Fire, fire, fire.
The man howled a single word. Magic slapped me, nearly ripping the bow from my fingers. The flies rained down in a cloud of ash.
The man waved his staff around, tore a small pot off of it, and hurled it at the ground. The bridge shivered and white scorpions skittered over the boards, heading for us.
I sent another man flying off the bridge with my arrow in his chest. Two more crawled up to take his place. Were they cloning these guys under the bridge?
“It’s like that, then? Okay.” Roman barked out something vicious and drew a line with his staff, and spat. The scorpions reached the line and melted into boiling goo.
The man let loose a string of unfamiliar syllables and pulled out a strange-looking knife. The moonlight gleamed off the roughly hewn blade and the man sliced himself across his chest. Blood poured. He ripped the entire bunch of spheres off his staff and smashed them on the ground.
Dark wavy lines formed upon the bridge boards and coalesced into snakes. Hundreds of snakes.
Not again.
“I can command snakes, too,” Roman yelled. “This won’t help you.”
“We’ll see!” the man yelled back.
The snakes slithered to us.
“Imenem Chernoboga!” Roman thrust his staff into the boards and planted his legs, gripping the staff directly in front of him with both hands. The bridge quaked. The staff opened its beak and screeched. Wind spun around Roman, stirring his robe. The snakes halted, unsure.
The other wizard shook his staff. The snakes attempted their best to slither forward, but hit an invisible wall of Roman’s magic.
The black volhv clenched his teeth. The muscles of his face shook from the strain. Sweat broke out at his hairline.
The snakes reversed their course but made it only a few feet before slamming into the other wizard’s magic. The reptiles began piling onto each other. Heads reared, and the snakes bit each other in a frenzy.
I had five arrows left.
Four.
The swarm built on itself. The injured snakes split in half, growing extra heads and tails and multiplying with shocking speed.
Roman shoved the three-foot-tall knot of snakes back at the other wizard.
The wizard ripped the wound on his chest and flung his blood at the swarm, pushing it back.
Two arrows.
“You will not pass!” Roman thundered.
Great. Now he had decided he was Gandalf.
The five-foot snake swarm teetered toward the wizard. They just kept shoving the snakes back and forth with their magic, and meanwhile the swarm was growing bigger and bigger. It was a tower now, a boiling, slithering tower of reptile flesh.
“I’ll eat your guts!” the wizard yelled. The snake tower careened back toward Roman.
Last arrow. I had to make it count.
“If I tell you that yours is bigger, will you kill him?” I snarled.
“I’m trying,” Roman squeezed the words out through clenched teeth. Blood poured from his nose.
I spun to the heap of dripping snakes, ran to the side of the bridge, and leaped onto the wooden rail, balancing on my toes. The snake tower rocked this way and that and through the gap I glimpsed the wizard’s strained face.
I fired.
The arrow punched through the left half of his chest. He gasped, clamping his fingers to the arrow’s shaft.
Roman groaned and the snake tower spilled over, burying the wizard.
I turned around. There were seven people on the bridge and they had stopped advancing, gaping at the writhing knot of reptilian bodies.
The knot showed no signs of getting smaller. In fact it was growing bigger, expanding like a snake tornado.
“Uh-oh,” Roman said.
“What do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?”
He glanced at me. “Run!” And then he turned and sprinted down the length of the bridge, leading his horse by the reins.
It’s never a good thing when the black volhv says “Uh-oh” and then runs for his life. I dashed after him, ignoring the black specks fluttering before my eyes and the pain returning to my muscles.
We ran past our attackers. A moment later, they saw the writing on the wall and followed us. We pounded down the bridge. Behind me something roared. I didn’t look back.
The air turned to fire in my lungs. My stomach lurched. Nausea came, followed by vertigo.
We cleared the bridge. Roman dropped to one knee, breathing like there was an anvil on his chest. I turned around.
A thirty-foot tower of snakes rose behind us. It swayed, rocking back and forth, dripping wriggling snake bodies, and exploded. Reptiles rained onto the ruins, revealing a single creature. Its long serpentine body was coiled into a tight spring. Brilliant gold and amber feathers flanked its triangular snake head. I had seen winged snakes before. They were tiny. Three feet was considered to be a large specimen.
