I blushed. Numped again. It seemed like every time I scored a point with the warlock, I said or did something totally uncool. I felt like I was taking one step back for every two steps forward. Luckily, Hexe didn’t seem to be holding my ignorance against me.
I took the carton of nonfat milk I’d bought the other day from the fridge and added a dollop to my coffee. The concoction was rich and fragrant, and it shot through my weary system like a jolt of electricity.
“Mmmm! It’s delicious. Thank you for making this for me. It was very thoughtful of you.”
“My pleasure.” He smiled. “Oh, by the way—our new houseguest has been asking for you.”
I nearly choked on my drink. “You mean he can
talk
?”
“Of course he can talk. He’s not feral.”
“What does he want?” I asked nervously. Hexe might be so used to supernatural creatures that he considered shape-shifters to be no more worrisome than raccoons, but I had seen one too many horror movies to act so blasé.
“He says he wants to apologize. You really ought to go see him, Tate. He’s quite contrite about the whole thing.”
The thought of coming face-to-face again with the creature that had pursued me the night before made my head swim. I took another gulp of the coffee, hoping it might fortify me further.
“That’s . . . nice, I guess. Can’t you just tell him I accept his apology?”
Hexe shook his head. “He insists on doing it himself. Bastet are very proper, in their own way.”
“It’s not that I want to be rude. ...” I glanced away, trying to control the ill ease steadily growing inside me. “But don’t you think it’s a little soon? I mean, he tried to murder me only a few hours ago. ...”
“If you’re going to live in Golgotham, you can’t let one bad experience color your understanding of an individual, much less an entire species. You have nothing to fear, Tate. He’s completely harmless.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Scratch is under orders to bite his head off the second he tries something. Does that make you feel safer?”
“Yeah, it does, actually,” I conceded. Funny how my earlier apprehension regarding the familiar miraculously disappeared once he saved my life.
The were-cat’s recovery room was on the second floor, on the other side of the communal bathroom. The knowledge that my would-be killer was only a few yards away from where I slept did little to soothe my nerves.
As Hexe opened the door, I steeled myself for the sight of the shape-shifter as I’d last seen him, sitting in bed, propped up on pillows, like a feline version of the Big Bad Wolf after he’d gobbled down Little Red Riding Hood’s granny.
Instead, what I saw was a teenaged boy, around sixteen years old, dressed in a pair of ill-fitting
Star Wars
pajamas. The fear and apprehension I had about confronting my attacker face-to-muzzle instantly disappeared.
I turned and stared at Hexe in disbelief. “You’ve gotta be shitting me—he’s a kid?”
“You must be Tate,” the teenaged were-cat said, struggling to sit up.
Scratch, once more in his winged house cat form, was curled up at the foot of the bed. He lifted his head and growled a warning at the shape-shifter.
“Allow me,” Hexe said, defusing the situation by arranging his patient’s pillows.
I stepped inside the room and closed the door behind me, unable to take my eyes off the young were-cat. He was lean, with the build of a track star, unruly sand-colored hair and a fairly impressive unibrow. If I hadn’t known he was a were-cougar, my only thought upon seeing him would have been that he was in desperate need of a brow wax and a sandwich.
“I’m Lukas, son of Evander and Valentina. And I am
so
ashamed of what I did to you,” the were-cat apologized. “My parents raised me better than that. Please forgive me, ma’am. I was not myself last night. They pumped me full of drugs to make me fight. I was still under the influence when you stumbled across me. ...”
“Fight?” Suddenly things started to make a horrible kind of sense. “How old are you, Lukas?”
“Sixteen, ma’am.”
“Where are you from?”
“My clan lives on the Dannemora Preserve. My people make their living as trappers.”
Hexe sat down on the edge of the bed. “What are you doing in the city?”
“I saw it on TV.”
“You saw it on TV?” I was unable to hide my surprise. It suddenly occurred to me that what little I knew about shape-shifters came straight from Hollywood and even less reliable sources.
“Not all of us sleep in dens and eat raw meat,” Lukas pointed out defensively. “Some of us live indoors, cook our food, and have satellite television.”
Good, at least he’s housebroken
, I thought to myself.
