The Problem with Promises (12 page)

Trowbridge lifted his arm and looked up at the things carried in that cyclone over his head—the spinning air above him carried the accumulation of anything that could be torn free from this world. Broken branches and stinging dirt. Wet leaves and the whipping ropes of lily-pad roots.

All of that debris made it far easier to see the ward rising like a dark film behind him.

He turned. Saw, just as I did, that the edges of it were flowing, stretching, searching for those lines drawn by the witches. Already the growing barrier was racing toward the path that wound up the ridge toward the Trowbridge home.

It was the only avenue of escape.

Trowbridge caught Cordelia’s arm and looped it around his shoulders, and then he hauled ass for both of them. Somewhere during the interim between bridge-building and beast-raising her tasteful gray sweater had been color dipped. Underneath her armpit, the fabric was red as my mother’s blood, but far less sweet.

Gerry’s shoulder bunched, then he pulled the trigger again.

I’m going to kill him for that.
It was the simplest thought, but one of the clearest I’d had all day. I had tunnel vision. Long and narrow. There was only one thing at the end of my spy viewer: one gut-bellied biker with cadaver written all over him. My Were was engaged, and my Fae was conscious and with me again. She’d been longing to hurt something. To make something bruised and small, as she’d felt since the Old Mage had duped her and the beast had threatened her.

Her wish to maim and hurt sang to us. More cunning than any portal song.

“Yes,” she agreed, uncoiling herself from my wrist.

Three-strong I spread my legs to steady us, then with a flick of my wrist, I cast my coil of magic toward the closest heavy thing.

Lift.

Raining earth, the tombstone rose jerkily in the air. A split second to aim, then we sent that heavenly marker on its mission.

Perhaps Gerry’s sixth sense for danger—honed from years of his good standing so close to the devil—warned him. He turned, saw incoming, and ducked. Not fast enough to escape damage completely though. The rounded edge caught his shoulder. He lost his footing, but did not go down.

Old bikers are used to being under fire. And I guess a tombstone of vengeance is no different than any other assailant. Coolly, he turned and shot at us.

Blindly.
At us.

I saw the flash first, then a piece of granite flew right off the headstone to my right. My brain noted them, but distantly.

“He is mortal, and therefore weak,” my Fae murmured.

Hide from this, Gerry.
I felt my face split into a dreadful smile. I don’t know what the biker read, but I was able to relish the fear that made his eyes round, and his eyebrows lift, and his stupid headband suddenly look too tight for his sweating face.

He did a crouching run for safety, but he was fat, and old, and slow.

And the tombstone followed.

You can’t outrun a grave marker with your name carved on it. And in my mind, oh yes. His name was etched on this one. The first blow caught him between the shoulders. It felled him. The old biker collapsed on his hands and knees, and—oh sweet joy—lost his gun.

Up in the air the tombstone went, down it came again. I hardly felt the strain on my wrist. There was no holding back. Howling “shits” and “fucks” like they were his own personal mantra, Gerry futilely tried to protect his head.

Say good night, Gerry.

Pleasure. I felt nothing but grim, rolling satisfaction. Up and down went the heavy stone, a clumsy hammer nailing shut a coffin.

Over and over again.

“Strawberry!” A loud voice cut through that mist of rage and anger, and jerked me back to the present. Where I stood, flanked by small tombstones for long-dead babies, my arm extended, my magic glittering from my fingertips.

The joy—the savage, pure happiness of hurting someone—rolled away.

My hand felt hot, and heavy.

“Strawberry!” I heard someone shout. And then again, far louder, “Strawberry!”

I blinked dully, noting that there was a tombstone in my hand—no, not in my hand. Attached to my paw through that part of me that was not me, but was me … and it had done something.
Oh Goddess! Look at that.
I shook my head, appalled and sickened. Fae-me sighed, peeved that I’d turned semimortal again.

Enough, I said in a whisper.

She let go of what remained of the tombstone. It was far smaller now, having broken in two at some point. It fell, with a hollow thump.

I stared at the biker’s remains. How long had it taken me to turn his head into something terrible? Five strikes? Four? A handful of seconds to turn a man into that.

“Strawberry!” I heard the man howl in fury.

Trowbridge.

