Must Love Hellhounds

by Harris, Charlaine

  The dragon’s flesh beckoned, elastic and smooth, coiling before me, begging for a taste.

  The world went red. I charged.

  Blood. Rip, claw, rip, rip, more, dig, dig into flesh.

  A huge, pulsating sac swelled before me. I sliced into it, laughed when blood drenched me, and kept ripping. All around me, wet, hot redness shuddered.

  “Enough!” A force clamped me and tossed me aside. I flew through the air, landed on all fours, and charged my assailant. He tripped me and I fell. The air burst from my lungs in a rush. My head swam.

  The reality came back with ponderous slowness. I lay on my back in the grass, my body slick with reptilian blood. Slowly the rage faded and I saw Raphael.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked him.

  “Nothing dire.”

  The dragon’s corpse lay on its side, a dozen half-formed heads sprawling like the stalks of some disgusting flower. A big hole gaped in her gut. It looked like someone had tunneled through her. Teddy Jo stood bent over near her, breathing hard.

  “Did I do that?”

  Raphael nodded. “You ripped apart her heart. That’s what finally killed her.”

  “The apples.” I tried to get up, but my legs refused to obey.

  Raphael scooped me up. “Are you okay?”

  “Overdid it.” Drowsiness swept over me. My muscles turned to cotton. I stuck my ugly head against his neck. I felt dirty and awful. My stomach clenched.

  If he hadn’t pulled me out, I would’ve cut and sliced until I passed out.

  Slowly it sank in: we won.

  “I’ll take care of the apples,” Teddy Jo said. “You take your lady home.”

  Raphael looked at him. “Good fight,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Teddy Jo answered. “We didn’t do too bad. I live down in the Warren. Look me up if you wanna have a beer some time.”

  Raphael carried me off.

  “Don’t forget the boy,” I whispered.

  “I won’t. We’re going to get the boy and drop him off with my mother. Then I’ll take you to my house. I have a garden tub. We’ll get nice and clean and then crawl into our bed and sleep until noon. Would you like that?”

  “Very much,” I said and licked his neck. “Raphael . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I killed them. The boudas who tortured me and my mother. I went back after Academy, and I challenged them and killed them all one by one.”

  He licked my cheek. “Come home with me,” he said simply.

  I held on to him and whispered, “You couldn’t keep me away.”

  No matter what job a man has, he always ends up hating parts of it. Now, I loved my job, the sword, the wings, the chopping off the evildoers’ heads and all, but I bloody hated flying down to Savannah. Every time I swung this way, I hit wet wind off the ocean flying through Low Country. It ate its way through me all the way to the bone. Enough to give a man the liking for one of those dumb-looking paratrooper jump-suits.

  It took me a bit of time to finally find the right house in the predawn light, a small place with white siding and green roof, nothing special except for the damn industrial-strength ward on it. I circled it once and felt the magic defenses go down: Kate had seen me. Nothing to do but land, which I did, right on the path before the porch.

  Kate sat on the porch with a book on her lap. She was on the pretty side, tan, dark-eyed, dark-haired. Exotic, even. Didn’t look like she was from around here, but then who did nowadays? Her sword lay next to her, a pale sliver. I paid attention to her eyes and the sword. She was a bit quick on the trigger with it.

  “I always knew there was something odd about you, Teddy Jo,” she said, nodding at my wings.

  “Likewise.”

  I felt the magic coil about her. Too much power there. Way too much. She hid it well, though.

  “How did it go?”

  I shrugged. “Killed the snake responsible. Everybody’s alive. Your friends are in one piece. I expect they’ll celebrate in bed once they sleep it off.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “They were together? Like together-together?”

  “Looked that way to me.”

  A grin bent her lips. Why now, she had a pretty smile. Who knew?

  “I’ve got something for you here,” I said, and showed her a sack of apples.

  She closed the book and set it aside. The title read, Lion, King of Cats: Exploring the Pride. I handed her the sack.