“I spent my entire life on the preserve, just like my father, and his father before him. But I always knew there was something more, something better. I felt hemmed in. I wanted to sniff trees that weren’t already marked, you know? Once I saved up enough money, I snuck off the preserve and bought a bus ticket to the city. I knew enough to wear a cap and pull it down low enough to keep humans from noticing my brow. ...”
“Perhaps it would be easier if you showed us your story, rather than told it to us,” Hexe said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a crystal the size of a goose egg. After polishing it on his shirtfront, he offered it to the young were-cat. “Here, take a deep breath and exhale it onto the scrying crystal, then hold it up between your thumb and forefinger. We’ll be able to see into your past,” Hexe explained, “but I’m afraid we won’t be able to hear anything.”
Lukas did as he was told and breathed onto its surface. As he held it up, I could see dozens upon dozens of tiny black-and-white figures moving around within the crystal. After a second I realized I was looking at the interior of the Port Authority bus terminal.
I spotted Lukas among the swirling mass of humanity, looking lost and confused. Suddenly he was approached by a man with long, dirty blond hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail, dressed in a black leather jacket and matching jeans.
“Who’s the bus station pimp?” I asked.
“That’s Phelan,” Lukas explained, his voice growing cold. “He’s shaved an open patch in his brow, but I could tell he was a werewolf by the way he moved. He told me he could take me to a den in the city, where there were other weres like ourselves, and I could bed down and get fed, free of charge.” He gave a bitter laugh. “At the time I couldn’t believe my luck! Normally I wouldn’t have anything to do with a werewolf, but I didn’t see any reason in holding grudges.”
I watched as Phelan led Lukas out of the bus terminal into the streets of Times Square. I could see Lukas staring in awe and trepidation at the traffic surrounding him on all sides. Times Square is intimidating enough for kids raised in the suburbs; I could only imagine how daunting it might seem to someone raised in a forest. Suddenly the side of a black panel van parked in the loading zone rolled open and a big Kymeran with a fauxhawk jumped out.
Hexe frowned. “A Kymeran? Working with a werewolf?”
Lukas nodded. “Yeah. He was the first one of your kind I’d seen in the flesh. You can’t tell by looking at this, but he has pink hair.”
The big Kymeran raised his hand to his mouth and blew a whitish powder in Lukas’s face, just like Hexe did the night before, with the same result. Phelan and the pink-haired guy then dragged Lukas into the van. The moment the door slammed shut, the picture became scrambled, like an old television signal.
By the time it cleared up, I could see Lukas was in a room somewhere, possibly a basement, judging from the exposed pipes. He was strapped to some kind of medical gurney. A figure stepped forward—a tall, thin Kymeran dressed in a long white coat with dried blood-stains all over it. For some reason my blood ran cold.
“That’s Dr. Moot.” Hexe more spat the name than spoke it. “He used to be a surgeon—until they found out he was doing unnecessary surgeries to harvest body parts for the black magic market. What is he saying to you, Lukas?”
“He’s telling me my new owner needs to have a few ‘adjustments’ made to me. He needs me to put on my cougar skin. But I refuse. He says it doesn’t matter because he can
make
me change, whether I want to or not.”
I watched as the Dr. Moot inside the scrying crystal filled a syringe with some kind of liquid and jabbed it into Lukas’s arm. The captive bastet started to convulse, transforming into his were-cougar aspect. Dr. Moot then turned to a tray of surgical instruments laid out beside the table. He picked up a scalpel and held it to the light, turning it so he could study its blade.
Hexe leaned forward, peering deep into the crystal. “Is that a silver scalpel?” he asked.
“Yes.” Lukas nodded sadly.
“What’s he doing?” I asked, a sick feeling rising in my gut.
“Moot’s hambling him,” Hexe replied grimly. “It’s a stroke of evil genius, really. Not only does it keep a beast fighting in the pit from being physically able to back away, basically forcing it to fight, it guarantees they won’t try and run away.”
“Why’s that?”
“If any of us were to return to our preserves as a cripple, it’s practically a death sentence,” Lukas replied. “Some of the older weres who end up in the kennel simply lie down and die after they realize what’s been done to them.”
