Destiny and Deception

  Snow still fluttered down around the house, big soft flakes like fat feathers falling from the sky.

  Amy and I were barely off the lowest step when Max charged us, hurling snowballs as Cat screamed from her position near the tree and frantically returned fire to cover our stunned advance.

  Pietr watched, dumbstruck, and I scooped and balled snow, throwing as fast as I could.

  And loving it.

  “Pietr!” I screamed.

  “Man-up, Jessie!” Max shouted.

  Pietr lobbed a snowball at him, and Max staggered back at the impact. Cat pelted him with a few, shrieking each time she tossed one and Max yelped and dodged away, keeping the tree between his sister and himself as he returned fire.

  Amy screamed, balling snow as fast as she could and tossing snowballs indiscriminately at everyone.

  Except Max.

  “Hey!” I protested. And got a loosely packed snowball to the thigh in response. “Whose side are you on?”

  “There are sides?” she asked, hitting me again.

  “Yeah—aren’t there?”

  “I thought we had a whole grand mêlée deal going on!” she called back, taking cover behind Pietr’s fort.

  “Grand mêlée? Are you goin’ medieval on our asses?” I laughed.

  Amy roared, bending over to hold her sides at the absolute indignation in my tone.

  I barreled over the wall of snow and took her to the ground with a whuff!

  Giggling, we tried to untangle ourselves from each other and each other’s scarves. We got to our knees and peered over the wall, watching Max and Cat still heaving snowballs at each other around the tree.

  Every time Cat got hit, she screamed. And every time she hit Max, he mimicked her scream so well she shouted at him. In Russian.

  Pietr started stockpiling snowballs and I thought back to social studies class and the arms race. My face ached from grinning in the cold.

  His back to me, Max made a lovely target. I tore into the top of the densely packed snow wall and freed a nice chunk of snow.

  Max stumbled when my snowball thumped right between his shoulder blades.

  He turned and snarled out my name. “Jessssie…”

  “Wuh-oh,” Amy squeaked.

  Ignoring Cat, he raced straight for us, and I pitched snowballs so fast and hard my shoulder tightened.

  Some went wide, but a few nailed Max.

  Right in the chest and gut.

  One accidentally went a bit lower.

  He growled—but didn’t slow down.

  One of his snowballs hit me in the shoulder so hard I spun partway round.

  Stooped and repeating, “Ow, ow, ow…,” I felt him rush past and heard the ooof as someone lost their breath. I whipped back just in time to see Max barrel over Amy, wrapping an arm around her as he took her to the ground and stopped her fall as fast as he’d started it, dropping into something like a push-up position, boots and one gloved hand holding them both up, one arm keeping her just suspended above the blanket of snow.

  “Give her back, you beast!” Cat shrieked, raining snowballs on Max’s broad back.

  He seemed not to notice; his nose a hairsbreadth from Amy’s, he said, “Good morning.”

  She just stared up into his face, her heart surely pounding after it’d dropped so quickly into her stomach. “Good morning yourself.”

  He turned his head and looked at all of us. He grinned, a stretch of his lips making him boyish and brazen at the same time. “Battle’s over,” he announced. “I win.”

  “What?!” Cat demanded, furiously pressing snow between her gloved hands.

  “Da, I won.” He looked back at Amy and kissed the tip of her nose as he smoothly brought them both back up to a standing position, his arm staying tight around her. “I rescued the princess.”

  “What?!” Cat socked him with a snowball and he pushed Amy behind him, shielding her with his broad body, and nearly doubling over laughing at his sister.

  “Rescued the princess from trolls!” he roared, scooping up a discarded snowball. He hurled it at Cat and roared even louder when it pulled her hat right off her head.

  “You brute!” she shouted. Her face was frozen and pink in a strange balance of outrage and laughter.

  Max looked over his shoulder at his willing captive. “Come with me?” he asked, his voice dropping. Going suddenly serious.

  She nodded and he scooped her up easily, sprinting around the far side of the house, away from our curious eyes and ears.

  Alexi

  I heard them on the porch before I saw them. Setting down my coffee mug and the newspaper that announced “Stray Dogs Become Problem for Junction,” I moved my chair closer to the window.

  His voice was low—dark.

  Hers was soft. And more vulnerable than ever.

  “If you aren’t sleeping well, maybe you need to do something differently,” he suggested. “Change a habit. Get some help.”

  “What habit? Or help?”

  “How you sleep. When. Maybe where?” He paused. I imagined Max was as deep in thought as he could get. Probably rubbing his forehead because that most important part of him—well, not the part he did most of his thinking with, but the part he should engage more regularly—was pounding against his skull at such sudden and intense usage.

  “I don’t sleep. Not much,” she retorted. “That’s a habit I’d definitely like to change. I fall asleep as soon as I can. As soon as I…”

  There was a stretch of silence.

  “As soon as you…?”

  “As soon as I can stop thinking about him. And you.”

  I shifted to peer between the curtains, catching a sliver of their two forms, huddled together, him in a denim jacket—stubborn against the cold—her bundled in a thick coat, scarf around her neck and covering her chin, knit hat pulled down to cover all the way to her eyebrows. Their breath pooled out in soft clouds of steam, mingling and fading into nothing as winter tore all warmth apart.

