Authors: Rob Thurman
Although ninety-nine percent of the time it certainly was.
“I’m taking a break from the business,” I said abruptly. He’d find out sooner or later. It might as well be now.
I’d put my best manager in charge of the car lot until I returned—if I returned, another shark like me . . . but one in puppy dog clothing. Soulful brown eyes, a sheepish grin, and an “aw, shucks” accent had little old ladies and big hulking men falling all over themselves to throw money at him. They never got quite close enough to see
that the flesh of his last meal hadn’t cleared his tonsils yet. He was wasted on humanity. He’d have made a great trickster—buy a lemon, learn an important life lesson.
“Hmm.” Ishiah leaned closer to ring a fingernail against the crystal of the wineglass, then closer yet still until I felt his warm breath against the sensitive skin behind my ear. “Are we celebrating you temporarily shedding the responsibility of a moral, decent, and contributing member of society or at least the closest you can possibly come?” He tilted his head, and there was the sensation of the singing nerves of teeth scraping across the line of my jaw. Not quite a bite, but not quite the absence of one either. It caused my first genuine smile of the day, and I suspect he knew it. Easing back far too soon, he raised his eyebrows to wait for my answer.
“Not quite. I do sell lemons, but I do not pay taxes, which removes the moral, decent, and contributing part of your question. And it’s not a vacation, as much as I’d like to spend a month or two on several nude beaches.” There was only a little mockery in the portion about nude beaches as I knew Ish would sooner fight another rebellion in Heaven than display himself on the most entertaining of beaches. I swiveled back and forth on the stool to give Ishiah a broad and no doubt lecherous smile. I can dial back the lechery, if my life depends on it in the utmost sense of the word, but that wasn’t often. And with the pictures of beaches and a naked angel in my head, now wasn’t one of those times.
It wasn’t my fault. He
had
started it.
“Then if it’s not a vacation, what are you planning?” He folded his arms to lean on the scratched and stained wood of the bar top beside me.
I felt my dirty grin melt away along with my momentary good mood and dipped my finger into my glass. Sketching the symbol for infinity on the bar in a red that
shouldn’t have looked like blood yet did, I studied it and then exhaled harshly. “It’s time . . . or it will be soon.”
He gave a dark frown. It was more for me, I thought, than for what was coming. He knew how attached I was. “Are you certain?”
“Over a thousand lives watching them die now? Yes, I’m certain. Especially this time.” I stared at the symbol for all that is and all that will always be and was not comforted in the slightest. Reincarnation wasn’t the consolation one imagined.
“Do they know?” He shifted, a thoughtful expression crossing his face to disappear as quickly as it had come. “Cal was here earlier, working. He got banged up a bit and I sent him home. He seemed . . . not tense at first. Distracted perhaps. But after the fight, more of a disagreement compared to most nights, he was very much on edge—as if something happened. Something I missed. And usually when he’s threatening to cut someone in half with an axe, he’s more cheerful.”
“Sometimes they sense it.” As many lives as they’d lived, they should. I exhaled and shook my head, as when they did suspect what was coming, the end never changed. “Sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t matter if they do or not. They never fight to retreat from it. They always fight their way to throw themselves through it. Warriors. In almost every life, they are warriors,” I scoffed, “and as such they have no brain cells, only skulls sloshing with honor and adrenaline-fueled death wishes.” I wiped away the double loop sketched in wine with a gesture more careless and violent than was necessary.
“And there never is a way through it?” A heavy hand rested on the nape of my neck. “Or a way to convince them to step back, just once?”
“No.” I bowed my head and felt the heat of his palm sink through the muscle and into my spine itself. This
was the first time in all my life that I hadn’t been alone in this. “Not yet. A puck who can’t talk someone out of certain death—over nine hundred times at least. I disgust myself.”
And I had tried. In the names of all the gods and goddesses that had once ruled, I had tried. But Niko, in all his variations, never lacked an unbreakable conviction in whatever cause he chose, and Cal . . . Cal had never been able to let anything go. And that was in addition to his almost gleeful lack of self-preservation. If reincarnation was meant to teach them lessons, they were very slow students.
