Kett didn’t look right. His clothing was torn and bloody, though he wasn’t bleeding. He seemed to be missing … chunks of himself. Like the chunks torn out of the walls and floor.
The zombie had trapped the vampire against the wall perpendicular to the one I was crumpled against. Neck-pinning one’s prey seemed popular among the undead. First Kett, and now the zombie. The zombie darted its head toward Kett’s neck, but the vampire managed to deflect the bite away to his shoulder. The zombie latched onto Kett’s flesh and then ripped a large piece … off … a large chunk of vampire shoulder flesh. I had to be seeing things.
Kett growled in pain. I was pretty sure I could see the actual bone of his collarbone.
The flesh in the zombie’s mouth dissolved into ash.
The zombie could hurt the unhurtable.
I thought about throwing up again as I watched Kett’s flesh seal over the shoulder wound, leaving a dent behind. I made it to my knees instead.
Kett saw me over the zombie’s shoulder and shook his head emphatically. His eyes were blood red. He lost a chunk of his neck for his distraction.
I gained my feet and swayed in place. Zombie, zombie, zombie … what the hell did I know about zombies that was actual truth?
Well, I certainly didn’t know that zombies trumped vampires.
I drew my knife.
“Get out, Jade. Get the fuck out. Find the shifter —” This time Kett lost a hunk of his lower arm. He’d been trying to pry the zombie away from his neck.
I needed leverage. My knife wasn’t long enough to cut off the zombie’s head in one slice. Nor was I tall enough, but I was banking on full decapitation being unnecessary.
The room had settled into a strange permanent tilt, but I was fairly certain that the entire room couldn’t be listing to one side. I rolled my neck and felt something snap back into place with a spasm of pain. That felt better, even though the pounding in my head was worse, like I’d just undammed the blood flow.
With my knife in my hand, the next two steps were easier than I anticipated. I jumped up on the now empty — and, oddly, still upright and intact — tray table.
I took one more wide stride forward to the very end of the table. Then, holding my knife in both hands over my head, I leaped upward and toward the zombie.
As my upward momentum became a downward fall, I thrust my knife, tip down, through the top of the zombie’s skull. The blade slid in easy and clean, right up to the hilt. A shock of magic — not my own — reverberated through the knife and into my arms, forcing me to let go of the weapon.
I hit the floor feet first, but couldn’t catch my balance. As I sprawled against the zombie’s back, it tipped sideways, taking me with it.
I scrambled a few feet backward on my ass. The zombie’s supine body lay between me and Kett, who had sunk down hunched against the wall.
The zombie — my knife still sticking out of his head — didn’t move.
I was aware I was sobbing, and that I had been doing so throughout my leap and stab, but I couldn’t stop. I’d just killed something … something already dead, but still something I’d once thought, however briefly, that I could love.
“You … stopped it,” Kett said. His voice was little more than a moan.
“Yeah, though it was probably a good thing it was distracted.”
Kett raised his eyes to mine. He didn’t look good. The floor around him was coated in the ash that his magic turned to when it died. That scared the hell out of me, but being scared was getting to be a pretty permanent state of being.
“You need to go. Stand. Move slowly,” Kett whispered, never taking his blood-red eyes off me. “Don’t look back. Go now.” He shuddered and pressed his hands to his stomach. A few of his fingers were sticking out at odd angles. He wasn’t healing anymore. “Go!” He also had fangs. I hadn’t seen those before.
Red eyes, fangs … injured vampire. I was a walking, breathing blood bag.
His magic hit me as it had before, trying to pin me in place.
I straightened despite it. He copied my movement, though he had to lean against and slide up the wall to do so.
I flicked my eyes to my knife in the zombie’s head. It was closer to the vampire than me.
Kett grinned. “I shall enjoy draining you, witch. It’s been a hundred years since I’ve hunted so freely. And I’ve never tasted magic like yours.”
Mr. Nice Vampire was gone. I was really wishing he’d stuck around a bit longer.
I ran.
I didn’t have a hope in hell.
