by Deanna Chase
I’m sure the shortage of willing victims had nothing to do with it.
My father was the Black Dog, a death omen, like me, and like me he was bound into service to both the Seelie and Unseelie houses. Macsen was a devoted servant of Faerie, a true neutral who bowed to neither house and granted neither the light nor the dark fae exception. He was a renowned hunter who never lost his quarry, an executioner whose mercy could not be bought, begged or borrowed.
His were big shoes to fill. If he had bothered to stick around, I might have tried them on for size.
“I’m not going to mess this up. I can’t.” Conclave auspices were conditional, after all. They may have solved my legal problems with mortal authorities, but they expected a return on their investment.
I told myself becoming a marshal was my idea, my dream. Most days I even believed it.
“This job means everything to Tee,” Mai said. “She won’t mess it up, even for a hot piece of—”
“Mai,” Mable snapped.
Mai dissolved into chuckles, flopping backward across the foot of the bed and crushing my toes.
Yowch.
Mable fanned her face as she stood. “On that note, I believe I will leave you girls to it.” Heaving her purse onto her shoulder, she dropped a kiss onto the crown of my head. “See you Monday, dear.”
Mai wiggled her fingers but didn’t sit up again. Sensing her preoccupation, I waited until Mable left then settled against my pillows and waited for her to speak. When she didn’t, I nudged her thigh.
“I’m not cut out for this.” She twisted onto her side to face me. “Marshaling is hardcore.”
Unsure where this conversation was headed, I shrugged. “I guess.”
“Eight cadets were trapped in a scrapyard—can you say tetanus?—with a hulked-out incubus on a white handkerchief killing spree.” She widened her chocolate eyes. “Only one made it out alive.”
I snorted. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Says the girl with the badge on her lap,” Mai quipped.
“Yes, five year olds everywhere envy me.” I flung the broken corner at her. “What will you do if you drop out?”
“Hayashis and the conclave go way back.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ll think of something.”
A cold knot congealed in my gut. No more academy meant no more roomie. Mai would have to clear out of our quarters, maybe before I was released. “Does this mean you’re moving back home?”
“Are you crazy?” She shoved upright. “I’ve tasted freedom, and it is sweet. Home is out.”
I pushed higher on the bed. “So what are you going to do?”
She leaned forward. “It’s what we’re going to do.”
“Okay.” I drew out the word. “What are we going to do?”
“Get an apartment.” She got on her knees and danced until she dragged the cover down my legs. “We’re eighteen. You’ve got your first job, and I’ve got...parents willing to spot me the rent money.”
“I—” I blinked. “An apartment?”
She stopped her one-woman wave long enough to cast me a serious look. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but you and your mom are in a better place now than you have been since we met.”
She was right. Mom was downright chipper when I called now that I was out from under her roof.
“Absence, heart, fonder,” I said.
“Exactly,” she agreed. “So let’s do this.” She stuck out her hand. “Roomies?”
Feeling lighter than I had in years, I shook on it. “Roomies.”
Chapter Four
Shaw wasn’t home anymore. Flames roared over my head, filling my nose with the scent of burnt hair as I crawled on my hands and knees toward him. His shirt hung in singed tatters from one shoulder. He squatted behind an antique chaise lounge with soot tracks blackening the gray upholstery. Blisters covered his neck and torso. Color leached from his skin and hair, his eyes. As I watched, his nails lengthened, sharpened. Hunger stared at me through his whited-out eyes and wet his lips.
Chills swept up my spine while sweat dripped from my hairline into my eyes.
So far my first day of OJT was a hot mess, literally.
While debating whether the danger was greater in staying put or in crawling forward, a blast of heat forced me to roll out of my hiding spot into his. I landed on my stomach, face level with his ass.
It wasn’t the worst view I’d had all day.
“What the hell is that?” I yelled, shoving my messenger bag behind my back. This sure wasn’t the docile pygmy ouroboros on our paperwork.
