The Problem with Promises (31 page)

“This is bullshit.” Rachel hissed, leaving the truck where Anu waited. “That one there”—she jerked her chin toward Cordelia—“can spritz himself all he wants but I can still smell the man under his French perfume. A scent is a scent.”

A flush spread across Bigg’s cheeks. “I couldn’t believe my nose, okay?”

“Have you been sleeping with her?” I demanded. “Working with her and Knoxs?”

“No,” he said sharply. “I told you. I haven’t seen her in two years.” A silent plea flitted across his face. “The girl I knew as Becci was supposed to be dead—don’t you understand? The halfling I loved
died
two years ago. All this time, I thought she was gone. All this time I’ve been…” His expression turned to wood and his voice trailed off.

Mourning her, I thought, watching the shadows grow in his eyes.

“Who was Brenda Pritty to you, Biggs?”

“A really pretty blonde,” he said, chin up, trying for flippant and failing.

So very badly failing.

His gaze sank and he bent his head to study the ground. Evidently, he didn’t find any life answers carved in the dirt by the toe of his Keds, because he reached to pluck a small stone from the weedy base of a clump of crabgrass. “She was a halfling. And a runaway.” He straightened, rolling the piece of granite between his fingers. “A girl who didn’t know that she had wolf blood in her.”

His mouth worked, making him look both bitter and broken, and then he shook his head. “I met her in Toronto. Two summers ago. I fell in love with her. We had a couple months together and she disappeared. Since then, I thought she was dead.”

With a huff of self-disgust, he flung the pebble into the brush.

“I’ve been asking myself all day—why didn’t she call me? She knew where I was. My cell number’s never changed. She didn’t even try to contact me to let me know that she was all right.” He winced suddenly, victim to another muscle spasm. When he could talk, he said, “When I caught her scent … I couldn’t believe what my nose was telling me. Becci was alive. And then I realized that if my Becci was alive, she’d been living with Knox under the name of Brenda Pritty. And that she’d been with him for a long time. Probably since the night she disappeared.”

Truth, I thought.

“That’s why it took me so long to accept what my nose was telling me.” His voice was rinsed of all emotion. “That’s why I didn’t really want to believe it was her until I saw her first text on his phone.”

“When was that?” Cordelia asked. “Last week? Last month?”

“Last night,” he said. “Before Trowbridge interrogated Newland. You guys were upstairs. I was checking Knox’s cell to see if it was fully charged when her message came in. I was going to call you but…”

Arms folded, Cordelia said dryly, “You stopped to read it first.”

A rough nod from Biggs. “Brenda didn’t know Knox was dead. Her message said,
Where r u????
” He examined his sweating palms with a fierce frown, then dried them methodically on the legs of his jeans.

“Biggs!” said Cordelia sharply.

“I was still telling myself, ‘It can’t be her,’” he said, staring blindly at the wet drag marks on his denim. “Then I saw it.”

“Saw what?” I asked.

“She ended the message with…” He sighed with exasperation then grabbed the rickety railing and painfully hoisted himself to his feet.

“Careful,” said Cordelia. “No sudden moves.”

“I have to show you,” Biggs muttered. He shambled across the yard to drop to his knees in front of the fire pit. He gathered a handful of ash, which he carefully sprinkled on the ground. Then, using his finger, he traced “^-
+
-^” in the dust. “I saw that and then I knew. Brenda Pritty was the halfling I fell for two years ago in Toronto.” He gently touched one of the symbols resembling a pointed roof. “She always signed off with this. Her wolf was calling and she just didn’t know it. Those roof peaks are ears.”

Rachel let out an impatient huff. “He betrayed the pack for some slut who didn’t even give him her real name. Either kill him or make him tell us where she is.”

“Shut up,” I said, my gaze fixed on Biggs’s perspiring face. We were moving both too slowly—what time was it now?—and too fast. Rushing toward a point where the winds of fate would collide in the perfect storm.

Cordelia cleared her throat. “God knows I hate to agree with Rachel but—”

“Don’t make me tell you to shut up too,” I said softly.

Biggs bowed through another muscle spasm. When it was over, he lifted his shirt to study his chest. The bullet’s flattened point was visible just below the surface of his skin below his right nipple. It would break through soon. “I’ve got to take this off,” he said in a distracted voice. Fingers trembling, he worked the buttons. When he’d pushed the final one through the last hole he sighed like an old man who’d slipped off his shoes.

