I stood atop the Jeep’s hood and
slowly swept the vast network of ravines with
binoculars. The Jeep itself sat on the edge of a
shallow gap, just beyond the spot where Cerberus
almost took a bite out of our backseat. Raphael,
still gloriously naked, sat in the passenger seat
and plucked random Hades-related trivia from the
book.
“A fun guy, this Hades. Apparently he
bridenapped his wife.”
“Things were much simpler in ancient
Greece if you were a god. I’m sure he got himself a
harem of mistresses, too.” The wind swirled with
Raphael’s scents: the light musk of his sweat, the
delicious redolence of his skin . . . I was having
trouble concentrating.
“No,” Raphael said, flipping a page.
“Actually, Hades didn’t screw around. His wife was
the daughter of Demeter, goddess of youth,
fertility, and harvest. After Hades stole
Persephone, Demeter refused to let the plants grow,
starving everyone, and they had to reach a
compromise: Persephone spends half of the year with
him and half with her mother. The guy only had her
for six months out of the year, and he still
remained faithful. That must be some sweet sex right
there.”
I took the binoculars down so I could
roll my eyes. “Do you ever think of anything but
sex?”
“Yes, I do. Sometimes I think of
waking up next to you. Or making you laugh.”
I was beginning to regret this.
“Of course, I do occasionally get
hungry . . .” he added. “And cold.”
A white speck caught my eye. I
adjusted the binoculars. A house. A two-story
colonial, seemingly intact, sitting in the bottom of
a ravine. I could only see the roof and a small
slice of the upper story.
Interesting.
“Kate was right: the Greeks lived in
fear of this guy. Instead of speaking his name, they
called him the Rich One, the Notorious One, the
Ruler of Many, and so on. Despite his sour
disposition, he was considered to be a just god. The
one sure way to piss Hades off was to steal one of
the shades—souls—from his realm or to somehow avoid
death. This dude Sisyphus apparently finagled a way
out of death a couple of times, and Hades had it and
made him drag an enormous boulder up a mountain.
Every time Sisyphus almost gets to the top, the
boulder rolls down and he has to do it all over.
Thus the term ‘Si syphean task.’ Huh. I never knew
that’s where it came from.”
He showed me a page. On it a man and
a woman sat side by side on simple thrones. To one
side of the pair stood Cerberus. To the other an
angel with black wings and a flaming sword.
“Who is that?”
“Thanatos. Angel of death.”
“Didn’t know the Greeks had angels.”
I turned back to watching the house. And just in
time, too. Cerberus trotted out of the ravine to the
left of the house. I could barely see his back. He
passed by the building and began to circle it.
“I see a house,” I said.
Raphael landed next to me with
inhuman agility. I passed the binoculars to him and
he straightened, almost a foot taller than me.
Standing next to him was a trial: his scents sang
through me, the warmth of his body seeped through my
clothes, and his skin practically glowed. Everything
about him said “mate” to me. It wasn’t rational. It
was the animal me, and I had to be better than that.
“I’ll be damned,” he said softly.
“Here is Fido. Going round and round. I wonder
what’s in that house?”
“I wonder why he doesn’t just go in
and get whatever it is.”
“I think we should find out. Andrea?”
“Yes?” I wished he would stop saying
my name.
“Why are your eyes closed?”
Because you’re
standing next to me. “It helps me think.”
I felt the heat wash over me and knew
he had leaned to me. His voice was a soft masculine
rasp, entirely too intimate. “I thought you were
trying not to think.”
I opened my eyes and found the deep
smoldering blue of his irises right next to me. I
lifted my index finger and pushed his chest. He slid
on the Jeep’s hood, distorted by the charged-water
engine underneath, and had to jump off, landing with
the grace of a gymnast on the ground.
“Personal space,” I told him. “I
protect mine.”
He simply smiled.
“How do we get to the house with the
dog making shark circles around it?” I asked.
“Fido doesn’t see that well,” Raphael
said. “It took him a while to find the crevice where
I was hiding before, and he had to sniff me out. We
fool his nose by masking our scent, we can probably
get close enough.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“The old-fashioned way.”
I sighed. “Which would be?”
Raphael shook his head. “You really
don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.”
He trotted off to the side and dived
into a ravine. I waited for a couple of minutes, and
he emerged, carrying two dark objects, and tossed
one of them to me. Reflexively I caught it even as
the reek lashed my nostrils. A dead, half-decomposed
cat.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Some people roll in it.” He grabbed
the dog carcass and ripped it in a half. Maggots
spilled. He shook them out. “I prefer to tear them
and tie pieces on myself. But if you would prefer to
rub it all over your skin, you can do that, too.”
All my fantasies of touching him
evaporated into thin air with a small pop.
“Hunting one-oh-one,” he said.
“Didn’t your pack ever do the hunts in Texas?”
“No. I wasn’t in that kind of pack.”
And I had fought my way out of shapeshifter society
before it was too late.
My face must’ve showed my memories,
because he paused. “That bad?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Raphael reached to the backseat and
pulled a roll of cord we kept there. He uncoiled a
foot-long piece and tore the tough hemp rope like it
was a hair. “You don’t have to do it,” he said. “I
keep forgetting you’re not—”
Not what? Not normal? Not like him?
“—properly trained. I’ll be back
shortly.”
He wasn’t better than me. Whatever he
could handle, I could deal with as well.
I picked up the roll of twine. If I
had been straight bouda, like my mother, I would’ve
enjoyed all of the enhancements Lyc-V brought, but
even though I wasn’t as strong as a regular
shapeshifter, I could handle the damn rope. I tore a
piece, sighed, and pulled the cat apart.
“It’s a good thing I’m part hyena,” I
murmured, moving along the bottom of the ravine.
Bits of the cat corpse dangled from me,
strategically positioned on my limbs and suspended
from a cord off my neck. To a human nose, all
decomposition odors were similar, but in reality
each corpse gave off its own specific scent just as
it did in life. And this particular carcass reeked
of something nauseatingly sour. “If I were a cat,
I’d probably die of the stink and the sheer
indignity.”
“You know who can’t handle it?”
Raphael scrambled up the slope like a gecko.
“Doolittle.”
“The Pack’s doctor?” Even carrying my
Weatherby, I made it out of the ravine faster than
he did. What I couldn’t match in strength, I made up
in agility and speed.
“Yeah. Badgers are very clean. In the
wild, foxes sometimes steal badger burrows by
sneaking into them and crapping all over the place.
The badger is so prissy, he’d rather dig a new
burrow than clean his old one up. Doolittle will do
open-heart surgery if he has to, but hand him a
chunk of a putrid cadaver and he’ll run for the
hills.”
An echo of a growl washed over us. He
clamped his mouth shut. We’d reached the dog’s
hearing range.
A few minutes later we went aground
on the edge. Several ravines converged here, forming
a gap almost wide enough to enclose a football
field. The house sat in the center of the gap. Two
stories high, with a row of white columns supporting
a triangular roof, it looked at us with twin rows of
windows blocked by dark shutters. Its black front
door stood closed and so did the doors of the cellar
on the left side. A ten-foot-tall fence topped with
coils of barbed wire guarded the house.
As we watched, Cerberus trotted out
of the ravine. He whined softly, spit dripping in
burning clumps of foam from between his fangs, and
inched toward the fence. The left head stretched on
his shaggy neck and sniffed at the mesh. A blue
spark jumped from the metal to his nose. Cerberus
yelped, clawed the ground in frustration, and
trotted off.
Electrified fencing. Peculiar. No
wires stretched to the house, so the power must have
come from inside. I strained and heard the faint hum
of a generator.
The doors to the cellar rose slowly.
Something squirmed beneath them, something pale. The
right half of the cellar door fell open and a
creature leapt into the open. Its gaunt, vaguely
humanoid body had lost every iota of its hair and
fat long ego. Thick, bloodless skin sheathed the dry
cords of its muscles, every rib distinct beneath its
leathery hide. Its stomach was hard and ridged. Huge
yellow claws tipped the fingers of its hands and its
long toes.
A vampire. And where there was a
vampire, there had to be a navigator. I raised the
binoculars to my eyes.
The vampire’s face was horrible, a
death mask sculpted with human features devoid of
emotion, intellect, and self-awareness. The creature
paused, perched on the edge of the cellar entrance.
It unhinged its maw, displaying twin sickles of
yellow fangs, leapt straight up, and clutched on to
the wall of the house like a fly. The vamp scuttled
up the wall, ran along the dark roof to the white
stub of the chimney, and hopped in like some
nightmarish Santa.
We could possibly deal with the
electric fence. But a vampire would prove
problematic. We had no way of knowing how many of
them were in that house. Two would present a
challenge. Three would be suicide. Especially if
magic hit.
“Andrea?” Raphael’s voice was a soft
cloud of warmth in my ear.
I glanced at him.
What?
“Did you like the thing I left for
you?”
The thing? Oh. The
thing. Shapeshifters had
an odd way of courtship. Mostly it involved proving
to your prospective mate what a stealthy and sleek
operator you were by prancing in and out of her
territory. Because all of the land belonged to the
Pack overall, “territory” came to be defined as the
potential mate’s house. Most shapeshifters broke in
and left presents, but boudas had an odd sense of
humor. They broke into the houses of their intended
and played practical jokes.
Raphael’s father glued Aunt B’s
furniture to the ceiling. Raphael’s uncle lock
picked his way into Raphael’s aunt’s house, flipped
all the doors around, and hung them back on their
hinges so the handles were inside. In fine bouda
tradition, Raphael somehow snuck away during the
Midnight Games, broke into my apartment, and left me
the thing.
“You want to know that now?” I hissed
in a fierce whisper.
“Just tell me yes or no?”
“Do you really think this is the best
time?”
His eyes flashed with red. “There
might not be any other time left.”
I turned and saw Cerberus crouching
in the ravine behind us. He stood there absolutely
still, the three pairs of his eyes fixed on us with
baleful fury.
I turned very slowly to Raphael.
“Did you like the thing?” he asked
with quiet desperation.
“Yes. It was funny.”
He grinned, his face made unbearably
handsome by the flash of his smile.
With a deafening growl, Cerberus
charged us. Fur sheathed the monstrous bloom of
Raphael’s jaws. I flipped on my back.
Cerberus’s center head dove at me,
his black maw gaping, ready to swallow me whole.
I fired.
The first shot punched the back of
the dog’s mouth. It yelped and I sank two more in
the same spot. Flesh exploded and I saw sky through
the hole where the back of the beast’s throat used
to be. The head drooped down. I rolled clear just as
an enormous paw clawed the spot where I had dropped.
The smallest claw grazed my side and leg, ripping
the clothes in a hot flash of pain.
I leapt to my feet. The left head
dove for me and missed as Raphael launched himself
into the air, slicing Cerberus’s nose with his
claws. Cerberus jerked back and Raphael clutched on
to his muzzle. The dog shook, but Raphael clung to
it, flinging bloody chunks of dog flesh to the
ground.
I backed up, reloading. Raphael
carved huge clumps out of Cerberus’s muzzle in a
frenzied whirl of fur and claws. Blood spurted in
dark streams.
The right head snapped at him, great
fangs clamping together like a bear trap. Raphael
hooked his claws into the dog’s nose, dropped out of
the way, swung his legs like a gymnast on a pommel
horse, and smashed his clawed feet into Cerberus’s
right head.
I snapped the Weatherby up,
anticipating Cerberus’s recoil.
The huge head swung back, as if in
slow motion, the ruby eye clear and bright.
Steady. Aim.
An ancient tie stretched between
Cerberus and me, vibrating like a live wire. The
bond between the hunter and her prey.
The head reared higher and higher.
I have time.
I fired.
Blood burst from the back of
Cerberus’s head. The head jerked straight up, its
nose pointing to the sky. Fire leaked from its
ruined orbit. The flames surged, engulfing the head.
As it crashed down, bouncing once on the hard dirt,
Raphael leapt to the ground. Behind him the last
head shuddered and fell, catching the flames.
Raphael straightened, a dark demonic figure
silhouetted against the orange fire, his eyes two
points of red light.
If I weren’t a trained professional,
I’d have fainted from the sheer overload of his
badassness.
I pointed my rifle straight up,
resting the butt against my hip, and put on my Order
face. Move along, nothing to
see here, I do this every day. I thought of
blowing imaginary smoke from the rifle barrel, but
the Weatherby was long and I’m barely five feet
four, so I’d look pretty stupid.
