The Problem with Promises (25 page)

Seriously? If the Peach Pit’s portal could respond to a lousy wolf, why on earth wasn’t it showing some sign of recognition? A little flicker of fairy lights would be nice. Could it really tell the difference between a taped voice and a real one?

If that was the case we—me, Trowbridge, Lexi, and possibly every single living thing on this planet—were out of luck.

Suddenly, Whitlock’s patience shattered. He shouted, “Then stop stalling and make something happen!”

No problem.
The gravel was there, the mound of earth was ready.
Pick up the stones,
I told my Fae. A slight pause—probably to register her discontent—before she complied. Thinning herself, she streamed toward the end of her tether, to form an abbreviated question mark over the pile of gravel. I could feel her confusion—did I want her to shovel it up? Pick it up stone by stone?

I needed her to break apart. To become pure energy. The essence of my desire. Pure magic.
Become the cyclone of my desire.
I poured what I had into her—all my cold hatred, all my black anger.
Break apart. Become my will. Become a manifestation of me.

“Ah,” she breathed.

Heat inside me, then she ruptured into a haze of glittering pieces. She hovered for an instant, then fell upon the gravel like a starved Dirt Devil spying a debris-strewn carpet.
Take those rocks.
With one whoosh, hundreds of rock fragments rose in the air.

Ryan spun toward the chatter of the stones, his gun raised.

“Run,” I mouthed to my niece. She took off like one of the Peach Pit’s rabbits as I flicked my wrist to send the cloud of gravel churning through the air toward Ryan.

The Were had a gun and the natural inclination for target practice. Mouth gaping, he fired at the angry hive of gravel swooping toward him. A stupid reaction—he should have run—because the hurricane of gravel was impervious to bullets and fear. Screaming, he fell under the assault, balling himself into a defensive crouch. How many shots he got off after the tornado of dust, dirt, and gravel swallowed him, I’m not sure. But I caught the glimpse of flailing arms, the turn of a shoulder—and sadly the last doomed attempt he made for freedom. He tried to crawl away from it. But there would be no escape for him; his demise was cast, because the cloud of malcontent consuming him was partly Fae, and partly me, and mostly set on killing him.

He got five feet and collapsed. The cloud flattened, and settled over him like a low, heavy hailstorm. There was something ugly about the way it continued to torture the unconscious Were. Pitter, pat, pitter, pat. The rocks bounced off him. Grotesque and savage satisfaction swelled inside me. I was the wolf with the skin of the hare hanging from its sharp teeth.

Die.

I caught movement to my left. I swung around in time to see Whitlock wrench a sign—
PLEASE DON’T FEED LARRY!
—right off its post. Holding it like a centurion’s shield, he came for me, racing down the low slope at top speed, his jacket winging out behind him.

“To him!” I yelled to my magic. She turned with me—my eyes, her vision—and perceived his threat. In a fluid motion, she re-formed our low cloud of gravel into the pointed
V
-shape of a dark and angry colony of wasps.

But this guy wasn’t mortal, and he wasn’t superstitious. He was a Were, of full age. Moreover, he was a
true
Alpha, and they are of different stock: judged by their willingness to act, weighted by their ability to quickly calculate the odds. Drowning and going down with a fight, versus being humbled by a cloud of gravel? I guess he figured the dog paddle would come to him.

Holding Larry’s sign over his head, he plowed right into the scummy pond, each thundering step sending water spraying up.

Fool. My hailstorm could find him in the water.

“To him,” I cried.

I should have said it silently. Because that’s when the bastard played dirty—chopping at the water with the side of his Alpha paw, effectively blinding me with a spray of cold, stinking pond water. Merry received a wave of water and shuddered hard.

“Don’t freak out,” I hissed to her. “There’s no iron in it.”

But my usually fearless friend scuttled upward, taking herself up, up, up away from the evil water. Her chain shortened until it was uncomfortably tight around my throat.

