by Devon Monk
“Everything check out?” he finally drawled.
“Looks good so far.” I flashed him a smile and stepped out into the cold, foggy night. “Reservations?”
“Plenty,” he said behind me. “Oh, were you talking about dinner?”
“Ha-ha. When do we need to be there?”
“In about an hour. We have time.”
“That’s good to hear.”
The night was cold. I kind of wished it were raining. I could use a little cold-shower action right now. My body, my senses, my nerves were focused on one thing only: Zayvion Jones.
Well, two things: Zayvion Jones, and keeping my hands off him.
Okay, three things: Zayvion Jones, keeping my hands off him, and not snapping my ankles in my boots.
Zayvion strolled up alongside me, and wonders of wonders, I heard the heel of his shoes thunk against the sidewalk, a hollow heartbeat in the fog. I didn’t think I’d ever heard his footsteps before. He was Mr. Zen, Mr. Silent, Mr. Invisible. Which I supposed came in handy for a Closer.
But I liked the sound, liked experiencing the auditory weight of him beside me.
“The car’s this way,” he said.
We crossed the street. Traffic hushed and growled through the fog, an ocean of metal and steam and oil, the rasping croon of the city. We walked uphill in silence. Pale yellow and blue streetlights caught moonlike in the fog to diffuse light and deepen shadow. I took some time to breathe in the cold air, think calm thoughts, and rein in my heartbeat.
The car was parked at the end of the block. Zayvion, always a gentleman, unlocked the door for me while I scanned the shadows for Davy Silvers, or any of the other Hounds who might be following me.
I didn’t see anyone, hear anyone, smell anyone, and it wasn’t worth the pain of drawing on magic to sense them in any other manner.
If it were any other day I’d figure I was just upwind and too distracted to spot the Hounds in the night. And that still might be the case. Except every Hound in the city had been at the pub this afternoon to pay their respects to Pike. To say their good-byes. To mourn.
There hadn’t been a sober body in that room by the time I’d gotten there. And I’d left long before the party ended. I figured there wasn’t a Hound in the city sober enough to walk, much less track magic or follow me.
Still, something made me pause. A shift in the gray and yellow fog. A man-sized shadow across the street held still for too long. There, in the alley between the single-floor antique and notions shop and the condemned, hollow and broken ten-story apartment building, something waited. Something watched.
The wind picked up, pulled the scent of the watcher to me. Blackberry, burnt, all the sugars used up so only the bitter, thick tar of it remained, sweetness burned down to ash. And with that, the stink of animal defecation, sweat, and pain.
The shadow shifted again, and eyes, now low to the ground, flashed ghost green.
The thing growled, whimpered in pain. A car drove past, blocking my view and covering the sound. Once it had gone by, I heard a sucking-smacking from across the street, like something, or someone, was making messy work of a spaghetti dinner.
“Allie?”
I jumped at Zayvion’s soft voice. He was standing in the open door on the driver’s side, leaning one elbow on the roof of the car. Watching me.
“Sorry,” I said before he asked me what was wrong. “I saw . . . something.”
“Something?”
At least he didn’t brush me off or say it was just fog. I guess being an assassin makes you pay attention to subtle things.
“Over there.” I tipped my head toward the buildings across the street. “Do you see anything? A dog, maybe?”
Zay tipped his head down, and his body language looked like he’d just heard something funny or embarrassing. Nice act. With his face at that angle, he could look across the street without whoever was over there knowing.
After a moment, he said, “No. Do you?”
I didn’t even try for discreet. I stared across the street. No shadow. No one. Nothing.
A chill plucked down my arms and magic stretched in me, pushed at my skin, heating my right hand and chilling my left.
Just what I didn’t need to deal with right now.
I took a breath, cleared my mind, and relaxed, letting the magic move through me, up through the ground, back out of me to fall into the ground again, an invisible, silent loop.
