“You won’t be smiling when that virus eats you. You’ll change or you’ll die. And if you change…” He rasped, his eyes still that golden shade of wolf. “We do this again. I’ll show you what happens to the weak and stupid.”
“No.” I shrugged as another fat drop of blood rolled down my fingers and plopped to the floor. “I can’t be changed. Sorry about that.”
A growl trickled through the room and TJ rolled her chair closer. In her hand, she held a crossbow, the bolt in it tipped with silver. Her eyes gleamed yellow-gold as well and when she smiled, her teeth looked far sharper than normal.
“I’ll show you what happens to the weak and stupid if you show up here and threaten my staff again,” she promised. “Now…get out. You’re lucky I’m feeling nice tonight. Goliath will watch over you for the next few minutes while you heal enough to walk home.”
Goliath practically dragged his bloody ass out of there. Once they were gone, it was like somebody popped a bubble and people started to breathe, started to talk.
I glanced at TJ. That gleam in her eyes hadn’t faded. And now she was glaring at me.
Well, shit.
* * * * *
“If you think I’m going to let you come between me and everybody that snarls at me, then we got a problem,” I said shortly as I fought to wrap a bandage of snowy white around my arm.
TJ sat in her chair on the far side of the back room, her eyes still flickering between gold and their normal brown. “That wolf could have torn you apart.”
Pausing in the middle of my shoddy first aid attempts, I lifted my head. “Yeah? Then how come I had him on the floor before he so much as touched me?”
“You were lucky.”
“No. I was making a point.” And everybody out there had seen it, too. I felt more than a little satisfaction over that. But my smug grin faded as I lifted my head to look at TJ. I set my jaw. “I could have killed him. All I had to do was call my blade and I could have taken his head the second he came at me. I didn’t.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, a scowl darkening her brow. After twenty seconds, she blew out a breath and then spun her chair around to stare outside. “It might have been better if you’d done just that, Kit.”
“I’m not a killer.”
“You might well have to become one after this.” Her hand brushed the curtain aside and moonlight streamed in, gilding her face with silver. “You still don’t get this world. Fuck. Just where did you come from that you think you can taunt wolves like that and not realize they’ll want blood back?”
Something hollow settled in my gut. Finishing the makeshift bandage on my arm, I settled on the floor in front of the fireplace. It wasn’t cold. It was November, but the temperatures in Wolf Haven, Florida—formerly Winter Haven—hadn’t yet dropped below sixty degrees. I felt chilled, though. “You don’t want to know where I came from, TJ.”
Even if she did, I wouldn’t tell her.
“I get the idea that it wasn’t fun,” she said, her voice almost as hollow as I felt. “I’ve seen the scars on you. And I know what a girl looks like when she’s running away. More to the point, I know for a fucking fact that you’re lost about how our world works. You need to figure it out, and fast, because you’re in for a rude awakening. That wolf isn’t going to walk away from this.”
Sliding her a look, I saw that she’d soundlessly turned to look at me.
“He’ll come after you. Again. He’ll watch. He’ll wait. First to see if you die. Then to see if you change. When neither happens, he’ll try to kill you again. Can you handle that?”
I didn’t doubt her words, even though I hadn’t realized this would happen. Whatever happened to getting your ass kicked and just walking away? Or hiding…that’s what I’d had to do most of my life. Get my ass kicked, my ass whipped, then slink away, heal. Have it done all over again.
The world of shifters was unlike any other world I’d known though.
“No,” I said quietly. “I can’t handle him trying to kill me.” I’d lived through that more than a couple of times already. “I guess that means I’ll just have to kill him first.”
When TJ didn’t answer, I turned my head to see her watching me. Now, she had a faint, but satisfied smile on her face.
“Don’t look so happy about it.”
She shrugged. “If you’re going to pick fights with furry people, you gotta be prepared to see them all the way through, Kit.”
