Destiny and Deception

  Still, her hand brushed down his rigid cheek. “No one’s taught you how blessed and beautiful we are.”

  “Leave now,” Max ordered, his attention split between what was happening between Marlaena and Pietr and the perplexed expression on my face.

  “You must come, meet the pack, and see the truth before you deny it,” she insisted.

  “NOW.” Max moved between Pietr and Marlaena, forcing her back out the door, Gabe stumbling behind her.

  The door slammed shut on them, and I wrapped my hands around Pietr’s waist, pressing my cheek to his back.

  He just stood there a moment, stunned into inaction.

  “She’ll be back.” He pulled me around to his front, holding me so tightly I thought my joints would pop. “I want you to stay away from her—from him—from all of them. I don’t want her to come back here,” he whispered into the top of my head. He inhaled sharply, sucking down as much of my scent as a simple human could, as desperately as a man dying in the desert sucked down water.

  But I wanted to see his eyes.

  To know what he wasn’t telling me.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Alexi

  I could not believe I was taking Wanda’s advice. But I called a local travel agent and began making arrangements to book a flight to Nadezhda. It was more than I would have liked to pay, but with the money Wanda was giving me, I could just cover it. I needed to see Nadezhda face-to-face. I needed to say things to her—things as powerful as the feelings I had—things connecting us across continents and huge waterways.

  Jessie

  Somehow I was surviving another session of Dungeons & Dragons. It amazed me that my survival was possible, considering how lost I was. Again.

  Luckily, Max’s and Smith’s characters kept stepping in to save mine, but I knew I was all but doomed the moment Hascal suggested my character be given a red shirt to wear. Even I got that particular reference.

  Amy, well, Amy was kicking ass and taking names. Maybe not names as much as loot and levels. Once the biggest opponent to playing D&D, she’d become a convert. When the game finally wound down and Smith began packing up his notes and books, she pointed out that it was a good idea to close the game up early, as Max actually had work.

  There was a faint growl that aptly expressed his opinion regarding a return to the movie theater that had decided to employ him. “It wouldn’t suck so badly if I just got to watch movies all the time, but they actually make me work, too,” he said with a slowly uncurling grin. “And it’s harder to sneak a hot chick into a dimly lit theater than you’d think.…”

  Amy slapped his arm. “Who’re you trying to sneak into dark theaters?”

  “Why don’t you meet me at Exit 3 tomorrow at twelve fifteen and find out?” he said with a wink.

  Amy grinned. “Maybe my weekend’s looking up.”

  I nodded in support. I wanted her to have an amazing weekend. But I wanted one, too, with my boyfriend. That same boyfriend who was being evasive about why he thought Marlaena would keep coming back until we all went to see her pack in action.

  Alexi

  I had returned to Wanda’s flat, as I’d arranged, to pick through a few more odds and ends before bringing Max over for the heavy lifting.

  “Good enough.” She set a photo on the coffee table. “Come back tonight with Max to get the couch and anything else you need.” She pointed. “Coffee table?”

  I glanced at it, but my eyes focused on the photo in the frame that now rested on it.

  Wanda. Holding a little dog and dressed in a jogging suit. Odd, it seemed somehow familiar.

  “Da. Coffee table,” I agreed, my mind racing.

  “Do you want the coffee table?” she clarified.

  “Ohhh,” I teased, though my heart suddenly wasn’t in it. “Da, Cat would probably like it. When did you have a dog?” I asked.

  “A little more than a year ago,” she responded, a bit too slowly for my taste. “Why do you ask?”

  “I noticed the picture.…”

  She looked at the frame I held in my hand, her expression nearly devoid of emotion. She was hiding something. Then she smiled and stepped forward to take it from me, giving it a look herself. “That was Geoffrey,” she said. “A cute little devil. A very common breed, but an uncommon character. I had to have him put down. Cancer.” Her expression dropped away again.

  Maybe that was all it was then. She had a little dog of a breed I had noticed before and it was euthanized. Perhaps that was all I was reading from her tone and expression.

