by Angie Fox
To his credit, Dimitri barely cringed. “The way that dragon can spot an ambush, the shoelaces are on the house.”
I knew it. “What happened?”
Dimitri bent and rubbed Pirate between the ears. “Look over there,” he said, as if letting my dog in on a big secret, “Sidecar Bob ordered extra bacon on his burger, just for you. I’ll bet he can find something for Flappy too.”
Pirate dashed away, toenails clacking and tail wagging. Dang griffin knew my dog. Seemed everyone did. Pirate was a lot thicker around the middle than he’d been when we started our adventures. Perhaps a doggie diet was in order.
“We found something you need to see,” Dimitri said against my ear.
He led me through the maze of witches crowded around tables to the back door of the bar. It was flanked by two rusty lanterns with green floss wound between. One of Grandma’s protective spells, I’d be willing to bet. I wondered why she felt the need to re-enforce the back wards rather than the front.
An unearthly howl erupted from the other side of the door. It was a female voice, like a caged animal, only worse.
I rubbed at my arms, and at the goose bumps prickling my skin.
Noticing my discomfort, Dimitri slipped off his coat. “Take this,” he said, sliding it over my shoulders.
It felt warm and comforting. Better still, it smelled like him.
“Before we go out there, let me tell you that given the choice, I wouldn’t show you this.”
“Have some faith,” I said, in part to stomp out the dread swelling inside me. “I’ve scorched imps, fried curses, beheaded a werewolf. I ripped out the blackened heart of a fifth-level demon, for Pete’s sake.” And I’d potty trained a bus load of three-year-olds. I was actually more proud of that than anything else. “Or wait. Did Grandma tell you about the spider?”
I wouldn’t put it past her.
There was no shame in it. I liked things clean, which meant I hated spiders and their webs.
Dimitri ran a hand through his hair, his shoulders stiff. “This isn’t about bugs. This is about our agreement that I tell you everything. Always.”
Good. Dimitri had tried to protect me for far too long. It was in his nature as a griffin – fierce, vigilant and loyal to a fault. Still, I had a right to know what was going on, even if the things I’d seen so far in the magical world hadn’t been what you’d call pleasant.
Dimitri opened the door to a green-skinned, blue-haired creature chained to the concrete patio. Its gangly fingers and limbs curled as it reared back. A second later, it leaped straight for me.
I whipped out a switch star as chains caught it in midair, holding the monster taut as it hissed and swiped at me, an arm’s length from my neck.
Sweet heavens. I clutched my switch star in one hand and braced against Dimitri’s wide forearm with the other. “What is that thing?”
It had an almost human appearance, save for an overlong face with sunken eye sockets and razor cut teeth.
“She’s an Icelandic banshee,” Dimitri said, his voice tight. “They’re native to the mountains and glaciers of the high land. When the ice cliffs began thinning out a few years ago, they started migrating south.”
The creature shook with predatory menace, her entire body straining against the chain around her neck.
The emerald at my throat began to hum, its bronze chain warming against my skin. Its energy flowed through me like a soft touch.
My stomach twinged. I stood motionless as the bronze metal slid over my skin, snaking down my chest, my hips, my legs and reforming into a pair of soccer-style shin guards.
Against a banshee. I shuddered.
The protective necklace had never been wrong before.
I glanced back into the bar, at the biker witches feasting on Burger King, at Frieda with a cigarette dangling from her lip as she told a story, Pirate eating French fries from Sidecar Bob’s unfolded Whopper wrapper. I closed the door, feeling the wards sizzle into place. It would be a disaster if this thing got loose in the bar.
“How strong is the chain?” I asked, watching the rusted metal plates rattle where they attached to the porch.
“It’ll hold her,” Dimitri said, not sounding as confident as I would have liked.
He couldn’t have had much experience with these things. I know I’d never seen one.
“Flappy killed two. I got three. And then we captured this beauty.”