Mercifully the image inside the crystal grew fuzzy and distorted as Dr. Moot took the scalpel to Lukas’s hind legs. When the picture cleared back up, I could see Lukas, once more in his human skin, lying on a pile of dirty straw inside a large metal cage. He was dressed in nothing but a pair of track pants, with filthy, bloody bandages wrapped about his feet. There was a shock collar fastened around his throat. I watched, my heart nearly breaking, as he dragged himself across the grimy floor to a metal bowl to try and get a drink of water.
Suddenly Lukas looked up and saw a figure sitting in the cage next to his. It was a young man slightly older than he, with scruffy hair, dressed in a tattered pair of jogging pants with a shock collar around his neck. I could see a scar going from his left brow up into his hairline.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“That’s Rufus,” Lukas said sadly. “He was from the Embreeville Preserve. We became friends. He was the one who told me that all the werewolves and other shape-shifters in the kennel belonged to someone called Boss Marz—and the only way I could hope to stay alive was by fighting to the death in the pit.”
“I should have known Boss Marz was involved.” Hexe scowled. “Leave it to the Malandanti to traffic in something barbaric.”
I felt a little flower of panic blossom in my belly. I might be a nump, but even I knew about the Kymeran version of the Mafia. Gambling, drugs, smuggling, prostitution, theft . . . If it was illegal and going on in Golgotham, the Malandanti had a six-fingered hand in it.
They first emerged during the Unholy War, where they offered protection to fellow Kymerans and other supernaturals—for a price. After the Divine Intervention of 1111 put an end to the wholesale persecution of nonhumans, the organization went underground, infiltrating supernatural ghettos worldwide.
“I realize shape-shifters have a bloodthirsty reputation in the human world, but among our own kind there are only two situations where fighting to the death is acceptable—mating and protecting our families,” Lukas explained. “Anything else is an unpardonable sin. You must understand that what we were being forced to do was an abomination.”
The picture faded out for a second. When it returned, I saw the henchman with the fauxhawk who had drugged Lukas unlocking the were-cat’s cage. He had a buddy with him, and they were both laughing at something. The one with the fauxhawk pushed a button on this gadget that looked like a universal remote. Suddenly Lukas fell to the ground in convulsions. The bastards tormenting him laughed and jolted him at least two more times before fixing a leash onto his collar.
They took him out of his cage and led him, still in his human form, out of the kennel and into some kind of tunnel. At the end was a door. Next to it stood the werewolf Phelan.
“They’re taking me to my first fight,” Lukas explained, his voice oddly flat. “I could hear people shouting and laughing on the other side of the door. I could also smell sawdust and blood. Lots of blood.”
Phelan grinned at Lukas and held up a hypodermic. The werewolf then shoved the needle into Lukas’s arm and opened the door. The two Malandanti threw Lukas across the threshold like bouncers kicking out a drunk, then slammed the door shut behind him. By the time the boy hit the sawdust, he was already changing into his were-cougar aspect.
Lukas stood at the bottom of a pit fifty feet across, with wooden sides twenty feet high, topped with bales of razor wire. Beyond the pit were bleachers full of spectators. Some were human, some were Kymerans, but all of them were waving handfuls of money. I could tell they were shouting at the top of their lungs, even though there was no sound.
Of all the faces peering down at Lukas, one in particular caught my attention. It belonged to a heavyset Kymeran with slicked-back hair. He was wearing an expensive suit and had gold rings on every finger.
“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing to the figure in the gazing glass.
“That’s Boss Marz,” Lukas said, a mixture of hatred and fear in his voice. “I knew it was him the moment I smelled him. He’s the alpha, for sure.”
A panel in the wall on the other side of the pit slid open. I couldn’t see what was on the other side, but I knew it had to be big and pissed off from the way the spectators overhead started shaking more handfuls of money at one another. The picture suddenly went hay-wire, and when it reappeared I saw Lukas, still in his were-cat form, roaring in triumph, his fur sticky with blood. The crowd overhead was even wilder than before. Then I realized Lukas was straddling a disemboweled African lion. I don’t know if Boss Marz caught it in the wild or if he bought it from a circus, but I could tell from its ribs that he had starved it before setting it loose.