Rivals and Retribution (11 page)

“Thank you, Ms. Science. Now. Shall we have a demonstration?” Marlaena asked, leaning over my shoulder and gently rocking my entire body so that more pebbles and a small puff of crystallized snow fell free and disappeared into the gap in the mountain’s teeth.

“Nyet!”
Pietr shouted, sprinting as he pushed his body. “Marlaena—tell me what you want—I’ll do it—
Anything!
” The knot was finally coming loose under the pressure of my prodding fingers, the coarse strands of it biting into my skin. But it was working. In a minute I’d be free.…

They were still yelling at each other, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gareth.

“Don’t” was all he said to Marlaena. Just one simple and soft word as he reached out a hand for her—or for me. I had no idea which of us he was trying to save at that moment or if he wanted to somehow save us both.…

The way she looked at him … something in my heart faltered seeing that expression—even on
her
face.

“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You never do. You never will.”

Pietr was nearly to me, the look of terror plain across his face as he realized he was too slow.…

Wolf again, Max raced in ground-swallowing strides, overtaking Pietr.…

The
crack
of a gunshot reverberated across the mountaintop and Max rolled, his head tucked, tail like a flag suddenly loose in the wind.

I screamed for them both.

Max tumbled into the trees, leaving nothing but an awkward and bloodstained path in the snow and an explosion of white when he landed with a thud against a tree trunk.

Leaning suspended from a harness high in a tree across the clearing was Dmitri, the barrel of his gun still smoking.

“Help me understand,” Gareth urged Marlaena, approaching slowly and steadily.

“I don’t even understand.…” And then her hand took a rough grip on me, squeezing my shoulder so tightly I knew it was bruising beneath her fingers. “But I think this is a lesson we all need to learn,” she said.

“What?” Gareth asked. “For me, ’Laena, don’t…”

Marlaena hesitated.

We were both frozen on top of the mountain, and not because of the crushing cold. Pietr rushed toward us, Gareth’s fingertips nearly at my sleeve as Marlaena’s grip tightened on me and Dmitri lowered his gun and took aim.

At me.

If Marlaena wasn’t going to end me, he would.

Their images blurred and faded into the darkness and I was again in Derek’s head, gasping as my world—the present world—was ripped out from under me.

“She needs to move. Get inside quickly, push her, and get out.”

We vaulted into Wanda’s brain, stood inside the hallway that made up the heart of her head, and stared down at the doors. One vibrated in the wall as if it knew our intention. Without a second thought we yanked the door open and stepped inside.

Before us was a chess board filled with figurines in black and white. The red squares among the army of figures were marked with words; scrawled across each in Wanda’s own handwriting was the name of a city or town in the local region. “There.” We pointed as one, reading Junction. Derek stepped forward to grab a pawn and shift it to the spot, but I recoiled, seeing that each pawn was a figure of Wanda.

“Move,” he insisted, sliding the pawn forward.

“More,” Mommy urged. “Shift them all to that position so that the message is understood, so that the need is fierce.” And we did.

The chessboard beneath our feet slanted, shifting, the ground rumbling below us. “Move,” we shouted as everything tilted and we were thrown from the board. We screamed, racing back toward the open door.

“Hold on,” Mommy cried, and everything went black, my vision clearing just enough …

“You can’t save everyone.” Marlaena’s voice broke through the fog fuzzing up my brain.

… and I took the best advice I’d gotten in the past few hours.

I
moved
.

Marlaena shifted as the gun fired, pulling me back—out of harm’s way?—but not before the ropes binding my wrists came free and I’d grabbed her pant leg, unbalancing her and sending us both tumbling. Damn it—whose side was she on?

All I heard were screams: hers, mine, Pietr’s, and Gareth’s.

Then there was the noise—and the sharp and bitter pain—as my body barreled down the mountainside, crashing awkwardly into snow and stone and chunks of trees and mashing the breath and the thoughts out of me, but not the will.

