Authors: A.J. Aalto
Ben the unicorn hobbled about straightening things, pinching out more than half the candles until the room was cloaked in gloom,
touching the women in the group as though to reassure himself that he'd collected enough, and I saw it for what it was: a head count. He rearranged his big mane atop his shoulders, cleared his throat, then went about doing a second head count, a checking routine perhaps. I counted with him,
six, seven, eight
…
Why count only the ladies? What happens if you didn't bring enough, Yiff-Master?
A nearby cat, this one a Siamese, refilled her glass of Zinfandel while she said something quietly to Giraffe. They both nodded enthusiastically and toasted.
Harry's gaze flicked to my face then to his violin case beside the stage for a split second, and then he went back to pointedly ignoring me.
A warning? A hint?
I tensed, my attention following his sweeping arm to the staircase.
The sight before me made all sane thought scramble for cover like exposed beetles on a turned corpse. Harry was quickly forgotten as I struggled to compute, groped dry-mouthed for a scientific explanation. One of my hands tapped my hip out of habit, looking for a Moleskine mini notebook and golf pencil in the pockets of my jeans, finding only layers of foam and fur. I sidestepped against Chapel, and his arm shot around to steady me; it was the second time in my life Gary Chapel had touched me of his own accord, but I'd never been more grateful for it.
The thing that crested the top of the stairs wasn't even remotely human anymore. Malas didn't make any attempt to blend; his color was moldy lemon curd, gone to the sour yellow-green of adipocere underscored with subdermal rot. The lovely alabaster of the immortal line had spoiled on him, the mediagenic pallor long since corrupted.
What he had lost in tone, however, he had gained in the unmistakable weight of power. Though Malas was not a big man, the floor trembled with his coming, shuddered under each agonizingly slow footfall. Most of his long, colorless hair had abandoned ship but for a few stubborn, wispy clumps; the smooth pate shone under the candlelight. There was a flinch around his eyes, as if even that faint light pained him. Those eyes were palest cornflower blue, but as they fell on the gathered group before him, his pupils expanded, black rapidly eating up most of that soft color, the thin ring of blue shot through with gold streaks. At the line of his neck, where his dun brown collar stopped, a faded black tattoo began; a ghostly ink hand
reached across his throat to behind his left ear to become a crescent moon fingered by thorny vines. His right arm was held protectively across his belly; withered to the bone, deformed, the fingers on his right hand were crammed tight in a seemingly useless fist. Napoleon Bonaparte couldn't have looked at Malas in that pose and not felt like an impostor and a lightweight.
A low growl ran under the range of mortal hearing; my own ears had become sensitive to smaller sounds, and his anticipation came through loud and clear, causing the contractions in my belly to double.
His searchlight gaze swung in my direction.
I dropped my chin immediately and prayed that Chapel shared my instinct. Malas must have tasted our fear; he strode forward another heavy step, his tread burdened under the load of so much preternatural power. I realized I was staring at him again; my focus had drifted back helplessly, from the need to analyze him for science or maybe out of sheer terror, and I couldn't look away. A grayish tongue flashed out to wet his bottom lip, revealing the chipped, dull-yellow length of the biggest single fang I'd ever seen, so dark it was nearly brown. This creature was unfathomably old; it would be foolish to attempt an estimate. Even with my experience in preternatural biology, I'd be so far off it couldn't possibly matter. If he was ever truly a viscount in the French court, he'd been lurking in those lands thousands of years before France existed on any map.
I forced my chin back down.
When he opened his mouth to speak, you didn't have to be psychic to feel the tension ratchet up in the room. My internal organs seemed to shrink to tiny ice nuggets, scrambling to hide behind the shelter of my spine.
“Please,” the elder revenant rasped, his voice like a boot scraping through the rusted-out floorboards of a scrap-metal car. He tried again. “Do not let me interrupt your fine party.”
On that note, Ben the unicorn hurriedly limped to a nearby stereo system and pushed some buttons, motioning at Harry. Harry bowed, took up his instrument, gave it a testing sweep, then started up a quick beat for dancing. Ben turned up the stereo to accompany Harry's music with a techno beat; Harry easily matched it, improvising with expert hands. And though every eye still followed the immortal
guest of honor, they relaxed. I didn't, but they did, and when they began to bop and groove and get friendlier with one another, I got the impression few had been here before, and few knew quite what to expect. They were still willing to believe that at some point, the real party would begin. It was going to be uglier than they'd expected, maybe, but they clung to the hope that their lurid expectations would be met.
