The Problem with Promises (19 page)

Has to be a family trait.

I sank down to the back of my heels. She didn’t flinch as my knee brushed hers, but she didn’t turn for a hug either.

I’ve done a great job of looking after her these last twenty-four hours, haven’t I, Lexi?
I touched the shoulder of the kid who’d known dangers that I had never been asked to face, and was probably going to be left alone in this foreign world in a few years, without family or without anyone who cared. I said, “It’s going to be okay.”

Anu wiped her nose with her hand. She had streaks of oil on her face—it must have been on her hands and now it was on her nose, on her chin, by the corner of her trembling mouth.

She’s just a kid. My brother’s kid.

My niece pulled in another shuddering breath as a pig trotted past us, its jaw working. I gave her a weak, encouraging smile. Then I garnished the moment with a rough pat on her shoulder.

“It’s going be okay,” I repeated.

She gave me a searching look. The air was filled with scents I never wanted to put together again: burned tires, spilled fuel, heated engine oil, witch blood, wolf death, Were anger, and human curiosity.

We were all a bunch of liars.

Nothing was going to be okay.

*   *   *

Trowbridge said, “We need to get off the road before the cops come. Since the cars are totalled, we’ll have to hoof it. We’ll cut across the fields until we find a secondary road, then find a phone.”

I nodded, knowing that he was right. The highway patrol would come soon, if they weren’t already on their way. Southbound traffic was gridlocked behind us. Gawkers had slowed the northbound lanes to a crawl, to gape at the accident and the solitary pig that had managed to squeeze through the break in the torn road divider.

Anu stood, but Cordelia remained seated, arms still wrapped around her gut.

“Your shoes are going to take a beating,” I told my mother hen. The field was deeply furrowed, the farmer having tilled the ground following the harvest.

Cordelia nodded but didn’t get up. “That’s why I’m staying here. You’d better hurry.”

It was the way she said it. The tone so quiet and dry. Her face so still.

“Cordie?” said Trowbridge, turning.

She looked up at us, her face white. “There’s something wrong with me.”

I crouched by her, scanning her for a new injury. “Where are you hurt?”

“The bullet I took back at the pond came out in pieces.” She worked her throat, then swallowed. Managed to muster a dry smile. “Silver pieces. I can’t run. I can barely stand. I’ll stay here.”

“You’re coming with us, even if I have to carry you,” I said flatly.

Trowbridge spun on his heels. A white vehicle was tearing down the breakdown lane, heading for us, caution lights flashing.

I stepped in front of him. “Let me talk to the cops. I do helpless really well.”

“Like hell you do,” said Trowbridge.

“Trust me. I can do Bambi really well. It’s all in the eyes.”

“You won’t have to,” my mate said. “That’s Rachel’s truck.”

Chapter Eleven

“Get that teacloth out of my face, you useless Chihuahua,” snapped Cordelia, except she spoke in a low forced baritone, all her usual deliberately soft modulation stripped away. “If I require something to bite down on, it won’t be some mildewed rag.”

Biggs flinched and backed away.

Cordelia had revived long enough to get tetchy. Can’t blame her. Her blood was on the linoleum floor, a line of wavering crimson drops, pitter-patters of awful, leading from the door all the way to the sixties dinette table on which she’d been placed.

The indignity of it all. She—a woman of feathers and silk—laid out on a slab of pink and black Formica like a trout ready to be filleted. They’d locked the table’s leaves into the up position, hoping to make it long enough to support her body, but it was still inadequately short; her long feet hung over the table’s chrome edges. Cordelia had bunions.

I never knew that.

In terms of avoiding any deep conversations with the provincial police, we’d made good. Rachel had gunned the vehicle as soon as she’d navigated around the wrecks and steered past the most intrepid pig (tail up, heading down the road toward Toronto at a steady clip-clop), and we’d rocketed back
up
the 400 until Harry had banged on the rear window’s glass and pointed to the exit ahead. Rachel’s truck was large, but it could seat only so many people. Thus Harry and Biggs had endured the Great Escape sitting hunched in the truck’s open bed.

In the short interval it took to get Cordelia into the backseat her color had leached from pale and interesting to gray and terrifying. Five minutes down the road, her head had unexpectedly drooped. I’d caught her before she melted into a puddle on the floor of Rachel’s Ford. She’d roused enough to essay an attempt to straighten, but when I wrapped my arms around her, she’d leaned into me. Her breath had turned shallow shortly after that.

