The Problem with Promises (26 page)

Get up. No one’s going to rescue you this time.

My world no longer included a six-foot mother hen who’d wade into the disgusting pool of stagnation, muttering under her breath about “Bridge’s bloody girl.” Cordelia would never complain again. Or fuss over my clothing, or tell me to eat some protein.

He killed her. He’s going to do the same to you.

Try harder.

Too difficult to coordinate raising myself to my knees.
Then crawl like a commando if you must.
I bent my left arm—
Goddess, it weighs so much
—and lifted it with the clumsy, fixed concentration of a baby attempting her first feat of self-locomotion. I won progress—one short foot, before it sank deep in the sludge.

Don’t think about it.

Shoulder screaming, pointed toes digging into the mud, belly catching on every sharp stalk there was, I used that arm like an anchor, and dragged myself to it.

So hard.

My shoulder screamed as I repeated the whole process again. Heave. Pull. Whimper. Drag. I lost count of how many reps it took to pull myself out of that water. But I did it.

*   *   *

They were side by side, two sportsmen standing over their catch. Whitlock wore a pair of brown slip-on loafers—the type that vaguely resemble boat shoes. Liam wore the same motorcycle boots as his club—square-toed, black leather.

I’d lost my shoes.

My face was half buried in the crook of my left arm, and I was near blinded by the muddy rattails of my own hair, but I could see them out of the corner of my right eye. Two shadows hazed by the vapor of my breath.

Whitlock swore. A long string featuring cocks doing things that probably weren’t physically possible, then he said, “Where’s the other girl?”

Liam’s voice sounded far away, and not at all distressed. “She took off through the fields.”

“Well, don’t stand there—go get her.”

Anu, have some part of me in you. Run.

“She won’t get far,” said Liam. “I’ll scoop her up when I’m ready to leave.”

Whitlock’s tone sharpened. “She’s a wolf; she can run fast, and the highway’s just over there. I don’t want to take a chance of her getting away.”

“She won’t head toward civilization, and she won’t get away. At least not from me,” he said with absolute certainty. “I will find her.”

“There are already too many loose ends. She’ll go to the first human—”

“I said she won’t,” said Liam. “You know what a good hunter I am.”

Whitlock let out a hiss, then said, “I keep getting fucked by the world.” I saw his foot lift.
No!
Before I could brace myself, he used the toe of his slip-on to heave me onto my side again. My back bowed into an anguished arch as tender abused tissue and muscle—and for all I knew, tendons too—screamed against the friction of the bolt. The world went gray, and all the shapes around me became wavering shapes.

Vertical ghosts, floating ghosts.

“You stupid bitch,” said Whitlock, prodding me again with his foot. “The next time I tell him to shoot, it won’t be soft tissue. The next time, I’ll tell him to hit bone.”

“Something to look forward to,” I said, my words slurring.

“Shut up,” snapped Whitlock. “Liam, go get the amulet.”

“I don’t climb trees,” replied Liam, intent on wiping his boot heel clean on the grass. “And the more distance you keep between yourself and a Fae amulet the safer you are.”

“What are you? An authority on fairies?” Whitlock stalked over to what was left of the Were we’d pummeled with our hailstorm of gravel. He bent, picked up the weapon, then returned to his muddy catch. He stood over me. The gun hung from his grip. Black. Square looking. Lethal.

Why is it that whenever someone has a gun, they feel compelled to point it at me? Do I wear a sticker? Shoot me, I’m a deer.

“You are a pain in the ass,” he said. “Frickin’ fairies. I hate them.” There was a perfectly round hole at the end of the perfectly round barrel. So dark. So lethal. You had to wonder if you’d see the bullet coming.

The hurting will stop then.

Whitlock’s toe tapped in irritation. “You told me you needed the song, well, we played the song. Where is your magic?” he shouted. To emphasize my sad lacking in all things Fae, he toed me again. “Why can’t you call the portal?”

So many questions. Where was my magic? Where was the portal? Before I had a chance to inhale, the gun did a slow menacing bob—the type of slow cocking motion a guy makes with his thumb and index finger. My stomach did an upward climb. The gesture looks dumb when some suit does it. It earns gravity when the scary guy actually has a weapon in his paw.

“This is not a game,” he said in a low savage voice.

No shit.

