Rivals and Retribution

  I snorted. “And how exactly do you suggest I do that?”

  “When the moment is right, you will kill Jessica Gillmansen.”

  Alexi

  Between Max’s nose and the standard American four-wheel drive, we found where they had parked their vehicle.

  “Slash the tires?” Max suggested.

  “Nyet,” I said. “We may need their vehicle on the way back down the mountain. I want all our options open,” I explained.

  Max nodded. Pietr and Cat were already up ahead, examining tracks.

  “Two snowmobiles,” Cat reported.

  Max’s eyes seemed to lose focus, and I knew he was listening. “They haven’t gotten very far. We can—” He began to jog forward.

  “Wait!” I caught him and looked at each of my siblings. Gareth was of little importance. Family was always the most important thing, and that was no different now. “They mean for us to catch them. They are only getting ahead of us to set the stage—to fix the snare.” I weighed the flashlight in my hand.

  Evening was sinking into the mountains. This task would be easier for the oboroten.

  Gareth nodded. “We need to go more carefully now than before. Gabriel’s impulsive and passionate—hotheaded—but he’s clever. And with Dmitri’s training … caution is the better part of valor,” he assured.

  “What about Marlaena?” Max asked, his voice gruff. “What does she bring to the party?”

  Gareth shook his head, his eyes sad. “I do not know. I did not think she would ever go this far … for anyone,” he added, his voice softening.

  “So she’s our wild card,” Max said.

  “Ugh.” Cat shivered. “I hate when you use that term. Do you remember the last time you used it?”

  Max blinked at her.

  “It’s the same thing you called Derek: our wild card. And you see how well that turned out. We are stuck with bits of him—perhaps forever.” She snorted in frustration.

  “What?” Max defended. “It’s just a name.”

  “Da,” Pietr said darkly. “What’s in a name?”

  “We must go,” I urged.

  “I’ll go on ahead,” Gareth volunteered, starting off at a ground-swallowing stride even in the snow.

  “Excellent,” I said. “Perhaps he will draw enemy fire and we will be rid of more of them when this all is over.”

  Their path was clear and bold—too clear for my liking. While Gareth scouted ahead I sent Cat into the treeline on one side of the path while I took the other, trudging through sudden piles of snow where the canopy broke and significant stretches of forest that were covered in crunching pine needles and peppered with the last traces of sunlight. We flanked Pietr and Max on their way up the hill.

  I expected all eyes to be on Pietr.

  I expected a trap.

  I did not expect to get so close to the mountain’s bald top without even a stir or a whisper from the shadows. With every step we drew closer to the peak—a dramatic setting for a dramatic werewolf alpha and her captive—the more nervous my stomach grew.

  What was I missing?

  I peered across the open path, where Pietr and Max pushed their way forward in the track left by the snowmobiles’ skis and bellies, and into the woods beyond. A slender beam of light announced that Cat still kept pace with me.

  Gareth paused suddenly up ahead, his gaze raised to a spot at the mountain’s very top.

  They were there. At the tip of the mountain’s highest rock outcropping Marlaena stood in snow that glittered beneath the rising moon’s light, a half step behind a figure who was bound, gagged, and kneeling awkwardly in the white powder, her dark hair waving and snapping in the breeze.

  Jessie.

  Pietr began to run.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jessie

  “He’s really something, isn’t he?” Marlaena’s voice boomed out. “He has the makings of an alpha—a hero,” she added. “Oh, hell,” she muttered. “I really don’t care for monologuing, and there’s no harm giving you a voice now.…”

  She ripped the gag’s knot out of my hair and tore it from my aching mouth. My eyes went wide as I wobbled close to the mountain’s edge.

  “Go ahead. Speak your mind. Get out all your words—you might not have many left.”

  I growled and found the words I thought whenever I thought of Pietr. “He doesn’t just have the makings of a hero,” I retorted, “he’s been a hero. And he will be again. He’s nothing like you or your pack of thieves and troublemakers.”

