A tingle went through my body like an electrical charge. Early termination. Points to the wolf for making a clever, double-edged pun: my employer was giving me the axe in literal fashion. So I had the who responsible. But I still lacked a why: why would Aldric try to kill his best—and only—Reaper?
I’d be sure to ask, provided I survived the next two minutes.
The alpha wolf pawed the sand, his feral lips curled in a hideous smile. Most wolves possessed a certain natural majesty. This guy, however, was ugly both outside and in. Props for being consistent, I guess. But none of that boded well for my chances. I wasn’t much of a fighter, nor had I ever been, even in the past—you know, in those halcyon days when touching a weapon didn’t create the sort of horrible, festering blister burn only a talented apothecarial sorceress could heal.
Fortunately, however, I also had a backup plan to Plans A and B. Contingencies are a necessity when most of the creatures you deal with on a daily basis are bigger, faster, and stronger than you—and you’re only allowed to carry a glorified steak knife for protection. But even a glorified steak knife can be handy, given the right circumstances—like when you have a beast with a three-foot gait standing twelve feet away.
With a feral yell, I unleashed the Molotov of useless light at the wolf’s face. He roared, shielding his blood-red eyes from the glowing ball as it surged around him. After a moment, the glow shot off into the distance, back toward my villa. The beach plunged into semi-darkness and shadow, and I dropped to one knee, planting the Reaper’s Switch blade-up in the dark sand three steps away.
The alpha wolf charged forward, blinded by rage and the harmless light. He howled in shocked pain as he put his full weight down on his front paw—and straight through my knife. Just as expected, his usually keen eyes had been unable to spot the blade in the dark sand after my faux-attack. Unfortunately, I hadn’t factored inertia into the equation. The assassin stumbled and pitched forward, his momentum carrying his thick body straight into my legs. We crashed into the frothing low tide.
The wolf whimpered as he tried to claw at me. I dodged the half-speed blows and pushed off, rolling farther into the pleasantly cool water. A small wave crashed over my tattered jeans, triggering a sharp shiver despite the late summer warmth that enveloped the beach like a blanket. Still stunned from the collision, it took me a moment to catch my breath. Heart pounding like an unhinged freight train, I got to my feet and walked slowly back to the wolf, who was clawing at the blade jammed all the way through his foot. The point glistened with blood, sticking out from the top like a flagpole claiming a summit.
Not bad for a backup plan.
“Silver and obsidian studded,” I said. “It’ll cut through just about anything. But you already knew that.”
I pressed my bare foot against his shoulder, where I’d wounded him back at the villa. He whined, his eyes flashing a deep, feral red. He took another swipe at me, but his abilities were heavily dulled by the silver. It would’ve been nice if Aldric had sprung for the more expensive model—a blade crafted with gold or platinum had a lot more stopping power. I didn’t know what it was about precious metals that made them like scissors capable of cutting through supernatural tissue paper. But I was forming a hypothesis about why Aldric hadn’t shelled out for the platinum model: I wasn’t as valued an employee as I’d thought.
Exhibit A: he’d sent this wolf to kill me.
I avoided the wolf’s punch-drunk slashes as I reclaimed my Reaper’s Switch from his blood-matted paw. A stream of blood sprayed across the dark sand when I removed the knife. I wiped the blade off, the broken handle pricking into my skin. Unlike me, it hadn’t survived the escape completely intact.
“Tell Aldric he made his point.” I wagged the knife at his sharp snout in warning.
I still wasn’t sure what point that was, exactly. But I was hoping the wolf would get the message, and dutifully relay it to our mutual employer. I wasn’t a killer, and besides, I couldn’t kill him even if I had wanted to. Yet another rule courtesy of the goddess who had barred me from properly arming myself. When I’d returned from the dead and awakened on this magical paradise, I’d briefly thought things would be different than the past life I’d left behind. But, if anything, this goddamn place had more annoying red tape, contracts, and boundaries than the mainland. Then again, maybe it was necessary to have strict laws when a pissed off warlock could animate a dining room table and use it as a killing machine.
