“Can you turn that off?” he asked.
She sighed like he’d asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Latin while juggling with one hand, but she complied with the substantial favor he’d requested. The room fell into darkness.
The alien spawn stopped gnawing on his brain. But only a little.
“Where am I?” Shane asked after the silence made the dark of the room feel almost claustrophobic.
“You’re in my bedroom.”
“Did you knock me out so you could have your way with me? Because you could have asked nicely.”
The light came back on, and Shane swore. The girl glared at him, then turned it off again. So that’s how this was going to work, was it? No waterboarding or bamboo nail torture. This girl was good. She’d simply threaten him with
light
until he started to behave.
“What am I doing in your bedroom, then?”
“I saved your life. It seemed kind of silly to do that and then leave you out in the middle of the street.”
“You…saved my life?”
“Yes.”
“You must have done a really good job. I feel fucking
awesome
.”
The light switched on.
“Fuck. God.
Sorry
. Thanks, is what I was trying to say.”
Darkness reigned again.
“For someone who claims to hunt vampires, you seem to treat the sanctity of life with a great deal of…frivolity,” she said, her voice going quiet.
“I spend all day worrying about other people’s lives. Doesn’t leave me many leftover fucks to give worrying about my own.” He winced, preparing for the visual assault, but she didn’t touch the light.
“If you don’t respect your own life, why should anyone trust you with theirs?” She sounded mystified by his response.
“No one knows I’m helping them.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“Yes.”
“And what about you? Going chasing after trolls doesn’t strike me as showing a lot of, what is it you said?
Regard for life
?”
“I have plenty of regard for life,” she snapped. “All I do with my life is protect people. My life is sacred because of that.”
“So you go out every night and risk your sacred life?”
“I…”
“No pithy reply?”
“Are you always an asshole when someone saves your life?”
“I have several high-ranking sources who would say yes.”
“Then it’s a wonder anyone bothers.”
“On that note, you’re sort of a wee thing. How the hell did you drag me back to your apartment?”
Siobhan made a disgusted noise. “I made a dead troll vanish into thin air. Why in Hecate’s name would I have to
drag
your sorry ass anywhere?”
“I’m guessing you didn’t cut my heart out and make a blood circle to move me.”
The bed sagged, and he could sense her drawing nearer. In spite of the raging migraine threatening to set up shop and never leave his head—and he was definitely helping that by talking as much as he was—he still felt his pulse trip when she bent over him. She smelled unlike any other woman he’d known, a heady aroma of spice and danger. Girls like this were, well…he didn’t know many girls like this.
“You’re an unusual man, aren’t you, Shane Hewitt?”
“I was just thinking the same thing about you.” He blinked in her general direction and frowned. “Wait, how the fuck did you know my last name? Are you a psychic or some shit?” Oh God, had he been thinking anything unwholesome? No. But now he was thinking about her boobs. Oh, Jesus, and her ass. And now he was thinking about peeling off all those layers of tight black clothing and seeing how much of her skin was covered in the freckles that colored her cheeks. “Oh, crap, okay look I’m sorry for the thing about your boobs—”
She pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m not psychic, you moron. I looked at your wallet while you were passed out.”
“Oh.”
“What were you going to say about my boobs?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re worse at lying than you are at saying thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“Can I turn the light on now?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Shane admitted.
“Well, I’d rather we not sit alone together in the dark while you think about my breasts.”
The lamp flicked back on, and Shane closed his eyes in response. It was almost the same as having a conversation in the dark only now his eyelids were glowing pink and he suspected he looked like an idiot.
Not that that was anything new to him.
“Look,” Siobhan said, “in spite of the part where you almost walked headfirst into your own untimely demise, you were sort of helpful tonight.”
“Thanks…I think?”
“You clearly know the general concepts of battle. I can tell you’ve been trained. There’s a reason I didn’t leave you out on the street.”
“Because you think I’m ruggedly handsome?”
“No.”
“Thanks,” he said again, this time his tone dripping with sarcasm.
“Romance is an entanglement I don’t have the luxury of participating in, Mr. Hewitt. I apologize if I’ve offended you. I think you’re very attractive, but that’s entirely beside the point.”
“Oookaaay.”
“I need your help.”
Shane opened one eye and gave her his most incredulous look. “You had to save my life and now you’re asking me for help. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Well, you see…I’m sort of desperate.”
Chapter Five
Siobhan didn’t work with partners.
Not since the whole messy debacle with Percy. But she’d been fifteen when Percy died, and she’d made sure the goblin that’d killed him followed him to the grave. The image of your first partner getting sucked into a bright burning light pit to an alternate dimension isn’t all that easy to forget, though. And it didn’t make you want to run out and find a replacement.
Yet, here she was asking a total stranger to help her.
She couldn’t put her finger on the exact reason she trusted Shane. Either it was his no-questions-asked willingness to help her kill the troll, or the fact he hadn’t run screaming like a girl when she’d ripped the creature’s heart out with her bare hands. Her job got messy, and she would need someone who wasn’t going to balk when the situation got hairy.
Shane seemed like he could be reliable.
Or—at the very least—he seemed like he could last a few rounds before getting himself killed, and that was all she really needed.
“You’re desperate?” he parroted. “Wow, lady. Be still my throbbing heart.”
Siobhan shot him a look. “I can take care of that throbbing-heart problem for you.”
Shane mimed zipping his lips shut.
“You know about some of the supernatural things lurking in the city, right? What do you know?”
