The Thing About Weres

speed-mature, I’d never match him in experience. I’d always be too young, too soft, too fluffy. The girl with the traitor brother. The Were with the Fae inside her.

Not a battle-hard Raha’ell.

But still, I had given my word, hadn’t I? That afternoon in the courtyard?

I opened my eyes and listlessly watched the young Were mowing the grass come to the end of the lawn and turn. He had light brown hair. Maybe he’d gone to school with me. He looked about the right age.

I still couldn’t remember his name.

Likely, I should never have given in to the urge to rest my eyes when I felt worn down to gristle and bone. Nor should I have dug myself deeper into the comfort of the chair. But I forgot, didn’t I? There were two other Fae in the house. Both as tired as me.

I opened my eyes in Anu’s dream and discovered that fear is a thing with a threshold that moves ever higher. We were back inside the pen with the pen. The moon was heavy and full in the night sky. Wolves slunk along the dark shadows near the forest’s edge.

Anu looked through the bars to the grandstands. Lexi was there, standing on the platform to the right of the seating, his bowler worn at a jaunty angle, his body canted toward the row of spectators.

Her terror flooded into me, drying my mouth.

Beside Lexi’s elbow was a lever that was attached to a hook and a rope strung between the stands and the ceiling of her cage. She understood that when the Shadow pulled on that lever, the hook would open, the rope would fall lax, and the walls of her pen would collapse.

No longer would she be the prey safely caged.

Lexi barely glanced at her. His attention was fixed on the tall man with the long face who sat in the choicest seat. The Black Mage’s vanity extended to his clothing. It was all funereal black, embellished with silver buttons, and lacing at his throat. And when he smiled—both ends of his long mouth turned up, his teeth bright white, his eyes wicked and sly—Anu’s grip on the bars tightened.

“Dearest Mother of the Goddesses, hear my final prayer,” she whispered.

The ladies in the stand tittered when the mage lifted his hand and held it in the air.

“Forgive me for—”

A noise behind us. Another surge of acid-mouthed terror.

I heard her thoughts, as clearly as my own. Should she close her eyes, and let the end come? No. Not she. Anu turned her head, but slowly, so as not to frighten the beast.

She expelled her breath. He was not in the throes of his moon-change.

He was in man form, with no distortion of limb or jaw. A dark beard covered his lower jaw, ropes of his black hair hung down to his waist. He stood swaying, and then he cocked his head, eyes narrowed on hers. “How fast can you run?”

“Like a deer,” she whispered.

“Then stay close behind me,” said the man. “There will be an opportunity.”

The Black Mage waggled his hand at my brother, coyly, extending the moment of truth.

“We will live through today and tomorrow,” said the beast.

“How do you know?” she dared to ask.

My Trowbridge gave her a feral grin. “Because I’m the Son of Lukynae.”

Chapter Twenty-one

I woke up with a gasp.

It was quiet in the Alpha of Creemore’s bedroom. Too quiet. Technically, if you’ve got any Were in you at all there is no such thing as near silence. You register the hum of the appliances over the sound of the lawn mower chewing up the grass, the discreet vibration of the heater under the chatter of the women working in the kitchen below. But if you stay motionless and let the outside world fall away, so it’s just you, and this room, and this man whom you thought you knew but didn’t … You might perceive the absence of breath. You might notice, as you stand there, feeling somehow naked again, that the person with whom you shared the bedroom has stopped breathing. That he is holding his breath, so that he can measure the hard hammer of your heart in your chest.

Without lifting my gaze, I knew he stood at the door’s threshold, watching me.

I can’t look at him. I really can’t.

“What is it, Tink?”

I wanted to howl. I wanted to pound my fists.

Feathers protested as I hugged the pillow to my chest. “I was in Anu’s nightmare … She was in a cage set inside a field. There were grandstands and wolves watching from under the trees.”

“You always going to walk through people’s dreams? If I go to sleep right now, are you going to do a drive- by?”

“I don’t know,” I said bleakly, staring at the floor. “She was so terrified of those wolves…”

A moment of silence, then he said, “Of course she was—she was scheduled as prey for the night’s entertainment. The kid wouldn’t have stood a chance against a pack of half-starved wolves.”

“Why didn’t she change into her wolf? Why didn’t you?”

He drew in a long breath and released it. “I could hold my transformation off. Not forever—no wolf can do that—but long enough for me to figure out the lay of the land. They’d given Anu a double dose of sun potion to make sure her wolf couldn’t break through.” His tone was flat. “The kid was defenseless. She’d been raised as a Kuskador—that pack chose to submit to the Fae following the Treaty of Brelland. Most of them have been on sun potion from puberty. They’ve never met their own wolf.”

“But Anu was wolf when she came through the portal.” The horror was spreading, spreading. Like water coming through the dam. Finding crevices to widen, cracks to pry open.

“I wouldn’t let your brother give her another dose while we were on the run—I didn’t want her going through the gates with that shit in her veins. The kid went through her first transformation two hours before we made it to the portal.”

“You were there in her dream.” I’ll never be able to rid my memory of the whip marks marring his flesh. Ugly red hash marks. Rivulets of his blood staining the backs of his naked thighs. An ache in my throat, tearing, hurting pain. “Oh Goddess.” The pillow fell as I stood. “What did I send you to? Your back was so torn up…”

“Forget it,” he said harshly. “It was just a dream.”

“No it wasn’t!” I hissed, my gaze jerking to him.

Fae Stars, look at him.

The elements that had so distracted me—the dreads, the beard, the foreign quality to him—had been mowed away by a pair of clippers, and now it was easy to appreciate again the cut of his cheekbones, the length of his long nose. He’d wrapped a towel around his hips, which made him look like one of those male models who, between stints of hawking man-perfume, filled in time alternately starving or bench-pressing fat people. Now his eyes dominated, and they glowed with a fire that wasn’t bred of an Alpha’s dominance but of a fine-edged human hatred. Deep inside them, I read a deadly, relentless loathing.

My heart sank to my belly.

“It was real,” I said, my voice hollow. “I’ve learned the difference between a dream made of fiction and one made of memories … They whipped you.”

“Not ‘they,’” he said harshly. “Say it. The Fae.”

I wanted to rock myself, I wanted to wail. “What was that place?”

“It’s called the Spectacle.” A muscle tightened in Trowbridge’s jaw. “Not every Raha’ell is shot for their pelt—the ones worth sport are brought to a field surrounded by twelve-foot walls. Less than half an acre for more than thirty wolves. Never enough food or water. When the moon is full, the Fae come to watch us tearing at each other for a share of food. To those bastards the Spectacle’s a morality play about the beast hidden within. But for us … it’s a choice of death or hunger.”