  “Couldn’t find anybody else immune to Persephone’s immortality?” She chuckled.

  “You guys don’t exactly grow on trees. I tried burning them, but fire does nothing to the damn things.”

  “That’s because they are meant to be eaten or sacrificed.” She picked up her sword, cut a small chunk, and popped it into her mouth. “Tart. Think they’ll keep for a week? I’ve got company coming next Friday, and I’d like to make them into a pie.”

  “Can the company handle Persephone’s Apples?”

  “He can.”

  I made of note of that he. Didn’t know there was anybody else in the area immune to Persephone’s Gift. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet it was the Beast Lord. Magic was a funny thing. The older it was, the stronger it was. True, Hades’ fire-power was of an ancient variety, but the magic Kate threw around was so much older, it gave me a start the first time I felt it. Now, I’d seen the Beast Lord once. He’d passed by me and I about choked. The magic that rolled off him was even older than Kate’s flavor. Primeval—not your regular shapeshifter. Enough to give a man a complex.

  “I don’t see why they wouldn’t keep,” I said aloud. “Damn things are near indestructible.”

  She lifted the sack. “Thanks!”

  “Thank you.”

  I pushed from the grass and shot into the sky. The sun was rising. Its rays warmed my wings and I headed back toward Atlanta. I had had a hard night. It was time to get home, drink me some coffee, and feed my dogs. Cerberus made sweet puppies, but the damn things sure ate a lot.

  Blind Spot

  A GUARDIAN NOVELLA

  Meljean Brook

  Chapter One

  That morning, two hours after she received an anonymous e-mail that included an address and a short message, Maggie Wren boarded a flight from San Francisco to New York. Accompanied by the hellhound that Maggie’s employer had demanded she bring with her, she arrived at JFK in midafternoon. The address led her to a brownstone in Brooklyn. Despite the busy streets and the glaring sun that exposed her movements, she picked the lock at the front door and dismantled the security system.

  With a silent hand gesture, she instructed the hellhound to check the first level. Upstairs, the first two bedrooms stood open and empty, except for a shirt and jeans strewn over the floor of the second. Maggie kicked through a third door when she found it locked.

  Her target—Geoffrey Blake—was sitting naked on the wooden floor, handcuffed to a radiator. He’d drawn his knees up and rested his back against the wall beneath a lace-curtained window. Although her foot slamming against the door could have woken the dead, his eyes remained closed.

  Maggie swept the room with her gun before shoving the weapon into the holster beneath her blazer.

  She crossed to Blake’s side, retrieving her lock picks from her jacket’s inside pocket. He wasn’t completely naked, she noted. Her gaze skipped to his black briefs as she crouched and reached for the handcuffs. Yellow smiley faces grinned up at her from the elastic waistband.

  “At least someone is happy to see me,” Maggie said. Or maybe the smiley faces were just thrilled to be hugging his muscled abdomen. Smug little bastards.

  “I would be,” Blake replied in a deep, dry voice, “if I could see you.”

  He raised his head and opened his eyes, revealing irises of light blue—and no pupils. From rim to rim, the color was solid.

  Maggie’s fingers twitched. The metal pick slipped out of the keyhole and jabbed his wrist. Shit. She murmured an apology, her mind racing.

  Blind. Yet nothin
g in Blake’s dossier had indicated it. How had he kept the disability unlisted on his official records? Why keep it hidden?

  And why hadn’t Maggie’s employer prepared her before she’d flown across the country to rescue him? More than that—what the hell had her employer been thinking by letting Blake come to New York alone? Had he actually expected his nephew—a man who couldn’t see, for God’s sake—to track down the woman who’d disappeared from a New York hotel room two days ago?

  That the woman was Blake’s sister was even more reason not to have sent him. Caring too much led to carelessness. Which, Maggie thought, was probably why Blake was handcuffed to a radiator.

  But at least his blindness explained why her employer had insisted that she bring the dog.

  “You didn’t know,” Blake said.