Ouroboros were basically self-devouring snakes. Completely harmless even when riled because they were too busy digesting their tails to bother with biting their handlers. This call, my first official one, should have been easy. Bag and tag the little guy then cart him back to the office for processing.
On paper, this wasn’t an instance of a fae behaving badly. This was a fae recovery mission. We assumed a human collector had snatched the pygmy, which happens, but that theory had just gone up in smoke. Again, literally.
“I can’t get a good look at it,” he rumbled.
I patted my head to check for hot spots. “Can you drain it?”
His glare made me flinch.
“Sorry I asked.”
Incubi fed on energy. Sex might be their preferred method of feeding, but they could sustain themselves in other ways. The problem being most alternative methods were lethal to mortal prey.
Not that I could judge. I had my own hungers to battle.
I knew for a fact Shaw could feed by absorbing energy through touch, but he had compared the experience to sipping through one of those tiny coffee straws. To quench his thirst, he required a more direct conduit.
In a manner of speaking, I had just asked Shaw to—at best—stick his straw into the bottle of an unidentified fae. At worst I had suggested he boink a flamethrower who might flambé his manly bits.
“Stay down.” He pressed his palm to my nape, nails digging into my spine. “I’m going in.”
“Wait. I’ll go—” I sat up as he leapt the chaise and vanished into the wall of smoke, “—with you.”
Thirty seconds passed to the rapid tapping of my toes. I was chewing the inside of my cheek like bubblegum when a bestial roar shook the floor straight up to the rafters. Ceiling beams collapsed into the center of what had been a rancher’s home office. At least it had been until whatever was in there hocking up fireballs had turned this end of the house into its lair and the cattle ranch into an all-it-could-eat brisket buffet.
“Shaw,” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Between the roaring and the fire, I was almost deaf.
Clenching my left fist, I contained the tingles spreading across my palm, lighting up the runes covering my hand.
This wasn’t the academy, this was real life, and this creature had crossed a line.
There were no restrictions placed on magic used in self-defense while in the field.
I smiled.
It was time to earn that badge.
After shoving to my feet, I leapt the smoking chaise and burst through the black cloud making it hard to breathe. I landed in a crouch and opened my senses. My nose might as well have been stuffed with tissue. My eyes watered nonstop. Hissing and spitting made me spin around, but it was just the fire.
I crept forward until my toes hit debris with some give to it. I stepped wide to cross it, but once I had my weight balanced on the other side, a hand grasped my ankle. Startled, I slid and fell on my ass. I reached down and braced myself to stand. My hand brushed over a scrap of fabric. I walked my fingers higher, touched the corner of a metal star then yanked them back, swearing a blue streak.
The cushion from my fall was Shaw. It was his hand clutching my ankle. I bent lower to see if I had a better shot at visibility beneath the smoke. No dice. I resisted the urge to check him for injuries in case my examination hurt him worse. He brought my hand to his lips, which were moving, but the words were
lost to the crackle and snap of our surroundings. I had fisted his shirt and was heaving him toward the front door when I was knocked sideways, and my head bounced off a shattered china cabinet’s edge.
Freaking monkeys. That hurt. Two head injuries inside of a week. That couldn’t be good for me.
Fur brushed past my shoulder. What the hell? I cracked the back of my skull against the cabinet again when a tawny muzzle appeared at the end of my nose. The lips pulled back, exposing sharp teeth and a sandpaper tongue panting from the heat of the building. Charred fur clumped around a leonine face. One of its eyes was an oozing welt. The other it had trained on me while drawing in a series of rapid breaths. Wait. It wasn’t panting. Holy crap. It was—
I dove aside as it spewed flame where I had been standing.
“A chimera,” I yelped. “I’m supposed to extinguish a flipping chimera? Alone? Shaw?”
