The Problem with Promises (24 page)

Whitlock could pretend diffidence but anger streamed from him. He jerked his head and left the fence. I followed him up the short incline, then along the path that led to the mini-golf and train course. Disgust rippled his face as he took in the montage of wolves. “Do you think they were trying to be funny? Stupid, frickin’ humans.”

My wrist ached where the kid had bit me
. Don’t call me, Mad-one. Not now, when I’ve got the wolf at my door.
I flicked a quick glance at my skin. It was pale and unblemished by the slightest hint of ghoulish light.

I rubbed it, thinking about calling portals, and running to different realms. If it was just me … but it wasn’t just me. By Ryan’s SUV, supine on a sheet of plastic, lay Trowbridge. In the vehicle sat Anu. Two guards; one wolf, one whatever, watched them.

No running for me.

“Fae women used to be beautiful,” he mused, watching me. “Your mother was a good-looking woman. The Gatekeeper looks like a troll with sharp teeth.”

Gatekeeper? I slanted a quick searching glance in his direction but he’d gone back to brooding at the statuary.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “You’re going to step in for Knox. You’re going to call the portal and you’re going to get me that final shipment.”

“Final shipment?” I repeated.

“I’m done with this business,” he said. “The money’s no longer worth the risk.”

“But what about those halflings? They depend on…” My voice trailed away. His expression was impassive. “You’re going to let them die.”

“No, I’m going to kill them and hide their bodies.”

“Those are people you are talking about. With the right to life and—”

“They’re incriminating evidence for a now-defunct business venture.” He turned to study me. “If you feel a responsibility for them, then twitch your nose and do whatever you need to do. Open the gates and those halflings will get enough sun potion to survive this next moon call.”

Bile burned at the bottom of my throat. “I can’t open the gates. Whatever you’ve heard, whatever you think you know about me—”

“I think you’re the Fae I have over a barrel.” He bent his head to piece the ends of his jacket zipper together. “You know what I’ve learned about my product? A bottle keeps a halfling alive for a month. A mouthful makes a Were stronger. But you give the same wolf half a bottle of it, and that man’s no damn good.” Whitlock pulled the tab up to mid-chest. “You’re going to fix my problem or I’m going to bring Trowbridge to St. Silas tomorrow at ten
A.M.
He won’t have a scratch on him, but he’ll be stoned out of his gourd on sun potion.”

“The bottle’s empty.”

“I have one stored away for personal emergencies.” He checked his wrists and adjusted his shirtsleeves so that a wedge of striped blue edged the leather trim of his jacket. “The Great Council is going to see what they expect to see—Robbie Trowbridge is still a drunk. Still a good-for-nothing responsible for the death of his family—”

“That’s not true!”

“They’ll see what they expect to see,” Whitlock said taking my arm.

Ryan ground out his cigarette as we approached. Liam leaned against the bumper. That particular biker was turning into my personal Lex Luthor. I knew, just by the way my head began to pound, that he still had iron on him. Probably buried beneath his jacket.

I need to put some distance between him and me.

My mate had shifted positions in his slow crawl back to life. Tears blurred my eyes. For a moment, there were two Trowbridges, both so badly wounded.

Keep crawling back to me.

Whitlock studied my mate. “Bridge’s going to meet them trussed up like a convict, with a Fae amulet around his neck, reeking of sun potion. I’ll produce Knox’s bottle—with your mate’s scent all over it. I’ll tell them that it was the three of you. Knox, Bridge, and his Fae.” A faint breeze lifted the tarp. Whitlock flattened it with his heel. “You have another option,” he told me. “Cross the portal. Bring back the Gatekeeper.”

I shook my head. “Portals don’t need gatekeepers. She’s not going to be sitting there with a badge and clipboard. Whoever she is—she’s not going to be hanging around the portal waiting for me.”

“This one does,” he replied. “Knox told me she always answered right away. You open the portal. You bring her and my shipment to me, and we call it a day.”

As if it’s that easy.
“Listen to me. Walking through a gate isn’t like walking through a door. The passages are complicated. You have to know the way. And even if I managed to get to the other side…” I knew from Whitlock’s expression that he thought I was lying. “I’m telling you the truth.” I forced steel into my voice. “I can’t talk the language. I don’t know where to go. There are a hundred different ways, I could—”

“I don’t give a shit,” he said.