“That’s a dangerous souvenir.”
“I’m hoping your Grandma can take a look at it, tell us who sent it.”
The banshee spit. I jumped back, but not before a hissing glob of black tar landed on my shin, right on the copper guard. It sizzled like a fried egg.
“Don’t move.” Dimitri had one eye on the creature as he made it to my side.
I let the banshee slobber burn itself out on my armor-plated shin as my attacker stalked me with hungry purple eyes.
My breathing quickened. “This thing is seriously messed up.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Dimitri said, favoring his side. I hadn’t noticed before.
“What happened? Are you hurt?” He let me push his shirt away to reveal a fist-shaped gash in his lower abdomen.
“Banshee bite,” he said.
“It looks awful.” It was red and raw, his skin seared around the edges from the banshee’s saliva.
“Thanks,” Dimitri groaned. “The cold air makes it sting even worse.”
That wasn’t a sting. That was real pain. The creature had sunk its teeth into Dimitri. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. “It tried to eat you.”
He cringed against another wave of pain. “They’re feral creatures, Lizzie. Eating things is what they do—animals, pets, people.”
The banshee struggled against the chain, stretching it tight. It watched me. It wanted me. I could see it in its eyes. I cringed as the rusted metal plate ground eerily on its hinges. “Tell me why we’re keeping this one?”
I had a split second of oh no as the chain snapped.
It leapt straight for me.
Lizzie!” Dimitri threw himself between me and the creature.
It attacked in a blaze of fury, lunging for Dimitri’s throat as I fired a switch star.
Dimitri reared back just as the churning blades of my weapon caught the creature between the eyes. The switch star sliced a clean hole through its head. Wet brain matter splattered onto the patio as the banshee fell on top of Dimitri. The creature’s jaws slackened and released him.
“Nice aim,” he grunted, throwing the corpse off. Black saliva ate at the threads of his torn T-shirt.
“Are you all right?” I rushed to him, with half an eye on the banshee.
Dead wasn’t always dead.
Dimitri eased his shirt off smeared the toxic spittle off his shoulder and arm, his skin firm and strong.
“The saliva doesn’t affect you?”
“Just the bites,” he grunted, inspecting the one on his stomach. It could have been a whole lot worse. “That’s why I wear leather.”
The jacket that he’d given to me. I ran my fingers down the coat and found gouged leather and bite marks. “You have to stop saving me.”
He laughed at that, which didn’t make sense at all.
The banshee would have been on me in a heartbeat and if I’d been without my switch stars, a fraction of a second slower, distracted in any way, Dimitri might be dead.
The creature bled mucus onto the ground as I tried to catch my breath. “I hate killing things.”
Before I’d come into my powers as a slayer, the worst thing I’d done was stomp a cockroach. Now I killed things all the time. In my defense, they were creatures who wanted to eat me or possess me. Still, it didn’t make it easy. The dead banshee reminded me a little of a smashed insect, leaking out its grape jelly insides.
What would happen if I had to kill my own father?
“I don’t think the six we killed tonight are the only ones,” he said, with a touch of resignat
ion. “Someone knew we were coming and brought a small army here to take us out. Best I can figure, the original drop point was on the driveway out front, less than an hour before we pulled up.”
“You don’t think they just happened to migrate here?”
He scowled at the creature, broken and bloody on the pavement. “One, maybe. But six? No way. They tend to be loners.”
“And if you’re going to release six…”
“You’ll release a lot more,” Dimitri said, finishing my thought.
I sucked in a breath. I didn’t want to be running into any more of these things.
Dimitri rose to his feet. He stood shirtless in the glow of the porch light. His chest, well muscled but not overdone, gave him an air of understated sexiness.
He walked toward the beast and squatted over it. “Whoever did it isn’t used to working with banshees,” he said. “They didn’t realize how fast the creatures scatter.”
”And we have no idea who set these things loose?”