Raphael strode to me. His voice was a
ragged growl torn to tatters by his fangs. “Are you
alright?”
I nodded. “A bit scratched up.
Nothing major.”
We walked away, slowly, trying to
maintain our coolness. A greasy stench of charred
flesh tainted the air currents.
“That was a hell of a shot,” Raphael
said.
“Thank you. That was a stunning
display of hand-to-hand.”
We killed a damn Cerberus. Kate would
turn green with envy.
Then the magic wave drowned us, and
we paused in unison as it penetrated our bodies,
awakening the inner beasts.
A bright blue glow surged from the
ground. It flashed and vanished—the ward, a strong
magic barrier, going active. Approaching the house
during magic would be problematic. We’d have to
somehow break through the ward.
A ghostly white light ignited in the
wall right in front of us. It struggled free of the
house and approached us, moving in sharp jerks. Its
fuzzy radiance halted just before reaching the
boundary of the ward and solidified into a
translucent older man with kind eyes and pale hair.
I jumped back and snapped my gun up
on reflex. Not that it would do anything with magic
up.
A grimace strained the ghost’s face,
as if he were pulling a great weight. “Raphael,” he
gasped. “Not safe . . .”
A spark of magic snapped from the
house. It clutched the ghost and jerked him back
into the wall. Raphael lunged at the ward. The
defensive spell flashed with blue, twisting a snarl
of pain from his lips. I grabbed him and pulled him
back.
“Is that Doulos? Your mother’s mate?”
He nodded, fury boiling in his eyes.
“We must get him out!”
An odd sucking sound rolled behind
us. I looked over my shoulder. Inside the ball of
flames, Cerberus’s skeleton rose upright. The fire
flared once more and vanished, snuffed out like a
candle. Flesh spiraled up the colossal bones.
Oh shit.
“Run!” Raphael snarled. We dashed
down the ravine.
We were halfway to the wall when the
first growl announced the hellhound giving chase.
“And you’re sure Doulos was dead?” I
drove like a maniac through Atlanta’s troubled
streets. Next to me Raphael licked a burn on his
arm.
“He was embalmed. Yeah, pretty sure.”
“Then what was
that?”
“I don’t know. A shade? A soul on its
way to Hades?”
“Is that even possible?”
“We’ve been almost eaten by a giant
three-headed dog. There is not a hell of a lot that
I consider not possible at this point. Watch out for
that cart!”
I threw the wheel to the right and
barely avoided a collision with a teamster, who
flipped me off. “We need a bigger gun.”
“We need a shower,” Raphael said.
“Gun first. Shower later.”
Ten minutes later I walked into the
Order’s office. A group of knights standing in the
hallway turned at my approach: Mauro, the huge
Samoan knight; Tobias, as usual dapper; and Gene,
the seasoned former Georgia Bureau of Investigations
detective. They looked at me. The conversation died.
My clothes were torn and bloody. Soot
stained my skin. My hair stuck out in clumps caked
with dirt and blood. The reek of a dead cat emanated
from me in a foul cloud.
I walked past them into the armory,
opened the glass case, took Boom Baby out, grabbed a
box of Silver Hawk cartridges, and walked out.
Nobody said a thing.
Raphael waited for me in the Jeep, a
spotted monster smeared with blood and dirt. A fly
apparently had fallen in love with a spot on his
round ear, and he kept twitching it. I put Boom Baby
in the backseat and hopped into the driver’s seat.
Raphael yawned, displaying a pink mouth bordered
with thick conical fangs. “Big gun.”
“Where do you want me to drop you
off?”
The hyena man licked his lips. “Your
apartment.”
“Ha. Ha. Seriously, where?”
“Your face was exposed when we fought
the dog and later when we spoke to Alex’s shade. The
bloodsucker saw you, which means the navigator
would’ve seen you through its eyes. It’s likely the
navigator knows who you are. It’s equally likely
he’s doing something he isn’t supposed to in that
ravine. Last I checked, stealing corpses was
illegal.”
Stealing corpses was very much
illegal. With magic making new and interesting
things possible, the lawmakers took theft of
cadavers extremely seriously. In Texas, you got more
time in a forced-labor camp for stealing a corpse
than you got for armed robbery.
Considering the remote location and
the electric fence, it was highly likely someone was
up to no good. If it had been a legitimate operation
of the People, we would’ve been approached by a
human or vampiric sentry. Because of our law
enforcement status, all navigators knew the knights
of the Order by sight and recognized that we were an
annoyingly persistent lot. The People would’ve made
contact to convince me they weren’t involved in
anything illegal and get me to go away.
Since they didn’t, either whatever
was taking place in that house was too dirty for the
People to admit their ownership of it, or it didn’t
involve the People at all. The second possibility
meant greater danger. For all of their nauseating
qualities, the People were tightly regulated and
mostly law-abiding. For now, anyway. They wouldn’t
dare to attack a knight of the Order, knowing that
the consequences would be public and painful. But a
rogue navigator armed with a vampire had no such
compunction.
Raphael’s thoughts ran along the same
lines. “The navigator will want to silence you
before you create a paper trail he can’t destroy.
You might end up hosting a bloodsucking party
tonight. So we go to your apartment, take what you
need, and then go to my place. He didn’t see me
except in bouda form.”
“Absolutely not.”
Raphael twitched his nose. “Are you
so scared to stay with me that you’d actually prefer
to be ripped apart by a couple of vampires?”
“I’m not scared of you.”
His lips stretched back in a
nightmarish smile, exhibiting a wall of teeth
capable of snapping a cow’s femur in half like a
toothpick. “I promise to keep my hands, tongue, and
other body parts to myself. You risk your life by
staying home. It’s late and we’re both too wiped out
to go climbing into the People’s lair tonight. What
do you risk by coming with me?”
“A huge migraine from being in your
company.” Try as I might, I couldn’t find any fault
with his reasoning. It was logically sound. And I
wanted to see his place. I practically itched with
curiosity.
“I’ll share my aspirin,” he promised.
“And that’s all you will share. I
mean it, Raphael. Touch any part of me with any part
of you without permission and I’ll put bullets into
you.”
“I understand.”
It took me almost ten minutes of
chanting to start the Jeep. Equipped with an
enchanted water engine in addition to its gasoline
one, the Jeep managed to attain the speed of nearly
forty miles per hour during the magic wave, which in
itself was an enormous achievement of magic
manipulation. Unfortunately, it suffered from the
illness affecting every magic-capable vehicle: it
made noise. Not the typical mechanical noise of an
engine either. No, it snarled, coughed, roared, and
belched thunder in its effort to attain sonic
supremacy, so all conversation had to be carried out
at a screaming level. I kept quiet and Raphael
napped. When a tired shapeshifter wants his rest,
you could fire cannons next to him. He won’t care.
A few minutes later we pulled up
before my apartment. Raphael followed me up the
stairs, dimly lit by the pale blue glow of
feylanterns, and sauntered into my living room. I
opened the side door leading to one of the two
bedrooms, which I used for storage, and heard
Raphael suck in the air through his nostrils.
I glanced up and saw the
thing. He had left it in
the living room, but I kept bumping into it and
eventually moved it here, to a corner by the barred
window. A six-foot-tall metal chandelier-like
contraption made of thin brass wire, the
thing stretched from the
ceiling to the floor, rotating slowly. Branches of
wire stuck out from it and on the branches little
glass ornaments shimmered, suspended on golden
chains. The ornaments contained thongs.
“You kept it,” he said softly.
I shrugged. I actually hadn’t taken
into account the effect it might have on him. A
miscalculation on my part. “It beats digging for my
underwear in the drawer.”
His eyes widened. “Are you wearing
one now?”
“Mind out of my pants!” I ordered.
“One more infraction, and I’m staying home.”
He said nothing. I grabbed a blue
duffel bag and went about the bedroom collecting
equipment. My travel kit: spare toothbrush,
toothpaste, hairbrush, deodorant. Crossbow bolts in
neat bundles, their broadheads safely wrapped in
soft wool in a box. Sharpshooter IV, a nice light
crossbow. I pulled open the dresser and plucked a
few boxes of ammo from it. Silver point.
“You’re the only woman I know who
keeps bullets in her dresser,” he said.
“I use this room for storage.”
“There are bullets in the other
dresser, too,” he said.
I suppose it was inevitable. He was a
man, a bouda, and he had access to my apartment. It
would be impossible for him not to have examined the
contents of my dresser. At least he didn’t write on
it in a big red marker, RAPHAEL WAS HERE.
“I like to be prepared. I don’t want
to wake up in the middle of the night, empty my clip
into some crazed shapeshifter sneaking about my
apartment, and then have to run around looking for
more ammo when he doesn’t stay down.”
Raphael winced.
If he knew I had lied about the
thing, he wouldn’t be wincing. He’d be grinning ear
to ear. I wasn’t sure myself why I had kept it,
except that it must’ve taken him hours to assemble
it all, and it would’ve required nearly godlike
ninja skills to slip away from the strict security
of the Midnight Games to set it up. He went through
all that trouble for me. I couldn’t throw it away.
Having filled my duffel with weapons
of destruction, I headed to my bedroom and shut the
door in his face when he tried to follow. He didn’t
need to see me pack my spare underwear.
I packed a change of clothes and
paused. I was incredibly filthy. Incredibly
disgustingly filthy. I had to take a shower either
here, where I had my shampoo and my soap, or in
Raphael’s apartment. I grabbed a change of clothes
and a firearm and stepped out of the room. “I’m
going to shower. Stay out of my bathroom.”
“Okay.”
I got into the bathroom, slid the
tiny deadbolt closed, and heard him lean on the wall
next to it. “I’ve seen you naked, you know,” he
said. “Twice.”
“Near-death experiences don’t count,”
I said, stripping off my clothes and trying not to
think of Raphael holding me firmly and whispering
soft encouragements in my ear, while Doolittle had
cut silver out of my body. Some memories were too
dangerous to carry around.
When I emerged, clean, dressed, and
smelling mostly of coconut with only mere traces of
dead cat, I found Raphael examining the photographs
on my shelf. Short little me and my mother, a petite
blonde, standing side by side.
“You’re about eight?” he guessed.
“Eleven. I was always small for my
age. Weaker than everyone else.” I touched the
photograph gently. “In the wild, hyena cubs are born
with functioning eyes and teeth. They start fighting
the moment they’re born, and the stronger female
tries to kill her sisters. Sometimes the weaker
girls get too scared to nurse and die of starvation.
The adults try to stop it, but hyena cubs will dig
tunnels, too small for adults to enter, so they’ll
fight to death there.”
“Boudas don’t dig tunnels,” Raphael
said softly.
“You’re right. They don’t have to
hide their violence from adults either.”
They just try to beat you to
death in the open. They do it right in front of your
mother because they know she can’t protect you.
I reached into the frame and pulled
out a small photograph resting behind it. The man on
it hunched over oddly, nude, yet still dappled with
faint outlines of hyena spots. His arms were too
thickly muscled, his face too heavy on the jaws, its
skin darkening at the nose. His round eyes were
solid black.
Lyc-V, the virus that created
shapeshifters, infected humans and animals alike.
Very rarely it produced an animal-were, a creature
who started his life as an animal and gained the
ability to turn human. Most didn’t survive the
transformation. Of the rare few who did, the
majority suffered from severe retardation. Mute and
stupid, they were universally reviled. The human
shapeshifters killed them on sight. But once in a
while, an animal-were turned out to be intelligent,
learned to speak, and could express his thoughts.
And even more rarely, he could breed.
I was the product of a mating between
a female bouda and a hyenawere. My father was an
animal. The shapeshifters called people like me
“beastkin.” And they killed us. No trial, no
questions, nothing but immediate death. That’s why I
hid my secret self deep inside and never let her
out.
Raphael’s clawed, furry hand rested
on my shoulder gently.
I wanted him to hold me. It was a
completely ridiculous feeling. I was an adult, more
capable than most of protecting myself, yet as he
stood there next to me, I had the heartbreaking
longing to be held almost like a child, to draw
strength from him. Instead I shrugged off his hand,
slid the photograph back into the frame, and headed
for the door.
“Home, sweet home,” Raphael growled,
pointing to a beautiful two-story brick townhome.
“Yours?”
He nodded. It was a lot of house and
it looked quite dignified from the outside.
