by Reine, SM
But Deirdre wasn’t interested in random shifters pretending to be badasses. She was only concerned with the guy who might report back to Stark.
Deirdre could lose Andrew. She could lose anyone Stark sent to follow her.
She jogged across the intersection while the light was green, weaving between the yellow cabs. Horns blared. She waved one finger at them and kept going.
Ducking around the CVS, she immediately doubled back, heading down another intersection a block away from the first.
Deirdre spotted Andrew down the street as he tried to cross where she had. He didn’t realize she was already gone.
Too easy.
She still didn’t let her guard down as she moved south, toward the river. She kept watching reflections and mirrors mounted on street corners and glancing over her shoulder when it wasn’t too obvious.
There was too much at risk for her to become complacent.
“I have no intent of allowing terrorists to harm anyone. We’ve worked hard over the years to support the growth of gaean businesses, gaean education, and gaean families.”
Rylie’s voice, small and distorted by the speaker of a tablet, murmured nearby. Deirdre paused by the homeless person who was streaming the news to watch.
The bum was sitting against the wall next to a shopping cart. Her tablet was scratched and smeared with stains. Still, it was functional enough to show Rylie’s face, cut into three different segments by the crack that split the screen.
The Alpha continued. “We’re partnering with the Office of Preternatural Affairs to provide round-the-clock defense to the most vulnerable members of our community. Beginning immediately, all state-run schools will be guarded by members of an OPA police force to ensure the safety of our precious children.”
“Innit crap?” asked the homeless woman. She had noticed Deirdre looking over her shoulder. She reeked of body odor, buried under a pile of dirty clothes. “Them kids isn’t in any danger.”
“I don’t know about that,” Deirdre said. “Nobody seems to be safe these days.”
“Waste of money,” she huffed, turning off her tablet. “I need that more than kids who already done got food and shelter.” When she moved her arm, her sleeve slipped down to her elbow.
Unpleasant surprise slithered through Deirdre. The homeless woman wore an intake bracelet. The skin around it was blue-tinted. Shriveled.
Lethe addict.
Deirdre had been about to give one of the dollar bills from Niamh’s lunch to the homeless woman, but now she clutched it in her fist and kept walking.
She followed her mental map of the city to Chelsea, leaving the indigent shifter behind her.
Chelsea was the neighborhood where most of Manhattan’s system-dependent gaeans had been shuttled to after Genesis, giving them decrepit brownstones, abandoned stores, and empty schools.
Nobody needed to use those schools anymore. Not when there were no children to attend.
Unlike Montreal, New York had been settled by far more vampires than shifters. Vampires couldn’t reproduce naturally. There was no such thing as a vampire pregnancy. They could only acquire new members of their species the way werewolves did: by biting them. There was also a fluid exchange involved with vampires, but Deirdre didn’t know the details. She’d made it a habit to avoid vampires aside from Jolene.
No vampire pregnancies meant no vampire children. It was a perpetually adult population.
The streets were eerily quiet without anyone to play in them.
Deirdre lifted her hood to cover her face and jammed her hands into her pockets. Nobody would bother her if they thought she was one of the vampire breeds, so she kept her golden eyes down and pretended that she didn’t like direct sunlight.
Because she was so busy watching the ground, she almost didn’t notice that someone else was tailing her.
This man was good—a lot better than Andrew. She wouldn’t have even noticed him if it hadn’t been for his shoes.
But she heard the faint creak of leather behind her. And when she glanced over her shoulder as she turned a corner, she saw the shifter wearing the square sunglasses and cloak-like jacket again. He had been behind her since leaving No Capes.
He’d pulled off his jacket to expose the hooded sweater underneath, which made him look different. She wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t still been wearing sunglasses that covered half of his face.
When she spotted him, he was all the way on the far end of the block, pretending to be interested in a newspaper. Much too far back for her to recognize him, especially now that he wasn’t wearing that jacket.
There was no mistaking the sunglasses, though.
Deirdre was still being followed.
She was tempted to ditch the meeting. Better to disappoint Brianna by being a no-show than someone realizing that she was meeting with a friend of Rylie’s. Or worse—leading someone who wanted to kill her to the only witch who’d be able to tell Deirdre what she was.
But that was the thing. Brianna was the only person who could tell Deirdre what she was. And who knew when she would be flying back to her office in Las Vegas?
Nothing was going to make her miss that meeting.
She needed to lose him.
Deirdre hooked a hard right turn into the alleyway. She vaulted over a crate, leaped onto the top of a Dumpster, and scaled the brick wall behind it with all the speed she could muster. And it was a lot of speed these days. She was getting faster all the time.
She scrambled up the side of the building, finding footholds and handholds with practiced ease. Three stories, five stories. It was easy.
Deirdre hit the roof and didn’t stop to look for the man following her.
She immediately launched off of the edge of the wall, catching a fire escape on the next building.
After all the time she’d recently spent climbing things like cliffs and trees, scaling a ladder was ridiculously easy. It only took her a couple of short minutes to reach an open window on the nineteenth floor.
She leaped into the living room on the other side.