He sank back on his heels, his shirt gaping. “We had sixty-three days together. A summer and a few days of fall as I watched her getting closer and closer to answering the call of the moon. I knew it was going to happen. Probably in the next cycle, her body would try to change into her wolf. And she was going to die. All torn up. I’d promised myself that I’d be there for her. That if anyone was going to take her to the woods, it would be me.”

Almost impossible for me not to flick anxious glances at the flexing skin beneath Biggs’s nipple. “I loved her,” he said quietly. “I loved her more than any other girl I’ve met. I thought she was…”

His.

Biggs’s shoulders slumped. “But a couple days before the full moon, she disappeared. I couldn’t find her anywhere and I flipped out … When I couldn’t find her trail I went to him for help. The little prick … he drank the beer I bought him, ate the wings, wiped his mouth with a napkin. Then he told me he’d found out about my ‘skank’ and that since I didn’t have any balls, he’d done the right thing. He said, ‘I put her down like the mutt she was.’”

“Who?” I broke in. “Mannus?”

Hate flashed over his face. “You think I’d go to him?” His gaze swiveled toward Rachel. “No, I went to her son. He was always going on about what a great family of trackers he came from.” Loathing drenched his words. “Stuart said that he’d taken her up north and ‘put her down.’ The son of a bitch told me he left her body there for the animals.”

“But Stuart was lying,” I said.

He nodded. “I believed him. I should have made the prick suffer more before I killed him.”

“It was you,” Rachel said in a shaking voice. “You killed Stuart. Not my brother’s bitch … you!”

“I should have gutted him,” he goaded. “He was a worthless piece of shit!”

Words chosen to inflame. Rachel launched herself at him with a screech. He tumbled right over onto his back. She straddled him to choke the life out of him.

“Don’t do that,” I shouted, starting to reach to grab her.

My hands.

Rachel looked up, from under her lashes, a lupine shadow across her face. Her posture that of a wolf protecting her kill. With murderous intent, she tightened her stranglehold until all ten of her knuckles shone whitely. Biggs didn’t fight back.

Oh no he doesn’t. He doesn’t get to choose death-by-bitch.

Faced with the fact that she was stronger than me and any attempt at hauling her off him was going to be an ow-fest, and about as effective as tearing a barnacle off the hull of a boat, I did what I had always wanted to do to Stuart Scawen’s mother. I kicked her.

Hard as I could. Right in the ribs.

She pivoted to bare her teeth at me.
Go ahead, give me an easy target.
The next kick was aimed for her pearly whites. She intercepted my swinging foot, twisted it, and down I went. Another face-plant.
Has my Goddess got something against my face?
Then she was on my back faster than I could shout, “Who has reflexes that fast?”

Enough.

Green light streamed from my right hand. “Get her,” I snarled. Spitting sparks, my magic swiftly formed itself into a cable of got-you-bitch, twisted over my shoulder, and—judging from Rachel’s strangled gasp—hooked itself around her neck.

“What is that!” she got out before my magic turned itself into a twist tie. A second later, Rachel’s claws slipped from my throat, and she became the Were-bitch payload in my catapult. Right over my head she went in a blur. Thump! She landed right in front of me. Kind of like a meal. On her back, still uselessly clawing at the green coil squeezing her neck.

“Kill her.” That’s what I heard from my inner-bitch.

“Yes,” murmured my Fae.

Eyes burning, I stood. “Release.”

My serpent gave the Were one more squeeze, then sulked off to coil presumably over my head. I’m not sure. I was building up toward a well-deserved release. I let Rachel cough twice before I bent forward. “You want to know what that was? Tightening around your neck like a noose? That was me—my magic. You can’t see it, can you? It’s just above my head right now. Waiting for me to tell it what to do. Bam! You won’t even see it coming.” I leaned down until I could feel her breath warm my face. “And this, Bestie, is the
other
part of me. Say hello to my flare.”

Chapter Eighteen

So much for being invited to Thanksgiving dinner. I released my inner light and not in a good way. That close, there was no way to avoid the glare of my fed-up flare. It didn’t bathe her, it fried her. Before she’d even made a fist, the dominance duel was over.

Perhaps I held her pinned under the nasty for a moment longer than required. I’m not a saint. It felt good. It felt right. Fae-me preened, my inner-bitch swelled.

