Reflected (Silver Series) (2 page)

Languid contentment pooled in her limbs. Even when the sweat drying on her skin started to chill her, Felicia didn’t want to move.

Tom slid his arm over her waist, probably feeling the same chill. “Wow,” he commented, tone warm rather than teasing.

“What, you thought I was as innocent as Father wishes I was? My first was back in Madrid, before I even met Father properly.” Felicia tried to burrow against him for more warmth, but it was a losing battle. She finally surrendered and sat up. Tom stood first to help her up and then draped his arm over her shoulders as they wandered back up to the trail in search of their clothes.

They’d stashed their bags with their clothes in a tree a couple yards off the trail. Even if Felicia hadn’t remembered where, the werewolf scents layered on that of human-made fabric stood out sharply among the growing things. Tom knocked their packs down, and they both rummaged. Felicia wished she’d thought to bring a brush. Her hair was probably a sight.

Cars had been coming intermittently up the winding road that bordered the Roanoke pack’s hunting land, heading for the houses buried in the trees farther up the hill. Now one engine rumble slowed, changed direction, and stopped. A slammed door from close by made it clear someone had turned in.

“Lady!” Tom hurriedly dumped all his clothes into a pile rather than pulling out each piece in order. “Roanoke Dare is going to kill me.”

Rather than jump to conclusions, Felicia waited it out until a few moments later a breeze came at the right angle to bring the newcomers’ scents. “Father’s not with them. It’s just Silver and the beta.”

Tom frowned. “Roanoke Silver, you mean.” He threw her an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, Felicia, but your stepmother’s just as scary.”

“She’s not my stepmother.” Felicia immediately regretted the snap to her tone, but it was true, wasn’t it? Fine, her father could have anyone he wanted as a mate, but that didn’t give her any connection to Felicia. “They’re not married. She’s not my anything.”

“She’s still one of your alphas.” Tom froze, underwear in his hands, as voices reached them.

“Go ahead. I’ll be up by the stream,” Silver said, presumably to John, the beta. Her white hair showed in flashes here and there through the trees farther down the trail. Felicia suppressed an instinctive urge to look back over her shoulder. The stream beyond them wouldn’t have moved in the last few minutes.

Sudden laughter bubbled up in her. What were they worrying so much for, anyway? She was an adult; she could make her own choices. What did it matter if Silver found out? She’d had enough rest to regather her energy since the last shift, so she shifted to wolf and snatched Tom’s jeans out of his hands. She stopped a few yards away, her turn to bend over her forelegs, and growled an invitation for him to try to get them.

Tom frowned without the humor she’d hoped for and grabbed for one pant leg. She took off, as fast as she could go on four legs. A beat later she heard Tom’s growl, from a wolf throat this time. No surprise. No way he could keep up with her on two legs.

Since she was trying to avoid the beta and Silver as well as evade Tom, Felicia headed off the trail quickly, straight to the edge of the property. She ducked under the pathetic barbed-wire fence that marked the property line but couldn’t really keep anyone out. It snagged a fluff of fur in retaliation.

Across a shallow ditch, pavement sliced through the trees. She hadn’t realized she’d been heading for the road, but it had probably been inevitable. The pack’s hunting lands weren’t that big. Tom crashed through the underbrush behind her, and she danced onto the road to keep out of his reach, grinning as she dragged his jeans along the ground. She backed onto the grassy rise on the other side until her tail brushed the fence, and she waggled the pants back and forth.

Tom tumbled under the fence and into the ditch, righted himself, and glared at her. After a moment and with a visible sigh, he bounded after her.

Then everything went wrong all at once.

Felicia registered the purr of a sports car barreling down the hill barely a heartbeat before the car itself flashed past. Tom gave a sickening canine shriek, the car thumped, skidded, swerved, and the engine growled away at even greater speed.

Felicia hurled herself back down onto the pavement. Tom. What had happened to Tom? Was he all right? Lady, please let him be all right.

*   *   *

Silver looked at Death when she heard Tom’s scream, even as she pounded into as much of a run as she could get from her human legs. He seemed amused, no more, as he effortlessly matched his pace to hers, the advantage of four wolf legs. The low growl of some great beast, perhaps the cause of Tom’s misfortune, disappeared down the mountain.