My gaze fell on the blue mat in the center of the room and its portentous stains. They were right: the real party was coming, but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be fun for anyone but Malas.
I also got the impression none of the Furry party-goers knew that Harry was a revenant; he had not pushed his immortal power into the room the way Viscount Creepypants had. I wondered if Ben knew about Harry. He must. Certainly, the elder revenant would. Revenants have a sense about these things; they can practically taste one another from miles away.
Malas did not seem interested in Harry. He seemed focused on getting to his chair, an immense, ornate mahogany number on the wall opposite the windows. The back of the chair depicted a sea monster betwixt open gates, colossal wings spread, complex overlapping triangular jaws open, tail forever coiled behind it in the deepest abyssopelagic depths, and I thought:
Leviathan at the Hellmouth.
The sides were adorned with mythical animals, dragons and gryphons and basilisks twisting along the arms, and the legs were heavily carved bird's feet. Malas eased into it, letting slip a soft noise. He didn't bother to hide his discomfort; it rode his face hard.
As my brain began to accept what I was seeing, I picked out details I'd been too afraid to acknowledge at first sight: fine, bird-like bone showed through the thinning skin along his knuckles. The skin was not regenerating as it should be across the bridge of his nose either, leaving cartilage bare. Trails of grey-green haze rose like campfire smoke from his shoulders, where his power rode high; the stench of burnt sugar was pungent.
His gold-shot eyes flickered across me, unimpressed, before they continued to the next partygoer, where they looked even more displeased, at which point the mood on his face collapsed in an avalanche of displeasure.
I swallowed hard and reached blindly behind me for Chapel's arm. He moved another step closer, shoring me up with his body. The armed FBI agent's presence did surprisingly little to quell my distress.
Guns, knives, stakes, backup, it's going to be okay
, but the part of me that wanted to jump out the window didn't buy it.
Ben attended the revenant with neck bent, speaking rapidly. I peeled myself away from Chapel's protective warmth and moved closer to the chair to eavesdrop, pretending interest in the dancing. Chapel gave a minute flick with his paw. To the casual observer, it looked like he was brushing lint off his costume, but I saw it as a subtle sign: Chapel was going to slip away if he could manage it, probably to do a walk-through of the house and look for signs of our three missing Furries. I gave him an answering brush and watched him go.
“Why are they costumed yet again?” Malas rasped at Ben. Could he do anything but rasp? His lack of revenant regeneration confused me. Shouldn't he be every bit as healthy, or more so, than Harry? Why was his body failing him? This was a deficiency I'd never seen in their kind. When a revenant hadn't fed enough for too long, they would waste away and become a desiccated husk, but they wouldn't wear out.
Ben's tone was playful. “The anonymity is thrilling, isn't it, my Lord?”
“Where is my companion?” Malas asked, pausing every other word to shove sound out of his grating vocal cords. “Bring Stuart before me. You are aware that I would have my DaySitter immediately upon rising. This change is unpardonable.”
“My Lord, I rang for Stuart. He didn't answer, but I've prepared everything just the way he—”
Malas lashed out, backhanding Ben with a speed and heft that Harry could not have matched. The unicorn helmet snapped off and went flying, and Ben's body broke the wall an eighth of a second after. He collapsed into a pile of limbs, raining bits of lathe and powdered plaster dust on his head. Crimson blood sprang instantly from his nose and upper lip in a great gush.
Current laws about revenant violence flipped up in my head: any physical infraction, any at all, even in self-defense, was punishable
by a warrant to stake the revenant. In the strictest sense, Malas had just committed suicide if SSA Chapel felt like being a stickler about things. I didn't think he would; after fondling my lady parts in the hallway at the convention center, Ben had that smack coming to him.
Malas brought his thin-skinned knuckle up, and that prune-dark tongue came out again, lapping blood off a gold ring featuring a crescent moon, all the while keeping his discontented glare on his errant attendant. Harry glanced sidelong at the bloody ring and then away. His rhythm did not falter.
