Leonidas motioned with his hands, now covered in golden fur and ending in inch-long black talons. Everyone took a few steps back. Moving over to the dog, I crouched down. Reaching out my left hand, I gently touched blood-slicked fur. A whine escaped its lips. It was still alive. It looked like hell warmed over, but it was still alive.
Softly I examined it. Sorry, her, softly I examined
her.
She was small, maybe sixty pounds, but when healthy she looked like she would fill out to a nice ninety to one hundred. She was long-limbed, and her fur, where it wasn’t covered in gore, was thick and soft. The color was a deep russet that made the blood hard to spot where it was drying. The thick collar had rubbed and worn away the fur around her neck, leaving the skin under it raw and chafed. I pushed my power out to her, letting it run down my arm and roll over her. The feedback I got was the feel of skin and the smell of a city park in the moonlight.
Just as I thought, another shape-shifter.
As gently as I could, I slid my arm under her, trying to find a purchase on her limp form that would allow me to pick her up. It was harder than you would think. It would have been cake if I’d had two hands to use, but I still had my gun out in my right hand and pointed at the bad guys.
Finally, I got her into the crook of my arm. Her head lolled limply against my skin, leaving smears of blood, brown and crimson. Lifting her confirmed she didn’t weigh anything. Carefully, I backed over to the Comet’s passenger door. There was a click as Tiff hit the button to unlock it, causing the heavy steel door to yawn wide and swallow us.
The toe of my boot slid behind the front seat and hooked the lever, which folded the back down. It was awkward to lean in and lay her on the backseat. I piled the chain up into loose bundles in the floorboards. Standing up, I raised the .45 to cover the Weres again.
I pushed the front seat back upright. Standing with one foot in the car and one foot on the ground, I drew the .44 snub-nosed revolver from the holster at my lower back. Now I had both hands full of gun pointed at the bad guys. Nodding to Tiff made her slip in behind the wheel and close her door. I felt the car bump a bit as she put it in gear, foot on the brake.
Seven angry lycanthropes glared at me in the springtime sun. Leonidas pointed a clawed hand at me. “This isn’t over. I will have what is mine.”
I gave him my best smile, the pit bull grin. “The only thing yours around here is a silver bullet.” I waved the guns from one to the other of them for effect. “Get out of my town. If I see you again, I will shoot you in the face.”
I dropped into the seat and Tiff put the pedal to the metal. The Comet’s door slammed shut as she lurched forward, scattering Weres like bowling pins and covering them with dust.
I had been right. An asshole had come along and ruined my perfectly good day.
I hate being right.
2
Kat covered the stage with clean bar towels for me to lay our rescue on. They were freshly bleached and gleaming white, so the blood and dirt from the dog’s fur screamed out against them. They were stark black marks even in the low light of the club. She grabbed the first-aid kit behind the bar and hauled it over, dropping it heavy on the wooden surface.
Kat is very efficient. That’s why she manages Polecats, the club I own. Before she came into my life, it made enough money to fund my war. With her at the helm, it made a killing.
I found Kat while on a hunt. Her little sister had been savagely killed by vampires. Kat had tried to go after them herself, looking for the bloodsucker responsible by playing groupie in the vampire scene. She had been willing to let them bite her, drink from her, and have her to try and find the vampire responsible for killing her sister. They discovered what she was up to and enslaved her, turning her into a bloodwhore. They handed her over to a sadistic bastard named Darius, and he put her through a level of sexual torture that most people would not survive.
For months.
I found her, rescued her, and helped her get revenge on them all. Since then, she’s had a deep-seated, violent hatred for anything vampire. She’s like a sister to me and is dedicated completely to what I do.
She bumped me out of the way and set the duffel bag we use as a first aid kit on the stage next to the dog. Inside that bag was everything you might need to deal with any injury short of major surgery.
Occult bounty hunting is a rough job.
Pulling her straight, thick blond hair back in a ponytail, she secured it with a hair tie from her wrist. Unzipping the bag, she reached in and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. They were bright pink and smelled like powdered rubbber.
I looked down at where I had carried the lycanthrope into the club. My arms were so filthy with dried blood, dirt, and fur that you could barely see the tattoos covering them. Standing up, I stripped off the black button-up shirt, leaving me in a black A-shirt, or a wife beater as they are called. The button-up was to cover my guns; the wife beater was to keep my shoulder holster from chafing. Father Mulcahy tossed me a wet towel and I began to clean off my arms.
It was odd to clean off blood and none of it be mine.