“Sorry, hi,” Deirdre said, hitting the floor on her knees.
The vampire occupant, who had been watching TV in a shady corner, leaped to his feet with a gasp. His eyes were nearly white, as though with cataracts. He must not have been getting enough blood lately.
He flashed elongated canines at her. “Get out!”
“Just passing through! Sorry again.”
He chased her through the kitchen to the hallway of the apartment building, but luckily, he didn’t follow her past his front door. He was sluggish with starvation. He couldn’t have caught her if he wanted to.
Deirdre pounded down the hallway, arms pumping, lungs heaving.
The walls were paper-thin. She could hear what the building’s other residents were up to through their doors—watching Rylie’s latest statement on the news, having arguments over who should pick up their food stamps that night, barking dogs. Everything smelled stale, like nobody in the building had cleaned for weeks.
There was a window at the end of the hallway, open a crack to let the summer breeze in. Deirdre shoved it open.
She could see the address that Rylie had given her by looking over the nearest rooftops. It was just a block away, underneath what used to be an office building.
Someone nearby screamed.
A door opened in the hallway behind Deirdre.
She glanced back long enough to see a skinny man with a hooded sweater and sunglasses emerging from an apartment. He was carrying a gun.
This wasn’t a tail. This was an assassination attempt.
“Better and better,” she muttered, swinging her legs out onto the ledge. Deirdre stepped to the left so that she wouldn’t be visible from the window.
A gunshot.
The windowsill beside her exploded into fragments of wood.
The next building was five stories shorter than where she stood. Maybe six stories. Too far away for her to reach.
There were trash bags piled against the side of the building, so she aimed for those, hoping they would be enough to soften her landing.
Deirdre didn’t have room to get a running start.
She threw herself from the building with all the power coiled into her thighs, soaring across the street with her arms outspread. Her jacket flapped behind her. The scarf covering her hair unknotted and whipped away into the wind.
Her stomach rose into her throat as she fell, graceful and without gravity.
Deirdre struck the edge of the building and rolled.
Her heart was pounding so hard that it felt like it was going to explode.
She hadn’t expected to land safely. She definitely hadn’t expected to hit the roof. She had only trusted that her body would be able to heal whatever she broke when she landed wrong.
Yet there she was, on the roof of the building, alive and without any new broken bones.
She glanced at the window she’d jumped from. There was no sign of the man with the gun.
That didn’t mean she could stop.
Deirdre jogged across the building’s roof, slid down the awning on the other side, bounced off of a dormer, and finally swung from a windowsill to reach the street level.
Another gunshot. It sounded like it might have been on the roof she’d just left.
“Crap,” Deirdre said.
There was a basement window level with the sidewalk to her left. It proved to be unlocked when she shoved.
Deirdre squeezed through the windowsill, dropping into the relative shelter of the basement underneath.
“You’re late.”
She whirled, heart jackhammering.
Deirdre came face to face with a woman draped in a knitted shawl, bejeweled rings, and several necklaces with wooden charms that clacked together when she moved. She was heavyset—the kind of woman whose thirties hadn’t struck gently—and she limped as she approached a table against the wall. She lowered herself into the chair carefully.
There was nothing threatening about this woman. Even the wooden charms that marked her as a witch looked like they were only defensive.
“Brianna?” Deirdre asked. The name came out in five syllables, she was so winded.
“In the flesh,” Brianna said, arranging her shawls around her. “Want to take a seat?”
Deirdre glanced up at the narrow window. It was too small for anyone bigger than her to wiggle through, but she hadn’t gotten a good look at her attacker. He could have been her size, maybe even smaller. And his stature didn’t matter if he had a gun loaded with silver bullets.
He’d be able to shoot her at the table if she sat there. The angle was perfect.
“I’ll keep standing,” Deirdre said, edging toward the opposite wall.
Brianna didn’t look surprised by the paranoia. Of course, she wouldn’t be if she dealt with preternaturals a lot. Most of them were on edge from one thing or another. Running from enemies, insufficient food or money, too much pressure from local factions.
The witch leaned back in her chair to give Deirdre a long look.
“Huh,” Brianna said.
“That’s not a positive sound,” Deirdre said.
Brianna unpacked her bag on the table, which was covered in a frilly purple tablecloth. “It’s a curious sound. That’s all.” She set items in front of her one by one as she extracted them. A crystal, a bowl, a packet of something that looked like salt.
Deirdre itched with the urge to start running again. “You’re supposed to be able to tell me what I am. At a glance, they said.”
“More like at a sniff,” Brianna said. “It’s not like any sense you have, but if it was any of them, it’d be sense of smell. Everyone has this kind of aroma. Angels always smell like something hot, so the half-blooded children of angels will smell like something that’s burning, too. And werewolves have this funny wet-dog musk, while demons—”
“So what do I smell like?” Deirdre asked. She didn’t need a list of preternatural stinks.
Brianna tapped her chin with a forefinger, which was decorated by a ruby the size of a small car. “Like the desert sky,” she said.
Paranoia was turning rapidly to annoyance.
She’d risked her life for this?
