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My hand went for my gun. It would be a tough shot, but I could make it. I’d wing Clarence, knowing the bullet would spin him counter-clockwise. The dagger would fly away from Grace rather than toward her. The shot would attract the attention of the brunchers, but that wouldn’t matter as long as my twin made it out alive.
Only...the spot beneath my arm where my gun belonged was empty. There was no holster waiting at my hip.
Right. Slim had my guns and Clarence now held my backup weapon. Which is how I came to be standing empty-handed when the son of the house turned his head and greeted me with a gamine grin.
“So there are two of you. Eggplant city.”
Grace’s eyes met mine then slid to the pelt draped across the teenager’s shoulders. I somehow knew that she’d enjoyed a wild leap of intuition soon after I left her, had realized that Clarence was the killer.
But while hunting for our cousin’s pelt, she’d been caught in the act.
“Eh, eh, eh. Eyes up here.” Clarence twisted the dagger so it scraped the first drop of blood free from my twin’s skin. She didn’t gasp, though. Just stood there waiting for me to come to her aid.
I closed my eyes for one split second, turning off fear for my sister and turning on the persona of a negotiator. “You’re on the wrong track.”
“Oh am I?” Clarence jerked his chin at me, but we all understood he was really pointing at the pelt curled around my shoulders. “So you don’t have one of these Harry Potter furs just like I do? A fresh one that’s not wearing out?”
He was still shivering even though the air had turned hot and Bastion’s pelt should have been heavy on his shoulders. Each twitch dislodged a hair or two from my cousin’s skin, white and silver fibers fluttering away on the hint of a breeze.
The vision proved that the pelt we’d been hunting for so long was nothing like mine. It wasn’t soft; it wasn’t supple. Instead, it resembled a moth-eaten rug left too long in an airless attic. Was there even enough energy left inside to save my cousin’s life?
The realization made my voice rougher than I meant it to be. “Is that what you want? This useless thing?”
I ripped my pelt from my shoulders, let it dangle from one hand like a soiled dish rag. Unfortunately, Clarence was no idiot.
“Yes,” he answered. “That’s exactly what I want.”
***
GIVE IT TO HIM. I read the plea in Grace’s eyes as easily as if she’d shouted. We’d retreat, lick our wounds, and return to fight another day.
But I shook my head in response to both of them. I couldn’t let that happen. Bastion didn’t have enough time left to take it slow.
“Are you sure?” Clarence wasn’t fazed by my refusal. Instead, he pushed Grace up against the railing, bending her down so only his grip prevented her from plummeting to hard stones beneath them. “Toss what I want up here and maybe I’ll let your sister go rather than letting her go.”
He wiggled his eyebrows, just in case I hadn’t caught the thinly veiled ultimatum. And as he stood there, threatening my sister with gravity, I took in the familiarity of his gesture, the ease of a task repeated.
That was exactly how he’d done away with Serena. Jimmy English might really have been an accident, but the young prostitute had been killed on purpose. The child in the woods? Her death by strangulation suggested Clarence was ready and willing to take his murders up a notch.
Plus, I now realized the obvious. If Clarence had been drawn to each person who’d touched my pelt the same way I’d been drawn to the child in the woods—through woelfin instinct—then my connection to Grace was likely ten times stronger. After all, we shared a twin-sense. Our furs were genetically identical. No wonder tears glimmered on my sister’s eyelids.
She needed out from under the murderer’s thumb, and quickly. But trading away my pelt wasn’t the way to release our family from Clarence’s grasp. He’d just keep killing everyone I came in contact with. I couldn’t take the easy way out.
So I took a step forward, heels echoing on the hard stone patio as I gauged the perfect spot to break my sister’s fall just in case I failed her.
Plan for the worst, prepare for the best, Uncle Reason had told us. I took a deep breath and did my best to reel Clarence in.
“You realize this fur will only grant you a few days of health, a week if you’re lucky.” I shook my pelt feeling my own teeth rattle. “The kills you’ve made are stopgap measures. You’ve felt how fast the strength fades each time, haven’t you?”
I didn’t give him time to agree or argue. Instead, I shifted my gaze away from Grace, who was trying to tell me something with her eyes that I didn’t have the time to decipher. Then I cast my net.
“Each of these furs matches a specific person.” This was the honest truth. Even Grace was nodding along at this point. “You’re borrowing the energy of the person yours is bound to. What you need to do is take it all.”
Grace gasped as she was pushed further over the edge. But Clarence wasn’t intentionally threatening her. Instead, he was interested. I could tell when he licked his lips and demanded, “How?”
I had no idea, but Bastion once told me there were no new stories, only old stories twisted around unexpected kernels of truth. So I grabbed onto an explanation that felt gruesome enough to keep Clarence’s interest and I ran with it. “You have to rip out his throat and drink his blood.”
Vampires. The fictitious monsters seemed like a good choice to appeal to an already twisted teenager. But Grace’s reaction came before Clarence’s did.
“Honor! What are you doing?” My twin sounded like she’d put a lollipop in her mouth expecting cherry and instead found herself sucking on blood-imbued sugar.
“Telling the truth,” I lied. “You’re more important to me than our cousin.”
And that part, I realized—despite the cherished partnership I had with Bastion—was the honest truth.
“Your cousin?” Clarence interrupted before whatever Grace was about to say could derail this conversation. “The one who matches this fur. You’ll bring him to me?”
I nodded. “And then you’ll let my sister go.”
***
IT WAS HARD TO HASH out a bargain with Grace’s tearful recriminations spluttering over the distant DAR chatter. “Honor. Stop it.”
I didn’t stop. Instead, I accepted Clarence’s one-hour deadline. Informed him that, no, I couldn’t come alone. I’d have to bring at least one friend to help carry my cousin. Bastion wasn’t precisely well.
“Will his sickness dilute the magic?” Clarence was so intent upon me that Grace could have wiggled out of his grasp now. But there was no way to overtly tell her that, and she seemed to have lost the ability to understand twin-speak.
“No, it won’t matter.” I clenched my jaw, sending instructions to my twin. Twist away. Now!
Unfortunately, her answer had nothing to do with saving herself. “Are you so desperate to be the only one of us with a wolfsfell that you’ll sacrifice Bastion to save your uniqueness?”
Her recrimination struck me hard and low, right where my twin-sense had been informing me of danger earlier. I flinched back and Clarence laughed.
“If only I had popcorn.” Then he tightened his grip on Grace, allowing the dagger to nip deeper into the soft skin above her jugular. “Clock’s ticking. Better run.”
And I did. I ignored the pain and horror in Grace’s eyes. Ignored the knowledge that something unfixable had broken between us. Instead of meeting her gaze and trying to communicate the honorableness of my intensions, I fled to the neighbor’s bush, shed my clothes, and donned my fur-lined skin.
The pelt settled around me like a smothering cocoon of betrayal. Clung tight and taut, repeating the recriminations Grace had flung at my back.
“If you do this, it’s over between us!” she’d warned as I turned away from her.
Sprinting across town without regard for traffic, the only reason I could see where I was going was because wolves are unable to cry.