Destiny and Deception

  Marlaena

  I vaulted over a broad rock dusted with winter’s white and gasped at the way my shoulder clenched on landing. Locking my jaws, I fought past the pain and whipped down a deer trail, my pack close behind.

  Dodging between the bare bushes, my sluggish humanity stuttered over the first lines of books I loved. J. K. Rowling’s Dursleys would’ve gotten along great with my parents—though Phil and Margie were as much my parents as the Dursleys were Harry Potter’s.

  Yeah, so, not at all.

  That book kicked off a great series, but a totally unrealistic one, if you asked this particular werewolf. Far too optimistic. No one ever came to my rescue. Living under a staircase? I’d be left there until I clawed my way out. Suffering with whiny, neglectful relatives on a windswept island? I’d be abandoned to my fate until I built my own damned boat and sailed away.

  But I was no chosen one, so who’d blame a hero who never arrived?

  I was nothing special. Phil and Margie made sure I knew that.

  Springing across a busted tree trunk, the breeze ruffled my fur, leaves crunching crisply under my paws as I landed on the log’s other side and I spun in a tight half-circle, determined no one would spot my weakness or my pain. I paused for a breath and a few heartbeats on the pretense of watching them catch up. Absorbed by the sight of them—beautiful beasts, glorious monsters—my pack, the throbbing in my shoulder dulled to a slow pulse of pain.

  They were my family—spelled with a capital F. And they were so much better than blood.

  The adults—Justin, Terra, Tembe—came first, trailed by the pups, all younger than I was: Kyanne, a tawny thing who in her human skin was blond and dreamed of being an author—the stories she’d write after time with us; Noah, one of the few boys; Darby, a polite redhead sparking with attitude; Londyn and Jordyn, the blond twins; Beth, the youngest, a clever brunette; and Debra, whose fur was as springy as her coffee-colored hair.

  Bringing up the rear was Gareth. Almost always last, he made sure everyone was taken care of. He’d quoted some Scripture to me—something about the last being first and the first being last.… It hadn’t been a first line of anything and certainly not from any of my favorite books. I’d barked out a laugh saying I was looking out for number one right now and I’d worry about how things’d reorder themselves later.

  He hadn’t been impressed.

  Gareth muscled up beside me, carefully keeping a few inches between our heaving sides. He stretched his legs, each ending with a broad paw that swallowed the ground when we ran. His dark coat was full and thick—a chocolate color as rich as his human voice and as smoky as his howl. That coat of his was so luxurious you’d never guess the structure of the wolf beneath—how much lean muscle and broad bone built him up.

  He was all powerful shoulders and sleek hips, with a thick neck, heavy snout, and ebony nose, his nostrils flared to drink in the night. And his eyes—lavender snarled with red—glowed with the promise of something like the sanctuary I sought.

  He was by far the prettiest of all of us. And the most noble. Amazing what a little prison time had done for him.

  Gareth paused beside me, knowing the others panted nearby, for a moment watching anything but us and our classically awkward interactions. Boldly he stepped forward and nuzzled my shoulder. I blinked and snapped my teeth at him—the only warning, and answer—he needed. I was still wounded. He whined so softly only my ears caught the sound, translating it to sorry, and I hardened my heart against him, reminding myself he’d show the same affection to any pack member.

  I couldn’t afford to mistake his tenderness as anything else but Gareth being Gareth. And giving to the extreme like some saint.

  Sainthood was only good for two things: pissing me off, and making the saint a target for sacrifice.

  I stared him down and counted the milling wolves. Twelve of us jumped that rotting log—only one was still absent.

  Gabriel. No angel.

  I tasted the air, skimming their scents and appraising their vitality. Everyone was in good health. In good spirits? What could be expected when you were running for your life?

  We were tired. Frustrated. Above all: hungry.

  Raising my head, I howled, my heart thumping faster when they joined in without question, making a wild and richly raucous chorus.