Whitlock kept coming at us, smacking the water hard, sending sheets of scum into my face. Blinded, I twisted away from him and we retreated, heading deeper into the pond. It was a desperate, sloshing retreat, made complicated by the fact that my disembodied magic was looking for a target, and not finding it. Bottom line, if I was blind, so was she. And since my magic couldn’t find the intended target—she swooped back home to me, dropping pieces of gravel in her agitation as she did. Overloaded, she whirled around me in cloud of chattering stones. Directionless. Volatile. Freaking out, Fae-style.

“Bitch, surrender to me!” shouted Whitlock as he fired his gun. Something very hot, and very angry, streaked past my bicep, stopping just long enough to take a searing nip before it zinged through the screen of my cyclone of gravel.

“Do you need me?” called Liam.

“I can handle one little bitch,” shouted Whitlock. “I speak to your wolf, Hedi Peacock. Come to your Alpha. Lay down your arms.”

I would have told him to go fuck himself but I was too busy choking. Mindless with terror, Merry had tightened to a strangling noose around my throat. Back I went, nails tearing at my skin, trying to loosen her stranglehold. Deeper I staggered, until my feet could barely touch the bottom. There wasn’t much I could do, but stay
en pointe,
keep my balance with a one-arm dog paddle, and hunker over my amulet, offering my back to my enemy.

If Whitlock had known how close I came to blacking out, he would never have ceased his splash efforts. But he couldn’t see that, could he? A tornado of stone still spun around me.

I don’t know how long it took me to figure out that the deluge had stopped—possibly two seconds longer than it took Merry. She’d loosened enough for me to inhale.

I really thought I had a chance. You know? I really did.

But first, I needed to get Merry out of the water and beyond Whitlock’s reach.

“I’m going to throw you to safety,” I told her as I pulled her over my head. I dried my eyes as best I could with a forearm, and won my Fae and me partial sight.

“Make a hole!” I screamed to my Fae. My magic—still feeding off my emotions—puzzled over that command. “I need to see!”

Aha.

She reshaped her cloud to create a small opening. Through the gap, I focused on the massive willow growing at the edge of the pond. I made a short prayer that for once my aim would be true, did a quick high-speed flutter kick that raised me in the water, and threw.

Make it, make it … Oh Goddess, I threw too short, she’ll never make it.
She hit the crotch of one of the limbs that stretched out over the pond, with a hollow thunk, then free-fell for the count of two, bounced, slid for another terrifying half second, until a vine caught one of the slippery, trailing yellow branches.

She held, her Fae gold chain swaying.

Safe.

Now, to summon up a cyclone of dirty water that will drown Whitlock.

My back was turned. I didn’t even see the bolt coming.

*   *   *

Pain. Hot, searing, stabbing. It tore through my right shoulder. So unexpected, so awful.

“Iron!” screamed my Fae. I heard her, as if she were me, wailing, loud and high inside the confines of my own head. Then with one broken sob, she gave up her outward shape—no longer a cyclone protecting me, no longer a tornado promising doom … no longer a tangible thing.

She was misery. She was fear.

Stones started to fall, pitter-patter, into the water, onto me. Pea gravel pinged, on my face, on my nose, cutting into my soft lower lip.
I should lift my arm to cover my face,
I thought groggily. I could taste the essence of sweet peas. I could taste me.

Semimortal, semi-Fae.

Stunned, I looked down. The rounded nub of an iron bolt protruded below my collarbone. The tip of it, having pierced through shirt and flesh, was red-glazed. My head turned, very slowly, because even the slightest tensing of neck muscle yielded horrifying misery. The part sticking out of my back was out of comfortable vision range. But between eyeblinks, I could just see it—a long stick of metal, coated with iron—quivering with each of my panicked breaths.

Not again.

I’m not a voodoo doll. People have to stop sticking things into me.

My knees gave out. One moment I was standing, safe inside the eye of a cyclone of gravel, thinking myself protected, and the next? I was part of the water, my legs floating, my arms nerveless. My face skyward, pointed ears covered by the awful water, tasting foulness as water surged into my mouth.

Oh Goddess, I’m going to drown.

Again.

The iron’s poison had felt like fire on contact, but now its tentacles were hurting me with a different type of burn—numbing, biting cold. And the weariness.

Not a bad way to go, if one considered it.

