by Elisa Paige
“No, this house belongs to Zihna, his fiancée. It’s a long story, but she’s a human. A professor at Tulane and…” Koda glanced at me over his shoulder, stopping dead in his tracks when he saw my camouflage. “Do not hide yourself, Sephti. Not from anyone. Not ever.”
Blushing, I let the glamour fall. “I just thought…when we met…maybe your brother would be less upset if I didn’t look—” Waves of hatred hammered my senses, cutting me off midsentence.
A new voice snarled, “Like Koda has lost his mind?”
Koda didn’t react, which told me he’d known we weren’t alone. Turning to place himself a little in front of me, he took my hand and tugged to bring me closer to his side. “Sephti, this is Ahanu.”
The same height as Koda, Ahanu was a little broader through the shoulders. Where Koda’s features were proud and strong, Ahanu’s were harder, more angular. His sharp gaze alighted on Koda’s and my clasped hands and profound distaste twisted his lips.
Koda’s eyes narrowed, the powerful muscles in his shoulders bunching. There was a new, proprietary charge coming from him, one that ignited a similar, primal urge within me. If I felt it, Ahanu had to. The urge to proclaim to the heavens: mine.
Sure enough, appalled disbelief filled his black eyes. “I see now why you were distracted, brother,” Ahanu growled. “I’d wondered if it was a woman who’d finally caught your notice. I never imagined you’d taken up with a filthy fae wh—”
“Be very careful,” Koda snapped. “If you cannot be civil, maybe Zihna—”
“When I sensed this colocolo’s presence down the street, I sent Zihna away.” Ahanu shoved off from the doorframe he’d been leaning on and stalked toward me, rocking to a stop when Koda intercepted him. Eyes wide with disbelieving fury, the older brother swore. “First you bring a disgusting fae into my betrothed’s home and then you protect her?”
“Ahanu, you are my brother, but I will not tolerate your prejudices. Sephti is not what you think.”
“Prejudices!” Ahanu echoed, incredulous. “Our people—”
“Are renowned for their hospitality and yet here we stand, with you ready to kill someone under my protection.”
I stirred. “Protection? But I’ve been protecting you.”
Koda shot me a look. “Not helping.”
Ahanu gaped at him. “Are you bewitched? Or just insane?”
From the corner of my mouth, I muttered, “If I hadn’t, Cian and the bitterns would’ve—”
Ahanu erupted in another language, his tone one of incredulity and horror. Koda snapped back at him and Ahanu roared in response.
I shook my head. “This was a bad idea, Koda. I’ll just wait outside.”
Ahanu stepped in front of me, blocking my path. “Why? So you can release your allies from my brother’s bindings? Even from here, I can sense their violent dreams, feel how they yearn for blood.”
“It’s not like that…” I sidestepped as he lunged.
The sound of flesh thunking solidly into flesh rang in my ears. Koda held Ahanu’s fist easily, having blocked the blow meant for me.
“That is enough,” Koda told his brother in a low, dangerous voice.
Wrenching himself free, Ahanu stared at him. “You have lost your mind. Or she has stolen your will, snared you somehow.”
Koda shook his head. “You’re wrong. About both of us, you’re wrong.”
“Us?” Ahanu echoed. He looked like he was going to be violently ill. “You actually care about this…this creature?”
I tried again to leave, but Ahanu blocked me once more, lifting a fist in clear threat. He was really beginning to piss me off.
Koda snarled at his brother, “Do not touch her!”
“Have you forgotten everything?” Ahanu cursed, lowering his hand to his side. “By consorting with that thing, you’re turning away from everything anzhenii stand for! How’s it feel to betray your own people?”
Something twisted in Koda’s beautiful face, like his brother’s barbed words had found their target.
Rage ignited within me—Ahanu had just crossed the line. Baring my teeth, I put myself between the brothers. This so shocked Ahanu, he actually took a step back, his glittering eyes widening as I advanced on him.
“You hold on a damned minute!” I snarled, not caring that he had four inches and over a hundred pounds on me. “Don’t you dare speak to him that way!”
