The Thing About Weres

Were mates usually smell something like each other. Not exact copies, thank the powers that be—because it would suck to be a Were-bitch that smelled like a guy—but a new signature aroma, one with scent tones from both of them. I’d been scentless, thanks to my Fae heritage, all my life. After shoving my mate through the portal’s maw, I’d luxuriated in the novelty of smelling like Trowbridge. Foolishly, I’d thought it would be permanent, but that delicious olfactory brew of woods, and wild, and grasses, and Trowbridge had gone down the trailer’s rust-stained shower drain just five hours later. Now I smell like a bar of Dove.

I put all his stuff back in the messenger bag then picked up my shirt off Samuel, my bra and panties off Absolom, and rescued my pants from Prudence.

I turned to pick up the Royal Amulet.

He wasn’t there.

His Nastiness should have been there, right where I left him, on top of baby Jasper’s grave marker, but he wasn’t. Had he fallen off? I squinted in the half-light. There was no ball of gold glittering among the pine needles and sparse tufts of grass.

I’d kept my promise to Merry to care for the Royal Amulet as if he were as precious to me as Trowbridge. I’d found a rowboat and plucked His Royal Nastiness off his lily pad. And for the first couple of days he’d been easy to take care of, because at first, he’d been mostly dead. But as fate would have it, he’d thrown a few intermittent sparks of light from the depths of his blue stone so I—feeling very Dudley Do-Right—had made it my daily ritual to offer him a variety of shrubs and deciduous trees to suck the sap out of. It had been touch and go for a month or more, but he’d made a full recovery over time and eventually had developed a personality. Not a good one, but a soul of sorts. The sullen type. Permanently set on rebellion with intermittent fits of entitlement.

He’d pissed me off so much I’d renamed him Ralph.

In the faint hope of a cease-fire, I’d explained to him, “This isn’t some war flick. You’re not a POW and I’m not your captor. I’m doing the best I can for you.” How had Ralph rewarded me? With simmering silence and nighttime stealth attacks. Sneaky juvenile stuff. Pinches and scratches. And, might I add, completely at odds with his behavior during the day. Then, he seemed happy enough to peacefully coexist and hang from my neck. Either because he liked to be in the know about pack business, or more likely, and as I was just beginning to fully understand, he used that time to minutely sip from my essence.

“An amulet will die, and its soul along with it, if you don’t take care of it,” Mum had said. The last thing she’d done before setting a ward on my cupboard was to shove Merry into my hands. “Keep her safe around your neck.”

She should have said, “Goddess, keep all of us safe.” Because in one night, the Fae had executed her, a Were had killed my dad, and my twin brother had been forcibly taken across the portal into Merenwyn.

My skin goosefleshed as I craned my head and studied the trees. The Royal Amulet hadn’t had enough time to climb one, had he? “Marco,” I coaxed with false sweetness.

I twisted to look behind myself.

Huh. You don’t see that every day.

Casperella crouched close to the ground on her side of the stone wall, a huddled shape of fluttering fabric and twisting hair. That was both unusual and noteworthy because to this point stalker-spook had basically been the hummingbird of ghosts. Flit, flit, flit. From one end of her enclosure to the other. Usually, spectacularly spectral—all shroud and serpent hair doing the swirling, obscuring thing around her vague glowing outline. Inner lit, just a bit, like the TV tube after you’ve held your thumb down on the power button. Face rarely glimpsed, and even then, it was little more than a rounded blur with dead gray eyes.

But she had grown two things: intent and a stubby, semitransparent arm that was straining to reach for the baby-fist-sized ball of gold at the base of a nearby tree.

Hello, Ralph.

Ever hungry, the Royal Pest must have morphed into a sphere, and used gravity to roll down a hillock hoping to hit that sturdy maple. But, Karma being the bitch she was, he’d missed and landed by a pine instead.

Ralph turns his nose up at evergreens; they turn his blue stone a tad greenish.

“Hey,” I said. “You don’t want to touch him.”

