His buddy gave out a long, hoarse sigh and shed his own skin suit. He was shaped like a human, with the appropriate set of limbs—thank God for small favors—but his skin was blood-red and layered with a pattern of tiny scales.
I had expected a welcoming committee, but nobody had mentioned a free striptease.
Jim snarled. The four-armed freak took a deep breath and leaned forward. A deafening roar washed over me, the deep, primeval sound of a huge predator hunting for its prey in darkness. It drowned Jim’s snarls and he took a small step back.
The creature roared louder, taking Jim’s retreat as his due and promising no mercy. He was larger than Jim and at least a hundred pounds heavier. Jim hissed. The four arms motioned to him: come.
Jim leapt onto the four-armed creature. The moment they clashed in a whirlwind of teeth and claws, I sank Slayer into the back of its red-scaled friend. The blade bit deep, severed the spinal column, and came out in a small spray of crimson. The Reaper whipped around, but his legs failed him. As he went down, I saw his face: human and impossibly beautiful.
Wood groaned. A lean shape sailed over me and landed in a crouch on the stones. A female creature. Her mint-green body was furry on the stomach and chest and studded with foot-long needles like a porcupine’s on her back. Black claws the length of my hand tipped her fingers. She glared at me with yellow eyes and charged.
Her clawed hand swiped at me, too fast. I dodged left, but she caught me. Pain sliced down my side. She dashed, trying to get behind me. I let her, reversed my blade, and stabbed backward into the soft green gut just under her rib cage. Slayer sliced into flesh, meeting elastic resistance, and I withdrew.
The creature raked at me with its left hand, oblivious to the blood gushing from its stomach. I spun and threw myself back, dancing away. Claws whistled past my face. I kept dodging. Strike, strike, strike. No finesse, no special training. Like a cat fighting: clawing straight ahead. Just like the fellow in the parking lot.
I dropped under the claws and sliced across her inner thigh. It cost me another singe of pain along my back, and I rolled clear.
Strike, strike, strike. Keep dancing with me, baby.
Red stained the creature’s fur with her every step. Her strikes lost their lethal speed. Her chest heaved. She stumbled, swayed forward, and I caught her and pulled her onto my sword. Slayer sliced into her chest and emerged from her back, bright with arterial blood.
Across the clearing, the four-armed freak tore away from Jim, sprinted to the trees, leaping to an inhuman height, and fled into the branches. With a snarl, Jim chased him and vanished into the jungle. Going after them would be a waste of time. I couldn’t match Jim’s speed, and a jaguar needed no help hunting through the trees.
I slid the inert body off my saber.
The red-scaled man lay prone on the ground, swallowing air in rapid, shallow gulps. Beyond him, the door to the building gaped, a rectangle of solid black. I flicked my blade, flinging the blood from it, and walked into the house.
It took me less than a minute to clear the three vast, gloomy rooms. Empty.
I went back outside and crouched by the scaled man. The wound in his back was deep. I had removed a section of his spine with my strike, and even with accelerated regeneration, he wouldn’t be walking anytime soon.
“A week ago a young werewolf tried to take a girl from you,” I said. “You beat him, tortured him, and dumped him by the shapeshifters’ house, but you let him live. Why?” Here’s hoping he understood English.
The scaled lips stretched in a grimace that could’ve been a smile, revealing snake fangs. “To send . . . a message.”
“What’s the message?”
“We are stronger. We shall triumph over half-breeds.”
Alrighty, then. “Who are the half-breeds? Are they shapeshifters?”
“Half-man, half-animal . . . Two base races become one. Scum of the world . . . We shall overtake. Overcome. We shall . . .” He coughed.
“Any hope for peace?”
The creature strained to raise its head off the ground. Diamond pupils gazed at me. “We . . . don’t do peace,” he said in a hoarse voice. “We don’t make . . . treaties. We kill. Kill and burn. Eat the meat. Celebrate. Rule in half-breeds’ stand . . .”
“So you want the Pack’s territory?”
He strained to say something else. I leaned toward him. He focused on me. “Rape,” he promised. “Many, many times. Until you bleed . . .”
“I’m so flattered.”
He raised his hand and traced a short line over my chest. “Carve out your heart . . . won’t cook it in the fire . . . eat it raw when all half-breeds are dead.”
We weren’t getting anywhere. “What are you?”
“Warriors . . . supreme.”
Hard to be supreme with your spine cut. “What are you called? Do you have a name?”
He rolled his eyes to the sky. “Glorious . . . army . . . blood like a red flower blooming . . . Soon. Very soon. We shall have the jewel. We shall honor the promise to the Sultan of Death and destroy the half-breeds . . . We shall take their place, grow stronger, and when our time comes . . . we shall . . . teach the Sultan of Death humility.”
“Who is the Sultan of Death?”
The Reaper’s eyes glinted with stubborn denial.
I reached into my belt and pulled out a canteen of lighter fluid and matches. “This liquid likes fire. It burns very hot for a long time. Tell me how to reverse the magic you put on the shapeshifter, and I won’t pour it on your chest and set you on fire.”
