“That's not legal, is it?” Catherine asked hoarsely, unable to take her eyes off the gun. Slayers sometimes had weapons loaded with enchanted ammo. Black magic was created by spinning witch blood through an iron centrifuge, until the magic particles imploded, creating something dark and evil. It gravitated towards magic like two poles of a magnet, guaranteeing that whatever bullet anointed with it never, ever missed.
“It is if it's unloaded.” The witch's face was dark. “I don't think we're so lucky.”
Catherine didn't think so, either. And it never bodes well when we're in agreement.
The woman sauntered over to their vehicle and looked through the dashboard at Catherine and the witch, bathed in the glow of the Studebaker's taillights. Without a word, the woman pulled two rolled up pieces of paper from a drawstring pouch at her waist and let them unroll themselves as if she were a warden of the wild, wild west. Catherine would have laughed at the bizarreness of it, if she weren't so frightened. She was staring at a picture of herself, done in black and white, the ink slightly blurred.
They said that you couldn't put a price on life. Well, somebody had done just that to hers. She was worth ten thousand dollars dead or alive. The witch was worth ten times that—but only alive. Bitterness welled up in her.
Something else to feed his ego.
“They really captured your good side,” she said sarcastically, to hide her fear.
“Shifter, shut up,” said the witch.
The male Slayer reached over his shoulder for his gun without breaking eye contact. It was as heavy a threat as the gun that was now in his hands, and Catherine found herself growing angry. “Step out of the car and no one gets hurt. We can all go home happy.”
Some of us one hundred and ten thousand dollars happier than others. Catherine eyed him incredulously. Did he take the two of them for complete morons?
Perhaps the Slayer saw her scorn even through the glass. His eyebrows angled down. “We can do this the hard way, or the harder way.”
He must have known what she was—who she was—or else there was no way he would have thought her able to hear him through all those layers of glass and steel. She started to Change, and the Slayer began firing homemade silver shells through the windshield, the moment her skin turned orange and fibrous.
Distantly, she was aware of the witch cursing and throwing up an arm to shield himself from the glass as he fumbled with his seat belt buckle. The door opened, and he tumbled out, where the male Slayer was already circling around to receive him.
Catherine exploded out of the car as an angry, fury mess of ravenous teeth and claws. Since the silver slugs were not enchanted—gods be praised—they were easy enough to miss. The male Slayer muttered an oath and stopped firing, for the moment. Silver was almost more than he could afford, and he resented her for forcing him to waste them.
She couldn't get too cocky, though. The woman had a knife she'd unstrapped from her calf. Catherine glared at her. The female Slayer glared back, determined, but scared. Catherine could smell her fear—it came off her body in waves. Watching the knife, Catherine circled her warily.
That makes two of us.
The witch had taken on the male Slayer, presumably because silver bullets did not affect him and would be easy enough to treat with his curative water spell. But the man had come prepared for that, as well, and produced an iron pipe. The witch could not enchant the pipe—iron repelled all magic—so he was trying to hit the Slayer. But the Slayer kept whacking the witch's spells away, like a baseball player nailing ball after ball, forcing the witch to dodge his own incantations as they blew up in his face.
Pain. Catherine let out a choking yelp. The knife had gouged her side. Shallowly—nothing vital had been hit. Not a silver blade, either, or she would have been forced out of the Change. Her fault. She hadn't been paying attention.
Catherine backed away and swiped at the female Slayer's unprotected stomach. The woman turned away, and Catherine's claws hooked into the leather jacket instead as it swung with the woman's movements. She yanked on her paw, and yowled. Stuck.
“Let go!” the Slayer shouted, slicing at Catherine's paw fiercely enough to make the tiger yowl again in pain. The battle continued, with Catherine trying to free herself and parry her attacker at the same time. Her face, neck, and paw were getting slashed pretty badly—at one point, the Slayer came close to gouging out an eye.