No one was afraid of my offensive powers, per se, although no one particularly welcomed a Reaper showing up. That meant death lurked nearby, and death tended to make everyone a little skittish. Given that, a little protection would’ve been nice to carry. But I had reasons far more important than my own safety to stay within the pseudo-pacifist lines that Lucille, goddess of rain (and drinking far more than her limit), had drawn around me.
Family reasons.
Unfortunately, my new acquaintance did not care. And he was a fast son of a bitch without the silver stunning him, because he was up and at my throat before I could implore him to give up again. The Reaper’s Switch tumbled from my wet fingers as his full weight held me down into the damp sand. My elbows scraped against the broken shells speckling the shore as I fought against his power. Under normal circumstances, the shells served as a reminder of time’s unending march. Right then, however, it felt like lying on a bed of rusty, tetanus-coated nails. Slobbery strands dripped from the wolf’s sharp snout as he tried to remove portions of my face.
I bobbed my head left, and he came up with a mouthful of sand. Taking the opening, I bashed my wrist into his nose. His lips curled in a manic snarl. I could feel his soul call to me, bloodlust consuming every aspect of his being. I’d learned how to read people when I was a teenager, but glimpsing into the soul was like seeing their poker hand. I’d learned a lot more about some creatures than I had ever wanted.
Like, say, the mayor. He was a warlock. And he was really into feet. But I’d take that trainwreck of uncomfortable weirdness any day of the week over this wolf’s singular murderous desire. More specifically, a desire to murder me and wear me as a hat.
My fingers blindly searched for the blade in the sand as my pulse thumped out a staccato, off-kilter rhythm. I could sense the wolf staring at my jugular with those blood-red eyes, visualizing the kill.
I found the Reaper’s Switch, snaring it between my index and middle fingers just as he reared back again. This time, he aimed lower, ensuring that I couldn’t dodge his attack. The fangs sliced through my shoulder like saliva-drenched scalpels. I yelped. His jaw tightened, driving his teeth in deeper. But I still clung to the blade with my good arm, clutching it like a life preserver in a roiling sea.
Then I plunged the glittering, blood-soaked blade right into his sinewy neck, shitty mutual employers, goddesses, and past unbreakable agreements be damned.
His strong jaw immediately released from my shoulder like I’d tapped a hidden button. I yanked the Reaper’s Switch out from the mountain of dense fur. Shutting my eyes and pursing my lips tight to keep the torrent of blood out, I pushed with all my strength. The wolf felt like he now weighed twice as much, but adrenaline was enough to marshal the strength to barely squirm away. My adversary rasped out one last convulsing breath, and then went still, snout down in the dark, damp sand.
Free of the wolf’s weight pressing into my chest, I took a deep breath and looked at the perfect stars. My shoulder throbbed from the bite, and despite my best efforts at closing my mouth, the salty-copper taste of his foul blood hung on my tongue, mixing with the lingering notes of his ashen assassin’s soul.
Nothing moved in the still night.
I whispered, “Damnit.”
The no-kill rule was one I shouldn’t have broken—and doing so would have serious ramifications. But as the water lapped against my stiff, tired body, I figured there was only one way to avoid paying for my sins.
Bury them.
It was going to be a stretch, getting away
with this. I’d been a con artist once. A master of the grift. And I’d have to conjure up all my dormant skills to make this illusion stick.
I wasn’t worried about the cops getting me for murder. Nope—I was worried about Lucille, who was a hell of a lot more powerful and, if legends were to be believed, vengeful. Goddesses tended to be unamused when you broke their rules. But that was only if they found out you’d disobeyed their direct and unambiguous orders.
Summoning the last of my strength, I stumbled to my feet. The werewolf now looked like a strange sort of carpet that had fallen from a passing cargo freighter and washed up on shore like flotsam. My forearms quaked and shook, veins pulsing in the ivory moonlight as I dragged the body into the ocean. With the tide out, I had to wait for its return to dispose of the evidence—hopefully with one hell of a rip current.
The water lapped over my aching feet as I worked. I plunged into the gentle surf and the wolf began to bob and float like a buoy. I waded out twenty yards from shore, dragging the body until I was waist-deep in the quiet water. All the way out here, he’d look like little more than a piece of debris. But if the sea didn’t claim him by daybreak, there was gonna be hell to pay.
