The Problem with Promises (23 page)

“Neither have I.” He rested his arms on the railing. “One day after this is all done and said, I may come back here. See how fast a llama runs.” He batted away a fly. “When you first showed up, I thought you were a gift from heaven.”

“You have an odd way of appreciating gifts.” I rubbed my left wrist, trying to work the circulation back into it.

“A Fae showing up in Creemore who was capable of opening a portal—it was genius.” He smiled, thin-lipped and smug. “You were my Canada Savings Bond. I let you sit there, accruing interest.”

“And here we thought you didn’t come hotfooting to Creemore because we wrote such a nice letter.”

“That was a piece of work,” he said. “Calling yourself Alpha-by-proxy. I could have—”

“Killed us,” I finished for him. “Why didn’t you?”

“Let’s say having the Great Council occupied with something other than my books was more important than my need to slap you down for your insolence. You were a great distraction. They haven’t been that shook up since St. Silas took his seat on the council.” The llama’s front hoof twitched when he pitched his voice to falsetto. “What should we do about her? Where do we stand on the Treaty of Brelland?”

“Things weren’t all tidy with the NAW’s balance sheet?”

A half smile. “There were certain financial irregularities in mine that required topping up.” He crouched, his body lithe and supple, to pick up a handful of pebbles. “Frickin’ St. Silas looks like a rocker, but he’s nothing more than a gray suit hiding in leathers. He’s worked his way to the NAW’s accounts.”

If a Were becomes incensed just by someone swiping fruit off his apple tree, I didn’t even want to think how they’d react to embezzlement. “You stole money from the Great Council?”

Tension thinned his mouth. “I
borrowed
from the contingency fund.” Whitlock shook his head. “Accountants. When the world ends, there will be nothing left but cockroaches and accountants.” He slanted me a smile that was almost winning. “And me.”

And bad things will drip into this world. “I’m tired, Whitlock. I’ve been knifed, choked, kidnapped, car-wrecked, and shot at—and that only in the last forty-eight hours. Just cut to the chase. How do Trowbridge and I fit into this? What was all that about with the bottle?”

He poured a pebble into his hand. “It ties the Alpha of Creemore to sun potion.”

“
This
is about sun potion?”

“No,” he corrected, rolling the stone between his fingers. “
This
is about the cash you make hand over fist selling the shit to the right customers.”

“You’re selling it?”

“For a couple of years.” He pitched a stone at the roughened plywood shed. Startled out of sleep, Larry the llama blearily lifted his woolly head.

He sells sun potion. Here. In this world.
I thought of Lexi, before Trowbridge and Cordelia carried him to the portal and pushed him through. Lying under the tree. His eyes glazed, his heart slowing. I remembered holding him in my arms, knowing that he was going. “Why would they want it?” I asked in a dead voice. “So they can last a little longer against the call of the moon? It’s not worth it. It’s addictive.”

“Well, praise Jesus for that,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the money you can make if you have access to a constant replenishing stock of the stuff.”

Constant replenishing?
“You’re not selling your stockpile,” I said, slowly.

“No,” he said, “that’s long gone.”

How could he continually resupply his stash? He didn’t have access to magic. Sun potion belonged to the Fae, and the mages, and the cursed wolves of my mother’s realm. Oh … it was so simple, so obvious. “You’re getting it from Merenwyn,” I whispered. “You’re trading with the Fae.”

“Just one.”

Another Fae, who might be here in this realm, right now. Walking among us. I might have passed him or her on the street and never known.
My hand crept to Merry as the full import hit me.
There has to be an open portal. One that wasn’t closed ten years ago. A gate just waiting for a girl with an amulet and a powerful need to get to Merenwyn.

Lexi.

This close to saving him. And this close to losing it all.

Whitlock brooded, oblivious to the chain of possibilities being crocheted in my mind. “I knew it couldn’t last. Guaranteed some halfling would screw the pooch. We tell them—everybody thinks you’re dead. Stay away from the big cities, stay away from cameras—we give them a long list of things they can and can’t do. But some brat didn’t pay attention. The little shit was spotted at a café in Paris, having a beer, months after he’d supposedly been taken on the long walk.” A certain peevish quality slipped into Whitlock’s voice. “The halfling was supposed to be a corpse. Dead to everyone. His body buried in Algonquin Park.”

