The Problem with Promises (42 page)

As soon as the Russian had launched his conspiracy theory, Trowbridge had shifted me so I was less in front of his body and more to the side of it. “We’re done,” he’d told them, his tone definitely threatening. “Whitlock’s dead. Let us go.”

Gregori had cracked a nut. “No,” he’d said.

“Agreed,” the Spaniard had added. “Interrogate her. We need to know how to summon the portal.”

And that’s when Trowbridge went ballistic. He’d already put it together, right? While I was still rubbing my palms against my jeans, convinced I’d never get the smell of Whitlock off me, he’d been thinking ahead. And thus, he’d seen what I hadn’t, and he’d anticipated what I hadn’t gotten around to worrying about. The Great Council wasn’t going to leave a portal unguarded and open to Fae travel. The Gatekeeper had to die, and her gates permanently closed.

They’d asked me to kill the Gatekeeper.

Lopping off someone’s head (the Spaniard’s suggestion) is the kind of proposition over which your brain should pause and linger. Sadly, I hadn’t been as appalled at the suggestion as one might expect. Since (
a
) I didn’t know her, and (
b
) I was already a mass murderer. Too late to grow a conscience now.

Besides, I never said when I’d lop her head. And personally? I was thinking that execution could wait. Until after Lexi’s problems were solved. And Trowbridge and I had led the Raha’ells through the Safe Passage.

I’d said, “Okay.”

Then, Trowbridge had said, “You bastards.” Because he’d realized what would happen after I killed the Gatekeeper and permanently shut down the portal. Good-bye to Trowbridge and his Fae. Which is why he went berserk, and the reason, despite his balance issues, he’d attempted to tear St. Silas and his guards into two pieces. Or three.

But it always comes down to guns, doesn’t it?

St. Silas had grabbed Louis’s weapon and held it on me, shouting that Trowbridge’s “Contempt of Council” would be answered by a bullet to my left arm. Followed by another bullet to my right arm. And so it would go. Legs following arms, torso points that didn’t protect vital organs being next.

The threat had worked. Trowbridge had stopped his drunken rampage of furniture and face breaking. He’d subsided with a growl, though he’d still seethed, a smoking Vesuvius ready to erupt molten lava.

All this had taken less than a minute. Sixty seconds, give or take, where I’d stood there … confused.

I’d rescued us, hadn’t I?

Solemnly, my mate wordlessly shook his head at me. Kind of the way the guy living at the bottom of the hill might have after the top of his pretty mountain blew off.

Oh.

Evidently, my flare-down with St. Silas had struck the Great Council as being less spunky than punky. And my physical attack on Whitlock (an Alpha of stature) and my subsequent verbal defiance to them (Bigger Alphas of Bigger Statures) had not been chalked down to a woman standing by her man. It was defiance. Pure and simple.

Okay. I got it: I was a threat to the Great Council. Worse, they assumed I had Fae friends.

Oh crap,
I’d thought.
We’re toast.

Doesn’t the good guy ever freakin’ win?

We passed the sign for Bradford. I’d watched it grow from a small green square to something roughly the size of a small billboard, my gut clenching and unclenching. The next exit would be the Peach Pit’s.

Soon,
I thought.
One way or the other, it will all be over in less than a half hour.

It was almost a relief. I could finally sleep.

Suddenly, St. Silas spoke. “Why did you assume leadership of the pack while your mate was in Merenwyn?”

Of all the questions he could have posed, that one threw me. I turned to study his face. He kept his eyes on the road and his scent neutral. “Why do you want to know?”

“After you sent Bridge through the gates, you stayed to live among his wolves,” he observed, his tone reflective. “You could have gone back to your old life, among the humans. Why did you choose to wait there—in Creemore?”

My hands knotted. “Free us.”

“I cannot free you,” he replied. “We must deal with this gatekeeper. A portal between their realm and ours cannot be left open and unattended.”

“So, I summon her, then I kill her. But the real question is, what happens after that?”

“You will seal the portal.”

“And following that,” I bit out, “what exactly will the Great Council do about me and Trowbridge?” There—that’s the real question, isn’t it? I turned my head away, knowing he wouldn’t answer it.