He shook his head. “That’s what I was hoping to learn by bringing this one to your Grandma.”
We stared down at the dead banshee.
“Wait.” I had to wonder. “Are they after the group, or are they after me?” The banshee had attacked me first, before Dimitri had gotten in the way. It had watched me, as if it were tracking me. And it had gone for the kill. If someone or something wanted the witches and their magic, it would need them alive.
Dimitri shook his head. “Either way, I don’t think we should wander far tonight.”
“Which means,” I said, my heart sinking to my toes, “we’re not going out.”
“I don’t think it would be smart,” he said, looking as sorry as I felt, “at least not tonight.”
“I know,” I said, feeling the cold of the night for the first time since we’d stepped outside.
We stood there a moment next to the dead banshee with nothing else to say.
I touched his chest. “We have to bandage that bite,” I said, his skin warm against my fingers. A swirl of black hair traced its way down his lower stomach toward a place I knew well.
Come on.” He ran a hand along my back. “Let’s get back inside. You can play Nurse Fix-it and then we’ll get something to eat.”
“Okay.” I slipped my hand into his. “But this is not a date.”
Chapter Five
We sat across from each other in a booth at the back of the bar. My crown-shaped chicken tenders didn’t taste as good with banshee spit on my shoes and creature dust in the jar on the table in front of me.
But seeing as either one of us could have gotten killed tonight, I supposed we were holding our own.
Dimitri had been pure business as I’d bandaged him up, which had been bad enough. Worse, he’d found a new black shirt.
Rather than think about the attack or our failed first date, I reverted to the most basic of womanly complaints. “I wanted to look good for you tonight and now all of this,” I waved a hand at my hair, my ruined pants, heck I probably had a booger in my nose too. It was that kind of night.
If Dimitri was fazed, he didn’t show it. “Bob told me what happened.”
“It’s awful, isn’t it?”
He paused for a second too long. “It’s really not, Lizzie.”
Right.
Dimitri shrugged his unbandaged shoulder. It was a nonchalant gesture, but I knew him too well. He was taking deep breaths and doing his best not to stare. “There’s nothing you can do to change it, so stop worrying.”
A flush crept up his neck.
Great. He was embarrassed to be seen with me. Here, in a bar full of witches. How much worse would it be when we were actually out in public?
What really killed me was that I wasn’t the type to worry about how I looked. I used to wear basic, sensible clothes. I went for tidy and presentable. Dependable. I didn’t waste time on this season’s “in” hairstyles or worry about the latest lipstick colors. Long ago, I decided the entire fashion industry was designed to make women feel insecure.
Yes, I admit it - it had felt good to slip into my first pair of leather pants. I felt powerful, sexy. But in the end, it was only a pair of pants. It didn’t change who I was.
So why did I care so much about this?
“I just wish I could do something,” I groaned.
I needed control.
And it would help if Dimitri stopped staring at my wild-child hair. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was turned on.
I found a rubber band in my pants pocket and used it to pull my hair back into a ponytail.
As much as I wanted things to be normal, we had bigger things to consider, like the dead banshee out back and exactly what kind of trouble my father had gotten himself into. Dear old dad showing up and the creature attacks had to be connected somehow.
Before tonight, we’d gone months without being ambushed. Of course we’d been hanging out at Dimitri’s villa in Greece. I tried to remember exactly why we’d insisted on coming back to the States. Oh yes, because I needed more than an idyllic life on the islands – sleeping in, sunbathing, watching the witches build small castles – literally – out of the black sand. The Red Skulls never could do anything halfway. Of course it had been hard to explain to the beach patrol.
Even that seemed like fun compared to this.
“Can we go back to Santorini?” I asked, stuffing the remains of my dinner into a Burger King bag.
Dimitri looked thoughtful. “Do you want to return?”
“No,” I answered on a sigh.
It was his destiny, not mine. I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged.