He sells it to the halflings. Not full Weres … halflings.

Larry and his red shed, even the frost fence, disappeared, and I was back, revisiting the night Lexi sat opposite me in the trailer’s dinette. He’d been weary, his eyes red-rimmed. “I don’t want to turn into my wolf,” he’d told me, lifting the flask of juice to his mouth.

My twin had a choice. Though it hurt his sense of identity, transforming into the four-legged did not present a life or death challenge for him. If he needed to, he could embrace his Were.

But at the age of sixteen or seventeen, halflings were faced with a completely different set of prospects. Prodded by an instinct they did not understand, they left everything they knew behind them and headed for the north. Goddess … they were babes in the woods, being followed by a wolf tasked with their murder.

What if they were told of the danger? Then offered false hope in the form of a draught that would block their bodies’ response to the moon? They’d do anything, pay anything …

“If they’re on sun potion during the moon’s call…” I felt sick.

Whitlock nodded. “They stay human.”

They don’t die.

Death would come later.

“Paris,” he repeated incredulously. “If I’d known the kid had access to that type of money, I would have squeezed his father for more.” He clicked his tongue at the llama. “Hey, boy,” he said, holding out his pebbles. “What have I got? Food? What’s this?”

Larry the llama may have looked like a sheep with a giraffe’s neck and legs, but he wasn’t dumb as a mutton chop. He bolted out of his red shed, ears pointed forward, and careened toward the safety of the back of his pen.

Whitlock let the stones dribble slowly from his grip. “It was a thousand to one that a Were would pass him on the sidewalk,” he said, watching them fall. “Maybe a million to one that he’d have recognized the halfling. A billion to one that St. Silas would recognize the halfling. Game frickin’ over.”

“How many?” I demanded.

“Hmm?” he murmured, moving along the fence in pursuit of Larry.

I followed him. “How many people do you have on the hook?”

“Enough that I was out of the red in seven months. You wouldn’t believe the money. A man facing the long walk will cough up anything you ask.”

“I find that hard to believe. I’ve seen no love for halflings.”

“It all changes when the man knows his kid doesn’t have to die.” For the first time I saw a flicker of real emotion. Sadness, of the weariest sort. “Some of us can’t produce kids. Not with our mates. Not even after years of trying.” He lifted his shoulders. “But after that kid was spotted in France, I knew it was only a matter of time before I got an invitation to appear in front of the Great Council. Not only was the halfling sired by a wolf under my jurisdiction, but I had an Alpha-by-proxy leading a pack—a Fae who could open a portal. Time to cash in my savings bond.”

“Me.”

“You, the perfect scapegoat. The consort who sent her mate to Merenwyn.” A semi whizzed by on the highway. Casually, he turned to watch its red lights wink out. “Your death would have tied everything up in a bow. A day after stepping into the role of Creemore’s Alpha, Knox would have discovered your stock of sun potion. I’d have launched a take-no-prisoners investigation. Within a few hours, I’d have dredged up two more sires and halflings and served them dead to the council. Case closed.”

“The money would never have been found.”

“Oh, maybe a few thousand bucks, but that’s it.”

Yes, very tidy. I wondered just how far Whitlock’s “containment” efforts would have extended. I glanced back to the parking lot Liam leaned against the RAV4’s front door. His arms were folded, and he was watching Anu with detached interest. Suddenly, the biker lifted his head and looked at me from under those arched brows again.

A chill ran down my spine. “How did you come to find out about the open portal and the Fae? It’s not like you can Google it.”

“Knox had an uncle who was childless. As the years go by, dear Uncle Pat starts treating Knox like his own son. When he died, he left Knox a hat, a letter and map telling him about the portal and the Fae. Knox, being a smart guy, immediately saw the potential for profits. One of his responsibilities was to keep an eye on the halflings.”

“And he came to you? Funny, I would have thought he’d have taken the map and run with it.”

“I have no doubts he thought of it. But then he realized that sun potion without clients is about as useful as a wine bottle without an opener. He didn’t know where to find the halflings and their sires.”