The serpent raised its fanged maw to the skies. Scarlet wings snapped open along its chest. It sprung up, uncoiling its ten-foot-long body, and took to the sky.
“Well, that’s not good,” a woman said behind me.
“Did Martinez turn into this, or did they eat him?” a man asked.
“How am I supposed to know? He was the priest.”
I spun around. The nine of us looked at each other. Roman pushed off the ground.
No arrows, I felt half-dead, and my volhv was all used up. There was only one thing I could do.
A large, blond woman jerked her sword up and charged me. I met her halfway, changing shape as I moved. My claws sliced into her stomach, cutting through the fragile muscle. Her slippery entrails slid against my fingers. I grasped a handful of intestines, ripped the sodden mass out, and flung it at the rest of her crew. A blood-curdling hyena cackle broke free from my fanged, black-lipped mouth. I charged.
A man stepped in my way. His blade cut my side, but I didn’t care. I gripped his right arm, wrenched it out of the socket, and tore it off.
The mist of blood lingered in the area like an exotic, entrancing perfume. I danced through it, drunk, but crystal clear, maiming, killing, carving the pliant flesh into hot, juicy morsels. They fell before me and I loved it. Rage sang through my veins, fuel to my internal inferno. Inside me a distant small voice squeaked a warning—I was using up the last of my fragile reserves—but it felt so good and I didn’t want to stop.
Another man stepped in front of me. I backhanded him out of the way. He flew and fell. Fun! I chased him and pinned him to the ground. My teeth snapped a hair from his throat. Hello, prey!
A familiar scent zinged through my nose. I knew this scent. I puzzled over it, holding the man down.
A name floated up to the surface of my memory: Roman.
Reality slammed into me, sudden and hard. I pulled myself back from the brink. My mind registered the strained expression on Roman’s face and my claws puncturing his shoulders.
Oh God.
I rocked back, releasing him, slipped on something slick, and slumped against a ruined building. The street was filled with bodies. Blood pooled in the recesses of the uneven pavement, its scent like the cut of a razor on my tongue. A thing that used to be a woman lay only a few feet away. Half of her stomach was missing and her skull was a mess of crushed bone. I had done that.
“You okay?” I asked softly. My voice was hoarse.
“Yeah.” Roman slowly rolled up. “What the fuck was that?”
“Bouda rage. It happens sometimes when we’re at our limit. We get a few minutes of berserker rage.” It was the last-ditch defensive mechanism of a body out of options. “I was bitten by a viper earlier. The Pack medmage pumped me full of antivenom. It made me weak, so when I turned, my body reacted. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Roman brushed his robe and got up. “No worries. Black doesn’t show blood at all.”
“I’m sorry.” He had no idea how close I had come to killing him.
“No worries. Look.” He raised his arms, indicating the scene with the dismemb
ered bodies, blood, and his black horse at the beginning of the bridge. “All our enemies are dead, we survived, the horse survived, the staff survived. I even get to say the best line from my favorite book. All is well.”
I pushed away from the building. Roman opened his mouth to say something and didn’t close it.
“What is it?”
“Breasts.”
“Oh for the love of God!”
Roman squeezed his eyes shut and turned away from me. “I have a cloak in my bag.”
“I’m comfortable with my body the way it is,” I growled.
He turned toward me a little and opened one eye, then turned and looked at me. Or rather at my chest.
“Don’t stare.”
“You said you were comfortable.”
Comfortable was one thing. Being on the receiving end of a very male stare was another.
“How about we find some gauze and bandage your shoulders,” I suggested.
“It really isn’t that bad.”
We walked toward the horse.
“What were you doing in front of me anyway?” I asked.
“You had that dark-haired bitch by the throat and kept beating her head against the wall for almost three minutes,” he said. “I became concerned…”
A red and gold silhouette plummeted from the sky. It dived at the horse, bit the Bone Staff, ripping it from the leather, and shot up to the clouds.