The silver had to be removed. Immediately.

Harry had known “someone” in Thornton who lived above the general store and had a small building behind it that a real estate agent might have optimistically dubbed a mother-in-law suite. Trowbridge’s brow had wrinkled at the lingering scent left by that long-gone tenant. “He is ‘Other’?” he’d said, mildly enough, but his intonation had put finger quotes and caps around the word.

Harry had nodded.

I could have asked, “Other what?” but I didn’t because my own nose told me that the guy Harry had roused from sleep wasn’t human or Were. To be honest, the guy wearing a sweatshirt pulled over plaid pajamas smelled a little like one of the dressed rolls of roast beef that Cordelia used to pick up for her Sunday dinner. That was a trifle worrisome—raising misgivings of germs and bacteria. But Ferris was one of the two medics trusted by the Weres, and of the two, he had a complete lack of response to silver, so here we were. Doing makeshift surgery in a room that smelled like a cross between a deli and an abattoir.

Trowbridge’s sister Rachel had barely spoken, except with her eyes, and they had lots to say whenever they focused on me. Condemnation and disapproval mostly, as if I’d somehow brought all of this on the pack, and on her brother, though I wasn’t sure which bothered her more. She hadn’t uncrossed her arms since she’d wedged a soup can under the window sash to hold it raised, and opened the back door.

Her nostrils looked permanently pinched. Being a first-rate tracker must have certain drawbacks.

Biggs turned to me—opened his mouth to say something—then quickly swung away to puke into the sink.

Lovely.

I wanted to go away from it all—to escape if only for a few minutes. Or at least curl up into a ball and fall asleep, right there, right then. Threall or no Threall. It was the scents. And the sights. You put those two together and memories were stirred.

Of death and loss.

I wound my fingers around Cordelia’s clenched fist. Though she didn’t open her eyes, she gave my hand a fierce squeeze. A silent Cordelia? Lying there with bra and belly exposed, and not saying one damn word? Anxiety wormed its way into my heart, found a ventricle and started drilling. I’m not sure if I could stand losing two moms. And for better or worse, that’s what Cordelia had turned into. This tall redhead with her patented scowls and arched eyebrows had become my mom-that-wasn’t.

“Why does she keep bleeding?” My voice sounded rusty, even to my ears.

My mate’s jaw tensed, then he worked it loose. “It’s the silver. Our bodies work to get rid of it but can’t. Her stomach muscles are constantly spasming and that shreds you up inside.”

It does?

My gaze slid to the scar above Trowbridge’s taut navel—a rough jagged line that was the only visible remainder of the night he’d been tortured by Mannus. I’d watched them cut him and lay fine filigree chains of silver inside the wounds. Most of them had been removed. All except the one that had lain below that scar. Had he felt agony?

“How did you get rid of the chain they left inside you?”

My mate lifted his shoulders. “I didn’t. It’s still inside me.”

I firmed my mouth, but Trowbridge must have read the horror on my face. “I felt pretty bad until I got to the Pool of Life, but the water neutralized the pain, and did some other shit.”

“What ‘other shit’?”

“Don’t know exactly, but the silver’s still inside me and I don’t feel sick at all.”

Ferris, the medic, said, “I need to get a look at her back. You’re going to have to roll her onto her side.”

Trowbridge and Harry moved into position. I placed my hands on either side of her clenched jaw and stared into her arctic-blue eyes, their lashes weighed down by heavy and repeated coatings of Max Factor mascara—no false lashes today, for my Cordelia.

“I’ve got you,” I said. Underneath the pads of my fingers, I could feel her muscles tense.

“We’re going to do it slowly,” said Trowbridge.

“How wonderful,” she said, on the crest of a ragged breath. Then my friend, my hectorer, my mother-who-wasn’t set her teeth. “Do it.”

“Smoothly now. On three,” said Trowbridge.

Don’t be sick, Cordelia. I need you.

Her chest rose as she drew in a big breath. Trowbridge and Harry tightened their grip on her shoulder and her knees. She hissed through her clenched teeth as they rolled her, and her back flexed into a painful arch as Ferris probed the terrible exit wound. My forehead was drenched in sweat before they’d rolled her back flat on the table. Her gaze sought mine. She gave me a sickly smile. Then finally, very quietly, my six-foot mother hen fell insensible.