The fields flashed by. The reaping long over; crops shorn to stubbled stalks.

It wouldn’t matter if I swore on my mum’s soul that there was only one portal that could be opened by yours truly. And that I’d never, ever, ever open another portal. They wouldn’t believe me. They’d probably weight our bodies and toss them into the Peach Pit’s fetid pond. My ghost forever taunted by the fact that I was
that
close to pie.

St. Silas returned to his earlier line of questioning. “You displayed no desire to lead a pack or aptitude for it before you sent Bridge to Merenwyn. I cannot understand why you chose to stay. The pack has not been your family.”

“No,” I said. “They’ve never been that.”

“It must have been difficult,” he said with a sideways glance, “to live among us and not be one of us.”

Fishing, was he?
I shrugged. “I’d thought if I stayed I could hold Trowbridge’s position—make sure that he had something to claim when he returned.” I went for my ear, finding the tip. Two strokes to soothe, a third to calm. “I didn’t want him to have to start from zero again. He’d already had everything taken from him.”

His family. His status. His future.

Maybe more than instinct and hormones had been at play when Trowbridge sparked my first flare. We’d been the same, hadn’t we? Trowbridge and me? Adrift after the night Mannus and Lou had destroyed our families. Seeing him? He’d been the Bridge to my nostalgia, carrying me back to the days when I was part of something that amounted to “Us Against the World.”

I would have sold my soul to re-create a facsimile of that life.

New love shouldn’t be embroidered onto old memories. Those bittersweet recollections belong where they live—deep inside you.

I’d felt shame, and remorse. Love and longing too.

I’d wanted to make amends.

“There’s so many things I couldn’t give my mate,” I said, thinking about it, “but I could give him that—a place to belong if he wanted to.”

“But you hoped he would not want to stay with the pack,” St. Silas said with surprising acuity.

“Yes.” I turned my head to look at him. “I’d hoped he’d just want to be with me.”

The Quebec Alpha tilted his head. “It could not be so. It is against our nature. Wolves need to live among the pack. Those who do not—they pine.”

My gaze slid away from him, thinking about the day Trowbridge had walked into my Starbucks. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. When he sat down at the table, my life changed. Right there, between one beaker of soy milk and a double shot of espresso.

I’d been wishing my brother would come back.

I’d been waiting for My One True Thing.

What had he been pining for? The pack? Is that why he’d returned to Mannus’s territory? Examining it now, I realized that Rachel’s request for some brotherly intervention didn’t hold up. I’d seen Rachel with her brother. Neither of them loved each other the way I loved Lexi. Trowbridge must have seen through it. And yet, he’d risked all when he’d crossed into Ontario.

He’d returned. Not to the bosom of his family, but to the heart of the pack. Because the need to belong was greater than the need to preserve his own life.

I’d known it, hadn’t I? Though unshaped and muddled, the thought had flickered on the edges of my consciousness. I’d waited by a fairy pond, instinct telling me that eventually he’d return to the place he belonged.

A wolf needs a pack.

And yet. By heavens … he loved me. His teeth on my skin—
his kiss
—it had said more to me than a thousand words.

Us against the world.

“Why are you interested in all this?” I asked testily.

“Because you never answered Gregori’s question. Are you wolf or are you Fae?”

“You people keep asking me to define myself.” Merry shifted slightly. I gazed at her, wondering what she saw when she studied me. “I don’t even know what I am yet. I keep finding myself being pushed from one identity to another, and with every jump I’m a little different. I refuse to choose. I’m both. I am Benjamin’s and Roslyn’s daughter.”

“Which makes you dangerous.”

“Am I any more dangerous than you? All I want to do is to protect those that are mine.”

“And yet, your definition of what is ‘mine’ keeps enlarging, gaining territory.”

He had that right.

“Very much like a wolf,” he murmured.

And the phrase echoed in my head, as the last exit sign flashed by us.

Like a wolf.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Money talks. And so does violence, or the threat of it. The owner of the Peach Pit spent ten minutes with St. Silas, then closed the business for the day. Employees were sent home. One of the wolves called in as backup muscle stood sentry down at the end of the long drive, ready to tell any pie lover that they’d have to travel farther on the 400 to satisfy their sweet tooth.