Eventually, it was going to occur to the female to go for the man's gun. She needed to get free. They were standing too close at the moment for her to put any real momentum behind her attacks with the knife, but a gunshot at this distance would be lethal.
Catherine leaned forward, putting more weight on the human. She felt the flesh yield easily to her great mass, felt bones and muscles strain and shift. She weighed roughly one hundred and forty pounds in this form, more than most people could bench press. The woman fell backwards, just as Catherine intended, throwing out her arms to break her fall against the blacktop. It looked like it hurt. Catherine imagined it probably did.
Her paw came free with a loud rip. A swatch of leather was still attached to her claws. Groaning, the Slayer pushed herself up again as Catherine swiped her paw against the tarmac, trying to dislodge the leather scrap.
The Slayer looked down at her stomach, where the leather was torn away to reveal a tight red shirt, and she met the tiger's eyes angrily. “Oh, you fucking bitch. I could just kill you. This jacket cost two hundred dollars!”
It had also saved her from being eviscerated.
The Slayer produced another knife and ran at her. Catherine had to give her some credit—it took guts to charge a fully grown Bengal tiger. Guts that were soon going to be strewn over the deserted street like Christmas decorations.
But to her surprise, she found herself being forced back. The Slayer was clearly right-handed, but adept with both. Catherine struck again and the woman blocked the attack, crossing both knives with a grating sound that shed sparks, catching Catherine's paw between them. Fur singed, and she felt the sting of the blades as they gouged her flesh.
Catherine withdrew, hastily, as the Slayer slashed upwards. Had the two blades actually connected, the blow would have done serious damage. Severed nerves and tendons. Maybe even severed her paw. Bits of her fur had fallen to the ground in orange and black tufts from a series of close-calls, only to be carried off by the wind.
“You are so dead,” the Slayer was saying. “I'm going to buy two jackets with the money I get from bringing you in. No—three jackets. Maybe even a fur coat or two,” she added, giving Catherine a once-over with a sneer.
Catherine gritted her teeth. This was bad. She was exhausted and losing blood. Not a lot, but enough to concern her. If the Slayer kept scoring her hide like this she was going to have to revert to another form—but she'd have to switch back to her human form in the interim, and that would leave her vulnerable—and naked.
Another slash of the blades, at her face this time, and an inch of whisker was lopped off. Catherine hissed. She gnashed at the air, catching the Slayer's wrist between her jaws. The Slayer's eyes opened wide in surprise and Catherine's did, as well. That move had been more the tiger's than her own—the tiger had had enough of this pesky hairless creature with the two sharp claws and the loud, nasal voice.
The knife fell from the woman's fingers and hit the road with a clang. Catherine met her eyes. Perhaps the Slayer saw something inside the tiger's amber gaze that scared her—a lack of the humanity that had been in there before—because she dropped the other dagger. “Don't,” she said, “oh, God, don't. Don't do it, please. Don't take my hand.”
It was tempting. She did taste delicious. Catherine ran her tongue over the fingers and the woman began to sob loudly. What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?
She released the woman with a snort, and gathered up the daggers in her teeth. She couldn't allow herself to lose control like that. Not again. Not after what happened before. She leaned up to drop the
blades into the open window of her car.
Something whizzed by her, so close that the tufts of hair around her cheeks rustled in the wind. What was that? And then pain scalded her from all directions, and she cried out, and when she did, it was human. The fucking Slayer had a filigreed lasso.
“I should have bitten off your fucking hand after all, you coward,” Catherine said.
That made the blood rush from the Slayer's face. Then she collected herself and pulled the chain tighter, making the silver links dig punishingly into Catherine's arms and ribs.
“The poster said dead or alive,” the Slayer said. “Dealer's choice.”
Catherine struggled, but the bonds held tight. She sucked in a breath when the Slayer reached into the open car and produced what looked like a harpoon. It had a barbed silver tip. “Let's see how many organs you can lose before you die,” she said grimly.
