I cleared my throat and nudged him with my foot. “Dom. Come on. Wake up. It’s time to go.”
Dom’s eyes snapped open and I barely had enough time to dodge the swing of his ax. It whistled in the air above my head, splitting the air with a hiss of deadly promise.
“What the hell?” I demanded. “Don’t tell me you’re still pissed.”
Dom blinked a few times, clearing the cobwebs. When his eyes focused on me, they clouded over with anger.
“Where were you last night?”
Without a word, I dumped the sack I carried onto the counter. During my walk, I’d discovered a thriving community of Macaw set up in a former pet shop. Unlike many of the animals, they’d been smart enough to escape their small enclosure and had apparently found enough food to set up a small habitat. The species was endangered in many other parts of the world, so it had made me uneasy to kill the two I had picked off. But given the choice between their lives and Dom’s, I knew which I was going to prioritize. I could probably go for a while without food. My body was technically dead now and I had no idea what Valerius would drive me to eat.
But Dom would die if I didn’t feed him and our other options were limited. I wasn’t going to eat any of the infected werewolves we were forced to kill, and our bag of junk food wouldn’t sustain him for long.
“I got lunch. It should last you a few days if all goes well.” I’d already plucked the birds, so if one didn’t pay much attention, they could conceivably pretend they were eating chicken.
Dominic considered the birds on the counter and then glanced back up at me, face still tight with anger. “You said you’d be gone an hour.”
I shrugged. “I lied. I guess you have your justification for not trusting me now, don’t you?”
I almost cringed. Hadn’t I resolved not to bait him on my way back to our temporary safehouse? How on earth were we ever going to cooperate for long enough to escape if all our best intentions went flying out the window the moment one of us opened our mouths?
Dominic’s jaw flexed once in anger, but he swallowed the words he was going to say. Only his aura clued me in to his mood. It crackled like a small thunderstorm, making the air in the gift shop thicker than before.
He pushed to his feet and strode over to the shelf that bore his clothes, setting his ax aside for the moment.
I had a very nice view of his ass as he wriggled into his jeans and missed the pale, taut expanse of back when he pulled on his shirt. He threw his coat on last and seized his weapon, hefting it onto his shoulder with a cold, businesslike air.
“Let’s go. We’ve lost too much time, and we shouldn’t even be on this portion of the island.”
I nodded once, holding back my vitriol as well. I hadn’t spotted anything big and nasty lurking nearby on my walk the night before, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t out there. “Lead the way, sir.”
I sounded stiff and formal, but it was better than angry, I supposed.
Once the birds were packed into his bag, we set off into the gloom at a brisk jog.
If we kept up at our current pace, I thought we might be able to make it to the fairground by nightfall.
We followed the sandy path through the thick jungle passing bamboo huts. A pair of bicycles were chained to a tree, so long ago the wood was growing over the chains.
Then we found a paved pedestrian path that led deeper into the commercial area. Neither of us spoke and for about an hour, the only sound was the soft, wet footfalls of our boots on the ground and drops of water landing on the thick, tropical leaves. The silence ended up saving our lives.
We’d just stepped foot in what appeared to be a theatre pit. It probably hosted small-time acts, since it appeared to seat only about a hundred people at a time. Rows of concrete bleachers descended down toward a half-moon stage. The pit where an orchestra might have played was completely flooded with water.
We froze on the bottom row of bleachers when a snarl split the air and turned my blood to ice. One wolf growl would have been enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. A single, rabid werewolf would have been dangerous. But I could sense and more than that smell, a whole host of them.
The putrid smell radiating off of the wolves nearly brought my last meal up. The collective odor of the necrotic flesh was a choking thing. Beside me, Dom wretched and bent double. I spun to get a good look at our opponents and nearly let out a yelp when I saw how many we’d be facing.
Around sixty wolves stood behind and just above us. Feral brown eyes glared down at us, reflecting the light of our flashlight back to us eerily.