The dancing slowed as heads half-turned, afraid to face the truth that was becoming ever more apparent: this was not to be the casual fuck-fest Ben had promised. No one dared to step on the blue mat except the sassy young pink Kitty, whose full attention had left the commotion with Ben and was now locked on Harry while she performed some funky modern form of the twist, trying to catch his eye. Though sporadic dancing continued among the other Furries, most did not dance anywhere near the mat.
Guess I'm not the only one who saw the stains
.
Harry obliged Kitty with a suggestive wink. In response, she raised her wine glass above her head and danced even more seductively for him, her whip-tight body limber and sultry. I thought,
Sixteen or forty-six, you lay a finger on him and I'll put you through the floor.
Inside my paws, my gloved fists clenched; I forced them to relax.
Ben was getting to his feet, shards of wood clattering from his shoulders, heels kicking and scrabbling for hold in the dust. I was surprised that nothing was broken but the wall and his lip. Faded red art deco wallpaper crumpled into the hole like sunken lips. Ben whipped the white hoof off his hand, wiped his finger under his nose and looked at the blood there, not surprised to see it; his calculating gaze darted from his bloody finger to the buffet table to the dancing snack food to the revenant and then settled on me.
“I brought you someone special,” he appealed to the revenant. “A young woman who might please you, Master.”
Balls
. Hadn't I said something idiotic about wanting to be humped by a heavy-handed revenant, back when I was having a brain fart in the hallway at the convention center? I shuffled back a few steps as Ben closed the distance between us, assembling a smile on his tight
lips; it wanted to turn into rage, but he was a mere mortal in his fifties trying hard to be useful to a master revenant, and anger would not do here. Where was Stuart the DaySitter, I wondered? Was Ben trying to replace him, too?
Ben motioned for me to remove my squirrel head; I did so obediently, also shedding the paws, my leather gloves abandoned inside in case I had to reach for the stake at my ankle in a hurry.
The revenant's eyes lit this time as they fell on me. I struggled to put my finger on what exactly they were alight with … thirst? Longing? Recognition? Vengeance? Something worse? No:
appreciation
. It made no sense, but there was no mistaking what I was feeling empathically from the elder's direction; he was making sure I got it, eyeing me with a gaze freighted with unspoken meaning.
The revenant reached out an inviting hand to me. I knew I should put mine there, though touching his grayish-yellow palm with my bare one seemed about as appealing as rolling naked in a flooded crypt in mid-November. I hesitated. The revenant was beyond gross, but he hadn't done anything illegal yet except backhand Ben, which I'd sort of enjoyed.
If I let him take hold of my hand in that immortal grip, I'd never get it free if he didn't release me. Then again, I was standing six inches from the tip of his black cavalry boots; if Malas wanted to get his hands on me, he'd be too quick to avoid whether he had me by the hand or not.
What was Harry thinking right now? Again, I felt an influx of
calm, calm, calm
. I took that to mean
go for it
.
As my palm touched the elder revenant's, the entire length of my arm lit up in an unholy, prickling mess. I did my best not to squirm, even when a blast of psi opened a vision of a youthful Malas of Brisbois on horseback, riding at, over, and through anything that got in his way; a cocky, grinning Malas being screamed at in furious French by a short man with a spit curl, his hand tucked between his uniform's buttons. Malas, dashing and handsome, tossing his white-plumed helmet on the field at Leipzig to reveal dark curls and a bright, rakish smile, impetuous and brave, reckless in his immortality. The vision vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving me shaken.
Malas lifted the back of my hand to his mouth in a show of Old-World courtesy. His lips were a cool dry brush. As the hard spike of his single fang pressed the tendons and knuckles on my hand, I was excruciatingly aware of the distance between it and the fine veins running beneath my skin. I tensed for a bite that didn't come.
“Not this one,” Malas told Ben.
Ben squawked, “But she's mundane, I … I …”
I saw Ben's problem immediately: he couldn't claim he'd
checked
if I was mundane, because to check something like that you had to have power yourself. He wasn't the least bit magical. He was just a hopeful, well-hung human in a fursuit. The real DaySitter would have been able to tell I was capable of manipulating psi.