The Problem with Promises (11 page)

I couldn’t see it. But I could sense the evil. An intangible presence as frightening as if a hoof-footed, scaled creature had crawled up from hell. Now, it floated in our world, and it sucked in deep hungry breaths. Tasting the air for magic.

My Fae slid off my hip and found a place to huddle against my belly.

Those stupid, stupid, ignorant women. This unseen entity—this manifestation of bad—was so much older, so much stronger than any coven of witches. And he would demand such payment that a thousand Fae Tears could not absorb his evil.

I would not pay that bill.

Nor could I protect my Fae or myself from the pain of his desire. So we endured, the four of us. Merry, sparking at my throat. My Fae, a flinching coil of misery. And my wolf, who howled and bayed, as if she’d seen the opposite of the moon and now knew true terror.

My eyes ached in their sockets. Goddess, they could burst under this pressure.

Don’t surrender to this evil. Don’t give it anything.

You’ll lose pieces of yourself forever if you do.

But it was a literal agony to suffer it. I rolled, looking for release from its call. And as I did, my Fae spasmed and thrashed with me. Hitting the sides of the shaking truck with dull thuds that released a scent of crushed flowers. Filling my head with her high cries of hurt and fright.

The vacuum grew stronger. Winds that once howled now shrieked.

I flinched as something clawed at the cover over our heads.

Stay away!

There was a bang, followed by a quick, sharp crack as the wind sucked away the back window. “Shit!” I heard Itchy shout—his curse almost simultaneous with the sound of the hailstorm of glass hitting the cover over my head.

Don’t come in!

The air was too thin, and I cried out in fear as an object, solid and heavy, hit the back bed hard enough to fold the side panel inward and send the car skidding to one side. Itchy shouted—though I couldn’t make out what he said—and the truck lifted on both wheels.

Please, no.

I felt sudden, bowel-loosening fear that the unseen evil would pick up the vehicle like it was a Matchbox car and toss it right over the edge of the cliff, and then we’d drown in our very own fairy pond, trapped in the back of some biker’s vanity truck.

That’s when absolute panic broke loose inside that truck bed. My Fae went bat-shit. And me?
Can’t breathe! Can’t get out!

I guess I went a bit crazy too.

*   *   *

“Trowbridge!” I screamed over the howling wind. “Cordelia!”

“Harry! Biggs!” I frantically swung my legs, trying to break Gerry’s precious rollback cover, but I couldn’t get enough swing to do much damage. With every desperate kick, I screamed another name. Trowbridge. Cordelia. Harry. Biggs.

Then finally, even Casperella.

With every wild flail of legs and core, my Fae swung wildly from the end of my hand, thumping against the lid and the lift gate until she met the infamous rounded hump of the tire well with a loud hard smack that I felt from wrist all the way to the bottom of my spine.

She fell limp as a discarded sock puppet.

Fear is never good and panic is never a thing you want to endure. But doing it alone? It’s fertilizer to your anxiety; water to your worry.

I’m alone, I’m alone.

Stay small, stay quiet.

It took going that low—to the gut-level despair of a terrorized mouse—to fan anger in my Were. She did not like the wind, or the noise, or my whimpering fear, or the fact that my Fae—who’d always been so dominant and proactive—was out for the count. If me and my Fae weren’t on the job, who the hell was looking out for Trowbridge? She growled, deep in my belly. Her obsession with him was the thing that transcended every other reason in her entity.

Wolves protect their own.

Mine,
she snarled, swelling inside me.

Sensations so strong, my sweet heavens. It wasn’t a flood, it wasn’t a tide, it was an immersion in animal heat. My heart was no longer a skittering, fluttering thing inside my chest. Now it felt like a giant muscle, squeezing and clenching. And with each contraction it poured another measure of rich, feral-spiced blood into my system.

My wolf was rising.
Let her come.

A sense of superior physical strength—something I’d only felt vaguely once before—flooded inside me. All the things that I took for granted and never really thought of unless they were letting me down—my muscles, my balance, my sense of space and hearing—coalesced.
This
is how a natural athlete feels. Attuned to his body, confident that it could meet any challenge.

I’m invincible. Even blinded and tied, and locked in a truck bed. We’re so strong.