“Human . . . I’m beyond . . . you.”
“You’re not beyond pain.” I twisted the cap off the canteen.
He smiled at me and gulped. No words came out. His eyes rolled into his skull. Short, abrupt moans erupted from him as if he suddenly went dumb. He shuddered, clawed at his throat . . .
He was choking.
I thrust Slayer between his teeth.
CHAPTER 19
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, GUTTURAL COUGHS ANNOUNCED Jim’s return. I waited for him by the scaled man’s corpse. He leapt off the tree and dropped a limp body onto the grass. Bulging dead eyes glared at me from a face that wasn’t even remotely human. A cross between a tiger and a Chinese temple dog might have looked like that.
“Shapeshifter?” I asked.
“No. Doesn’t smell right.”
The werejaguar glanced at the two prone forms and prodded the red-skinned creature. He didn’t respond and Jim gave a small snort.
“Swallowed his own tongue,” I explained.
Jim sighed, a purely feline fatalism twisting his monstrous face. “You get anything before he croaked?”
“They dumped Derek as a declaration of war. According to the recently departed, you are scum, a mix of base races of human and animal, and no peace is possible. They hate the Pack and plan on killing you all in a glorious slaughter with much bloodshed and much feasting on your flesh, as soon as they get the jewel. They’ve allied themselves with the Sultan of Death, who will help them nuke you, after which they’re hoping to double-cross him. Oh, and I’m to be raped many, many times.”
It was hard to roll your eyes in a half-shape. Jim gave it a good college try. “Who is the Sultan of Death?”
“Beats me.”
Roland would certainly fit the bill. I didn’t say it out loud. Roland was the center of my existence. As long as I’d been aware of myself, I knew that I had to kill him and that if he ever found out about me, he would sacrifice every resource at his disposal to kill me. His power was incredible. Legends of him floated through the ages, and almost every ancient civilization had a record of his reign. Hunting him would be akin to assassinating a god. I needed more experience and more power, before I could even contemplate that confrontation. Until my abilities grew, I had to hide, living every moment with the awareness of being discovered. My paranoia ran so deep it was a wonder I didn’t check for Roland’s agents under my bed.
Any mysterious threat
, any unknown danger, any mention of a magically powerful being automatically brought Roland to the front of my mind. Yes, the Sultan of Death fit him perfectly—he had brought undeath into the world. But the title could refer to someone completely different. Just because I had fixated on him didn’t mean the rest of the world had.
“This keeps coming back to the Wolf Diamond. I have a feeling they plan to use it as a weapon. It was how he said it, Jim. He said, ‘We shall have the jewel’ the way MSDU might say, ‘We shall have air support.’ ”
Jim swore.
I led him inside, into the first room. A long stone table ran the length of the room. On the table Saiman’s victim, still in his human body, lay spread-eagled on his stomach. Strips of flesh had been carved from his back and buttocks down to the bone and stacked aside like meat cuts in a butchery shop. I walked over to a huge stainless steel chest freezer sitting by the table. It was unplugged—there wasn’t a single outlet in the ruins—and filled with ice and raw meat. Steaks, ground patties, slabs of ribs, pork chops, venison roasts layered atop one another, some in plastic, some in paper, some simply sitting, wedged, dripping frozen blood. I pointed to the left, where several long hunks of meat sat crammed into a corner. The skin on the meat was the color of coffee with cream.
Jim sniffed and recoiled.
“Human?”
“Yes.” He snarled and spat to the side. I’d had much the same reaction when I first realized what it was. These bastards caught some person, chopped him up, and stuffed him into a freezer to be eaten. We’d never know his name. Or his sex for that matter. Somewhere a person simply didn’t come home and nobody would ever find out why. It made me sick.
Jim glanced at the table, where slabs of flesh, carved from the body of Saiman’s victim, lay in a stack. “Cannibals .”
“Equal opportunity carnivores: any flesh is meat. They don’t discriminate. There is more.”
He followed me into the second room. Empty and dusty, it offered several straw sleeping mats tossed haphazardly into a corner. A mural stretched on the wall, painted on a long sheet of plain brown paper, pinned to the stones with tape. Bright with garish red and green and gold, the mural began with a hellish forge. A waterfall of molten metal fell into a wide basin in its center. Anvils stood by the walls, lightning bolts and twisted metal tools hung from the hooks in the ceiling, and dark smoke billowed, obscuring the edges of the picture and twisting to form a frame around the forge. A demonic man hefted a huge hammer, critically surveying a half-forged sword in his hand. Monstrously muscled, he wore a leather apron and nothing else. A dark beard protruded from his face, and his eyes glowed red.
The next panel of the mural showed a room strewn with pillows. A beautiful man reclined in the center, clad in gauzy robes and surrounded by nude women bearing fruit and garlands of flowers. The man’s delicate face bore little resemblance to the dark inhabitant of the forge, but the dark beard gave him away. The metalsmith cleaned up rather nice.