My arms and legs pinwheeled, flailing, but my hands kept grasping stubbornly for anything that might slow my progress down the steep slope. The snow and ice made grass and vines impossible to find, and when my hand suddenly snagged in something I screamed at the pain burning through my left shoulder as my body suddenly ripped to a stop, my hand caught in the root of a downed tree. “Breathe, just breathe,” I whispered, my right hand trying to find a grip and pull me up to alleviate the weight that pulled on my shoulder and wrist and made me scream and curse.

I dug into the snow with my right hand, feeling carefully—and quickly as my fingers became numb—for another root or a branch or an oddly shaped rock … anything to help me move up the mountainside instead of continuing down.

I cried, tears streaking out the only heat on my stinging face. The taste of blood made me guess a split lip was among my many injuries. All of me ached, bursts of sharp pain intersected with throbbing dull pain, and my vision swam with more than tears.

About five feet below me and to my left I heard Marlaena whimper, clinging awkwardly to something that was protruding from the stubborn snow still clinging to the cliff side.

I crawled up far enough to take the weight off my left hand and shoulder and, looping my right arm through another sturdy-looking tangle of roots, I pulled my left free with a sob. “Not good,” I whispered, every tendon burning and every bone and joint loose and springy as old rubber bands. “But alive,” I realized with awe and a sudden burst of joy as I looked up the steep cliff face and saw just how far I’d fallen.

With a swallow, I looked down, past Marlaena’s struggling form, and assessed my options.

The bottom was actually closer than the top. Maybe, if I could control my descent, gravity would do most of the work for me instead of having to fight it in a struggle to climb back to the top.

My stomach churned. My head felt murky and thick. I wondered what was happening far above me. Marlaena had hesitated, changed her mind, and Dmitri had taken a shot at me instead? Shit. How were Max and Pietr? And Gareth. I even worried on Gareth’s behalf. He was the most reasonable member of Marlaena’s pack.

Of course, I probably would’ve given credit to any member of Marlaena’s pack who tried to save me. Maybe my forgiveness was too sweeping.

But Pietr … Where was Pietr? I craned my neck, looking back up, and screamed when I saw the answer hurtling toward me, large and dark and powerful with eyes like hellfire. Wolf. He skidded and clawed and fought the ravine’s pull the whole way down the slope.

He came straight for me with nothing but my battered face and his seething rage reflected in glowing
oborot
eyes.

We connected, a
poof
of air slamming out of our bodies and shaking the tree’s roots so hard the entire thing rattled and Marlaena flew free as I also lost my grip. Pietr’s front legs morphed into something more human, sleek and furred but ending in hands, and he grabbed me and pulled me firmly against his chest and stomach.

He tucked and rolled, letting gravity take control but shielding me with his body—a canine roll cage—the whole way down. Above us I dimly heard the sound of something else tearing down the cliff face and for a heartbeat my gaze caught the image of a midnight-colored wolf charging headlong down the slope, paying no mind to his own body’s harm—only one goal in sight: Marlaena.

Gareth
.

Pietr and I came to a jolting stop—as if every part of our impromptu journey downhill hadn’t been jolting—and I breathed deep, my lungs shaken and rattling, my teeth aching in my jaw and my mind full of one word:
OW
. My fingers twined in the dark hair of his wolf’s pelt (never had I imagined a hairy back to be so appealing), and snuggling against his thickly furred chest, I did a quick mental accounting.

I was still alive.

Pietr was still alive.

Pietr was a wolf again. But more important than back hair or battered faces, Pietr was still alive.

Max…?

I whimpered, straining to look up the way we’d come.

Pietr shivered against me and his form wavered, trembling like a mirage around its very edges as he fell back into his human form. Reaching up, I stroked my fingers down the side of his cheek, faint stubble rasping against my fingertips just long enough to wake sensation in them. “You’re going to freeze out here like that…” I winced; even unzipping my coat to open it and pull Pietr into it with me made tears well up in my eyes.

“Stop,” he whispered, grabbing my zipper with one hand. “You need it more than I do now. I’ll be fine. We just need to hurry back.…”

I adjusted my grip on him, my fingers twisting into his hair and pulling his mouth down to cover mine. I pressed myself against him and it only took one heartbeat before he reciprocated, and all the intensity and the heat and the hunger—everything I had hoped for and missed so desperately—came back to him on that slippery slope.