  He reached an arm out to rest around her shoulders. She leaned back. Away. Far enough that he hesitated and dropped his arm down, sitting back to watch her, to wait for some clue to what he should do next.

  Max being awkward yet attempting to be something—someone—better was fascinating.

  “What do you dream about?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  She straightened, going stiff at the question, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “You can ask me almost anything else—but not that.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Okay,” he said. The next words blurted out. “Do you trust me?”

  Amy watched him a moment, knowing the question was loaded and that no matter how she answered it’d potentially change everything between them.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “Yes. I trust you. Completely. I want no walls between us. Ever. That’s how much I trust you.”

  “Da. No walls. So sleep with me.”

  She shot back from him, her body language all angles that read like a line of exclamation points. “Sleep with you?”

  He raised his hands. “I don’t want sex—”

  “You don’t want—”

  “Just sleep beside me. Maybe knowing someone you trust is right next to you…”

  “Ha.”

  “What?”

  “You must think I’m stupid. Or easy.” She stood, straight and sharp and, placing her hands on her hips, glared down at him.

  “Nyet,” he protested. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because guys—especially guys with the sort of reputation you’ve earned, Maximilian Rusakova—don’t just sleep next to a girl and expect nothing else will happen. And nothing else is going to happen, do you understand? Comprende?”

  He stared at her, stricken. “Nothing else…”

  But she turned on her heel and strode away, into the foyer, the door slamming behind her.

  “… was going to happen,” he concluded. “Damn it.”

  I sat still as a rabbit waiting for the
hunter’s hound and wishing I could tell him to go to her, to tell her exactly what he’d meant to before she’d cut him off.

  Jessie

  I brushed the snow off my coat and followed Pietr inside. “So.” I looked him over and did my best to smile. Suggestively. “Wanna try and warm me up?”

  He nodded. “I’ll heat some water for tea.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking about,” I countered, putting a hand on his arm. “I was thinking about something we could do together that would get my blood pumping.” I glanced toward the upstairs as plainly as I could.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “So … shall we?”

  He nodded slowly and, taking my hand, we climbed the stairs together and headed to his room. The knot I felt in my stomach eased as the door to his room clicked shut behind us. We had our privacy.

  The knot doubled when I sat on the bed and he sat a healthy distance away. “Kiss me, Pietr,” I said, leaning toward him.

  His response was a firm closed-mouth kiss that was cool in every way except the good one. Carefully, he put an arm around my waist and I scooted closer so our hips and legs touched.

  Oblivious, he just looked at me. Blankly. I pressed myself to him and pushed my lips against his until he responded.

  Awkwardly.

  Romance is supposed to be awkward, my mind whispered. He was just a late bloomer when it came to the awkward, stuttering, and clumsy part of it.

  We flopped onto his bed together, kissing, my heart pounding against the cage my ribs formed.

  His lips were too soft or too wet or … They never managed to find my own frantic ones as my hands raced across his back.

  Or maybe he’s just been an idiot savant and now we are more firmly in the realm of idiot than savant.…

  “Pietr,” I whispered, surprised by the need I heard in my voice and hoping it was enough to silence the sniping voice in my head …

  … or to help him home in on my lips.…

  Damn it.

  Then he said, “Jess,” and snuggled me into his arms, holding me so politely and carefully, his chin resting on top of my head, that I wanted to die.

  And as long as we lay there together—twenty-seven minutes precisely—that was as far as Pietr was inspired to go.

  It felt perfectly like rejection—although I knew it wasn’t; it was the result of the cure, an effect of the very thing my own blood caused.

  Like so much else, this was my fault, too.

  So I rolled over and placed my head on his chest and tried to enjoy the slower rhythm of his heart at rest.

  When I finally gave up on our time turning romantic and tugged free of his gentlemanly embrace, I kissed his forehead and left the room.

  Amy sat on the bottom of the steps, staring at the door to the front porch.

  I plopped down beside her. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” She continued to stare straight ahead.

  “What’s got so much of your attention?”

  A shadow moved on the door’s other side, and I instantly recognized the silhouette.

  “Oh. Not what. Who. What’s Max done now?”

  “He asked me to sleep with him.”

  A year ago I would have needed to pick my jaw up off of the ground after hearing a statement like that. Now? I barely stopped myself from nodding. “The … bastard?”

  She glared at me. “He thinks I’m easy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why else would he suggest that I sleep with him if he didn’t think I was easy?”

  “Because maybe he actually meant sleep with him? Not sleep with him. Like, the passive form of the verb, if there is such a thing, compared to the”—I cleared my throat—“more active form?”

  She snorted. “So you actually think Maximilian Rusakova, stud of Junction High, just wants to have me in his bed to hold me like some lame body pillow—or teddy bear?”

  “It happens,” I said with a sigh.

  “Really? Max actually means sleep as in sleep?”

  “Why not?”

  “I never thought…” She stared even harder at the door and the small window set into it covered by thin and lacy curtains.

