The Problem with Promises (38 page)

“There’s no precedence for their involvement.” She developed a sudden and intense interest in the three construction workers doing not much of anything with a piece of plywood.

Ah, Cordelia. I’ve looked ahead. Like you have.

“They’ll make one,” I said, inserting the woolen-cozied tablet into the bag. “It’s all about money. And power. Who has what, and who wants what. Am I wrong?”

“No.” A soft reply. Filled with regret.

“Well, the Alpha of Creemore has a lot of things to covet. Remember the first time I sent the pack off for their moon run?” I smiled, feeling wistful. “I almost felt like I was one of you for a little while. Just for a few minutes. Right after I used my flare to send the pack down the trail. Some of the younger wolves stretched their necks as if my flare felt really, really good. But after you all left, I went back to the trailer. On the table was Harry’s map.” I glanced to her for confirmation. “You know the one that shows all the packs and boundary lines?”

She jerked a nod.

“I’d never seen it laid out like that, Cordie. So much land to look after and so many small packs to watch over. How could I protect them? They were so far away. So spread out.” My gaze left hers and drifted to the throng of humans on the street. “That’s when I realized that all of those people were now my responsibility and all those boundary lines were mine to guard. I stayed awake all night thinking about it. Then I picked up a book and kept my head in one until Knox knocked on our door.”

“Why?” she said, her voice low. “I never understood. You just … disappeared.”

“I was scared. I’m still scared. But I won’t run from my fears anymore.” I wanted to stroke my ear, but my hands were busy. Tightening on the plastic handles. Making fists on my thighs. So very busy. “No matter which way you look at it, my heritage is going to be a problem for us. The council will note that Ontario is riddled with Fae portals and point out that he chose a halfling for a mate. And that will be their precedent.”

“You’re not a halfling.”

“Semantics, Cordie. I am half blood. They’ll use my Fae as a device to keep us under constant surveillance. All of us. Trowbridge and me. Anu. You too, Cordie. They’ll be coming at us all the time and even when we’re at Creemore, among our pack … there’ll be no sanctuary. No safe place.” I chewed my lip. “If Trowbridge and I ever get to return to his pack, I’m going to have to face Rachel. She’s going to say that I made a promise to her and broke it. She’ll be telling the truth.”

And I hate the pack, Cordie. I truly hate them.

Cordie went back to digging under her wig, trying to get that spot that bothered her so, then swore. She whipped the carefully cut red bob off her head and slapped it on her knee. Then she gave in to the demand to scratch.

No wonder she was at that spot like a poodle with a case of mites. She’d developed a nasty rash, haloing the stubble she buzzed every day with her electric razor.

“What is that?”

“I have no idea,” she murmured, rubbing the back of her balding pate. “I think it’s stress. My hair is coming out in patches.”

“Well, stop going at it. You’ll wear what’s left of your real hair off.”

“And you should stop making promises!” She gave it one more furious go, then sighed. She gripped the steering wheel and stared ahead bleakly. “What did Rachel want?”

“For me to go to Merenwyn and stay there.” I shrugged. “She should have made me pinkie swear. I have no intention of staying in the Fae realm and I imagine she might be feeling a tad pissy when I return. With Trowbridge standing by me, she won’t be able to do anything directly, but she’s vindictive and she’ll find a way to get her own back. She’ll come at it sideways.”

Her nod was more of a head jerk. “She’ll take it out on Anu.”

“I won’t be able to give Anu the type of home my twin wanted for her.” My hand traveled to my breast where Merry lay. She wrapped a gentle tendril around my thumb. “I don’t want her name to be added to someone’s list. I don’t want her watched and ostracized. No—to do it right, Anu needs to be taken to a place where she can’t be hurt by people who don’t understand her.”

Cordelia’s knuckles were white. “I can do that,” she said, her voice very low.

I turned back to watch the drones in the suits. “I want her to go to school. I don’t care how much grief she gives you about that—you make her graduate from high school anyhow.” In the silence that followed that, I studied the young guy wearing a Queen’s University windbreaker checking his cell phone. “College would be nice.”

“That’s a long time in the future,” she said.

“Well, you’ll be busy teaching her stuff in the meantime. Start with our language. Give her words to shout at you when you’re being pushy or demanding. I want her to be capable of giving you as much trouble as I did.”