He paused, and Siobhan let herself take a good look at him. His face was rough with dark stubble except for one spot on his right cheek where a silvery white scar showed bright against the rest of growth. Scars were usually good for a story, and Siobhan liked them because it meant somewhere in a person’s past they’d been able to walk away from something bad.
His dark, almost black hair was styled into a sort of Mohawk with the sides cut close to his scalp and the hair on the crown allowed to grow long. It probably usually stood tall, but right now it lay flat and gave the unfortunate impression of the styles she’d seen German SS officers wear. Without thinking about it Siobhan reached out and fluffed up his flat hair so it stood at attention rather than making him look like a battered Nazi.
Now he looked like an outcast from the Sex Pistols, but it was an improvement.
His nose had been broken at some point in his life, and it hadn’t healed right, giving the bridge a slight zigzag appearance.
When she’d touched his hair, he’d opened his eyes and stared at her while she looked him over. Eyes the color of bluebells or midafternoon sky weren’t what she expected from his otherwise dusky features.
When he grinned at her, she realized she’d been cataloguing him too long. She had crossed the line from passing interest into creepy.
Shane pretended not to notice and answered her question like nothing strange had happened. “Vampires are the big ones. For me, anyway. I mean the vamp council cuts my checks, and in return I kill their lost boys and girls.”
“How peculiar.”
“Well, the way they put it to me, better to deal with your own problems before they become somebody else’s, right?”
“I wouldn’t have anticipated that kind of logic from vampires.”
“Hell, lady, vampires have an overabundance of logic. Those bastards spend all damn night debating this and that, and it’s a goddamn wonder they get a single thing done.”
“What else?”
“Werewolves.”
Siobhan nodded. “Yes, thankfully not something I have to deal with in my line of work. My people made a pact hundreds of years ago that we wouldn’t interfere with the wolves as long as they didn’t become a problem for us. So far they haven’t.”
Shane laughed hoarsely, and she wasn’t sure if it was at her expense. “Monsters are everyone’s problem,” he clarified. “Some are just too close to human most days for it to matter.”
“Any others?” She wasn’t in a mood to ruminate on the philosophy of what kept a good person with bad luck from becoming an all-out bad person.
“Fae?”
Siobhan groaned. “
Fae
?”
“Yeah…you know, fairies and shit.”
“Oh, Shane.”
“Wow, you just channeled my foster mom to a scary extreme.”
“Saying
fae
like they’re one entity is like saying you’ve heard of
insects
.”
“A pest is a pest.”
“The fae are much more than that. You understand
nothing
.”
“Jesus, lady, take a chill pill.” Shane propped himself up on his elbows and furrowed his brow at her. “How about you differentiate some frigging
order
or
genus
or some shit like that? Instead of treating me like an idiot, why don’t you
tell me
what you want me to know?”
Just like that she boomeranged from being prepared to kick him to the curb to thinking he
might
have hope yet.
“It’s complicated.”
“Should I be taking notes?”
Siobhan shifted on the bed, her hand coming to rest on Shane’s knee where she squeezed in a silent message somewhere between
shut the hell up
and
seriously shut up before I stick my giant glowing knife in you.
“Have you ever regretted saving someone’s life?”
“No, but I think I’ve made a few people regret saving mine.”
She smiled and tapped a finger to her nose before releasing his leg. “I’m sorry. I’m just used to being with people who have been raised to know these things. The ignorance of humans is sometimes…staggering to me.”
If Shane was offended by her calling him ignorant, it didn’t show. “Are you not human?”
“I’m…more than human.” She wanted to say
better
, because pride of her line made her believe she really was better, but she stuck with
more
seeing as he was being patient with her attitude to this point, and she thought it better not to push him too far before he agreed to help her.
“Define
more than human
.”
“I’m a druid.”
Shane sat all the way up and crossed his arms over his chest. “Like, ancient Celtic dudes in cloaks who built Stonehenge and sacrificed humans to the gods? Those druids?”
Siobhan huffed out a breath, blowing her bangs out of her eyes. “Close enough,” she said with a sigh. Trying to explain the different clans, their purposes and the gates they protected might take hours. She was going to have to give him the CliffsNotes version. “Druids are protectors. There are gates…metaphysical passageways between this world and the reality belonging to the fae. The two realities exist simultaneously, one on top of the other but never mingling. These gates allow fae to pass from their reality into ours.”
“And that’s bad, I take it.”
“It isn’t always disastrous, but it’s never…advisable.”
“Okay, so if these gates are such a bad thing, why doesn’t someone close them?”
Siobhan snorted. “The gateways have been open for millennia, since the fae wandered freely on this realm and wreaked havoc at will. Then my people became the defenders of mankind and—”
“
The defenders of mankind
?” Shane started laughing and didn’t stop even when Siobhan glared and started thought-stabbing him. “Lady, you’ve got a pretty inflated sense of purpose.”
“
Siobhan
,” she replied curtly. “My name isn’t
lady
, so I’d appreciate it if you either called me Siobhan or kept quiet. In fact, given your habit for saying truly moronic things, I think it would be best if you just didn’t interrupt until I’m done.”
“You sure know how to woo a dude into helping you…
Siobhan
.”
Siobhan thought it best to ignore him at this point and plow forward with her story. “The gates are now guarded by druidic clans all over the world. There are two gateways in New York. One is under the protection of a fae guardian. The other is exposed and watched by my people, the Claughdid clan.”