“Weak?” I leaned in until my own grin made a clinking sound as it touched his. Teeth to teeth. Hunter to hunter. “I taste weak?” I heard hisses and growls from behind me. I reminded myself—baby monsters, emphasis on baby. No matter what my hand wanted to do, it was going to listen to me. “Kids. You’re so cute. I don’t have to want to kill you. To kill you I only have to be better than you.” The fetid breath mixed with mine, but his eyes were gleaming now, from pained moisture. “Junior, I’m better than you. Go home to Mommy.”
He thumped his tail against the ground. I was concentrating on his eyes and the intent smoldering there, but I heard the sound. It was a signal. The rapacious snapping and rumbling from behind went silent. “You are not weak. We will go.” He gave a cautiously sinuous step back away from my blade and I let him. The scaly lids blinked to take away the pain. As tough as they were, if I’d scratched his cornea I’d have been surprised. I’d been careful, but I’d been ready. If I’d had to jam the blade through his eye into his brain, I would have, but teenagers do stupid shit all the time. Giving him the chance to think it out and make the smart choice was the right thing to do. When he was a full-grown monster, then I’d hold him accountable for his decision-making skills and take him out without a second thought. Until that happened, I’d make like a social worker.
Slithering past me, he and his brothers and sisters ran, disappearing into the trees. I turned my attention to Leandros, who had a boglet on the ground, one foot on the grass, one on the muddy throat, and his sword embedded a few inches into flesh over where I guessed a boggle might carry its heart. “Jesus, Leandros, you’re not going to kill it, are you? It probably has a date for monster homecoming later. Cut it some slack.”
“I hadn’t planned on killing it as that would annoy Mama Boggle. She’s fond of her children. I was merely keeping it from killing me while I kept an eye on you.” He stepped back, removing his foot and his sword. The boglet gave a growl before following the rest of its litter, exhibiting a definitely dejected slink to his lope. “Killing a boglet would bring Boggle and the rest of them on us. That we might not be able to handle. Boggle on her own is more deadly than all her children combined.”
“Good point,” I granted. “She looked badass, but I didn’t know she was that badass.”
“I told you on the way over… . Never mind. Why do I try?” He turned his eyes up to the sky, searching for the answer or peace. I looked up too. I didn’t see either one. “Amnesia or not,” he started again, sheathing his sword, “your attention span hasn’t changed. If you didn’t kill your boglet because of the mother, then why didn’t you?”
I started walking beside him when he began moving. “It was a kid. Killing a kid, even a monster kid, you shouldn’t do that.” Because death was forever and blackbirds fell from the sky. If you had an opportunity to spare one, if only for a little while, you should.
“That’s true, although you normally would’ve taunted the boglet more. You do enjoy a good insult.”
“I insulted,” I protested, my breath a frozen fog as a mix of fallen leaves and dead grass crunched under my feet. “I didn’t spend all night doing it, but I’m freezing my ass off out here. And what did that thing mean when it was talking about my being weak? About off? My being off or not having off. Something. What was he talking about?”
“Face it, little brother,” he answered, walking faster, despite not having complained about the cold once. “Even to boggles, your humor has always been a little off.”
We didn’t go home after Central Park and, when I asked where we were going, Leandros answered to do something worse than play hide-and-seek with mud-loving homicidal alligators.
“What could be worse? Saddling them up and riding them like broncos in some bizarre supernatural rodeo? I’m sure Goodfellow has a few assless chaps he could lend us.”
“Smart-ass.” Leandros snorted as we reached the edge of the park and he hailed a taxi. “That certainly didn’t disappear with your memory.”
“Worse things than being a smart-ass,” I grumbled.
“Far worse,” he agreed. “So be prepared, because we’re going to see one of those far worse things.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Our annoyed clients.”
The building was close to Central Park but on the opposite side, making me glad for the taxi. I’d run enough today. The limo was long gone. Promise and Goodfellow had better things to do. Lucky them. I’d asked Leandros if he wasn’t worried about Promise becoming an Ammut snack—Goodfellow had someone else to bunk with; I wasn’t sure Moses would approve, but not my business. Regarding Promise, Leandros had said she was staying with several vampires; there was safety in numbers. Normally she would’ve stayed with us or vice versa, but he was afraid I’d have a glitch of die-monster-die and try to stab her with a kitchen knife if she reached past me for a breakfast bagel.
