The Problem with Promises (28 page)

Cordelia shook her head.

“I’m not dead,” she said slowly. She started moving toward me, her gait mechanical, almost robotic. The way you walk when your arms are full, and your brain is preoccupied by a possibility that up to that moment had been imponderable.

“Liam said to burn the house—I
heard
a shot.” I tried in vain to shape two fingers to imitate the barrel of a gun, but failed. Because I had a bolt buried inside me and moving my arm ignited nerve endings I didn’t even know I had. And because my pointer and f-u fingers were too swollen to straighten, too painful to manipulate.

And finally, because I didn’t believe it.

Any of it—men turning into birds, phoenix risings, magic reanimations. At any moment, the heavenly representative tasked with the job of informing me of my death would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, babe, your mom and dad are waiting for you at cloud nine. Haul ass, okay? Your mother is motoring through our stock of maple syrup.”

It had to be that. All this—everything since Knox had sunk his blade into my belly—was part of Hedi’s personal hell. That or a hallucination that just kept going and going.

“Yes,” she said tautly. “You heard a shot.”

I lay there, unable to stand, my clawed hand hovering near my chest in a failed bang-bang pantomime, feeling the heat of stirring anger. I’d been the cursed yo-yo at the end of the Grim Reaper’s string for over forty-eight hours, and I was tired of it. One flick of her wrist, and I was spinning toward certain annihilation. One tweak of her f-u finger, and there I went again, jerked back upward toward the mockery of false hope.

“There was a biker inside the shack with you,” I said, my words missiles fired through clenched teeth. “He couldn’t have missed.”

“Hedi, I’m all right.”

“You’re a ghost,” I said, with a negative roll of my head. “I’m hallucinating right now—”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes! I am!” I said, my voice rising. “I conjured you up because I want my mum and I know I can’t have her. And you’re my mom-who-isn’t and the next best thing. So I’ve dreamed you up, because I need you…”

Ah shit. Was I crying?

My broken speech had stopped her in her tracks. Her mouth worked then she said in a low, rough voice, “Biggs was shot. Not me. Biggs.”

“Is he dead?”

She shook her head. “No, he’s not.”

“He should be,” I whispered. A tear rolled down my temple. “He betrayed us.”

“He’s in the backseat. It’s your call, Hedi.”

“No, I need to speak to him. He’s our link to Brenda Pritty.” I needed to blot my face but the idea of moving anything other than my head …
I’ll lie here for a little longer.
I needed to do stuff. Pull out the bolt. Stand. Make a plan. Find Trowbridge. Gather all the parts of me, and do something.

Because I’d made a promise. To my twin, to myself. And because Strongholds hold. Even ones that gave up using their true name long ago.

I won’t give up. Which means, I must rise to my feet.

And I would. In a second.

Cordelia’s knees cracked as she knelt beside me. “Look at you,” she muttered. “What have they done to you?”

“Used me for a dartboard.” I flinched as her hand moved perilously close to the bolt. But all she did was to reach across my body for my good paw—the one that wasn’t grossly swollen and bubbled with blisters. She held it, firm and warm in her relentlessly gentle grip, as if she reckoned I needed support and that was her job.

“I’m not that hurt, you know,” I muttered to her. “I’m just resting.”

“I know,” she said.

Her heat penetrated. Her skin was soft, made so by the peach-scented lotion she purchased from a small apothecary outside of Collingwood.

So. Not a mirage.

Alive. Missing an earring that exposed one of her fleshy lobes to view. Kneeling here, beside me, after I’d written her name with blood ink in my grieving column. A band tightened around my chest. Is this what happens when you start loving again? When you open your heart and let people in?
Goddess, curse her.
I did not need another suspension bridge in my life. All sharp angles, and rusted arches, and thin wires that could snap.

“Harry?” I asked after a hard swallow.

“No, pet,” she said after a long quiet moment. “He’s dead.”

Dammit. Is she tearing up?

“Did you leave him there?” I whispered. “Did you let them burn his body—”

“Whatever was Harry was already gone. The rest was just…”

“A shell,” I said, remembering Dad and Mum. “Go find his bones afterward, okay, Cordelia? Bury them in Creemore. Near my grandfather’s stone. Promise me?”