Some of what I felt must have shown on my face because her face softened with something that might have been sympathy. “We don’t live in a soft world, kid. As much as I hate to say it, and as clichéd as it sounds, sometimes it comes down to this…it’s kill or be killed. You’ve already had to bloody your hands. You’re not as strong as everybody else and most of them out there aren’t going to pick fights with you. But when those fights end up on your doorstep, or if you go and pick a fight like you did tonight…” She leaned forward, her gaze holding mine. “Finish it.”
Colleen arrived almost two hours later. Adrenaline was still riding high, probably to combat the pain that had yet to fade. The fever was burning hot, too. I couldn’t turn were, but that didn’t mean my body liked the virus currently tearing through my blood.
As I told her how my arm had gotten torn to hell—again—her face was folded into tight lines.
“The good news, I figure I’ll settle down once you finish with my arm,” I said in overly bright tones.
Colleen paused in the process of wrapping a poultice around my bruised, torn and bloody flesh. The bleeding had started anew once she’d torn, peeled or cut away the bandage. “Settle down?”
“Yeah.” I made a face. “I’ve been edgy all day. I get that way sometimes.”
A troubled look came across her face. “Edgy how?”
“I don’t know. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, except I never saw the first one. If that makes sense. Where did that saying come from anyway?” I looked away as she took a pair of what looked like oversize tweezers to an area on my forearm, pulling something out of the flesh that she’d missed earlier. Then she continued the process of wrapping me up.
“I don’t know and quit changing the subject. How often do you feel like that?”
I went to shrug and then stopped. Colleen made me sit through these Q&A sessions a lot, and had for the past year or so. Some people thought I was some sort of weird witch offshoot—the name they applied to the non-humans in our world who weren’t witch or were. Sometimes you’d see a weird mutation of the races that interbred, and there were other non-human races in the world besides witch, were and vamp, although those were the dominant ones.
People assumed I was either an offshoot or a weak witch.
Colleen knew better. I wasn’t a witch. I wasn’t an offshoot. I was one of the rarer races that few people knew about. Even fewer understood my kind. I didn’t understand my kind, but then again, none of them had ever seen fit to teach me anything that didn’t involve some sort of physical pain.
Oh, you’ve dropped your guard—
I cut that memory off before I could let it go any farther. The nightmares were bad enough. If I let them continue to plague my waking hours, I might as well go back to hiding in my room the way I had the first few months I’d been here. Or just hit the road again, running from every sound, every shadow.
Sighing, I met Colleen’s eyes. “I don’t know why you keep trying to figure me out. I don’t care.”
“You should,” she said, her voice soft. “One of these days, you might need to know. Now come on. How often?”
“Not very. Every now and then.”
“Name a time.”
Swallowing, I averted my gaze. “I don’t think you want to know.”
“Kit…”
Blowing out a breath, I met her gaze. “The day you called about your daughter.”
She went white, her mouth tightening. Then, slowly, she nodded. “So that ended up…interesting for you.” S
omething glittered in her eyes and then she focused on my arm again. “Another time.”
“Hell. What is this? Twenty questions? Remember that girl who TJ tried to help a year ago? Weird were-mix? Part wolf and part…something else.” I’d never been able to puzzle that one out, and sadly, she was too dead now for me to ask.
“Cari.” Colleen lifted her brows. “She’s the one who had some fucked-up family members come looking for her.”
“They found her,” I said softly. I’d told TJ. The men and women who’d come through TJ’s doors had been looking for trouble, and a lot of it. TJ was more than willing to dish it out. I wasn’t quite so ready for it, but I’d settled myself in the corner with a gun. Not my favorite weapon, but if I had to deal with weres of questionable sanity, I’d go for something with serious stopping power.
But Cari had decided to leave with them.
TJ had said she didn’t have to.
Cari had almost taken the lifeline TJ had given. Almost.
Instead, she’d followed them out the door and it wasn’t until we heard Goliath’s roar shaking the very foundations of the building that we’d raced outside. They’d seen that slight hesitation, and now Cari lay face-first on the concrete, her father slamming her into the concrete so hard, it busted underneath the force of the blows.