“You never gave me trouble,” she muttered.

“You’re a bad liar.” My throat ached. It
ached.
I took in a breath and another, breathing through my mouth until the urge to bawl eased.

Cordelia’s scent was strong as it reached for me.

I slid my hand down inside my pants until I felt the golden links of my mom’s bride belt, warm against my hip. “You’re going to need some money,” I told her, hooking the chain with a finger. Sucking in my gut was required to pull the soft leather pouch clear of my jeans waistband. “You’re getting a little long in the tooth for the drag circuit.”

“I have some cash hidden in my sock drawer back in Toronto.”

“You don’t have a sock drawer.” I worked the jeweled clasp open, then sat forward to pull the chain belt free. Gold glinted in the early morning sun, catching the eye of a passerby. I gave him the finger. The human lifted his brows and huffed off. I sat back, head resting on the window. “I wish I had a scent,” I said, tracing the gilt embroidery on the leather. “Anu won’t remember me at all.”

“You are unforgettable, Hedi, darling.”

I winced. “Don’t torture her with that song, okay? Not everybody likes grocery store music.”

“It is a classic.”

“So you say.” I glanced at her. A fat tear hung from her lower lash, too proud to fall. I held out the bride belt. “Here. Take it. There are enough diamonds in it for you to buy a home and see both of you to old age.”

“I won’t take your tears,” Cordelia said. “I can sew costumes. I can glue rhinestones onto tiaras. You won’t have anything of your own if I take those.”

I winked. “Never fear. There’s more where that came from.” And damned if my eyes didn’t start to fill. “Cordie … I have the thing I wanted most in life—I am loved. I’ve been surrounded by it for half a year. It just took me a while to recognize that love comes in different flavors. It’s not just One True Thing. It was a geezer that called me ‘Little Miss.’ It’s a six-foot mother hen who never knows when to back off. It’s a brother … a really broken twin … who loves me enough to swallow a bottle of sun potion.” I watched a man in a fine coat stride into the hotel. “I want Anu to find that out for herself. I want to meet the council, knowing that whatever happens, you and Anu are going to be safe for the rest of your lives. Living at one address, not a whole bunch of them. In a house. A real one, made of brick, with a solid door that no wolf can huff and puff down.”

“You’ll be back,” she said.

“I want it to have a wide bow window in the front room exactly like the one in the Trowbridge living room and a white picket fence like the one in that magazine you keep hidden under your satin knickers.”

A flush crawled across her raw boned cheeks. “I
knew
you went through my drawers.”

“It will have a garden exactly like the one in that picture.”

“With sweet peas,” she said thickly.

“And roses for my mum.” I tapped the glove compartment with my knee and gave her a significant look. She’d seen me take out the square of canvas and watched me brood over Lexi’s painted image for several exits. She hadn’t commented, but her scent had woven around my seat—maternal warm and mother protective—until I’d rolled it into a cylinder and put it in the glove compartment. Now, she flicked a glance toward that safe-deposit box and gave me an infinitesimal nod. “Later, when the time is right, you’re going to tell Anu about her father. You can start by telling her that he was brave.”

“He was that.”

“And that her eyes are shaped like his.” Before age tightened them. “Tell her that he didn’t mean to become what he was. That once he was so full of mischief and light. That he liked to prowl the woods and pretend to save damsels in distress—”

“You’ll be back!” she repeated fiercely.

“Sure I will,” I said, suppressing a shiver. Before I lost my courage, I put the belt in the console’s cup holder. “Wagons ho, Cordie. Drive as fast you can, and get the hell out of Ontario.”

Her wig lay forgotten on her knee. “We’ll go to B.C.”

I smiled. “Where rogue Weres and society’s discards live in perfect harmony.”

“Supposedly,” she said, her gaze rigid on the side mirror.

A cab driver honked.

I pivoted in my seat to look over my shoulder. I stared long and hard, trying to take a mental picture that one day I might share with my twin. Thin face, good bones though. A promise of future beauty. “Good-bye, Anu. You give her hell.”

Her grip tightened onto the ferret. It squeaked and squirmed.

One final glance at the driver. Her jaw was a rigid line with a whole bunch of sagging skin below it. “You’ll always be beautiful to me, Cordelia,” I whispered. Then I opened the door and slid out into the traffic.

