Race of Thieves

by S. M. Reine

“Did you have to be mean to her?” Cage muttered as they limped toward the team of demons. They were an intimidating crew, like everyone who worked for Arawn. Heavily tattooed, burly, and smelling of rotted meat.

  “She locked us in kennels,” Brigid said.

  “Yeah, but she also let us leave.”

  “You’re naïve if you think that wasn’t a power move.”

  “Sometimes people are just nice to each other,” Cage said. “Believe it or not, you can even trust people sometimes.”

  Brigid didn’t have time to sling venom back at him. Their approach had been noticed.

  “So, you’re Phil and Melinda, huh?” asked one of the men in jumpsuits. Cage could only guess that this was Big Buck. His face was furry. Antlers jutted from his hair.

  Cage and Brigid exchanged glances.

  “Yes,” Cage said. “I’m Phil. This is…Melinda.”

  “Charity’s too nice. Giving jobs to topsiders…” Big Buck shook his head. “I know you guys got stuck here on your honeymoon, but Jesus. There are so many demons who live in the city who could use part-time jobs like this, and she’s letting it all flow out, just like Arawn.”

  Cage felt like he should apologize, but he wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t responsible for the economic situation in Shadowhold. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Shadowhold would have an economic situation until that moment.

  He was surprised when Brigid rested her hands on Big Buck’s arm. She was tall, so she shouldn’t have been able to make herself look as small and afraid as she did in that moment. “I’m so sorry. We had no idea that Charity’s generosity would put others out. I just—I don’t know what to do for the next month, you know? A month is a lot of time for humans in Shadowhold.”

  Big Buck shook her off, not unkindly. “Pick up your part of the crystal and come on.”

  There was an array of identical duffel bags waiting to be carried to the crack in the wards. Cage was surprised to see the payload separated like that, but it made sense once he picked one up. His shoulders ached with the weight of it. He couldn’t remember the last time that picking something up had made him feel tired.

  Brigid strained with her bag. Her face grew red.

  “I can carry both,” Cage said.

  “I’ll figure it out!” But she tugged and tugged, to no avail.

  “I was just telling you to trust people sometimes, Melinda,” Cage said. He pulled the handle out of her grip.

  He could lift it, barely, but having two duffle bags was almost too much. It kept him slow, leaving him in the back of the pack as the gang moved through Shadowhold. Brigid was the only person slower than he was. She kept a hand on his shoulder so that she wouldn’t fall, but she didn’t look happy about it.

  As they crossed through Shadowhold, Cage tried to pay only attention to the backs of the other men in the jumpsuits ahead of him. He didn’t look at the shadows surrounding them, so deep in the lightless cave, and wonder if Gutterman might be lurking.

  How long could Arawn take to tattoo one nightmare demon? At some point, they would stop having fun drawing on each other, and Gutterman would look for Cage.

  He walked faster.

  Brigid was a storm cloud rolling along beside him, the front of a hurricane heading for shore. “I see why we’re wearing jumpsuits,” she growled.

  Cage leaned around the shoulders of the men in front of him. The end of Scapula was filled with a slurry pit, a place where they dumped all the infernal effluence that collected in the gutters. The road just cut off, and there was a ten-foot drop to a football field-sized hole filled with a mountain of rotten meat and demon patties.

  Plumbing was difficult this deep in the rock, so a lot of people just threw buckets of crap out the windows. Cage had spotted a few crap-buckets when he’d been trying not to look for Gutterman. He hadn’t thought that he’d have to follow that horrible stench to its origin.

  The gang set their duffel bags down at the edge of the pit.

  “Let’s get ready to assemble,” Big Buck said. He unzipped his duffel bag, and the other demons followed suit.

  Cage moved more slowly. His acute shifter ears were picking up a distractingly off-key whine, and he didn’t need any auditory mnemonics to know what it meant. The wards were broken. Badly.

  Brigid’s pallor likely had more to do with the whine than the smell of the pit itself. As a planeswalker, Brigid would hear the universe outside leaking in.