Considering his Casanova tendencies, the inside was
likely to feature heart-shaped vibrating beds and
disco balls.
“What is it you do, Raphael?”
“This and that,” he murmured.
I had run a background scan on him
when he first came on to me, but aside from his
first name and his status as the only child of Aunt
B, the alpha of Clan Hyena, nothing came up. He
belonged to the upper level of the Pack’s command
and his records were sealed. To dig deeper, I needed
a warrant.
However, I had also made some
inquiries with a couple of female boudas. His name
was Raphael Medrano. The Pack owned a number of
businesses, and Raphael ran one of them: Medrano
Extractors. When magic brought down a structure, it
ground concrete to useless powder, but it left the
metal behind. The extractors went in and salvaged
what could be saved and then sold it to the highest
bidder or bought it themselves. The job carried a
high level of danger, but with half of the world in
ruins, Raphael wouldn’t be out of a job anytime
soon.
He took my duffel, unlocked the door,
and held it open for me while I carried Boom Baby
inside. The door opened into a spacious living room
with a vaulted ceiling. The floor was wood, the rug
plain and beige, matching an oversized soft sofa
diligently guarded by a blocky dark wood coffee
table. A flat screen hung on the wall, angled toward
the couch. Massive cubes of wooden shelves lined the
opposite wall, housing books and DVDs.
The walls were custom painted in a
light-brown-and-gray pattern resembling stone. No
pictures decorated them; instead, Raphael displayed
weapons: swords and knives in every shape and size
imaginable. The place was clean, neat, and
uncluttered, free of knickknacks and throw pillows.
A very masculine house. Like stepping into the lair
of some medieval lord with a penchant for frequent
dusting.
Raphael locked the door. “Make
yourself comfortable. My fridge is your fridge. I’m
off to shower.”
I placed Boom Baby under the window
for easy access in case of emergency and sat on the
couch. Above me the soothing noise of the shower
announced Raphael scrubbing himself clean. He’d
napped on the way to the Order, so he would likely
manage the transformation without passing out. The
thought of naked human Raphael in the shower was
terribly distracting.
Suddenly I was so tired.
I crawled off the couch and forced
myself into the kitchen. Eating Raphael’s food was
out of the question. Shapeshifters attached a
special significance to food. A shapeshifter
approaching his or her mate would try to feed them.
That’s how Kate got burned once: the Beast Lord of
Atlanta, the Pack’s head alpha and the final
authority, fed her some chicken soup. She ate it,
having no clue what it meant, which, according to
her, the Beast Lord found incredibly amusing. Curran
had a peculiar sense of humor. Cats. Weird
creatures.
I tried the phone. No dial tone. The
magic was still up.
I went back to the sofa and closed my
eyes just for a moment.
The enticing aroma of meat tickled my
nostrils. My eyes snapped open. Raphael, clean and
mind-numbingly gorgeous, stood in the kitchen,
trimming a piece of steak.
My mouth watered, and I wasn’t sure
if it was the man or the steak that caused the
reaction. Probably both. I was so hungry. And I so
deeply wanted Raphael. I should’ve never come here.
Raphael glanced at me, his eyes like
blue fire. My heart actually skipped a beat. “I’m
cooking you dinner,” he said. “Shocking.”
“You know I can’t take that from
you,” I said.
“Why not?”
I shook my head.
He casually flipped the knife in his
fingers. His knife skills were uncanny. A flash of
irritation flared in his eyes. He hesitated. “Look,
I know you’re starving. If you won’t let me cook for
you, will you at least cook for yourself?”
That was the first time I had ever
seen him irritated. I pushed off the couch. “Sure.”
He opened the fridge. A complicated
web glistened in the back of it, gathering into a
knot in the corner. An ice spider. It cost an arm
and a leg. I, like most other normal people, had to
buy friz-ice from the Water and Sewer Department to
keep my fridge from getting warm when the tech
failed and magic robbed it of electricity.
Raphael pulled another steak and
slapped it on the cutting board next to his. “Here.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
We stared at each other for a second,
and then I took the saltshaker and began to season
my steak.
We glided in the small space of the
kitchen, boxed in by the island and counters like
two dancers, never touching each other, until we
ended up next to each other searing our steaks on
twin burners.
“I would just like to know if I have
a chance,” Raphael ground out. “I’ve been patient.”
“And I owe you something because of
that?”
He glared at me. “I just want an
answer. Look, it’s been half a year now. I call you
every day—you don’t take my calls. I try to meet you
and you blow me off. But you look at me like you
want me. Just tell me yes or no.”
“No.”
“Is that your answer or are you
refusing to tell me?”
“My answer is no. I won’t sleep with
you. I’ve never led you on, Raphael. I told you from
the beginning this wasn’t going to happen.”
Raphael’s eyes went dark. “Fair
enough. Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why? I know you want me. I see
it in your face, I smell it in your body, I hear it
in your voice. That’s why I kept coming back after
you like a fucking idiot. At least you can tell me
why.”
I unclenched my teeth. This talk was
almost six months in coming. “Your mother is a good
person, Raphael. Her clan is a good clan. But it’s
not like that everywhere. My mother was the weakest
of six females in a small bouda clan. The others
beat her every day. There were only two males and my
mother didn’t get to mate. Hell, if one of them
looked at her, the others attacked her. In other
places boudas don’t stick that strictly to the Code.
There’s no Beast Lord to hold them to it and no
punishment. They get to govern themselves, and the
pack’s only as good as the alpha. You know what my
first memory is? I’m sitting in the dirt and our
fucking alpha, Clarissa, is beating my mother in the
face with a brick!”
He recoiled.
“My mother didn’t want to mate with
my father. They forced her to do it, because they
got off on the perversity of it. He didn’t know any
better. He didn’t understand the concept of rape.
All he knew was that there was a female and she was
made available to him. For three years my mother was
raped by a man who had started his life as a hyena.
He had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. And
when I was born, they started beating me as soon as
I could walk. I was beastkin. No rules applied to
me. Under your precious Code, I was an abomination.
Every bone in my body was broken before I turned
ten. As soon as I healed, they started on me again.
And my mother couldn’t stop it. She could do
nothing. They would’ve killed me, Raphael. I was
weaker and smaller than them and they would’ve kept
beating me and beating me until there was nothing
left, if my mother hadn’t gotten together what
little shreds of courage she had left. I live now
because she grabbed me and ran across the country.”
His face turned bloodless, but now it
was too late to stop.
“When Kate drove me to the flare to
your mother, I kept trying to get out of the cart,
because I was sure Aunt B would kill me. That’s what
‘bouda’ means to me, Raphael. It means hate and
cruelty and disgust.”
I shoved my pan off the fire to save
the half-burned steak.
“So you refuse to be with me because
of what I am,” he said. “You can’t be that
shortsighted. What happened to you was awful. But
I’m not them. I would never hurt you. My family, my
clan, we would never hurt you. We protect our own.”
“What you are is only a part of it.
If you were a different man, maybe I could get over
it. But you’re a typical bouda male. I want love,
Raphael. I might not deserve it, after some of the
stuff I’ve done, but I want it. I want security and
kindness and a home. I want monogamy and
consideration for my feelings. What do you have to
offer me? You’ve slept with every bouda woman who
isn’t related to you. Everybody had you, Raphael.
They offered to give me pointers on what you like in
bed. Hell, you didn’t stop with boudas. You played
with wolves, and with rats, with jackals . . . To
you, I’m just another weird thing to hump. For God’s
sake, you got stuck inside a jackal girl while you
were both in beast form and they had to call
Doolittle out to separate you two. What were you
thinking? You outweighed her by a hundred and fifty
pounds and you aren’t even of the same species!”
“I was fourteen,” he snarled. “I
didn’t know any better. She wiggled her ass in front
of me . . .”
“You’re like a greedy kid in an ice
cream store. You want everything and so you make
this giant rainbow mess of a cone and gorge yourself
on sweets until you can’t even think anymore. You
have no restraint and no discipline. Why would I
want to get involved with you? So the next time
someone wiggles her ass before you, you’ll take off
like a rocket? Please.”
I grabbed a fork, stuck it into my
steak, and marched out of the kitchen, carrying off
my charred piece of meat. I got outside, climbed in
my Jeep, and realized I had left my guns and my keys
inside. There was nothing left to do but chew on my
steak. I really wanted to cry.
I was so screwed up. I tried so hard
to be a human, and he unhinged me. I just fell apart
like a doll. The beatings, the humiliation, the
fear—I had left those things in the past. I had
interacted with other boudas and never once had been
bothered by them. But with him all of it came
flooding back in a choking painful wave.
Only Kate, the boudas, and the Beast
Lord knew what I was. If the Pack found out that I
was beastkin, the Beast Lord would protect me from
physical harm. Curran had considered the issue of
beastkin and come to the conclusion that he wouldn’t
tolerate genocide against us. But at least some of
the shapeshifters would still despise me. If the
Order found out what I was, they would expel me. The
Order took a dim view of monsters in their ranks
unless they were fully human.
Years of hiding, first in
adolescence, then during the gruel ing training at
the Order’s Academy, stressed to my limit, tortured
physically and mentally, hammered into shape, into a
new me, then service in the name of the Order. I had
rigidly maintained my humanity and composure through
it all, and what undid me? Raphael, with his blue
eyes and warm hands and voice that made me want to
press against him and purr . . .
How could I have fallen for a damn
bouda?
I slumped forward and rested my head
on the steering wheel. Why did I tell him all that?
What possessed me? I should’ve just laughed off his
dinner invitation. But it had been eating at me for
months now and I just couldn’t help myself. There
was this bitter emptiness inside me and it made me
want to scream, It’s not fair!
and I didn’t even know why.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that I
wanted to wake up next to Raphael. It wasn’t fair
that he was a bouda. It wasn’t fair that for eleven
years boudas tortured me and my mother.
Half an hour later Raphael emerged
onto the porch and held open the door. Remaining in
the Jeep was childish. Even storming out in the
first place was childish. I took my fork, hopped out
of the Jeep, and went inside with as much dignity as
I could muster.
Raphael closed the door behind me. An
odd light played in his eyes. He grabbed me by my
shoulders and pulled me to him.
The breath jumped out of my lungs.
His stare was hard. “You will give us
a chance.”
“What?”
“Things happened before I met you and
before you met me. Those things don’t matter. You
had no control over your past, but here, right now,
you control the situation and you’re voluntarily
giving it up. You’re punishing both of us because of
something that happened half a lifetime ago. It
makes no sense.”
I tried to pull away, but he held me.
“There hasn’t been anyone since I met
you. I’ve been good, and don’t think for a moment it
was because of the lack of wiggling asses. Have you
ever seen me with another woman since we met? Have
you heard of me being with another woman? The same
women who wanted to give you pointers will tell you
that I haven’t touched anyone since I saw you. Are
you jealous of them? Is that it?”
My face went hot and I knew I had
flushed. I was jealous of them. Of all of them.
“Andrea, you can’t be jealous of
someone I met before I knew you. I didn’t know you
existed back then. I don’t want anyone else now. Has
there been anybody for you?”
I shook my head.
“I think of you a lot. Do you think
of me, Andrea? Don’t lie to me.”
“Yes!” I snarled, my face burning.
“Yes, I do! All the time. I can’t get you out of my
head. I wish I could!”
He hugged me so hard, my bones nearly
crunched. “You’ve made yourself into a new person
and so have I. We deserve a fucking chance. I want
you and you want me. Why aren’t we together? I’ll
deal with your hang-ups if you’ll deal with mine,
but if you’re still too scared to even try, then
you’re not worth waiting for. I have some goddamn
pride left and I won’t wait forever.”
He let me go.
I could either take control of it now
or walk out. I clenched my teeth. This was
my decision. I owned it,
I took full responsibility for it, and no memories
would make me cower and run away from him. I was
worth it, damn it. He was worth it.
I did what I had wanted to do since I
first saw him. I dropped my fork and kissed him.
We never made it upstairs to the
bedroom.
The problem with falling asleep
wrapped in a comfy blanket on the floor between the
coffee table and the sofa is that in the morning,
when the phone rings and wakes you up, you forget
the coffee table is there. At least Raphael did.
There was a solid thud as he sat up, smashing his
head against the table, and then a string of foul
curses as he staggered into the kitchen and picked
up the phone.
“It’s for you!”