  She snorted. “We’ll see about that.… It’s a funny thing, really, how similar we are just below our skins.” She looked me up and down, her mouth twisting. “You having only one skin, it makes you far less understandable—far less compatible than we wolves are to one another.”

  “Is that what all this is about? Compatibility?” I snarled. I was getting so sick of every frikkin’ psycho wanting to get her claws into Pietr. Sure, he wasn’t wearing his specially crafted necklace to combat his animal magnetism, but since being cured he didn’t have much magnetism. “If you’re looking for love, can I suggest an online dating service?”

  Leaning toward me, her eyes locked on mine, she froze, staring at me as if she was contemplating my words. Deeply. As if she was confused, puzzled by her own actions. “Love?” she whispered. “I’m not looking for love with Pietr.…”

  Her forehead scrunched up, creasing, and for another long minute she was simply silent. Finally she regained her attitude and hit me with another question. “How many times has he had to rescue you, Jessica?”

  “Too many.”

  “Don’t you get tired of playing the hapless victim?”

  Hapless victim? I could shut her up and tell her about the men I’d killed defending myself and my friends, but no matter what my reasons—what my justification—had been, I hated talking about it. And boasting about it was wrong on so many levels.… I seethed silently and tried to twist the ropes around my wrists to better work the knot with my fingers. Because, yes, although she had me trussed up like a pig for barbecue, Gabe hadn’t run rope between my wrists to keep his tangled mess in shape. He had definitely not grown up in the country where knot-tying was still a useful skill.

  I was thankful he was a rookie.

  “How does it feel to be so utterly useless you need someone to rescue you?” She nudged my knee with the toe of her boot.

  I tugged at the ropes biting into my wrists. “Come closer and I’ll tell you all about my feelings.”

  “Ha. Like you’re a threat. You’re just some lame-ass fairytale princess in need of a prince’s rescue. God. I hate those stories. Maybe that’s why I hate you.”

  “Hate me? You don’t even know me to hate me.” I shook my head and squinted toward Pietr’s distant figure. “Maybe you just hate anyone who’s better than you.” I laughed. “That’s gotta be a looong list.”

  “You really aren’t very smart, are you? Here I am, able to roll you down the mountainside, and you’re getting attitude.”

  I shrugged. “I was the same way with a previous psychotic attacker,” I admitted, thinking back to my encounter with Marvin in the school hallway. “And a jerk who wanted me dead because of what I could do for the werewolves,” I added, remembering Officer Kent at the gun range. “But hey, there’s something to be said for consistency, right? And maybe the third time’s the charm—though there’s nothing charming about you.…”

  She returned to watching Pietr make his approach.

  “Geez. Whatever happened to them?” I wondered out loud. “Oh. Yeah. They’re dead. Both dead. Sucks to be on the wrong side.” I didn’t bother adding I hadn’t killed either of them.

  Still downhill a good distance, Pietr paused, assessing the situation, his left hand twitching at his side, signaling to someone behind him? Let it be Max. For such a sexy slacker, Max always came through when he was needed.

  Marlaena didn’t notice. Her eyes were fixed on Pietr. “Marlena,” Pietr called, “what are y
ou doing?”

  “I have a working theory,” she shouted down the hillside, compensating as the wind tore her words away. “I think Jessica hasn’t been one hundred percent honest with you. My sources tell me—and I think you’ll agree they are in the know—that cures like yours can’t truly end what’s effed up in your genetics. The cure you took? A temporary fix. A stopgap measure. It masks your true self—doesn’t cure a thing.”

  Pietr froze a moment, considering. He licked his lips as he weighed his words. “Jess wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “Why not? She’s lied to everyone else. So what would stop her from lying to you? What makes you so special?”

  “Love,” I answered simply. “Love is what makes him so special. But Pietr, she’s right. Cat and I didn’t tell you everything about the cure. We only found out by accident the night the company was blown to Hell. And when we told Alexi, he wanted time to come up with an alternate plan. He wanted to have a complete cure before you’d demand it.”

  “See? She lied to you, Pietr. She omitted pertinent facts and put you at a disadvantage.”