Koda caught me by the shoulders and held me back when I would’ve kept going. “Sephti, calm down. You don’t have to defend me.”
“The hell I don’t!” I squirmed in his grip, but wasn’t going anywhere. Glaring at Ahanu, I snapped, “You are so blinded by pride and anger, you can’t see past either!”
Shaking off his shock, Ahanu leaned a shoulder against the wall and stared at me. He switched his gaze to Koda, then back to me. “Fae don’t form emotional attachments.”
“I’m not a fucking fae!” I yelled, kicking the wall because Koda wouldn’t let me close enough to kick Ahanu.
“Brother, if you’d listen…” Koda began, working hard to control his anger.
Ahanu scoffed, “Her kind twist words and reality to suit them. Anything you’d say would be suspect because she’s tainted you. Changed you.”
“She’s the one who’s changing!”
I swiveled to look at Koda, my breath catching in my throat.
“Yeah, it probably seems that way to you,” Ahanu jeered. “What kind of hook does she have in you? I refuse to believe you could feel anything for her besides disgust. Or is she leading you around by the balls? She’s pretty enough. Are you screwing her, Koda? Fae have the morals of animals in heat and—”
“Enough!” Koda bellowed. On the same breath, instinct bared my teeth as a growl rumbled in my chest, low and vicious. The bastard’s eyes fell on me, the triumph and contempt in them telling me I’d just made his point for him.
A heavy silence filled the little house, along with the threat of decisive violence. Koda’s hands were hard on my shoulders and he was trembling with rage. “I expected better of you, brother,” he said in a strangled voice, drawing me back against him.
“I expected better of you, too,” Ahanu shot back.
I itched to draw my daggers and carve an apology out of the smug sonuvabitch for the way he was behaving toward Koda. Knowing this would not only be counterproductive, it’d confirm all his firmly held, species-ist beliefs, I fisted my hands to keep from acting on the overwhelming impulse.
“I believe you want to kick my ass,” Ahanu remarked.
“From here to Alaska,” Koda snapped.
“No doubt. But I was talking to her.”
“Mostly, I’d like to kick your teeth in,” I informed him, baring mine threateningly. “Then work my way down from there.”
Ahanu cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. I felt his senses brush against my awareness and hastily slammed up a mental barricade. “You really do care about him.” His voice was full of wonder. “Maybe even…love him. How is that possible?”
Love? Is that what I felt for Koda? This all-consuming emotion that made my heart beat more strongly when he was near? A breathlessness that seemed as if I couldn’t get enough air, yet my lungs were full and breathing more strongly than I’d ever known them to? A hyper-acute awareness of him—tingling on my skin, filling my head, burrowing deep in my bones? The absolute inability to even comprehend harm coming to him…especially if I was its source?
Koda was very still behind me, like he was waiting for my response. I opened my mouth to speak, without a clue what to say, when the city’s tornado sirens began wailing.
“Txan kal doe kja hey?” Ahanu muttered, striding swiftly to the closest window. “The weather’s clear tonight.”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with the weather,” I said, sprinting for what I took to be the front door. The thing had one of those keyed deadbolts, so I sifted through the cracks right before I would’ve run into the door face-first. Resolidifying on
the broad front porch, I leaped the steps and stopped on the sidewalk.
There came an explosion behind me and I turned to see Koda stepping through what was left of the front door. Behind him, Ahanu snarled, “Zihna’s going to be pissed!”
Flashing a grin at Koda—he looked pretty happy with himself about the splinters of wood in his wake—I extended my senses into the night.
“The assault on Philippe’s house isn’t supposed to begin for another hour yet,” Koda said, coming to my side.
“I think…I think this is a preemptive strike on Philippe’s part,” I answered distractedly. My instincts started going crazy as, all around us, supernatural creatures began to move.
“Meaning he knows about the task force.” Koda’s tone was grim. “Great. I wonder what else he knows.”
Supe power flared somewhere east of us, but on such a scale, it slammed into my mind like a fist. “Are you feeling this?”