We listened to the sound of the cover shuddering. The lock sounded weak; it clicked against each tug of the wind.
Weak things can be broken.
I brought my knees up underneath myself.

Do it.

I surged upward. My shoulders hit the cover with the brute impact of a linebacker going for the block. The cover lifted, I could hear the lock being tested, and then the plastic gave. Cold air swirled around me as the lid was torn away.
I’m free—Dorothy without the farmhouse!

I struggled to stand. Anger and terror streaked through my belly as two very real hands bit into my shoulders. I squirmed, I kicked, I wriggled. His grip slid and bare human skin touched the vulnerable half-Fae flesh. On contact, blisters bubbled.

“Stop fighting me, bitch! I’m trying to save you,” Itchy yelled hoarsely.

So that he could kill me later?

Sir Galahad caught me around my knees and threw me over his shoulder.

I am not a thing to be grabbed and hauled and hurt and told what to do.

I am Hedi.

And I am as angry as my inner-bitch.

Like a cornered wolf, I went with what I had—my teeth. My incisors bit down on his skanky ass while Merry went for his shoulder. His glutes flinched under our two-pronged attack and his spine went stiff as a poker—but I didn’t let go of my mouthful of blanket, dirty denim, and stringy butt cheek.

Itchy took four more running steps, then tossed us. My own well-padded ass met the soil first, then my back hit something solid and flat, and finally my head met a surface far denser and harder than my skull.

FYI. Never, ever slam the back of your noggin against a tombstone. Vomit rose, got halfway to my throat, then slid back to rejoin the bile in my churning gut. “Stay there!” Itchy shouted in my ear. His thigh brushed my hip as he hunkered down beside me.

Mortal, do not touch us.

Teeth clenched, I stretched my head back so that the blanket’s surface was tight, and Merry dove back to work on chewing a hole through the fabric.
Hurry. I need to see.
Red light flashed from her belly, as she struggled to enlarge the hole. The fabric gave, and I used my head to enlarge the aperture.

Wind. It blinded me. Whipping my hair around my eyes. The smell of sulfur burned my nostrils. Evil was here. Its breath heated my face.

I heard Itchy scream, “Jesus!”

I opened my eyes and knew with sudden acuity the exact nature of the entity I’d sensed but not seen. Not a devil as humans understood him. No curling horns, no red glowing eyes or cloven feet. This beast was an oily shadow, gray as the smoke from a tire fire, coiling over us. A huge hulking mass, denser over the pond, but reaching all the way beyond the lines that Elizabeth had drawn in the earth. It was angry—I knew that instinctively right down in my Were bones—just as I understood that the creature would consume me and Itchy before it slunk back to the fire below.

Because those witches—those women I’d dismissed as charlatans—had done it. They’d caught the vile and foul beast in the web of their intent.

I struggled to my feet, frantic to free my arms. Itchy was staring upward at the twisting darkness above him, his expression frozen into a mask of stark horror.

The beast’s mouth opened.

I’d only succeeded in freeing one arm, and my back was against hard granite. Rapid-fire, my brain sorted the options. They were depressingly pitiful. Either sink into a ball and pray that the beast didn’t have a taste for Faes, or feed him a canapé.

I’m a big fan of no one going hungry. I bent at the waist and charged into Itchy. My head hit his stomach with enough force for me to feel the jolt all the way down to the base of my spine. The biker staggered backward with a high scream, his arms flailing uselessly. I almost felt sorry for him—that biker who wished me harm—as tongues of darkness reached for him.

I’m a bad, bad girl.

Unrepentant, and probably damned, I fell to my knees and closed my eyes as the dark shadow swallowed him whole.

*   *   *

Here’s what you do when you’ve used up your last match. You put your faith in a divine force. I hunched up my shoulders, and silently prayed.

Dear Goddess. Save me. And Trowbridge. Cordelia needs some help, and—oh yes, Lexi needs major rescuing too. Do this for me, and I’ll make it worth your while. Whatever you want, I’ll do it. I’ll be good. I won’t lie. I won’t cheat. I won’t flinch from what comes my way. Promise.