The vigilance against the curious struck me as unnecessary. We could have summoned the portal in front of a busload of tourists and they’d have just stood there, eating pie, thinking the lights and the smoke was yet another spiffy amusement offered by the Peach Pit.

Case in point: I’d held the faint hope when St. Silas pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot that we’d find it cordoned off with yellow caution tape and damn near full to bursting with black-and-white cruisers. Why? Because Ryan’s abandoned car was still there, parked where Liam and he had left it.

Now, if I’d driven up to work, and noticed a vehicle that had clearly spent a portion of the night sitting in the lot (the windows were dewed), I’d have thought to myself, “Gee, Hedi, I wonder whose car that is?” And then, I would have done what anyone with a scintilla of curiosity would have—I’d have moseyed over to the vehicle and peeked inside. That’s when I’d probably have noticed the long trail of mud and blood leading from the pond to the top of the small hill.

Hello, crime scene. Didn’t anyone watch
CSI
?

Humans. They’re the mortal equivalent of a dray horse wearing blinders. For crap’s sake, signs of a mortal struggle were right
there.
All they’d had to do was walk a few feet toward the animal pens to see it.

“Where is this portal, Miss Peacock?” inquired St. Silas, opening my door. “Over the pond?”

“No.” I pointed to the fenced-in train ride. “It’s down over there.”

St. Silas’s right eyebrow rose. “Interesting.”

I looked over his shoulder to the gray van. Mathieu had pulled into a spot closer to the restaurant. He sat behind the wheel, watching us from his side-view mirror. The vehicle’s ignition was off, but the engine ticked as it cooled.

The Alpha turned to follow my gaze. “You look for your mate? He will stay where he is until I get a sense for the land.” Then he swept his hand. “Lead the way,
ma chère.
”

I swallowed.
Call the gates. Kill a Fae. Today’s to-do list sucks.
Wearily, I slid out of the car, and led St. Silas down the little hill, and past the go-cart track and the sign that said
THIS WAY TO THE BEST PIE IN ONTARIO
! Once we broached the cement walkway, I turned left.

Under sunlight, the kiddie ride was even more incongruous. A chain-link fence, the type used to surround municipal swimming pools, circled the cement pad. Six enormous wolves, set on plinths, provided the wow factor for the tiny-tot train riders. The actual train was missing. I supposed it was locked up in the adjacent shed.

“
This
is the entrance to the Safe Passage,” he said slowly. He glanced at me, then at the enclosure again. Suspicion spiced his scent.

“If I’m lying, I’m dying,” I said blandly.

He cocked his head. “Would that be black humor?”

“Oh yes.” Jesting was preferable to shivering. I swore I felt the iron leaching from the rust, its numbing cold wicking up from the ground, chilling the soles of my feet. Being around so much iron—the only thing I hadn’t done over the last eight hours was eat the stuff—had increased my sensitivity to it. I’d have to move fast. The longer I stayed inside the fence, the weaker I’d feel.

“Shall we call the portal?” St. Silas swung the fence gate open and gestured inside.

I hate we-jobs. The person who does the talking never does the walking.

Worry bit at me as I stepped inside. I’d never tried to call a portal in daylight, and Lou had always waited for dusk before she began her song. What if darkness and a moon were two open-sesame requirements?

St. Silas followed me inside, and shut the fence gate behind us.

Geez Louise.

It was spookier inside the place than out. The flatness of the concrete. The serpentine rails. The six statues. Seen close up in daylight, they packed a predatory punch. Partly due to their size, and partly due to the realism the artist had infused into the cast stone. The tendons, the bunched muscles, the teeth …
Talk about putting your head into the jaws of the wolf.
The smallest of them would loom over me.

I studied them hard, trying to figure out which of the six appeared the most hungry for a mouthful of coin.
One coin. Six one-armed bandits.
The majority were cast from the same mold, poised with their snouts open, their muzzles lifted upward for a howl.

The easiest thing would be to try each animal, but that would look lame. I took a moment to sort through Brenda’s statements, then smiled. She said that you gave the coin to the
wolves,
not the wolf. How fortunate, then, for me. The statues were placed in pairs, like mates.