  His body language barely changed, only stiffened a little. He was coping tremendously well. Like he already knew … We had both tried so hard to always be honest with each other. We hadn’t always succeeded, but we’d tried.

  “And Pietr…” The breeze shifted and so did Marlaena on the gravel beside me, her back straightening and her chin lifting. I looked up and saw her nostrils flare. “While you’re asking for answers, why not ask Max why he’s still a werewolf?”

  We’d seen Pietr force Max to take the cure, but none of us witnessed his final change. And Max had remained more Max-like than any of the other Rusakovas had remained like their oborot selves.

  Pietr turned back down the hill and shrugged. “Max?”

  Max stepped out from the deepening shadows and also shrugged, like a little boy caught taking an extra cookie from the jar. Then he unfurled his most devilish grin and aimed it at Marlaena. “We’ve been through this already, Mar, but if it makes you feel better…” He cleared his throat and faced his younger brother, giving him the most pained look he had in his arsenal of expressions. God. “What was I supposed to do?” he asked. Dramatically. There were even hand gestures.

  Max knew, like I did, his drama bought us time. I refocused on the knot near my wrists, ignoring how my fingernails bent back as I plucked at it.

  “I couldn’t leave us defenseless,” Max said. “I understood your grief and I get what drove you to force the cure on me, but it wasn’t how I’d handle things. So I spit it out and locked myself up a while. I got sick,” he admitted, “puked a bunch. But you didn’t get enough into me to make me go through the final change.” Max looked back at Marlaena. “Huh. That felt pretty good, getting that out. It’s like therapy in the wilderness,” he said through a grin. “Some people pay a helluva lotta money for that, I guess.”

  Marlaena was unimpressed.

  Max’s grin snapped shut and his brow lowered, his forehead heavy and shadowing his eyes. The boy was designed for drama. And he was exactly what Amy needed. “Maybe that could be your career path—kidnapping girls and getting their boyfriends’ family to fess up.” He clapped his hands together in front of him and cocked his head. “Of course it won’t be much of a career if you die here today.”

  Marlaena’s boots scraped in the gravel and snow as she widened her stance, adopting a fighter’s pose. But she clapped, slowly and loudly, at the spectacle before her. “Now, Jessica, tell Pietr the rest,” she urged. “Tell him what breaks the cure.”

  Silent, I continued working the ropes.

  “Tell him,” she demanded, nudging my hip with her boot. A few pebbles fell off the edge of the mountain and tumbled down into the ravine. She froze, seeing the same thing.

  My throat tightened, watching the stones fall and bounce their way to the bottom. How would what I said or did at this moment really matter?

  I could tell him the truth, warn him about the unreliable burst of adrenaline it took for the wolf to jump back out of his skin and take over once more. I could agree there was no cure that was permanent at this point and there was no way to know when a werewolf’s life would end.

  Chances were good that Pietr wouldn’t die immediately after changing back.

  Chances were good he would still have years before his werewolf nature drove him to an early grave.

  And chances were also good that no matter what I did or said, Marlaena was going to shove me down the mountainside.

  But chances were still only chances.

  “It’s a burst of energy,” I said. “It’s a dumping of so much adrenaline into your system—so much fear or passion or angst or pain—that it pushes you past your limits. Your body breaks through the mask of the cure.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Science. Now. Shall we have a demonstration?” Marlaena asked, leaning over my shoulder and gently rocking my entire body so that more pebbles and a small puff of crystallized snow fell free and disappeared into the gap in the mountain’s teeth.

  “Nyet!” Pietr shouted, sprinting as he pushed his body. “Marlaena—tell me what you want—I’ll do it—Anything!” The knot was finally coming loose under the pressure of my prodding fingers, the coarse strands of it biting into my skin. But it was working. In a minute I’d be free.…

  They were still yelling at each other, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gareth.

  “Don’t” was all he said to Marlaena. Just one simple and soft word as he reached out a hand for her—or for me. I had no idea which of us he was trying to save at that moment or if he wanted to somehow save us both.…

  The way she looked at him … something in my heart faltered seeing that expression—even on her face.