As much as I loved Dimitri, I couldn’t just take up the life of a griffin housewife. Not that we’d ever talked marriage. That was the problem with him – with us. Our past was fiery. Our present was toe-curling, but our future was anything but certain.
I couldn’t live in a griffin clan on Santorini. I’d tried. And I didn’t think he wanted to spend the rest of his life tearing around on the back of a Harley, hunting demons.
Who would?
Creely slapped both hands onto our table, rattling everything on it. “You got any beer cans?” She reached for my Diet Coke, and shook it. “Good enough.”
“Hey,” I protested, “I still have a little more in there.”
“I can fix that,” Creely said, drinking it in a swig.
“Gee, thanks.”
But she was already jogging back to Bob, Pirate and a group of witches who were building a beer can tower by the bar.
“You see what I put up with?” I was about to get up and get another soda when the ashes of the rope twitched in Grandma’s jar.
Holy Hades. “Look at that.”
The particles in the jar rolled over each other as if blown by an invisible wind. They twisted faster and faster until they shaped themselves into a paler version of the silver rope. One end poked against the glass, reminding me of a blind snake, arching and finding its way. It stretched up into thin air, as if looking for something, and then wound back around itself, forming a noose.
“Unreal,” I murmured. Of course so was a zombie crow.
We stared at it, waiting for it to do something else, like I don’t know – make rope animals. I was up for anything at that point.
I wished Rachmort were here to see this. He not only had generations of experience mentoring slayers, he was also a necromancer who specialized in lost souls and spiritual apparitions.
Maybe there was a way to contact him. I’d have to talk to Grandma once she finished building the Budweiser tower of Babel.
Dimitri didn’t say a word about the reconstituted rope, which was telling. In our half year together, I’d learned he didn’t like to state the obvious. We both knew it was evil.
We watched the jar to see what it would do next. Yet once the rope made itself whole again, it seemed content to wind itself around the bottom.
Across the bar, the biker witches let out a collective hoot
as Ant Eater launched a dart at the wobbling tower of beer cans.
“So listen to this,” I said, in a futile attempt to ignore them. I told Dimitri about my dad, the zombie crow and everything else he’d missed while he was out on patrol.
He placed his hand over mine. “I wish I could have been there.”
I nodded, swiping at a few tears.
“We’ll fix this,” he said.
The kicker was, he meant every word. Leave it to Dimitri to save the world.
I could do it on my own, but thanks to this man, I’d abandoned the notion that I should.
Single kick butt demon slayers who were mad at the world and did everything on their own were fine in the movies, or in books. But in real life, I needed a partner. I wanted Dimitri by my side. Not because I had trouble handling things on my own, but because I wanted someone to share this life with.
I ducked as a dart hit the wall between Dimitri and me.
“The beer can tower is that way,” Dimitri said, yanking the dart out of the wall and taking aim himself. His shot went wide. The Red Skulls cheered anyway.
The witches were getting rowdy, which meant it was time for Dimitri and I to turn in. It was either that or try to control them.
Ha.
We stood. “Thanks for killing banshees for me,” I said.
Dimitri brushed a kiss along my shoulder and let me step in front of him. “You do a pretty good job yourself.”
We waved at the witches, who toasted us and started giving us bedroom tips as we headed for the second floor.
Dimitri placed a protective hand on my back as we navigated the narrow stairs, lit by broken light bulbs. “I don’t want to judge my girlfriend’s family before I meet them, but let’s just say I have a few questions for your dad.”
Join the club.
I waited until we reached the top of the stairs before I leaned close. “You’ll never believe what Grandma discovered. Turns out I’m half angel.”
“Angel?” He nearly sputtered.
“Now why is that so hard to believe?” I asked, enjoying the sight of my mighty griffin nearly speechless.
He leaned back against the brown paneled landing, “I’m…”
“What? Shocked? Amazed? Freaked out? Take your pick. I’m still trying to decide.”