This time was the worst of them all. In other lives, I’d seen ways out before, not always, but fifty percent of the time at least. They involved cowardice, desertion, backstabbing, and a wholly self-centered sense of self—all good things to pucks—but all things Niko refused to be a part of, and where Niko went, Cal never failed to follow. That had been before. Now the battle was coming to them, not vice versa. They could run forever and still might not escape it. And they wouldn’t run. When they were boys they had, when they hadn’t known what they were running from, but they were men now. They’d decided their running days were over. No matter how it all ended.
Selfish
bastards
. Running wouldn’t work this time, but could they not at least
try
?
Although there had been the one time Cal had been chosen to be a eunuch for Queen Jezebel’s harem, and he had no qualms about running then, the ass.
Niko and I had been on horses when we rescued him from the palace guard. He’d started running and hadn’t stopped until we were half a mile outside the city before swinging up on the horse to settle behind Niko. I’d laughed harder than I had in ten years. The crazed son of
a bitch who backed down from nothing and no one, yet at several points he had out-
run
our horses who were at a full gallop.
This from the man who’d once told David regarding Goliath, “Hey, Jewish kid, I’m bored. You want me to take this asshole for you?”
Perhaps if I hired someone to threaten to castrate him now, he would run. I sighed. No, he would merely shoot them. Things weren’t so simple these days.
The warm weight of Ishiah’s hand slid down to the middle of my back. Without my noticing, he’d moved around the bar to stand behind me. “But Niko and Cal, they never knew before—that death wasn’t the end. That they came back. Time and time again. That you would be waiting for them. That you miss them when they’re gone, questionable taste aside. That they need to do right by you. Perhaps that can be the difference. Perhaps this time you can convince them they need more than someone fighting at their side. They need planning, plotting, scheming. They need what you do best.”
Angels of the Lord—not mine, but regardless—were made to be convincing with voices that rang with faith and truth. Unfortunately I’d been born with feelings of a devious nature that I was forced to admit would’ve filled me with cold chills at that faith and truth, if they hadn’t warred with and lost against how unbelievable the sex was with Ishiah. Not to mention the lust, the blatantly carnal desire . . .
The new handcuffs we’d just used last night.
“It’s your orgy face again.” He grimaced.
“No, that face was for you and you alone.” I gave him a sharp-edged grin.
He returned it with enthusiasm. I was proud. It wasn’t everyone who could tempt an angel and then corrupt him thoroughly after he retired. “Smug bastard,” he
grumbled, sitting on the stool beside me, shoulder to shoulder. “What is coming for them, then? Who is it?” he asked. “I can guess, but I do hate the mockery that inspires in a trickster if I guess wrong.”
I tapped one finger against the bar. “Grimm and the Bae.” Caliban’s utterly insane half Auphe cousin and his offspring he’d created to replace the now extinct Auphe. He’d been out of sight for months now. He’d had time to heal from our last battle and was more than past due back to torture Cal some more. I was surprised he’d waited this long
My second finger tapped down. “The Vigil, which by the way is where I obtained the rocket launcher.” I’d left the sniper rifle. It was garbage. The Mossad would’ve turned up their noses at it. “One of them was on the roof across the way about an hour ago waiting for Cal to leave.” Since Iahiah had sent him home early, the Vigil had missed him. Luck . . . ever a lady for me. I nudged the weapon with my foot. “Boys and their big bad toys. He had more than this and was, as they say, armed for bear.” I’d disposed of him. As big and bad as he’d thought he was with his portable armory, he wasn’t close to being as bad as I was. “Oddly, he was going commando.”
“Carrying that, it isn’t a stretch to think he was in commando mode,” Ishiah replied, handing the weapon over the bar to one of his fellow peris to hide from sight.
“Hm? Oh no. I meant he was going commando as in no briefs or boxers. Curious, that. If you’re going into battle, one would think you’d desire to keep your package of goods tightly secured and safe,” I contemplated.
“You mean he was . . . Why did you even look?” Ishiah demanded, face flushing with embarrassment or anger. With an ex-angel, who knew which emotion it was?