I got up, wrapped the blanket about
myself like a cape, and went to get the phone.
“Aha!” Kate’s voice said on the other
end.
“Aha what?”
Raphael must’ve recovered from his
unfortunate connection with the table, because he
set about trying to steal my blanket.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” Miss
Innocence said.
“How did you get this number anyway?”
I smacked Raphael’s hand away.
“Jim gave it to me a long time ago. I
tried your cell, the Order, and your house. This was
the next logical number. I’m a trained detective,
you know.”
“You couldn’t detect your way out of
a shoe if someone lit the way with neon signs.”
Raphael finally won the battle for
the blanket and molded his body against mine,
nipping gently at my neck. “Hold on a minute.”
I covered the phone and turned to
him. “About dealing with my hang-ups—this is one of
them. I’m on the phone. Please let me be.”
He sighed and went about the kitchen
getting eggs out.
“I’m here,” I said, pulling my
blanket back up.
“How did it go with Cerberus?”
I briefly sketched it for her. “Even
if destroyed, he continues to remanifest as soon as
the magic is up. He’s bound to that house. I’ll be
talking to the People today about the vampire. I
doubt they’ll tell me anything.”
“How important is this?”
I explained about Aunt B.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“Ghastek owes me a favor,” Kate said.
“I have it on paper, signed in the presence of
witnesses. Call him on it.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s the least I can do. Say, how
did you even get into this mess?”
“Some man called Teddy Jo called it
in.”
Kate hesitated. “Be careful with
Teddy Jo,” she said softly.
“Why?”
“I don’t have anything solid, but
there is something that bothers me about Teddy. Just
watch him carefully if he ever shows up.”
I hung up. After Nataraja, the head
of the People in Atlanta, Ghastek was the most
talented of the Masters of the Dead. And also the
most dangerous.
“Are you off the phone?” Raphael
inquired mildly.
“Yes.”
A hint of danger added edge to his
smile. “Good.”
When one says “pounce,” most people
typically think of a cat. Maybe a dog. But none of
them can manage to pounce quite as well as a horny
male werehyena.
It took us nearly forty-five minutes
to get out of the house, partly because Raphael had
jumped me and partly because I had lingered. I lay
next to him, wrapped in his arms, and tried to sort
it out, and all the while my brain feverishly pulled
apart my emotions, the secret creature inside me
purred and snuggled up to Raphael, blissful in her
simple happiness.
Raphael went all out: black jeans,
black T-shirt, black jacket, enough knives to fight
off a gaggle of ninjas. At least he didn’t wear
leather, or we would’ve caused a slew of traffic
accidents.
He had also called his mother. During
his life, Alex Doulos was a Greek pagan, and he did
worship Hades. Aunt B didn’t know the particulars.
Raphael didn’t mention that her mate’s shade was
trapped behind a ward by some sort of necromancer.
We both agreed that she could be spared that
knowledge.
“What’s bothering you?” Raphael
asked, as I slid the Jeep into traffic. The magic
had dropped again during the night. At least we
could speak without yelling over the roar of the
water engine. “Was the morning not good for you?”
He was worried. If he knew how
completely he’d blown my socks off, his head would
swell to twice its normal size. I tried my best not
to laugh. “Sex, it’s what for breakfast.”
“Seriously?”
“It was great.” The best I ever had,
but he didn’t need to know that. “Couldn’t you
tell?”
“You never know. Women are more
complicated.” He shook his head. “If not that, then
what is it? You have that pinched look on your
face.”
“Aren’t men supposed to be bad about
reading women’s faces?”
Raphael sighed. “Not when they are
reading the face of a woman they’ve obsessed over
for the last six months. Tell me.”
I didn’t say anything. He would think
less of me if I did.
“This is one of my hang-ups,” he
said. “I’ll keep asking you what’s wrong until you
tell me.”
Fair enough. “I’m a professional,” I
said. “I went through the training, got knighted,
the whole thing. I have decorations for meritorious
service. But I have to rely on Kate to get the
People to talk to me. It bothers me.”
He waited for more.
“Back in Texas, my partner and I took
out a group of loups. My partner caught Lyc-V and
went loup. I killed her. The Order tested me, but I
got the all clear.”
“How did you manage that? The virus
is in your blood.”
“I had a silver ring implanted under
my skin in my arm just below the armpit. It pinched
off my blood supply and then I shot liquid silver
into my veins. It killed the virus. I cut my wrist
to bleed out the dead virus cells, and the ring kept
Lyc-V from the rest of my body from entering my
arm.” The mere memory made me want to curl in pain.
“That was insanely dangerous. You
could’ve lost your arm.”
“I almost did. But the blood work
came back clear, and the amulet in my skull, the one
you pulled out during the flare, kept my magic from
leaking into an m-scan. I was given a clean slate,
but they still shipped me off to Atlanta. Ted
Monahan, the knight-protector, put me on the back
burner. Before coming here, I was on the way to
becoming Master-at-Arms, Firearm.”
Raphael nodded. “I take it that’s a
big deal.”
“Very. I had all of my security
briefings, passed all of the tests. All that remains
is the formal nomination from my chapter’s
knight-protector. But Ted will never do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because he senses there is something
wrong with me. He isn’t sure what, and until he
figures it out, I’m the only knight without any
active cases. I don’t even have an office.”
Raphael’s jaw took on a stubborn set.
I had seen it before a few times, and I knew what it
meant. “I know that look.”
He turned a dazzling smile at me.
“What look?”
“Promise me that you’ll cause no harm
directly or indirectly to Ted by acting on my
behalf. I’m dead serious, Raphael. Promise me.”
“What he’s doing to you—”
“Is exactly what I would do in his
place. I knew the risks when I got into the Order.
The Order has done absolutely nothing to renege on
the terms of our bargain. All the fault lies with
me. I deceived it, and if discovered, I’ll pay the
price. I accept that.”
“What is the price?”
A spike of anxiety pinched me. My
throat closed up for a moment. “They’ll throw me out
on my ass.”
“Is that all?” he asked. “Are you
sure they won’t send someone after you to make sure
you don’t join the opposite side?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Their
conditioning is very good. It would take a lot to
break my devotion to the Order even if they put me
out on the street. Promise me.”
“Fine. I promise.”
We drove in silence for a few
minutes.
Raphael’s eyes darkened. “Maybe we
should be careful with public displays of
affection.”
I gave him my thousand-yard stare.
“Oh no. I think you misunderstand the nature of our
relationship. You are mine.
If there is an attractive female in speaking range,
you will be publicly
affectionate to me. Otherwise I’ll end up
pistol-whipping them off you, and I’m pretty sure
injuring innocent civilian hussies would be
considered ‘conduct unbecoming a knight.’”
Raphael showed me the edge of his
teeth in a slight smile. “And what will Ted think of
you shacking up with a bouda?”
“Ted is welcome to show me a section
in the Order’s regulations that forbids me to do so.
My knowledge of regulations is extremely extensive.
I can quote entire passages from memory. I guarantee
that I know the rules much better than Ted.”
My brain took a second to process the
words that had just left my mouth and realized how
many things I had taken for granted. I said softly,
“At least I hope you would be publicly
affectionate.”
Raphael laughed softly, like a
bemused wolf. “You ruined a spectacular alpha
snarl.”
I had seen Raphael fight. He was
devastatingly lethal. The way he tore up Cerberus’s
head took both skill and the berserk frenzy that
made boudas feared in any fight. Physically he could
overpower me. I was barely five feet four; he was
six feet and change. He outweighed me by about
eighty pounds of hard muscle, toughened by constant
exercise. He was without a doubt the best fighter of
the bouda clan. But he was also a male, and bouda
males preferred the beta role. I had snapped into an
alpha mode without even realizing it.
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“I trust you to take the lead most of
the time,” he said. “With the understanding that
when I really insist, you will
listen.”
I exhaled. “Agreed.”
The Casino, the People’s HQ in
Atlanta, occupied the enormous lot that had once
housed the Georgia Dome. The People’s architect had
taken the Taj Mahal as a model and expanded the
blueprint to twice its original size. Pure white in
daylight, the Casino seemed to float above the
asphalt, buoyed by the glittering streams of many
fountains surrounding its walls. Its slender towers
reached to a dizzying height, flanking the ornate
central cupola. Elegant passageways united the
towers, ethereal as if woven of spider’s web or
carved from a chunk of ivory by a patient sculptor.
Its elaborate central gates always stood open, just
as the guardhouses and engines of war on its thick
walls were always manned.
I parked in a side lot and nudged
Raphael to put Kate’s book down.
A hundred yards from the gates, both
of us paused in unison. The stench of undeath spread
through the lot like a sickening miasma. No words
could adequately describe it, but once you smelled
it, you never forgot it. It was a sharp, leathery,
dry stench, unmistakably of death but not of rot,
the scent of sinew and bone wrapped in a foul, foul
magic. I nearly gagged. Raphael slowed and I
followed his example.
I’ve had the acclimatization training
to accustom me to vampiric scent and presence, but
it was one thing to watch a single vamp held tightly
in check twenty yards away and completely another to
be walking into the den of more than three hundred
of them.
We made it through the doors past
twin sentries dressed in black and armed with
wickedly curved scimitars and stepped into the sea
of slot machines. The air rang with a discordant
cacophony of bells and chimes. Lights flashed.
People screamed in manic glee, cursed, and laughed.
More than half of the slots had been reworked to be
completely independent of electricity. Even when the
magic hit, the one-armed bandits would continue to
quickly and mercilessly siphon cash out of the
public’s pockets and into the coffers of the People.
Necromantic research wasn’t cheap.
We halted before a service desk and I
told a young man in a business suit who I was,
flashed my Order ID, and explained I was here to see
Ghastek. The young man, having introduced himself as
Thomas, promptly affixed a smile on his face. “I’m
sorry, ma’am, he’s incredibly busy.”
“Tell him I’m here on behalf of Kate
Daniels.”
Thomas’s eyes went wide. He tapped
the intercom, whispered into it, and nodded at us.
“Unfortunately, he’s in the stables and can’t leave
at the moment. He’s most eager to see you, and
someone will be here to guide you to him very
shortly.”
We walked over to the waiting area by
the wall. A row of chairs waited for us, but I
didn’t feel like sitting down. I felt like someone
had painted a giant bull’s-eye on my chest and a
dozen hidden snipers were ready to take a shot.
Raphael’s lips bent in an odd little
smile. If you didn’t know him, you could mistake it
for the dreamy absentminded grin of a man quietly
enjoying his private thoughts. This little smile
meant Raphael was a single infraction away from
whipping out his knives and slicing everything
around him to pieces. He wouldn’t do anything unless
provoked, but once provoked, nobody could hold him
back. The Pack and the People represented two sides
of the same power coin: among all civilian factions
in Atlanta, they were the most powerful. They had
divided the city between them and stayed out of each
other’s territory, knowing that if open conflict
broke out between the two of them, the fight would
be long, bloody, and costly, and the victor would be
so weakened, he wouldn’t survive for long.
But as much as they avoided provoking
each other, both found it prudent to show their
opponent their teeth—and Raphael was all about
proper etiquette.
A vampire dropped into the doorway.
Female and probably black during life, now it had
gained an odd purple tint. Hairless and emaciated,
as if knitted together from twine and tough jerky,
it stared at us with hungry eyes. Its mouth unhinged
with mechanical precision, and the voice of a female
navigator issued forth. “Good morning. My name is
Jessica. Welcome to the Casino. Master Ghastek sends
his deepest apologies. He’s engaged in something he
cannot postpone, but he instructed me to take you to
him. With my sincere regrets for your inconvenience,
I must ask you to please leave your firearms at the
desk.”
They wanted my guns. “Why?”
“The inner facilities house a lot of
delicate and in some cases irreplaceable equipment.
Occasionally our guests experience a heightened
sense of anxiety and discomfort due to the presence
of vampires, particularly when they visit the
stables.”
“I wonder why,” Raphael said.
“We’ve had incidents of accidental
discharge of firearms by our guests. We don’t
request that you surrender your bladed weapons, only
your firearms. I’m afraid this rule can’t be bent.
My deepest apologies.”
“That will be fine,” I said, and
deposited my P226s on the desk. Without my weapons,
I felt naked.
“Thank you. Follow me, please.”
