With Voron dead, Kate was on her own. A knight of the Order of Merciful Aid temporarily assumed guardianship of her and tried to send her to the Order Academy, but she dropped out. The Order is a semiofficial law enforcement agency. Their legal status is murky, as I’ve pointed out a number of times to anyone who will listen. They are fanatics, they have a rigid mind-set, and they believe that any deviation from your average vanilla Homo sapiens makes you nonhuman.
You’ve read what I wrote. Do you think I’m human?
To these guys, Charles Manson and Jack the Ripper are more human than I am. If it weren’t for the fact that our police force is overwhelmed, their presence wouldn’t be tolerated. It shouldn’t be tolerated anyway. But, as is typical, when someone comes to you and offers to remove that pesky griffin that’s killing people in your neighborhood and to do it free of charge if you can’t afford to pay, most people refuse to look a gift knight in the mouth.
So Kate decided the Order’s brainwashing wasn’t for her. She bummed around Georgia, dropping in and out of Atlanta. Worked for the Mercenary Guild for a while. They’re the guys you call if you have money and a monster in your backyard, and the cops are too busy with a poisonous flying jellyfish downtown. She tried to hide in plain sight. She might have succeeded except she ran into the Beast Lord. As I mentioned, he is a scary, bossy bastard. She hates all authority. He said, “Jump.” She said, “Screw you.” Of course, they would fall madly in love after that. And when I say madly, I mean it.
Kate never does things halfway. I’m certain that Voron attempted to create a psychopath but somehow he failed. Kate will put herself between danger and some idiot bystanders every single time. She found the half-starved child of an alcoholic on the street, almost died saving her from demons, and then adopted her. Julie is an exceptional child in every way, including the amount of trouble she can generate. She isn’t easy to raise. I’ve never heard Kate complain.
Kate counts me as one of her friends. It is a privilege. It means when I’m several states away and I call her and say, “I’m in trouble,” she will get her sword and come to get me, expecting nothing in return. That is a rare thing. Curran might be the Beast Lord and a stubborn one, but he knew what he had when he met her. That’s why she’s now the Consort of the Pack. We needed a Consort for a long time. Someone to balance out Curran. Then she came along and she is sensible and tries to be fair. Things were going so well for a while.
Remember I mentioned panacea, the herbal medicine that helps us to not go loup? Until recently we had no access to it. It was created somewhere in Europe and they wouldn’t sell it to us at any price. Last summer suddenly the Beast Lord and his Consort got an invite to settle a shapeshifter family dispute in a small country on the Black Sea. They would be paid in panacea. We all knew it was a trap, and we all went to see who was holding the string of the trapdoor. It was Hugh d’Ambray. He’d followed the trail of bread crumbs and found Kate. Here is a woman who had been trained by the man he viewed as his father. She is better with a sword than he is. She is the daughter of the guy he worships. You see where I’m going with this? Hugh wants her and he doesn’t understand “no.” She hates him, because he’s a sick f**k and he killed her sensei. It went weird really fast and ended up in a giant fight and a castle on fire.
So here we are. We didn’t get the panacea, but we got Christopher, an insane mage Kate pulled out of a cage where Hugh was slowly starving him to death. Christopher isn’t all there. Turns out he can make panacea, so now we have our own supply, but the price was high. We lost Aunt B, the alpha of Clan Bouda. The boudas are misfits. Other shapeshifters don’t trust us. We don’t do things by the book. Aunt B took care of us. Of me. Words can’t describe what she meant to me. She is gone now. Kate watched her die. It eats at her. I can see it in her face. She visits Aunt B’s grave more than her son does, and Raphael is over there every chance he gets.
So here we are, at a crossroads. We don’t know if Hugh is alive or dead. Curran had broken Hugh’s spine and hurled him into the fire, but Kate says she felt him teleport out. We know that the days of hiding are over. Roland will come for his daughter. He’d attacked the Pack before through his agents. He doesn’t like us, because we are growing and gaining in strength. But now, whether Hugh survived or not, Roland is coming for sure. If Hugh is dead, Roland will come to see who killed him. If Hugh’s alive, he will have told Roland about his daughter, and Roland will come to see her.
As I said, this is the moment when everything hangs in the balance. If Roland attacks us, we will fight, not just for the Consort, but for our lives, as overly dramatic as it sounds. Roland understands the concept of personal freedom. He just believes it’s highly overrated. Freedom is everything to us. We won’t be slaves. Kate is our best hope of stopping him, but—there is that pesky word again—she knows her magic can’t match his. The Covens of Atlanta threw their lot in with her and are supplying her with undead blood so she can practice her father’s blood magic. She’s learning, but I’m afraid it’s not fast enough. If Roland takes over Atlanta, other cities will follow. We, the Pack, have the best chance of fighting him off.
There is a storm gathering on our horizon. We will make a stand, but I wonder if it will matter in the end.
1
“KATE, THIS IS really dangerous,” Ascanio said.
Teenage shapeshifters have an interesting definition of “dangerous.” Lyc-V, the virus responsible for their existence, regenerates their bodies at an accelerated rate, so getting stabbed means a nap followed by a really big dinner, and a broken leg would equal two weeks of taking it easy and then running a marathon with no problems. On top of being a shapeshifter, Ascanio was an adolescent male and a bouda, or werehyena, who were in a category all their own when it came to taking risks. Usually when a bouda said that something was dangerous, it meant it could instantly incinerate you and spread the ashes to the wind.