  “You all right?” he asked, peeling the duffel bag open. The crystal fragment was brittle, almost crumbly. Cage bet that it would somehow hold together once all the pieces were combined. Demons were good at slapping together magic that looked impossible.

  “I can hear the scream of ley lines,” Brigid said through her teeth. “They stretched them too far trying to make Shadowhold impenetrable. They’re hurting.”

  “Ley lines hurt?”

  “They suffer,” she whispered.

  Big Buck began issuing loud commands to the group. “Now we have to assemble the crystal and switch it out for that one.” He pointed out at the pile of shit.

  In the middle, a stone pillar thrust from it all. A stone ladder was carved into its side. There was a lumpy orange crystal on top, and its crack was the reason that the wards were broken here.

  It was going to take a few minutes to put the crystals together and then for someone to get it out to the pillar. Cage pulled Brigid aside. “Can you planeswalk from here?”

  Her lips were the same ashy gray as her cheeks, which made it looked like she’d been living in Shadowhold for months already. “I need to get closer. Before they close the flaw.”

  Big Buck and three of his guys were patching together the crystals now. “It should be finished in its final position,” Big Buck said. “I need two volunteers to carry the halves out to the middle.” Cage couldn’t think of anything that he wanted to do less with his life. He would rather Gatling gun crystal shards out his butthole than carry it through that pit of effluence, even if it was the only way to escape.

  Until he heard the howling.

  It echoed throughout the cavern containing Shadowhold. At first, Cage almost thought that it was the wail of a baby or a woman having her throat slit. His gut told him different. These were wild dogs. But there weren’t wolves or coyotes down here.

  Some musty, distant memory from Cage’s public education brought the word Hounds to mind. Arawn was known for having Hounds.

  Cage had never known much about demon species, so it was hard to guess how dangerous Arawn’s Hounds might be. But Cage was gonna guess it was pretty bad, so he spoke up. “We’ll take the crystals to the middle.”

  The whole party looked at him in surprise and confusion. Including Brigid.

  “I’d rather take my chances with the dogs,” she hissed.

  But Cage was already hefting the two halves of the crystal. The entire thing must’ve weighed more than a car.

  The howling was getting closer.

  “I wonder what Arawn is hunting tonight,” Big Buck mused, scratching his furred chin seriously. “They sound worked up, but it’s the wrong season for the Wild Hunt.”

  Cage glanced over his shoulder in time to see a pair of leggy white Hounds skidding to a stop a block up Scapula. They were gorgeous beasts. Ghostly and slight, with legs that looked like little more than threads dangling toward the ground from furry bodies. They were wolves from his nightmares.

  Their eyes were focusing right on him.

  He unzipped his coveralls, ripped off the shirt from the uniform, and wrapped it around his chest. He put one of the crystal halves against his chest to help distribute the weight. Only then could he deadlift the other, clutching it to his belly. “Get on my back, Brigid!”

  She jumped on. Since he was already struggling to hold the crystal, her added weight and momentum pitched him forward.

  They fell over the edge of the street.

  They hit the shit.

  Cage sank up to his waist. On the bright side, th
e effluence was a lot shallower than he expected. On the downside, he was still treading on a mix of feces and solidified fat.

  “Oh God,” Brigid moaned. “I don’t like this. I do not like this. I do not like anything about this.”

  “You’re not the one whose dick is gonna smell like demon shit later,” Cage said.

  “I don’t have a dick!”

  “I know, you must be so jealous.”

  The ward crystal’s column was not far out. Under ordinary circumstances, even weighed down, he would’ve been able to reach it at a slow jog. But the thickness of the shit and the dizzying stench left him crawling.

  Meanwhile, the howls and yips were closing in.

  “Cage!” Brigid shouted. He could feel her shifting on his back to look behind them. She was jerking, gagging on the scent.

  “I know,” he said through gritted teeth. The Hounds were coming.

  He put all the effort he could muster into moving faster. They reached the ladder. He heard a couple of small splashes, and he looked over to see that the Hounds had dropped to the waste pit too. They look surprised to have sunk in. The Hounds were fighting to release their feet, shaking their paws wildly.

