“Ummm. Yeah. No. But thank you.” I was certain that I couldn’t keep up with wolves in a gay dance bar, and I had work to do that limited my time to hunt. He insisted. I desisted. When I finally convinced Ziggy that I really wasn’t going off with the pack, he kissed me on the cheek and hopped into one of the topless cars, fingers fluttering in a wave as they drove off.
As the rest of the guys closed up, I ordered a car and texted my plans to my partners. Have a few free hours. Need some alone time. Back after dusk. When the driver arrived, I told Shemmy to take me to HQ.
It was daylight and I went through the usual security measures, accepted a comms unit, and headed to sub-five to have a chat with a white werewolf. The elevator doors swooshed open and I stepped out onto the clay floor. The lights were focused on the SOD on the far wall, leaving the rest of the huge room dim, but my eyes adjusted quickly. I moved across to the SOD and the white wolf at his feet.
The subbasement reeked of old blood, the odor of damp werewolf, and the peculiar stink of the Son of Darkness. The sour, bloodless, heartless creature hanging on the wall would have garnered my pity if I hadn’t seen video of him drinking down and killing a barroom full of dancers and partygoers. The thing I hadn’t been allowed to kill was watching me, his dark eyes dull yet full of malice. That was new. I’d hoped me cutting out his heart and giving it to a cop would have kept him totally down and out. He was healing. That sucked.
At his feet, Brute was watching me, head on paws, looking sleepy, crystalline eyes content. There were two stainless steel bowls on the floor a few feet away. One held water. The other smelled of raw roast beef and blood.
I dropped to one knee beside him. “Hey.”
He yawned, showing me his killing teeth.
Beast perked up. Fight Brute?
No. He’s on our side. I think.
Beast padded away, her tail twitching, catty and irritated.
“Werewolves came here because they thought you were being held against your will.”
Brute chuffed and his big mouth grinned, tongue lolling.
“I know, right? You can timewalk, so there’s no keeping you anywhere you don’t want to be.” I could change time back to before something awful happened if I wanted. If I was willing to risk the time-paradox possibilities. I’d done that a few times by accident already and it was scary. Brute could do that too. I studied the wolf, who was watching me back. We hadn’t fought on the same side very often, and one of those times he was being eaten by a demon, so I doubted he remembered my part in that. “The angel who saved you, Hayyel? He left you in wolf form so he could give you the ability to timewalk, didn’t he?”
Brute blinked and yawned again. Bored.
“Hayyel wanted you here, to guard the Son of Darkness, didn’t he?”
Brute slanted his eyes to me, suddenly interested in what I had to say.
“He wants this psycho thing alive for some reason that’s more important to the timeline than human lives are.”
A low vibration trembled up through the clay floor into my knee, and I realized Brute was growling so low it wasn’t audible, even to me. Brute shook his head no, a foreign human gesture on the huge wolf head.
“Ooookay. So you’re here to bite the SOD? That’s it?”
Brute’s eyes narrowed, but the growling stopped, so I went on.
“The werecats might try to come back and steal the SOD.”
The werewolf’s eyes narrowed further in an expression that said the cats could die trying.
“Right. Okay. FYI: There are two different wolf packs in town and one of them may be the crazy kind.”
Brute raised his head, chuffed, and licked his lips.
“The other pack seems to think you’re something like royalty and would be honored to have you hunt the crazy pack with them.”
Brute dropped his head, as if bored by the suggestion.
“Yeah. Well. Thanks for the chat.” I looked up at the thing on the wall over me, speaking to it. “Someday Leo won’t be around and I’ll take your head. Just so you know.”
Joses Santana, the SOD, stuck out his tongue and curled it up at me, as if licking the air. And then he laughed. It was silent but mocking, his desiccated lips curling up and the flesh around his eyes crinkling. Brute chuffed up at me as if the idea of my killing the SOD was long overdue and I might save us all a lot of trouble if I just killed him now. Or maybe that was my fond imagining and the wolf just had indigestion. What did I know?
I took the elevator up, checked out, and took an SUV from the motor pool.
I drove by my house and spotted a PsyLED car out front, a tiny sticker on the back window the only clue. I slowed and rolled down the window, taking a sniff of the car, expecting to scent Rick. I got Ayatas instead. Dang.
I drove on past, thinking about the unfriendly werewolves loose in New Orleans and making pacts with gangs. About Ziggy and the friendly werewolves. About the Sangre Duello and the emperor, who I had ignored for hours as I dealt with were problems. Titus Flavius Vespasianus had been a powerful Roman general who became the Roman emperor. As a human, he and his human second in command, Tiberius Julius Alexander, besieged and conquered the city of Jerusalem. Inside the besieged walls were the Jewish, Christian, and Mithran defenders. The siege ended with the sacking of the city, the destruction of the temple, and the enslavement of what pitiful humans remained alive inside the walls. Titus returned home and gained the throne, ruling Rome for two years before he was turned by his vampire concubine, a woman captured from the fall of Jerusalem. He became the undisputed ruler of the Roman Empire and the European Mithrans. He had ruled for two thousand years. Technically, Leo owed him fealty. The legal challenge of Sangre Duello meant Leo was aiming to behead the king in personal combat. But Titus had been fighting with a sword for hundreds of years longer than Leo. To win, Leo would have to cheat. Fortunately he was pretty good at that.
* * *
• • •
Miles away from the city, my weapons and shoes left behind in the SUV, my feet in flops against the mud, I stepped along the path to the bayou, conscious of the tracks of raccoon, dog, deer, turkey, and boar, and evidence of hog destruction, all around me. Wild hogs used their tusks to dig up edibles and left the signs behind. A single wild hog could destroy large swaths of otherwise useful habitat. Beast had killed a boar once and had been badly injured from the experience, but that only increased her desire to hunt and kill another one. This one was in heat, and her musky odor seemed to have settled across the ground all along the path, into the foliage all around, even into the mud itself, obscuring the scents of the other prey and predators.
Hunt boar. Or alli-gator, she thought. Hunt and kill and eat. I hunger.
You’re always hungry.
Yes.
I found the low-hanging branch of a scrub tree and stripped, wrapping an extra pair of flops, my shorts, shirt, and throwaway burner cell tightly in a zippy in my gobag, which I secured around my neck. Adjusted the gold nugget and Puma concolor tooth on the doubled gold chain necklace. I sat on the low branch and rocked my feet back and forth, securing my flops in the mud to give me a balanced tripod perch on two feet and my backside. I relaxed. Closed my eyes. Sought the Gray Between of my magics.
Skinwalkers weren’t traditionally moon-called, like were-creatures, but the time of day and phase of the moon did make a difference. It was easier to shift on the three days of the full moon. Easier to shift at night, and harder to shift in the daytime—unless I was dying and a shift meant survival. And the shifting wasn’t a balanced thing. It was a peculiar effect of my skinwalker magics that while I could shift from human shape to Beast in daylight, I was unable to shift back to human until night. I wondered if Ayatas had that problem. The thought pushed the Gray Between away from me.
I admitted that I was feeling weird. Different. Emotionally different from my normal. Because of the man who claimed to be my brother. Who had been at my house just now. And I had run away from him.
Coward, Beast thought at me. Must make peace with littermate.
It was the same word she used to describe Eli and Alex. I asked her, Littermate. Like from the same parents or littermate in the same way the Youngers are?
Beast didn’t answer. Dang cat. But that might be why I wasn’t ready to face him, to make peace with him, yet. I wasn’t sure he was the man he said he was.