No help from that quarter. Shaw and his bag of tricks were down for the count. Shoving off the busted frame behind me, I steadied myself while glass sliced into the meat of my palm. Wincing at the sharp bite of pain, I hissed as pulses of magic knit my skin back together.
Peridot light knifed through the hazy air. The chimera narrowed its eye on me, curled its lip and then charged with a bone-rattling roar. I braced myself, shouted a prayer and raised my left hand.
The magic gathered in my palm exploded with the creature on contact. The pulse of energy slammed me backward, locked its teeth into my prey and brought it toppling down on top of me in a twitching heap. I should have stopped. I could have left it alive, but I was hurt. Shaw was…I didn’t know…and I was pissed off too.
I fed my runes more and more power, until magic seeped under the chimera’s skin and lit it from the inside. I could have stopped then, but I didn’t. Jagged bolts of pain shot through me, cramping my lungs and twisting my gut. I was dying. No. I was experiencing its death. Agony zinged through my limbs, but I clung to the chimera, pumping every ounce of juice I had into its muscular body.
While it twitched and jerked, I rolled it off me and crawled to my knees, then onto my feet.
Worse sensations spread over my face and neck, like sunburnt skin cracking. Tears poured down my face, but I couldn’t let go now. I had gone too far. My magic sniffed out the chimera’s essence. It found the sweetest spot, the still-beating heart. It ripped into that succulent energy, and it feasted.
I was licking my lips when the fur gripped in my fist sloughed off the body and fell to the floor. I was left holding the lush pelt of a lion with a goat’s hind legs and a snake’s head for a tail that withered to a paper-thin husk as I watched. I looked down at my hand in shock. That had never happened before.
A broad palm wrapped around my upper arm, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
Shaw’s eyes shot wide when he recognized the pelt in my hand and the meaty corpse at my feet for what they were. He recovered in the next second and jerked me—and the pelt—through the flaming debris into the yard.
After scanning me from head to toe, he grabbed my shoulders and shook. “What the hell?”
“I don’t know.” My injuries from last week began screaming at me. “It just happened.”
“You skinned him. How did you—?” He seemed to realize he was hurting me and exhaled. “Did you feed?”
Shame tightened my gut. I had to find somewhere else to look.
“That’s a yes.” He pinched my chin between his thumb and finger and swung my face toward him. “Don’t hide this from me.”
“I’m not hiding.” I stared at a particularly deep crease in his forehead. “I’m just—”
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
His tone snapped my gaze to his. Shaw’s eyes were warm now, copper. All traces of the incubus had been erased, and he looked…almost human.
“I did what you taught me. I fed. I did like we practiced. I reached inside him and I…” my voice trembled, “…don’t know. I didn’t stop. I was angry. I was hurt and you…” I bit my lip. “I thought…”
He crushed me against his chest. “Don’t do that thing where your eyes leak, okay?”
My damp laughter was muffled against his shirt.
“We’ll figure this out.” His lips moved against my cheek. “You handled yourself in there.”
“I was terrified,” I admitted, forcing myself out the comfort of his arms.
He cracked a smile that split his lip. “That just means you’re smart.”
I studied the smoldering heap behind him. “Is it always going to be like this?”
“Nah.” Shaw glanced over his shoulder. “We won’t always get the good calls.”
Chapter Five
After a brief visit to the medical ward, where Dr. Row’s glare flayed what untouched skin I had left, I had another three hours’ worth of paperwork standing between me and the cold shower waiting back at my now-empty dorm room.
Paperwork. Hours of it. Sixteen weeks of marshal academy and no one mentioned this?
Clean, tired and lightly coated with balm for my healing blisters, I flopped back on my bed.
My eyes closed, and my day got just a smidge better.
“Thierry,” a muffled voice called through the door.
I shot upright so fast I toppled over the twin bed’s edge.
“Shaw?”
A pause. “Were you expecting someone else?”