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You never do. You never will.”

  Pietr was nearly to me, the look of terror plain across his face as he realized he was too slow.…

  Wolf again, Max raced in ground-swallowing strides, overtaking Pietr.…

  The crack of a gunshot reverberated across the mountaintop and Max rolled, his head tucked, tail like a flag suddenly loose in the wind.

  I screamed for them both.

  Max tumbled into the trees, leaving nothing but an awkward and bloodstained path in the snow and an explosion of white when he landed with a thud against a tree trunk.

  Leaning suspended from a harness high in a tree across the clearing was Dmitri, the barrel of his gun still smoking.

  “Help me understand,” Gareth urged Marlaena, approaching slowly and steadily.

  “I don’t even understand.…” And then her hand took a rough grip on me, squeezing my shoulder so tightly I knew it was bruising beneath her fingers. “But I think this is a lesson we all need to learn,” she said.

  “What?” Gareth asked. “For me, ’Laena, don’t…”

  Marlaena hesitated.

  We were both frozen on top of the mountain, and not because of the crushing cold. Pietr rushed toward us, Gareth’s fingertips nearly at my sleeve as Marlaena’s grip tightened on me and Dmitri lowered his gun and took aim.

  At me.

  If Marlaena wasn’t going to end me, he would.

  Their images blurred and faded into the darkness and I was again in Derek’s head, gasping as my world—the present world—was ripped out from under me.

  “She needs to move. Get inside quickly, push her, and get out.”

  We vaulted into Wanda’s brain, stood inside the hallway that made up the heart of her head, and stared down at the doors. One vibrated in the wall as if it knew our intention. Without a second thought we yanked the door open and stepped inside.

  Before us was a chess board filled with figurines in black and white. The red squares among the army of figures were marked with words; scrawled across each in Wanda’s own handwriting was the name of a city or town in the local region. “There.” We pointed as one, reading Junction. Derek stepped forward to grab a pawn and shift it to the
spot, but I recoiled, seeing that each pawn was a figure of Wanda.

  “Move,” he insisted, sliding the pawn forward.

  “More,” Mommy urged. “Shift them all to that position so that the message is understood, so that the need is fierce.” And we did.

  The chessboard beneath our feet slanted, shifting, the ground rumbling below us. “Move,” we shouted as everything tilted and we were thrown from the board. We screamed, racing back toward the open door.

  “Hold on,” Mommy cried, and everything went black, my vision clearing just enough …

  “You can’t save everyone.” Marlaena’s voice broke through the fog fuzzing up my brain.

  … and I took the best advice I’d gotten in the past few hours.

  I moved.

  Marlaena shifted as the gun fired, pulling me back—out of harm’s way?—but not before the ropes binding my wrists came free and I’d grabbed her pant leg, unbalancing her and sending us both tumbling. Damn it—whose side was she on?

  All I heard were screams: hers, mine, Pietr’s, and Gareth’s.

  Then there was the noise—and the sharp and bitter pain—as my body barreled down the mountainside, crashing awkwardly into snow and stone and chunks of trees and mashing the breath and the thoughts out of me, but not the will.

  My arms and legs pinwheeled, flailing, but my hands kept grasping stubbornly for anything that might slow my progress down the steep slope. The snow and ice made grass and vines impossible to find, and when my hand suddenly snagged in something I screamed at the pain burning through my left shoulder as my body suddenly ripped to a stop, my hand caught in the root of a downed tree. “Breathe, just breathe,” I whispered, my right hand trying to find a grip and pull me up to alleviate the weight that pulled on my shoulder and wrist and made me scream and curse.

  I dug into the snow with my right hand, feeling carefully—and quickly as my fingers became numb—for another root or a branch or an oddly shaped rock … anything to help me move up the mountainside instead of continuing down.

  I cried, tears streaking out the only heat on my stinging face. The taste of blood made me guess a split lip was among my many injuries. All of me ached, bursts of sharp pain intersected with throbbing dull pain, and my vision swam with more than tears.