“Well, I don’t have your wife’s fat belly to keep me warm at night.” She smirks.
I take a sip from the mug—ice cold—and sit down next to her, stretching my feet out toward the fire.
“Be nice.”
She turns her good eye toward me and raises one eyebrow. The patch over her left dancing with reflected firelight. “I’m just jealous. Why should she always get the guy?”
I chuckle and take the joint from between her fingers, taking a deep drag and handing it back.
“Are you sure about this?” I ask, holding the breath and sounding like a bad Darth Vader impression.
“I can’t stay here. Who wants to live with their pervo little brothers? Let alone their married cousins about to have inbred mutant babies?”
She catches me mid-exhalation, and I gag on the smoke, laughing and coughing at the same time. Tears fill my eyes, and something hot lodges in my throat. I swig another mouthful of cold coffee and clear my throat.
“Pervos?”
“Bob caught them trying to steal Playboys at the gas station.”
She takes a drag and holds it out to me. I just shake my head.
“In the middle of all things,” I remind her.
“Always. Right?” She pulls her knees up tighter, sneaking her feet back under the blanket.
“You can stay here as long as you want, and we’re going to rebuild the big house. Bigger, better. Room for everybody.”
“Is that what you’re gonna call it, the bigger house?” She snuffs. “You know I don’t belong here. It’s not in me. I need . . .”
“More. I know. Just don’t get carried away, all right? And if you need anything . . .”
“Yeah, yeah. I can always come home.”
I get up and take the cup to the sink, dump out the remnants of cold coffee, and rinse it under the tap.
“Bob’s coming up tomorrow to help me clear the road. He can take you to town, catch a bus wherever you want to go.” I don’t want her to leave, but I know how it feels to be looking for something where you know you can’t find it.
She’s behind me like a goddamn ninja, wrapping her arms around me. I squeeze her elbows and try to ignore the heat coming from her like a furnace.
“You’re naked.”
“And you’re not. Go get back in bed with your wife, hero.”
She slaps me on the ass and saunters away toward the door.
“Tell them I said goodbye,” she says, pulling the strap from around her head and hanging it at her neck.
I know what that means.
“Jules.”
She stops with her hand on the door.
“You’re the hero.”
She turns, the tiniest of grins curling up at one corner of her mouth. She gives me a wink and a little salute, then bounds out into the snow. I watch her disappear into the night, a grey ghost against the winter cold, a sudden clamour as a dozen black shadows shake loose from the trees to follow her.
I sit in front of the dying embers of the fire, staring at the hero statue on the mantle.
“Not like she has any pockets,” I mumble to the coals.
“WHAT WAS ALL that?” Emma grumbles as I climb in beside her.
“Jules. She’s gone.”
“Hmmm,” seems to be all she has to say about that.
She wraps her arms around me, pulls me close, and presses her soft lips against mine. Electricity jolts through my chest, and the heat of her body seeps into mine. She rolls on top of me, nipping at my neck, then stops and fixes me with those deep olive green eyes. The eyes I’ve dreamt of every night of my life. The other half of the me I never knew.
“I’m glad you’re home,” she says.
Home.
Wolf & Devil
DEVIL WOKE UP to the clinking of ice in a glass.
Even half-asleep, he knew the sound. Crystal tumbler. Saturn cut.
He could hear somebody out there, on his deck, in his yard . . .
Drinking his whiskey.
“THAT’S A THREE-hundred dollar bottle of whiskey you’re fucking with.”
Devil stepped out into the night, pistol first, business-end muzzled with a silencer he’d snuck in from Argentina.
“Better join me then,” she said, honey dripping from a dusky voice. Long, slender legs reached out from the shadows hiding her on the far side of the patio table. She hooked nimble feet around the chair closest to Devil and pulled it away from the table, a clear signal for him to sit down and enjoy some of his own booze.
“Nice stems. Where’s the rest of you?”
“Come over and have a look, sailor.”
Devil clomped out onto the patio, thick-soled boots and boxer shorts the only thing between him and the cool winter night. He took a deep breath through his nose, taking his time before moving toward her.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” Devil said, smiling as he heard the clink of ice in another glass, followed by the screw-top coming off of the bottle. A few short glugs and one of his heavy crystal glasses slid across the table-top toward him.
“Not as of yet.”
The girl leaned in from her dark alcove, winking one brilliant emerald eye. The other eye was covered with a black leather patch. She had a stunning face, framed by a cascade of loose blonde curls.
“You gonna offer a girl a drink?”
“Seems like you already helped yourself, kid.”
