Alpha: An Urban Fantasy Novel (War of the Alphas Book 3)

by SM Reine

  Stark didn’t follow Chadwick toward the desk with the coffee. He remained stiff by the front door, eyes on the elevators as Trilby headed down.

  “Coffee’s already on,” Chadwick said. “I’ve got one of those new Behexed things. Potion pods, blood pods, coffee pods. Does darn near anything you could want. Won’t take long, as I said.”

  “I hate your parrot,” Stark said, boots glued to the welcome mat.

  Chadwick laughed. “Me too. She’s in her cage today.” He waved at the corner, where it was still silent under the white drape. “Don’t worry about her—she’s actually shut up for once.”

  Stark finally moved through the lobby. The wards on the high-rise hummed in response. Everton Stark was something prehistoric and powerful—a bear wolf, a creature that hadn’t walked the Earth since humans came about—and the wards knew exactly how dangerous he was.

  Not dangerous enough, though. There were things on the planet even older and deadlier than that guy.

  Chadwick was going to enjoy watching him die.

  “I need you to disarm, as usual,” Chadwick said as he grabbed a couple of mugs that fit the Behexed. “You know how it is. It’s in the contract and all.” So was keeping Stark’s relationship with Chadwick confidential, but Stark would be dead before he realized those terms had been violated.

  Stark opened his jacket to reveal an underarm holster. He set a handgun on the desk, then pulled another, smaller gun out of his belt, and a third from his boots. Stark also produced two knives from within his sleeves and set those alongside the other weapons.

  “That’s everything,” Stark said, letting his jacket fall closed around him again.

  “Don’t mind if I check, do you?” Chadwick asked.

  Stark grunted.

  Chadwick activated a charm with a twist of his fingers, snagging the spell out of the air. It would make all weapons within the room glow. The magical light came from the table and the silver knife that Chadwick was wearing.

  Stark had been honest about his weapons. There really was a first time for everything.

  “You must be having a bad week if you needed to come here.” Chadwick gathered the weapons and put them into his safe. Enchantments buzzed as the locked clicked shut.

  “The worst kind of week,” Stark agreed.

  “I expected you to be excited about the upcoming elections,” Chadwick said. “You’ve been polling well. Have you seen the latest numbers?”

  “I don’t watch polls.”

  “You’ve got thirty percent of shifters saying they’re going to vote for you. Thirty percent! That’s a lot of shifters.”

  “Shifters don’t hold elections. We earn our roles through blood. The Office of Preternatural Affairs wouldn’t yield to me even if I won.”

  “Probably not, if they’re on your tail,” Chadwick said. “What’d you do tonight? Raid another benefits office?”

  “A safe house.”

  “See, why you gotta go and do that? You’re just agitating the OPA. It’s like poking a hornet’s nest with a stick. It’s so much easier to keep out of their sight. They’ll let you conduct your business if you don’t make a bother of yourself.”

  “Not all of us want to sell animal blood to vampire junkies,” Stark said.

  “Junkies, huh? You’re not usually singing that tune when you come to me for more lethe.”

  Stark glowered. He could glower all he wanted, but that didn’t change the fact that he was one of Chadwick’s biggest buyers.

  The shifter Alpha was an addict. He’d been buying more and more pallets of lethe in recent weeks, going through easily twice the amount that any man should—even a shifter his size.

  Chadwick poured coffee for both of them. Stark didn’t take the second mug.

  “Shouldn’t take Trilby long at all to get the horses down,” Chadwick said again.

  He thumbed the button on the monitor to switch it to the basement cameras. The woman was still trying to get down to the bomb shelter. She was so painfully slow.

  Chadwick would wait.

  He slid a hand into his pocket. There was a stone the size of his palm in it, warm with the buzz of sidhe magic.

  Stark still hadn’t taken the coffee.

  “I didn’t put any potion in it, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Chadwick said. “Have a drink. Really. Enjoy.” It was going to be the man’s last drink, after all.

  “What do you know about the unseelie sidhe?” Stark asked.

