Rivals and Retribution (10 page)

“You may continue,” Dmitri said as we started off.

“Thanks so much.” I watched the scenery ghost past us. “We tried triggering the wolf with the truck crash, remember?”

Jessica’s growl filled my helmet until Dmitri gave her a swift smack across the back.

“No wolf—no over-whatever.”

“
Oborot,
” he corrected.

“Whatever. It didn’t happen then—why now?”

“It requires the appropriate stress and proper timing,” he said grimly. “Timing is the key to everything.”

“Yeah, well, so far our timing’s sucked. And Jessica, well, hers isn’t any better,” I muttered.

“Remember the deal. You get me Pietr Rusakova and I’ll be nothing but a memory. And evidently Gabriel will make himself scarce as well. You can only win by doing this.”

I thought about it. I could be rid of two devils with one dramatic choice. Maybe I could rebuild things with Gareth. Maybe once he realized what I had to do to save all of us—the sacrifice I had to make …

Gareth understood sacrifice better than anyone. Surely he’d understand this if it freed our struggling family from Gabe and Dmitri.

“Just what exactly do I have to do to hold up my end of the deal?” I asked, regretting my willingness to go through with it as soon as the words fell out of my mouth.

“You will trigger the wolf inside Pietr,” Dmitri said as if it were as simple as breathing.

I snorted. “And how exactly do you suggest I do that?”

“When the moment is right, you will kill Jessica Gillmansen.”

Alexi

Between Max’s nose and the standard American four-wheel drive, we found where they had parked their vehicle.

“Slash the tires?” Max suggested.

“
Nyet,
” I said. “We may need their vehicle on the way back down the mountain. I want all our options open,” I explained.

Max nodded. Pietr and Cat were already up ahead, examining tracks.

“Two snowmobiles,” Cat reported.

Max’s eyes seemed to lose focus, and I knew he was listening. “They haven’t gotten very far. We can—” He began to jog forward.

“Wait!” I caught him and looked at each of my siblings. Gareth was of little importance. Family was always the most important thing, and that was no different now. “They mean for us to catch them. They are only getting ahead of us to set the stage—to fix the snare.” I weighed the flashlight in my hand.

Evening was sinking into the mountains. This task would be easier for the
oboroten
.

Gareth nodded. “We need to go more carefully now than before. Gabriel’s impulsive and passionate—hotheaded—but he’s clever. And with Dmitri’s training … caution is the better part of valor,” he assured.

“What about Marlaena?” Max asked, his voice gruff. “What does she bring to the party?”

Gareth shook his head, his eyes sad. “I do not know. I did not think she would ever go this far … for anyone,” he added, his voice softening.

“So she’s our wild card,” Max said.

“Ugh.” Cat shivered. “I hate when you use that term. Do you remember the last time you used it?”

Max blinked at her.

“It’s the same thing you called Derek: our wild card. And you see how well that turned out. We are stuck with bits of him—perhaps forever.” She snorted in frustration.

“What?” Max defended. “It’s just a name.”

“
Da,
” Pietr said darkly. “What’s in a name?”

“We must go,” I urged.

“I’ll go on ahead,” Gareth volunteered, starting off at a ground-swallowing stride even in the snow.

“Excellent,” I said. “Perhaps he will draw enemy fire and we will be rid of more of them when this all is over.”

Their path was clear and bold—too clear for my liking. While Gareth scouted ahead I sent Cat into the treeline on one side of the path while I took the other, trudging through sudden piles of snow where the canopy broke and significant stretches of forest that were covered in crunching pine needles and peppered with the last traces of sunlight. We flanked Pietr and Max on their way up the hill.

I expected all eyes to be on Pietr.

I expected a trap.

I did not expect to get so close to the mountain’s bald top without even a stir or a whisper from the shadows. With every step we drew closer to the peak—a dramatic setting for a dramatic werewolf alpha and her captive—the more nervous my stomach grew.

What was I missing?

I peered across the open path, where Pietr and Max pushed their way forward in the track left by the snowmobiles’ skis and bellies, and into the woods beyond. A slender beam of light announced that Cat still kept pace with me.

Gareth paused suddenly up ahead, his gaze raised to a spot at the mountain’s very top.