“Curiosity mainly.” What a bizarre question . . . to a
puck at any rate. “Also I was searching for hidden ID. Did you know that I once smuggled over the border Gabriel’s Trumpet in my—” Ishiah’s hand slapped over my mouth. As if that wouldn’t be ludicrous if true. I did need to invest huge amounts more time toward developing his sense of humor.
That was currently beside the point, however. As the man on the roof had been human, and the only humans who knew about
paien
or the Auphe were the Vigil and the Rom. The Rom, all of them now, were aware of Cal and Niko and thanks to a decimated Sarzo Clan. They knew to stay away from them. It was easy enough to guess, ID or no—that meant he was Vigil.
Cal’s understandable, but very real, fuckup, of flashing an especially nasty piece of the supernatural world in broad daylight on a sidewalk of humans. And humans, aside from the rare exception, didn’t know about us. They couldn’t know. If they did, they would kill us. They would try to kill all of us, every last
paien
on this world. That was how man was. If you didn’t understand it, kill it. If they were more powerful than you, build even more horrible weapons and absolutely kill it. But the war would be bloody and the humans wouldn’t escape unscathed, not from us or from their shiny new instruments of hell.
Unscathed or not, win they still would by sheer numbers alone.
The Vigil existed to prevent all of that: discovery and the most likely ensuing war. Naturally, if it came down to war, they were an all-human thousand-year organization with more information, and actually accurate information, on
paien
than
paien
themselves probably had, which would not be in our best interest. Preventing a war
was
in everyone’s best interest, however, but ours most of all. They had not ever been happy with Cal, but he’d proved
useful in wiping out the Auphe and he kept under the radar, so they were satisfied.
I wondered if they knew about Grimm and his Bae offspring. Unlikely. Grimm was clever. If he took over the world, it would be done before anyone knew it had happened.
Cal wasn’t like Grimm. Nik had been in danger and if Cal had thought anything at all before gating in front of those people, it would’ve been “watch the light show and fuck you and the three-legged donkey you staggered in on.” I understood it. I knew saving Niko was all that mattered to him at that moment, but the Vigil would not understand or care. They wouldn’t be happy with Cal now. They would conclude that he had to go. They weren’t entirely wrong that Cal had been foolish and reckless, but, same as Cal, I didn’t care. It had been to save Niko. The Vigil could kiss my superb ass.
Cal was my friend and I would do anything to keep him. It wouldn’t be the first war I’d fought in. It wouldn’t even break the top two hundred.
Before I could tell Ishiah about threat number three, a wave of terrified howling erupted, filling the bar and the night air outside. Perfect timing. That one I’d expected, and expected now or yesterday, but close enough to the same. Every Wolf was headed for the door in a panic, clawing at the wood to escape, smashing through the small window to run, to flee the city before it was too late. They were the packless ones. The subcontractors for the Kin, better known as the werewolf Mafia, and now, from the citywide howls, they were nothing. The hunted. Prey. The new Alpha had risen.
Caliban’s ex-homicidal fiend with benefits had finally forced all the Kin to submit. Or die. The kid truly did know how to pick the chicks.
My third finger hit the bar by Ishiah. “And Delilah.” I
had informants, but I also had a sense for a rise of power—the smell of it, the taste of it, the recognition of the perfect time for it—all those and more. All had told me the same.
I’d seen this coming as well. Tricksters aren’t too successful if they don’t keep their eyes open to squirrel away nuggets of information to use for cons, for blackmail, or to sell. I’d noticed the bitter infighting in the Kin, I knew who the cause of it was, and I knew who I’d put my money on coming out on top . . . and when. The ruthless, the crazed sociopath, they win every time.
I knew because I’d done the same before many times, long ago.
Sat on a hundred thrones.
“Wonderful. I’m thinking my Kin protection money just doubled.” Ishiah already had a shot glass of tequila in his hand, and he tapped it to my glass. He threw it back, then grunted, “I hate to say it, but what a bitch.”
That she was.
But to give credit where credit was due . . . she did excel at it.
All hail the new queen.
Caliban
Around three a.m., an hour or so after the Kin howl of triumph, Nik found me as I was tying knots in the top of garbage bags and growling with a furry tail popped out of one weak seam. Stuffing it back in, I reached for the duct tape on the floor beside where I crouched and sealed the heavy-duty—my ass—garbage bag full of werewolf. “Hey, Cyrano,” I said absently, not bothering to look up as yet another seam split. Goddammit. I waved a hand toward the kitchen breakfast bar. “I made you breakfast.”