The kill list.
“So you gave him their names and addresses.”

“Nothing as crude as that. I just gave him access to the NAW’s database. Officially, he’s listed as one of the list’s two admin users.”

“Who’s the other one?

“Me, though I haven’t been near that database since I gave him access to it.”

“Keeping your hands stain-free,” I said.

He made a show of dusting them off. “Seemed the smart thing to do.”

I thought about it for a bit. “How did you know that sun potion would work on the halflings?”

“We did a test run. Knox picked through the list, looking for someone close to their change. Brenda’s name came up. She’d split from her family, but her sire had tracked her down to Toronto. It didn’t take Knox more than a week to find her.” His voice turned reflective. “Even in the city, there are places that mimic a natural forest. Knox found Brenda testing her new hiking boots on the Don Valley trails. He said her scent led him straight to her—she was ripe and ready for the change.”

Plucked like a piece of sun-ripe fruit from the vine. “He took her up north for the moon call and let her start her change. A few minutes into it, he gave her a dose of sun potion. He said it stopped her change just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “She’s been on it ever since.”

What would it be like to have to take the sun potion, every month? Knowing that you were a puppet dancing on the strings held by a wolf who saw you as nothing more than a business prospect? How many years would it take before mild cravings turned into full addiction?

“How long has she been on it?” I whispered.

“Twenty-six months.”

My stomach clenched as I imagined myself in her place. “I’m glad Trowbridge killed Knox,” I said.

“Really,” he replied, his voice hard.

“Yes,” I said, staring him down.

“Well, I guess I won’t ask you to sign the condolence card,” he said, briefly amused. He scratched his neck. “Let’s get to business. Tonight, Knox was supposed to be here, ready to accept the final shipment from the Fae. What I want from you—”

“Here?” I interrupted. “The portal is
here
?” Lou had dragged me everywhere during those first weeks following the night the Fae closed down all the portals. We’d trudged from Barrie to Hamilton to Peterborough—a four-hour trip that grew and grew as we paused for a look-see at various spots—but we’d never stopped here.

Maybe the giant thirty-foot peach had put her off.

“Where is it?” I asked, doing a three-sixty.

His expression soured, and he bent his head to examine the tip of his boot. Recognition of his problem made me smile—one of my cruel smiles, the ones I never wanted my parents to see. “You don’t know where it is,” I purred.

“I know it’s somewhere here.” His gaze lifted. “Probably over there.” He gestured toward the pond. “These things are always near water, right?”

Lou had taken me to pools, a couple of rivers, even a secluded bay on the shores of Lake Ontario. How many places did we go? Eight? Ten? I couldn’t remember them all. I’d been so beat up. Mum and Dad dead. Lexi gone. But yes, every place we’d visited had been near a body of water.

But this pond was empty of life. No lazy fish, no paddling ducks, no croaking frogs. Nothing except the tall blond stalks of wild sage and the broken, short spars of rotting water grass. I couldn’t see a single sacred pine mixed in among the scrubby growth ringing the banks.

Whitlock studied the man-made pond with equal disgust. “If I’d known Knox would die without showing me how to call the portal, I would have planted some hidden cameras.”

Welcome to my life.
“You’re an Alpha. Why didn’t you make him show you?”

“The frickin’ fairy placed a spell on Knox,” he said. “I asked him a question, I told him to show me, but he just choked. Couldn’t answer squat. He sat there, his mouth opening and shutting—no words coming out. Basically, all I got from him was what she wanted me to know.”

“She?”

“That bitch of a Fae.”

“You’ve met her,” I said, interest stirring.

“You think I’m going to put out my neck without meeting her? Of course I did. I insisted on it. For all the good it did me.” A bunny scampered across the grass. Whitlock went silent, his eyes narrowed until it disappeared under a shrub. He blinked and then gestured to the restaurant. “The three of us had a late lunch right over there. She ordered three pieces of pie. Smug bitch smiled when Knox choked. Then she told me that she’d only trade with him, and that I could ask all I wanted but his tongue was tied.” He wiped his palms on his thighs and essayed an indifferent shrug. “At least he wasn’t going to flap his mouth to anyone else. As long as I made money, I could let it go.”