His fingers brushed my hair.
I hadn’t even taken a second step. I had a feeling he was playing with me, despite his obvious need. He was toying with me just a bit, before the big finale.
I was going to die and I’d just saved his freaking life. No good deed goes unpunished.
∞
The double swinging doors from the hallway blew open, and fury burst through in the body of a nightmare. This monster grabbed the enraged, starving vampire and tossed him — yes, tossed, with one massive, clawed hand — through the far wall, all without even sideswiping me. The thing had to be seven feet tall but was partly humanoid in form. It turned to look over its shoulder.
“Get her out of here.” It spoke perfectly through a face that was malformed, caught in some cross between human and beast — though what beast, I wasn’t sure. Its teeth jutted out of an oversized jaw and were fanged top and bottom. Like a cat’s; not like the vampire’s.
The vampire was laughing from beyond the far wall, and there was nothing human about the sound. I totally would have peed myself except I was actually frozen in place.
Suddenly, Kandy was trying to pull me from the room, more roughly than was necessary. But then, I was resisting more than was healthy for me. In my morbid fear, I just wanted to watch —
The vampire was on the monster before I knew he’d reentered the room.
The beast raised a clawed hand wider than a medicine ball, and smacked the vampire to the floor. The creature was gurgling some choking sort of laugh, like it was playing rather than in a battle for its life.
Kandy finally managed to yank me fully through the half-unhinged and dented swinging doors and out of the room. Two other werewolves — Lara and the tall blond, who were calm but glowing green around the eyes — waited in the hall. I clicked two and two together and figured out the identity of the monster. I’d blame the delay on whatever head injury I was currently suffering, but … well, I wasn’t known for being quick on my feet uninjured either.
“He’s not a wolf,” I said as Kandy pulled me past the two werewolves and continued dragging me toward an emergency exit, which opened to reveal stairs, not the elevator. I’d figured out the half-beast was Desmond Llewelyn, the Lord and Alpha of the West Coast North American Pack.
“No, a cat.” Kandy shoved me up the stairs in front of her.
“He didn’t look like any cat I’ve ever seen.”
“Half-form. Some of us can partly change, and meld the strength of our animal forms into the mobility of our human. Opposable clawed thumbs and all that.”
Oh. That was clear. Not. I wondered if he liked cream and catnip as much as my childhood cat, Lester, had. Kandy’s stifled giggle informed me I’d wondered that last bit out loud.
“But you’re a wolf?” I asked.
“Most of us are.”
How had I not known that not all shapeshifters were wolves? The Compendium had totally let me down in that respect. Shouldn’t the werewolf section have referenced a shapeshifter entry? I’d noticed the vampire calling the werewolves ‘shapeshifters’, of course, but I’d thought he was just being all correct and elitist, as usual.
Kandy slammed her palms on the bar of the emergency exit door at the top of the stairs, and we were suddenly in the fresh air. Well, the fresh air of an alley between two four-storey hospital buildings — but still, I breathed deeply, over and over again, to get the smell of morgue and
undead out of my nostrils, out of my brain.
Kandy propped me up against a cement wall and began to pace the short strip of pavement twenty or so feet in front of me. Like she was securing her territory, or perhaps securing her prisoner. I was happy to be out of her bruising grasp. My upper left arm was tingling as if she’d actually hindered the blood flow.
“He’s going to kill him,” I said.
“Nah, they’re sort of friendly, as much as a shifter and a vampire can be. He’ll just subdue him. He looked pretty beaten up already.”
“I meant Kett would kill Desmond.”
Kandy barked out a laugh. I was pretty tired of being the butt of everyone’s jokes, so I chose to ignore her and rest my aching head against the concrete wall. My neck really was killing me. And whether vampire trumped were … cat? Well, that was way out of my hands and league.
Ah, damn it. I’d left my knife in the zombie’s skull.