Inside, we made the grade past the doorman, just barely, considering all the mud we were streaked with, and not exactly fragrant mud either. We stank. The security desk had our names and had us sign in. Leandros signed Sun Tzu. I didn’t ask. I was learning to bob and weave those lectures. I signed Captain Hook. Unlike me, he did ask.
I’d turned toward the elevators and got a lecture anyway. You should never take an elevator. Elevators were death traps—metal boxes that turned into untelevised caged death matches when something slithered in there with you and tried to tear you apart. And if you survived, you still had to walk out wearing monster guts from head to toe. It was not a good look from security’s point of view. Leandros all but smacked my hand as if I were a two-year-old reaching for a hot stove when I aimed a finger for the UP button.
On the stairs Leandros asked, “Why Captain Hook? It’s not one of your usual fake names. Did you forget?”
Nope, I did remember those from my fake IDs in South Carolina.
Nightmare on Elm Street
,
Friday the Thirteenth
, and
Halloween
. Movie villains R us or R me. I started climbing. “No, I remember those. I was thinking about Nevah’s Landing. You said you told me the story
Peter Pan
there when I was a kid, right? I was kind of picturing my memories chasing me like that albino crocodile with the ticking clock chased Hook.” I remembered it as well as the blackbird, if not more. Creepy damn thing.
“Albino?”
We passed the third floor. “Yeah, the one that ate Hook’s hand. Albino. Big white crocodile with red eyes. It would sneak up and whisper in your ear. Spooky as hell. That’s a damn scary story to be telling a kid by the way, Leandros. But it is like that. My memories are whispering with that blackbird memory,” my inner self with its rampant monster prejudice was whispering more, “but I just can’t make them out. And what floor did you say this meeting is on?”
“Sixteenth,” he answered, but there was a distracted tone in his voice. Maybe the albino croc had scared him as a kid too and he’d forgotten it. Although I doubt anyone or anything had scared Niko Leandros, no matter what his age.
Christ. I would rather take the death trap. Sixteen floors. Forget death trap. I’d rather take a real crocodile gnawing off my leg. “If we haven’t found anything yet on …” Crap, what was it again? “Ammut,” I said triumphantly. “If we haven’t found anything on that life-force-sucking, spider-loving Egyptian bitch to report, why are we here?”
“To tell why we have nothing to show, hope they don’t attempt to kill us for the delay, and to find out how many more of her victims have gone missing or been found dead.”
“Dead. Kill. Say them like bad words,” someone scoffed.
The voice was striking, as was the Wolf’s surprising plunge out of nowhere to the fourth-floor landing, hitting the tile barely a foot from me. She was all that made a Wolf, predatory in her speed, there was no doubt, but she was all female too, that being almost more dangerous than the Wolf in her. She crouched on all fours, silver blond hair like a bridal veil over her face. Through the winter strands I could see tilted amber eyes the same color as the skin that showed between the white leather shirt and black jeans. Her arms were bare. Her throat and her lower abdomen were the same except for a tattooed choker around the first and wicked slashes of scar tissue across the last. She smiled, teeth bright against her darker skin, as she tossed her hair back to show her face. I wanted to say she was beautiful. She
was
beautiful, but it wasn’t a human kind of beauty. Hers was the beauty of a mountain so high, so fierce, so deadly, it would suck the oxygen from your lungs and take your life in a heartbeat for the crime of wanting to see that beauty up close.
Remaining on all fours, she said, “Where have you been, pretty boy? You leave, who is here to play games?” Beauty like hers took; it never gave. And if it pretended that it did, it was only to soften you up to make your fall that much harder.
The same kind of hard fall that Wolf I’d shot in the head had taken. “Delilah.” I didn’t remember her face or her body or her unique lupine smell, but Niko and Goodfellow had said the Alpha of the Lupa pack liked to play games. And as my ex, she especially liked to play them with me.
