Leigh Evans - The Thing About Weres

His Royal Nastiness was probably an enchanted prince.

Oh, put away your hankie. It’s just as possible that he could be a dumb Asrai peasant who got too close to a Fae bent on mischief. Possibly that’s why he dislikes me—he was cursed by one of my kind to live eternity in a hunk of blue stone. Or maybe it’s because of my Were—its hot blood is disappointingly thin in terms of required Fae magic.

Whatever. If he was the fair lost prince of the Asrais it would explain his sense of entitlement. How many people had a “the” in front of their names? It had to mess with your head. Keeping half an eye on Casperella’s flipper-paws progress, I picked up my socks. The Alpha. That worked. The Alpha-by-proxy. Weak. The Fae. A tad nonspecific because I was the only Fae—well, half Fae—on this side of the portal. The Mystwalker . If the pack knew what that meant they’d be horrified, given how they felt about the supernatural. I imagined bringing it up in casual conversation. “Hey, do you know I use my mind to travel to a different realm? Uh-huh, sure can. And you know what I can do while I’m there? I can sort through a Fae’s memories like they’re a deck of playing cards. Rearrange them, too, if I felt it like it.”

Yeah, that would go down well.

I flicked a glance over to the Royal Asshat as I slid the white cotton anklet over my heel. His reaction was covert, but I recognized his interest in the ghost. Where once there had been slack in his chain, now there was an indefinable tension.

“You’ve got a whole bunch of Napoleon syndrome going on tonight,” I told him. In response, the Royal Amulet flashed a blip of light twice—a piece of communication I’d witnessed enough times to recognize as an insolent FU.

“Nice language.” But the oak tree shivered behind me, and I did, too.

He set out a lure: a string of white blips brightened the dim gloom under the tree. White blip (see me sparkle), white blip (ain’t I pretty), white blip (uh-huh, I’m so damn fine).

Fascinating. He was coaxing her closer. But why?

What was the worst that could happen if I allowed them to interact? Could he drain her dry of whatever supernatural essence she had? I tried to imagine Ralph with more attitude, which almost immediately led to the thought of me standing in front of Merry with an apologetic expression, explaining how I watched disaster unfold while I fumbled with my socks.

No, thank you.

“Hey, Boo,” I said. “Beat it.”

She didn’t even turn her little Medusa head my way. Her mincing hand inched forward.

Annoying.

Plan B. Remove Ralph from danger. I plunged my hand into my bag. Where are my tongs? The damn messenger bag was crammed full of stuff. Trowbridge’s shoe. A soft leather pouch attached to a pool of golden chain. An almost empty roll of duct tape. Crap, crap, crap. Where are they? My fingers delved past the empty coin purse. Brushed against a romance novel with the cover torn off. Hit the bottom seam of the bag where the orphaned Skittles lolled. Did a hurried and rough exploration of its contours.

And came up tongs-empty.

When he was in a pissy mood, tongs were kind of essential amulet-handling equipment. I popped the red Skittle in my mouth, and sucked on it for a soothing half second, considering my options. You know when you know something bad is going to happen and you just can’t figure out how, or why? A certainty of impending doom corkscrewed through me. But even as a little voice said to me, Perhaps you should take a brief moment right now for a spot of reflection, I’d already swung my messenger bag at Casperella. Because in my book, that’s what you do.

You act. You don’t think.

I charged.

The messenger bag was a twelve-inch nylon rectangle, heavy enough to make my shoulder ache. Theoretically, it should have batted her smoke right to the nearest ashtray.

It didn’t.

On impact, she half turned toward me, her head arched and tilted sideways in an all too mortal WTF as my messenger bag sliced through her fluttering shroud. It made dust rags out of her garment, and then, curiously, its momentum slowed markedly, too.

Not something you see every day: a ghost with a Nike shoulder bag planted in her middle. She seemed to buckle over it, and then she heaved—the way a cat does before it throws up a hairball—and my bag broke through her, curved in a sharp arc, and walloped me hard enough on my naked thigh to make me spit out my Skittle.

To top it off, she’d graced my messenger bag with a thin layer of her ectoplasmic goo.

Why are people always messing with my stuff?

As my foot sliced through her and she became a Rorschach test around me, I realized something interesting and potentially important. Casperella was not smoke. In fact, she was more like dark ink. I registered this, and my automatic ewww, as something liquid-cool and syrup-thick started sliding down my throat.

How can something that smells that good feel so bad inside? While I choked and spasmed to cough her up, she reassembled the rest of her inky bits and dove for the amulet, in a graceful, arched column. Like the St. Louis Arch, except dark and planted over a crumbling stone wall.

Without a sound, she enveloped him.

No, no, no.

I threw myself into the stream of her and got in a couple of flailing ink-smearing bitch slaps, but soon found myself sinking to the ground. Because, as it turns out, the burden of a writhing body of ink can be soul-wearying.

Her sadness weighted my limbs.

“Home,” I heard her say in my head. “Let me go home.”

The slightly foreign cadence to her voice threw a chill down my ribs. And with that, I forgot all about protecting Ralph. And the gathering Weres. Even the damn letter that sat under the bowl of oranges on the dinette table. The accent was unmistakable. I’d grown up listening to it, first with my mum then with my aunt Lou.

Oh, sweet heavens, I thought, clawing for air . Casperella’s not a Were.

She’s a Fae.

The ghost from Merenwyn was over me, fluid and intangible. I felt like I was drowning under the smothering blanket of her. Picking up flickers of thought and broken bits of a life once lived.

So tired .

A blip of light shone in the murky ink. White, sharp.

Followed by a sparkling flash of gold.

Ralph had unwound his trinity knots into rapiers and gone all Three Musketeers. His blades flashed. They may have been thin and short but they were made of Fae gold—stronger than titanium—and were thus neither as soft nor as fragile as mortal precious metal. Also, and more importantly, they weren’t being wielded by a lily-livered popinjay. Merry’s boyfriend was lightning fast, using one rapier to thrust and slash, the other to cut and slash. He really must have been a prince once upon a time, back in the day when they wore feathers in their hats and swordplay was a way of life, because the arc of each slashing cut was precise in a way that bespoke long hours of training.

Casperella surged back in retreat, a contorted, whirling whisper of smoke and ink. I caught a glimpse of her eye, black and tragic. An open mouth and a pale thin jaw. I could feel her yearning for home like a sad song in my heart.

“Enough, Ralph,” I said.

Unappeased, Merry’s lover sprang up, a veritable Jack in the Box of doom, and jabbed both swords into her throat.

Casperella moaned one word. Low, piteously.

And then she broke into fragments of ink. The blue-gray droplets hung in the air, impervious to gravity. Another groan, this time from the wind sawing through the oak tree on the other side of the picket fence. And then, slowly, in a way that kind of hurt me, I watched those floating bits of ghost turn the color of ash.