by Tricia Owens
It took only seconds for his entire body to turn completely black.
"Raker?" I was afraid to touch him with my bare hands, but I couldn't just leave him like this. "Raker, can you hear me?"
His chest didn't rise and fall, which worried me.
The front door of the shop banged open as Lev rushed in.
"Be careful!" I cried, but it was too late.
The simple blast of wind created by Lev's entrance was too much for Raker's form to take. It crumbled at the hips and then the whole thing collapsed like a Pompeii victim. I leaped back, horrified.
"Was that my alpha?" Lev choked out, staring uncomprehendingly at the black pile on the carpet.
I pointed at the first wolf shifter's body accusingly, but it had completed its degeneration—or mission?—and had melted into an unrecognizable puddle of goo. I wasn't sure a steam cleaner was going to make much of a dent on that.
"That wolf shifter," I said, struggling to understand what I'd just witnessed. "It shot something at Raker that turned him to ash. It killed him, Lev. How could a dead body do that? Is that normal for wolf shifters?"
"No! No, not normal!" Lev was beginning to freak out and I didn't blame him. Besides the fact that his leader had just been killed, there might be those in the pack who would think Lev had deliberately led him to his end.
The door banged open again and I spun to face the stocky shifter with the wild mustache and goatee. He looked at the scene in shock, but only for a moment.
"I claim alpha!"
"Dude, the body's still warm," I shot at him, disgusted.
He bared his teeth at me, all bristle and attitude. "I claim alpha." He glared at Lev. "Do you challenge me?"
Muscles rippled across Lev's body, but then gradually he calmed down. "No. I do not challenge."
I was relieved to hear it. After seeing all the scars on Raker, being alpha seemed like a hell of a dangerous job. Celestina would see her boyfriend even less frequently than she already did.
With a wolfish grin of triumph, the shifter rushed back outside to challenge the rest of the pack. I wouldn't put it past the guy to fight them while they were blinded.
"I'm so sorry, Lev," I told him as we turned our attention back to the two messes on the floor. "Do you have any idea what happened?"
Rage had tightened his features. I'd never seen him anything less than happy-go-lucky. I felt terrible for it now as I watched his eyes fill with anger and suspicion.
"This is big trick," he growled out. "His smell not right and now we see why. Someone want to attack my alpha and they succeeded." Grief loosened the skin around his mouth. "He was good alpha. Good man. I am sorry this is how he go. He should have died in battle."
"The body turned into something strange, sort of like a mushroom." I motioned at the goopy puddle. "Now it's all melted. Have you ever seen this before?"
"No. Never."
My gut told me it wasn't an accident that my friends and I had stumbled across the shifter body and brought it back here for it to kill Raker. That was what the note was for, right? To stir my curiosity and hook me. And then someone had called Raker here. I was being set up, or at the least I was being used, and I wasn't happy about it. Was that stocky shifter involved? All of this had benefited him without any of the suspicion landing on his doorstep. It had landed on mine. If he truly believed I had killed Raker, he would have gone after me. But he hadn't. He'd run off to claim his place. No doubt later, once the pack had regained their senses, he'd blame everything on me.
"Hey, guys," I called to my friends in the kitchen. Celestina, Christian, and Melanie tentatively came out only to jerk back with alarm at the mess on the floor.
"What is that?" Celestina screeched, horrified. "It's leaking into the padding!"
"That is what remains of our dead shifter." I pointed at the black charcoal. "And that's what remains of Raker after the dead shifter spit something at him."
"But I thought it was dead!" Melanie cried. "How did it spit anything?"
"That's the mystery, isn't it?"
Police sirens whined in the distance.
"Just perfect." I turned to Lev. "Better get your pack out of here."
He nodded, though he obviously didn't want to leave what remained of Raker behind. Still, what could he do? Raker was a bit beyond CPR at this point.
With a last, sad look at the blackness, Lev trotted outside.
"Now does everyone believe me that magick is involved?" I asked my friends.
"Black magick, definitely," Christian agreed. He skirted the edges of the room and peered out the front door. "The pack is leaving."
He opened the door for Vale, who was naked and pissed. "I felt it. What happ—"
He fell silent when he spied the remains of Raker and the dead shifter. With a shake of the head, he looked to me. "I suppose you want to go to Orlaton's now."