Goliath had lunged himself forward and had already taken down six of the weird were-things. They resembled something between a bat and a wolf, misshapen and awkward, with too large heads and limbs that were too long for their bodies. But they were strong and once they saw the danger—Goliath—they’d thrown themselves at him with a fury.
If we’d gotten to her sooner, we might have been able to save her.
But by the time Goliath cut down the stronger ones and TJ and I dealt with the weaker ones with either silver bullets or silver-tipped bolts, the father had come out of whatever fury had possessed them. Holding Cari’s head in his hands, he’d simply wrenched it off her shoulders.
For months, I’d seen that every time I closed my eyes.
“Every time it happens, it’s because some sort of trouble is brewing,” Colleen murmured.
“The trouble already brewed. My cup of trouble runneth over, even.” If life was fair, I’d never deal with any more trouble again. Sadly, life wasn’t fair. Very often, life just sucked. She laid her hands on my arm and I took a deep breath, braced myself.
“This will hurt,” she warned.
“No shit.”
I managed not to scream. Barely.
Chapter Three
Ever heard the phrase like a dog with a bone?
That describes Colleen.
It was nearly an hour later, down in the bar, and she was still going at me.
I had my hand wrapped around a highball, two fingers of whiskey—nothing near as potent as what TJ served her regulars, but stronger than what humans drank. Colleen was at my side, leaning in, her voice low as she asked, “So when is it the worst? When you act or when you do nothing?”
“What?” I asked, tired. Pressing the glass to my forehead, I tried to ignore the headache pounding at the back of my skull. Heavy healings could do that. Toss booze on top and I was going to feel like shit in the morning, but I was hoping the alcohol would slow the racing in my mind.
My skin still crawled.
I still felt like something in the air was whispering…get ready, get ready…
“This weird feeling you get. When is it the worst? When does it fade the quickest?”
Popping one eye open, I stared at her. She had a pretty face, milk-pale skin, green eyes, red hair. Irish to the bone and beautiful with it. As gentle as she looked, she was stubborn as hell. I guess that came with being Irish, too. “You’re not going to shut up about this, are you?”
“Nope.” She smiled sunnily at me. “We’re still trying to understand everything you are, remember? Nothing much in the Assembly database about you and all.”
She kept her voice down, but I still winced and skimmed a quick look around.
Nobody seemed to notice.
“Fine.” Huffing out a breath, I thought back. “The day I went after Mandy. Once I was actually doing something, all my energy focused on the doing.”
“Like you were supposed to be doing just that.” Her gaze went thoughtful, not sad the way I would have expected when I said her lost child’s name. “You think it would have passed easier if you’d tried to help with Cari?”
“I did.” The words slipped out of me, soft and reluctant. “I went to follow her outside, telling TJ the girl shouldn’t leave. But she said it wasn’t up to us. I could almost see the death on her. Once I got outside, I thought I could stop it…but we were too late.” I shrugged and tried to brush it off. “After that, TJ had wards put up around the place. You know, you helped make them. But that’s what brought it on. If people want in here, they have to really want it. It’s the hardest on strangers. People she knows can come and go almost easily, but if you don’t know TJ, you’re shit out of luck.”
“Like Cari’s family.” She nodded and went silent. After a few moments, she said, “It’s your instincts.”
I’d spent those moments tending to my whiskey, and I’d tended it well. So well that I needed a refill. But before I caught Mac’s eyes—he handled the night shift—I glanced at Colleen. “What do you mean?”
“It’s part of you, I think.” Something burned in her eyes. “It’s what you are. You’re supposed to be acting. You are guided by those instincts, Kit. I’ve seen it a hundred times. And I—”
She stopped, frowning. Then she groaned and looked around. “Why is he…”
The wards on the door sparked, hard and bright green.
“Hell.”