By the time I crossed the boulevard and looked over my shoulder, the green car had been swallowed by cars heading west.

It is good. It is right.

Goddess, please watch over both of them.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Royal Empress Hotel has old-world charm. Back in its heyday, it had lured in movie stars and princes with its opulence and attention to fine detail. It still had that, in spades. The lobby’s ceiling could have been lifted from Windsor Palace. I’d circumvented the guys with the epaulets manning the front door by taking an entrance on the side of the building. A bellman looked askance at my bare feet as I walked past him.

My cologne was eau de flames, my clothing was street-person chic, and he was worried about my dusty feet? I lifted my brows in a perfect mimicry of Mad-one. “I’m with the band.”

He looked away.

I got on the elevator. Stared at all the buttons. There were so many floors to search in very little time, and on those, perhaps more rooms than I can care to think of. But I had my nose, didn’t I? And a wolf inside me, who was on high alert. I took my finger and started jabbing, from mezzanine all the way to fourteen. The round lights glowed at me.

I leaned back against the wall, thinking about Lexi and Trowbridge.

A man in a suit entered the elevator. He went to push the buttons, stiffened, and then turned to glare at me before he exited in a huff.

Tinned background music played as the cab traveled up a floor. The doors opened. I leaned out and let my wolf do its job. She smelled cleaning products, and food, and human, human, human—but no wolves.

We didn’t get lucky until the eighth floor.

Yes. There.

Not just a wolf, but at quick guess, at least five. I stepped out, my head back. Inhaled again. The scent streamed from the corridor to my left.

And then, once those doors slid closed, I followed the Alpha-ripe trail all the way down the hallway. Trowbridge’s strand of scent was thick and heavy. Alive then, though the usual combination of woods, and wild, and sex, and him was muddied by the sweet tone of the sun potion.

A guard stood outside the room at the end of the short hall. Sparely built, wearing, incongruously, a three-piece suit. I could almost read his mind when he spotted me. “Small young female, round and unassuming, carrying a plastic bag and the scent of” … and that’s when his brain skipped.

I smiled at him, knowing that I carried the signature of Cordelia, who smelled of perfume, wolf, and man. Confusion and suspicion creased the guard’s face. He reached inside his suit—I’ve seen enough Bond movies to know that when a bodyguard reaches for his armpit, he’s not bringing out a Subway sandwich—and began to walk toward me.

I am tired of guns and of men who want to shoot me.

My eyes, which had been burning since I left Cordelia and Anu, ignited into a full flare. Green light—as bright and magical as my serpent’s, spiced with the fury of a woman who has been pushed beyond the pale—exploded from me.

It’s the only way I can describe it.

Power, in the form of light. It came from my heart; it came from my soul. And it rolled down that hallway, a long ocean roller swell. My Fae-gift hit him with a slap, just like that wave you’re not expecting, the one with an undertow and suck to it, the one that pulls your feet out from under you.

He stalled, right there, hand still tucked under his armpit.

Who’s the tough guy now?
I walked right up to him. “Give me your weapon.”

His peepers were brown, and mostly, thanks to his conflicted feelings, had dilated pupils. My green light bathed his face—he grimaced as if struggling to swallow a very bitter draught.

I focused on him. On nothing but him.

He gave a shudder, and then he passed me his weapon.

“What is it with all the guns?” I shook my head. “You know we’re Canadians, right?” I jerked my head toward the door. “You first, buddy.”

*   *   *

I pushed Mr. Natty Dresser through the door. Two dark outlines turned to meet my flare.

One gasped.

The other’s Alpha-blue light flashed, as unexpected and dazzling bright as a Ninja assassin’s bomb. Someone gasped—not me—because I was bracing myself for the full impact. Joy, oh joy. A huge undulating breaker of delft blue surged down the narrow hallway to meet my green challenge. There was no soft hello of two bright hues, no merging into turquoise. Our respective flares met, a tidal wave hitting a rickety pier.

Thank Goddess, I braced. As it was, the slap of his dominance rocked me to my underpinnings—my right knee felt distinctly wobbly. Fortunately, my left knee said, “You’re not Robson Trowbridge. We only go weak for him.”