“The sky doesn’t smell,” Deirdre said.
Brianna circled the crystal in salt. “I have some ritualistic ways to augment my senses. I don’t usually need it, because most people are one of a couple common things, but—”
“Then what am I?”
“I’ve been around the block a few times.” Brianna touched the premature crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes with a gentle fingertip. “More than a few times. Some days I think I’ve met everything under the sun. I’ve run into hybrids that were everything all wrapped up into one—an angel-demon-witch, for instance, and even a couple of gods.”
That pricked Deirdre’s interest. “Gods?”
“One or two,” Brianna said.
Deirdre’s legs suddenly felt weak. The gods had died during Genesis. The void that had killed her—and everyone else on the planet—had been the result of a war between gods. Which meant that Brianna must have met them before Genesis.
Rylie had described Brianna as an old associate, hadn’t she?
“You knew Rylie before Genesis,” Deirdre said.
“Barely,” Brianna said.
“But you were there. You were involved.”
The witch lit a candle and set it behind the crystal. “Again, barely. A bit player in a much bigger game.”
“You’re not trying to tell me that you’ve met the gods before, are you?”
“Are there any other kind?” Brianna asked.
“You could tell me what happened,” Deirdre said. “You could tell me what Rylie did during Genesis.” Stark had told Deirdre that Rylie was responsible for Genesis, and when confronted about it, Rylie hadn’t denied any involvement. But she hadn’t told Deirdre more than that, either.
The werewolf Alpha’s involvement was a big question mark that could have had a very ugly answer.
“Did you know that Rylie speaks very highly of you?” Brianna asked, tone light, fingers sifting through the bowl of salt.
Deirdre clenched her jaw. She imagined that Rylie probably spoke “very highly” of everyone. She was practically the werewolf Mister Rogers. The woman didn’t have a bitter bone in her body, even in the places she needed them most.
“What did she do in Genesis?” Deirdre pressed.
“She died,” Brianna said. “She fought in battles meant to prevent Genesis and she died for it.” The witch massaged her temple, sighing. “As I said, I’ve met everything under the sun. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of bitter gaeans who don’t know why they were changed, or why their family was changed, and wish everything could go back the way it was a decade ago. You’re angry, aren’t you? Get in line. Everyone’s angry.”
Deirdre’s hand twitched toward her gun.
She forced her arm to relax.
This wasn’t the asylum, she wasn’t Everton Stark, and she couldn’t hurt everyone who pissed her off.
Although she had to admit there was a charming simplicity to the concept.
“Lots of people died,” Deirdre said through gritted teeth. “It’s nothing special if Rylie did, too.”
Brianna clapped her hands, and magic whip-cracked through Deirdre’s chest.
She gasped, jerking back—but there was nothing to escape. The magic had tapped her and vanished just as quickly.
“The fact of the matter is that whatever Rylie did—whatever we all did, because she wasn’t the only one there—we were trying to prevent something worse from happening.” Brianna began packing up her spell, just as quickly as she’d set it out. Apparently she was done.
Deirdre’s eyes burned hot. “You don’t know what I should be grateful for. You don’t know anything about me.”
“You’re right,” Brianna said. “I don’t. I know absolutely nothing about you.”
&
nbsp; Disappointment crashed over Deirdre. “The spell didn’t help?”
Brianna swept the salt back into its packet, shouldered her bag, and stood.
“I’m sorry. I know you and Rylie were counting on this,” Brianna said. “But I have no idea what you are, Deirdre Tombs.”
Deirdre left the basement to find that the promised storm had arrived with all the fury she’d been dreading, dumping sheets of water straight on her head. Her straightened hair, no longer protected by a scarf, was going to be ruined. Niamh would blow a gasket.
Not to mention that it was cold.
She tipped her head back to glare at the clouds high above.
“What did I do?” she asked. “Seriously, what the hell, karma?”
It was a rhetorical question. Deirdre knew exactly what she had done to deserve all this.
The smell of Gage’s burning fur still lingered in her nostrils.
A black shape wheeled above the buildings. It was so small that she could have blotted it from her vision with an upheld thumb, but she was certain that it was an eagle or hawk, something that shouldn’t have been able to survive in New York City. Of course, that bird probably didn’t spend most of its time with wings and feathers.
She had given up her life—a miserable life, to be fair, but the only life she’d ever known—for a shot at finding out what kind of animal she should have been able to shapeshift into. Rylie had offered money, but all Deirdre had wanted was a meeting with the witch who could identify every gaean at a glance. Or a smell. Whatever.
Brianna hadn’t known what she was.
Deirdre had stumped two werewolf Alphas, Everton Stark, and now a witch specialist.
Where did that leave her?
Movement in the alley caught her eye.
She turned in time to see something slither under a pile of trash. It was shiny and as thick as her arm—an oversized serpent, just as werewolves were bigger than the real thing.
Deirdre was pretty sure that flash of black and red she’d seen belonged to a viper.
She stepped into the alley before drawing her gun.
“Jacek?” she whispered.
He was the only snake shifter she knew, and the worst person possible to see her meeting with an ally of Rylie’s.
