Rivals and Retribution (30 page)

“What?” Pietr stepped closer to me, and catching my scent, his eyes rolled.

“Nothing,” I soothed, reaching out to touch his hand. But he pulled back.

“Don’t lie to me. You lie to everyone else. Don’t start lying to me, too.”

“I’m not…” But as I stepped forward to reassure him, he jumped back like a frightened animal, and turning, dashed out the back door.

Amy took the single step required to stand beside me. “He’s not himself,” she said, leaning in to rest her head against mine. “Remember that, Jessie. That’s not your Pietr.”

“I know. I know. But that Pietr … he may be the only Pietr I have left.”

“Don’t give up on Sasha yet. There’s still some time.”

“What if it’s not enough time?”

But instead of answering, she just held me close in a hug because we both knew too well there was never enough time with the Rusakovas—until we had a real cure.

*   *   *

Back home the next day a knock at the door made me freeze, seeing Gareth standing on its other side. His thick dreadlocks were pulled back into a modified ponytail, and his eyes were red. But not the red of a man on the verge of changing into a wolf, instead, the red of someone not getting enough sleep. I understood. My own eyes looked eerily like his and burned like I’d forgotten to blink for days.

“Come in,” I muttered once I was certain Marlaena had not somehow healed up and managed to join him.

He slipped in with the grace of the beast that was always just a breath away and waited for me to show him the way to the couch.

He fiddled a moment with a coaster on the coffee table, waiting for me to clear my throat or maybe waiting to find the right words. I could relate to that.

“We share a common problem, you and I,” he whispered, not meeting my eyes.

“Yeah. She’s redheaded and bitchy and named Marlaena.” I flopped into Dad’s easy chair, tucking my legs underneath me. I played with the edge of the armrest cover, waiting for him to bark at me.

He didn’t. “They’ve imprinted.”

“I’m aware of that fact.”

“You see what it’s doing to them both,” he added.

“And you know what it’s doing to
us
.”

He nodded. “But what it does to us and what it does to them is incomparable. This might break our hearts. But it will kill them. And that would break our hearts, too.”

I stopped touching the dustcover and stared at him. “It sounds like you have an idea.”

“I do.”

“Go.”

“Wait. It requires a very open mind and some truly liberal thinking.”

I straightened in the chair. Already I didn’t like where this seemed to be heading. “I said go.”

“The imprint is designed to attract the best mate for passing on superior genetics to the next generation, that’s it. Once the female’s impregnated, the imprint should drop because the deed’s been done.”

“Whoa. What are you suggesting?”

“Let them embrace the imprint.”

“You mean embrace each other.”

He paused, searching my face. “They are fighting the imprint so hard they are dying.”

“But maybe they’re winning. We don’t know.”

“How late are you willing to wait to know for sure? Are we going to watch them suffer when we could just let nature take its course and move on?”

“You’re talking about letting them—
encouraging
them—to have sex together.”

“It’s only sex.”

I jumped to my feet. “Only sex?
Only?
Sex is a pretty big thing, where I come from—it means something. It’s an act of love and is usually a commitment.”

“I told you this requires extremely liberal thinking.”

“Yeah.” I puffed out a breath. “I may be liberal enough to date a werewolf whose family comes from a country my own once considered our enemy, but I have my limits.” I wrapped a strand of hair around my finger just to pull on it. “I think you’d better go.”

Gareth rose to his feet. “If you think this idea sits well with me…” He shook his head. “They are killing themselves, Jessie. And we’re encouraging them to do it. What are you willing to sacrifice to save your love’s life?”

Mute with frustration, I pointed toward the door.

The slamming of it proved he’d gone, and I sank into the chair and cried. But only long enough to regain control of myself so I could sound sane on the phone with Alexi.

“I need you to do something for me,” I told him, the quiver nearly out of my voice.

“
Da,
” Alexi said. In the background I heard the clinking of glass and the hum of machinery. “What is it, Jessie?”

“I need you to tell me how to cure Pietr. How to break the imprint.”