Or, more specifically, my sister’s life. I touched the silver necklace once more, my other hand still on the furry body. This time, I didn’t pray for Lucille to help. Goddesses ignored most prayers, but I didn’t want to tempt fate.
I let my fingers linger on the corpse for a second longer. Finally, I took out the Reaper’s Switch and slid the blade in right above his heart, where every being’s soul resided. His looked exactly like it had tasted: like the remnants of a terrible fire. I cradled the tiny chunk of matter in my palm, no larger than a pack of gum. It was cliched, but I couldn’t help but be amazed at how something so tiny had been the engine behind such murderous rage.
I wondered, if someone cut me open, what they would find. With my history, it wouldn’t smell like the vanilla orchids that dotted every inch of the jungle near the villa—that was for damn sure.
I headed back to shore, my jeans clinging to my thighs like crackly cellophane. A light wind picked up from the horizon, chilling my skin. I stomped up the black sand, trying to get warm and make sense of what happened—and what to do next.
In the distance, far up the beach, I heard what I swore was thunder in the cloudless night. Maybe I was already screwed. Deities had a way of knowing things before anyone else. You couldn’t keep a secret this big tucked away from them for long.
“There’s a storm coming,” I whispered to myself. But I didn’t mean the weather.
Bang.
Bang.
An angry boom hurtled through the sky. An uneasy shiver racked my body as I properly identified the disturbance.
That wasn’t thunder. That was a gun.
It was coming from the same direction as my villa. Right next to it, in fact. Another muzzle flash lit up the horizon, and then another. Which is when I heard a different noise.
A scream. The kind of scream I’d have made earlier if I’d had any breath to spare.
Fear chilled my spine as the shots cascaded into the starry blackness. Aldric wasn’t done. My last remaining adrenaline reserves kicked in, and I sprinted across the warm sand as someone emptied an entire magazine into the otherwise silent night.
3
I ran through possible next moves as the wind streamed through my hair. The import bike growled as the speedometer crept over sixty. I leaned into the turn, just enough to almost touch the road with my soaked jeans.
Ultimately, all the next moves ran to one inevitable end: go to the city and scream at Aldric.
Maybe my judgement was clouded by the werewolf’s bite—or maybe I was just pissed enough at Aldric to confront him. Of course, that was an insane plan. No plan at all, really, unless my objective was to die. I’d survived my clash with the werewolf assassin, but that was blind luck—like hitting on twenty in blackjack and getting an ace. Going toe-to-toe with a 2,400 year old vampire? I doubted that would end well. But I couldn’t go home, either, since my villa had suddenly become murder central. And, really, there was no place to hide on Atheas. Aldric had founded the place back in 552 A.D. He owned it and ran it.
And, seeing as how my employment contract stipulated that I would work for Aldric for seven years—during which time I couldn’t leave the boundaries of the island—going on the lam wasn’t viable. But it wouldn’t have been an option anyway. A vampire warlord who had helped Alaric the Visigoth sack Rome—and adopted a variant of his former master’s name as a tribute—wasn’t someone you just ran from.
So, maybe I wasn’t crazy. Maybe I was thinking straight.
But I still couldn’t fathom why I was being fired. I was his only Reaper. We were rare, and we sure as hell weren’t free. He’d paid a hefty price in souls to have me revived me from the Elysian Fields, minted as a harvester of souls and then returned to Earth. And I’d brought him five souls a week, just as our contract agreed, for the past four years.
None of it added up, which meant I was walking into a dangerous confrontation blind. I slowed the bike to a crawl, the engine coasting into a low-rumble as Black Sea Holdings’ headquarters came into view. It was a bland, corporate-looking structure, the kind all illegitimate crime lords dream of having one day to launder their money and sponsor youth softball leagues. The glass and steel skyscraper stretched into the starry night about thirty stories. All the lights were out, except for the massive penthouse office, which took up a third of the building’s height. It glowed like a beacon, urging me closer. Or maybe it was a warning flare, screaming at me to run like hell.