“You’ll do it yourself,” she growled, her gaze assessing the bolt, the shoulder, and my level of resistance.

“I’ll be in Merenwyn, remember? Don’t wait until his remains are picked up by some fire investigator. I don’t want them sitting in a box in a coroner’s office. No one but us should touch them.” When she nodded, I demanded, “How did you get here? Why aren’t you shot?”

“Rachel,” she said shortly. “I despise the woman and now I owe her.”

“Where is she?”

“Here,” I heard. My gaze swung to the truck. Rachel stood beside the driver’s door. She carried a weapon that looked very much like the sawn-off shotgun one of the bikers had carried. All the lines in her body spoke of edges. “We need to move,” she said. “Shots were fired.”

“We’ll move when Hedi’s ready,” Cordelia parried.

I lifted my brows in inquiry. My mom-who-wasn’t gave me a faint smile and continued. “When Biggs saw her through the window, he threw a chair at the man covering me. Rachel and I took care of the rest.” She exhaled, then she asked, in a voice so careful I knew she dreaded the answer, “Where’s Bridge?”

I slowly pulled my mitt from her grip. “Whitlock took him.”
Wrapped in a plastic shroud.
“Help me up.”

“Stay there.” She gestured toward the bolt. “That needs to come out of you. It will be easier to do it if you’re lying down.”

I think not.
I got a quick image of a smiling Rachel holding me down with her foot while a grim-faced Cordelia tore the bad thing out of me. “Even better reason to help me up,” I muttered, lifting my head. How could one noggin weigh so much? It was impossibly heavy, and sadly, connected to my neck, which was connected to my shoulder …
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.
While Cordelia’s face pleated into a terrible frown, I breathed through my mouth, waiting for things to settle.

When I could muster words without gasping, I told her, “They’re going to frame Trowbridge. And me too.”

“How?” she asked.

“Whitlock and Knox have been trading with the Fae.” I rolled onto my good side, biting down against the need to scream as I leveraged myself up onto my hip.

“You are ridiculously stubborn,” she said, moving to support me.

She had a hard time finding a good handhold because the five-inch bolt that used to protrude from the front of me had lengthened into nine or ten inches of gore-covered arrow sticking out from my shirt.

“Don’t touch it,” I warned.

The logical portion of me had arrived at unpleasant mathematical certainty. The bolt was only so long. If that much was sticking out of the front of me … I risked a quick glance over my shoulder. Uh-huh. Impact with the ground had drilled the thing through me. Now the feathered fletch was buried inside me.

I cringed at the thought of the pain coming my way. Odds were, I’d pass out halfway through the extraction. Hell, I was that close to doing it already.

I can’t do that. Not right now.

I’ll faint later.

“There’s a portal here,” I informed her. “I thought it would be over the pond, but…” I paused for a long steadying inhale through my teeth. “The gates didn’t respond to the portal song. Maybe the magic knows the difference between an audio file and a real voice…”

In which case I’ll never get to Merenwyn.

Tempting to swoon. I widened my eyes and focused on Cordelia’s set chin—an uneven landscape of enlarged pores and hair follicles. “Whitlock wanted me to call the portal and find its gatekeeper.”

“Why?”

“Sun potion.” I reached to touch her cheek. Leather coated with the best foundation on the market. Her nostrils pinched as my finger traced the deep groove beside her mouth.

“You said Whitlock was going to frame my brother,” prodded Rachel. “How?”

My gaze swung sharply (well, relatively so) to my right.

Somehow the wolf-bitch had snuck up on Cordelia and me. She stood uncomfortably close to us, gripping the sawed-off shotgun like she wanted to use it again. I ditched exploring Cordelia’s face and hitched myself upright on one hip. Immediate remorse.
Shit, that hurt.
Life was better reclining sideways on the solid, if lumpy-boobed, comfort of my mother hen.

“Whitlock and Knox have been selling the potion to the halflings,” I said. “A dose of it before the full moon will—”

Cordelia inhaled sharply. “Stop their transformation.”

“Whitlock’s going to bring Trowbridge in front of the Great Council, but first they’re going to force-feed him sun potion. They’re going to pour it down his throat until he’s wasted.”

“Robbie’s reputation is lousy,” said Rachel in disgust. “Once the rogue wolf, always the rogue wolf.”

Some of the air went out of Cordelia.