“Yeah, that was vampires and fae. No idea what they just did, though it can’t be good.” I sensed him casting his awareness outward. “The other things are—”
“Bodach. A lot of them. Wanna bet they’re the ehrlindriel-tipped kind?”
The original siren’s mournful howl was joined by another, farther away, the two rising and falling in counterpoint. A third soon joined in, lifting the hair at my nape. Off in the distance, there came a loud whump, followed in quick succession by four more. The scent of burning gas and melting rubber carried to me on the evening’s gentle breeze, along with human screams and a long, drawn-out shriek.
“What the freaking hell was that?” I gasped, my senses prickling.
“Some kind of were,” Koda muttered. “A big one.”
From his other side, Ahanu cursed. “What’s going on?”
“New Orleans is under attack.” Koda turned to him.
His jaw working, Ahanu glared down at me. “If you brought this here…if you are the cause of this…”
“I’m trying to stop it,” I growled, glaring right back. “So’s Koda, which you’d know if you bothered to listen.”
“Yeah, yeah, Ahanu’s an asshole.”
Koda gave his brother a shove, half-playful, half-pissed. “Nobody’s arguing.”
Even as I registered the slight easing of tension between the men, my instincts fully roused and alarm tightened my gut. Something had changed. Something I should have noticed sooner. The incessant sirens were muffled, the air itself blanketing the shrill wailing in damp, black baffling. Movement teased the corners of my eyes as the night’s formerly soft shadows seemed to swirl and intensify. I blinked away the illusion that they coalesced into a malevolent form, a sentient creature hunkering low to the ground, its hindquarters tensing in the seconds before its lethal attack.
At least I hoped it was an illusion.
Scanning the area, I cranked my awareness and instincts to their most receptive limits. There was no sense of humans in the neighboring houses or sharing the increasingly black night. No sense of any living thing except us in the immediate vicinity. As if in response to my heightened probing, the shadows deepened and the air became still. Resisting the urge to growl a warning, I eyed the distance between the little yellow house and the closest street lights a long block away. Their yellow glow seemed feeble and wan, quickly losing ground to the crouching darkness.
A pack of bodach formed in the night’s deepest shadows less than six feet away, their eyeless faces skipping over me before honing in on the two anzhenii. I grabbed both guys’ arms and shaded as the furred killers leaped, their slashing claws and snapping teeth passing harmlessly through. When the bodach landed behind us, I released Koda and a shaken Ahanu and whirled on the pack.
“These two are mine!” I roared at the bodach in Fae, drawing my daggers and crouching.
The leader hissed in my mind, its thoughts crystallizing within my own like shards of ice. Happily, only the alpha bodach were capable of this—I couldn’t imagine the arctic cacophony of a pack in full mental cry. “We are many and you are one, Nomad.”
“But if you’re dead, your followers will retreat.” Half shading since the foul creature’s venom would kill me just as easily as it would kill anything else made of flesh and blood, I advanced on it.
The leader stood its ground for all of half a second, then bowed its head. “No offense was intended, Nomad. We will hunt elsewhere.” Turning on its pack, the creature harried them into motion, driving them with its sharp teeth down the street. The bodach blurred their forms and melded with the darkness pooled under cars, thick shrubs, a concrete birdbath, even the small round shadow cast by a child’s tire swing.
I followed them with my eyes as they flowed like black, oily water down the street, careful to avoid the street lights’ weak fringes. When they were out of sight, I sheathed my daggers and rolled my shoulders, releasing the battle-ready tension. In the bodachs’ absence, the night’s oppressiveness lessened and the air returned to its normal consistency. Koda, Ahanu and I winced at the same moment as the sirens returned to their pain-inducing one-hundred-thirty-five-decibel level.
Ahanu recovered his lousy attitude. “Why’d you back them off? What game are you playing?”
Not bothering to answer him, I crossed the yard and headed toward the garage. Ignoring the furious exchange between Koda and his brother, I flung open the side door and went to the truck. The bitterns were still unconscious, oblivious to everything around them.