Something Silver couldn’t see caught at her legs, tried to scratch and trip her. Thorns, her eyes told her, reaching malevolently for her skin, but she knew better than to trust her eyes. They suffered from the shadows that poisoning had brought to her mind. The deeper the shadows, the more unexpected the truth beneath. To help Tom, she needed to find that truth.

Two hands would have helped, but Silver did the best she could with one after tucking her scarred and useless arm more securely, hand in pocket. If the thorns caught that, she would bleed before she was done. She tore the plants up at the roots with her good hand and half slid down a hillside to reach Tom.

More shadows there—rushing water, tumbled to white over rocks, foaming up around the flat place where Tom lay. Water that Silver knew wasn’t water. In her worry for Tom, the harder she tried to see something else, the more the rushing sound filled her ears. Felicia waded out into the current from the other side, red-tinted black fur remaining pristine and dry as she reached Tom and whined over him in shock.

“I’d hurry,” Death said, using her brother’s voice. Good advice, like her brother would have given, even though it wasn’t him speaking.

Silver nodded and darted out to Tom. Water that violent meant danger. The sooner she dragged Tom out of it, the better. Felicia looked up from trying to nose Tom out of his protective curl around his injuries, so they could see the damage. Silver stroked his tame self’s hair, sandy like the wild self’s fur, and eased it to lie more comfortably, trapped beneath the wild self. Blood from both mixed on her hand and Felicia’s ruff and in the water.

Felicia kept whining and Silver wished she could make the sound properly with her human throat. Finally, Tom’s wild self relaxed enough for her to roll him over to see the wounds. The torn and abraded skin wasn’t knitting, which meant his healing had more important things to do, like repairing smashed organs. They needed to get him out of the river to help.

Not river.
Path.
Having a plan focused her, and Silver found that understanding with a bubble-pop of relief. They needed to get him off the path. Felicia must have been thinking along similar lines, because she crouched and began to switch her wild self for tame with hands useful for carrying.

“No,” Death snapped.

“No!” Silver held out her hand to stop Felicia before she even quite understood what Death was reacting to. Another growl approached from up the mountain, more uneven in tone than the beast that had hurt Tom. Felicia, surprised by Silver’s order, settled back onto four feet as a human arrived and stepped out of her vehicle. A vehicle, not a beast.

“Oh, my God! Your poor dog!” The human woman smelled of children, though she had none with her at the moment. She jogged up and leaned over Tom, slippery black hair fanning down to hang over her shoulders.

Silver smoothed Tom’s ears, trying to imagine he was a pet, not a Were she was desperate to get away from human eyes so further healing at werewolf speed would not raise alarms. “If we can just move him out of the way, my friend’s around, we’ll—”

The woman gasped in objection. “That’ll take too long. I’ll give you a ride down the hill, the—” She said a word Silver didn’t understand but could guess at. One who healed pets, not humans. The last thing Tom needed, though he could have used a Were doctor. “—we use, she’s really great. I’m sure she can do something for him.”

Silver looked again at Tom’s wounds. Which was the greater risk? Going along to the pet doctor, hoping that Tom’s healing, without additional sleep or food, would stop short of the torn skin, leaving something to at least explain the blood? Or would it be better to knock the woman down, run for it?

And how would they take Tom with them if they did run? Felicia couldn’t help carry him as her wild self, couldn’t switch to her tame in front of the human. Silver couldn’t drag him one-armed without showing strength greater than a human woman should have. She seemed to have no choice but to pray to the Lady the doctor would see nothing more than a pet with wolf ancestry.

“Thank you,” she told the woman, accepting. She helped the human lift Tom into her vehicle and glanced back to see Felicia standing in the path, stock-still and smelling of anger at Silver’s choice. Silver squashed exasperation she had no time for. Even if Felicia had a better idea, circumstances didn’t allow her to share it, so better she put her effort into making this one succeed.

“Run, girl,” Death said in a woman’s accented voice that belonged to Felicia’s and her father’s past, not Silver’s. Silver saw what he meant immediately. If Felicia ran off, Silver could justify coming back to find her later, after treating Tom. Meanwhile, Felicia could warn John what was going on.