  Chadwick stiffened. “Huh?” Stark couldn’t know about the visit from Melchior the day before. He just couldn’t.

  “The unseelie sidhe,” he repeated.

  “Oh, uh—well, the sidhe mostly hide in the Middle Worlds. No real presence on Earth to speak of.” He laughed and hoped that it didn’t sound too nervous. “I don’t do much business with those people.”

  “Did you know they have a lot in common with shifters?” Stark said. “If a shifter had everything human stripped away from him, leaving a purely magical gaean core alive, the result would be a sidhe. Did you know that?”

  That didn’t sound like a rhetorical question.

  “No?” Chadwick ventured.

  “I expected you to be an expert.”

  The long look that Stark gave him said that he knew. Somehow, he knew that the unseelie had visited the high-rise before his arrival. He knew that they wanted Stark dead. And he knew that they had paid Chadwick enough to make arranging that death worthwhile.

  Chadwick ripped the stone the unseelie gave him out of his pocket. “Don’t have to be an expert,” he said. “All I have to do is activate this, and they’ll be here in moments. I could give you a head start if you want. Thirty seconds. Seems like the least I could do, after all the business we’ve done together this year.”

  Stark rubbed a hand over his beard. “A head start. That’s the best you’ll give me?”

  “Better than you deserve,” Chadwick said.

  “Fine,” Stark said. “Do it, Tombs.”

  “Tombs?” Chadwick asked. But Stark hadn’t been speaking to him.

  Hands settled on Chadwick’s shoulders. “Hi,” said a female voice from behind him.

  And then he exploded into flame.

  “Holy gods!”

  Deirdre leaped back from Chadwick Hawfinch, jerking her hands away from him.

  It was too late. The man had already been consumed by fire.

  And he hadn’t just been consumed. All of the moisture had evaporated from his body in an instant. His final breaths rattled in his chest. A wail squeezed out of him, small and pathetic, as he tipped forward onto his knees.

  Embers scattered across the floor when he struck.

  Chadwick landed on his face and didn’t move.

  Deirdre turned to Stark, hands uplifted, white with heat.

  “Wow,” she said.

  He looked impressed. And he wasn’t an easy man to shake.

  Stark nudged the body with his boot and the skin crumbled to ash. Chadwick had probably died as soon as she touched him. His clothing was still smoldering.

  The fire spread to the decorative rug beside him, sweeping toward the table with the Behexed. Black smoke gushed through the lobby, stinking of sticky-sweet meat and the artificial fibers of his clothing.

  Deirdre bit back a cry of surprise, leaped onto the rug, and stomped at the fire with her boots.

  Stark whipped a blanket off of the nearest chair and threw it on the smoldering body. It smothered the flames, but it was far too late to help Chadwick Hawfinch.

  Deirdre stood over the lumpy blanket, stomach churning with sudden regret.

  “Wow,” she said again.

  Ever since she and Stark had left the asylum, Deirdre had been practicing her newfound pyro abilities. She’d been burning things. Little things. Pieces of paper, some grass, a garbage can. It hadn’t been easy, not once—she could barely increase her temperature on command, much less set fire to anything.

  But it had been easy to kill th
is man, and she wasn’t even sure that he had deserved it.

  Deirdre swallowed hard. “Remind me. Who was this guy?”

  “He’s a major supplier who trades on the black market,” Stark said. “This high-rise is his base of operations. Nobody lives in the apartments upstairs. His only source of income is selling contraband and harboring fugitives.”

  Tension eased out of Deirdre’s shoulders. If that was true, then Chadwick Hawfinch had deserved to die. “So you knew that he was the kind of person who would betray you to the highest bidder. You knew that the unseelie would have contacted him.”

  “And now I have this.” Stark peeled the unseelie charm out of the Chadwick’s hand. Bits of burned skin clung to the side.

  Deirdre’s nose wrinkled. “That’s—wow, that’s really gross. Do you need to touch that?”

  “Yes.” He delivered a swift kick to the side of the blanket-covered body. It made a strange crumbly noise.

