“Bill me. You know I’m good for it.” He turned and trudged past the taciturn dryad and a handful of other customers toward the door.
Outside, the air had grown even colder in the brief period he’d spent having his nightcap. Winter had arrived late, but he wouldn’t particularly complain when it packed up and left for the year.
He knew he’d made the right decision. Taylor would walk all over him if he didn’t stand up for himself, even if she did try to make it a question of his safety. As though he hadn’t already thought of that.
Besides, based on what he’d seen so far, Moswen Neith was the type whose battle strategy consisted of trying something, waiting, re-planning, and then trying something else a while later. It was what she’d done by sending Alex to kill or capture him and going dormant after that.
Then, she’d sent a few minions against both himself and Taylor recently, which meant that they were—probably—now at the end of her next feint.
There was no way she’d try something again so soon.
“None whatsoever,” he drawled aloud, mostly to himself, as he stumbled to where he’d parked. A couple of Elven women glanced curiously at him as he passed before they descended the stairs to the pub.
For a moment, while he fumbled for his keys in his pocket, he had the vague but powerful sensation that someone was watching him.
That car across the street, the dark one? No. There isn’t even anyone in it. Ugh, this whole business has my nerves about as frayed as a natural brunette after too many excursions into blondeness in too short a time. No wonder I’m drinking again lately.
David Remington’s Penthouse, Midtown Manhattan, New York
Having lied to Taylor about wanting to go straight home, Remington had also lied to Por about taking an Uber home.
He’d made it in one piece. While he knew his capabilities well enough to judge that he’d probably be okay to drive himself, it still came as a relief to pull in at his building with neither body damage nor a DUI. Either would have been even more inconvenient and embarrassing than having to pick his car up from Por’s Bar in the morning.
Therefore, he told himself, let’s never do that again. It’s not worth it.
Dawn wasn’t too far off. Enrique, the usual third-shift concierge, didn’t seem to be on duty when he approached. Usually, the man would see his car on the camera and come out to welcome him home.
“Whatever,” he mumbled as he trudged through the residual crust of snow. “It’s not like I’m incapable of opening a door by myself. I’m not that drunk. Not by a long shot.”
He stepped over the threshold and into the lobby. Enrique wasn’t there and neither was anyone else. The concierge must have been taking a crap or something. And at this hour, it wasn’t very likely that anyone else would be around, anyway.
Behind him, a car pulled into the adjacent lot—probably someone turning around. The one-way streets in this part of town seemed to have that effect on motorists of below-average skill.
Once inside the elevator, his thoughts turned once more to how he would handle the Taylor situation. First of all, the simple fact that he’d made it safely home proved that he was right—obviously. He allowed himself a smirk.
Of course, he did have to follow-up on his promise to fortify his apartment. At the first convenient opportunity, he’d need to draw up a detailed plan of how he’d add security systems, what his own emergency procedure would be for getting out or calling for help, and maybe design a couple of really cool booby-traps or something.
“That’ll teach her.” He chuckled as the elevator pinged and opened for him at the penthouse.
Remy stepped out into the hall and walked to his door, placed his hand on it, and frowned when it swung open immediately. He must have forgotten to lock up before he’d left in the morning. Hangovers did that to a man.
With a shrug, he stepped into the place he called home.
The lights were still on, too. He’d tried to save a little money by turning everything off when he wasn’t using it, but a single day’s worth of wasted power wasn’t likely to run his bills up terribly much.
He took his coat off, already almost fantasizing about his nice warm bed while keeping his tired gaze on the floor. Without looking, he hung his coat and began to kick his shoes off.
A muddy boot print leading toward the kitchen drew his focus and he looked up.
His gaze settled on the unmistakable face of a dwarf—a short one even by dwarven standards, with wild blond eyebrows and hair and beard and a mustache of the same color. He wore bulky clothes with enough angles under them to suggest a hidden suit of armor and a double-bladed ax rested against his back.