Some of the wolves only stood back and watched, while others leaned forward in eager anticipation, awaiting the signal to leap down into the small pit and tear us into pieces.
The rumbling growl came from all sides and sounded like someone trying to start up a big rig in confined quarters. I spun in a slow circle, finding that we’d been surrounded on all sides by the mass of furry predators.
“How the hell did they sneak up on us?” I wondered aloud, not really anticipating an answer. Dom was busy choking up his meal. I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t doing the same. Maybe Valerius was bracing me against the worst of it. Or maybe the stench of decay didn’t bother the demon who kept my body’s metabolic processes mostly intact.
“We were waiting for you.”
The unexpected, mostly human voice rooted me in place. I sought him in the mass of fur and fangs, some still hidden in the shadow of the trees, trying to find what I’d missed in my initial sweep.
He was crouching low to the ground, at eye level with all the other wolves, which was why I hadn’t spotted him at first. He was exceptionally hairy, too, which had added to the impression of wolfishness.
He had the grisled, untamed beard of a castaway and I was pretty sure that his hair hadn’t seen a brush since leaving the mainland years ago. He was broad and resembled a pro football player. His frame had once supported muscle and a lot of it. It had been worn away by time and harsh living, leaving him with only the lean muscle that came from hard living. His dark eyes were fixed on me with feverish intensity.
I raised my palms in the universal gesture for surrender. I wasn’t sure how sane this guy might be, but he wasn’t as far gone as many of the wolves we’d seen. If he could resume his human shape, he could at least reason well enough to listen.
“Hello, friend,” I began slowly, trying to ape the warm and friendly tone that Dom used when negotiating. Diplomacy had never been my strong suit. I’d never developed the filter that allowed me to keep the sarcastic quips from spilling out of my mouth. But if there was ever a time to develop one, it was now.
The wolfman barked a laugh. “Don’t think you can use your silver tongue on us, stranger. You have already killed several of our kin already on the beach. Call me friend again and I will have you skinned before we finish with you.”
The hairs on my neck, not satisfied with standing on end, tried to crawl up my scalp and find cover. Somehow his coherency made the whole thing worse. A rabid animal that attacked you had the excuse of being ill and or completely batshit insane. The psychotic gleam in his dark eyes told me that he wouldn’t just kill us. He would do it slowly, he’d make it painful, and then he’d leave us to rot.
Of course, I’d come back. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to recover from being skinned alive and wasn’t eager to find out. If it were only my hide on the line I might have called Hairy McGee on his threat. My natural response to fear was to punch whatever was scaring me in the face.
I wasn’t helpless, and with my super strength, I was sure I could use the shovel to turn the attack into a game of putt-putt, using wolves as both the ball and the goal. I could eventually recover from whatever they did to me. Dom couldn’t, and it was for his sake that I kept my mouth firmly fixed in an insipid smile, instead of shouting where the wolf could shove his threats.
An uneasy laugh burbled from my lips. “We we
re abandoned on this rock the same as you. We all want to find a way to get out of here. So why don’t you help us? We don’t have to fight. Let’s get to the mainland and tear those fanged freaks a new collective asshole, huh?”
Hairy McGee watched me through narrowed eyes. Idly he reached into the pocket of a fur-lined vest and withdrew a short bone dagger. My intuition told me that the material for both had probably come for a slain wolf. In these savage times, it was strictly waste-not.
“Is that what you think?” he mused, staring out at the terrain. Wisps of fog curled around everything, making even the rows of benches nearest us appear vague and soft-edged. “That we want to escape this place?”
I blinked at him. “Don’t you?”
He bared his teeth in an exultant smile. “Of course not. Those misguided bloodsuckers have done us a favor. On the mainland, we were being forced from our homes. We were tortured, neglected, left to die. Here a wolf is free to live as he or she pleases. We were chosen. It’s the dawn of a new age.”