And I was glad. Because the really bad stuff had only just begun.

*   *   *

It’s a good thing I’d used up my daily faint allotment. Otherwise, I would have hit the deck when Ferris said, “The wound has to be kept open while I work. She has the smallest hands.”

Oh. Joy.

I’d never really wanted to inspect the inside of Cordelia—so pink, so wet. Plus, her body was reacting just as Trowbridge had warned me. It worked double time to extrude the bad thing buried deep in her body; her tendons flexed; her muscles twitched against the tools I held.

Do not throw up.

Trowbridge’s sister remained silent, but I could feel her eyes boring holes into my back.
Stop looking at me.
How long had we been doing this? How much time had this taken? It seemed like forever.

“I think it is done,” Ferris finally said, tossing the mushroom-shaped plug of silver into the trash.

Not a moment too soon, my head swam. “Can I take these things out of Cordelia now?”

He did one more poke with his improvised tool before he nodded. That’s when Anu volunteered a sharp comment.

“Wait!” said Trowbridge sharply.

I didn’t understand a word of her reply because she spoke in Merenwynian. “What did she say?” I said through my teeth.

Trowbridge shook his head, then raised his gaze to mine. “She thinks there’s still silver inside Cordie.”

Crap.

“How could she know that?” Rachel asked, suspiciously. “She can’t see from where she’s standing.”

“Can you see anything?” I asked the medic.

He bent his head to reexamine the obscenity of a hole that marred Cordelia’s flesh. “No. I think it’s clean.”

Anu had her game face on, but I’d worn a few thousand of those over my life, so I recognized it for what it was—a borrowed mask of feigned indifference—and knew as surely as if my hand was slapped on her tree up in Threall that she doubted anyone believed her.

I stared at my brother’s kid, my thoughts swirling.
Could Aunt Lou’s gift have found a new home in my niece?
My aunt Lou had been a Collector, which meant she’d been able to call to any of the seven precious metals with her voice and hands, and it would liquefy and stream toward her like a sinuous snake to puddle by her feet. Hers for the taking.

But that was a talent acquired after puberty—when the full measure of your Fae magic woke inside you. And Anu was only thirteen. Way too young to be able to
call
to the seven, but perhaps she was already aware of it.

“Trowbridge, ask her if she can sense the seven,” I said. “Use as close a translation as you can.”

Anu’s response was simple: an inhale and a nod.

“Look again,” I told the medic. “Our Cordelia’s not clean yet.”

Four sweating minutes later, Ferris exclaimed, “I see it.” The air fouled as he mouth-breathed in concentration. A flex of his wrist, then he placed a silver fragment smaller than a newborn’s fingernail on the plate we’d been using to collect the pieces.

I said to Anu, “Good call, niece.”

Pleasure fired in her eyes, almost immediately banked, and then she cast a superior look toward Rachel. Truly, a huge, massive “Up that, bitch” that required no effort to interpret.

*   *   *

Ferris had been paid and had left us to our own devices. Cordelia was recovering on the couch while Rachel partook of the fresh night air outside. Predictably, Biggs was brooding. He’d retrieved the backpack from our car wreck. Though, in terms of go-bags, it wasn’t particularly useful. Two sweaters, a knife, and the bag containing Knox’s personal effects. Biggs had removed Knox’s necklace and was studying the coin with a level of bleakness that a tarot card reader might summon for the hangman.

Harry said, “I need her number. Call me back as soon as you get it.” He glanced to Trowbridge, who gave him a hard nod. Then he added, “There’s a thousand bucks in it for you if you can get it for me within the next twenty minutes.”

We needed to find a link to the witches. Right away.

Or I was going to splinter apart in an anguish of failure and grief. But, quietly. Inside, so that no one could see.

Lexi.

Trowbridge hovered, as discreetly as he could. He leaned against the counter, as if he just happened to find that its metal edge made a comfortable backrest. His scent broadcast his emotions more strongly than his actions. It spoke to me. Of comfort, and worry.

I hate blood. I detest the color of it, the sticky texture. I loathe the scent of it—particularly when it belongs to someone I love. It seemed to me that I was covered with it. Streaks, dots, dribbles, smears. Some of it mine, some Cordelia’s, some Gerry’s, and perhaps, a fleck of Natasha’s too.