We followed the creature down an
opulent hallway to a stairway and then down, and
down, and down, beyond the daylight to the
artificial illumination of electric lamps. The
vampire crept lower and lower, moving on all fours,
making so little noise, it was uncanny. We wove our
way through a maze of dim tunnels, interrupted only
by the occasional bulb of electric light and dark,
foot-wide gaps in the ceiling.
“Is there going to be a minotaur in
this labyrinth?” Raphael growled.
“The maze is a security measure,
necessary for proper containment,” the navigator’s
voice answered through the vamp’s mouth. “Unguided
vampires are ruled by instinct. They don’t possess
the cognitive capacity to navigate the tunnels. In
the event of a massive breakout, the tunnels will
act as a buffer zone. The ceiling contains a number
of heavy-duty metal grilles that will drop down,
separating the vampires into easily manageable
groups and minimizing damage resulting from
bloodlust-induced infighting.”
“How often do breakouts occur?” I
asked. The stench of undeath had grown to a nearly
unbearable level.
“Never. This way, please.” The
vampire scuttled to a brightly lit doorway. “Watch
your step.”
We entered a huge chamber and
descended a dozen stairs to the floor. Harsh white
light streamed from the high ceilings, illuminating
every inch. A narrow hallway stretched to the center
of the chamber, its walls formed by prison cells.
Each six-by-six-foot cell housed a single vampire,
chained by the neck to the wall. The chains were
thicker than my thigh. The vampires’ eyes burned
with insatiable bloodlust. They didn’t vocalize,
didn’t make any noise; they just stared at us,
straining on the chains as we passed by them. Every
hair rose on the back of my neck. Deep inside, my
secret self gathered into a tight clump, watching
them back, ready to leap out at the slightest
opportunity.
The hallway terminated in a round
platform, from which more corridors radiated like
spokes from a wheel. On the platform stood Ghastek.
He was a man of average height and thin build. His
light brown hair receded from his forehead, focusing
attention on his eyes: dark and sharp enough to draw
blood. His attire was black, from tailored slacks to
the long-sleeved shirt, collar unbuttoned and
sleeves very carefully and precisely rolled up, but
where Raphael’s black was an aggressive, kick-ass
darkness, Ghastek’s black was the laid-back,
business-casual shade, an absence of color rather
than a statement of attitude.
He glanced at us, nodded briskly, and
turned his attention to three young people standing
to the side next to a console. They wore identical
black slacks, gray dress shirts, and dark violet
vests. Journeymen, the Masters of the Dead in
training. One of the three, a tall young male with
red hair, stood very rigid. His hands curled into
fists. He stared straight ahead, at the cell where a
single vampire sat at the end of its chain.
Ghastek nodded. “Are you ready,
Danton?”
“Yes, Master,” the redhead said
through clenched teeth.
“Very well. Proceed.”
The vampire jerked as if shocked with
live wire.
“Easy,” Ghastek said. “Remember: no
fear.”
Slowly the bloodsucker took two steps
back. The hunger in its ruby eyes dimmed slightly.
The chain sagged and clanged to the floor.
“Good,” Ghastek said. “Maria, you may
release the gate.”
A female journeywoman with long dark
hair tapped the console. The gate of the cell crept
up. The vampire stood still.
“Disengage the collar,” Ghastek
ordered.
The vampire snapped the collar open.
“Bring him forward.”
The vampire took a tentative step
forward. Another . . .
Its eyes flared with bloodlust like
two glowing coals. Danton screamed. The bloodsucker
charged us, eyes shining, jaws unhinging, huge claws
scratching the platform.
No gun.
I dashed forward, pulling a field
knife, but Raphael beat me to it. He swung, slashing
in a precise arc, and checked himself in midmove.
The vamp froze. It simply stopped,
petrified, one clawed foot on the ground and the
rest in the air. Raphael had stopped his knife blade
a mere half an inch from the undead throat.
“You have excellent reflexes,”
Ghastek said. “A shapeshifter?”
Raphael simply nodded.
“I sincerely apologize,” Ghastek
said. “I’m piloting him at the moment, so he won’t
cause us any further concern.”
The vampire leapt backward, landing
at Ghastek’s feet, and hugged the floor, his
forehead pressed to stone. Ghastek’s face showed no
strain. None at all.
Raphael stepped back, the knife
vanishing into the sheath at his waist.
On the platform, Danton slumped into
a heap, moaning softly, white clumps of foamy spit
sliding out of his mouth. A medical team with a
stretcher emerged from the side corridor and loaded
him up, strapping him in.
Both remaining journeymen stared at
Danton in horrified silence.
“You may go,” Ghastek said.
They fled.
“A shame, that,” Ghastek said softly.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Fear. Done correctly, the contact
with the undead mind, while repulsive to some, is
completely harmless.”
The vampire uncoiled and rose
straight up. It had been quite tall during life, but
its body had shifted to a quadruped locomotion. Yet
it stood straight as an arrow, probably in pain but
staring right into Ghastek’s eyes. The Master of the
Dead studied the twin points of furious red. “Fear
of contact, however, can bring about horrible
consequences, as you saw.”
The vampire dropped on all fours.
“Perhaps we had best continue this discussion in my
office.” Ghastek smiled drily. “Please.”
I walked next to him, Raphael on my
right, the vampire on Ghastek’s left. “Navigating a
vampire is similar to riding a large wave: you have
to stay on top of it or it will crest and pull you
under. Danton, unfortunately, permitted himself to
drown. If he’s lucky, he should be able to regain
enough cognitive ability to feed himself and tend to
his own personal hygiene. If he’s unlucky, he’ll
spend the rest of his life as a human vegetable.
Would you care for an espresso?”
The vampire sprinted ahead.
“No, thank you. Watching a man foam
at the mouth tends to short-circuit my thirst and
appetite.” What happened to Danton deeply bothered
me, but I knew the People’s contracts, and
everything that had transpired was completely within
the law. The journeymen signed their lives away when
they chose to work for the People.
“Again, my apologies. I could have
postponed the test, but Danton had avoided it twice
already after daring to brag about how well he would
do. I don’t tolerate displays of baseless
egocentricity. The test had to proceed as scheduled.
He’s a rare case. Most of our journeymen manage to
fail without quite so much melodrama.”
We climbed the stairs and headed
through the maze of the hallways until Ghastek
opened the door to one of the rooms. Spacious, it
resembled a living room rather than an office: a
semicircle of sectional sofa upholstered in a warm
red shade, a plain desk in the corner, books lining
the shelves. To the left, through the door, I saw a
small kitchenette and a vampire mixing a drink. To
the right, floor-to-ceiling windows offered a view
of the stables from above.
“Please sit down.”
I took a spot on the sofa. Raphael
sat next to me, and Ghastek opposite. The vampire
squirmed into the room and offered Ghastek an
espresso. The Master of the Dead smiled quietly at
his drink and sipped with obvious pleasure. The
bloodsucker dropped to the floor and sat at his
feet. It moved so naturally and Ghastek was so
relaxed, I found it difficult to believe that the
Master of the Dead controlled the vampire’s every
twitch.
“I believe we’ve met before,” Ghastek
said. “In Kate’s office. You pointed guns at my
vampire.”
“You questioned my reflexes,” I said.
“I was quite impressed by them.
That’s why I requested that you disarm.”
“You expected the journeyman to
fail?”
“Precisely. This particular vampire
is appraised at $34,500. It would be bad business
sense to put it into a situation where it would
endure a dozen bullets shot through its skull.”
What a cold,
cold man.
Ghastek sipped his espresso. “I
assume you’re here to call in the favor I owe to
Kate.”
“Yes.”
“How is she, by the way?”
Something in the perfectly neutral
way he asked the question set my teeth on edge.
“She’s recuperating,” Raphael said.
“And as a Friend of the Pack, she’s enjoying the
Pack’s protection.” He had been staying quiet so far
and I knew why. Anything he said would be used by
the People against the Pack. He minimized the amount
of conversation, but he made the message crystal
clear.
Ghastek chuckled. “I assure you,
she’s quite capable of protecting herself. She tends
to kick people in the face when she finds them
offensive. Is it true she broke a red sword during
the Midnight Games by impaling herself on it?”
An alarm blared in my head. “I don’t
remember it quite that way,” I lied. “As I recall, a
member of the opposing team meant to strike with the
sword. Kate interrupted his strike, and when he
tried to free the blade, he cut himself on it. The
blood from his hand shattered the sword.”
“I see.” Ghastek drank the last of
his espresso and handed the cup to the vampire. “So
what may I do for you?”
“I would like you to answer a series
of questions.” I had to phrase the questions very
carefully. “This interview is conducted in
confidence. I ask you to not discuss it with anyone
unless required to do so by law.”
“I’ll happily do so, provided your
questions are within the range defined by the
conditions in the original agreement.”
The agreement specified that he
wouldn’t do anything to directly harm himself, his
team, or the People as a group.
“Are you familiar with the area known
as Scratches, located west of Red Market?”
“Yes.”
“Is it true that the People routinely
patrol a large area of the city surrounding the
Casino?”
“Yes.”
“Do any patrol routes pass through
Scratches?”
“No.
So the vampire wasn’t the People’s
observer. “To your knowledge, are the People
currently conducting any operations in the
Scratches?”
“No.”
“Are you familiar with Greek
paganism?”
I watched him carefully, but he
showed no signs of being surprised by the question.
“I have a moderate knowledge of it, within the
limits common to most educated individuals. I’m not,
by any means, an expert.”
“Keeping in mind the previous
question, how would you define the term ‘shade’?”
“An incorporeal entity representing
the essence of a recently departed, a disembodied
‘soul,’ if you will. It’s a purely philosophical
concept.”
“If confronted with a shade, how
would you explain its existence?”
Ghastek leaned back, braiding his
long fingers. “There are no such things as ghosts.
All ‘spirits,’ ‘lost souls,’ and so forth are
superstition. To exist in our reality, one requires
a solid form. So, if confronted with a shade, I
would surmise that it’s either a hoax or a
postmortem projection. For some magically capable
individuals death comes slowly, in that even after
their bodies cease their function and become
clinically dead, their magic keeps their minds
functioning for an extended period of time. In
effect, they are mostly dead. In this state, some
persons may project an image of themselves,
especially if they are aided by the magic of a
trained necromancer or a medium.
“Folklore is full of examples of such
phenomena. For example, there’s a tale in
Arabian Nights that
features a sage whose head was struck off his body
after death and set upon a platter. It recognized
people familiar to the sage and was able to speak.
But I digress.” He invited the next question with a
nod.
“Are you aware of any necromancers
unaffiliated with the People and capable of vampiric
navigation who are currently active in the city?”
Ghastek’s face registered distaste,
as if he had smelled something unpleasant. He
plainly didn’t want to answer the question. “Yes.”
“Please identify the individuals
described.”
“Lynn Morriss.”
Oh wow. Spider Lynn was one the seven
premier Masters of the Dead in Atlanta. All of the
People’s Masters of the Dead branded their vampires.
Lynn’s brand was a small stylized spider. “When did
she leave the People?”
“She withdrew her membership three
days ago.”
According to Raphael, that was Alex
Doulos’s date of death. It could be a coincidence,
but I highly doubted it.
“She also purchased several vampires
out of her stable,” Ghastek volunteered.
“How many can she pilot at once?”
Raphael asked.
“Three,” Ghastek said. “Up to four on
a good day. Her control becomes shaky after that.”
“Why did she leave?” I asked.
“She became disillusioned. We all
seek to attain our goals. Some are willing to wait
and others, like Lynn, lose their patience.”
“How would you describe her?”
Ghastek sighed. “Precise, ruthless,
single-minded. She was neither liked nor disliked.
She did her job well and required little attention.”
“What caused her to leave the People,
in your opinion?”
“I don’t know. But it was deeply
profound. One doesn’t walk away from fifteen years
of hard work without a reason.”
I rose. “Thank you very much for your
time.”
Ghastek nodded. “Thank you. When I
made the agreement with Kate, I never imagined the
restitution would be so easy. Let me see you out.”
The vampire moved by the door. “A word of caution:
if Lynn Morriss has decided to make her new home in
the Scratches, I would advise you to stay away from
it. Lynn is a formidable opponent.”
“Do the People plan to take any
action against her?”
“No,” Ghastek said with a small
smile. “There is no need.”
* * *
Outside I hopped into our
vehicle, the taint of vampiric magic clinging to
me like greasy smoke. “I feel soiled.”