Nodding, he moved over by Tiff. His left leg dragged just a bit, giving him a short limp. Father Mulcahy is the Catholic priest who tends bar at Polecats. Mass on Sundays and tending bar the rest of the week. He has been with me since I first started hunting monsters after my family was killed those years back. Only he knew the details of my family’s deaths and what happened afterward. Only he had any inkling of what it did to me. I needed someone that I could rely on when everything went tits up.
Father Mulcahy was as reliable as cancer.
The dog lay limp like she had since we rescued her, but the convulsive shaking she had done in the car had slowed to a tremble. Whimpers and whines came from her muzzle as Kat probed her for wounds. Kat has a lot of experience being a medic. She’s usually the one who patches me up. No, I am not a dog, but technically neither was her current patient.
Lycanthropes are humans who can change into animals. It’s a supernatural virus. It is contagious, but not all that easy to catch. Not like in the movies where a scratch will make you furry once a month. You need blood-to-blood contact or blood-to-mucous membrane. It works a lot like AIDS, actually.
Also, the virus mutates with the host DNA, so it is different from lycanthrope to lycanthrope. Some shape-shifters can change form anytime they want; some can only change in the height of the lunar cycle. Some can change into partial animal forms, like a half-human, half-animal combo pack. Some can only change completely into their animal form. Some shape-shifters retain their intellect while shifted, some don’t and they remember what their animal half did as a dream. And all these variants had more variants.
The only two constant rules about lycanthropes are as follows: First, they all lose control during the full moon. They go completely, out-of-control, batshit crazy. Transformed and vicious. Different lycanthropes handle it different ways. Some lock up, some dope up, and some go north to northern Georgia where a wealthy Were-possum has a fully fenced and portioned off hunting preserve that covers an entire mountain. If the Weres are not a predator, they just stay home, but the dangerous ones have to take precautions.
The second constant is that silver is the great equalizer. Every lycanthrope in the world has a violent allergic reaction to silver to the point that it negates their healing ability and can be deadly.
Other than that, all bets are off.
There are also shape-shifters who have nothing to do with lycanthropy. I know a family of Tengu here in Atlanta. They own a drive-through sushi joint called the Bento Box. Tengu shift into ravens and raven-human warrior forms, but they are not lycanthropes. They are Tengu. There are also skinwalkers, selkies, and animals who turn into men. I am an acquaintance-who-doesn’t-kill-each-other with an ancient three-headed dragon who spends his days as a professional hitman. He is apparently a Werekin, whatever that means. Silver worked on some of these, some it didn’t. But even if a shape-shifter could shrug off silver, I was still delivering a bullet.
I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but the one Kat was examining felt like a lycanthrope. It’s hard to describe, but I felt the night and the moon in her, but not the forest. A Were-dog instead of a Werewolf, she looked tamer than any kind of feral canine. My ability to feel out supernatural crap in others filters through my natural senses, but it is very impressionistic and I have to do a lot of interpretation. It’s a guessing game that I win only sometimes.
Kat sat back on her heels, kneeling on the stage next to her patient. “There are some definite broken ribs, but I can’t be certain of much else. There are a lot of cuts and contusions.” Her gloved hand was filthy as it waved over the Were-dog’s abdomen. “But I am really worried about this area, though. It is swollen, solid, and hot to the touch. It’s probably an internal injury, but I can’t tell without an X-ray or an ultrasound.”
“Well, we can’t just swing her over to the local vet.”
“We could take her to Larson. He’s been treating lycanthropes for a few months now and is equipped to handle something like this.”
Larson is a former wannabe vampire hunter who had been used as bait in a plot to kill me by the same hell-bitch vampire from when I met Tiff. In the final standoff he had been seriously injured by one of her minions. That had been months ago, and since then he had become our local mad scientist and go-to guy for research on the supernatural. He lives and works in a lab that I fund through the club.
It was the least I could do, the man was hurt helping me save the world.
I nodded. “Let’s load her back in the Comet and get her over there then.” I knelt down and started using the towels to wrap the dog.
Some small noise I couldn’t identify made the muscles on the back of my neck tense. I stopped working for a second, waiting to hear it again. A tingle started on the back of my scalp, getting stronger as the seconds ticked away.
The entrance doors swung open. Light streamed into the dim club silhouetting three people as they walked in. They were indistinct in the bright light. A deep voice rumbled. “You are not taking her anywhere. We are here to collect her.”
My gun was out just seconds before Kat’s and Father Mulcahy’s.
The doors closed, shutting the light off with a snap. With the streaming light cut off, the three people could now be seen. One was a short, stocky man with a wide chest and a wide jaw to match. Scars covered his neck and arms where his skintight T-shirt did not hide them. Deep-set eyes glared bright gray from under a heavy brow full of scar tissue. They rolled and jittered in his thick skull, making him look crazed. I had seen the same look in the eyes of punch-drunk boxers and soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The middle one of the group was a woman. Tall and lithe, she stalked into the club like she owned it. Her skin was golden brown, like expensive caramel, and her hair was a mass of thick ringlet waves that were pulled back and pinned to show her face. High cheekbones cut between sultry lips and deadly eyes the color of mahogany. She was striking and aristocratic, noble and elegant. She looked like you would find her face stamped on a coin in a foreign country.