“Trowbridge is not rogue,” I snapped. “He’s the Son of Lukynae—and that means something in Merenwyn. And he’s the Alpha of Creemore—and that should mean something here.”

But Rachel hadn’t finished smashing her bro’s rep into tiny little hurtful fragments. “All my brother’s known for here is his drinking, whoring, and violence.”

Whoring? Violence? The guy who sauntered into my Starbucks hadn’t been … okay, that was then. Now, he was …
He’s mine. That’s what he is. And Whitlock shouldn’t have taken him.

“He built a business in British Columbia,” Cordelia murmured, her tone distracted.

A gate creaked. We all spun—weapons (well, in my case my blistered hand) ready to fire—but it was only Anu, emerging from Larry the llama’s enclosure. My niece wore the vacant expression of someone who’d survived a perishing disaster. She surveyed us, then tossed her hair back in a gesture so achingly like Lexi’s that I wanted to close my eyes.

Don’t think about Threall or the Old Mage. You can’t save your brother’s soul if you and Trowbridge are dead.

She tilted her head to inspect me.

Words were necessary even if she didn’t understand them. “Thank you,” I said.

Her gaze sharpened on mine, wandered to the arrow, returned to my eyes, then looked down to the horror of my hand, and then back up to my face again.

“You’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll make sure you’ll come out of this okay.”

Anu’s nostrils flared and she turned for the truck. The ferret was running along the dashboard. Back and forth, forth and back, desperate to find release.

“You brought the ferret,” I said to Cordelia.

“It didn’t leave us any choice.” She gazed unseeingly over my shoulder, and then nodded to herself before raking me over with one of her all-seeing assessments. “You’re a mess, my darling girl.”

I glanced down. The light had faded from my arm, but there were traces—individual pinpoints of pink, in the heart of each tooth indent. As for my hand? Yes. It was grossly swollen.

“It’s not bad. I hardly feel it what with—”

“You do and you will,” she said grimly. “We need Merry on the job.”

Merry.
There had been a massacre on my chessboard—pawns had been forfeited, a rook overturned, the bishop had lost his head, the king was still in peril, and I’d allowed my friend Merry, the dark queen on my board, to be left swinging from a branch over a fetid pond.

My mouth was dry. “Help me stand. I left her by the pond.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t walk. I’ll get her.”

“No,” I said through my teeth. “I left her, I’ll retrieve her.” Waves of nauseating heat (
why does pain always feel hot?
) pulsed as I rose with Cordelia’s help. Crap. The whole damn world turned into a shifting ocean. Trees swayed like hula girls, Cordelia blurred in and out, and the ground beneath me seemed to slope invitingly toward hell.

“Before I die, I’m going to kill Whitlock,” I told her. “And any person who hurts my mate in the hours it takes for me to find him again.”

Was that me? That cold, hard voice that sounded a bit like my Fae?

Yes. It’s me.

All of me.

As I waited for my sea legs, Cordelia’s gaze traveled over my features in a way that I will never, ever forget. Her mouth went from a grim slash to a smile that was slow, and full, and as wide and proud as any mother’s when her child crossed the dais for the coveted diploma.

“That’s my girl,” she said softly. “You’re back. The little upstart who stood by that pond and told them all to go to hell is back.”

Damn right she is.
And she’s going to see Liam suffer too. Though there was the remote possibility that I might need birdshot for that. Unless that last bit really
was
a hallucination. “Did I see that right?” I asked, jerking my chin in the direction of the pond. “Did Liam blow apart and become a crow?”

“A raven,” she corrected, her mouth pulled down.

“What the hell is Liam?” I asked, accepting her arm. “I didn’t get any ‘other’ to his scent.”

Anu scuttled around to my other side, to wrap an arm around my waist.

Her scent tugged at a memory. I wove on my feet, trying to place it. Woods after a storm. Earth newly turned. Cedar.

“You smell a bit like my dad,” I told her. “In the morning. Before his shower.” Had my brother recognized it? Scent it on her?
Oh, Lexi. Is that one of the reasons you brought her to me?

I scanned my niece’s face, searching for my mum.

Anu spoke. I watched her mouth move, thinking that the world was weaving around me. My niece shook her head, angered. She took a step, pulling me gently with her toward the pond. Still yammering away.