When it’s down to microseconds, you notice certain things in perfect clarity. The shape of a knuckle, and the three deep lines bridging it, and the blood flow or lack of it. His finger tightened on the trigger.

He’s going to shoot me now.

“Where is the portal?” he said in a low forced voice.

Wherever the passage was, it wasn’t over the pond. The song had been sung. The air would have stirred instead of whispered. My bite mark should have reacted to the magic, shouldn’t it have? Before I could form a lie, Whitlock grabbed my shirt, and hauled me up—bolt bobbing and grinding through skin and tendon and bone.

I screamed, the high shrill sound of a creature being tortured.

“You’re dead, do you understand?”

Sweet merciful Goddess, why? What have I done?

Whitlock gave me another shake then said in disgust, “She doesn’t know where it is.” He released me, and I slumped, my elbow raised to block another blow. “Dammit! Dammit all to hell!”

Don’t sob. Don’t throw up.

Liam walked to the edge of the pond, and stared up at Merry. His crossbow lay balanced over his arm. “Do you want me to kill her?”

“No. Not now. She’s Bridge’s mate and I need him alive for the Great Council. I need him to take the heat for sun potion. It will be over for her as soon as they serve their justice on him. You’ll know when it happens. She’ll start to fade and die within a few minutes.” He tucked the gun in the back of his pants and jerked his coat to cover it. “Fairies. Freakin’ fairies.”

“What do you want me to do with her?”

Frustration laced Whitlock’s voice. “Just take her somewhere and keep her stashed until…” He glanced at his watch and did some rapid calculations. “One o’clock.”

“Then what?”

“Find a place to bury her.”

*   *   *

Whitlock went away. He was there right beside me by the pond. And then his loafers moved and he was not there. I wanted to follow him. Because where he went, so did Trowbridge.

But Liam reached for the back of my shirt, and started dragging me up the hill, with his arm outstretched as if I was a garbage bag leaking sour stuff. The bolt grated at my shoulder. Within a few feet, the slow cold drain of his iron vest numbed the worst pain. I was Scott in the Antarctic, slowly freezing to death. My eyes kept closing, my heart slowing.

Fight to stay awake.

I blinked against sleep’s seductive pull—but could only scrounge up a slow droop of my eyelids. Liam and his iron were too close.

Whitlock said, “I’ll need your help. I want to move Trowbridge to my truck.” I opened my eyes, tried to pin the voice to location, but everything was blurring. Liam didn’t drop me and leap to Whitlock’s call. Stubbornly, he dragged his burden—the inconvenient Fae—all the way to Ryan’s SUV. He opened the door, then swung me face-first onto the backseat.

“Hurry up,” called Whitlock.

Liam stiffened. This was one biker who didn’t like dancing to the Alpha’s tune. But then again, he wasn’t a wolf. He was something other though. But what?

“Now!” snarled Whitlock.

Whenever Liam was within a foot of me, I had to fight against the desire to slide into a coma of sleep, the logical consequence of being so close to his vest of iron. But if he moved away, I started to revive. Not anywhere close to full capacity. I still had an iron-coated bolt sticking out of me and chaining thoughts together took heavy effort.

Go away, Liam. Do what Whitlock tells you to.
Weak relief spread when he said something under his breath. He left me—my sprawled legs hanging out of the car, my toes hitched on a clump of stray grass—and went to help.

Thank you, Goddess.

I listened, identifying the sound of a rear cargo door being raised, then heard the slide of plastic and a thump that I hoped was Trowbridge’s knee, not his head.

“I want this place cleaned up,” snapped Whitlock. “Hide Ryan’s body. Find the girl stat—I do not want her flagging down some trucker for help. When you get her, kill her. And I want that frickin’ amulet.”

“I don’t climb—”

“Ten grand,” Whitlock said flatly.

“Twelve and I’ll do it.”

Whitlock said some more stuff in the surreal haze that followed. I could vaguely hear the drone of his voice—like the hum of an angry bee—but here’s what happened. I stopped listening and started thinking. Liam thought me weak.
I am not.
Liam thought me done.
I am not.
Liam thinks I can’t move with this iron bolt inside me.
He might be a bit right on that.