  The rumble of a car pulled me back from our music-making, and with a snarl I pressed my nose to the ground and snapped up Gabe’s trail. Together we plunged into the sparkling and spinning flurries.

  Alexi

  I had done well, considering. I glared at my hand as it shivered like a panicking animal caught in a trap. Stop shaking. It shook harder. Shoving it into my coat pocket, I looked toward the house, the porch and turret shrouded in a swirl of growing snow and gathering gloom.

  A shadow moved, darkness smeared over darkness, and Max appeared, cradling Mother as carefully as if she slept in his arms. The car’s trunk glowed in the dark, and I watched him lay her in the back, careful to not knock her head against the trunk’s edge. He hesitated, staring, as I slowly closed the trunk, shutting Mother away in darkness.

  “I should come,” he said, his voice as rough as the stubble that marked his jawline.

  “Nyet.” Max and I might war over little things, but regardless of the fact he tried to kill me once—and nearly succeeded—I did not hate him. So I would spare him this if I could. “Nyet.”

  “You cannot do it. Not by yourself.”

  I glared at him, wondering if the cure had dulled his superior night vision. Could he read my eyes even now? I considered the task and my abilities.

  “Alexi. I am right. You hate it, but you need me to come along.”

  He was correct. On all counts. Mother was a … How could I say it without lessening the fact it was Mother in the trunk of the car? A burden? Nyet. A difficulty? Never. A … I struggled to put a name to it until it occurred to me that Mother wasn’t involved in this at all. Not anymore. Mother was gone. This was her body—something her soul (presuming such things existed)—had shrugged off.

  “Sasha.” He invoked my nickname as only Max could: like a boy who still looked up to his big brother. The same way he used to say it when we were all just little scraps of flesh with no idea of what we were or what we were destined to become.

  “Da, Maximilian,” I conceded. “Will Pietr…?”

  “Nyet,” Max assured. “Jessie has him—occupied—in his room.”

  “Lucky Pietr,” I muttered, sliding into the car and trying to not think about what we were going to do. And where.

  “Da,” Max said with a sly grin that somehow still came easily to him. “Lucky Pietr.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jessie

  Lucky me, I was alone with Pietr. In his room—one of the locations my father still held as taboo when it came to where Pietr and I spent our time. And yet, lucky Dad, nothing was happening regardless of location or proximity.

  I wanted to scream.

  Although I’d been sent to distract Pietr, just being close to him was distracting me.

  He’d crawled out of his bed (and a bit of his depression) and made himself busy. Already. Maybe this was denial: Counselors say grief comes in stages, and denial is one of the earliest. I didn’t care, because Pietr—climbing out of sorrow so fast—was amazingly encouraging.

  But even as encouraging as it was, there was still something odd about Pietr after the cure—something softer, something quieter, something …

  Less.

  What if the alpha wolf had been such a big part of Pietr’s makeup that removing the wolf reduced him to something much farther down the food chain?

  Something simply human.

  “I do not know if I can respect a school that believes we have such a great need for upper-level math,” Pietr muttered, bent over the papers on his desk. “What time is it?”

  That question—asked with increasing frequency—shook me. Pietr had been born with an internal clock that began ticking
obnoxiously in his ears with his first full change. To know that his last change deafened him to it—or wiped it out entirely—was frightening. But on the edge of his bed, my fingers twisting in the bedspread, homework and the time was far from my mind. Pietr—alone—was the only thing on it. “Seven … ish?” I guessed.

  “Seven-ish?” he snorted, and pulled a watch out of his desk drawer. A watch I’d never seen before.

  “Is that new?”

  He nodded, examining the small clockface. “Seven-ten,” he said with a tone just short of authority.

  “You’re not sure?”

  He rubbed a thumb across the glass. “Nyet,” he admitted. “It says seven-ten … seven-eleven now. But I don’t feel it. I see it, but it doesn’t seem real. Like time no longer connects to me. It sounds crazy, da?”