“If I knew…”

“No. Not ‘if I knew.’ Go over all the ways to break the imprint with me again, Sasha. Now. I need to think.”

“He gets her pregnant. I find a chemical antidote. Or one of them dies.”

“Gareth was just here pushing plan A. How close are you to plan B?”

“Not as close as you want me to be, but closer every minute.”

“Keep working on it, Sasha. You can figure this out. I know it.”

“But it may take time I do not have.…”

“Just keep pushing forward.”

He sighed. “I will, Jessie. You have to know that I will.”

I hung up the phone and all I could think about was not plan A or B but the very existence of a plan C. Gareth wanted to know what I was willing to sacrifice to save my love’s life? What if the answer was simply one word—a name? Marlaena.

Alexi

“Red again!” I shouted, hurling the beaker against the lab’s wall. It shattered, the formula splashing and leaving a bright stain on the otherwise unremarkable paint job.

I was at an impasse. The cure was stubbornly turning red each time I dripped the catalyst into it. Red was not what we wanted. Red proved that some ingredient in the cure’s formula was in the wrong amount. Or some ingredient was simply the wrong ingredient altogether.…

I reached for another beaker, but Hazel’s hand came down on my own, stopping me.

She shook her head and removed my hand from the lab table’s surface. “How does this help us? Now someone needs to take time away from their research and experimentation to clean up your mess.”

“Ironic, is it not?”

“What is ironic?” she asked, the wrinkles around her eyes rearranging.

“That you are complaining about cleaning up one of my messes when, in fact, we are both struggling to clean up your father’s mess. If he had never encouraged this line of research—if he had decided his laboratory would research something else for the good of Mother Russia…”

“Then Wondermann would have developed the
oboroten
on his own and we would have no chance of undoing the damage he still would have seen done.”

I snorted. “You make it sound as if it is destiny, the two of us working to fix werewolves in America.”

“And what if it is? What if life and history combines in one frightening juggernaut barreling toward its own conclusion, with very few ways we might adjust or avoid its path?” she asked. “What if most things are fixed and perhaps foretold and we only have rare moments to shift the way destiny weaves together? What if
this
is such a moment?”

I shook my head, a thousand ways to disagree with her musings sliding around in my brain. “I deny the existence of destiny,” I said, “but that does not mean I do not understand the stupidity of wasting our time. What determines our future is not some destiny written in the stars but rather our own sense of perseverance. Back to work.”

Jessie

Dad had joined the construction effort and brought Annabelle Lee, who insisted on reading aloud to us. Suggesting Anna save her voice and let his old boom box work some magic, Dad just grumbled when she responded that the only magic it might ever work was finding a clear radio station, and certainly not a good one, she added with a sniff. She had begun reading the third chapter of
Little Women
when I dropped the nail I’d been holding.

It never hit the floor, coming back up to my eye level and resting in Gareth’s palm.

“Thanks.”

He shrugged and held it for me as I pulled the hammer back. “I want to help. The pups do, too.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw them standing by obediently, dressed in work clothes—most of what the pups had gotten so recently as a result of Dmitri’s association was starting to look more like work clothes, anyhow.

Everything and everyone seemed to have lost their shine over the past few weeks.

“The pups need to focus on their homework,” I pointed out as I hammered in the nail.

I was greeted by a chorus of “Done,” “Done,” and “So very done.”

“And is it all right?” I prodded, striking the nail one last time so it was flush with the wood.

Gareth leaned in so I could see his face plainly. “I’ve checked all of it. I think they’re set.” Then, more softly, he said, “Let us help you, Jessie. We all want this to be taken care of.”

I spun to face them, Annabelle Lee’s reading dropping away to silence. “We’ll gladly accept all the help we can get, but I don’t want anyone screwing up their grades because they’re spread too thin.”

Dad coughed. “Pot calling the kettle black,” he announced.

“I don’t have a choice,” I said.

He shrugged and went back to work.

Annabelle Lee continued her reading.