My mind spun in circles. No. This couldn’t be right. Who would want to live here? Even without the oppressive thought of disaster looming over them at all times, this place was no paradise. Food was scarce, the disease was rampant, and overcrowding would become an issue when the rest of the population was deported here during the final stages of the vampire’s plans.
“You’re a damned fool then,” I shot back. “The vampires aren’t doing this out some sense of charity. They aren’t even doing it to protect the human masses like they claimed. They want you all dead. When the quarantine zones and the virus didn’t kill you off, they came up with a plan. The vampires are going to blow this island sky high in a few weeks.”
I neglected to mention that I was the incendiary device they’d be using. Hairy McGee was already unstable and didn’t need any additional reasons to rip my throat out. Some wolves shifted uncomfortably. This was news to them.
The leader barked another short laugh. “Oh, we don’t have any more love for the bloodsuckers than you do. But we will be strong enough to handle them when they come. We won’t scramble onto a boat like cockroaches and hope that we find someplace safer. This is our land and we won’t be driven from it. You sound like the adherents. They also believe that the move was nefarious.”
I was momentarily sidetracked by that bit of information. Dom finally spoke up and voiced the question battering around the inside of my skull.
“So you’re not the ones who told us to meet them at the fairground?”
That was something of a relief, actually. Not every wolf was dead or out of their minds in these parts. It sounded like we needed to find the adherents if we survived our encounter with this separatist faction.
Hairy McGee grinned. “Justus Pleasant? That weakling fell years ago. I’m wearing his pelt.”
Connecting a face I’d known and trusted to the belt Hairy wore was enough to make my stomach roll and my anger to rise like a scalding tide. This asshole may have destroyed our one chance of getting out of here alive. I’d met morons like this before. You found them in every group. He was the sort of person that would happily condemn others to die for his misguided beliefs. Something had to be done. There were at least sixty wolves here. Surely not all of them were eager to die for this man’s stupidity?
My lips pulled away from my teeth and a collective growl ran through the wolves. I realized belatedly what I’d done and what it would look like to their leader. With the demon came new powers, new physical attributes, and a temper that was hard to quell.
One of my physical additions was fangs. And without a beating heart…
“Vampire,” the wolf hissed, eyes narrowing to slits.
“I’m not. I swear it. You have to listen to me—”
But Hairy didn’t give me enough time to explain. He bared his teeth, which were rapidly elongating into razor-sharp canines. His nose extended with a crunch of bone and his jaw fused into a new position. Grisled fur ran like a cascade of water down his back. He hunched over onto all fours and then threw back his head, letting out a long warbling howl that was taken up by the others at once.
My blood chilled and a shiver ran down my spine. I’d been around enough shifters to know what was happening and to know that I was in very deep shit.
I was an interloper. A challenger and a threat. The alpha would deal with me accordingly: a fight to the death. Only one of us could survive.
The pit was a shallow, bowl-like scoop from the earth. In three bounding steps, Hairy had thrown himself off of the ledge, slid down the gently sloping walls, and leaped over two rows of seats to launch himself right at my face.
chapter
6
I DODGED HAIRY MCGEE’S RAZOR-SHARP claws, but the momentum of his charge was enough to send me tumbling back into the row of bleachers just above us, driving the concrete corner into the base of my skull with a solid crack of sound. I’d had worse in my tenure as one of the Big Five, when a sasquatch had come at me full tilt, swinging me into a tree with such force I’d actually blacked out.
I managed to hold onto consciousness with white-knuckled hands, and rolled out of the way just in time to avoid the four hundred pound monster’s teeth scything down toward my throat. The alpha werewolf’s jaws connected with concrete instead, and the sound of its tooth splitting made me wince.
My ungainly roll took me down three rows of bleachers in a painful slide toward the bottom of the pit. My back was going to be a patchwork of bruises if I survived this.
The wolf recovered quickly, spinning around to rest its weight on its haunches. Its fearsome eyes found me struggling to regain my footing four feet below where I’d originally stood.