"Actually, I had another thought. One I should have had the moment we brought that shifter back here." I mentally kicked myself. "We need to talk to a specialist."
Chapter 3
There were several magickally-inclined businesses within my neighborhood besides Celestina's fortune telling shop and my pawnshop. There was Tomes, the occult bookstore and rites venue that Orlaton ran, as well as the Gallery of Veritatis, run by a goblin. It featured cursed artwork and shapeshifter portraits, among other services it provided.
In the nearby vicinity there was yet another business: the exotic animals breeder.
For obvious reasons I'd steered clear of the place. We're talking magickal beings here. Breeding all sorts of monstrosities. I could easily picture the sorts of creatures that came out of that place and they'd fill the cast of the world's scariest horror movie.
Admittedly, I'd never seen any weird creepy crawly leave the place. Come to think of it, I'd never seen an ordinary-looking person enter or leave it either. Did it have a secret passageway? Was entrance through a portal in time? It may have sounded ridiculous, but I was willing to entertain any option when it came to magick. Anything you could imagine—or wouldn't dare—had probably already come true.
Though it grossed me out, I scooped up some of the puddle of shifter using a spatula and one of Celestina's Tupperware containers.
"I will never, ever want those things back," she assured me with a shudder.
I also scraped a few chunks of Raker into a sandwich bag. With one container in each hand, held as far from my body as possible, I led the way to the animal breeder's shop down the street.
"I don't know anything about this place," Vale warned me quietly as we walked.
Earlier, a single police cruiser had driven slowly down the street, its passenger aiming the spotlight this way and that, and seen nothing. The Black Die Pack had skedaddled, and my friends and I had hidden inside Celestina's shop with the curtains down.
But I was conscious of someone in the houses we now passed having called the cops. That meant they'd been concerned either about the wolf howls or the wolves fighting a glowing golden dragon in the middle of the street. Or maybe they'd had a problem with my dragon flashbang. Lots to choose from, come to think of it. It was amazing a SWAT team hadn't shown up and kicked the door in.
Nor had the Oddsmakers made their presence known. Were they aware that I was involved in these shenanigans and giving me leeway to clean it up? Or were they monitoring me even now, building up evidence for a case against me?
Ha ha. Evidence. A case. Yeah, right. The day the Oddsmakers held a trial for anyone was the day I decided to stop eating doughnuts.
"I know zilch about this place, too," I told Vale, referring to the animal breeder. "And this place has been here for as long as Uncle James has run Moonlight. What bugs me is that I've never seen anyone or anything go in or come out. Do you think it's out of business?"
But the moment I asked that I realized it was a dumb question. I'd seen lights in the windows a couple of times. Someone was inside. Someone collected the mail. Someone was probably peering out at us a
s we approached the front lawn.
Like the majority of houses on the street, it was a conversion. Business in the front, party in the back, as I liked to put it. So the front wasn't all that interesting. A typical, sagging, battered one-story house that you'd expect a retiree to be living in. The yard was mostly dirt and bits of concrete, with a few cheery weeds sprouting here and there. A walkway that was cracked from age and heat led to the front door. The driveway was empty and cobwebs clogged the edges of the garage door.
A wooden sign that reminded me of a piece of driftwood or maybe a chunk of a pirate ship had been hammered into the wall beside the front door. Burned into the wood was the name of the place: Darwin's Exotics.
"It's like they're playing with us," I muttered.
Melanie, who'd chosen to come along with us while Christian stayed behind to help defend Celestina against any random, angry wolf shifters, let out a squeak. "Is that supposed to mean that only the strongest and scariest breeds survive?"
"I have a hunch we're going to find out," I told her while the first ember of dread began to glow in my belly.
Vale pushed the doorbell since my hands were full of dead guys, and we waited.
And waited. After about two minutes I leaned closer to the door and studied the doorknob. Spider webs were wrapped around it and filled with dozens of tiny flies. I found a few more webs in the top and bottom corners of the door frame.
"I'm guessing this isn't the entrance," I said with a sigh. "If we're going to have to climb down a chimney, Santa-style, I may have to camp out front here and wait for one of you to come get me."
"Let's try the backyard," Vale suggested. He slid a hand onto my shoulder and squeezed. "I promise I won't make you crawl down a chimney."
"When you make promises like that, you're not supposed to have a smirk on your face."