  “I am sorry,” I said.

  She nodded and slipped the picture frame into a box and closed the lid on it. “Oh—I have good news.” She turned and picked up her purse. “The deposit’s back early because my landlord said I’m so honest and a great tenant.”

  I did not flinch.

  “So here, take this and go see that girl of yours. Make her understand the way you feel. Otherwise…” She shrugged. “You don’t want to lose someone you love, do you?”

  “Nyet.” I had loved my mother. And lost her. “I never wanted to.”

  She handed me an envelope. “I have a box of some kitchen stuff Cat might like practicing her cooking skills with. It’s by the door. And take all the curtains and blinds as you go,” she said, pushing a garbage bag filled with them out of her bedroom. “You all can sharpen your claws on them, for all I care.”

  Nodding, I grabbed the bag and the box and headed for the stairs, my mind on everything but what I carried.

  Marlaena

  Gareth took the lead, slipping into the store at exactly nine fifty-eight. The owner shot him a glare and looked pointedly at the clock hanging above the door.

  We knew the time, intimately.

  Gareth’s shoulders slid up in a shrug as if that were apology enough and he headed to the cash register, where he appeared absolutely entranced by the selection of gum and candy.

  And while attention was on him—who could tear their eyes away from him—Kyanne moved forward from the shadows, slid beneath the camera, and leaned back to black out its curious eye from below. Sliding along the wall, she sank back into the night and slipped around to come stand beside me. “How long?”

  But she knew as well as I did. “Watch,” I commanded.

  The man escorted Gareth out, and Gareth smiled, waggling a pack of gum at him appreciatively.

  It was the last distraction we needed for Gabriel to take his position.

  The door closed, the lock clicked into place; the sign flipped over.

  CLOSED to the store owner meant OPEN FOR BUSINESS to us.

  Gareth sidled over, withdrawing one slender stick of gum. He looked at me, tilted his head, and offered it to Kyanne.

  “Thanks,” she said with a grin that made her cheeks plump up and emphasized her expressive eyes. Garr. I wanted to pluck the gum out of her hands and shove it into my mouth just to chew it up and spit it out—on Gareth’s shoe—but I shifted my weight instead, a close eye on the store.

  Lights popped off.

  Movement in the back.

  A shadow headed toward the front.

  A bag tucked under his arm.

  I stiffened, eyes finding the thin outline of Gabriel’s sleek form as he stood in heavy shadow by the door, waiting to snatch the bag and run.

  It’d be easy. Gabriel was quick on his feet as a wolf giving chase to its favorite quarry. More slender than Gareth, I’d found myself thinking of him as more fox than wolf many times. His coloring made that even easier to imagine. He leaned tight against the store’s front, tucked into a slight alcove between the brick face of the storefront and the broad stretch of glass that made up the main display window.

  A flash of color showed in the reflection of the glass and the man was there—a quarter-inch of glass separating Gabriel from him—separating Gabriel from the money we needed to survive.

  Need drove us far harder than want ever could.

  Maybe I should’ve taken the deal with Dmitri
. But to give him so much control … We needed control of our destiny as much as we needed food.

  That need was the thing that made us stand there, still as rabbits—our breath burning in our throats—as the lock turned, the door opened, and the man stepped outside the safety of his store and within Gabriel’s reach.

  Gabriel rushed him, his hand snaking out in anticipation of the bag’s location.

  The man’s eyes widened when Gabriel plowed into him, reaching for the bag he cradled up under his arm. I nearly laughed at his shock and surprise. Junction wasn’t a place you worried about getting robbed. He must’ve thought that same thing as he pulled back from Gabe, determination fierce on his face. Was he betting Gabe was just a kid—so what were the odds Gabe was armed?

  Way less than the odds the man was armed.

  The crack of gunfire sounded, and Gabriel stumbled backward, his eyes wide and frightened, his hands clutching at his chest as blood poured from a sudden wound. I pulled free of Gareth’s grip, but Kyanne was ahead of me, just a few strides, making a headlong rush—to catch Gabe as he fell or snatch the prize from the shop’s owner.…

  The second shot knocked her back, too.