Casperella’s head rolled in my direction. A glimpse of a black eye, a flat bleak slash for her mouth. I scratched at the mosquito bite on my arm, frowning. Was he in any danger? As I contemplated, the Royal Pain in the Ass reverted to his default shape; a round gold pendant, Celtic in appearance, lots of openwork, flattened bands of gold in four trinity knots surrounding an icy blue jewel that was big enough to make any self-respecting rapper’s heart go pitty-pat. He casually propped himself against the pine tree, his necklace of Fae gold in a lazy loop near his feet. “Who, me?” his body language screamed. “I’m harmless.”

The little imposter.

I shook out my panties. Practically speaking, this situation couldn’t be counted as reckless endangerment. Casperella was a twisting shadow of rags who’d sprouted an arm devoid of a hand. (Can we spell i- n-c-o-r-p-o-r-e-a-l?) He was a solid Fae amulet loitering under a pine a good five feet beyond that.

Thieving required fingers. Light ones.

And opportunity.

Also, I think it probably helps if you were born with smarts. The type of cool, calculating common sense that allows you to look ahead in the future, and ask yourself, “Do I really need this? Or do I just want it?”

Because hindsight is a bitch who never knows when to call it a day.

I was fumbling with the hooks of my bra thinking how much I missed stealing when Casperella gave a massive shudder that made all her floaty bits snap in the air. Interesting. I adjusted the girls, watchful as the blob at the end of the arm struggled to morph into something that resembled a hand. Apparently growing mitts required a whole-body effort. She contracted with a sharp inhale—yeah, yeah, I know that’s impossible, but that’s what it looked like—that flattened her tattered shroud into a long sheet of ragged edges. Then, with a soundless sigh, she exhaled.

Must add that to my rule book. Ghosts remember how to breathe.

Pop! A hand formed—if that’s what you could call a thumb and flipper of melded fingers. Unlovely, but adequate, I guess, if you’re a spook thinking of pinching a pretty piece of something sparkly.

“You should stop and think about this,” I warned. “He’s nice to look at, but he’s got a temper.”

Oblivious to my tidbit of wisdom, Casperella added a little more ghost juice to her Pilates and succeeded in extending herself until she was an inhuman U-shape curved over her stone barricade. Her flipper-fingers chewed the dirt in an effort to get to Mr. Sparkle.

It looked painful.

Was it worth telling her that all the stuff that spoke to her worst instincts—his loops of Fae gold, his intricately cut jewel, his long, glittering diamond-cut chain—amounted to nothing more than glitzy ornamentation? The real deal was the rice-sized shadow in the center of the blue topaz.

That was the mind and soul of the Royal Amulet.

I’m thinking he was an Asrai before he’d been imprisoned in the jewel set in the middle of the pendant, because that’s what Merry had been. She’d recognized him, and I figured then and still did now, that like recognizes like. My amulet friend had fought for the jerk’s life, just as I had fought for Trowbridge’s.

You don’t do that shit unless you have a reason.

Some evenings, before I put Ralph to bed in his brand-new terrarium, I hold him up to the moonlight with a pair of tongs, and speculate whether he’d ever been Merry’s lover.

Hey, it could have happened.

Back in the day, he’d had legs, arms, a head, and in his case, probably a dick. I know because I checked. The day after I rescued him, I’d borrowed a magnifying glass from the librarian’s drawer, duct-taped his chain to the dinette’s table, and studied the dark smudge in the center of that near-perfect stone. I’d arrived at the firm conviction that the imprisoned sentient being was male; it was something about the way he stood, like a toy soldier with one little sticklike appendage out—I’m thinking his arm, not his dick, in case you’re wondering—as if he’d raised it to ward off the magic, but the curse had struck first, and now he was frozen, his hand forever poised to halt the evil speeding toward him.

His Royal Nastiness was probably an enchanted prince.

Oh, put away your hankie. It’s just as possible that he could be a dumb Asrai peasant who got too close to a