I scowled and looked up just in time to see a familiar man saunter through the door. He passed through the wards like they were made of gossamer and fluff. That meant only one thing—he was either stronger than the wards, or he’d helped craft them.
Considering how strong he’d felt, I figure I knew which it was.
That odd, itching sensation I’d felt all day started to get stronger as he shifted his gaze to me. Those startling green eyes focused on mine and he grinned.
“Well, well, well. Just who I was looking for. Got a minute, Kitty-kitty?” Justin asked.
I almost fell off my stool. “Kitty-kitty?”
He smiled, but it was a cold smile, sharp enough to cut. He came closer and as he did, the currents of air moved and I caught it, the scent of blood. “I need to talk to you.”
Behind me, I heard the door open, heard the familiar sound of TJ’s chair. “Back off, Justin. Last time you two talked, there was trouble.”
“There’s still trouble,” he said, not taking his eyes off me.
My heart had started to pump, slow and heavy against my ribs. And that weird sensing of waiting had sharpened down, clarified. This, a voice whispered in my ear. It’s this. It’s him.
Part of me wanted to scream what, what, what?
But I’d have that answer soon enough.
“Justin, if you don’t get out of my bar, I’ll have you dragged out by your—”
“TJ.” I didn’t look at her, didn’t take my eyes off Justin’s face. “I’ll talk to him.”
I don’t know who was more surprised. Her or me.
All I knew was that some knot inside me relaxed.
This…it’s this.
That sense of waiting shifted and transformed. Get ready. Get ready.
I’d felt it before. The day I went hunting…for a scared, foolish girl who’d almost gotten herself killed.
We ended up in TJ’s office. It was the only place we were guaranteed privacy, other than my bedroom upstairs and I was definitely not inviting him up there.
There was a condition, of course. There were always conditions. Especially with TJ. If we used her office, that meant she got to come along for the ride. She’d wheeled herself inside, along with Colleen. I didn’t bother arguing, although Justin l
ooked like he wanted to. There wasn’t much point. Unless he knew how to circumvent TJ’s security system, she’d have a birds-eye view of what was going on in here, anyway.
Once the door shut, I looked at him. “You smell like blood.”
“So do you.” He lifted a brow. “I wouldn’t have figured you for having that sensitive of a nose.”
“Why not? You do.”
“Hmmm. But I’m a witch. It comes in useful.”
Angling my head, I studied Colleen. “You smell it?”
“No. Thank God.” Then she shrugged. “But Justin is a different kind of witch.”
A different kind of witch. There were different kinds of witches? I hadn’t known that. Running my tongue across the inside of my lip, I pondered that. Through my lashes, I studied him, that pretty face, the dreads…and the weapons. Colleen wouldn’t touch a weapon if she had to. That sort of baffled me, but to each their own.
They felt different, but nobody felt the same. I’d learned that much in the past few years. The air around him snapped bright, hard, while the energy around Colleen was something gentle, soft. She felt like a spring rain against my senses, sweet and gentle and renewing.
He felt like a fighting fury, but a focused one.
“So what kind of witch are you, then?” I asked him.
“Does that matter?” He continued to watch me.
“It does to me.” I flashed him a sunny smile.
“Justin, stop playing games,” Colleen said tiredly as she moved over to an empty seat. “Justin’s freelance—he’s not affiliated with any of the Houses. I’ve explained about those. But he’s…well, he’s also a warrior. That makes him different, too.”
Warrior—
Useless. You shame us. A weakling among warriors…
I jerked my mind back from the traps of the past. “So you can fight.” Rolling my eyes, I leaned my hips against the surface of TJ’s desk and waited. There had to be more to it than that.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” TJ said, speaking for the first time since we’d come into the office. Her voice was gravelly, rough. “Witches, as a whole, are pacifists. Not by choice. It’s a racial thing, bred into them. They’d die before lifting a hand to defend themselves. They can’t. It’s not in them.”
Misery's Way: A Kit Colbana World Story Page 7