Also, the first night we’d been in the city, while I slept, Leandros had made index cards. Memory joggers. Who was who. Who could be trusted and who could not. The guy was brilliant in everything he did. The way he fought the boggle, when he sparred, all the books he had—each one weighing twenty pounds minimum—the precise way he made his tea, the equally precise way he disarmed me when I thought I was a hotshot back in South Carolina. Not even a week and some of those days were cloudy, but I saw what I saw: Niko was an expert in everything he did, mental or physical. He was the kind of man the world saw only every few centuries. Born to rule and gifted by nature beyond all others.
But nature does hate perfection. The guy couldn’t draw his ass out of a wet paper bag. I’d thumbed through my stack of cards on the subway to the Ninth Circle. The first had been a stick figure with circles for breasts, long blond hair indicated by two swoopy lines, a fluffy dog tail, and a fang-filled smile.
Delilah (bad)
was written in machine-perfect calligraphy at the top of the card. There’d been stick men with angel wings,
Ishiah (good) Samyel (good),
a stick woman with vampire fangs,
Promise (good)
, a round thing with Mickey Mouse ears and a skinny tail marked
Mickey (debatable)
. Then there’d been one stick figure with curly hair and three legs. I didn’t need the
Robin Goodfellow (Run for your life)
to ball it up and throw it at Leandros, which I had.
“I thought the Lupa pack wasn’t committing to this fight,” Niko said at my shoulder.
She stood and shrugged as more Lupa rained down around her. “I can change my mind—did change my mind. Spiders took four of my pack. What the Kin is learning, what the vampires know, I want this bitch to
feel
. We Lupa are untouchable. To kill Lupa is to take your last breath.” The Wolves around her smiled in a lightning-swift shadow of hers. They smelled her arousal. I smelled it. “Except for you, pretty boy.” The muzzle of my Desert Eagle was pressed against her forehead as her fingers ran along my jaw. My brain might stay out to lunch forever, but my body always knew what it was doing.
“Any present I give to you, you are free. Do as you wish. Play, kill, eat.” She laughed, the gun not existing in her reality at all. She slapped me in the face, playfully to another Wolf maybe, but it was a damn hard smack to a human. She laughed again. “Stop with the silly puck cologne. Who do you hide from in this city? Yourself?”
I didn’t have a chance to wonder why she’d think I was into cologne, much less
Goodfellow’s
cologne when she was under my gun, feinting, and leaping over me, a diver into water far below. That it wasn’t water, only more stairs, didn’t matter. She landed on her feet and kept running. Her pack moved around us. I felt the swipe of claws and pulled a combat knife with my other hand to slap back hands and paws and several elongated jaws with fangs ready for one tiny opening. Play to them, following their Alpha’s lead. Except for Delilah, they all were obviously All Wolf—stuck in between. Wolf eyes, human face. Wolf face, human eyes and hands. Some used hooded jackets to hide and some needed nothing; they simply were exotic-looking women. But if you knew …
“Delilah is Alpha, but the whole pack is that All Wolf cult?” I asked, rubbing my burning jaw as I watched them all disappear down the stairs in the blink of an eye, wolves on a rabbit. Run, run, run.
“Her vocal cords.” He answered the question I hadn’t asked. “That’s not an accent. Delilah’s All Wolf is hidden inside her, but she’s All Wolf, and more than that, she’s Kin; make no mistake.” He tapped my arm and pointed. “Kin.”
There were bloody fingerprints, footprints, and paw prints on the stairs. Kin were killers, I’d been told—every last one of them. I touched my jaw where Delilah’s fingers had been. There was a smudge of blood there too. “You think Delilah is now our only client?”
“I think she may be,” he said as he started running up the rest of the stairs.
But the boardroom he charged into was empty except for a card with neatly written letters,
Fourth Alternate Location
, resting in the middle of the table. The blood was from a dead security guard at the end of the hall. He wasn’t human. He looked human … until I lifted his upper lip to see small fangs, right before they slid out of sight, the gums sealing over them. Nature—keeping the vamp’s secret for them. I checked his vitals just in case, although I wasn’t precisely sure what made a vampire dead. “No heartbeat,” I was informed. Born, not made—live, not undead. They were the same as humans that way with the same vital signs or lack of them after a she-Wolf Alpha took one down. And they even bled red like humans. Made sense. They used to drain humans. You wouldn’t eat what you couldn’t digest. I hadn’t seen a scratch on Delilah, and Leandros said vamps were fast and strong—very fast, very strong. She was something all right.