CHAPTER NINE
I was proven completely wrong about Kett killing Desmond when, before I’d even caught my breath, McGrowly sauntered out of the emergency exit. Of course, I had no idea if it was Desmond’s strength and skill or Kett maintaining enough control to hold back that kept the werecat whole but bloody.
He was back in his full human form, clothed in a rather ratty, bloody T-shirt and jeans. He was just couple of inches taller than me, though I was sure he’d been closer to seven feet and covered in nothing but fur in the morgue.
I was going to need to start running an abilities-that-scare-the-shit-out-of-me list on the shapeshifters now, not just for the vampire. It was one thing to read about such abilities in a book and completely another to see it with my own eyes. Especially since the Compendium was obviously missing chunks of pertinent information. Or I hadn’t looked in the correct section. I could never rule out my own inability to focus on things that didn’t interest me.
Anyway, each hour with this group of Adepts was a whole new terrifying experience. Lucky me. Shapeshifters, who came in forms other than wolf, could transform into a half-human/half-beast over seven feet tall. Delightfully scary. Then they could throw a vampire through a cement wall. Though maybe that was a far more chilling fact about the vampire than the shifter. Also, they too, like the vampire, could casually pin a helpless half-witch against a concrete wall and stare at her intimidatingly until she wanted to pee her pants.
Um, yeah … speaking of which … Desmond turned on me the instant the door had closed behind him. Kandy took two big steps away and turned her back on us. Traitor.
Desmond didn’t actually have to touch me to pin me against the wall; one green-glowing-eyed look was enough. Plus, he was so wide that he pretty much created a wall himself. He practically occupied all my peripheral vision just by standing a foot-and-a-half away.
He narrowed his eyes at me, assessing I supposed. Then he held his hand out, palm up. He’d rescued my knife from the zombie’s skull. It was wiped clean and I was grateful for this. Overly grateful, in fact, because I felt like Kett and Desmond were to blame for the fact that I had to stab Hudson’s reanimated body through the head in the first place. Therefore, they deserved very little of my gratitude.
“Is Kett … dead?”
“Not any more than he was before,” Desmond said without smiling. It was a joke nonetheless; lame shifter humor, I supposed. I didn’t laugh either but Kandy snorted, even with her back turned.
“Nice knife work down there,” Desmond said. “Brave. The vampire is in your debt. He won’t like that, so use it well.” Then he reached up with two fingers to touch my chin. He added a bit of pressure to slowly rotate my head. I thought about resisting, but my neck was really killing me and I didn’t want to strain it further.
Desmond let out a low whistle. Kandy turned as he lifted the hair off the side and back of my neck. My curls had fallen out of their clip and I hadn’t even noticed.
“That is an impressive bruise,” Desmond said, referencing my neck. Even Kandy looked momentarily impressed. “I haven’t ever seen a bruise like that on a human. Not one alive, anyway.”
I kept quiet. The headache was now pounding at the back of my skull, and I just wasn’t up to bantering.
Kandy’s eyes fell on Desmond’s shoulder and she uttered a short, blunt curse. I looked myself — Desmond had freed my head — and ogled the half-healed chew mark on the bridge between Desmond’s neck and his meaty shoulder. His neck had been savaged, T-shirt and all, so his shirt must have stretched and ripped in places to accommodate his half-beast form. It was a similar enough color to the deep beige of his fur that I missed seeing it.
Kandy reached over and extracted a long, broken canine tooth from this bloody wound.
Desmond took the tooth from her and started to laugh. The green-haired wolf growled impatiently and started her pacing game again, only now her track encircled Desmond and me.
The wound on Desmond’s neck sealed as he laughed. He was practically clutching his belly with mirth. I was surprised he was capable of such emotion.
“He found me a difficult meal,” Desmond managed to wheeze. “He just hung on chewing, waiting for me to drop from his damn venom shit. It takes more than that to get me on my back.” The shifter flashed me a grin, and I deliberately ignored the sexual allusion.
Scary venom shit — that was one more check mark in the vampire’s-are-walking-talking-nightmares box.
“It’ll take him time to grow that back,” Kandy said. Satisfaction laced her growl.