Holy shit.
Roman fell to his knees. He opened his mouth and let out a wordless scream of pure rage. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
“It will be okay,” I told him.
“I had it! It was in my hands!” He showed me his hands, as if expecting the staff to materialize in his fingers. “In my hands! Eight hundred years!”
“I know,” I told him. “I know.”
He slumped forward. “I had it and I lost it. I lost it!”
“Come on,” I told him. “Let’s get ourselves home before we both pass out.”
We climbed the stairs to my apartment. I had collapsed on the street, my body finally giving out, and we had ended up riding Roman’s horse after all. Roman moved like a zombie. Despondent didn’t even begin to describe him. If despair was liquid, he’d be dripping buckets of it with every step.
“I had it in my hands,” he told me mournfully, halfway up the stairs.
“I’m sure I have some honey in my pantry,” I told him. “And lemon juice. We can have a nice cup of hot tea.”
The landing smelled like fresh banana bread. Mrs. Haffey had been baking again. I slid the key into the lock and swung the door open.
A pair of familiar black boots sat in the shoe rack in my foyer, between my black pumps and my yellow work boots.
You’ve got to be kidding me. He didn’t.
“Something wrong?” Roman asked.
On the right, a row of hooks was attached to the wall—I usually hung my rain-dampened jackets there to dry out before taking them to the closet. A large black leather jacket hung on the middle hook.
I marched into my apartment. What must be a spare set of Raphael’s keys was in the round plastic dish where I normally left mine. In the kitchen a hanging pot rack had been installed over my dining room table. Raphael’s copper-bottomed pots hung from it, and in the corner, his wine cabinet sat next to my spice shelves.
I dashed out of the kitchen, almost knocking Roman over. In the living room three prized swords from Raphael’s collection hung on the walls. A picture of Aunt B in a dark frame was on the bookshelf next to the picture of my mother. Raphael’s beige and brown Jaipur rug covered the floor. He had double-stacked my DVDs in the media case and added his own, all pre-Shift movies he loved: the entire Rocky collection, the Godfather I and II, Commando, Tropic Thunder…
I tore into the spare bedroom. I had used it for weapon storage. A new desk sat by the window with a computer on it and a tall filing cabinet next to it. He’d made himself an office! In my spare room! A picture of Raphael and I sat on the desk next to the keyboard. He had his arms around me. I was smiling.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Roman asked.
“No,” I snarled.
“A male roommate?”
I shoved the door to my bedroom open. A second night table stood on the other side of my bed, the perfect match to the one I had. With the same lamp. And his spy novels in a stack on top. I yanked open the closet door. Raphael’s clothes hung on the left side, with his shoes in a row. I pulled open the dresser. His underwear. Condoms. His socks.
He had moved into my apartment. He’d snuck in and made it look like he’d lived here for the last ten years. His scent was everywhere, floating through my territory.
Words failed me. I just stood in the middle of my place, shaking with rage.
Breaking and entering was an essential part of the shapeshifter courtship. The idea was to break into your prospective mate’s territory and get out undetected, proving that you were sleek enough to mate. Some clans left gifts. Boudas played practical jokes. But this? This was going too far.
He’d punked me. Did he expect that after everything that had happened I would think this was charming? Did he think challenging me was funny? I would rip his head off.
“I think you have a boyfriend.”
I inhaled and exhaled slowly. “No, I just know somebody with a really sick sense of humor.”
“Really? Because there is a picture of you and him back in the office.” Roman pointed his thumb back over his shoulder.
“He’s an ex-boyfriend. He is having trouble understanding the word ‘over.’”
“So what, he just moved his stuff in while you were gone?”
“Yes,” I ground out.
“Ballsy.”
No, that wasn’t ballsy. That wasn’t even in the mile radius of ballsy. It was in its own little universe with the word “lunatic” stamped on it. He should be locked in a padded room and never let out.
“Should I leave?” Roman asked.
“No. I promised you a cup of tea; we will drink that tea, God damn it.”