They were there. At the tip of the mountain’s highest rock outcropping Marlaena stood in snow that glittered beneath the rising moon’s light, a half step behind a figure who was bound, gagged, and kneeling awkwardly in the white powder, her dark hair waving and snapping in the breeze.

Jessie
.

Pietr began to run.

CHAPTER SIX

Jessie

“He’s really something, isn’t he?” Marlaena’s voice boomed out. “He has the makings of an alpha—a hero,” she added. “Oh, hell,” she muttered. “I really don’t care for monologuing, and there’s no harm giving you a voice
now
.…”

She ripped the gag’s knot out of my hair and tore it from my aching mouth. My eyes went wide as I wobbled close to the mountain’s edge.

“Go ahead. Speak your mind. Get out all your words—you might not have many left.”

I growled and found the words I thought whenever I thought of Pietr. “He doesn’t just have the
makings
of a hero,” I retorted, “he’s been a hero. And he will be again. He’s nothing like you or your pack of thieves and troublemakers.”

She snorted. “We’ll see about that.… It’s a funny thing, really, how similar we are just below our skins.” She looked me up and down, her mouth twisting. “You having only one skin, it makes you far less understandable—far less compatible than we wolves are to one another.”

“Is that what all this is about? Compatibility?” I snarled. I was getting so sick of every frikkin’ psycho wanting to get her claws into Pietr. Sure, he wasn’t wearing his specially crafted necklace to combat his animal magnetism, but since being cured he didn’t have much magnetism. “If you’re looking for love, can I suggest an online dating service?”

Leaning toward me, her eyes locked on mine, she froze, staring at me as if she was contemplating my words. Deeply. As if she was confused, puzzled by her own actions. “Love?” she whispered. “I’m not looking for love with Pietr.…”

Her forehead scrunched up, creasing, and for another long minute she was simply silent. Finally she regained her attitude and hit me with another question. “How many times has he had to rescue you, Jessica?”

“Too many.”

“Don’t you get tired of playing the hapless victim?”

Hapless victim? I could shut her up and tell her about the men I’d killed defending myself and my friends, but no matter what my reasons—what my justification—had been, I hated talking about it. And boasting about it was wrong on so many levels.… I seethed silently and tried to twist the ropes around my wrists to better work the knot with my fingers. Because, yes, although she had me trussed up like a pig for barbecue, Gabe hadn’t run rope between my wrists to keep his tangled mess in shape. He had definitely not grown up in the country where knot-tying was still a useful skill.

I was thankful he was a rookie.

“How does it feel to be so utterly useless you need someone to rescue you?” She nudged my knee with the toe of her boot.

I tugged at the ropes biting into my wrists. “Come closer and I’ll tell you all about my feelings.”

“Ha. Like you’re a threat. You’re just some lame-ass fairytale princess in need of a prince’s rescue. God. I hate those stories. Maybe that’s why I hate you.”

“
Hate
me? You don’t even
know
me to hate me.” I shook my head and squinted toward Pietr’s distant figure. “Maybe you just hate anyone who’s better than you.” I laughed. “That’s gotta be a
looong
list.”

“You really aren’t very smart, are you? Here I am, able to roll you down the mountainside, and you’re getting attitude.”

I shrugged. “I was the same way with a
previous
psychotic attacker,” I admitted, thinking back to my encounter with Marvin in the school hallway. “And a jerk who wanted me dead because of what I could do for the werewolves,” I added, remembering Officer Kent at the gun range. “But hey, there’s something to be said for consistency, right? And maybe the third time’s the charm—though there’s nothing charming about
you
.…”

She returned to watching Pietr make his approach.

“Geez. Whatever happened to
them?
” I wondered out loud. “Oh. Yeah. They’re
dead
. Both dead. Sucks to be on the wrong side.” I didn’t bother adding I hadn’t killed either of them.

Still downhill a good distance, Pietr paused, assessing the situation, his left hand twitching at his side, signaling to someone behind him? Let it be Max. For such a sexy slacker, Max always came through when he was needed.

Marlaena didn’t notice. Her eyes were fixed on Pietr. “Marlena,” Pietr called, “what are you doing?”