A heavy gust of wind clawed at my blanket burka and tore it away—another token offered to the beast. I could feel the claw of him on my clothing, the stink of him on my skin. My Goddess was being curiously quiet.
Screw it.
I would not meet evil on my knees. I staggered upright, bent over against the wind.

The wind, the wind. It sucked, it plucked.

I clenched my teeth and forced myself to stand relatively straight. Or as vertical as you can, when the air is raking at you with claws of hunger and death and corruption.

Make it fast, make it fast.

There was a terrible roar, louder than a subway train hurtling past the station. I clapped my hands over my ears with a scream, and rocked on my heels.

Do it. Don’t toy with me.

Evil’s terrible exhale didn’t last long. That’s the way of it—screams and exhales never do. With a quiet moan, the cacophony died as quickly as it had come. Within two heartbeats, the anguished howl had died away, and the thunder had petered out to low grumbles.

A shudder went through me.

I waited. For the birds to commence tweeting or the other shoe to drop. But nothing happened, except it became marginally easier to breathe now that my lungs weren’t trying to suck air inside a vacuum and definitely harder to stand upright now that reaction was knocking at the door, requesting an audience.

I opened my eyes. Broken branches had gathered at the base of the nearest grave marker. With a strange detachment, I found myself thinking of Mad-one’s barricade of twigs around the old elm up in Threall. And I wondered if she’d watched my soul-light blink in stuttering terror and if she worried in her own cool, detached manner that I wouldn’t come and lead her back to Merenwyn.

Close one. Mad-one.

I heard a bang. Somewhat muffled. I tilted my head. It wasn’t quite a bang; it was more of a ping. What would make that noise?
Gunfire?
Which led to …
Trowbridge.
Two unformed thoughts once linked together that hit the panic button all over again.

Bang, bang.

I slapped my hand on the top of the nearest hunk of granite and vaulted over it like I was a hopeful for the Canadian Olympic track team. Fear can make feet so fleet. See Hedi sprint. Flat out I ran, boobs bouncing hard, my serpent a dazed streamer from my pumping arm.
Go faster.
Merry pulsed red at my breast as I tore around the markers and sailed past the old tree.

Trowbridge. Cordelia.

Hell. I didn’t even bother to navigate around the last fence—I did a hurdler’s leap over the rotting pickets, landed neatly without breaking stride, and tore to the end of the cemetery’s cliff. There, I stood staring, stunned and disbelieving, at the scene in front of me. There was so much to absorb. And so much being absorbed.

Looking back, I’m sure that I only got half of it.

*   *   *

Lightning still flickered over the pond.

I paused and shielded my eyes and searched, then—oh Goddess—I saw my guy and Cordelia. There—down by the edge of the pond. They’d retreated to the large boulder I called my pirate rock, and were crouched low by it.

The water still roiled. A body, twisted, broken—Itchy’s—was impaled on the broken spar of one of the sumacs.

I tore my gaze from that visual reminder of my misdeeds and looked upward, searching for the beast. I found the echo of it in the membrane-thin wall that was rising just beyond where Trowbridge had made a bridge out of two fallen logs and four pounds of muck. The ward’s growth was blisteringly fast—it was already rolling its edges, turning upward and outward, sinuously following the serpentine curve of the ridges.

Such a thing is supposed to be invisible. That’s the whole point with wards. You can’t see it and you can’t detect it. And up to now, I’d been the dupe that had believed it to be a benign device. Protective and harmless. But now, the proverbial scales having been wrenched from my eyes, I
could
see it. Evil had been siphoned, intent and magic had communed, and now the coven’s creation was in its final throes of birth.

Stop the bad from happening.
That was my instinct. Helpless and hazy.

But in truth, I was as powerless as the flock of finches that were trapped in the interior of that setting ward. They wheeled in confusion, their course changing direction with every terrified tip of the wing until the leader bravely went where no bird should go. They hit the ward, full on, then, stunned or dead, the finches plummeted, brown missiles, legs folded. Horrible.

But what was happening on the beach was far worse.

The demand for a bridge over the creek had just been a piece of fiction manufactured to keep Cordelia and Trowbridge toiling deep inside the parameter of the ward—a diversion to trap them inside while the ward was drawn—and an opportunity for the witches to quietly move to safety before the beast was called.