Suddenly, Biggs spoke up. “She should let the old guy keep her brother’s soul.” His expression grew haunted as an awful silence fell and stretched. “What? I’m only saying what everyone else is thinking. Her brother might have been a good guy back in the day but he’s a bit of a douche now.”
Trowbridge’s arms tightened around me.
“Not the time to bring this up,” Cordelia said, her voice very low.
“Well, when is?” Biggs was already leaning on the wall. But he upped his homage to James Dean by crossing his arms and flattening one foot behind him. “Someone needs to give her a wake-up call. We all earned the right when we stood by her—”
“A man doesn’t bring that stuff up,” growled Harry. “Now get your damn foot off the wallpaper.”
Biggs did, if a little slowly. “Well, someone still needs to tell her that she should just let the old guy take over her brother’s body.” He flicked a wary glance toward his Alpha. “The old dude will take better care of it than her brother ever did. And with all that magic shit he’s got going on, he might live forever.” He dug his hands into his jeans pockets, his expression mulish.
Harry looked neutral. Cordelia played with her earlobe, her gaze slanted from my searching one.
And Trowbridge?
He played absently with a strand of my hair while he stared at the floorboards in deep thought. “The Black Mage is a cruel bastard but I’m told that compared to the Old Mage, his magic skills are…” Brows furrowed, he groped for the right word. “Pedestrian. He’s never going to come up with the end of the world on his own.”
Biggs muttered, “I don’t care if the Fae world blows up.”
“Well, you sure as hell should. Because it wouldn’t surprise me if things did ‘drip’ down from the passages. I’ve seen stuff in Merenwyn. Stuff that…” A long pause grew, which was never filled with words, but somehow managed to swell with misery.
The Alpha of Creemore said very quietly, “So if you want to worry about something a little more home- based, you think about that.” He lifted his head and his gaze swept the room, touching on each one of them—the family that was not my family and yet somehow had become my family. “The old guy’s chances of succeeding on his own are bad. Forget his magic skills—he’ll use a lot of that to carry him past any guards the Black Mage has left by the gates. Then he has two days of terrain to cover before he reaches the castle, and he’ll be wearing the Shadow’s face the entire time he dodges the Royal Guards and the Rahae’lls.
“My mate did the right thing,” he told them. “The Old Mage will need backup—that will be me and her. And when it’s done, his cyreath has got to be taken from her brother’s.”
Burning pressure behind my eyes again—either pent-up tears or a simmering flare.
He lifted my chin so that he could gaze into my eyes. “You did exactly what I would have done.”
“You shouldn’t be coming to Merenwyn,” I whispered. “You’ve got a kill-me sticker slapped on your head.”
“Small sticker.” He smiled. “Even smaller print.”
“Lovely.” Cordelia stomped over to the dresser. “Just lovely.” She opened the dresser’s second drawer from which she pulled out a folded white T-shirt. This, she tossed to Bridge. “Before we challenge Armageddon, can we focus on tonight? How are we going to do this under the pack’s nose without screwing the pooch?”
Face grim, my mate shook out the cotton with two quick snaps. His voice grew muffled as he pulled the garment over his head. “We can’t hide it from them.”
“This is going to be a mistake,” muttered Biggs.
The Alpha brooded. “Your brother has to be near death when he goes through the portal—the mage was right about that. So, we’ll turn that into something we can use. I’ll summon the pack. Then we’re going to have to make it look like an execution.”
That sick feeling came back.
“After the pack witnesses your participation, they’ll never doubt you again.”
I closed my eyes. But I couldn’t seal my ears, so I heard the rest. “There’s enough sun potion in Knox’s bottle to put Lexi into a coma. Once the Shadow calls the portal, we’ll force him to drink it.”
I flinched.
Trowbridge said, “He’d just go to sleep, sweetheart.”
An angry sun was setting over the tree line. I shivered. Trowbridge wrapped an arm around me and drew me close. We stood near the edge of the cliff, overlooking the pond, under the very same oak tree where a teenage Trowbridge had once strummed his guitar.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said quietly. But I was, right down to the bones, and I was beginning to worry that it was the type of chill that was never going to get better.
Cordelia peeled off her tasteful beige sweater. “She’s lying through her teeth.” My ex-roomie looked worn out, but then again, age, worry, and fatigue are hard to hide when a woman hasn’t had a chance to trowel on a thick layer of foundation. “Here, put this on,” she said gruffly, holding it out so that I could thread my arms into it.
“I don’t need it,” I said, shaking my head.
But Trowbridge gently turned me around so I faced him and helped me thread first one arm, and then the other, into the sleeves. Hard to do with the bulky bandage I wore above my wrist. Cordelia fussed over how the cardigan sat on my shoulders. “I told them to get some of your clothing from the laundry basket on the chair in my bedroom.” She fumed as she rolled the sleeves. “Instead they rummaged through my bag for Goodwill. So bloody lazy.”
“We’ll get some new clothes tomorrow,” Trowbridge said dismissively. He began to do the buttons up, with more adeptness than I thought he’d manage considering the pearl closures were small and slippery. When the last button was done, he pulled my hair free of the neckline and used two fingers to rake its length so that it spread over my shoulders. “You hanging in there?”
I gave him a dumb nod.
“It will be over, soon,” he murmured. “Stay strong.”
Seriously, he was saying that to a Stronghold?
I wanted to tell him—this wasn’t near over; this was only the beginning. Because I knew what lay ahead—I could see that string of nights where I would wake up and lie there, unable to fall back to sleep because I’d had a nightmare about my brother being trapped inside the portal’s walls for eternity. But why share with my mate the things that will haunt my soul?
We both bore scars already, didn’t we? Some of them hardly scabbed over.
If he could silently bear the pulling pain of his healing wounds, I could bear the sharp slicing pain of mine.
Besides. It was a little late to start wringing my hands in dismay and whining doubt. I’d put my trust in a wily Old Goat. And yes, when it all came down to it, I’d wagered my twin’s life on the slim odds and a brief nod toward higher principles—which had to have Karma bent over in a belly laugh. What follows now … oh Goddess, what follows now?
A quack from the pond below the cliff turned my head. The water looked dark and brown but a ray of a fading sun had fallen across the pond in a streak of golden light. It played on the beaks of the duck family, gilding them with vibrant green highlights. I watched them paddle single file. Daddy led—at least I assumed the pretty one was the father—then made a sharp turn at the edge of some bulrushes. The entire raft uniformly turned at exactly the same spot, though the third mallard in the string waggled his tail feathers at the apex of the curve.
Seems even duck families have their Biggs.