“Not hardly,” I groused. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
My ankles twinged when I put my weight on them. My hip wasn’t thrilled with me either. After I flung open the door, Shaw’s eyes glinted with mischief. Inwardly cringing, I pasted on a tight grin.
“I respect your love of the classics,” he said, brushing past me to enter the room.
Crossing my arms over the vintage Pooh Bear face covering my chest, I glared. “So.”
One of his eyebrows lifted. “You’re not going to ask me to sit?”
The one chair in the room was buried under a mountain of clean laundry that had spilled onto it from my desk.
I gestured toward his options. “Which bed, Mr. Incubus, would you prefer?”
His mouth opened, but he snapped it shut and kept his smartass response to himself.
“I brought you something.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out an envelope.
Frowning, I crossed to him and accepted the letter. “Have I been reassigned?”
He tapped it. “Open it.”
“I know you know what it is.” I tore the flap. “Why not answer a simple question for once?”
“A little thing called anticipation,” he answered.
I looked inside. Blue paper peeked up at me with numbers almost like a... “Is this a real check?”
His second eyebrow joined the first. “As opposed to a fake one?”
“This is for twenty-five hundred dollars.” The room started spinning, so I sat down fast. “Is this a workman’s comp thing?” I double- and triple-checked the front. Yes, that really was my name on it.
He chuckled and dropped onto Mai’s old bed. “It’s your first bonus.”
“The ouroboros didn’t carry a bounty.” I knew. I had checked.
“No, but the chimera did.” He dragged a hand over his mouth. “We aren’t sure what the connection between them was. Two rare fae breeds don’t just materialize on a cattle ranch near Odessa, Texas.”
Not without leaving a string of crispy corpses in their wake. “What about the owners?”
“The rancher and his wife—Jake and Bethany Richardson—are both fully human.”
Curious at his tone, I tilted my head. “You spoke to them?”
Conclave badges were enchanted. Human or fae, people saw what they expected to see. It was a harmless bit of glamour on our part, something to help us interact with humans without involving the human authorities. Most folks saw marshals as local cops, some figured them for FBI or even MIB.
Until fae came out to humanity on a global scale, marshals had to do the best th
ey could to cover up the supernatural messes fae justice sometimes left behind.
“The man cried when I broke the news his prize Hereford was barbeque.” Shaw scrubbed a hand down his face. “His wife, though. She’s one of those polished types. Commutes from her high-class digs in Dallas to visit her husband every second weekend and on major holidays. If you ask me, the missus didn’t seem that shocked to come home and find her house toastier than a s’more. In fact, after being informed that they both had to stay local, she was more upset at the prospect of spending the night in a hotel with her husband than over the loss of their home.”
Interesting. “Are we talking socialite or career woman?”
“She’s an interior designer.”
“An interior— Wait. How do you know all this?” My breath caught. “Are we investigating?”
His eyes twinkled. “Got the case files in my truck.”
Like a struck match, my imagination ignited. My fingers itched to thumb through those papers. I forced the tight lump down my throat. Rookies drew low-priority cases during OJT. That meant most training officers coasted for about six weeks while their temporary partners learned the ropes. Heck, after completing OJT, most marshals remained in the special operations division by choice, acting as glorified bounty hunters for the bonuses alone. That’s what Shaw had done, that’s what I wanted too.
Inspectors were stretched thin and shared across all divisions. They tended to burn out faster and either quit or drift back to spec ops.
Taking on this case, in that role, stamped a gold star on my resume.
“Do you need a moment?” His lips spread in a grin.
I shook my head, thoughts whirling. “Is the missus initiated?”
The number of initiated humans kept climbing every year as fae interbred with humans, but they were generally a tight-lipped community, given the fae they knew were their loved ones. In cases where blood wasn’t a good enough reason to protect fae secrets, a visit from a friendly, neighborhood marshal generally was.
“As far as we can tell,” he said, “she has no fae relatives or reason to know of our existence.”