“Someone was there,” I said. “Something. Maybe hurt.” And the image of Davy or one of the other Hounds, too drunk to think straight, maybe stabbed, mugged, or, hell, chewed on by a stray dog flashed in front of my eyes.
My heart started beating faster. There was no way I could drive off and leave one of my Hounds in danger. I started around the front of the car.
“What are you doing?” Zayvion asked.
“We’re close enough to my house; we can call 911 if someone needs help.”
“Allie,” he warned.
“It will just take a second.” It came out like I didn’t care if he followed me or not, and the truth was I didn’t care. If one of my people was hurt, I wasn’t going to stand by and leave him on his own.
I wondered if this was what a mother felt like and quickly pushed that away. Didn’t matter. What mattered was making sure whoever was over here was okay.
Zayvion shut up and followed me. I only knew he paced next to me because I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He was walking, breathing, moving, like an assassin again. Silent.
I was not nearly so smooth. I stomped over in my boots, making noise on purpose.
Grunts accompanied the smacking and slurping, and I had a weird feeling there was more than one person back there.
I almost turned back, because, seriously, I had no desire to walk in on some dirty lovin’ going on in the alley. But the whimper, the stink of pain, drew me forward.
“Hey,” I called out once I stepped up on the sidewalk. “Everything okay over here?”
Silence.
The fog in the alley did not stir. There were no lights down the narrow passage, just two buildings standing so close together I didn’t think Zayvion could walk in there without losing jacket, shirt, and an inch of skin off both shoulders. Plus, the brick foundation of the apartment bulged outward at the bottom, sagging under the weight of years and making the alley even narrower.
I could see maybe ten feet into the alley. Something shifted back there. Then an almost-human moan rose to a keen, was muffled, silenced.
The familiar smell of strawberry bubble gum and cheap wine hit my nose. Those scents belonged to Tomi Nowlan. Tough girl, cutter chick, she was a Hound who didn’t like me stepping into the boss job now that Pike was gone.
I didn’t care how much she hated me. She was one of Pike’s pack, my pack, and that meant I looked out for her. Especially when it involved a dark night and a dark alley.
“Tomi?” I called out a little more quietly.
Okay, dark night, dark alley, me with no gun—not that I ever carried one—and Zayvion with no gun, or at least I didn’t think he carried one. All systems go for getting hurt or killed.
Except we both had magic.
I recited a quick mantra, just the first lines of a Beatles’ song, set a Disbursement to choose how I’d pay for the magic—I was going with the tried-and-true headache in a day or so—and drew a glyph so I could pull magic up into my senses of sight and smell. Magic licked across my bones, warm, heavy, and poured out of my skin, filling the glyph.
The world burst into layers of old magic, caught and tangled like slowly dissolving spiderwebs. The ashy macramé hung in the air, snagged on the building fronts, smudged in pastel luminescence among the piles of garbage leaning farther down the alley.
Scents came at me too quickly, bubble gum and booze: Tomi; pine and spice: Zayvion; Diesel, mold, algae, moss, grilled meat, and soap from a nearby dry cleaner: the city.
The other scents were harder to sort from the stink of dog s
hit that permeated the entire alley. Burnt blackberry, licorice, the chemical taint of formaldehyde, and a burn of copper that tasted like hot pennies on the back of my tongue.
And among it all fear. Pain. Death.
I noted it all with detached interest, not wanting to let my emotions get in the way of casting magic.
I drew one of the most simple glyphs for Light, thinking small, orb, and glow, as I poured magic out through my fingertips to fill the ribbon and promise of the glyph.
An orb of light the size of a grapefruit appeared in front of my hand and flooded the alley with white light.
Probably should have used a lot less magic. The orb blazed like a searchlight, reflecting off the fog instead of piercing it. Blinded by the brightness, I caught only a vague outline of the figure crouching in the alley.
Hunched over, the size of a thin man or a big dog, the figure was gravestone white. Its head swiveled toward me and was too wide for a man, unless he was wearing a hood. Eyes shone animal green. Human eyes, I thought, but everything else about him was wrong.