*   *   *

In the space of time it took to pulverize Gerry’s head, my man and friend had almost made it out—they’d covered the distance from edge of pond all the way to the top of the path and the old oak tree, where there should have been an exit point. A trapdoor in the magic. Keyed to recognize the secret password “strawberry.”

Trowbridge unlooped Cordelia’s arm from his neck. He walked right up to the near-invisible barrier, and repeated the password, one last time. But the barrier never fell.

They were trapped.

The witches were long gone. Betrayal complete, they’d probably made tracks when things turned ugly with flying tombstones and raging Weres. Back to their car, and their lives. To their coven that at some point I would hunt down, and, one by one, eliminate.

I imagine they will protest.

That some of them, prior to their death throe, might point out that they’d done pretty much everything else we’d asked. Trowbridge had requested an enormous dome-shaped ward that followed the ridges surrounding the fairy pond—his, the Strongholds’, and the one I stood on. Well, they’d given it to him. The freakin’ thing was monstrous. And it looked so innocuous—hardly more than a faint shimmering skin over an otherwise unchanged landscape. But it encapsulated everything. Water. Frogs. Crickets.

Mates and friends.

And there was no doorway. No exit keyed to the simple word “strawberry.”

Feeling heartsick, I left what remained of Gerry-bloody-Gerry and walked like a girl caught in the teeth of a very bad dream all the way to the edge of Casperella’s stone wall. I could have spared my demolition attempt. If the Fae ghost had stayed within her spit of land, she would have had easy access to the portal because the shimmering veil of the ward extended all the way to the crumbling ruins of her wall.

I stared at it, thinking dumbly, it’s a wall. Between him and me. A final one, unless I could think how to break it. Slowly my gaze traveled from it to My One True Thing. “You okay?” I asked my mate.

“I’ve had better days,” he said, glowering at the wall in front of him.

I saw the muscles on his back bunch.

“Don’t touch it!” I cried. “It’s foul!”

If he heard me, he didn’t pause. The Alpha of Creemore punched at the shimmering wall with all his considerable frustration. His knuckles met something solid—I saw the recoil of his arm—and the witches’ net spat out a shower of red sparks.

But unlike me, it didn’t call to his magic. Trowbridge danced back, rubbing his knuckles. He said some words, and then a few more. Clearly, he was more furious that he’d been rendered impotent than appalled by the darkness sensed on contact.

“I will hunt down the witches,” I told Trowbridge, striving to sound hopeful. “I’ll leave now.”

“I don’t think you can,” he replied, confirming my private thoughts.

“We’ll find them, Trowbridge.”

But it will take time.

My man stared sightlessly down at his feet for a moment, then he gave himself a brief nod and squared his shoulders. He pivoted to give me a strained smile. “Get Harry, Sweetheart. Tell him we’re looking at Plan B.”

“What’s Plan B?”

He exhaled, as if he was very, very tired. “Go find Harry, Tink.”

Chapter Seven

And you know what? For once I wasn’t behaving like an impetuous teenager. For the first time in my life I wasn’t that dimwit girl who went down into the basement because she heard a strange noise.

Instead, unbelievably, I was going to do all the right things.

I was going to follow his suggestion—for once—and find Harry. I was going to do what was sensible after that—for the first time—and listen to my old geezer’s advice.

We would find a way to fix this.

Even if I couldn’t see how.

That was my intent.

Trowbridge was just damn lucky that one little finch had the heart of an ultimate survivor and I have the attention span of a gnat.

*   *   *

Here’s the thing about aftermaths. When you’re three-quarters numb and only just beginning to appreciate all the ramifications of what’s happened, part of you is pissed that the world is still spinning indifferently on its axis.

Doesn’t the earth know that it should stop?

Right then? Right there?

As I picked my way past the ruin of Casperella’s old stone wall, I was fighting to process the fact that my guy was on one side of the ward and I was on the other. He couldn’t stay there. Slowly starving once he and Cordelia had consumed every frog in the pond.

Common sense told me that sooner—rather than later—he’d have to hit play on Knox’s phone. He’d have to summon the portal and travel to Merenwyn. Where he and Cordelia would stay, for the rest of their lives.

While I stayed here. In Creemore.

Without them.