  “Close enough to the fissure?” Cage asked.

  Brigid’s hand stretched over his shoulder, as if to feel the air in front of him. “Get a little higher!”

  He supported both halves of the crystal in the same arm—which made him feel like he was cradling an elephant the size of Banana Bread—and he climbed using one hand and his feet. Centimeter by slow centimeter. The stench followed him up. If anything, the fumes seemed even stronger as he got higher. The air was hazy from it.

  The Hounds pulled themselves free. Now they leaped across the surface of the effluence without sinking in, agile on their spindly legs. Cage realized that their mouths were opening, necks extending, spines stretching out like taffy. They weren’t going to try to climb the column where the broken crystal rested. They were just trying to eat him off the side, like it was the stick and he was the lollipop.

  “Almost…” Brigid said, fingers straining at the air.

  Cage reached the top of the column. The flaw in the wards here was obvious: it looked like someone had taken an ice pick to the old crystal and chipped at it until a deep crack formed at the center. He shoved the broken crystal off, and it vanished into brown sludge with a low blop. He stood where it had been.

  Brigid screamed.

  The weight vanished from his back.

  “Brigid!” Case whirled, and he spotted Brigid clasped in the teeth of a Hound. It had bitten down on her abdomen, leaving puncture marks on her ribs like a shark on a surfboard.

  Shit. Literally.

  Cage dropped the pieces of the crystal on top of the pillar. They fused automatically. He didn’t care.

  He threw himself into the air, soaring hands-out toward the Hound.

  The Hound still hadn’t fully retracted its neck, so they collided in midair. He wrapped his arms around Brigid.

  Impact changed the direction of her fall. It flung them just a few meters closer to the wall of Shadowhold’s cavern.

  Brigid’s fingers bit Cage’s delts.

  The world pinched around them, narrowing to a point of light. The smell was gone. His heartbeat was gone, for that matter. He couldn’t breathe.

  For a long moment, he was just rushing through darkness, traveling toward that one-dimensional point of light that seemed to exist outside of traditional space.

  He would’ve screamed if he’d had a voice.

  Pop.

  Cage and Brigid collapsed upon the narrow street of Barcelona.

  Now they were in the middle of the road, and cars had stopped to honk angrily at them. The air was so much clearer here. The only reason that Cage could still smell the stench of the demon city was because he brought half of it on his clothes.

  He got up on his knees, wavering. It was incredibly jarring to have blinked in one place and opened his eyes in another. Jarring, but so cool.

  “Neat trick,” he said. And Brigid almost smiled.

  But opening his mouth had been a mistake, because then his stomach twisted, and he barfed all over the streets of Spain.

  Chapter Twelve

  Unlike Cage, Brigid Byrne was not short on money. She only needed to place one call to Ameria before they dragged their smelly, bleeding carcasses to an upscale hotel room in downtown Barcelona.

  Cage piled the coveralls and the Elevator Gatekeeper uniform in the bathtub. The word “coverall” proved itself to be a misnomer. They didn’t actually cover all, and there was still poop on his ankles, wrists, and a few cracks where he was not enthused to have someone else’s shit. He stripped down to his skivvies and dumped everything into the bathtub. “Want to add anything, Brigid?” he called into the room.

  Brigid’s disgusting clothes slapped to the bathroom floor, hurled through the doorway. He scooped them up and tossed them into the tub, too.

  This was all of her clothing. Every last article of it.

  Including her underwear.

  “Well,” Cage said.

  He added his boxer briefs to the pile before setting fire to everything.

  “Those better be phoenix powers I’m smelling in there,” Brigid called. She sounded more tired than he’d ever heard her.

  “Phoenix powers put to the best use possible.” Cage had used just enough flame to get his thumb ring burning against his knuckle.

  Even though Cage was admiring his smoldering handiwork, he wasn’t so distracted that he didn’t notice Brigid appearing in the mirror behind him. She wore a sleek black robe cinched at the waist. She wasn’t a curvaceous woman, in much the same way that Cage was not particularly bulging and muscular; the robe made her look like a comfortable two-by-four.