  I reached the man, hit him so hard his eyes blinked shut and his head rocked back on his neck with a cracking noise that reminded me of Phil husking walnuts at Christmas. The man slumped to the sidewalk, his head landing with a dull thud as the bag fell free and I snatched it up, looking for Gareth.

  He’d already slung Gabe’s arm around his shoulders and snaked another around Kyanne’s waist, hauling them both up and urging them forward with kind words.

  I snagged Kyanne, twisting her arm over my shoulders so I could lock it with my own. She yelped as I pulled her to her full height. “Step it up, Kyanne,” I commanded. “Step it up or die here—next to him,” I added, looking down at the store owner’s body, limp by the door.

  Gareth shot me one of his totally-appalled-by-my-behavior looks. But there was no time to call me out. Together we half-dragged, half-carried the two to the waiting car and pushed them into the backseat. I slammed the doors and slid into the passenger’s side, my hand slapping down on Gareth’s thigh.

  I didn’t have to say the word, but I did, anyhow. “Drive!”

  With a squeal of tires we roared away from the scene of the crime, blowing through the town and its assortment of traffic lights and stop signs like we were color-blind.

  If anyone had cared to take a look at our current vehicle’s mismatched parts, they would have had another reason to assume.

  “Get back there,” Gareth said, looking at me as I unzipped the bag.

  “What? Back where?”

  “In the backseat—take care of them.”

  I yanked my mirror down and looked at the two of them, their legs tangled, blood weeping from their wounds. Their ribs heaved. “They’re breathing.…”

  The look he gave me …

  “We’re werewolves,” I justified, “damn near invincible!” His glare didn’t soften—it seemed to intensify the next time he pulled his gaze from the twisting country back road. “Damn it,” I muttered, crawling into the backseat, prying the two of them apart to get a better look at the damage.

  One shot to the chest for Gabriel. Wide of both heart and lungs. I patted his face, and his eyes opened. “Hey, angel,” he said with a sloppy smile.

  “Gabe’s hallucinating,” I announced. “Or he’s proclaimed today Opposite Day and decided not to let any of us in on the joke.”

  Gabe grabbed my hand and held it until I tugged it free of his grip.

  I turned in the seat to look at Kyanne. A shot to the shoulder oozed blood across her T-shirt. Her eyes were unfocused but somehow fierce. “Kyanne,” I said, touching her good shoulder.

  “Thanks so frikkin’ much,” she snapped. “Pull me out of one gutter to get me shot in another.”

  “Wow,” I replied.

  Gareth was again the voice of reason. “She’s in shock.”

  “The hell I am,” Kyanne responded, her normally sweet demeanor dropping away. “I’m seeing things clearly. She wasn’t first on the scene to help Gabe because she didn’t care enough.”

  I whipped around to face her. “How dare—”

  “How dare I? How dare I?” She shook her finger in my face.

  “What about me?” Gareth asked.

  Kyanne stopped short, hearing his softly spoken words. “What do you mean, what about you?”

  “If you’re going to say she’s guilty because of when she arrived to help, then I’m even guiltier being three steps behind you when she was only two.”

  “Darn it, Gareth,” Kyanne muttered, looking down at the hand that a moment before had been in my face and now had fallen limp in her lap. “Why are you always so quick to fall on the sword?”

  He refocused on the road, but I could glimpse just a bit of his face—hardened by some pain he never spoke of—in the rearview mirror.

  I tried to find a socially appropriate response. “I’m sorry if you feel I’m letting you down, Kyanne,” I tried.

  “Geez. Have you ever listened to yourself? You’re ‘sorry if I feel’ like this isn’t your fault, like it’s the fault of my emotions, not your actions. That’s one of the most retarded phrases I’ve ever heard anyone say. It ranks right up there with ‘because I said so.’”