Incongruously, a sandwich hung out of his mouth, made of bread, meat, and cheese he’d taken from Remington’s fridge.
The investigator sputtered and his hands clenched involuntarily. “Who the hell gave your ass permission to come in here and eat my food?” he demanded.
The intruder spat the sandwich out and reached for his weapon.
Heavy footsteps sounded from the living area and another short, dark, thick form strode in, holding one of the bottles of Swedish vodka Remy had been saving for emergencies. It was two-thirds empty.
“Is it him? He’s here!” the second dwarf burst out, asking and answering his own question at once. He tossed the liquor onto a sofa and suddenly produced a heavy wooden crossbow laden with wooden studs and loaded with a nasty barbed bolt.
In an instant, pandemonium erupted. Remy’s brain took a second to catch up with what was going on, since—as he was now forced to admit—he was too drunk for this shit.
The blond dwarf swung his ax. The investigator threw himself to the side but the room spun faster and more wildly than he would have liked. It seemed the whole planet had been knocked off its axis to tumble into the depths of space.
“Shit!” he exclaimed when one of his legs tumbled a potted fern. A loud snapping sound heralded the second dwarf’s crossbow bolt that rocketed over his head to embed in the wall.
He continued his roll, already almost as afraid of throwing up when he came to a stop as he was of being axed or skewered.
His attackers’ pounding feet moved closer, and as he came to rest against a loveseat with his hips and legs somehow twisted over his chest, his face was pointed toward the still-open doorway.
Something else—fast, dark, and hairy—careened into the apartment.
“What?” The crossbowman’s voice growled with fury. “Kill it!”
Judging by the dwarf’s slurred cadence, Remy had the awful suspicion that he’d already drained another entire bottle before he’d drunk the first two-thirds of the second.
“Conrad!” Remy shouted and rolled to his side so he could boost himself to his feet. Nausea threatened to overwhelm him. “That’s you, right? The other guy has a crossbow.”
The werewolf and the blond assassin tangled within the kitchen. The dwarf must have been unusually strong since he’d forced Conrad back into one of the shelves to upend the new spice rack and cover the counter with spilled cumin and rosemary.
The second dwarf had finished reloading his bow. He seemed to hesitate for an instant, unsure who to shoot first.
Remy scooped up the fallen fern pot and heaved it at the assassin. He staggered forward himself with the momentum and decided he was barely sober enough to pull off some kind of airborne dropkick. His martial arts instructors recommended against flashy, overcommitted shit like that, but it could catch the dwarf off-guard, not to mention that regular takedowns might not work against such a heavy, stolid creature.
The projectile shattered in his adversary’s face and he stumbled back a step with a grunt so the crossbow’s business end wavered toward the ceiling. By then, the investigator had already leapt into the air.
“Haaaaa!” he cried as he launched himself and tried to bring his legs up in time to drive them into the dwarf’s face or chest.
Instead, one of his feet snagged on the edge of a
sofa and he again somersaulted helplessly, this time toward its cushions. It would have been a soft impact if his stomach hadn’t landed directly on the discarded vodka bottle.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed in pain, twirled off the couch to the floor, and landed on his knees before he finally vomited.
Behind him, Conrad seemed to have incapacitated the blond dwarf and had pounced over the half-wall to engage the crossbowman. Snarls, pounding, and curses filled the air.
“Okay,” Remy gasped and crawled madly away from the brawl, “I’m not in peak condition here. It’s time to let Wonder Boy handle it.” It took him a second to realize he’d brushed a knee through his own puke, which almost made him gag again.
He honestly paid very little attention to where he was going. His only goal was to escape being trampled by the struggle between dwarf and lycanthrope.
In the midst of his mad scamper, his eyes focused on what was directly ahead of him. His landline phone rested on an end table. When he’d first acquired this penthouse, his parents had prevailed upon him to install a landline as a backup measure, even if the damn things were obsolete.