Fail.
“Even if I found her, and brought your shipment back. Once you had that, you wouldn’t need us anymore.”

“I’m a fair man,” he replied, straight-faced.

“Tell that to the witches.”

“They were collateral damage and all part of containment,” said Whitlock with an indifferent shrug. “You come through with the shipment and I’ll let you and Trowbridge return to Merenwyn. I’ll tell the council that I tracked you all the way to here, but you escaped across the gates before I could close in.” His smile didn’t reassure me in the least. “I get my shipment, you get your happily ever after. And maybe we’ll do business one day again. Except this time, you’ll be
my
gatekeeper.”

Bullshit.
“You’ll still need the scapegoat.”

“Knox will do,” he said negligently. “Tell me where his body is, and I’ll present it to them. They’ll smell the sun potion on his corpse. And I can show the computer logs to prove that he was accessing the halfling list since Brenda—something I haven’t done in three or four years, so I’m square. I’ll even wrap it up by producing Brenda Pritty’s body.”

“You don’t know where she is.”

“I’ll find her.”

“We’re pawns to you, aren’t we?” I muttered. “Pick us up, move us around, knock us over—”

Whitlock glanced at the sky and said, “You’re wasting my time. Let’s get on with it.” He bent to twitch the tarp. It settled over the top half of Trowbridge again, like a shroud.

He keeps getting beat up.

Time after time, he keeps getting beat up because of me.

“I’ll do it, but Liam has to keep away,” I said quietly, staring at the ragged outline of swamp cedars and overgrown spruces near the pond. “He has iron hidden on him. It’s interfering with my ability to call to magic.”

And think.

Whitlock made an impatient noise between his teeth then spun around. “Do you have more iron on you?”

Liam lifted a silky brow. “Of course.”

“Get rid of it.”

Merry spat a bright, intense white light from the middle of her stone. A sharp brilliant explosion, like a minifirework. Liam considered us for a moment, then slowly slid off his jacket. He looked around, walked to the fence, and hung it neatly. Cold stretched for me when the mercenary peeled open his vest.
Stand tall.
I bit down on my back teeth as he worked his buttons. He gave me that peculiar smile again—too intimate and taunting—then he held the shirt open, like an elegant, insolent flasher, so that we could get a good eyeful of the light, elegant chain-mail vest he wore beneath his clothing.

No clumsy steel reproduction, this vest of chains. Real iron, each double link precise and thin, so that the overall piece was not a weighty burden. It began at his neck—did a high scoop just at the base of it—then skimmed his body all the way to where it disappeared under the waistband of his well-fitting jeans.

No wonder he’d made me ill. I locked my knees against their desire to tremble.

“You should be wearing one,” he said to Whitlock. “It’s the only way to keep the upper hand with the Fae.”

“I don’t need it,” growled Whitlock.

“She is Fae. You shouldn’t forget that.” Liam reached for his jacket and sweater. “Since I’m not taking this off, I’ll wait by the SUV with my crossbow.”

“No!” I said sharply.

Liam pivoted, eyebrows raised.

“I won’t be able to concentrate if he’s left alone with her,” I said to Whitlock, gesturing to Anu in the Toyota.

Whitlock looked annoyed. “Ryan! Come down here with the girl.”

Ryan jumped to it, yanking open the RAV4’s door to extract Anu. My niece was obviously shaken. She stumbled once, only to be brought up shortly by Ryan’s punishing grip on her arm.

Whitlock waited until she and her escort had passed Larry the llama before he said roughly, “Go on, Liam.”

The nausea at the base of my throat slipped an inch. I watched Liam insolently stroll up the hill, knowing that I would kill him, too.

“I need Knox’s phone.” My shoe sank into the fetid mud. “The portal is called by a song. Knox recorded it and sent Brenda a video.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Whitlock. A bunny scampered along the far bank of the pond, then disappeared down a hollow, its white tail a flash to all who would be interested.

“Open the file and hit play.”

“Why should I do that?”

My cheeks heated. “I don’t know the words to the song.”

To the victor goes the huff. Whitlock’s was an explosion of pure mirth. “That’s rich,” he said, extracting the cell.

Anu and I were alone with wolves.