  Evidently Kyanne wasn’t hurting too badly. At least not physically. I had more important things to deal with than her emo spaz out. I turned my attention back to Gabe.

  “Kyanne, you need to relax. It looks like you’re still bleeding badly,” Gareth tried.

  “Well, of course I’m bleeding badly. It’s a gunshot wound. It also hurts like heck, if you didn’t know.” Then her voice got soft and the compassion crept back in. “But I think that you do know, don’t you, Gareth?”

  Gareth’s eyes again focused on the road. Fiercely.

  I tugged at Gabe’s shirt. The cloth stuck to the drying blood.

  I looked out the window at the countryside flashing by. Even with my keen nighttime senses, I couldn’t accurately judge our location or the distance we were from what now served as our home.

  “I should’ve just taken the deal.”

  “What?” Gareth asked.

  “The Russian. This’d be different if I’d gone along instead of thinking about it. Damn it.” I pressed the button on the door handle and watched the window roll down with a soft whirr. The wind rushed in and I opened my nose and my senses to the night.

  Gabe muttered something like, “Glad I didn’t steal the Rusakovas’ red convertible.… It’d suck trying to get this much blood out of a real leather interior.…” He closed his eyes and dozed off under the weight and warmth of my body.

  Gareth glanced back at the three of us, Kyanne still grumbling angrily, and me all but curled on Gabriel’s lap.…

  He smiled.

  And it made me just the slightest bit angry.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Alexi

  We climbed the stairs to Wanda’s flat, and she opened the door just before I had a chance to knock on it.

  “Hey, guys,” she greeted us. “Grab whatever you want.”

  Max looked at me and shrugged.

  “We will start with the coffee table,” I suggested, thinking about its glass top.

  Max followed my lead, heading for the center of the room. “Ready?” Max asked, hefting the coffee table. “You get the doors. I have this.”

  I opened each door and spotted him on the stairs and all the way to the door, but the picture from earlier—everything about it—seemed to overlay real life in a strangely surreal fashion. I had been there before.

  I knew it.

  Back we went for the recliner. And then the couch.

  On the way down the stairs I suddenly remembered and slipped toward Max, my ass hitting two steps as I bounced down the staircase and was nearly crushed beneath the couch.

  Max snorted. “It is only a couch. Why must you wrestle
with it?”

  I stood and, wincing, got a grip on the couch once more. “Do you remember what color the houses across the street from us were?”

  “Where?” he asked with a grunt as he rested the couch on his hip to get a free hand to open the last door.

  “Farthington.”

  “There was that tan one. And the white one. And that strange one. It always looked pink if the sun caught it wrong.”

  I kept my grip on the couch although I feared I might lose my grip on my mind. “Da. The strange one.”

  We loaded the couch awkwardly in Mr. Gillmansen’s truck. “There are some boxes we need to get,” I said. “And then I think we will be finished.”

  “Excellent,” Max said. “You just point and I’ll carry. Like the man in any couple would.”

  I shot him a glare.

  He responded with a grin.

  Back up the stairs we went.

  Wanda was back in the kitchen, so I took my chance and stacked two boxes in Max’s waiting arms. One that said CRAP and one that said PHOTOS.

  He looked at me a moment, and I just shook my head, warning him to silence.

  I needed answers now that my mind was filled with so many fresh questions.

  All I knew was what I could remember and what I had just discovered. Mother had called Wanda a traitor, something I had dismissed as part of the madness that came with being an older oborot. Wanda had been working in the area when we were in the same area—before Junction.

  Mother had gone jogging once or twice a week and mentioned a little rat of a dog. Wanda and her rat of a dog were in a photograph in front of a house that looked oddly pink. A house that stood across the street from ours in Farthington.

  The photo positioned Wanda on our sidewalk.

  With the photographer standing on our lawn.

  With everything loaded, I returned one more time to Wanda’s flat. I needed to see her again. To read her face and hope that I was wrong. That everything was circumstantial. That I was making something out of nothing.

  Standing before her open doorway, I called her name and she appeared.