The bolt had to go. Could I grab that iron-tipped thing with my bare hand? Could I make a fist around it strong enough to pull the long shaft all the way through my body? Without passing out? Before he came back? Maybe I could reach behind myself, and grasp it from the other side? Or what if I heaved myself against something hard, and drove it right through my body?

I’ll pass out. Doing that, guaranteed, I’ll pass out.

Shit.

While I was still pondering the possibilities, I heard the crunch of gravel under boot, a door shut—with a frustrated bang—and an engine turn over. My wolf surged inside me. Scrambled to be released.

Exploding into fur? I didn’t know how to do it.

“Goddamn fairy,” Whitlock muttered with disgust, putting his vehicle into drive.

I hung my head, as the black SUV carrying My One True Thing left the Peach Pit.

*   *   *

I would have folded into the mire of despair except someone chose that moment to drip molten lava on the underside of my upper arm. Each droplet, as hot as a sear of solder. I sucked in a shuddering breath against the sensation. What fresh hell was this? I opened my eyes, and discovered something interesting.

Iron was on the move.

Stunned, I considered the molten bead of the metal poised at the tip of the bolt that protruded from my shoulder. Was I hallucinating?
But no … look at that.
The end that Liam had so carefully coated with iron was turning liquid right in front of my disbelieving eyes. Melting right off the tip of the bolt. Each tiny drip of it—splat, pause, splat—sharp microbites of fire.

Another pearl formed.
Crap. Move your arm out of the drip path.
It was a simple, straightforward suggestion from my brain to my body, but damn, it took an enormous amount of effort to force myself to accomplish that simple feat.

Iron’s on the move. It’s been called.

The next bit always embarrasses me to remember. Truth? I’d seen too many ghosts and specters in one night. And simply put, I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. My gaze traveled from the iron, to the seat’s upholstery, past the door frame, beyond my splayed foot, searching for Lou. Yes, I knew she was dead, but hell, this was the night of spooks, and my brain was fumbling to supply an answer to the fact that melted iron was being summoned by a Collector.

There could be only one. Lou had returned to save me in my moment of dire need. Yup, that’s what I was thinking. Because there had been only one Fae I knew who could make the seven metals do her bidding. So I was sure Lou had come back—the Jacob Marley of the Fae—filled with self-reproach and the desperate need to make things up to me.

What my bleary eyes found was Anu. Standing half hidden by Larry the llama’s shed. Colt legs, big eyes, expression a meld of fear and determination.

I promised Lexi you’d be safe.

Chapter Fifteen

If she’d had any sense, Anu would have kept going, sprinting through the cover of the woods until she hit the highway where she could have flagged down help. Or hidden. Or done any of the things any sane thirteen-year-old kid would have done in the face of the bad guys. Instead she’d come back, and in so doing, she’d pushed herself into what should have come far later, when her body was ready for it, when the timing was right—all of it done in a place far, far safer than this one. My niece had gone straight to the claiming; that turning point for those with Fae blood where they received the full gift of their heritage.

For some that moment never comes.

But for those that it does, its arrival comes at you in a visceral rush. It courses through you—blood, heart, brain—filling you. Your Fae. Your magic. Your destiny. You cannot anticipate the full impact of it and nothing will adequately prepare you for that first introduction to your Fae. It changes your inner balance and even the way you stand.

I’d fallen to my knees when my gift had burst to life.

Lexi’s daughter stood, more or less upright, her narrow back braced against the chewed-up board siding on Larry the llama’s little shack. White-faced, she held her trembling hand aloft. Her mouth moved silently as she called to the iron.

Within seconds, she’d cleansed the shaft of the crossbow’s bolt of its iron taint. If I could have, I would have cheered as the molten ore pooled on the ground. Instead I watched, half numb, half dumb, as the round blob of melted misery elongated into a tear shape, and then funneled into a long spittoon of evil. Compelled by Anu’s call, the slender rivulet moved in a slow but steadfast direction toward her.

Moving on out.

I slowed my respiration from dog pant to forced and steady breath. Getting out of the truck was going to be difficult.
You want your mate back?
I asked my wolf. She lifted her head from her paws and whined.
Stand up.
Butterflies in my stomach, then a squeeze, and I felt her expand. Her essence—that wild creature that reacted rather than planned—filled in the cracks left in my physical body.
This is good. But I need more.
I required every bitter bit of me. The good, the bad, and the awful.