He closed the door and locked it behind him, no asking how I knew it was him and not some random flesh eater. My brother knew I could smell him a block away in the city—five miles away in the countryside. The Auphe gift that keeps on giving. A predator’s sense of smell was the least of it.
Glancing down at the two bagged but not tagged
Wolves I was wrapping up, he raised his eyebrows. “I suppose I do not have to ask if you heard the Howl.” The call passed from Wolf to Wolf to Wolf, traveling miles, to cities, states, then the entire country, carrying the news. The Kin belonged to Delilah now, and Delilah was a stone-cold killer. Stay out of NYC. That was the Howl.
Howl with a capital H because it was like that Disney movie with all the Dalmatians. Hundred and one, right? I paused a second and concentrated on the hazy childhood memory of that.
Good old Disney, who lied psychotically about nearly every supernatural creature they stuck in a movie. Set the bar high when you were a kid and then swung that same bar at your skull when you grew up and faced the real deal. Like mermaids. Cute on TV. In real life they have miniature shark teeth, drown you, tuck your body into an underwater nook, and when you’re good and decomposed, they eat you.
Thank you, Disney, for the scar of that mermaid bite mark on my back.
The Howl seemed to be fairly accurate so far, and that was something. “Yeah, the ‘Twilight Howl,’ or was it Bark?” I grinned up at him this time. “I think it’s a little more homicidal with Mafia werewolves than cute and fluffy spotted dogs.” I finished taping the last bag.
Delilah and I, while we’d once been fiends with benefits, had been on the lookout for an opportunity to kill each other for a while now. I, because she’d tried to slaughter my friends and brother. Delilah, as she was the single Wolf who didn’t mind screwing an Auphe. Rather liked it, I was pretty sure, as it was dangerous and Delilah loved danger. None of the other Wolves approved, though, including her now all-female Mafia. They worshipped her for taking down the top male Alpha and for being All Wolf, but they had their limits. Fucking an
Auphe was one of them. Nobody loved the Auphe. If this was a Lifetime made-for-TV movie, the sobbing would abound.
Delilah would try to kill me. Sooner or later. We’d both been working on killing each other for months now. She’d get around to it personally one day. She’d taken over the entire werewolf Mafia of NYC and she had things to do. Killing me was one of them, without question, but down the list some. Instead she settled for sending me three newly anointed female Kin to do it for her. She knew it wouldn’t work, didn’t want it to work, as she wanted to do it herself. It would be seen as an effort on her part until then.
And Delilah, hell, she might be able to pull that off. I was good, but so was she.
* * *
I’d always known how good she was and smart, but it hit home with what happened before Niko had come home. I knew she’d suggested it. No other Wolf would’ve thought of it.
What had caught me off guard was it didn’t happen that way. It didn’t. They don’t knock on the door. They’d have broken in through the second-floor window to slink in. They’d have tried to surprise me outside before I got through the door. They hadn’t done those things, the normal things . . . in our world. They’d showed up half an hour later and knocked.
Me? I’d been stupid. I hadn’t bothered to inhale their scent when I’d opened the door, because monsters? Monsters don’t knock. Or so I was under the impression.
I’d opened the door, Glock in hand. I was perplexed at what stood there, then caught on, and couldn’t have been less in the mood for this shit. Fur and round gold eyes that belonged in the forest instead was hovering above a sidewalk. Yeah, I’d been stupid, no lying to
myself about that, but not completely idiotic. I’d been prepared. A human knocking at your door can kill you if he’s armed well enough.
The three of them, in varied stages of wolf, had rushed through and taken me to the floor. There were claws, fangs, and growling—it reminded me of some absolutely unbelievable sex Delilah and I had had more than once. You can have good memories whether the person involved is a psycho killing nightmare or not. Strange, but true. I’d been relieved none of the Wolves were silver-blond like Delilah. When I put her down, I’d do it because it needed to be done. I didn’t want substitutes that I could pretend were her. When I ended her life, I wanted to see it in her eyes, no one else’s. She’d tried to kill people who mattered to me,
everyone
who mattered to me, to gain points with the Kin. Forget what we’d had before, I wanted to see the realization, fear, and haze of death in the red-gold of her setting sun eyes—clouding as I watched. The other Wolves didn’t, wouldn’t matter.