He lifted away from the other, crumpled form on the ground. Then he lunged at us.
Fast.
Zayvion grabbed my arm.
The thing’s blood-covered mouth opened on a yell, revealing fangs thick as my thumb on both the top and bottom of his jaw.
My back hit the rough stucco of the antique shop. I exhaled at the impact. Zayvion spun, pressed his back full-body against me. He blocked my view of the thing.
He whispered something that sounded like “Dead” and threw his arms out to both sides.
The smell of butterscotch and rum assaulted my nostrils, filled my mouth and lungs. A second ago, I couldn’t see around Zayvion. Now that he had cast this spell over us, I couldn’t see Zayvion at all. I still felt him, his wide back pressed against me, his hip leaning against mine. Through a wavering, watery curtain around me, I could make out the buildings. But I looked right through where Zayvion should be, where I felt him, and saw only the sagging bricks across the alley in front of me,
Weird, weird, weird.
It was a Shield spell I’d never seen before. Some kind of camouflage.
Zay didn’t move. I could feel his breathing, even and la bored, like he was jogging or lifting weights. I got the feeling he wanted me to be quiet and still, so I did my best not to freak out while my claustrophobia stuck fingers down my throat and made me want to scream.
Just because I couldn’t see any living thing didn’t mean I couldn’t hear.
The thing yelled again, a nerve-burning sound that was half human and wholly something else. The muscles down Zayvion’s back flexed, and he leaned forward a fraction, as if pushing against an unmovable wall.
Sweat poured down my back, trickled between my breasts. I wanted to run, run, like a child from a nightmare, like an adult from a gunman, a killer, death. Instinct told me that thing out there was death. My death. Zayvion’s death. And death to whatever it had been feasting on before we interrupted it.
And then it wasn’t yelling anymore.
It was talking.
“Fear me.”
Its voice was low—a man’s—words mangled by fangs. Those two words crawled under my skin, and I wished he’d go back to yelling.
Okay, yes, I was afraid. Yes, I was comforted knowing Zayvion would stand in front of me and put himself in the way of danger. But I was done being smashed against a wall, unable to move my hands, and therefore more helpless than if I were free and standing beside my knight in leather coat armor.
I drew my hand up Zayvion’s back, felt the tension in his muscles. It occurred to me that with his hands stretched out on either side, holding this spell in place like a curtain over a window, his hands were not free to draw glyphs. He couldn’t cast.
Not a problem. Because I sure as hell could.
I pulled magic up from the stores deep within the earth and it poured into me, filling me, jumping to my call until I burned with the strength of it.
I set a new Disbursement—a little more pain to that headache—and stepped out from behind Zayvion, outside his reach. I stood next to him.
“No!” Zayvion yelled. The spell he cast broke. Butterscotch and rum magic rained big, warm, slippery drops around us.
“Fear this,” I growled at the thing in front of us. I traced the glyph for Impact and poured all the magic I had in me into it.
The thing was a man, I think—heavily modified or disfigured, his arms too long, skin too white, and covered in blood. His legs bones were wrapped in sinew and bent wrong at the knees. He pivoted so damn fast, I didn’t even have time to swear.
He dropped to all fours, dodging my spell. The spell bashed into the brick wall behind him, blowing a hole into the building and sending brick and dust everywhere. Something farther down the alley skittered and ran—the very human sound of footfalls.
A siren called out in the distance.
Then the thing, still on all fours, ran. Long legs and hands stretched out into a strange liquid lope. He covered twice as much ground as anything I’d ever seen—man, animal, or nightmare—a blur of white against shadow that crossed the street and disappeared, like a ghost into the foggy night.
Chapter Three
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”Zayvion yelled.
I rubbed at my neck, which already hurt, and worked on letting go of the magic, my panic, and the push of adrenaline that made me want to yell back at him.
“So, you do lose your cool,” I said. “Who knew?”
