Anna gave a half-amused huff. "What do I get if I'm right?"
His eyes lightened with the wolf who lurked inside him, and the hunger in his gaze told her exactly what he meant when he said, "The same thing you get if you're wrong."
She waited for the fear or even trepidation that thoughts of sex had usually brought to her-but it never came. Just a welcome tickly feeling in her stomach. In less than a month's time, he'd made serious inroads on her problems in that area. "Good," she told him.
He smiled at her and relaxed against his seat.
SEATTLE highways had a lot more vertical variation than those in Chicago. The roads rose above water, tangled and burrowed under hills where houses sat unmoved by the thousands of cars that traveled beneath them. Over the smell of the cars was the scent of water and salt from the Puget Sound and various other saltwater lakes and ponds. The gray skies leaked here and there, not enough to turn the wipers on full but too much to let the rain accumulate long.
Following Charles's directions, she exited the highway and found herself tootling along a slower road in what could just as well have been a small town in Britain as a part of Seattle. It looked old, quaint, and beautiful, if a little self-conscious. On the water to her right was a series of docks with boats and houseboats, while on her left, narrow buildings covered the side of a hill that got progressively steeper as she drove.
A huge silver bridge arched over the water and the road she was driving, soaring up to land on the top of a steep hill above. The name of the cross street that ran directly under the bridge had Anna pulling her foot off the gas so she could be sure that she was reading the street sign correctly.
"Troll?"
"What?" Charles had been looking toward the water, but he turned back to look at her.
"There's a street here called Troll?"
He smiled suddenly. "I'd forgotten about that. Why don't you follow it up the hill?"
She turned the car up the road and thought for a moment the decision was a mistake because the little blue car strained to crawl up the hill, which was even steeper than it had looked from the bottom. The road was narrow and claustrophobic, with the bridge for roofing, its steel feet closing in from left and right.
She was so busy worrying about driving that she didn't see it until they were quite close. The road they were on ended and teed into another road. The bridge overhead plowed into the top of the hill. And in the space between the road and the end of the bridge crouched a giant something.
Without consulting Charles, she parked.
Someone had sculpted a huge humanoid monster out of cement, rising from the sand: a troll for the bridge. Cement hair hung limply over one eye while the other stared over Anna's head at the waterway at the bottom of the hill they'd just driven up. One of its hands, which rested on a real VW Bug, was big enough to engulf the car. The Bug's nose burrowed beneath the troll's beard as if it sought refuge there.
Anna got out of the car slowly and strolled across the road, Charles at her side. The statue had been attacked with chalk recently, and the bright pink and green colors only enhanced the oddity of the creature. Fingernails and the lines of knuckles had been drawn on the creature's hands. Pink and green chalk flowers followed the contours of the Bug's fender, and on the back window-cement-covered glass-someone had written "Just Married."
Peripherally, Anna sensed they were being watched. Above the troll, in the notch where the bridge met the top of the hill, three or four street people observed them warily. One man set aside a newspaper he'd been reading and started down toward them.
He was a little above average height, though he slumped until he appeared shorter. He wore a battered canvas duster that was liberally splattered with muck. Mismatched Nikes adorned his feet. The right shoe had a hole in the toe and the left another along the edge of his heel, exposing the dirty, sockless foot inside. The jeans he wore were new and stiff, though as mucky as his duster. She caught glimpses of layers of shirts-a red flannel shirt over a yellow plaid button-up that almost obscured a graying white tee.
Anna took note of the man, but with Charles at her side the stranger wasn't a threat-and Anna was more interested in the troll. So she let Charles deal with him as she climbed up the back of the Bug and onto the creature's arm, then higher still until she could rest her hand on his overlarge nose.
"Like my little troll, eh?" the stranger said to Charles, his voice rough like that of a man who'd smoked a pack a day for years. He didn't smell like cigarettes, though. His scent, rising through the air to Anna's nose, was earthy and magical, sharp with a predator's musk.
"Was it a real one?" Anna asked him, safe upon her perch, safe with Charles.
The stranger looked up at her and laughed, exposing ragged, blackened teeth as sharp as he smelled. "Well, now. It might be that the artist saw somp'n. Somp'n he out ter not have seen, wolf-kin." He patted the cement arm she stood on, and she took a wary step back. "Happen though, he built me a friend, so we're all happy. Even the Gray Lord, there, she thought it were funny. Didn't hardly hurt me at all for gettin' seen and not tellin' her."