  Maggie worked at the lock, pulling herself out of assignment mode and slipping back into the deferential courtesy required by her newest occupation: household management and personal security.

  Which, she’d often thought, was just a nice way of saying that she was a butler with a gun.

  She popped the first cuff, moved on to the second. “Mr. Ames-Beaumont must have considered your blindness irrelevant to my objective, sir.”

  “Is it relevant?”

  “No, sir.” She had to get Blake out of here, either way.

  “Sir?” His faint smile didn’t soften his strong features. The beginnings of a dark beard shadowed his jaw. His nose, Maggie thought, would have done a Stoic emperor proud. “If you are calling me ‘sir,’ then you must be the recently acquired—and, according to Uncle Colin, the already indispensable—Winters.”

  There was no point in correcting him. She’d been called more offensive names before. And she didn’t know why Ames-Beaumont had taken to calling her “Winters,” but considering the salary he paid her, she’d decided that he could address her however he wished.

  The billionaire owner of Ramsdell Pharmaceuticals had high standards for his employees—and the closer to his family those employees were, the higher those standards were.

  And he’d called her indispensable. Not easily disposed of and replaced. She’d never been that before.

  But she couldn’t afford to acknowledge the warm glow the secondhand praise brought, or the despair that it would change.

  Yes, “Winters” was much better than what he’d soon be calling her.

  “You are correct, sir.” Despite the tightening of her throat, her voice remained even. “I am.”

  “Of course you are. And, of course, when we finally meet, I am like this.” Blake gestured at himself with his free hand. “Do you know why you’ve found me half-naked? Do you know what this is?”

  Finally meet? He’d said that as if they’d communicated before. Maggie was certain they hadn’t. Blake had been in Britain since she’d begun working for his uncle three months ago. Before that, he’d traveled as often and as extensively as she had, but they’d never been in the same place at the same time—with one exception, four years ago. Maggie hadn’t seen him then; she would have remembered. And he couldn’t have seen her.

  So whatever he meant by “finally,” it had little to do with her. More likely, it referenced a conversation between him and his uncle—perhaps the one where she’d been described as indispensable. “I don’t know, sir. What is this?”

  “This is karma. This is every negative thing I’ve done, coming back to take a big bite of my ass.”

  The tightness in her throat eased. She strove to match the light tone his response invited. “That is unfortunate. Particularly as, in my professional opinion, the consequences of your actions are worse than you imagine.”

  “Why do you say that, Winters?”

  “Because you are much more than half-naked, sir. And although I have many talents, protecting you from mystical kar mic forces is not one of them.”

  He tilted his head, as if weighing that. “So chances are, I’ll lose my shorts before we’re done.”

  She ignored the little jolt in her stomach as his smile widened, carving crescents beside his mouth. In the humid air, his overlong hair had curled over his forehead and at his neck and ears. Combined with the smile, his dishevelment was unexpectedly appealing.

  The job, Maggie. “We’ll try to avoid that, sir.” Though unlocking the cuffs required touch rather than sight, she focused on her fingers. “Your uncle sends his regrets that he wasn’t able to come.”

  “I could hardly expect a vampire to catch an early-morning flight to New York.”

  Perhaps not a normal vampire, no. Even if one could rise from his daily sleep, he’d burst into flames at the touch of the sun. But Colin Ames-Beaumont wasn’t a normal vampire, and so he could have come—but his fiancée couldn’t travel during the day, and the vampire would never leave his partner unprotected.

  “I was the most expedient option,” Maggie explained.

  “How fortunate for me.”

  Fortune had nothing to do with it. After reading the e-mail, she’d convinced Ames-Beaumont to send her, citing the same qualifications that had led him to hire her: a level head, weapons expertise, and a history of successful troubleshooting missions.

  But Maggie hadn’t mentioned the “You can stop me, Brunhilda” written in the e-mail beneath the brownstone’s address, or that she had a very good idea who’d done this to Blake.