“Uh, yes!” he snapped and hurried toward it. Then it occurred to him that he wasn’t sure who to call. The mortal police? That, of course, was a bad idea—they’d ask way too many questions.
Taylor? She could handle these dwarves, but even she couldn’t get there fast enough. And she’d have words to say about the whole situation that Remington did not want to hear.
He looked over his shoulder. Conrad had clawed the face and chest of the crossbowman, but the dwarf had pinned him against the sofa and now punched him repeatedly in the head. His heavy fist had begun to take a toll.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the other attacker drag himself gradually toward the door out of the apartment. Conrad’s jaws had savaged his leg and it was bleeding badly, even with a crude tourniquet tied around it.
Remy thought he could hear someone shouting and cursing elsewhere in the building. Then, he almost jumped in place. His phone rang.
“Goddammit,” he muttered, finished his crawl toward it, and grabbed the receiver off the hook. “Hi, how are ya?”
“David,” a man’s voice said. “Could you please keep the noise down? Here we were these last few months, thinking the dark age of all your stupid loud parties was over, and now this. We’re trying to get some sleep here and we don’t want to have to call the cops.”
He sighed. It was Mr. Blankfein, his neighbor on the floor below.
“Oh…uh…ha ha, yes,” he stammered as wolf-snorts and inhumanly low grunts sounded behind him and furniture scraped the floor. “Sorry about that, Murray. Don’t you worry, though. I’ll have these cockamamie party animals under control in no time.”
A chair spun, dangerously airborne. He ducked and it passed over his head to crash into the wall, shatter to splinters, and leave a hideous gouge in the plaster.
“Uh,” he resumed into the phone and cut off the nascent tirade of profanity that Blankfein was about to launch into, “like I said, in no time. We’re having some technical difficulties—you know, chair problems. Let me take care of that.”
He hung up.
Remy spun toward the action as Conrad lurched at the dwarf again and finally yanked the crossbow away from him, ripped it to pieces with his foreclaws and fangs, and kicked the dwarf in the stomach with one of his hind paws at the same time.
The assailant toppled back and landed next to his partner, both of them mere feet from the open door leading to both the hallway and the elevator.
The investigator remained where he was, frozen while he waited to see what they did. So did Conrad, who hunched and growled at them with bloody drool dripping from one of his curling wolfen lips.
The crossbowman muttered a curse in his own language and seized his partner under the arms, dragged the man out into the hall, and slammed the door behind them. The sounds of their shuffling progress dwindled and finally faded altogether.
After a short moment of silence, Remy blew out his breath and allowed himself to fall limply against the wall. He drew his hand across his brow to disperse the worst of the sweat.
“Well, that was fun,” he drawled. He turned toward the werewolf. “Conrad…uh, thanks again. I could have handled them if I was sober, though. You know how it is.”
His rescuer was already half-transformed into his human shape. The dark hair receded and revealed him to be naked as he hurried toward the kitchen. He must have stripped again before he changed so as to not have to buy another outfit in one night.
“Sir,” the lycanthrope said, “please excuse me for a moment while I get dressed.”
“Sure,” he flung in response. “I can’t say I’m overly interested in seeing your bare ass cheeks, no offense.” He looked in the opposite direction. “Why did you let them live, though? You probably could have killed the bastards. Then, we wouldn’t have to worry about them showing up again later.”
From behind the kitchen’s half-wall where the other man now crouched, Conrad’s voice wafted up. “I didn’t think it would be a good idea to kill anyone in your home, sir. That presents certain problems.”
Remy sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Couldn’t you have maybe, like, eaten them, though?”
“The size of a lycanthrope’s stomach,” his bodyguard explained by way of reply, “is still limited by the same laws of nature that govern a human’s. Also, dwarf bones are extremely thick, which makes them difficult to crunch through and digest.”