“Like walking into a room after a
day of work, falling into bed, and realizing the
sheets are covered in cold K-Y jelly,” Raphael
said.
I just stared at him.
“With a funky smell,” he added.
My Order conditioning failed me.
“Ew.”
Raphael grinned.
“I’m not even going to ask if
that’s happened to you.” I started the vehicle.
“Has that happened to you?”
“Yes.”
Ew.
“Where?”
“In the bouda house.”
Ew!
“I was really tired and you’ve
seen that place: everything smells like sex . .
.”
“I don’t want to know.” I peeled
out of the parking lot.
“So where are we going?”
“To Spider Lynn’s house. We’re
going to dig through her trash, and if that
doesn’t work, we’ll do some breaking and
entering.”
Raphael frowned. “Do you know
where she lives?”
“Yes. I memorized the addresses
of all the Masters of the Dead in the city. I
have a lot of time on my hands.”
He squinted at me, looking
remarkably like a gentleman pirate from my
favorite romance novels. “What else do you store
in your head?”
“This and that. I remember the
first thing you ever said to me. You know, when
you carried me from the cart into the tub so
your mother could fix me.”
“I imagine it was something very
romantic,” he said. “Something along the lines
of ‘I’ve got you’ or ‘I won’t let you die.’”
“I was bleeding in the bathtub,
trying to realign my bones, and my hyena glands
voided from the pain. You said, ‘Don’t worry, we
have an excellent filtration system.’”
The look on his face was
priceless.
“That can’t be the first thing.”
“It was.”
We drove in silence. “About the
K-Y,”
Raphael said.
“I don’t want to know!’
“Once I washed it out of my
hair—”
“Raphael, why are you doing
this?”
“I want to make you go ‘Ew’
again.”
“Why in the world would you want
to do that?”
“It’s an irrepressible male
impulse. It just has to be done. As I was
saying, once I washed it out—”
“Raphael!”
“No, wait, you’ll like the next
part.”
By the time we reached Spider
Lynn’s house, my endurance had been tested to
its limits.
Her place was a small ranch-style
house, set way back from the road and hidden by
a six-foot-tall wooden fence. I opened the trash
can. A cloud of rancid stink hit me. Filthy but
empty.
Raphael examined the fence, took
a running start, and sailed over it, flipping in
the air like a vault gymnast. I did it the
old-fashioned way: I ran, jumped, gripping the
edge, and pulled myself up and over. Raphael
pulled out a couple of lock picks and inserted
them into the lock. The door clicked and we
entered a dark, empty garage. I blinked a couple
of times, adjusting to the gloom, and then my
night vision kicked in. Some people’s garages
resembled a yard sale postbombing. Spider Lynn’s
was orderly and precise, a collection of tools
and cleaning utensils carefully hung on hooks.
The floor was freshly swept. If I had a garage,
mine would look just like it.
The door leading from the garage
to the house was predictably locked and took ten
seconds to be sprung by Raphael. Inside was an
upscale suburban kitchen with stainless steel
appliances and brand-new furniture. Perfectly
clean sink. No odor of rot from the garbage
disposal.
The scent signatures were old.
She hadn’t been in the house for two days, at
least.
“Interesting,” Raphael said.
I came to stand by him.
A large dent marred the living
room wall just below a painting of some
geometric shapes. A stain spread about it.
Below, shards of broken glass glinted, weakly
catching the daylight from the windows, among
shriveled green stems. Someone had thrown a vase
against the wall.
“How tall is she?” Raphael asked.
“Two inches taller than me.”
“It might have been her then. I’d
hit a lot higher.”
We look at the stain. “She was
angry,” I said.
“Very.”
“Not a lover.”
Raphael nodded. “White flowers.”
I inhaled, sorting the pollen
aroma: barely noticeable scent of white lilies,
light perfume of carnations, sweet fragrance of
snapdragons, dryness of baby’s breath . . .
“Sympathy arrangement,” we both
said at the same time.
I crouched by the pile of stems
and dug through it. My fingers slid against a
damp rectangle. I pulled it free: a small card
with a logo, a snake coiling around a wineglass.
The letters under it said, “Bright Light
Hospital, Thaumaturgy College of Atlanta.”
I opened the card and read it out
loud. “I am so sorry. Ben Rodney, MD, CMM.”
Doctor of Medicine and Certified Medical Mage.
Raphael bent down and tapped the
card. “Alex was a patient there. I know what
this is: when there is nothing more they can do,
they send you the ‘set your affairs in order’
flowers.”
“She was dying.”
“Looks that way.”
“At least we’ve established the
connection between her and Alex.” I looked at
the card.
We searched the rest of the
house. In the office we found a filing cabinet
full of medical records. Spider Lynn was
diagnosed with Niemann-Pick disease, type C. A
progressive, incurable disease, it affected her
spleen and liver and damaged her brain. Simple
things like walking and swallowing had become
increasingly difficult. She had trouble looking
up and down. Her vision and hearing were fading.
Soon she would be a prisoner in her own body,
and then she would die.
“Come see this,” Raphael called.
I followed him to the library.
Open books covered the floor. Raphael picked up
one. “And so Hades seized Persephone and bore
her away in his chariot to the depths of the
bleak realm of the dead. In vain her mother, the
generous Demeter, searched for her daughter.
Alone the Goddess of Harvest wandered the world,
clothed in rags, like a common woman, and in her
sorrow she had forgotten to tend to the soil and
cultivate plants. Denied her precious gifts, the
flowers withered on their stalks, the trees shed
their leaves in mourning, and everything that
had been green and alive shriveled and died.
Winter had come upon the world and the people
wailed in hunger. Even the golden apples in
Hera’s orchard had fallen off the bare branches
of the sacred tree.”
“Cheery.” I checked a couple of
other books. “Same thing.”
“This one is in Greek.” Raphael
held up a huge, dusty tome and pointed to the
page. On it was a picture of an apple.
“So she is obsessed with Hades
and apples. What do we know about these apples?”
I looked through the book.
“Here’s one,” Raphael said.
“‘Eris, the Goddess of Discord, alone was not
invited to attend the wedding. Quietly she
sulked until, consumed by her need for revenge,
she picked a golden apple, wrote “Kallistri,”
meaning “To the Fairest,” upon its golden skin,
and tossed it in the midst of the celebrating
Olym pians. And thus began the Trojan War . .
.’”
“Well, that was slick, but it
doesn’t help us any.” I searched through my
book. “Here is the eleventh labor of Hercules.
He needs to get the golden apples of immortality
from Hera’s orchard.” I stopped and looked at
Raphael.
“Immortality apples,” he said.
“How about that.”
I tapped the book. “What do we
know so far? Spider Lynn is terminally ill.
She’s obsessed with apples of immortality,
probably because she thinks they can cure her.
She’s holding the shade of Alex Doulos hostage
for unknown purposes. Alex was the priest of
Hades.”
“Hades stole Persephone, who was
the daughter of Demeter, Goddess of Harvest, who
controlled the seasons, which affected Hera’s
apples of immortality. It’s like playing six
degrees of separation.” Raphael flipped through
his book. “It says here that apples are the food
of the gods. They and ambrosia keep the gods
young and immortal. What do you suppose happens
if that bitch eats them?”
“Nothing good.” We had both dealt
with two wannabe gods during the flare. I still
had nightmares. I could tell by Raphael’s face
that he didn’t care to repeat the experience
either.
“We’re going to have to break
into that house.”
“Yes.” Raphael’s face was grim.
A house guarded by a giant
hellhound, surrounded by an electric fence and a
strong ward, and hiding at least three vampires,
piloted by a woman overcome by anger and
terrified of death.
It’s good that I had Boom Baby.
We stood leaning against the
Jeep, on the very edge of Cerberus’s territory,
waiting for the magic to drain from the world.
Raphael leaned next to me, still engrossed in
the book of Greek myths. He read, playing with a
small knife, flipping it absent mindedly with
his left hand, his fingers catching whichever
end happened to point down. Tip, handle, tip,
handle. The sun set, bleeding orange blood onto
the pale sky. I sampled the evening breeze and
petted my giant gun.
Being a professional meant you
nurtured your fear. You struggled with your
terror until you tamed it and made it serve you.
It made you sharper and helped you stay alive.
But no matter how tame your fear became, it
still gnawed on your soul. I didn’t want to go
into the house full of vampires. I didn’t want
Raphael to be hurt.
I had fought so hard not to fall
for him, but I had anyway, and now, having been
with him, having woken up next to him, I knew we
had something. It was a very small, fragile
something, and I would rip through a hundred
vampires to keep it safe.
“You’re my Artemis,” Raphael
said.
I blinked.
“Fierce, prickly, beautiful
huntress, forever pure and uncompromising.”
Prickly? More like bitchy. “I’m
not that pure.”
He leaned over. His hand brushed
the back of my neck and I felt the light press
of teeth on skin. Every nerve in my body
tingled. My nipples went tight, and a slow,
hungry heat blossomed below my stomach.
Raphael’s voice was a smooth
whispery seduction in my ear. “There is nobody
to see us for miles and miles, but you’re
blushing. How is that not pure?”
His smile was pure sin. I shifted
closer to him and leaned against his chest,
resting my head on his shoulder. He stiffened,
surprised, and I snuggled closer, soaking up the
warmth of his body with my back. He raised his
arm and put it around my shoulders. I
concentrated and heard the steady beating of his
heart, strong and a little too fast. He was
anxious, too.
“If we get out of this mess alive
and undamaged, would you like to spend the night
in my apartment or do you want me to stay with
you?”
“Either way will work,” he said
softly.
The six-month storming of my
castle had put a definite dent in Raphael’s body
armor. It would take me a long time to convince
him that he didn’t have to be charming, witty,
and sexy around me twenty-four-seven. Some part
of me had hoped that once we had sex, everything
would smooth itself out. But in the end, he was
still insecure and I was still broken. Sex was
simple. Being together was a lot more
complicated.
We stood together and watched the
sunset.
The magic crashed.
“Time to pry Doulos’s shade from
that bitch,” Raphael said.
“You realize that if we’re right
and Cerberus is after his corpse, he will follow
Doulos wherever we take him?”
“Yes. But my mother deserves to
say her good-byes.”
He took off his clothes, stood
still for a moment, the breeze fanning his
perfect form, and opened his mouth. A groan
broke free, deepening into a hair-raising growl,
as his body stretched and thickened, hard muscle
encasing it. Fur sheathed him. He glanced at me
and his eyes were completely wild.
I lifted Boom Baby. Raphael
picked up a six-foot metal pole he’d wrenched
from the slope on the way here. We headed down
through the ravines to the house.
“Those bullets are the size of a
dollar bill,” Raphael said.
“They are Silver Hawks:
armor-piercing, incendiary, explosive,
silver-load cartridges. They slice through
armor, set things on fire, and explode inside
the target, delivering a load of extremely
potent silver pellets. Boom Baby fires two
hundred of these per minute.”
An excited snarl rolled ahead of
us. The ground trembled in sync with the beat of
the giant paws.
“Can they handle the dog?” he
asked.
“We’re about to find out.” I
raised Boom Baby. “Here, Fido . . . Here, boy .
. .”
Ahead, Cerberus rounded the curve
and charged us.
I squeezed the trigger. A
high-pitched whine of bullet flurry ripped
through the air. Boom Baby bucked in my hands,
the recoil hitting me hard. The bullets bit into
Cerberus’s chest, punching through the muscle to
the heart. Blood flew. The great hellhound ran
three more steps, not realizing the lethal swarm
had already shredded his life, stumbled, and
fell, paws over head. He rolled and slid to a
stop five feet from me in a smoking ruin.
“Nice gun,” Raphael said.
Five minutes later we reached the
electric fence. Raphael braided the fingers of
his hands together and offered them to me like a
stepping stool. I stepped, pushing hard, and he
threw me, adding his strength to my jump. I shot
over the fence, flipped in the air, and landed
in the dirt. Boom Baby came flying next. I
caught it and gently lowered it to the ground.
In the cramped quarters inside the house, it
would restrict my movements too much. I pulled
out my P226s, the
familiar weight of the twin firearms reassuring
in my hands. Raphael took a running start, pole
in hand, and vaulted over the fence, landing
gracefully next to me. There were times when
Lyc-V
came in handy.