Oh shit. Her stomach clenched as the Slayer approached.
“Witch!” she screamed. He had finished with the man, who was collapsed at his feet, but didn't seem to hear her. Or maybe he did, and he just doesn't care.
“For fuck's sake, Finn! Help me!”
Now he turned around. He glanced at her bound arms, and then at the Slayer with her silver harpoon.
“But you're handling it so well.”
The Slayer jabbed with the harpoon and hit air, because Catherine had let herself roll to the ground. But that was a trick that could only work once; she had only served to put herself in an even more vulnerable position than before.
“Finn, please.”
She didn't want to beg. She also didn't want to die.
The witch gave a long-suffering sigh. To the human he said, “Do what she says. Put down the harpoon.”
“What do you care, witch?” The Slayer kicked Catherine in the kidneys with the toe of her boot, and without her strength to act as counterpoint, the blow had the same affect that it would on any other human.
Catherine cried out, curling into a ball to protect her side. “You hate the vermin as much as we do. Used to hunt 'em down yourself.”
It was true. One of the ways a new witch might test their powers would be to hunt down a shape-shifter, to kill them with the element of their choice. Fire. Water. Wind. Earth. So many ways to die, all of them cruel, all of them painful.
All for sport.
His eyes flashed. “I won't ask again.”
The Slayer brandished the harpoon at him, instead.
“It will have no effect on me,” said the witch, in that same dead voice.
Catherine saw the woman's eyes go to her fallen companion. He was still alive, stirring now, barely conscious. He had been burned badly, his face a red mess of broiled skin and raw, oozing blisters. His hand was the worst: a blackened stump, the fingers charred clean off, flaking into ash where live nerve endings and muscle once thrived.
His gun had melted, spattered with a silver liquid that was hissing ominously. There was more of it at the Slayer's feet, hardening even as she watched, etching itself into the dirt. It wasn't just silver liquid, she realized. It was liquid silver.
“Do you know what the melting point of silver is?” he asked, almost pleasantly.
The Slayer looked at Catherine, who shrugged, and then back at the witch.
“It's roughly one thousand, seven-hundred and sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit. If you tried to touch it, your hand would be vaporized. Few of my kind are able to command that level of energy. But I can.”
“You're bluffing.”
The witch laughed, and goosebumps rippled down Catherine's arms, because his laugh didn't sound sane. And then—his aura—it exploded. Blue flame arced up the spear causing the metal to drip downwards in ropy strands that looked like glass.
The Slayer screamed and dropped the harpoon as fire surged towards her face, causing first-degree burns just from the sheer heat of the air. Whatever the fire touched, it liquidated, and the silver spread out in sizzling, glittering fingers, making the dirt bubble and burst. Catherine backed away from it with a sob, all the hairs on her body standing up on edge.
I had no idea…no idea that he was that powerful.
“Your friend thought so, too. And now he is short one hand because of it.” He bared his teeth. “The savage might not have taken your hand, but I will. And I might force you to eat it instead, to feel it burning you alive from the inside out. What do you think of that, you putrescent scum?”
The Slayer retched. The hand in question was red as her face—it, too, had been seared by the heat all the same. She would need to visit a hospital, and soon. If not for her own sake, then for the male's, whose condition was beginning to look alarming.
“What are you?” the woman whispered, crossing herself.
The witch's smile disappeared. Flames whipped around him. “Annoyed. Would you like to see what happens when I am angry? You're about to.”
She uttered a scared cry and started dragging her companion towards the car.
And Catherine felt her wits begin to leave her as this new threat walked towards her.
The shifter tensed as he came near. Possibly because she wasn't wearing any clothes, or because he had chosen to approach from her left only to circle around behind her, out of sight. Or, he thought, remembering the small sob that had escaped her when he melted the spear, because she finally sees me for the threat that I am.