“Fair enough.” He put a hand on the wall and returned to a full standing position. Having thrown up a minute or two before, he felt marginally better. “Ugh, couldn’t we have gone to war with a cartel made up of…I don’t know, leprechauns or something? Dwarves are proving to be a pain in the ass.”
He scanned the wreck of his apartment and shook his head slowly. Inebriation cocooned him against being too upset about it—yet—but it still sucked. His home hadn’t been this badly trashed since his final party before he’d started working with Taylor.
“So, then,” he announced as Conrad finished re-clothing himself, “obviously, my apartment is compromised. I don’t know how the sons of bitches found out where I live, but they did. I’m not in any condition to go someplace else tonight, though, so I think I’ll have to simply crash here.”
The werewolf walked toward him and stepped carefully over the various blood patches and pieces of debris. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea—”
Remy flapped a hand dismissively. “It’ll take them a while to come back with heavier artillery. Plus, they’ll probably assume we’re tattling to Taylor already, which ought to give them pause. I’ll decide what to do in the morning.”
Conrad grimaced uncomfortably and adjusted his shirt at the neck.
As he turned and headed toward his bed, the investigator said over his shoulder, “Please keep an eye on things, if you could. I trust your ‘werewolf-sense’ to alert me to further danger. You do have something like that, right?”
For once, the other man did not respond right away.
“Oh,” he added, before he stumbled into his bedroom, “feel free to help yourself to that sandwich the first dwarf spat out. It should still be on the kitchen floor somewhere. The ingredients were all still good as of a couple of days ago.”
His bodyguard coughed. “Ah, thank you, sir.”
“No problem.” He closed the door with his foot and allowed himself to plummet forward, face first, into his covers. It took him all of about fifteen seconds to fall asleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Moonlight Detective Agency Offices, Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York
As a way to thank Conrad for providing rescue services, Remy had bought him a cup of coffee and decided to let him do all the driving. It was the least he could do.
“Your doorman,” the lycanthrope explained as they made their way toward Bushwick, “had been incapacitated with a sleep spell combined with a low-level me
mory wipe. Normally, dwarves can’t cast enchantments of that kind themselves, but they have enough connection to the preternatural that they can still manage to make a magic scroll work if someone else imbues it with power.”
He was too groggy to exactly be aghast but he was still a little shocked that someone with Conrad’s education would disrespect Enrique in this fashion.
“How dare you call him a doorman,” he said. “The preferred term is concierge.”
“Oh.” The man gasped and instantly blushed. “I’m terribly sorry, sir. I didn’t take the time to look into how your residence handled—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted him and waved a hand lazily. “But don’t let it happen again. In any event, at least he’s okay, right?”
The werewolf nodded. “He should be. The whole idea of using spells like that is to leave uninitiated humans none the wiser when there’s preternatural activity going on.”
“Right.” He rubbed his eyes. Unfortunately, he’d only had a single cup of average-strength coffee after getting up. More and stronger would have been better, but he didn’t want to have to pee every twenty minutes for the first three hours of work.
They were now only a mile or so from the office. Conrad seemed content to drive in silence. He probably regarded it as more professional that way.
Remy spoke up again soon, though. “So…” He sighed. “I appreciate you saving my life and all, but what I could really use right now is your…uh, confidence. Let’s keep what happened at my condo between you and me, right? There’s no need for Taylor to know that I’ve already been ambushed by homicidal dwarves.”
His companion frowned. “Well, sir, if we look at the big picture, she did hire me to look after your safety, and you see—”
“I know that,” he protested, “but we also agreed on some rules, most of which boil down to ‘I’m in charge and you have to do whatever I say.’ So, right now, I’m saying don’t tell her.”
Conrad swallowed whatever further commentary he might have had. Still, the vibes he gave off told the whole story. He disapproved, probably out of legitimate concern for his charge’s well-being.
A Girl’s Best Friend (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 3) Page 14