The fae could hide what they were. Could look just like anyone else. But the hunger that shone in his eyes when he looked at her was as immortal as she was and a lot older.
Her wolf didn't like him, and Anna narrowed her eyes at him and let him hear her growl. He should know that she was not prey.
He laughed again and slapped one thigh with a hand covered in a worn fingerless glove. "If'n I forgot meself so bad as to take a bite"-he snapped his teeth together and in the darkness under the bridge she saw the spark when they struck-"she'd chew me up and feed me to them great octopuses that live 'round here, she would." The thought seemed to amuse him. "Though a good meaty bit of wolf-flesh might be worth it."
"Troll," said Charles.
He had been having so much fun with Anna, he'd forgotten about the real threat. Reminded, he jerked around, crouched, and hissed.
Charles took out one of the plain gold studs he wore in his ears and tossed it at the fae, who caught it with inhu manly quick hands.
"Take your toll and go, Old One," Charles said.
"Hey, Jer," came a worried and thin voice from above them. "You don't go bothering them, or the police'll have us outta here. You know they will."
The troll in human guise held the bit of gold up to his nose and smelled. His face twitched, and his eyes swirled with an eerie blue light before they settled down and became just eyes again. "Toll," he said. "Toll."
"Jerry?"
"No troubles, Bill," he called up to his... what... friends? His roommates, his bridgemates, who were more human than he. "Jest saying good afternoon."
He looked at Charles, and for a moment an oddly noble expression crossed his face, his back straightened, shoulders thrown back. In a clear, accentless voice he said, "Word of advice for your payment. Don't trust the fae." He laughed again, devolving into the man who'd greeted them in the first place, and scrambled up the hill and under the bridge.
Charles didn't say anything, but Anna slid off her perch and followed him back to the car.
"Are trolls really as big as that statue?" she asked, belting herself in.
"I don't know," Charles answered. And smiled at the startled look she gave him. "I don't know everything. I've never seen a troll in its true form."
She started the car. "A toll is supposed to be for crossing his bridge. We didn't cross the bridge."
"But we were trespassing. It seemed appropriate."
"What about the advice he gave?"
He smiled again, his face lit with amusement. "You know what they say, 'Don't trust the fae.' "
"Okay." It was a common piece of advice. The first thing people said and the main point of most stories about them. "Especially when they tell us not to, I suppose. Where to now?"
"Back down the Troll road. See those docks down there? Dana lives on a houseboat at the foot of the troll."
***
HE'd only visited Dana at her home once before, but Charles had no trouble finding it again: it didn't exactly blend in.
There were four docks; three of them had a number of boats of various kinds secured to them. The fourth had only one. A houseboat two stories tall, it looked like a miniature Victorian mansion, complete with gingerbread trim in every color of an ocean sunset: blue and orange, yellow and red.
Dana brought hiding in plain sight to a new level. None of her neighbors, except the fae themselves, knew what she was. She was powerful enough that she had been allowed to choose to expose herself or not-and she'd chosen to continue hiding.
Charles was powerful, too. But he had no choice.
"This is it?" Anna asked, "It looks exactly like something a fairy should live in."
"Wait until you see the inside," he told her.
For nearly two centuries he had been trekking along happily... or at least contentedly, down a straight path. His life had always been about serving his Alpha, who was both his father and the Marrok, in whatever capacity he was needed.
When his father had told him what he intended, had told him he needed wolves to give a public face to the werewolf, wolves Bran could trust not to screw up in public, Charles had agreed to be one of them. Not that it would have mattered if he'd refused; in the end a wolf obeyed his Alpha or he killed him. And Charles knew with an absolute certainty that left him content that he would never be able to take on his father.
But that had been before Anna. Now his life was about her, about keeping her safe. As much as he agreed with his father about what the proper course of action to follow was, he and Brother Wolf were both concerned that keeping her safe and presenting himself to the public as a werewolf were not compatible.
This week, he couldn't let so much as a breath out that might express his true feelings on this. It was necessary for the wolves to come out. He knew that.