I wanted to scream. Not because of the pain that worked like a cheese grater across every bone in my body, but because Pietr—
my
Pietr—was back.

He pulled away from me, his lower lip still between my teeth, his brilliant blue eyes sparking with red like someone had set off flares in their wild ocean depths.

He blinked. And shuddered.

I released his lip and tried to come back to my senses. “My Pietr,” I whispered.

He rumbled out a purr. “We need to get up top.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, choking back my hesitancy. “I hope Max…”

He nodded and readjusted our position with a grunt. “Max’ll be fine. And do not worry about
us
. I am here,” he assured me. “We’ll be fine.”

“Better than fine,” I insisted, pressing my face into the crook of his neck, my nose tickled by the short hair near his ears.

The groan to our left pulled our attention that direction and we looked as one.

Marlaena lay on her side, her hair a long, stringy mess of red, her eyes shut, her face splotchy and red with scrapes and scratches already healing. Even the slice I’d given her across her cheek had pinched together and started to smooth.

Gareth, still wolf, was looking very, very worried; nudging his alpha with his snout he whined for her attention … whined for her to regain consciousness. It was the most affection I’d seen him give her.

He shimmered and became human again, tugging her limp body into his lap and cradling her head in the bend of his arm as he made soft noises at her. Gentle noises. “Come on, Princess,” he whispered. He had to be the only guy bold enough to call someone like Marlaena
princess
. “You’re too hardheaded to let a little tumble end it all.… Come back, ’laena. Come back to me.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m not ready to learn that lesson you want so bad to teach me: that you can’t save everyone,” he confessed. “Not yet—not with you. Let me save you, ’laena. Come back.”

“We should help him,” Pietr murmured, his lips brushing a curl by my ear.

“Helping him means helping
her,
” I reminded him. “And at the moment I’m pretty firmly opposed to that course of action.” My fingers grazed his forehead, trying to erase the crease that marred his beautiful brow. I brushed his bangs back and pressed a kiss to his temple. “Let’s go—get topside and find Max. And…”

“And Cat and Alexi,” he muttered. But he was studying the two of them with an intensity that rivaled the one he’d only recently found for his schoolwork.

“Pietr,” I whispered, my palm sliding down to flatten against his chest, “we need to go.…”

His heart was racing.

Gareth shook her gently, saying, “Don’t you dare try to convince me that—”

Marlaena’s eyelashes fluttered, and her eyes slowly opened, fixing on Pietr’s face. “You can’t save everyone,” she whispered.

Something in Pietr tightened beneath my touch, and his heartbeat vaulted to an even faster speed.

Marlaena’s expression shifted, her eyes going wide with shock, something sparkling in their depths. Fear. Absolute terror turned her florid face pale as milk.

What had her so scared? Being alive? Or what she had nearly done? Or…?

“Pietr. You’re trembling. You must be cold,” I whispered. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here. And find everyone. And everyone’s clothing. Let’s go home.” I petted his chest. But he wasn’t looking at me. “Pietr?”

“
Da,
” he said finally, shaking his head as if to pull himself out of a daze. “
Da,
we should go.”

“Pietr,” Marlaena called as we rose and began searching for the best route to get back up to the top. He froze rabbit-still hearing his name on her lips. “Pietr,” she repeated. “I’m so sorry.…”

Pietr grabbed my hand, yanking me tight to his side. He dragged me after him, fiercely ignoring her voice as it rose and strained to get his attention. To apologize. But all the time I was thinking she didn’t mean she was sorry about
me,
but about something else.…

Something as new as the thing that sparked in her eyes when they met his.

And that something worried me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Marlaena

I pulled myself off Gareth’s lap, my stomach twisting into knots as my eyes followed Pietr Rusakova and his girlfriend away from the spots we’d all landed.

They picked their way back up the mountain’s dangerous side, Pietr occasionally casting glances over his shoulder in our direction. In
my
direction? Did he feel the same sudden, strange and sickening pull I did? The sweeping sense of disorientation?

I stood a moment before doubling over to catch my breath, my hands on my knees, my head low. Gareth was beside me in a moment, his hand hot from the change and pressed into my back, the very definition of comfort.