  “Why aren’t you naked?” he asked.

  “Why are you naked?” Brigid asked.

  “We’re burning our clothes! I thought that we would both be naked!”

  “Please, for the love of the gods and everything that is holy, put on a damn bathrobe, Shatter.”

  He spread his arms wide to emphasize exactly how naked he looked. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I didn’t take anything to Shadowhold with me. I didn’t have time for shopping while I was there, either.”

  “This is an expensive hotel. There are robes in the closet.” Brigid was pinching the bridge of her nose, looking pained.

  She made sure that the hotel didn’t burn down while he found a robe. It seemed silly to put it on while he was still covered in crap, though. The bathtub would be smoldering for a while, so he claimed the enormous shower stall instead. Brigid still wasn’t looking at him, and Cage could only assume that it was because she was so wildly attracted to him and didn’t want to struggle with the urge to jump his bones.

  He stood halfway out the glass door. “I have to shower all this garbage off me.” He held up a courtesy loofah. “Want to join? I’ll scrub your back.”

  “No.” Brigid walked out of the room in a swirl of bathrobe, leaving behind nothing but that decadent lavender scent that followed her everywhere.

  Cage showered alone, sadly. He wasn’t surprised. Right now, he didn’t have anything, including the Death Underpants. Brigid wouldn’t want to screw him until she could screw him out of something.

  He used the entire bottle of courtesy soap and rubbed his body with the loofah so hard that he emerged looking redder than a strawberry. Not an attractive look, granted, but it was more attractive than being covered in crusty shit.

  The bathrobe felt like the kisses of clouds and butterflies and giggling babies over his skin. “Nice,” he said, tying the robe tight and twisting to look at his physique in the mirror. He looked pretty manly for a guy wearing a ladies’ bathrobe. He flexed at himself. The robe did nothing to give his arms the illusion of biceps. “Yeah, but how many bulging musclemen escaped Shadowhold today?” Cage asked his reflection.

  The answer was zero. The only people who had es
caped Shadowhold that day were Cage and the gorgeous, angry, complicated woman who was sitting by the window when he emerged from the bathroom.

  Brigid’s chin rested on her hand as she stared out at Barcelona, looking troubled.

  “You’re quiet even for you,” he remarked, sitting on the end of the bed.

  She held up a jar of salve. “I’m in a lot of pain. I can’t reach the cuts on my back to treat them.”

  “All right, come on over.”

  Brigid shifted to the bed. She loosened the tie enough to allow the robe to slip over her shoulders, exposing lengths of soft skin. Cage’s physique was the equivalent of human spaghetti, but Brigid had been working out. Her back was downright sculpted. He could tell, even underneath all of the blood and the torn skin, of which there was a lot.

  In fact, when she moved, he thought he saw the glisten of bone amid all that torn skin.

  “Gods above, Brigid!” he exclaimed. “How did you get to be such a mess? You haven’t looked like you’re in pain at all.”

  “I’m flattered that you can’t tell,” she said in a tight voice. “I thought you’d be able to tell by my disinterest in having sex with you at the moment.” The implication being that she wanted to have sex with him.

  It was hard to feel good about the ego boost when he was looking down at the cuts on Brigid’s back. The only thing he could feel was the powerful urge to care for her—to reach deep beyond the barbed walls she erected to keep the world out and cradle the fragile heart he knew was in there somewhere. She would fight him on such kindness. Cage restricted himself to dipping his fingers into the salve and spreading it over her claw marks. He heard sizzling. He smelled camphor. Her muscles began visibly stitching together, covering the bone and slowing the bleeding.

  If magical salve was anything like shifter healing, it must have burned. She didn’t twitch or make a sound.

  “I was planning to betray you,” she eventually said.

  “Which time?” he asked, coaxing her sliced lats together so that the skin could join faster. “Aside from all the time.”

  “In the kennels. I had figured out a method to escape from mine, and I planned to leave without opening yours. I’d have left you to Gutterman.”