  Deirdre wasn’t sure if she was feeling elation or panic. They were so similar in many ways. Her heart was pounding, her head was spinning, and she couldn’t seem to catch a breath.

  She had wanted to kill Chadwick. That had definitely been her intent. But even though she’d visualized her flames consuming him, she hadn’t really expected that to happen. She’d been planning to beat him up like a good Beta would in defense of Everton Stark.

  “Oh my gods,” she whispered.

  No, it was definitely panic.

  Deirdre’s legs wobbled as she approached the kennels in the back of the lobby. The dogs had barked when she first entered the high-rise, but had fallen silent quickly. They had been beaten too many times. The will had been kicked out of them.

  They cringed in their cages when they saw her coming.

  “What are you doing?” Stark asked without looking up from the sidhe stone, running his fingernails through the engravings, as though searching for a seam.

  “I’m releasing the dogs.”

  “Why?”

  Deirdre unlocked the cages. The dogs didn’t come out until she backed away, giving them room.

  As soon as they stepped out of their kennels, they started running.

  The lobby doors were still open. The dogs vanished into the darkness of night. Deirdre hoped that whatever they found out there would be better than what they had suffered inside. The vampires probably wouldn’t bother them, and at least they would have a chance out there on their own.

  When she turned around, she was startled to realize Stark was looking at her.

  “Did you need the dogs for something?” Deirdre asked. “Was that a problem?”

  He returned his attention to the stone. “No.”

  Now that the dogs were gone and Chadwick Hawfinch was dead, Deirdre gave herself permission to sink into one of the lobby chairs. She stared blankly at the coffee table. There was rubber tubing and an empty syringe on the edge nearest her. Implements for injecting lethe.

  She shut her eyes and relaxed back against the chair.

  Only days earlier, Deirdre had died after getting stabbed with a silver knife. It was a surefire way to kill any shifter, but overkill for someone like Deirdre—an Omega, a shapeshifter who couldn’t shift shapes, weaker than the rest of her kind by every metric. She healed slower. She moved slower. Her senses were duller.

  She was so much easier to kill than every other shapeshifter.

  But apparently “easy to kill” and “easy to keep dead” were two very different things.

  Deirdre spread her fingers out to watch the flames licking between them. Her palms burned pleasantly.

  It was a strange thing, this fire. It moved like feathers rippling in the wind, appearing and disappearing in time with the pulse of her blood. Her burning flesh didn’t hurt. That was obviously an immunity unique to Deirdre, since she’d charred Chadwick Hawfinch to a crisp within seconds.

  Stark pressed a button on the security monitor to switch to the basement camera.

  “Trilby?” Deirdre asked.

  “Dead,” he said.

  Vidya had gotten into the basement without attracting Chadwick’s attention and killed Trilby Hawfinch before she could hide. The valkyrie’s wings were retracting now that she didn’t have anyone to kill. They would be gone in moments. It was amazing how quickly she could hide her true form.

  Stark ripped one of Chadwick’s charred hands off and used it to open the safe. He took his guns out one by one and returned them to his holster.

  “The bird?” Stark asked.

  Deirdre stood on trembling legs and pulled the covering off of the parrot’s cage. The rear door stood open. “I let her out a window.”

  “I told you to kill the parrot,” Stark said, sliding the knives back into his sleeves.

  “I thought I’d save my murdering mood for someone more deserving than a bird.”

  Stark’s eyes glinted. “You never met that bird before.”

  He flipped a switch inside of the safe to disengage the last of the high-rise’s external wards. The shifters that they’d unleashed from the safe house streamed into the high-rise, nails clicking against the linoleum floor, paws scrabbling, wheezing with the exertion of running through vampire territory.

  Stark marched toward the elevator, leaving Deirdre no choice but to follow him. Her feet barely seemed to touch the ground. She was always flying now, the way that she flew over rooftops when free running, and it made her giddier than lethe.

  She had just murdered a man and was surrounded by fugitive shifters.

  And she was giddy.