Desmond, who was now wiping tears from his eyes, pocketed the tooth. “Blackmail,” he whispered as he winked at me.
I wasn’t impressed. I just wanted to go home and find solace in a fresh batch of double fudge brownies. Desmond dropped his smile and stepped closer to me again. This time he leaned in and actually smelled me. He took a great big sniff just underneath my left ear, then clasped and raised both my hands to his face. He inhaled at my wrists, then pinned me with his gaze again. A green glow rolled over his green-flecked, golden brown eyes. Again, I assumed the glow must have something to do with the shapeshifters accessing their power. Maybe scent this time?
“What are you?”
“We’ve done this dance before. It’s boring,” I answered. I guess I did have some lip left in me.
“You haven’t danced properly with me,” Desmond said, his voice growling low in his chest.
I couldn’t figure out if he thought he was being sexy or flirty or whether he was threatening me. I just sighed and turned my head to fix my gaze over his shoulder. This pissed him off, and I could actually feel his anger rise. But then, that had been my intention.
“You owe me a life debt, half-witch, and I’m about to collect.”
I shuddered as the power laced through those words rolled over me. I shuddered at the thought of owing anything to this man-beast who could command such magic in mere words.
He’d saved my life.
I couldn’t even pretend to dispute it. He could have let the vampire kill me, but he obviously wanted something more from me.
I looked back at him. He was waiting for my acknowledgement. I nodded and felt the magic settle between us. It was a light connection, but it felt heavy to me; I’d never accepted a life debt before. I understood it was a serious binding, fueled and enforced by the magic of the caster — Desmond in this case — and reinforced with my own magic. He didn’t own me or anything but it felt like I’d signed some sort of lease agreement nonetheless.
I knew then that even if he owed it to me, I wouldn’t be collecting such an acknowledgement from the vampire. I didn’t want to play with magic that felt so tangible and terrifying.
My grandmother was going to freak unless I could cancel out the debt before she laid eyes on me.
“What do you want in return?” I asked. I was back to looking over Desmond’s shoulder and attempting to ignore the tug of the bond.
“What? No, thank you for saving your life?”
“You felt the bond seal as surely as I did. That’s thanks enough.” I’d seen that much in the satisfaction that had flitted over his face, before it settled back into its usual grim lines.
“Hudson was my second. He was invaluable. Irreplaceable.”
My eyes flicked to Kandy, who was currently on her guard rounds. If she could hear the conversation, it didn’t seem to interest her.
“Kandy is a warrior. One of my best. And while Hudson could be fearsome, you have to be more than just fearsome to reach and hold the second position. He was a diplomat. Charming, agreeable —”
“Everything you’re not.” I couldn’t help saying it. Desmond scared me.
“Exactly.” He wasn’t insulted easily, it seemed. “I hold you responsible for Hudson’s death. Somehow, being around you called him to the attention of the killer.”
“That’s not fair,” I said as calmly as possible, even as guilty tears threatened the corners of my eyes. “You were already investigating murdered werewolves when I met Hudson.”
“Why do you think he danced with you?” Desmond said with a sneer. “You think a half-witch held any thrill for such as him? Yes, your magic is appealing. Intoxicating in the right circumstances, I suppose. But shifters don’t mate with weak humans.”
“Well, you all keep telling me I’m not human at all, so I guess that wasn’t an issue. Perhaps you didn’t know your precious Hudson as well as you think.”
Anger momentarily edged Desmond’s chiseled features, but was gone as soon as I’d glimpsed it. Which was good, as I’d momentarily forgotten I didn’t want to provoke the beast.
“I can see why the vampire likes you,” Desmond said. “The same won’t apply to me.”
“You prefer your followers with their noses shoved up your ass.”
“You have me completely figured out.”
Desmond bared his teeth at me. I returned the non-smile as he took an aggressive step forward. I didn’t step back. Of course, I was already practically plastered to the concrete wall, so that didn’t mean much. But I didn’t back down.
Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic Page 13