Finn knew exactly what he was doing. He had hunted down her kind for years. He knew how to intimidate as well as any of their alpha males, how to threaten, how to induce capitulation. She was trembling visibly, and when he ran his knuckles down her spine she flinched, struggling to sit up. “What are you doing?”
“Untying you.”
The silver chain had knotted up and caught. The Slayer had pulled it very tight; he hooked a finger around the chain, eliciting a cry of pain. It was digging into the shifter's skin. His nails were too blunt to pick apart the knot, so he grabbed the knife from his belt and started sawing through the section he'd selected.
An errant breeze kept blowing her hair into his face, or into the path of his hands. He moved it back over her shoulder each time, letting his fingers drag over her skin, raising a path of goosebumps. But why? He wondered. From fear…or lust?
“Aren't you done yet?” she snapped.
He leaned down, so his words were spoken directly into her sensitive ears. “Shall I leave you like this?” he said, so softly that no human could have heard him.
She fell into silence. The knife was almost through the silver links now. They were densely woven, true, but silver was fragile, and his blade was sharp.
He slipped the chains off her body and the moment they were off, she wasted no time scrambling to her feet, guarding the injury the Slayer had inflicted with her boot.
“You shouldn't joke about that.”
“What?” Finn was finding it difficult not to stare. Her nipples were hard, puckering from their contact with the chilled, misty air. When he let his eyes fall, once, briefly, they snagged on the dark triangle between her thighs. He drew in a breath and looked away, disgusted by her, and by himself, and by how badly he wanted to take her until there was nothing left. He met her eyes again and saw them flicker, as if she wanted very badly to look away. There was a flush in her cheeks, and her mouth was tight.
It was as if she had been placed on this earth to tempt him.
“Imprisoning a shape-shifter.” It took him a moment to realize what she was responding to. Her face was pale; the silver had drained the flush in her skin, making her look sickly and sallow. “That kills us, you know.”
He did know. He knew that all too well. He had done it.
Finn grabbed her by the arms, painfully conscious of the fact that she was still nude, and that her bare breasts were crushed against his chest. The skin of her arms burned hot against his palms, and the heat of her was making him sweat through his clothes.
“Why don't you defend yourself properly?” he demanded.
&n
bsp; “If I don't fight, I die.” She looked away. “If I fight, and I kill, I become what I hate.”
“Circle of life,” he said, tossing off the phrase most shape-shifters were quick to use in their own defense. “You can't fight what you are.”
“No.” She jerked free—and that never failed to surprise him, how much stronger than him she was, despite being so much smaller in stature and size. He watched her unlock the door and unzip her backpack, slipping a light dress over her head. She stepped into a fresh pair of underwear and pulled them up beneath the hem of the skirt in a show of modesty that seemed almost superfluous. “It doesn't work like that. It doesn't have to.”
“You were born a killer, and you'll die a killer,” he told her. “Fight that, and you'll die sooner, although we all die in the end.”
“I don't believe that.”
“I've watched you narrowly avoid death four times now,” Finn said. “What does that tell you?”
“That you're bad luck.”
He slammed his fist against her car, and she jumped. “You are going to die.”
She turned around, and seemed surprised to find him standing so close. Surprised and alarmed. She was so vulnerable, this shape-shifter. Her large, hazel eyes were so artless, so innocent, that they stripped her soul of all artifice.
“Are you planning on killing me yourself, witch?”
He had tracked down hundreds of shape-shifters, hauling them in to meet their fate—and their deaths. But in all those years of hunting, he had never met a shape-shifter quite like this one. She was a Glamor, and they made a point of assimilating to humankind, which perhaps explained why. She was very good at pretending, but even she couldn't quite hide the instincts that boiled beneath the surface, cresting at her most vulnerable.
Shape-shifters were social animals. Though territorial, they were fiercely protective of their families and their mates, and felt such losses acutely. Catherine had lost both her mate and her family in one sweep, and it had left her devastated.
Crowned by Fire Page 2