  “Not when you consider recent events.” Like the fact werewolves existed. And I’m dating one. Well, I had dated a werewolf. Now I was dating just some normal guy.

  Nice and normal. No prickle of heat between us when he pressed his body to mine, no roasting breath heating my lips when he paused just before a kiss … Snap out of it, Jess. “How much math do you have?”

  “Enough that an apt description of the quantity should include the phrase bordering on the ridiculous.” He shook his head. “There is no need to drown us in numbers.”

  I nodded, watching him. “I guess it depends on what you plan on getting into…,” I whispered, watching the back of his strong neck where his hair ended in slight curls.

  “What?” he asked. He pinned me with blue eyes that pierced straight to my heart even as they sent it racing. Think, Jess. But the hair that usually tumbled into his right eye was swept back, giving him a very studious look. A look that made me want to do things that’d mess it all up …

  His fingers drifted along the chain at his neck and he suddenly sat up straighter. “I don’t need this anymore, I guess,” he mumbled, slowly unfastening the necklace that had been specially designed to keep his animal magnetism in check. He set it on the desk beside his textbook. “Any different?” he asked, his eyes soft, his voice sweet.

  He knew I hadn’t been affected before, but now my reaction seemed even more important. I cleared my throat. “No. You’re still Pietr to me. My beautiful Pietr.” I leaned forward, but he’d already turned back to his jumble of books and papers.

  Dear. God. How had he turned me into this? Unable to focus on anything but him …

  His mother had just died, and I was imagining touching him. What sort of monster had I become?

  I straightened on the bed and folded my hands in my lap. Focus. He’d been slow to touch me ever since he’d made his final transformation. Modest—shy. Something between us had changed, something I wanted to fix. “What are you going to do—after high school? Maybe math will count.”

  His mouth quirked in a smile. “Math always counts.”

  “So what do you want to do?” I asked, feeling the heat rise in my face as my eyes raced along his body, observing his long, lean lines.

  “After high school?”

  “Yes. That’s what I was thinking. Precisely. What do you want to do after high school?” Not right now. With me. In the quiet privacy of your room.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it. Until recently”—by which I knew he meant after the cure—“the idea of a career, complete with eventual retirement, never crossed my mind. Things are different. Da,” he added, a note of sadness creeping into his voice. “Very different. I have a future to plan for.”

  I used that as my cue. Pushing to my feet, I crossed the floor and stood before him in two quick steps, my hands on his muscular shoulders. “I hope you mean a future with me…” I breathed deep, qualifying my request. “… at least for a while.” I didn’t want to sound desperate.

  He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me onto his lap. “Of course I want my future to include you. You’re the reason I have a future.”

  Winding one arm around his neck, I played with his hair, letting the contact calm me and hoping it soothed him, too. But he took my hand in his own and drew it back around to his front, kissing it gently.

  Just once.

  “Don’t you have homework?” he asked.

  With a groan, I stalked back to the bed and my book bag. “I’m sure there’s something I could be doing,” I muttered, rummaging through its contents.

  I pulled out my history text and flopped onto the bed with a sigh. Alexi said to keep him occupied—he didn’t specify how. And although I knew how I wanted to occupy Pietr, doing my homework and watching Pietr do homework at least still accomplished somebody’s goal.

  Marlaena

  My goals changed with the region’s weather. Wincing, I shoved Tembe into the bushes and dove after him as the car rolled by, its headlights dividing the night sky from the inky road with burning white light. Laughter and curses poured from the car’s open windows along with a heavy bass line of some metal tune. The sharp scent of alcohol—and vomit—scalded my nose.

  Grain alcohol. Nasty shit. It’d blind them faster than anything else they could do in a dark room alone.… The last thing we needed was some group of dumb-ass country teens reporting seeing a pack of large wolves roaming the mountains.

  That’d be enough to get every guy with a gun on our tails. We should have never come this way. What the hell was Gabriel thinking?

