to tell me about?”

“No,” I said, truly affronted. “I’d never do that.”

He pawed through the hair rollers and brushes, until he found a pair of scissors and a set of hair clippers. “But you used your mystwalking talent to summon me at night to that damn Pool of Life—”

“I didn’t summon you,” I snapped. “We were both taken there every night. Blame Karma—”

“That bloody place was so damn—”

“Cold,” I said, thinking of the chill in the air.

“I was thinking wet, but you’re right; it was cold.” He plugged the clippers into the wall, and tested them. “You always stood under a tree, talking to me about books and stuff. Arguing with me. Both of us knowing what was going to happen.” Flicking off the electric shears, he asked, “Why’d you keep doing that to us?”

“Do you honestly think I had any control over those dreams? That I liked standing there, watching you —”

“Learn how to swim the hard way,” he said grimly, picking up the scissors. “Remind me never to really piss you off.” He chose a dreadlock, hesitated long enough for me to worry that he might actually think he looked good with all that Rastafarian nonsense, then set the blades to it. Snip. One fourteen-inch length of twisted hair fell to the floor.

Downstairs in the kitchen, the League of Extraordinary Bitches were filling their pails with hot water in the kitchen while discussing us in voices pitched low. “How much do you really remember of the dreams?”

He scowled at me in the mirror, scissors poised. “Well, the diving into the freezing pond was hard to forget. The rest is just bits and pieces.” Snip. “Most of it was gone by daylight.”

So it was forgotten. The minutes—sometimes a full hour—before the arrows flew. The intimacy of just him and me, talking and arguing. Along with the tenderness sandwiched in between the fear, and the tears.

Then we were to start as strangers again.

An Alpha and a half-breed Fae.

Impossible.

He lifted a dread from the back of his head. Pulled it tight then went for the chop. And so it went. Thirty-two more snips and he was near shorn, heaps of hair littering the floor by his callused heels like small dead rodents. “But I do remember a few things,” he murmured as he considered his Grizzly Adams beard.

“What?” I flexed my fingers, wondering how long it would be before I could actually fold them into a clumsy fist.

“You spend too much time overthinking the little stuff. And when the chips are down, you run on courage and instinct.”

Startled, I looked up and found his reflected gaze fixed on me.

“I missed your dreams last month,” he said softly.

“How could you? You kept dying at the end of them.”

“Did you ever see me really die? Did you ever see an arrow get me?”

I thought back. “No.”

“All I had to do to end the dream was dive into the water. I knew that. I was never in true mortal danger.” His gaze was bleak. “Please don’t go to Threall again.”

My eyes burned. I’m not going to cry. I heard a lawn mower start up and turned my head toward the sound and found peace outside the window in the hypnotic movement of the swaying trees. After a bit, I whispered, “I’ll try.”

“Shit,” Trowbridge cursed. “Got myself.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back on the chair. A couple minutes later, I heard the bath curtains being pulled, the taps turned, the beat of water pattering on an acrylic tub.

I imagined him slipping off the jeans. Standing under the spray.

Soaping his chest.

Don’t think. Don’t feel.

Back in May, he’d asked, “Promise me that I’ll never come out of a shower and discover you gone again.” I told him that I wouldn’t, and I’d made him make the same pledge. Because we were equals. That’s what I thought back then, when I’d believed that taking a blind leap into love required nothing more than sucking up your courage and following your instincts.

I hadn’t tallied up the negatives. The possibilities. The sheer cruelty of Karma.

There wasn’t six years between us anymore. There was a daunting fifteen. No matter how fast I tried to