My body weightless. The pain receding to a dull constant throb coming from my shoulder. Breathing took concentration. Thinking took more. The water lapped at the seam of my mouth, searching for entry.

My wolf let out a long mournful howl inside me.

Mate,
she called for Trowbridge.

“Pull her out of there,” Whitlock said.

*   *   *

Liam stood over me, wet to his waist. I floated, eyes slit. Waves of cold streamed from him. Iron vested, iron hearted, he studied me, without his habitual half smile, or even the spark of curiosity. His attitude was one of resignation. I was the bump that refused to stay flattened; the button that kept flying loose.

It would have been equally practical to seize my floating arm or snag my collar. They were right there, for pity’s sake. Even my hair would have made a better handhold. But his focus traveled to the bolt that stuck out of me, and quivered with each one of my ragged breaths.

Don’t do it.
My gut twisted in fear.

Without expression, he wrapped his hand around that slippery rod, and then he turned—without even a flicker of glance downward to his limp prize—and began to walk. Agony …
agony.
Dragging me toward shore with each churning step. I screamed. Water rushed up my nostrils and clogged my throat.

Choking. Thrashing. Crying. I spluttered and kicked, trying to turn my head, unmindful of anything but keeping alive to the next second and the one after that. No wily catfish was I; no great marlin capable of an inspiring leap. I was the sunfish wiggling on the curved hook, tail flapping. Truly caught. Weakly struggling, being pulled willy-nilly to a place I knew I did not want to go.

It’s tearing me apart. My shoulder will break in two.

“Let me go!” I screamed. “Stop!”

Liam dredged me through the slime of decomposing weeds, dragged me choking through the stiff and broken stalks of the lone clump of bulrushes. All of it was awful, but nothing compared to the great rasping horror when he reached the edge of the water and finally … let go of the bolt.

“You want her any farther, you get her,” he told Whitlock.

Maybe Whitlock planned to pluck me free a few chokes before the last sayonara. Perhaps, once I’d choked enough, he’d have reached for me and dragged me out of the water, and up the slope.

Whatever. He didn’t spring to my rescue.

I sank, jaw first, into the soft shoreline muck. Eating mud? It’s worse than swallowing water. It’s thicker; it’s slimier. You can’t expel it with a splutter. The mud creeps up your nasal passages, it slides past your teeth. And as it does, your panic level shoots upward faster than the red needle on a pressure cooker.

I can’t cough. I can’t lift myself!

Goddess, help me!

If ever there are moments in your life when you see the value of your existence in absolute clarity, this instant must count among them—that split second during which you are no longer a thinking person or a calculating entity; you are the animal on the brink of death. One who either wants to live or wants to die.

And by glory be—not to be redundant on this point—I wanted to live. I’d come all this way, never giving up, always ruled by two principles. Don’t die. Find your family. Well, by Goddess, I’d found and lost a family again. At least I could stick to point one.

Let go of the pain.

Ignore it.

Choose to live.

Stubborn desire knocked the stupor right out of me. My neck may have felt weak, and my head heavier than a cast-iron pot filled with cement, but I lifted my chin free from that soft bed of stinking sludge. As soon as I did, brown water filled in the depression left by my face.

It was a powerful motivator.

What did one monkey say to the other? Roll over.
Ordinarily that meant using my right arm, but that particular appendage was full of pins and needles. Everything’s connected, right? The arm bone’s connected to the shoulder bone. And the area south of my clavicle had a bolt rimmed with iron sticking out of it.

Before you drop your head, heave yourself over to your back.

My flopping arm was nearly useless in terms of bracing, so I threw it behind my back, and did what comes so naturally to others—I used my head. In this case, as a dead weight that helped my entire body roll over to its side.

Good enough.
At least I could breathe. And feel throbbing, stabbing, heated agony radiating from my shoulder. My arm felt numb. Useless.

Breathing an exquisite self-torture.

Don’t look at the bolt.

The hot knifing sensation in my shoulder had spread until my entire body pulsed with it.
If you’re hurting, you’re still in the game.
I tried to sit up. Couldn’t because my spine had dissolved. I wished for Trowbridge. For Merry. For Cordelia. For Harry and …