All of me was in accord. Turning her into charred bacon was the right thing to do.

A few sparks before total eyeball incarnation, Cordelia’s hand touched my shoulder. “One would assume you’ve proved your point, dearest,” she said in a carefully neutral voice. “The sun is starting to climb. We have so little time.” A nail dug into my tense muscles. “Hedi, do you hear me?”

That would be a yes. But my inner-bitch was saying, “Turn that woman into a charcoal briquette.”

On the other hand, my eyes are flaming.

“He killed my son,” I heard Rachel rasp as my flare dowsed. “Over a halfling. I want justice.”

Wearily, I slid off her. “You’re not getting it now. Hear me? You will not touch him until I tell you that you can.” I tested the concept of lifting my eyelids.

Crap. Cue the usual pain and misery.
“One day, I will get mine back,” she promised Biggs.

“Yeah, yeah.” I squinted against the early morning light streaming through the base of the trees.
What time does that make it? Six-thirty? Seven?
Anxiety tensed a gut that already roiled.

Merry began to ratchet down her chain, heading toward my heart. “No,” I said, capturing her. “You’ve pushed yourself as far as you can go. I’ll get over this.”

Biggs sat with his head buried into his folded arms. A shimmer of sweat coated the back of his neck.

“You stupid boy,” Cordelia hissed. “You should have chosen from one of the bitches in the pack. A halfling! You knew there could be only one outcome to that story.”

He raised his eyes to meet hers. “I couldn’t stop myself. The first time I saw her…” Cordelia’s expression was chilled, and his gaze wandered to the blank canvas of the clapboard siding. “She was sitting on the sidewalk outside the Eaton Centre and she couldn’t panhandle for shit. I passed her Tim Horton’s cup five, maybe six, times before she looked up and said, ‘Why don’t you take a picture?’”

Cordelia said sternly, “You should have kept walking.”

“I couldn’t have if I tried,” he replied slowly. “I could smell the wolf on her and it…”

Don’t say “spoke to me.”

He fingered his mouth, trying to hide the bittersweet smile curving it. “I never believed in soul mates before. I’d always thought it was bullshit—putting a polite face on wanting to fuck someone. But when you meet the right person it’s nothing like that…”

“My One True Thing,” I whispered.

Cordelia’s expression pained when Biggs turned to me with almost pathetic eagerness. “She listened to me, you know? When I talked she really listened.” Then, weary disillusionment swept his features, and I got a teasing impression of what he’d look like twenty years from now if he was given the option of living them.

I said I’d kill anyone who stood in the way. Anyone who betrayed us.

“I gave her money,” he said. “Found her an apartment and kept her refrigerator full until she got a job in a confectioner’s shop off Queen Street. Never accepted a dime from me after that. I was proud of her independence but now I wonder if she was already … Anyways, it was the best and worst of my life.” A small, bittersweet smile. “She always smelled like sugar to me after she started working.”

Still does. There’s sugar to her scent.

“You should have trusted us,” I told him.

“After what Bridge did to the NAW guy? No way was I taking that chance with Brenda.” Suddenly, he hunched over in acute pain, his palm flattened over the place where the bullet fought to break skin. A groan broke from him.

Don’t touch him. Don’t offer help.

“I hope it hurts like hell!” shouted Rachel.

“Be quiet!” I snapped in frustration.

“Keep it down if you can, Biggs,” murmured Cordelia. “Anu is in the truck. She doesn’t understand what’s happening or why.”

“I’m trying.” Biggs moaned, rocking himself.

I paced a circle around him until he straightened. When he lifted his gaze, I asked in a hard voice, “Where is Brenda?”

He tilted his head to consider me. “So I tell you and you bring her in front of the council. And what will happen then, eh?”

“We’ll explain the circumstances, and she’ll give her evidence.”

“And then they’ll put the halfling down,” he said harshly.

Yes.

“I’ll hurt you, Biggs. I don’t want to but I will.” Part of me—the one that was cold and distant—knew it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Hell, all I’d have to do was squeeze the trigger a few times and then wait to interrogate him during the inevitable agonizing muscle spasms. Could I do that? Shoot the guy I’d shared more dinners with than I could count? Aim at his various body parts with the intention to hurt and maim? Hurt the guy who’d stood in line at Walmart to buy my historical romance novels?