  She grazed her fingers over Blake’s inner wrist as she opened the second cuff. He was perspiring in the stifling room, and his skin was warm. Warm, but not hot—and so not belonging to a shape-shifted demon acting as a decoy.

  Blake’s large hand caught hers. It was difficult to remember that his eyes were sightless when he stared into hers with such intensity. “It’s good to know that you’re who you say, too.”

  Maggie didn’t point out that she’d said her name was Winters. “There’s a needle mark on the inside of your elbow.”

  Blake released her hand. “He took blood.”

  That was . . . strange. “How much?” She didn’t think it had been too much; Blake’s color was good beneath his tan. “Can you walk? Were you drugged?”

  “Yes. Some sort of sedative.” Blake lifted his jaw, exposing a swelling on his neck the size of a bee sting. “I was on the sidewalk outside my hotel. He pushed me into a taxi, told the driver I was drunk. I blacked out after that.”

  And his abductor hadn’t tried to avoid being seen. Not a good sign. There were three primary reasons a criminal didn’t hide his identity: he wanted to be caught, he assumed he’d never be punished . . . or he already knew he wouldn’t get out alive.

  “‘He’? You’re sure? And not a demon or a vampire?”

  “Yes. Male. Human.”

  That’s what she’d been afraid of. Demons were forbidden to physically harm humans, and so couldn’t do anything except tempt and bargain. Vampires weren’t bound by the same rules, but were helpless during the daylight hours.

  But a human could be dangerous at any time—especially if it was the man Maggie suspected it was.

  She prayed it wasn’t James. If it wasn’t, that meant she hadn’t made the wrong decision three years ago when she’d let him go. But if James had sent her that e-mail, if he’d abducted Katherine . . . she might have to really kill him this time.

  And then flee to save her own life. When Ames-Beaumont discovered her deception and her connection to the man who’d endangered his family, the vampire would kill her.

  After she sent his nephew home in one piece, perhaps he’d make it quick. And if she found Katherine, maybe Ames-Beaumont would let Maggie go.

  Or at least give her a head start.

  “Your clothes are in one of the other bedrooms,” she said, and stood. “Let’s get you dressed and head out.”

  “Did someone come with you?” Blake asked.

  Maggie glanced over her shoulder. Inside the bedroom, Blake was hitching his jeans up over a backside that, even chewed up by karma, still looked damn good. With his tall, leanly muscled build,
all of him looked good.

  But not flawless. A puckered scar marred his upper left shoulder. There hadn’t been a scar in front, so the bullet hadn’t punched through. Removing it would’ve required surgery, yet there were no gunshot wounds or hospital stays listed in his medical history.

  According to his profile and the pile of write-ups from his supervisors, Blake did nothing at Ramsdell Pharmaceuticals but dick around behind his desks and research stations. According to his body, he did much more than that.

  Maggie wasn’t surprised by the evidence his body offered. Although she hadn’t anticipated his blindness, she’d assumed there was more to Geoffrey Blake than his frequent transfers between Ramsdell’s international subsidiaries suggested. Even if nepotism and family connections had played a part in Blake’s employment history, Ames-Beaumont would never have relied on an incompetent man to lead the search for Katherine.

  So Geoffrey Blake wouldn’t be inept—and no stranger to dangerous situations.

  “No,” Maggie finally answered. “Except for a dog, I came alone.”

  Blake cocked his head before giving it a shake. To Maggie, his silence seemed to be of confusion rather than just caution.

  Or was it disorientation? She continued, “We’ll have your blood tested to make sure the drug—”

  “No.” Blake turned, pushing his dark hair back off his forehead. “The Ramsdell offices in New York don’t have labs. We don’t send my blood anywhere else. I’m fine.”

  She couldn’t blame him for his paranoia, not after he’d already had his blood stolen. “Very well. Are you ready?”

  As an answer, Blake walked unerringly toward her. Guided by the direction of her voice, Maggie guessed. When he drew close and stopped, she had to look up at him. That didn’t happen often, whether she was in boots or bare feet.