And Lexi? Oh Goddess, what of him?

My distracted gaze kept flitting to the little bird who wheeled alone inside the dome. The last survivor of the flock was the unlikely Mensa candidate. The little brown finch must have tailed at the end of the stream of birds, taking notes on what worked and what didn’t. And unlike the other birds of the same feather, this dull brown finch had learned a thing or two. For instance, the ward was clearly bad. And those birds that flew willy-nilly into that invisible shield died.

So she’d avoided doing both those things.

I wish I was that bird.

The little finch did a slow lonely circle over the pond. Some lives are not lived well alone. The final survivor of a once noisy flock did one final quick circuit, gaining speed, and then she made a sharp turn.

My heart tightened as I took in her flight path. The bird seemed to be moving at full speed directly for me. Her altitude was low. I stopped, stricken, the helpless flight deck crew watching a fighter jet coming in too fast for their landing.

Don’t,
I thought. At the very last moment, a hiccup away from death, the little bird made the smallest, slightest course adjustment midair. She turned on the edge of a brown wing and swooped low.

Really low. Like she was aiming for my knees.

I tensed, ready for the inevitable, knowing she was seconds away from turning into an explosion of feathers and broken beak.

She hit the wall of magic, but instead of bursting into cinders, her dash to freedom seemed to slow—I swear she hung in the air for a moment or two, caught in a ward that wasn’t solid, but … solidifying.

I grabbed the stick, sucked in my breath, and made a careful slash. The membrane tore and the bird fell, released from its grip. I could smell the pond—swamp rot now perfumed with sulfur—through the hole I’d created.

The finch hopped to its tiny feet, tilted its head at me, gave an avian WTF, and then the smartest bird in Creemore beat her wings. She streaked right past my shoulder without so much as a bye-bye and she got the hell out of town. For all I know she made it all the way to the deep forests of northern Ontario without once stopping for a nosh of mosquitoes.

My mouth opened. Closed. My Fae rolled into a question mark by my shoulder.

I made a hole in the ward.

And bang! I went from grim to hopeful. Heart thudding, I bent down and started tearing and slashing with my handy stick. Further investigation told me that the rest of the ward was quite solid. Except for one crucial place. The small opening the bird had aimed for—the gap in Casperella’s prison wall.

*   *   *

Some people think every Canadian has an igloo in their backyard. For the record? I’ve never seen one, never been in one, and never owned one. That’s probably why it took two more seconds and a whole bunch more prodding with the sharp end of my poker to figure out two things.

Thing #1: Like an igloo, the ward had an escape tunnel going straight through the part of the wall I’d dismantled.

Thing #2: But the escape chute wasn’t going to last. The magic kept trying to seal itself over the perplexing residue of Fae magic left in the ground within the stone enclosure.

Given time it would close. But that’s not right now, and so—

“Trowbridge!” I hollered, dropping to my knees. “I found a hole.”

“What?”

I did a quick crawl through the tunnel, cleared it, went a couple more feet, then very cautiously sat back on my heels. I gave him an impertinent hand wave. “Hey, Big Guy,” I said, giving him a kick-ass proud smile. “Looks like we’re all going to Merenwyn.”

“No!” he shouted.

I paused, dumbstruck. Hair hanging over my eyes. “What?”

He made a gesture with his hands. “Go back!”

“I’m already here,” I said. “You want to explain to me why that’s a bad idea?”

“Because there’s no getting out of here, Hedi,” he shouted. “We’ll never be able to return to Creemore. We’ll be marooned in Merenwyn.”

A realm without humans? Let me think about that. “Well, I’ll learn the language,” I said, starting to rise.

“No.” And this time there was no doubt about what he meant. No, as in no means no.

“Don’t be an ass,” I said.

His expression was unforgiving. “Go back the way you came and keep that ward open. We’re coming to you.”

“Well, you better hurry up,” I said, feeling all kinds of cold. “It’s closing.”

“Keep it open for us.”

*   *   *

I kept swinging at the stick, trying keeping the hole open—one eye on their progress, the other on the aperture that despite my best efforts was getting smaller by the minute.
Hurry, hurry.
I came to a decision. I went back down on my knees and charged through. “Look alive, Trowbridge. I’m sending a piece of me your way.”