The third member of the party was dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit with a smart charcoal stripe. His skin was darker than the woman’s, a dark cocoa to her caramel, and his hair sprouted in tiny dreads the color of blond rolled in dirt. I had seen his face about an hour ago.
It was the same face as the Were-lion that had beaten the dog.
They stopped just inside the club. The man in the suit had his arms outstretched, hands empty of weapons; the other two stayed just behind him. The woman stood straight, hand gently resting on his outstretched arm to the right, whereas the other man leaned his chest against the left one, straining to keep from moving forward. All our guns stayed on them, ruby dots dancing on center mass.
Mentally I cursed at us for leaving the door unlocked in the hurry to see to the injured lycanthrope. I had relied on someone else to get the lock since my arms were full of dog. I would have to stop that. I opened my power up. The same nose-wrinkling smell of cat came to me as earlier, double strong since I was inside and there were two cats in front of me. I would bet dollars to donuts they were both lions. They felt like a mated pair.
The other man gave off the feel of violence. Blood and cement, the taste of fur and metal. Power rolled off the three of them in three distinct flavors: regal and aloof power, calm and peaceful power, and barely contained power that wanted to shed blood.
The lion in front lowered his head just slightly, not deferring, just placating. His arms stayed out to his side, hands held loose, looking as human as I am.
Which isn’t all that human, to be honest.
His voice was deep, a slight purr in his inflections that soothed the ears. “She is one of mine. I thank you for rescuing her, but we are equipped to care for her now. Let us have her so we can tend to her.”
I moved the laser dot up his chest until it flared across the planes of his face. Golden amber eyes blinked in the glare. The dot stopped in the center of his forehead. “I don’t think so. She is under my protection now; I’ll see to her medical care.” I stood up and took a step forward. The red dot stayed on his forehead. “Just who the hell are you people?”
“We are her friends. Her family. We just want to take her to a safe place and nurse her to health.”
“Some asshole named Leonidas is the one who did this to her.” I studied his face. “He looked a lot like you, so you have to understand why I am having a hard time trusting you.”
“That is my brother. We are nothing alike and have nothing to do with each other.”
The scarred one growled low and raspy. The rumble in his chest tightened his jaw into a bulge. The lion turned his hand and touched him on his arm. I think it was meant to be a calming gesture.
It didn’t work.
“You’re not one of us. You can’t protect her like we can.” The scarred man’s jaw was thick and heavy while he talked.
I laughed—a head-back, full-throated guffaw. “You weren’t there when we saved her from the piece of shit who was trying to beat her to death. So take your protection and care, turn it sideways, and shove it up your ass. And while I’m at it, get the fuck out of my club. I need to get her to medical attention.”
I felt the air move before I saw the stocky one come at me. In a blink, he was around the other man’s arm and charging toward me. He was a blur of superhuman speed as he plowed into me, knocking me off my feet. The Colt .45 spun out of my hand and away. Powerful hands clamped on my wrist and throat as we rolled across the floor. I managed to swing my elbow into his face, pain flashing across my arm as his teeth broke skin, but I landed a solid blow to his mouth. I knew because I felt it jolt all the way up to my shoulder. Hot blood spurted, arcing over my forearm to hit me in the face.
We came to a stop in the middle of the floor with him crouching in front of me and me sprawled on my side. Red dripped from his lower jaw. It could have been his blood or mine. I knew I had broken some of his teeth, but I could also feel blood pulsing out of my forearm and running hot down to my wrist. I got to my feet in a scramble, crouching low like he was. Dirty napkins and beer bottles littered the floor between us, and the carpet was soaked with dozens of leftover drinks. We had knocked over a trash can in our tumble.
Kat’s voice called from behind me. “I have no shot!”
I was between her and the lycanthrope that still crouched in front of me. Muscles bunched across his chest and shoulders, white fur sprouting through the scar tissue on his neck and arms. His face was more canine. Jaw wider, lips pulled into a joker grin. Pit bull flashed in my mind. Fucking great. I couldn’t get into a fight with a Were-Labradoodle? No, of course I couldn’t. Who was I kidding?
He wasn’t fully shifting, but he was edging toward it, probably from the adrenaline. He crouched, muscles bunching as he panted. He had attacked me but wasn’t trying to kill me. It made me want to keep from killing him back.