She leaned back, face disappearing into the dark, replaced by a slender hand and an empty glass full of half-melted ice.
“I could use a refill, Pops.”
Devil grinned, reached across for the bottle and poured her another.
“So what’s with the eyepatch, señorita?”
“Wizard battle gone wrong. What’s a girl to do? You don’t like it?”
Devil strained to see the rest of her through the darkness.
“No, from what I can tell, it suits you, Jules. It is Jules, right?”
Her Cheshire cat smile gleamed there in the black.
“Hmm. Finn said you were smart.”
“So what are you doing in my backyard at two A.M. on a Wednesday?”
“Finn said I should look you up. He thought we might have a little fun together.”
“But how did you get in? That fence is seven feet high, reinforced, and alarmed.”
“I just hopped on over. I could smell this Yamazaki single malt from a block away.”
The ice in her glass clinked as she took a sip. Devil found himself staring at her full red lips on the glass, parting just slightly to let the amber liquid slide past those perfect white teeth, and along her tongue, swirling once through the warm insides of her mouth before being carried down her throat.
Jules leaned forward again, licking those luscious lips, and nodded her head toward the concrete slab off to one side of the yard, where a tall shrouded figure loomed.
“Sex swing?” She grinned, popping her shapely eyebrows at him.
Devil laughed out loud, almost spitting Japanese scotch out his nose. “Heavy bag.”
She regarded him quietly for a moment.
“You keep that stuff outside?”
“I don’t want to stink up the house.”
“What do you do when it snows?”
“I put on pants.”
Devil watched her with a wary eye, silently battling his own raging libido in his mind. How old was this girl? Jimmy’s cousin. Old enough to be a stripper. Old enough to lose an eye fighting some crazy fucking magician. Jimmy’d told him the whole wild story. In any case, she was old enough to be a fucking werewolf, right?
“You want to take this conversation inside, like civilized adults?”
“Is that what we are?” Jules looked Devil up and down, taking in this man in his four-leaf clover print boxers and motorcycle boots, covered with strange tattoos, not seeming to mind the cold any more than she did. Finn was right. They’d get along just fine.
She stretched her legs under the table, working out the las
t knots from the change that brought her here, running through the streets of this strange neighbourhood, leaping his fortress walls. She might not even bother bewitching this one. Let Simon Magus take his tricks with him to his grave. This guy knew all about what she was, and didn’t seem to care. She was just a woman, seducing a man. The old-fashioned way. Naked in the moonlight.
Jules folded her legs up, slid out from the chair, and stepped up the patio stairs into the light, letting him drink her in, like a three-hundred dollar bottle of whiskey. This was a man who appreciated the finest.
And she was the finest.
Devil watched her as she slinked out from the shadows, every bit of her smooth, honey-gold, and perfect.
“What’s with the ink?” she asked as he slid up behind her at the door.
“Wizard battle. A little protection can’t hurt.”
“Seven foot-high fence, alarms, tattoos of magical protection . . . You are a careful boy.”
“House of bricks.”
She spun to face him, slid her arms around, and clamped her hands on his ass, pulling him in hard and smashing his lips with hers.
“Little pig, little pig,” she said, that Cheshire cat grin beaming wide, showing Devil the long canines as she pushed her hard nipples and soft curves against him, grinding against the barely contained erection about to burst out of the thin layer of cotton between them.
“You ever make it with a big bad wolf, Devil?” she purred.
“Not as of yet.”
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Wolf & Devil:
Demon Days
Coming Summer 2017
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the family and friends that always see me through; to the amazing crew at Tyche books who made this thing happen; and to all the madmen who put all of these monsters in my head - thanks for a lifetime of reading and watching and daydreaming
About the Author
Axel Howerton (or #AxelHow, if you're into that whole hashtags & brevity thing) is the genre-hopping, punch-drunk author of the Arthur Ellis Award nominated Hot Sinatra, the gothic urban fantasy Furr and the forthcoming Wolf & Devil series. His short fiction and essays have appeared the world over, in no fewer than five languages, and more than 30 (but less than 1000?) publications. Axel is the Prairies director of the Crime Writers of Canada and a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, the Calgary Crime Writers, and the Kintsugi Poets. He is also the editor of the books AB Negative and Tall Tales of the Weird West, and the organizer behind one of Canada's first recurring "Noir At The Bar" events, #NoirBarYYC.
Visit Axel online at axelhow.com to sign up for the GotHow? email list and receive free exclusive ebook collections, sneak peeks, and more!
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Table of Contents
Title Page
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Wolf & Devil
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Furr Page 23