  III

  There were stables in the basement underneath Chadwick Hawfinch’s high-rise. Each stall held a single gaunt, sickly horse whose muscles had atrophied from long weeks trapped in the basement, its flesh pocked by needle marks.

  When Stark and Deirdre entered the stables, most of the horses shrieked, reared onto their hind legs, and beat at the insides of their enclosures with blunted hooves. A few of them lifted their heads weakly and then went back to staring blankly at the walls.

  The basement smelled like droppings and sweat and copper pennies. Worse, it smelled like perforated intestine.

  Vidya had killed Trilby messily. Violently.

  The valkyrie stood among her remains, reaching over one of the stable doors to pet a horse that seemed to have lost the will to fight back.

  “My gods,” Deirdre said, staring around the squalor in the basement. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a farm,” Stark said curtly.

  She shot a sideways look at him.

  Stark had never been friendly. Not exactly. But he and Deirdre had been growing close in their sick way. He had trusted her, divulged secrets to her, leaned on her for support as his Beta.

  He’d even killed everyone on an airplane to save her life, and then kissed her.

  Deirdre assumed that kiss had meant something. Probably something like “Stark hates me slightly less than he hates everyone else.”

  But ever since they’d left the asylum, he had become distant. He barely spoke to her. Deirdre chalked it up to brooding over his ex-wife, who was rebelling against the unseelie queen without his help, but she was afraid that his mood might have been more personal than that.

  She was afraid that he knew the truth.

  Deirdre approached the nearest stall. Its thick walls shielded her from the wild flailing of hooves, but allowed her to see the equipment on the inside.

  A pump was mounted on the interior of the stall. Tubes hung from hooks, tipped by rusty needles. Medical tape was piled on the shelves. Dirty milk jugs were scattered around the door.

  “What exactly is this farm producing?” Deirdre asked.

  She answered her own question when she spotted a jug sitting against the back wall, beyond all the stalls. Deirdre hooked a finger in the handle and lifted it to look. The fluid inside was sludgy, almost black in the darkness. Horse blood.

  “Do vampires actually drink this?” she asked. “I didn’t think horse bloo
d would be a close analog to human blood.”

  “Chadwick Hawfinch told them it was the real thing. And it’s cheap enough that people will go along with it to enjoy the idea that they’re really drinking blood.” Stark’s upper lip curled. Deirdre suspected the disapproval wasn’t directed toward Chadwick Hawfinch for deceiving his vampire clients, but for the OPA laws that forbade vampires from consuming human blood.

  The horses grew more agitated as Stark entered the empty center stall, still carrying Chadwick Hawfinch’s charred and severed hand.

  Stark bared his teeth in a growl, golden eyes flashing.

  The horses in the adjoining stalls skittered away from him so quickly that they slammed into the opposite walls. Amazing how Stark’s aura of fear worked on herd animals just as well as human beings.

  He pressed Chadwick’s hand against the rear wall. A rune Deirdre hadn’t noticed flared with magic.

  A door appeared where there had been nothing but smooth concrete before, and it swung open to reveal a set of stairs leading underneath the first basement level.

  Vidya moved to enter, but Stark stopped her. “Watch the shifters upstairs. Keep them under wraps until sunrise.”

  She went to the elevator obediently without hesitation.

  That left Stark and Deirdre alone.

  Her stomach knotted as she moved downstairs into the sub-basement, leaving the thrashing horses behind. Stark tossed Chadwick’s hand into one of the other stalls before going downstairs.

  The bomb shelter was spacious and well lit, with several cots along one wall and cabinets of food along the other. The rear was cordoned off to be a shooting range. And the guns—there must have been at least three dozen different kinds of guns racked along with melee weapons, like swords, whips, and silver chains.

  Stark shoved the door shut behind him. It locked automatically with a heavy thump.

  It was quiet in the bomb shelter. Very quiet.

  Deirdre stood near the weapons racks as Stark engaged the wards, hands moving over the runes confidently. He wasn’t trying to lock anyone out. He was trying to lock Deirdre in.

  She had died and come back from the dead.

  Again.