We jogged to the house and I
pressed against the side. Raphael hammered a
single kick to the door and it flew off its
hinges, crashing into the darkness. I cleared
the doorway and stepped into the gloom. The door
led to a narrow foyer. On the right, stairs led
to the second floor. Straight ahead lay a
hallway and past it, through a doorway, a
sitting room waited steeped in the twilight, the
dark bulky shapes of furniture like the spines
of sleeping beasts.
The nauseating stench of undead
flesh laced my nostrils. It clung to the floor,
permeating the carpets. If smell had color, this
reek would drip from the draft in oily, fat
drops of black. It was impossible to tell where
it came from.
A moment later I caught another
scent entirely: the bitter, clinical scent of
embalming fluid. A human body waited for us
somewhere in the house.
My eyes adjusted to the low
light. We padded through the foyer on silent
feet, cleared the doorway, and emerged into the
hallway.
Slow and steady, room by room. An
undead waited at the end of this race, and I had
a feeling it would find us before we found it.
Two small, musty rooms later, we
stepped into the family room. The old furniture
had been haphazardly piled at the walls. In the
center of the room, on the filthy old rug, lay
the corpse of Alex Doulos. A huge chain caught
the body’s ankle, binding it to a rod driven
into the floor.
Two red-hot eyes sparked in the
heap of furniture at the opposite wall.
I fired. The first two bullets
punched the bloodsucker’s head.
The vampire leapt.
My guns spat thunder and bullets
in a lethal rhythm, trailing the bloodsucker as
it hurtled through the air.
Raphael lunged from the left, and
I raised the guns’ barrels up a fraction of a
second before he fell onto the vamp from behind.
The bloodsucker went limp in his hands. My
bullets had chewed its skull to mush. Raphael
grasped the vamp’s chin, exposing the neck; his
knife flashed, and the head went flying across
the room.
I reloaded. The bloodsucker had
been unpiloted. Its eyes had been too crazed and
it attacked me straight on, without any
consideration for the fact that there were two
of us. Spider Lynn was gone. She had left the
vampire to us as a present.
It took us ten minutes to search
the rest of the house. Empty as expected. I
didn’t think she would sacrifice another
vampire. We did find the generator and I shut it
off, cutting the power to the fence.
We returned to the body. Alex lay
on his side, thrown on the floor like a dirty
rag. Death had robbed him of warmth, but his
features still kept hints of his personality: a
network of laugh lines around the eyes; strong
chin; wide, tall forehead. His hair was pure
white and worn long enough to reach his
shoulders. A small green object lay by him. I
picked it up. A little toy car. How odd. I
tucked the car into my pocket.
We had to take him out of this
terrible place. Raphael touched the chain
securing Alex’s ankle and jerked his hand away.
A silver-steel alloy.
The chain clasped Alex’s ankle
too tightly. Neither one of us could get it off
without burning all the meat off our fingers. I
ripped fabric off the nearest couch, wrapped it
around the rod the body was chained to, and
strained. It didn’t even shiver.
“Let me.”
Raphael grasped the rod. Veins on
his face bulged and he ripped it free. He slung
the body over his shoulder and let the chain
trail behind him. It would have to do.
It took us three hours to cross
the city. We drove through the dilapidated
remnants of the industrial district and left
Atlanta behind. Woods replaced ruins. The road
grew bumpy. Neither of us said anything. The
corpse wrapped in a blanket and resting in the
backseat kept me from talking, and Raphael
seemed immersed in thought.
Cold wind fanned us. The night
was vast and filled with a flurry of scents. A
sprinkling of stars shone high above,
indifferent to us and our little problems.
Thirty minutes later we pulled
onto the side road, dipping into the dense
forest. The dirt road veered, we turned, and a
large ranch-style house came into view. The
bouda house. Usually it was full of life:
sentries prowled the woods, and insane laughter
floated on the wind currents, mixing with
moaning and snarls of sexual release. But now it
lay quiet. Raphael had said that everyone had
left, letting Aunt B grieve in private, but it
didn’t hit home until I actually saw it.
A woman waited for us on the
porch, her hands crossed under her breasts.
Middle-aged and plump, she wore her hair atop
her head in a bun. Careworn shadows distorted
her usually happy face. She looked like a very
young grandmother who had just realized her
grandson’s school bus was ten minutes late.
We parked. Raphael hopped out and
gently picked up Alex’s body. Alex’s white hair
spilled over Raphael’s shaggy arm. Aunt B looked
on without a word as the monster who was her son
and my mate carried her lover’s body to her and
held it out. A single word escaped his monstrous
mouth. “Mother . . .”
Aunt B’s lips trembled. She
slumped against the porch post. Her shoulders
shook and she covered her mouth with her hand.
Tears swelled in her eyes. No sobs escaped her
lips. She simply stood there and cried, grief
plain and raw on her face.
What do I
do? She was the bouda alpha. Alphas
didn’t . . . they didn’t show weakness. They
didn’t cry.
She was just a woman.
I walked up on the porch and
hugged her. “Let’s take him inside.”
For a moment I thought she would
snap my neck, and then she nodded wordlessly and
I opened the door. We took him in and laid him
to rest on a table in the back room. She sank
into a chair next to him. Raphael sat on the
floor next to her and she stroked his head.
I went into the kitchen, brewed
herbal tea, and took it to her. Raphael was gone
and Aunt B sat alone. Her face was wet with
tears. Her eyes glanced at me. Still sharp and
hard. She took the cup. “Thank you.”
I nodded, not knowing what to do
with myself.
“Are you and my son together?”
Everything inside me clenched,
reminding me I was beastkin and she was the
boudas’ alpha. “Yes.”
“That’s good,” she said softly.
“I always liked you.” She glanced at Alex. “Make
the best of it. The way we did.”
The magic surged, drowning us.
The outline of Alex’s body shimmered. A pale
glow broke free of the corpse and congealed into
Alex Doulos. He saw Aunt B. His voice was like
the whisper of dry leaves underfoot. “Beatrice?”
“Yes,” she said softly.
I tiptoed out of the room.
I found Raphael outside, on the
porch. Too bulky to fit into a chair in his
warrior form, he sat on the floor. Hard knotted
muscle corded his back. His long arms lay folded
on his knees and the claws of his right hand
protruded, crisp in moonlight.
He truly looked monstrous. Just
like the secret me.
I sat next to him.
“If I die, will you grieve for
me?” he asked.
“Yes. But before I do that, I’ll
fight to save you.”
“Why?”
I put my hand onto his furry
forearm. “Because I feel good when you’re near
me. It’s not just sex, and it isn’t loneliness,
it’s more than that. It’s kind of frightening. I
think that’s why I fought it for so long.”
The lawn before us seemed to go
on forever, each grass blade slick with
reflected moonlight. Soon Cerberus would come
running, his paws mashing big ugly holes in the
perfect grass.
“Do you think we’ll ever have
what they had?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think what they
had grew over many years. We still have a lot of
things to work out. But I’d like to try,
Raphael. When I said you’re mine, I meant it. I
don’t do things halfway. For better or worse.”
We heard light footsteps. The
door opened. “He wants you,” Aunt B said.
Alex Doulos had a soft, kind
voice. “My time’s short,” he said. “Do you know
the myth of Hades and Persephone?”
“Yes,” Raphael answered.
“Good. That will make things
simple then. I’m a priest of Hades. My family
has served him for generations. One of our
duties is to tend to secret shrines of Hades.
They’re scattered all over the world and kept
hidden. During the flares, one of the shrines
randomly grows an apple tree, which bears
fruit.”
“Hera’s Apples,” I said.
Alex motioned with his arm. “The
Vikings call them Idun’s Apples, the Russians
call them Apples of Youth, and we call them
Persephone’s Apples. The name doesn’t matter.
The apples are supposed to grant youth and long
life span to gods. When eaten by normal humans,
who don’t have Persephone’s gift or immunity to
it, the apples produce horrible consequences.
That’s why we guard the tree until the apples
ripen and sacrifice the fruit to Hades. No part
of the apples must remain in our world. It is my
duty to make sure the apples are destroyed. It’s
the purpose of my service. But I’ve failed.
“My body was kidnapped by a woman
who calls herself Spider Lynn. She’s dying and
she wants the apples for herself. She mustn’t
eat them. It’s very, very important. She must
not eat them.”
“Where is Lynn now?” I asked.
“I imagine she’s at the shrine.
It’s in the woods behind my summer house.
Raphael, you remember, we had a cookout at that
house last year.”
I glanced at Raphael. “It’s
across the wood, bordering our territory. Not
too far,” he said. “How did she know the
location of the shrine?”
Alex’s shade shuddered. “I told
her. She realized that she couldn’t compel me to
reveal it and she kidnapped my nephew. His
parents are away and I was watching the boy. I
couldn’t let the vampires hurt the child.”
I pulled the green toy car from
my pocket. “The boy . . .”
“Yes,” Alex confirmed. “It’s his.
Raphael, I know that you’re not my son and you
owe me nothing. But I beg you, please, don’t let
her get the apples. Save the boy. And whatever
you do, don’t eat them.”
“I’ll do it,” Raphael said
simply.
“The shrine’s guarded by a
serpent, but it won’t last against Spider Lynn’s
vampires for long. Take the bracelet off my arm.
It’s keyed to the ward that’s guarding the
shrine. Lynn has enough magic to force herself
past the defensive spell, but it will leave her
weakened. She’ll need time to recover. You
won’t.”
A deafening roar shook the house.
Cerberus had found us.
“He’s come for me.” Alex smiled.
“It’s time to go. Take the bracelet. It will
unlock the ward and let you pick up the apples.”
Raphael slipped the simple metal
loop off the corpse’s right wrist and placed it
over his own. The bracelet barely enclosed two
thirds of his wrist. “Are you really going to
Hades?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “But
the last of my power is fading. My body is dead,
Raphael. I can no longer hold on to it. Earth is
the home of the living, not the dead. Don’t
mourn me. My life was full and well lived. I was
fortunate. Some might even say blessed. I only
wish that I had lived a few days longer so I
could destroy the apples myself instead of
forcing this burden on you. That and your
mother’s tears are my only regrets.”
Aunt B rose, picked up the
corpse, and strode outside. We followed her. She
walked onto the lawn. They said something to
each other, too quiet to hear, and then she
lowered him into the grass and stepped away.
The trees rustled. A giant shape
muscled through the trunks and trotted into the
open, its three heads close to the ground. The
center head sniffed Alex’s body and picked it
up, clamping it in its great fangs.
“Take care of your mother,
Raphael,” a ghostly voice called out.
The body burst into flames. The
great dog howled and vanished.
Raphael’s eyes shone once,
catching the moonlight. “Are you with me?”
“Who else will protect your furry
butt?”
“I’m coming, too,” Aunt B said.
Raphael shook his head. “We’ve
got this.”
Her eyes flashed with red, a
precursor to an alpha stare.
“He didn’t want you involved,”
Raphael said. “He asked me, not you. The clan
needs you.”
“We’ve got it.” I nodded.
We turned our backs on her and
headed to the Jeep. “Did we just defy your
mother, who’s also your alpha?” I murmured.
“Yes, we did.”
I glanced over my shoulder and
saw Aunt B standing there with a bewildered look
on her face. “Let’s go faster before she
realizes that.”
The magic was up and Boom Baby
was useless. I took a crossbow and bolts from
the Jeep and followed Raphael into the woods. He
broke into a run, inhumanly fast in warrior
form, and I struggled to keep up.
Half a mile later Raphael
stopped. “The magic is up,” he said softly.
“I know.”
“You’re slower in this form.”
I had run as fast as I could.
When we were both in human form, I was faster.
But in warrior form, he beat me.
“You can’t keep up.”
I realized what he was saying.
“No.”
“Andrea . . .”
“No!”
“We’re short on time,” he said.
“There’s a little boy out there with at least
two vampires. We don’t even know if he’s alive.”
My heart hammered in my chest.
“You don’t understand. I lose control when I’m
her.”
“Andrea, please,” he said. “We’re
losing time.”
I closed my eyes. He was right.
We had to save the boy. We had to get the apples
away from Lynn. I had to . . .
I stripped off my clothes and
reached to the beast living inside me. She
smiled and leapt out, flowing over my arms, my
legs, my back, giving me her strength. My bones
stretched, my muscles swelled, and there I
stood, revealed and naked.
The shapeshifters got a choice:
human, warrior form, or animal. I had only two:
the human me and the secret me.