I made a pot of tea in the kitchen. We sat at my kitchen table with MINE scratched on it and drank one cup each, before Roman couldn’t stand it any longer and bailed.
The second he was out the door, I grabbed my phone and dialed Raphael’s number.
“Hey, babycakes,” he said into the phone.
Babycakes? Babycakes! “You want to act psycho? You haven’t seen psycho yet.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. “To go psycho, you’d have to pull that stick out of your ass and we both know that won’t be happening.”
I unclenched my teeth. “You will regret this.”
“Love you, babe.”
The plastic receiver crunched in my hand and the phone went dead. I looked at it. Crushed electronic guts peeked out through the gaps in the broken plastic. I dropped the mangled wreck of the phone on my table and went into the bathroom.
A razor and shaving cream rested on the sink next to my lotion. A second toothbrush greeted me, a twin to mine, except mine was green and this one was blue. He had invaded my territory. He had put his stuff into it. He, he, he…Aaaaargh! He’d made my place smell like him!
I grabbed the toothbrush. I wanted to break it into tiny pieces and then feed it into the garbage disposal.
No. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I wouldn’t gather all of his things into a large metal trash can, I wouldn’t pour gasoline on it, and I wouldn’t set it on fire. No, nothing so pedestrian.
This, this deserved a special retaliation.
I would have to think of something. Oh yes. He would regret this. He would wish he’d gotten run over by a PAD tank instead.
CHAPTER 11
I woke up early and lay in bed for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling, before my brain finally registered that there was a new chandelier on it. I must not have noticed it last night, when I finally fell into bed, exhausted and enraged. A glossy silver disk of about eighteen inches in diam
eter was attached directly to the ceiling. Long wavy crystal leaves patterned with ribs of varying textures cascaded from it, suspended by chains hidden within crystal beads. Thin tendrils of crystal, like the curved shoots of a grape vine, hung between the leaves, translucent with light, and between them, on longer gleaming chains, textured crystal spheres, frosted with silver, clinked gently in the light breeze from the open windows. It was beautifully romantic, yet modern, a kind of chandelier a twenty-first-century mermaid might have in her underwater cave or an Ice Queen from an Andersen fairy tale might hang in her palace of ice.
It was exactly the kind of chandelier I would’ve loved to have. Elegant, feminine, romantic, but without a trace of corny cuteness. And I wanted to rip it out of my ceiling. He made me so angry.
I pushed myself out of the bed. The fatigue still napped deep in my bones, but it was growing weaker. No nausea. No ache. My body must’ve won the war with snake venom. Now if I could only win the war with myself.
The magic was down and I was deeply grateful for not having to resort to the kerosene cooker. I went into the office, confiscated Raphael’s monitor, and hooked up Gloria’s tower at my kitchen table. While the computer booted up, I made myself two pieces of Texas toast—a slice of thick bread, buttered on both sides and fried a bit in the pan, and a small steak, barely seared on both sides. I needed the calories. I boiled some shockingly strong coffee in an ibrik, a little Turkish coffeepot Kate had given me as a gift, and sat down to my breakfast. Mmm, coffee, the breakfast of champions. Delicious and nutritious.
I was halfway through my first cup and knee-deep in Gloria’s files, when someone knocked on my door. The peephole revealed a scowling black man in his early thirties, dressed in black and looking like he wanted to bite someone’s head off. Jim. There were other people in the hallway behind him. What the hell?
I opened the door. Jim stood in my doorway. He was over six feet tall, with short hair, and the kind of muscular build that resulted when you fought for your life a lot. He looked like a thug, and he worked very hard to keep looking like that. Jim liked to be underestimated.
When I first came to Atlanta, I made it a point to read through the background files the Order kept on the shapeshifters. Before Jim’s father went to prison and died there, shanked by an inmate, Jim was taking advanced classes and skipping grades. Jim could’ve been anything he wanted. A doctor, like his father. A scientist. An engineer. But life got in his way. He was the alpha of Clan Cat now and he oversaw the entirety of the Pack’s security, which meant every day he got to spy, discover, and eliminate threats to the Pack. Jim loved his job.
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