“Can you tell them what to do?” I asked Gareth. “And then go and…”

He nodded. “Keep an eye on trouble?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, hating the fact we couldn’t trust Pietr and Marlaena in the same house. With Alexi back in the city working desperately long hours, Cat was stuck watching them now, but I knew Gareth was much-needed backup.

That night, as Cat watched Marlaena and Pietr, I returned to the basement. Time was nearly up.

Amy and Max soon found me, and not saying a word, picked up tools and began to help. Then Gareth and the pups tumbled out of their beds and joined in.

And by the time the sun had come up, we had holding tanks for two rabid werewolves.

*   *   *

Luring a werewolf into a place you want to trap it, with decidedly few escape routes for you, is a stupid, stupid thing to do, I realized as I called Marlaena every dirty word I’d ever heard (and a few I took significant liberties with).

Luring two werewolves into a place you intend to trap them with decidedly few escape routes for you is simply and utterly insane. But then, I had spent time in the local asylum, Pecan Place.

And actually it was easier than I expected to make both Marlaena and Pietr angry enough to chase me into the basement. But getting them locked in and getting myself back out alive?

That required Max.

“Set and
spike!
” he shouted as he barreled into Marlaena, shoving her into the first cage. Well, not so much a cage as a panic room. But smaller. A panic
cell?
Max locked the door, pulling a heavy bar across it to keep her inside.

A standard deadlock wasn’t going to do it. We had to go medieval on their asses.

Pietr shifted his attention from me to his brother and this was one moment I was glad
not
to be the center of his attention.

“Come now, brotherrr,” Max growled, putting his hands up. “Be reasonable about this. You have lost your ever-loving mind and we are trying to save you. So…”

Pietr lunged at him, but Max dodged and wiggled his fingers as an obnoxious invitation to Pietr to try again.

Outraged, Pietr did.

And like the most amazing of bullfighters, Max stepped aside and let Pietr rush straight into his cell. The door slammed shut, the bar came down, and I ran straight into Max’s arms, thanking him again and again.

And then crying like
I
needed to be locked up, too.

His arm around me, Max led me up the stairs and shut the basement door, lowering a newly installed bar there, too.

“I think you should go home tonight. Take Amy with you,” he said.

She was already waiting in the foyer, a bag in her hand.

I nodded and let them take me home.

Alexi

“I wanted to call you first,” I said to Jessie as Feldman and I boarded the train, all our belongings in an awkward combination of suitcases and duffel bags and one very precious briefcase. “We are coming home, Hazel and I.”

There was a lengthy silence as she processed what my words truly meant. “You mean … you have it?”

“
Da
.”

“You have the cure?”

“
Da
. Enough for everyone.”

She screamed so loudly I moved the phone away from my ear. It was a moment before I dared to move it back.

“You are happy now,
da?
” I teased.

“I’ll be over the moon if you’re on your way here now,” she confessed.

“Then ready your rocketship, Jessie Gillmansen, because we will be arriving at the station at two.”

She shrieked again, and I hung up.

“She seems pleased,” I said, setting the phone on my lap. But try as I might to remain cool, I grinned like an idiot at the thought of, after so many years on the opposite side, truly being a hero.

*   *   *

My next two calls were brief. “Wanda,” I said. “Listen to me. No matter what happens next, you must not go near the Wondermann Corporation. You must not join Interpol on the raid.”

“Don’t you tell me what I can do, Alexi Rusakova…”

“I am not telling you what you
can
do, I am merely making a friendly suggestion. Wondermann wants you dead. His best men will be watching for you.”

“I’m already headed to the city,” she griped.

“Excellent. It is not much farther from the Big Apple to the best of small-town America. And there are people here who I know are desperate to see you.”

She grumbled a bit. “If I go…”

“You will most certainly be targeted the moment you are identified. Make the smart choice. Come home to Junction.”

“Crap,” she muttered, and I knew I had convinced her, so I concluded the call.

“One more,” I said. I punched in Nadezhda’s number. “Naddie, we are out. I have everything I require. Take your men in, but be careful,” I said, disgusted at how soft my voice went.