Hurry. Find something to pitch at them.
A spar of cedar lay broken near the base of its trunk on the pond’s left bank. Too heavy. There was a largish boulder at the back end of the property, but Goddess knows how deeply it was buried or if my magic could stretch that far. What to use? All I had was grass, earth, and a pile of gravel waiting to be spread over the clearing.
Hello.
I almost smiled.

“Rise,” I told my Fae.

“Nay,” she replied, her voice distant and cold.

“Rise.”

“What is she doing?” Ryan muttered.

“Nay. There be cold poison,” my Fae murmured, tightening into a ball of refusal.

She will obey me.
I shut my eyes, concentrating on her. Then with a cold hardness that was all Hedi Peacock’s, I surrounded her. Held her in my mental grip, both to test her weight and to allow her to gauge my strength.
You will bend to me.
I squeezed, with the same implacable, steady pressure of Liam’s finger tightening on the trigger.

I will be obeyed.

In response, her magic surged upward, as always, but now I wasn’t the dry-mouthed witness, nor was I steeling myself against the sting of her heat. When my talent hit my heart, and did the roll through valve and ventricle, I inhaled deeply.

And felt stronger, not weaker.

I heard her cry. Felt the wild flutter of her distress. Now she knew how I felt in Threall.
You will obey.
My magic was mine, part of the flow of my rich, thick mixed blood. And for the first time in my life, I knew my Fae in a way that I had never before. Still a separate entity, but one who’d just been apprised of a very pertinent fact.

We may fight together, but from this day forward, Hedi rules.

Chapter Fourteen

When Whitlock hit play and Casperella’s voice broke the dead silence, Larry the llama gave a bleat and disappeared once more into his little red hut.

Wolves can’t swim.
Magic simmered at the ends of both my hands. Jewels gleamed at my breast. I stepped into the water and Merry tightened into a nervous ball. Asrais and pond water—it’s never a good combination. For reasons unknown to me, they fear it. Period. And Merry had good reason to be skittish. The last time she’d been doused with pond water, it had contained iron and contact with it had burned her badly. “It will be okay,” I murmured. “I’ll keep you safe.”

I wasn’t planning to take a swim. I just needed to get out of Whitlock’s reach.

“What are you doing?” he asked sharply as I slogged through the first crop of battered weeds.

I could have told him, “Using the fact that showers are the only time Weres are willing to enter water to my best advantage.” Instead I gestured vaguely to the middle of the pond, which I was praying wasn’t very deep. “The portal opens over there. The amulet needs to be closer to call it.” Total balderdash, a quick lie to pacify the Alpha. I kept moving deeper into the water, feet sinking into the sucking muck. When my jeans were soaked to mid-thigh, I said, “This looks about right.”

Perfect in terms of getting out of Liam’s sightline too. Standing up by the Toyota, he couldn’t see me through the scrub of trees. What he can’t see, he can’t shoot.
This will work.
I turned to face them.
You can do this because you must. Break it down. Free Anu first because Ryan has the gun. Take Whitlock out next. Destroy Liam. Liberate Trowbridge. Open a portal. Find your brother. Kill the mage
 …

Stop making lists before you freak out. Take it step by step.

Whitlock stood at the edge of the pond; Ryan was some five feet beyond him, guarding Anu. One thing I’d noticed about that biker—he was prone to aiming his weapon at things that frightened him.

He could be a lousy shot but that only happens in
Die Hard
movies.

Take him down first.

I lifted my hands breast high, palms outward, fingers splayed. I paused like that—the wicked witch ready to shoot a fireball. Sure enough, the Were’s gun switched from being pressed to Anu’s ribs toward pointing at me.

Go,
I silently told the magic waiting at the tips of my right hand.

Anu’s eyes rounded as the thin cable of pure magic streamed from me. I gave her a slight smile, before casting a significant glance toward the cover of the tree line. Would she have the sense to run? Her gaze narrowed thoughtfully.

Casperella’s song had moved past the chorus, and now was starting the second verse. “Does it always take this long?” demanded Whitlock.

“Longer, as a rule,” I said with complete honesty. Though I was getting a bad feeling. If the portal was truly here, wouldn’t the air be moving in a clockwise fashion above the pond? Yes, there was wind—the tops of the rangy cedars swayed in distress—but that could have been nothing more potent than a breeze. There should be lights by now. The scent of freesias. The tinkle of bells.