The first one who had been on me had dark-brown hair, to her waist, a filmy down of it on her face that crept down her entire body, which was easy to see as her clothes were in tatters and rags on the floor as she’d shifted further into Wolf. She had spring grass green eyes and claws longer than her fingers. She was beautiful in the way nature alone can create beauty. The fact that she’d been trying to bury her claws in my throat was too bad. I shot her in the head, between those amazing pale green eyes.
Dark dishwater blond had been the second one. Another All Wolf, capable of only partial shifting, most of them. She didn’t have claws, but her fangs angled toward me would’ve made a shark piss the Atlantic. I’d shot her in the mouth three times and finished her with a coup de grace to the back of her head when she’d turned to either
run or crawl inch by inch to breathe her last. Wolves weren’t my favorite monsters, but leaving one to skulk off to die in a corner, I wouldn’t do that.
Monsters of almost any kind don’t deserve that.
The last had hair the color of the darkest ink, eyes round and pale blue as barely bloomed flax. Except for her eyes, you’d have thought her human, not a Wolf or a member of the All Wolf cult at all. Nails, neat and tidy, the same color as her eyes, grew eight inches at least and had stabbed toward my own eyes. I’d kicked her back and aimed my gun at her chest. Her small but perfect breasts were covered by a silk shirt the same blue that she coveted elsewhere . . . as were her pants and her boots spangled with sky-colored topaz stones, and then there was her gun. It wasn’t every day you saw a Wolf with a gun. Even her gun had been blue. I knew some guns came in sunshine yellow or bright pink, Rugers, Walthers, Mossbergs, Colts, and Tauruses, but light blue? Not available. Custom job, I’d swear on it.
“That must’ve cost big bucks,” I’d said to her as she stood over me while I lay on my back where the first Wolf had knocked me flat.
“Money is money, but style is much more. How one represents one’s self.”
I suppose that was why she hadn’t shifted any further. This chick loved her clothes, and destroying them if she didn’t have to . . . as in having a gun . . . wasn’t going to happen. That gun, by the way, was a Ruger. I’d recognized it in less time than she’d taken to aim at my chest.
Mine, not as colorful, was aimed at her head—same as the first two. Practice, practice, practice. “Style doesn’t mean much to me.” I tightened my finger on the trigger. “And I represent myself with my aim, which means more than blue boots, shiny stones, and a custom-painted gun.”
She could have shot me in the chest and I might have died; chances are I would’ve died, but not necessarily instantly depending on her aim. I also could have fired simultaneously, as practice was my life. That practice would’ve put a bullet in her brain. She’d die, no way out of that. I might live. I might not, but she wouldn’t know one way or the other—she wouldn’t have known if she’d done her Alpha Delilah proud or not, as she’d be dead.
Disappointing Delilah was one thing. Disappointing Delilah and not living to inform her of the situation was worse. Delilah would want to know. Poor Delilah, too busy taking over the Kin and killing those she didn’t trust or think worthwhile, that wasn’t leaving her time to kill me herself. Just yet.
“If I get you first,” I asked casually, “can I have your boots? My neighbor loves all that sparkly crap like that.”
She snarled, a bizarrely upper-class snarl—I’d not seen an upper-class Wolf before, and I’d thought it was more over the thought of me looting her boots from her dead body than killing her.
“You can always run?” As that would be one less body for me to clean up, and with the day I’d had, it would be worth it.
She didn’t run. She retracted her claws, the fingernail polish a little worse for wear, tucked her gun in her boot, and then turned her back on me and walked away. Damn, she had balls. I hadn’t minded and not only over the cleaning-up issue. It was Delilah I wanted dead, not the other female Wolves she’d gathered to her. If anything, I applauded them. The Kin refused female Alphas, refused those of the All Wolf cult. The Lupas deserved to rule. If you weren’t the unbeatable killer Delilah was, the males would have the female Wolves in strip clubs or worse. They’d been disgusted by the All Wolf, considering them the lowest of the low. They deserved what the female
Wolves gave them. I hoped it was nasty and inventive. Knowing Delilah, it would be.