Either way, I’d made up my mind.
I’d just have to live—or die—with the consequences.
I killed the bike’s engine and left it parked in the executive lot. My soaked sneakers squished on the smooth asphalt as I made my way toward the immaculate sandstone sidewalk. I passed by the logo-emblazoned stone sign embedded next to a flower bed. The clean logo was so nondescript—not even an image to go with the text—that it was impossible to tell what the company did. Which was the point. Were they a shipping magnate? A law firm? Some sort of import-export operation? Even looking at their balance sheet wouldn’t tell you a damn thing.
Then again, there wasn’t a double-entry bookkeeping system with a “souls harvested” column. And besides, that was just one of the many sordid supernatural enterprises in which Black Sea Holdings found itself firmly entrenched. I was just a grain of sand on a very dark, nuclear wasteland of an entrepreneurial beach.
The automatic glass doors slid open when I punched my access code into the number pad. Good to know I still worked here—or maybe Aldric hadn’t expected me to be needing it any more. No need to waste resources on disabling a code that would soon be rendered obsolete.
I dragged my aching body across the unlit lobby, my lonely footsteps echoing against the sparse furnishings. My right shoulder throbbed from the werewolf bite. I checked the wound and found it already dripping a brackish, mud-like sort of slime through the torn black fabric. The foul fluid seeped from the bite marks all the way down to the crook of my elbow. Fortunately, my t-shirts were all thrift-store finds, otherwise I’d have had two things to be pissed off about. But I’d have to get the wound examined, and soon. Leave a werewolf bite go untreated for too long and the results were ugly. Well, it was already ugly, but I meant wake up without make-up after raiding the Jack Daniel’s distillery level ugly. I made a mental note to head out to Jack’s Apothecary Shack before amputation became a necessity, then headed toward the glittering elevators. There was only one that visited the penthouse, and it required approval.
I called it, and the button lit up. Guess I was still allowed into the inner sanctum. The elevator dinged and invited me in. I left behind a smear of brackish blood on the chrome elevator button, which glowed green as the doors shut. A hidden vent blew cool air through my sea-salt stiffened hair. My head pounded as the lights came on and
the car went up, taking me to the penthouse office. A little voice—the one of reason, perhaps—told me that I could still turn around, that everything could be forgotten. But then I thought about the gunshots near the villa, and that horrible scream, and I knew that, if I didn’t confront Aldric now, that would be me. Sooner, rather than later. Better to live bravely than die in fear, right? I’m sure some smart person said that at one point in another, wrote it down in a book for posterity, but as the doors opened, I wanted to reach through time and shake them to tell them they were full of shit.
I stepped into a dimly lit hallway where everything gleamed. This was where the vampire worked, slept, and fed. I didn’t know if he’d left the place since he’d had it built centuries ago. I’d never seen him anywhere other than his office. Maybe his loyal acolytes just worked and remodeled around him. The dueling scents of bleach and ammonia hung in the midnight quiet. My shoes left behind little pools of water as I walked across the polished black granite. I passed a potted fern and an exotic plant I couldn’t identify. Otherwise, the décor screamed respectable corporate businessman, down to the stainless steel trimming the floor-to-ceiling frameless windows.
My echoing footfalls were reminiscent of the reverb one found in a cathedral. It wasn’t that far off. The ceiling in the penthouse hallway stretched a hundred feet in the air, money being no object when intimidation was the name of the game. Much to my eternal chagrin, my knees wobbled as I braved the long gauntlet toward his actual office. There was only one set of doors, but he made you sweat it out for a good two hundred feet.
The effect was palpable: I felt small in the vast hallway. Two massive doors, crafted from petrified oak trees imported from the Eurasian Steppes, were embedded within a wall that resembled a sheer, smooth cliff face. Nothing but black granite stretching toward a ceiling of glass that segued seamlessly into the starry night. A chestnut leather sofa, probably costing more than my villa, sat just outside the office doors, matched with a conservative but elegant glass table. There was a single book on the table—his favorite book, impossible to forget—a first edition, ready for visitors to read.
Rain Dance (Sunshine & Scythes Book 1) Page 2