A quick glance upward showed that Dom had vacated his previous position. It took my wheeling eyes a moment to find him leaping like an over-enthusiastic hare toward the stage. I had no idea what the hell he thought he was doing and didn’t have time to question it. Trusting that he had a plan, I followed.
The world tilted and nausea washed over me. The double-edge to my vision clued me in that I was not well. The impact had probably given me a concussion, possibly even a brain bleed. I ran across the narrow aisle, trying to get to the stairs that split the middle row in half. If I could reach the flat ground of the stage, I could finally start swinging at Hairy with my shovel. As it was, he had the high ground and a definite advantage over me in size and bulk.
Hairy was after me in an instant, launching himself over the rows of bleachers that separated us in a single bound. He reached the stairs just I did. I backpedaled a step, trying not to run into his flank.
My grip tightened on the shovel in my hand. It looked like I was out of options.
It was similar to swinging a stave if the weapon were a little topheavy. The whistle of the shovel blade could barely be heard over the excited huffs and growls of the wolves above us. As the alpha, Hairy had the right to kill us first in a dominance fight. If he hadn’t claimed that right, I was fairly sure it would have been raining wolves by now. No matter how good Dom and I were, we couldn’t fend off that many without guns or magic.
The shovel connected with a wet crunch and the wolf flew into the air, landing in a crumpled heap about six feet away from me. I fought the urge to whistle. I’d been able to launch a full-grown crocodile through the air when the rat bastard Findlay attacked us in the Everglades. Hairy must be a tough customer if he could withstand what Valerius could dish out.
The wolf staggered to its feet, a bit punch drunk but still very much alive. It swayed a little but kept its footing.
Now that there was some distance between us I could finally make out the general shape of my attacker. He stood as tall as Dom, even on all fours. Six feet and change, most of it made up of sinewy muscle. If I’d been human, even having it land on me would have been a death sentence.
“Over here, Nat!” Dom shouted.
I interrupted my horrified contemplation of my opponent and found D
om waving at me frantically from the stage. Sometime during the last few minutes, he’d dragged the coiled innards of a breaker box out into the open and fiddled with the wires. Weak and wavering lights lit the stage.
I wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted me to do but it seemed to include keeping the wolf busy. My only course of action was to pummel Hairy until he resembled blood pudding.
I heaved the shovel up onto my shoulder and measured the distance between myself and the stage. I had about ten feet to go. If I ran, Hairy was going to tear through my back like wrapping paper, revealing the goodies inside. I’d never been eviscerated before and wasn’t keen on learning what it felt like.
“Come on, Valerius,” I muttered, addressing the demon directly for the first time since he’d been shoved inside of me. “I need a little help here. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t blow us all to hell, okay?”
Warmth trickled into my veins and I could have sworn that a hand clasped my shoulder in a burning grip for a half-second.
Before I could examine what the hell had just happened, my limbs started forward without my conscious permission. I took two running steps and launched myself with all of my considerable might toward the stage.
The leap was worthy of an Olympic gymnast. I really wished that I could have gotten a good look at whatever aerial maneuver Valerius had just sent my body into, because it felt like it had been spectacular. My leap took me over the flooded orchestra pit, through the maze of wires and stage lights that hung low in their brackets, and I found myself reaching out to grasp the track that held the thick curtains in place.
I spun once like a demented trapeze artist and came to a magnificent stop, perched on tiptoe on top of a steel beam.
“Holy mother of God,” Dom muttered from far below.
“Holy shit,” I agreed emphatically.
The small, tiny part of me that had always wanted to be more graceful rejoiced at my newfound ability. The lion’s share of my mind was freaking the fuck out. For at least ten seconds, my actions had been entirely out of my control. When I’d asked Valerius for help, I’d assumed that I’d end up with access to a new ability, not taking part in a reenactment of the exorcist.
Agent of Magic Box Set Page 24