Raphael’s eyes shone with red. He
ran.
I swiped up my crossbow and then
dropped it. My claws were too long. I wouldn’t
be able to work it. I’d have to fight with my
claws and teeth. I grabbed the little toy car
and hid it in my fist.
Raphael was a mere shadow in the
distance. I burst into a run. It felt like
flying, light and easy. My muscles welcomed the
exertion and I sprinted, catching him with ease.
Together we dashed through the woods, two
humanoid nightmares, fast and slick, our voices
faint whispers on the draft.
“I can’t see you.”
“I don’t want you to see me.”
I purposely picked my
way so he caught only the mere flashes of me.
“Don’t hide from me,” he asked.
I ignored him.
Suddenly he burst through the
brush. I had no chance to hide. He saw all of
me: my limbs, my face that was neither animal
nor beast, my breasts . . .
“You’re lovely,” he whispered as
he passed me in a burst of speed.
“You’re sick,” I told him.
“You’ve a perfect union of human
and animal: proportionate and elegant and
strong. Your form is what we aspire to. How’s
that sick?”
“I’m a human!”
“So am I. You don’t have to hide
from me, Andrea. I think you are beautiful.”
Nobody, not human, not
shapeshifter, not even my mother had ever told
me that the beast form was beautiful. Inside me,
the human me put her hands on her face and
cried.
Miles flashed by. We passed a
house in a blur of speed. Trees parted,
underbrush snapped, and we burst into a
clearing. A ward ignited with gold, barring our
way in a translucent wall.
Inside the ward, a dark-haired
boy crouched on the ground, hugging his knees.
Past him a dead vampire lay broken on the grass,
its skull shattered. To the left, an unnaturally
large snake was dying on the grass, a second
vampire caught in its coils. The vamp’s neck was
broken, its vertebrae crushed. Blood drenched
the snake’s coils. With each new squeeze, more
blood washed the scales.
Past them, a ring of colonnades
carved of pure white stone guarded a narrow
apple sapling. Four yellow apples hung from the
branches. The fifth apple, with a small piece
bitten off, lay on the grass, by the hand of a
dark-haired woman. She slumped on the grass. Her
horribly distended stomach had ripped through
her tailored slacks.
Oh no. She ate it. We were too
late.
“Now look what you did.” A man
walked up to us, his eyes fixed on Spider Lynn.
“I done told you to leave the apples alone.”
Raphael snarled. The fur on his
back rose.
The man was tall and
broad-shouldered, built with strength in mind.
Dark stubble peppered his face. He wore a white
T-shirt, a pair of old jeans, and yellow work
boots. A flannel shirt hung from his blocky
shoulders. He looked like a good old boy in
search of a porch with a rocking chair and a
glass of iced tea. He turned to us and said,
“Hi.”
This was surreal. “Who are you?”
I asked.
“I’m Teddy Jo.”
“You’re the man who called me
about Raphael running from Cerberus?”
“I called Kate,” he said. “You
answered the phone. Do you have the bracelet?”
“What?”
“Doulos’s bracelet. You have it?”
He saw the bracelet on Raphael’s arm. “Oh good
then. We’re in business.”
Lynn squirmed on the grass and
began to cry. “What is happening to me?”
Teddy Jo glanced at her. “You’ve
brought this on yourself.”
Raphael lunged at him. His clawed
fingers closed about Teddy Jo’s throat, the
bracelet glinting with steel on his forearm.
“What are you doing here?”
“Well now, you might want to
rethink that,” Teddy Jo said, raising his arm.
His sleeve fell back, revealing an identical
bracelet, but made of gold. “Given as we’re on
the same side.”
Magic slammed my senses. Teddy
Jo’s eyes turned solid black. The flannel shirt
ripped on his back and two colossal black wings
thrust into the night. Fire ran from his
bracelet down into his hand and snapped into a
flaming blade.
“Thanatos,” Lynn squeaked.
The angel of death clamped
Raphael’s wrist and squeezed. Raphael bared his
teeth and crushed Thanatos’s throat.
Lynn’s stomach twisted. She
howled as if cut. Alex’s nephew jerked.
“Stop!” I barked at the two men.
“There’s a kid in shock sitting behind that
ward, locked with whatever is about to crawl out
of Lynn’s gut! Raphael, break the damn ward.
Teddy Jo, I swear, you don’t let go of him this
instant, I’ll rip your wings off!”
The two of them stared at me.
“Do it!”
Teddy Jo let go. Raphael thrust
his arm into the ward and the wall of gold
drained down, revealing the shrine.
I leapt inside and swept the boy
up into my arms. “Listen to me.”
He stared at me with empty eyes.
To him I was a monster.
I opened my hand and showed him
the car. He touched it gently and I handed it to
him. “I won’t hurt you. Uncle Alex’s house, do
you know where it is?”
He nodded.
“I want you to run to it and not
look back. Okay?”
He clutched the car in his fist.
I set him down and he ran.
Raphael snarled at Teddy Jo.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Teddy Jo shrugged his massive
wings. “I’m here to set things right. I serve
Hades just like Doulos, except that he was a
priest and I’m something other.”
“Where were you until now?”
“Look, fella, I follow the rules.
I would have liked to come down earlier and
start chopping people’s heads off, but I have to
sit on my hands and wait until someone bites the
damn apple. I’m the emergency brake here. That’s
what makes me the good guy.”
Lynn screamed.
“And there she goes,” Teddy Jo
said.
Lynn’s stomach tore. A slithering
green mass spilled forth, and as it boiled out,
Lynn was sucked in, almost as if her body had
turned inside out. The mass grew larger and
larger, bigger than a house, bigger than
Cerberus. Scales formed on its surface. Magic
roiled inside it, whipping my senses into
overdrive.
The mass flexed and uncoiled. An
enormous reptilian body thrust across the
clearing. Three dragon heads snapped at the air
with wicked teeth, jerking on long necks.
The dragon tasted the night and
roared.
Teddy Jo shot straight up and
hovered, his sword a beacon of light. “I’ll take
the center head. You two do as you please.”
Lynn the dragon whipped about and
I saw her eyes: cold and green, devoid of any
humanity or feeling. Something inside me
snapped. Fury drowned the world, flushing the
rational thought. I was very angry. She had
stolen the body of a man, denying his mate her
mourning. She had tortured that man. She had
kidnapped and terrorized a child. She deserved
to die.
Teddy Jo swept at the dragon. The
flaming sword carved through her neck like it
was butter. The head tumbled down in a whiff of
scorched meat. Then the stump quivered and split
in half, and two new heads sprouted in its place
and lunged for Teddy Jo.
“A hydra! Gods damn it!”
Teddy Jo veered out of
the way.
I smelled her flesh, waiting for
me just beneath her scales. My fingers flexed.
My tongue licked my fangs. Rage warmed me from
the inside, hot and sharp and so very welcome.
Andrea, the knight of the Order, would have to
sleep through tonight. Tonight I was beastkin,
the daughter of a hyena.
The dragon’s flesh beckoned,
elastic and smooth, coiling before me, begging
for a taste.
The world went red. I charged.
Blood. Rip,
claw, rip, rip, more, dig, dig into flesh.
A huge, pulsating sac swelled
before me. I sliced into it, laughed when blood
drenched me, and kept ripping. All around me,
wet, hot redness shuddered.
“Enough!” A force clamped me and
tossed me aside. I flew through the air, landed
on all fours, and charged my assailant. He
tripped me and I fell. The air burst from my
lungs in a rush. My head swam.
The reality came back with
ponderous slowness. I lay on my back in the
grass, my body slick with reptilian blood.
Slowly the rage faded and I saw Raphael.
“Are you hurt?” I asked him.
“Nothing dire.”
The dragon’s corpse lay on its
side, a dozen half-formed heads sprawling like
the stalks of some disgusting flower. A big hole
gaped in her gut. It looked like someone had
tunneled through her. Teddy Jo stood bent over
near her, breathing hard.
“Did I do that?”
Raphael nodded. “You ripped apart
her heart. That’s what finally killed her.”
“The apples.” I tried to get up,
but my legs refused to obey.
Raphael scooped me up. “Are you
okay?”
“Overdid it.” Drowsiness swept
over me. My muscles turned to cotton. I stuck my
ugly head against his neck. I felt dirty and
awful. My stomach clenched.
If he hadn’t pulled me out, I
would’ve cut and sliced until I passed out.
Slowly it sank in: we won.
“I’ll take care of the apples,”
Teddy Jo said. “You take your lady home.”
Raphael looked at him. “Good
fight,” he said.
“Yeah,” Teddy Jo answered. “We
didn’t do too bad. I live down in the Warren.
Look me up if you wanna have a beer some time.”
Raphael carried me off.
“Don’t forget the boy,” I
whispered.
“I won’t. We’re going to get the
boy and drop him off with my mother. Then I’ll
take you to my house. I have a garden tub. We’ll
get nice and clean and then crawl into our bed
and sleep until noon. Would you like that?”
“Very much,” I said and licked
his neck. “Raphael . . .”
“Yes?”
“I killed them. The boudas who
tortured me and my mother. I went back after
Academy, and I challenged them and killed them
all one by one.”
He licked my cheek. “Come home
with me,” he said simply.
I held on to him and whispered,
“You couldn’t keep me away.”
No matter what job a man has, he
always ends up hating parts of it. Now, I loved
my job, the sword, the wings, the chopping off
the evildoers’ heads and all, but I bloody hated
flying down to Savannah. Every time I swung this
way, I hit wet wind off the ocean flying through
Low Country. It ate its way through me all the
way to the bone. Enough to give a man the liking
for one of those dumb-looking paratrooper
jump-suits.
It took me a bit of time to
finally find the right house in the predawn
light, a small place with white siding and green
roof, nothing special except for the damn
industrial-strength ward on it. I circled it
once and felt the magic defenses go down: Kate
had seen me. Nothing to do but land, which I
did, right on the path before the porch.
Kate sat on the porch with a book
on her lap. She was on the pretty side, tan,
dark-eyed, dark-haired. Exotic, even. Didn’t
look like she was from around here, but then who
did nowadays? Her sword lay next to her, a pale
sliver. I paid attention to her eyes and the
sword. She was a bit quick on the trigger with
it.
“I always knew there was
something odd about you, Teddy Jo,” she said,
nodding at my wings.
“Likewise.”
I felt the magic coil about her.
Too much power there. Way too much. She hid it
well, though.
“How did it go?”
I shrugged. “Killed the snake
responsible. Everybody’s alive. Your friends are
in one piece. I expect they’ll celebrate in bed
once they sleep it off.”
She arched an eyebrow. “They were
together? Like together-together?”
“Looked that way to me.”
A grin bent her lips. Why now,
she had a pretty smile. Who knew?
“I’ve got something for you
here,” I said, and showed her a sack of apples.
She closed the book and set it
aside. The title read,
Lion, King of Cats: Exploring the Pride.
I handed her the sack.
“Couldn’t find anybody else
immune to Persephone’s immortality?” She
chuckled.
“You guys don’t exactly grow on
trees. I tried burning them, but fire does
nothing to the damn things.”
“That’s because they are meant to
be eaten or sacrificed.” She picked up her
sword, cut a small chunk, and popped it into her
mouth. “Tart. Think they’ll keep for a week?
I’ve got company coming next Friday, and I’d
like to make them into a pie.”
“Can the company handle
Persephone’s Apples?”
“He can.”
I made of note of that
he. Didn’t know
there was anybody else in the area immune to
Persephone’s Gift. If I had to put money on it,
I’d bet it was the Beast Lord. Magic was a funny
thing. The older it was, the stronger it was.
True, Hades’ fire-power was of an ancient
variety, but the magic Kate threw around was so
much older, it gave me a start the first time I
felt it. Now, I’d seen the Beast Lord once. He’d
passed by me and I about choked. The magic that
rolled off him was even older than Kate’s
flavor. Primeval—not your regular shapeshifter.
Enough to give a man a complex.
“I don’t see why they wouldn’t
keep,” I said aloud. “Damn things are near
indestructible.”
She lifted the sack. “Thanks!”
“Thank you.”
I pushed from the grass and shot
into the sky. The sun was rising. Its rays
warmed my wings and I headed back toward
Atlanta. I had had a hard night. It was time to
get home, drink me some coffee, and feed my
dogs. Cerberus made sweet puppies, but the damn
things sure ate a lot.