I slid my hand into my pocket. The small glass bottle resting inside it had already been heated to my body temperature. What if my mate was wrong? What if the contents sent Lexi into a final sleep, not just a coma?
Trowbridge whispered in my ear, “They’re coming.”
Harry nodded and picked up the stick he’d leaned against a nearby tree. “I’ll be off to the cemetery to wrangle a ghost, then.” When I’d voiced a concern that Casperella might try to snatch some of my magic from the air, he said, “Ghosts don’t scare me. I’ll take care of it.”
I watched him leave, his spine erect, his long white silver hair strangely riveting in the dying light. Though —perhaps not so strange. We instinctively search for light in the gathering dark, don’t we?
Lexi had to have known the pack was waiting for him long before he stepped into the clearing. His nose would have warned him. But smelling danger and seeing it are two very different things.
He entered it with a bit of a fanfare, stumbling into Biggs’s back hard enough to send the smaller Were tripping into a shrub. Whether Lexi meant to do that or it was a consequence of the fact that his hands were tied behind his back and the symptoms of his withdrawal had turned his balance to crap, I couldn’t be sure.
But still, his feet faltered as he saw the gathered pack.
Perhaps he’d forgotten how many of them there were.
I knew what that felt like. Walking into a field with your arms pinned behind your back, smelling the pack’s excitement and the pond. Hearing those murmurs drop to hushed anticipation.
The Stronghold in me resented the ropes, but I couldn’t completely blame Biggs. His upper lip was swollen and that shirt he loved so much was never going to be wearable again.
He looked so foreign and Fae, with his high boots and his tight pants.
One of the pack escorts gave my brother’s back a hard, motivational push that sent Lexi staggering for a few steps. But ever graceful—yet another gene he’d swiped from me in the great placenta divide—he grimly turned what could have been a face-planting sprawl into a dancer’s run.
His gaze bounced from the pack, to me and Trowbridge, then to the small path beyond us—the one that led down the Trowbridge ridge to the pond and then wound back up to the Stronghold property. That he gave brief consideration.
A bead of sweat rolled down my back.
Finally, he was before us. Sandwiched between two of the taller pack guys, with Biggs in the rear. The setting sun made the wolf tattooed above his ear seem almost alive.
Lexi didn’t look at the Alpha of Creemore. Just at me.
His brows rose in a silent question.
I should have said something soothing along the lines of “it will be all right.” But I—that girl who could spin a lie faster than the truth—came up empty. Treachery had formed a knot in the middle of my throat and I couldn’t push a word past it. So, I gave him my very best I’m-no-betrayer smile instead.
But we were twins.
Lexi’s expression turned to stone. My eyes burned as he took a deep breath and lifted his chin—exactly the way he had back in grade two when Sean Edwards had called him the son of a whore. “Am I on trial?” he drawled. “Or is this my execution?”
“Neither, Shadow,” said Trowbridge truthfully.
“So you’re full pack now, Hell?” Three dark vees of sweat soaked Lexi’s shirt—one for each armpit and another below his pecs. “Do you have a leash hanging from a hook somewhere?”
“She is your sister and my mate,” Trowbridge grated. “Show her your respect.”
My twin shook his head with slow insult. “All I see is a wolf’s bitch.”
Trowbridge’s fist caught Lexi’s chin hard enough to snap my twin’s head back. But my twin was a Stronghold, too, wasn’t he? Again, he didn’t fall—probably because he must have counted on a blow coming his way the instant he used the B-word and, accordingly, had braced himself. An appalled hush came from the spectators as Lexi shook his head like a boxer.
Then, in an impressive display of insolence, my brother rolled his neck and firmed his mouth. I read the intent behind his glittering eyes.
“Don’t, Lexi!” I said in a low voice. “Don’t force him to hurt you.”
Blood welled from Lexi’s split lip. “Still the mouse afraid of a raised fist, Hell?”
“Idiot. You were brought here to summon the portal.” I forced that stiff smile back on my liar’s face. “Not to die.”
My twin’s mask fell. Very, very briefly. Almost immediately he covered up his response with an overlay of gloating triumph, but I saw quick unguarded reaction and for once—Karma still had her claws in at that point—I could read a facial expression without having to consult a manual to figure out what it meant.
Restored faith. That’s what I saw.
“You did it,” he said in the softest whisper. “You talked him into letting me go.”
I gave him a dumb nod for which he favored me with a large smile—one of his real ones—too wide, white teeth gleaming. “Are you coming with me?”
“No, she’s not,” said Trowbridge.
Lexi’s gaze clung to mine for another beat or two then he nodded. “That’s all right,” he said. Just like he did the afternoon I didn’t want to try using that flimsy rope to swing over the pond. “I’m going to have to move fast once I go through the other side, anyhow. You never were that good in a footrace, Hell.”
Misreading my expression, my twin gave me a quick grin. “Don’t worry, runt. I’ve got a trick or two up my sleeve. I’ll get through.”
I searched his face. “You’re sure?”
“Do you think I’d have come here without a backup plan?” He looked around. “Where’s my bag?”
Cordelia held it up by the straps. “I have it.”
My twin stared at it then gave me a frustrated smile. “You’re going to have to tell them to undo these ropes. I can’t go through the passage tied up.”
Trowbridge answered for me. “You lose those after you call the gates.”
“Alpha to the end, Son of Lukynae?” mocked Lexi.
“Mate to the end, Shadow,” replied Trowbridge.
I wanted to cry again but I figured I hadn’t earned the right.
The pack remained wary of the woo-woo. They’d moved back in the clearing—far enough that they could scoot into the woods if any Fae came slithering through the gates when we called them. But close enough to watch.
To stare.
Back at the house, when all this had been theory and planning, I’d told Trowbridge that I’d need a minute or two for just me and Lexi.