“I have a working theory,” she shouted down the hillside, compensating as the wind tore her words away. “I think Jessica hasn’t been one hundred percent honest with you. My sources tell me—and I think you’ll agree they are in
the know
—that cures like yours can’t truly end what’s effed up in your genetics. The cure you took? A temporary fix. A stopgap measure. It
masks
your true self—doesn’t cure a thing.”

Pietr froze a moment, considering. He licked his lips as he weighed his words. “Jess wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Why not? She’s lied to everyone else. So what would stop her from lying to you? What makes
you
so special?”

“Love,” I answered simply. “Love is what makes him so special. But Pietr, she’s right. Cat and I didn’t tell you everything about the cure. We only found out by accident the night the company was blown to Hell. And when we told Alexi, he wanted time to come up with an alternate plan. He wanted to have a complete cure before you’d demand it.”

“See? She lied to you, Pietr. She omitted pertinent facts and put you at a disadvantage.”

His body language barely changed, only stiffened a little. He was coping tremendously well. Like he already knew … We had both tried so hard to always be honest with each other. We hadn’t always succeeded, but we’d tried.

“And Pietr…” The breeze shifted and so did Marlaena on the gravel beside me, her back straightening and her chin lifting. I looked up and saw her nostrils flare. “While you’re asking for answers, why not ask Max why he’s
still
a werewolf?”

We’d seen Pietr force Max to take the cure, but none of us witnessed his final change. And Max had remained more Max-like than any of the other Rusakovas had remained like their
oborot
selves.

Pietr turned back down the hill and shrugged. “Max?”

Max stepped out from the deepening shadows and also shrugged, like a little boy caught taking an extra cookie from the jar. Then he unfurled his most devilish grin and aimed it at Marlaena. “We’ve been through this already, Mar, but if it makes you feel better…” He cleared his throat and faced his younger brother, giving him the most pained look he had in his arsenal of expressions. God. “What was I supposed to do?” he asked. Dramatically. There were even hand gestures.

Max knew, like I did, his drama bought us time. I refocused on the knot near my wrists, ignoring how my fingernails bent back as I plucked at it.

“I couldn’t leave us defenseless,” Max said. “I understood your grief and I get what drove you to force the cure on me, but it wasn’t how I’d handle things. So I spit it out and locked myself up a while. I got sick,” he admitted, “puked a bunch. But you didn’t get enough into me to make me go through the final change.” Max looked back at Marlaena. “Huh. That felt pretty good, getting that out. It’s like therapy in the wilderness,” he said through a grin. “Some people pay a helluva lotta money for that, I guess.”

Marlaena was unimpressed.

Max’s grin snapped shut and his brow lowered, his forehead heavy and shadowing his eyes. The boy was designed for drama. And he was exactly what Amy needed. “Maybe that could be your career path—kidnapping girls and getting their boyfriends’ family to fess up.” He clapped his hands together in front of him and cocked his head. “Of course it won’t be much of a career if you die here today.”

Marlaena’s boots scraped in the gravel and snow as she widened her stance, adopting a fighter’s pose. But she clapped, slowly and loudly, at the spectacle before her. “Now, Jessica, tell Pietr the rest,” she urged. “Tell him what breaks the cure.”

Silent, I continued working the ropes.

“Tell him,” she demanded, nudging my hip with her boot. A few pebbles fell off the edge of the mountain and tumbled down into the ravine. She froze, seeing the same thing.

My throat tightened, watching the stones fall and bounce their way to the bottom. How would what
I
said or did at this moment really matter?

I could tell him the truth, warn him about the unreliable burst of adrenaline it took for the wolf to jump back out of his skin and take over once more. I could agree there was no cure that was permanent at this point and there was no way to know when a werewolf’s life would end.

Chances were good that Pietr wouldn’t die immediately after changing back.

Chances were good he would still have years before his werewolf nature drove him to an early grave.

And chances were also good that no matter what I did or said, Marlaena was going to shove me down the mountainside.

But
chances
were still only chances.

“It’s a burst of energy,” I said. “It’s a dumping of so much adrenaline into your system—so much fear or passion or angst or pain—that it pushes you past your limits. Your body breaks through the mask of the cure.”