  I nipped Tembe, making him whine and focus. The noise of the car faded into the distance, and in the dark I saw the hot red glow of wolf eyes as the pack ringed us. Only my saliva softened the sound of my snapping teeth, and I sucked down the acrid scent of Tembe’s growing fear.

  Fear made me hungrier. Reminded me we were all either predator or prey. The difference was marked by a narrow margin based on choices: smart or dumb.

  Whimpering, Tembe flopped to the ground, sending snow up in a puff of white. Belly up and throat exposed, he submitted.

  Totally.

  His will? Mine. His life? Mine to take or leave. Life or death. My choice.

  Mind-blowing. Knowing where I’d been—how helpless I was …

  The sharp sound of a train in the distance flattened my ears and pulled my lips away from my teeth, wrinkling my snout in a growl as my tongue curled.

  A breeze tickled my fur, and I spared a glance for the valley below, filled with a bustling town that crawled awkwardly away from its heart, stretching toward the crest of the mountains. The difference between where I’d been two years ago and where I’d led my baker’s dozen werewolves was startling.

  From deserts and plateaus in the southwest where grit ground our fur short and left us chasing lizards and holding up liquor stores to some white-bread town where the junction of railroads lay and where ice crusted sharp and fierce between canine toes like glass from a busted windshield prickling in a driver’s hair. Every place brought its own special pain, its own subtle needle prick to tender flesh.

  The heat pumping through our veins and singing through our blood combined with our thick coats and temperature-moderating paws shielded us from the worst of the northern wind and weather.

  It only stung at unexpected moments …

  … and reminded us we were still alive.

  I’d take this particular prick of pain over the pricks we’d encountered two states back: men calling themselves hunters. Outwitting them was much more a need than a want.

  Sure, we were trouble—but a plague upon humanity? Words like that easily offended an entire pack.

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.… Bullets, though—bullets that sizzled in the skin and sat too long in a busted and burning shoulder—they could kill. My shoulder ached with more than memory. Chicago had sucked for me.

  My teeth snapped shut like a steel trap on the ruff of fur at Tembe’s neck. He yelped and whined and wiggled in my grasp. I shook him so hard I hurt, reminding him this pain, instead of death, was the extent of my mercy.

  Life was a bitch. And for them,
I was that bitch. For us, the wolf: the pleasure, the pain, the fear, and the exhilaration of the change—that was the Way.

  Alexi

  My hands trembled holding the phone, but my breathing steadied and my pulse slowed, the sound of Nadezhda’s voice filling my ear. “Did you find a way?” she asked, her voice yielding and worried.

  “Da. She is gone.”

  “She was gone long before you made her body disappear, Sasha,” Nadezhda assured.

  My voice caught, dragging roughly across my question. “Where are you?” I could hear her, true, but I wanted to see her, hold her. Although remembering how she’d held a gun to my head during our most recent carriage ride together cooled my baser impulses.

  “Does it matter?” she wondered aloud. “I am too far for you to see me easily and too busy to make more time than what we have now—on this phone call.”

  “So you will not give me your location?”

  “You know I cannot.” But something in her demeanor changed, becoming nearly wistful. “Have you ever heard the nightingale sing outside your bedroom window?”

  The nightingale … She was giving me a hint to her location.

  “Nyet. Tell me what it is like.”

  “They can be very loud if they are lonely,” she said, her words as soft as the snow falling outside my window. I imagined following the trail of that voice all the winding way to wherever she rested without me. “They have a journey they make every year. I do not know why this one still sings, and stays—he should be gone—he should have given up finding love this year.”

  “He is a stubborn bird?”

  “Da. Stubborn, or persistent. I like to think of him as the latter.”

  “Do you think he will find his love?”

  “Persistence should pay off, da?”

  “Da. In a perfect world.”

  But our world was far from perfect.

  She wished me good night, knowing I did not know what to wish her—was it morning, afternoon, evening, or something stretching in between where she was? Was her day coming to an end or a new beginning?