I hadn’t thought twice about that.
* * *
I didn’t bother reliving the fight a second time. It hadn’t been worth reliving the first.
“Delilah didn’t waste any time sending a few messengers over in case I did miss the Howl. Messengers, assassins, whatever. I don’t think she was that serious, though, only sending three. This is most likely revenge for the fact that the birthday present I gave her when we were screwing was a bag of doggy chews.” I nudged the body curled in the Hefty bag on the floor. “We need more garbage bags. Extraduty. I had to double-bag these.”
“You think?” Niko hung up his long leather coat with care on the wall-mount hook. His holster that was made to hold his katana along his back, under that coat, and out of sight he leaned against the wall. He slept with the katana under the bed. I didn’t judge. I slept with a gun under my pillow and a knife under my mattress. And I had, at least with the knife, since I’d been ten years old.
“Think? About the revenge for the doggy chews or the garbage bags?”
“You should’ve killed her, you know,” he said, shaking his head at the garbage bags of dead Wolf. “Or let me. We all knew about her ruthlessness and her ambition. We all knew this day would come when the Kin would bow before her.”
I was actually rather proud of her for that. The Kin did not accept female Alphas and they did not accept All Wolf Alphas. Delilah was as female as they came and I didn’t regret all the times she’d proved that to me. I didn’t know why people, even the Kin, forget the female of any species is the most dangerous. They are
treacherous and fearless and won’t hesitate for a second to do what has to be done. Rules are for the weak in their eyes.
Delilah was also All Wolf, the speciest movement that worked to prove that werewolves needed to drop the “were,” lose the ability to shift to human, and go back to what they’d been before evolution took that “looking like humans part of the time will fool them and let us catch and eat them faster” branch. All Wolf rejected evolution’s logic there. They wanted to be all wolf, all the time, no human taint. All Wolves only bred with other All Wolves to up the wolf genetic quotient every time. The results were werewolves that mostly couldn’t shift all the way to human. They were stuck halfway between human and wolf when they moved among people, with furry ears, gold eyes, sharp teeth, all usually concealed by hoodies. They didn’t mind. They had a goal, and in another hundred, five hundred, a thousand years, they’d get there. But for now, what Delilah had done. . . .
Un-fucking-precedented.
A female All Wolf Kin Alpha, along with the enormous number of all-female All Wolves she’d spared when taking out a random pack. It was very Amazonian, and if I’d watched
Xena
when I was a little kid, which I didn’t—fuck you very much—I’d think that was pretty goddamn hot.
“I should’ve killed her sooner,” I agreed. I’d had at least two wide-open opportunities and every intention of doing it. She’d betrayed me, after all, and while I was used to that, no big deal really, she’d betrayed my brother and my friends, and that shit didn’t fly. “I wish I’d killed her.” And I did. For all that she fascinated me—that was nothing compared to protecting my own. “But something always came up. I hesitated the first time, for fucking old times’ sake, I guess.” I grinned. “Literally. With the fucking, in case you missed that.”
Nik, long dark blond braid swaying with the movement, swatted me on the back of the head as he walked by to the kitchen. “Yes, I believe I did ‘get that,’ foulmouthed brat.”
“And the second time we were fighting something bigger and badder than her and we needed her help.” I stood from my crouch and gave one bag a solid kick. It stayed whole. God bless duct tape. “But now? Puppy love is over. I’d take her out in a second, if . . .” I was fighting the urge not to. As much as I told myself I would take her out for what she’d tried to do to my family, that nothing and no one could stop me, I was lying to myself.
I couldn’t. Not now. I’d waited too long.
Investigating a covered plate he’d pulled from the oven set at low heat, Nik caught my gaze. His eyes were the same gray as mine—minus the irregular come-and- go streaks of Auphe red—and I couldn’t wait for that conversation. I’d started physically, fucking
physically
turning into one of the worst monsters that ever lived. Homicidal insanity couldn’t be far behind. How was your day?