  As if by her wish, the door opened and Max appeared, pausing on the Oriental rug, his boots shining with snow and slush. He saw her instantly and hung his head, his tousled curls falling into his eyes.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  How was it that between the two of them that single word had so much more intimacy and immediacy than I’d ever heard it have used in any other way? The weight of those three letters felt totally different stretching across the air between them.

  Amy shifted beside me and tugged at her ponytail. “I may owe you an apology,” she said to Max. “It might just be possible I misinterpreted your words.”

  Without raising his head, Max lifted a single eyebrow, his eyes darting from one of us to the other and back again as he tried to figure out what she actually meant. “Want to talk about it?”

  Amy pulled me close and said in a whisper loud enough for Max to hear, “It freaks me out when he suggests we talk and it doesn’t mean he’s breaking up with me.” Then she turned and looked at him again. “You’re not like most guys, are you?”

  He raised his head, straightened his shoulders and back, and gave her a cocky grin. “The werewolf thing didn’t give you a hint?”

  She blinked at him, nonplussed.

  The grin faded back to a simple smile, and he cleared his throat and tried his answer again. “Undoubtedly not.”

  “Good,” Amy said firmly. “Because most guys suck. Let’s talk.”

  She rose, pausing to rest her hand on my shoulder. Then she left, taking Max’s hand in her own and leading him down the basement steps so they could be alone and discuss what sleep actually meant.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Alexi

  I sat in the car, my eyes drifting over the large brick building at the opposite end of the parking lot. The sign reading GOLDEN OAKS ADULT DAYCARE AND RETIREMENT HOME was in need of a fresh coat of paint, and what used to be sharp lines of architectural detailing had blurred slightly with time or acid rain. Its window ledges were softened by smudges of snow, but the facility looked respectable.

  And I had been here before.

  Once to bring home a wayward retiree and once when Pietr called after falling from the second story chasing a kitten and mystifying the onlookers because he walked away with barely any bumps or bruises.

  Then I’d returned another dozen times or so since learning my biological mother was a resident. Just to circle the parking lot, look up at the windows, and wonder which one was hers. And if she had ever peered out and noticed a red convertible.

  Leaving.

  As the sky began to darken at dusk I started the car again, remembering Max had promised to take Jessie home. Pulling out of my parking space, I counted the rows in the lot between the building’s entrance and me.

  Twenty-two. The same as my age. A dabbler in the paranormal, as I knew Feldman to be, thanks to Jessie’s descriptions, would have thought there was some significance to such a coincidence.

  I knew better. So I left without meeting her or even seeing her.

  Again.

  Marlaena

  The truck rattled, bits of green flaking off its wheel wells. “Jesus, Gabe. Next time you grab a vehicle make sure it’s not gonna shake itself to bits.”

  “Want something flashier?” he asked. “I’ve been eyeing other options, but the locals aren’t big on sexy cars.”

  I jabbed a thumb in the direction of a gleaming red convertible leaving the school parking lot.

  “There are exceptions to every rule,” he noted.

  I looked in the rearview mirror. “Got what you need?” The truck heaved and bucked its way to the edge of Junction High’s property.

  Fictional supernatural creatures abhorred holy ground. Me? I wouldn’t step foot on school property. Traditional education wa
sn’t my thing.

  Gareth had already signed the appropriate enrollment papers as their guardian. The alpha that always ghosted around his edges made it easy to bluff his way into and out of situations like that.

  In the rearview mirror Jordyn and Londyn rested their heads together and peered at me, a smile starting on Londyn’s lips and spreading to Jordyn’s. The twins were amazing. And a touch creepy.

  “Bagged lunches—” Jordyn began.

  “Full of preservative-rich foods—” Londyn continued.

  “That Gabe acquired for us.”

  “Acquired?”

  Gabe mimicked their lazy smile and shrugged, a movement more innocent than he had any right to portray.

  “Got pencils and paper?”

  They nodded.

  “We need more than supplies,” Gabe pointed out. “Instructions.”

  “Stay quiet and out of trouble. Below the radar. Sniff around a bit. There’s more going on in this little town. I don’t want us falling into something we can’t fight our way out of.”

  The twins nodded again, but Gabe’s eyes narrowed. “When will the rest be enrolled?”

  “We’ll go in stages. Play things carefully here. More carefully than in Chicago. The last thing I want is to attract more attention or—”

  “More trouble,” Jordyn concluded for me.

  “Exactly,” Londyn agreed.

  Gabe watched and said nothing.

  Jessie

  Junction High was swathed in black to acknowledge the latest of what had been dubbed by local newspapers the “Teen Train Track Suicides.” The suicide of Marvin Broderick was one of many. If any of the others had been suicides. Wrestling with the last textbook wedged in the bottom of my locker, I struggled with the fact there probably hadn’t been a single suicide among the list except for Marvin’s.

  Even that one left doubts in my mind.

  Had there been murders? Yes. Probably every death on the train tracks between Farthington and Junction had been the result of one twisted teen.

  My head ached just thinking about him and I wondered how long someone that screwed up could maintain a hold on someone’s mind. Even after death.

  “I can’t believe Derek’s still missing,” someone said to their friend as they walked down the hall. I shoved the last of my supplies into my book bag.