But of course Felicia couldn’t see Death. She stayed where she was, and the human woman turned back to her. “C’mon, boy,” she crooned in a voice for a pet or a baby. “There’s room in the back for you too.” She got a grip in Felicia’s ruff.

Too late. Silver would have to bring her other “pet” too. She almost called Felicia by her real name, but of course that wasn’t a pet name. Silver wanted to snarl a curse. Names were hard enough for her to remember as it was. Glaring at Felicia’s wild self, she remembered a thought she’d had on first meeting the girl: so much of her childhood had been shaped by flames.

“Smoke,” Silver snapped, using an alpha’s command in her tone before Felicia could decide to fight free of the human. “Come.” She took over the woman’s grip on Felicia’s ruff, pushed her into the vehicle, and climbed up after. She smoothed Tom’s fur along his head, one of the few places free of blood, and wondered what in the Lady’s name she was going to do once they reached their destination and the only one who could speak was the one whose sight was obscured by shadows.

The human woman chattered in a bright tone as they traveled down the hill, but Silver could smell the stink of her worry. She seemed to think Silver would fall apart if she wasn’t distracted. Silver would have preferred silence, though if the woman could have gotten Felicia to stop staring at Silver with wide, frightened eyes, Silver would have hugged her. She needed to
think.

“I’d do it now, if I were you,” Death said. He used what Silver thought of as “his” voice, though of course he had none of his own since the Lady had taken his from him. This voice must have belonged to someone long dead.

Silver pressed the heel of her hand between her eyes. Even if she could have said “do what?” out loud to Death with the human listening, he would have just laughed. She knew what he meant. She could see past the shadows, but the pain that caused had been worth it only once before.

She checked Tom again first, to stall. He was still unconscious, and the tears across his side seeped slowly and did not heal. Silver had no food for him, to give him more energy to heal, so perhaps the doctor would find something to explain all the blood after all.

But there would still be questions. Her name, the location of her home, payment. Silver knew she couldn’t give the kind of answers the humans would want without one of her pack members with her. Unless she did what Death had already decided she must do. Lady, wasn’t there any other choice?

She supposed not.

2

When their path flattened at the bottom of the hill, Silver could put it off no longer. Lady help her. Or more rightly—Death help her. Silver tried to catch Death’s eyes, though they were perfect darkness within the greater darkness of his fur, and were not for someone to ever meet straight on. She couldn’t ask him, but he knew what she needed anyway.

A name.

“Selene,” he said, in her brother’s voice once more. That voice had a name too: Ares. Those names had childhood teasing: Why were they named after human gods? Why didn’t they have normal names? That childhood had a home: Seattle, then Bellingham. And Bellingham had a massacre.

Selene doubled over, digging mental fingers into the name, to hold it to her even as the memories tried to hurt her so much she let it go. Yes, her brother, her niece and nephew, her whole pack was dead, bleeding out slowly from torture, but there was a young man here and now who was not yet dead. If she wanted “cell phone” and “credit card” and “veterinarian,” she had to reach into the very heart of the fire of memories and pluck them out. Out from among the feeling of liquid silver injected into her arm, burning away parts of her mind; the bright joy of the one who had done it; the children’s dying screams.

Things snapped into crystalline clarity, every surface ready to scrape her skin away until nothing was left, but Selene had what she needed. When the SUV stopped, she opened the back door before the human woman reached it, and jumped down. Tom sprawled, blood staining the carpeting on top of a row of folded-down seats, while Felicia had to crawl out from where she’d pressed herself under the next upright row.

“I bet Dr. Sarrento has a burly vet tech. Let me go get him,” the human woman said after frowning at Tom. She probably remembered how heavy he had been when they loaded him.

Selene pressed a palm flat to a taillight and swallowed nausea along with the feeling of a phantom burning stealing up her arm. The silver nitrate was gone, leaving only scars and an arm she couldn’t use. “I left my cell phone and wallet in my car,” she told the tech when he arrived, more weedy college intern than burly anything. “Can I use your phone to get my boyfriend to come out here? It’s not far, he should be back by the time you’re done stitching him up.” Belatedly, she remembered she was a worried pet owner, and she gave tech a wan smile, implying her hope stitches would be the only thing needed.