“Alright,” I said. “Hold the rope.”
“I really think it would be better if I went instead.”
Ascanio gave me a dazzling smile. I let it bounce off me and fixed him with my hard stare. Five ten and still slender from growing too fast, Ascanio wasn’t just handsome; he was beautiful: perfect lines, cut jaw, sculpted cheekbones, dark hair, and darker eyes. He had the kind of face that could only be described as angelic; however, one look at those big eyes and you realized that he’d never been to heaven, but somewhere in hell a couple of fallen angels were missing a sixteen-year-old. He realized the effect he had early in life, and he milked it for everything it was worth. In about five years, when that face matured, he would be devastating. If he lived that long. Which right now didn’t seem likely, because I was mad at him.
“Hold the rope,” I repeated, and took the first step.
“Don’t look down,” Ascanio said.
I looked down. I was standing on a metal beam about eighteen inches wide. Below me, the remains of the Georgian Terrace Hotel sagged sadly onto the ruined street. Magic hadn’t been kind to the once-proud building. Its eighteen floors had collapsed in stages, creating a maze of passageways, sheer drops, and crumbling walls. The whole mess threatened to bite the dust any second, and I was on the very top of this heap of rubble. If I slipped, I would fall about a hundred feet to the pavement below. My imagination painted my head cracking like an egg dropped onto the sidewalk. Just what I needed. Because balancing on the iced-over beam wasn’t hard enough.
“I said don’t look down,” Ascanio said helpfully. “Also, be careful, the ice is slippery.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Below me, the graveyard of Atlanta’s Downtown stretched into the distance. The massive buildings had toppled over decades ago, some shattering into gravel, some almost whole, sprawling on the ground with their beam work exposed, like rotting beached whales with their bones on display. Heaps of rubble choked the streets. Strange orange plants grew among the debris, each a thin stalk terminating in a single triangular leaf. In summer, sewage and rain overflow spilled into the open, but the harsh winter froze it, sheathing the ground with black ice.
The magic of Unicorn Lane swirled around me, dangerous and twisted. Magic flooded our world in waves, here one minute, gone the next, but Unicorn Lane, the lovely place that it was, retained its power even when the tech was at its strongest. It was the place where you came when life’s troubles became too much for you. Things with glowing eyes bred here among fallen skyscrapers, and if you lingered in these ruins, one of them was guaranteed to cure all that ailed you.
Anyone with half a brain avoided Unicorn Lane, especially after dark. But when your business is floundering, you have to take whatever job comes along, especially if it starts with the chief editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution crying in your office chair because her rare and expensive pet has gone missing. Since the magic killed the Internet and crippled TV, newspapers had once again become the primary source of news, and an endorsement from the largest newspaper in the region was worth its weight in gold. Also, she cried in my office. I took the job.
Being a Consort, I didn’t have to work for my living. The Pack took care of the necessities, but I wanted Cutting Edge to succeed and I would do whatever it took to make it stand on its own two feet. Even if it involved tracking down escaped pets.
Unfortunately, the fluffy critter in question had made a beeline straight for Unicorn Lane, and so it took me a few hours to find it. And I let my sixteen-year-old bouda intern come with me, because he could track the beast by scent and I couldn’t. Ascanio wasn’t bad in a fight. He was physically powerful and fast, and he had a strong half-form, a meld between a human and animal that made the shapeshifters incredibly efficient killers. Raphael, the alpha of Clan Bouda, had been whittling Ascanio down into a decent fighter over the past months. Unfortunately all that training didn’t do anything for his common sense.
I had finally cornered the small creature, hiding in a crevice. While I tiptoed toward it making quiet nonthreatening noises, Ascanio decided to help by snarling “to flush it out,” which caused me to nearly fall into a hole in the floor and sent the panicked beast straight to the top of the precariously standing building. Which is how I ended up with a rope around my waist, trying to maneuver on a foot-and-a-half-wide beam protruding twenty feet over a sheer drop, while the exotic and rare pet shivered at the very end of it.
“Please let me do this,” Ascanio said. “I want to help.”
“You’ve helped enough, thank you.” I took another step along the beam. If I fell, with his shapeshifter strength he would have no problems pulling me to safety. If he fell, getting him back up to the top of the building would be considerably harder for me. The deadweight of a human being was no joke.
“I’m sorry I scared it.”
“When I grab it, you can apologize.”
The small beast shivered and tiptoed toward the other end of the beam. Great.
Ascanio growled under his breath.
“I can hear you growling. If I can hear you growling, it can hear you, too. If you scare it into leaping to its death, I’ll be really mad at you.”
“I can’t help it. It’s an abomination.”
The abomination stared at me with large green eyes.
I took another step. “It’s not an abomination. It’s a bunnycat.”
The bunnycat scooted another inch toward the end of the beam. It resembled a criminally fluffy average-sized housecat. Its owner described the fur color as lilac, which to me looked like pale grayish-brown. It had a cute kitten face, framed by two long ears, as if someone had taken regular cat ears and stretched them out, enlarging them to bunny size. Its hind legs were all rabbit, powerful and muscled, while its front legs, much shorter than those of an average cat, looked completely feline. Its tail, a squirrel-like length of fluff, shook in alarm. The first bunnycats were the result of some sort of botched magical experiment at the veterinary school of the University of California. They were sold off to private breeders and since they were rare and cute, they became the latest rage in hideously expensive household pets.