“Do you know how stupid that was?” he asked.
“I don’t even know what kind of man? Creature . . . ?” I glanced at Zayvion, whose locked-jaw anger flickered at that guess. “Creature,” I confirmed, “that was. Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I don’t. Want to see if it’s still in fighting range?”
I wiped my hands on my coat, because I felt dirty, covered in shit and blood even though I hadn’t touched anything in the alley. I strode over to where the creature had been eating.
Zayvion swore, and I mean he pulled out a raft of curses that made me rethink his upbringing. He stormed out of the alley and onto the sidewalk, six feet and then some of pissed-off assassin.
Me, I could hold my calm in high-stress situations. I was good at denial—had plenty of practice. I simply blocked out the fear, terror; shoved a metaphorical sock into the mouth of the little girl’s screaming panic in my mind; and took it one thing at a time. First thing was to see whether anything else was still alive back here.
I took the time to recast Light, got the glow down to a tolerable level, and left the hovering orb behind me as I walked forward slowly and quietly. If something was alive, it was probably also hurt. Sometimes injured people and animals attacked when someone was trying to help them.
I drew a circle in the air with the index fingers of both hands, pinching the point where the circles closed between my index finger and thumb. Containment spells, the basics of Hold, that I could quickly fill with magic and toss at whatever was back there.
After a few steps, I was walking in a thin trail of blood; a few steps more and the blood thickened with gore.
And Nola had wanted me to wear my strappy sandals. Shows you what a country girl knew about city dating.
About twenty feet into the alley, I spotted the mess. It wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. I dropped the glyph in my left hand and put my palm over my nose to try to block the stink of death, defecation, and rotted magic.
Large enough to be another person, the poor thing was spread across the entire width of the alley. From the bits I could recognize—a muzzle, tail, a paw attached to half a leg—I knew it was a dog. Had been a dog.
Shit.
That thing hadn’t just killed it, it had ravaged it. There were bloody bits everywhere, but the inside gore—heart, intestine, lungs—none of that was left. Just skin and bits of bone.
Bile rose up in my throat and I swallowed to k
eep from puking. My eyes watered, and I started coughing.
I scanned the mess one last time, looking for a collar. I couldn’t see any, and I just didn’t have it in me to touch the poor thing’s remains. I backed away from the corpse, blinking back tears.
Zayvion made some noise striding toward me. Probably so I wouldn’t be surprised.
I turned my back on the mess and headed toward him, trying to hold it together.
“What’s back there?” he asked.
“A d-dog,” I stuttered. Way to sound tough, Beckstrom, I thought.
Zayvion took a deep breath, filling his chest and making him look even bigger than he was. But when he exhaled, some of the anger was gone, replaced by his familiar, and at the moment much-appreciated, Zen.
He placed his hand gently but firmly on my right arm. “If you ever do that again, if you ever break a protection spell, I will knock you down and drag you to safety. Do you understand me?”
“Not really.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. Okay, so maybe he really was still angry.
“Hey, it’s not like anyone taught me about protection spells like that, that—”
“Camouflage,” he said.
“Camouflage you did. You want me to stay out of your way, then I will.” I took a step, but he pulled me against him so quickly, my boot slipped down the side of his shoe, probably smearing blood and gunk all over the outside of his leather loafers.
His arms closed around me and I could feel the heat of his body, smell the sweet pine and spice of his cologne over the sharp bite of his fear and sweat, could feel the pounding of his heart—strong. Fast.
But it was not a loving embrace.
“Let me go,” I said.
“Not until you understand me.” Zayvion searched my face. “You could have been hurt. Killed. It had fed—was feeding—and you have too much magic it wants. It could have killed you.”
“Got it. Big scary monster is not my friend. Now let go.”
He didn’t loosen his grip. The stomach-dropping panic of claustrophobia licked across my skin. I didn’t do tight spaces—not even someone’s arms—very well. “Zayvion, let go.” My voice was a little higher than I liked.