Remembering that Koda had woven strands of my hair into the bindings, I figured this gave me some influence over how they worked. Turned out, I was right, because the bitterns roused the moment I told them to.
As they came alert, I ordered them out of the truck. The sound of breaking glass carried to us from outside, and somewhere down the street, a woman’s sudden scream was cut off mid-breath. This brought the bitterns’ heads up, their eyes taking on a murderous sheen.
Keeping them in my periphery, I dug the truck’s keys from my pocket and opened the glovebox. Holding their daggers, I turned to face the suddenly wary bitterns—our kind never reacted calmly to naked weapons.
“We are at war,” I told them, “with enemies on all sides. Onas, you are my Second and will stay on my right flank. Târre, you will cover Onas’s side. Neither of you will engage anyone without my command. Understood?”
“As you will it,” they responded, quivering with excitement when I handed them their daggers.
A glowering Koda came into the garage with Ahanu on his heels.
“You woke them.” Koda eyed the bitterns.
“Nomad-shakti, may we engage?” Onas asked, his awareness hard on the brothers.
“No!” I flinched at being called shakti—weapon—but let it pass since it was intended as an honorific. No matter that the reminder that bitterns were intended as living weapons, khul shaktis, set my teeth on edge. “These are allies.”
“What did he say?” Koda asked, not having missed the threat implicit in Onas’s face.
“He asked if he could kill Ahanu and I told him I was thinking about it,” I said, just to screw with the arrogant jackass.
“Really not helping,” Koda muttered, although I caught the glint of amusement in his eyes.
“Mmm. But ever so enjoyable.” Subtly putting myself between him and Onas, I crossed my arms. “I woke the bitterns because we need more fighters.”
“Which would be why you armed them.” Koda’s tone made clear how bad an idea he thought that was.
“When we’re in a state of war, all urges to battle for rank are put aside. Until the war footing changes, their homicidal instincts will be focused on protecting those the alpha designates as ours and killing everybody else.”
A humorless grin lifted one side of Koda’s mouth. “So they won’t try to gut us as long as somebody else is trying to. Is that it?”
I barked a laugh. “That’s about right. Nobody ever said the fae were stupid. The last thing they’d want when they were under siege is for their bioengineer
ed creations to turn on them.”
Ahanu had followed the exchange with growing consternation. “You mean you’re not even a real being? You were spliced together in a test tube?”
Koda spun on his brother, rage distorting his features as he got in his face. This triggered the bitterns’ readiness to fight and they fixed on Ahanu.
“Everybody calm down,” I muttered, catching Koda’s arm and tugging him back from his furious brother. Given his incredible strength, I had no doubt Koda moved only because he chose to. Ordering Onas to stand down, I drew breath to speak when the sound of a lot of people headed our way drew us outside.
“Now what?” I grumbled. I didn’t have to look to know that Onas and Târre instantly formed up in the positions I’d commanded them to take.
Rounding the corner that Koda and I had turned less than an hour earlier came about eighty humans. They ran together in a bunch, so tightly packed they barely had enough room to stride without tripping each other. Their expressions masks of terror, the mortals came in all shapes, sizes and colors, including five strippers and three elderly men in motorized wheelchairs. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing, why they were staying bunched up like that, until I noticed the blurs of motion at their perimeter, harrying anyone who stumbled or slowed.
“Vampires,” Ahanu cursed.
I counted four immortals herding the humans down the center of the street, and now that I was looking for them, saw how they reveled in their victims’ extreme fear. “Where are they taking them?”
Koda stirred. “Philippe’s house. I’d bet on it.”
“It will be a slaughter.”
“Isn’t that the point?” Ahanu muttered.
I rolled my eyes. “I meant they’ll be caught in the crossfire when the task force attacks.”
“Either way, the human creatures will die,” Onas surprised me by saying. It was the first time he’d ventured an opinion.
“Not tonight, they won’t.” In Fae, I told him, “Those immortals are our enemies. I want them dead.”
His eyes glinted. “By your will, Nomad-shakti.”
“Sephti, what—?” Koda began, but the bitterns and I were already in motion.