The third part of the mural was unfinished. A pale gold wash had been applied through the faint pencil outline. The graceful man from the center of the mural had become a god: he had grown three additional heads and six arms. One face looked straight at me, two faces showed in profile, and an outline of the back of his head pointed to a fourth face turned away from me. North, east, south, and west.
Two enormous wings protruded from his shoulders, and between the wings shimmered a mirage of a city: a sea of elegant towers and domes guarded by a wall. The style of the mural didn’t point to any mythology in particular; it reminded me more of a comic book than anything else. The poses were stylized, the man’s musculature seemed greatly exaggerated, and all women came equipped with tiny asses, disproportionately long legs, and perfectly round, udder-sized breasts.
“Ring any bells?” I looked at Jim.
Jim shook his head.
“Yeah, me neither.”
I pulled the mural off the wall and rolled it into a tube.
Jim took the corpse from the table, slung it over his shoulder, and took it outside.
I went back to the freezer. I would’ve liked to bury the human remains, but we had neither the time nor the means to do it. I pulled a leather pouch from my belt, untied the cord securing it, and sprinkled dark green dust over the meat, careful not to inhale or touch the powder.
“Spicing it up?” Jim asked from the doorway.
“Water hemlock. Also called cowbane.” I put the pouch away. “Thirty minutes and then projectile vomiting, violent convulsions, and death or permanent nervous system damage. A little present from me for their table.”
Jim stepped outside, grasped the four-armed freak, swung it onto his shoulders, and stared pointedly at the other three bodies sprawled on the grass. They were our evidence. I would have to carry one. A seven-foot-tall scaled monstrosity, a green creature covered in foot-long needles, or the guy missing most of his flesh from his ass and legs. Hmmm, let me think . . .
CHAPTER 20
CARRYING CORPSES IN PLAIN DAYLIGHT, ESPECIALLY corpses with four arms, pretty much takes the whole notion of “not drawing attention” out back and explodes it with fireworks. Especially since the people doing the carrying are covered in blood and look like they’ve been dragged through a hedge backward. Not to mention that one of them is a werejaguar in a warrior form and the other a woman hauling a human corpse with his ass cut off.
Fortunately, the outskirts of Unicorn were deserted. One would have to be some sort of special breed of idiot to approach that street in the first place. Apparently, Atlanta was experiencing a moron shortage, and today Jim and I were the only idiots of this caliber.
Even without his butt and thighs, Saiman’s unfortunate victim weighed a ton. We passed out of the jungle into the city with no problems, but carrying him through Unicorn Lane and out to the vehicle proved to be near my limits. I had slid into a kind of fog where taking the next step was all that mattered. I dimly recalled reaching the spot where we had left the vehicle and finding a cart hitched to a pair of horses instead. The dingo must’ve come back with the horses once the magic wave had hit the city. Unfortunately, he didn’t stick around.
I also remembered packing the corpses into the cart under some canvas and sliding into the seat to steer, because Jim, being the top man on Curran’s Most-Wanted List, had to stay out of sight. Then there was the trek across the city, through the morning traffic. The glow of pain along my side and back nicely kept me awake. A layer of jungle dirt had mixed with Reaper blood on my skin, and the fall sun baked it into a crust over my face and hair. At least I had no trouble with traffic jams. The rival drivers took one look at my blood-encrusted persona and scrambled to get out of the way.
I drove and thought of Roland.
I had no mother. Instead I had Voron, whom I called my father. Tall, his dark blond hair cropped short, Voron had led me through my childhood with his quiet strength. Voron could kill anything. He could solve anything. He could fix anything. I would do anything for one of his rare smiles. He was my father, one of the two constants in my life.
Roland had been the other.
He entered my life as a fairy tale that Voron would tell me before bed. There once was a man who had lived through the ages. He had been a builder, an artisan, a healer, a priest, a prophet, a warrior, and a sorcerer. At times he had been a slave. At others he was a tyrant. Magic fell and technology reigned, and then magic rose again, and still he persevered, ancient like the sand itself, driven through the years by his obsession for a perfect world.
He had many names, although he called himself Roland now. He had been master to many men and lover to many women, but he had not loved anyone as much as he loved my mother. She was kind and smart and generous and she filled Roland with life. My mother wanted a baby. It had been millennia since Roland had sired a child, because his child would inherit all the power of Roland’s ancient blood and all of his ambition, and Roland had fought too many wars to kill children who had risen against him.
But he loved my mother too much and he decided to give her a child because it would make her happy. She was only two months along when he started to have second thoughts. He became obsessed that the child would oppose him, and he decided to kill the child in the womb.
But my mother loved the baby. The more obsessed Roland became, the farther she pulled away from him.
Roland had a Warlord. His name was Voron, which meant raven in Russian. They called him that because death followed him. And Voron loved my mother as well.
When Roland was away, my mother ran and Voron ran with her. He was there when she gave birth to me. For a few blissful months on the run they were happy. But Roland chased them, and my mother, knowing that Voron was the stronger of the two, stayed behind to delay Roland so he and I could escape. She sank her dagger into Roland’s eye and then he killed her.
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