The backyard was protected by an old wooden fence which Vale easily unlatched. The yard hadn't seen a lawnmower since 1968 or thereabouts. A machete would have been useful in hacking away the tall weeds that had managed to grow in the hard ground, but Vale courageously forged us a path without one.
By far the strangest part of the yard wasn't the lack of landscaping, but the concrete fountain that sat incongruously in the middle of it. Fountains in Vegas were a waste of time. Drought restrictions meant you weren't supposed to keep water running for any reason and the air temperatures and lack of humidity meant everything evaporated anyway. As expected, this thing was as dry as my wit and filled with bits of dried weeds, a few leaves, and a whole lot of dust.
The design was strange, big surprise. The base where the water was supposed to be held was circular with a curved lip. Normal enough. But then you got a good look at the centerpiece of the thing and wondered whether its designer had been a cultist of Cthulhu. I think it was supposed to be a sort of cherub with its arms raised to the sky and its curly-haired head tipped back as if in supplication to the stars or some otherworldly deity, but somewhere along the production things had gone off the rails in a big way.
"That thing scares me," I stated as I peered up at it.
"Why are there so many tentacles?" Melanie asked.
"Why are there tentacles at all?" I countered.
Vale ran a finger along one curling tendril. "I think it's supposed to represent transformation."
I held up the bag and box in my hands. "I think I've had just about enough of transformation, thank you very much. A cute, fat cherub would have gone a long way toward restoring my equilibrium."
He chuckled and then jumped up onto the ledge of the fountain.
"You don't seriously want a closer look at that thing?" I asked, cringing. I turned my head and noticed that the shadows cast by the fountain looked like the Kraken bursting out of the skull of an upright baby hippo. "This is the sort of thing Liberace's demonic twin would commission."
"This isn't simply a statue from your wildest nightmares," Vale murmured as he turned his head this way and that, studying the thing. "There isn't any dirt on it up here. Around the head it's clean."
"It's a secret entrance," I guessed. "Just like the Keyhole. We need to push a button or perform a sequence of steps to make it open for us."
"Ooh, this might be fun! I was so jealous when you opened the secret door at the Keyhole!" Melanie immediately leaned over the edge of the fountain and began molesting the Hydra-cherub.
I grinned as I watched my boyfriend and best friend rub all over the fountain, digging their fingers into nooks and crannies, rubbing it here and there in ways that would have gotten them thrown out of a legitimate art gallery and possibly arrested for public indecency. Actually, they were doing a pretty good job of cleaning it.
The longer I watched them crawling over the creepy fountain, the more I began to suspect that tugging on an earlobe or pressing down on the thirty-eighth tentacle sucker wasn't the key to opening or activating this fountain. In fact, I had the growing suspicion that "activating" was the key word here.
I carefully set down my precious, if gross, cargo and walked a slow circle around the fountain. On the backside, the side farthest from the house, I discovered the metal tracks in the ground. Brushing aside the dirt covering them revealed them to be two rails embedded in concrete which had been texturized with dirt and rocks to look like natural dirt. The two rails ran perpendicular to the fountain's base, leading me to believe the whole thing slid away from the house, revealing an opening beneath.
But how to get it to open? And why the hell was it so difficult to get into this place? A secret handshake was one thing but this extreme secrecy suggested that some majorly illegal things were happening inside.
Regardless, whoever ran this place would know the most about shifter biology and what dead bodies were and weren't supposed to do, so I needed to talk to them. Now that I knew which way the fountain moved, I assumed that activating it wouldn't happen from this side otherwise you'd get your toes crushed. I circled around to the opposite side, scanning the statue and the ground beneath.
When I saw the droplets, I hissed between my teeth, hoping I was wrong.
They were dark but not completely black and I would have bet money that in the sunlight they would be faintly crimson. Three drops had slid down the side of a tall weed and dried there, which I might have missed had I not seen the fourth dried droplet on the ledge of the fountain, right where the flat pieces joined together.
I dragged my eyes up the cherub's chubby feet and up the plump leg nearest to me, searching for a trail. Nothing, nothing—
"Bingo."
A tentacle that was smaller than the rest, about the length and thickness of my middle finger, reached out from within the indentation of the cherub's belly button. I'd seen Melanie tug and push on it in case it was a lever, but I knew now that it wasn't. I peered closer and sure enough, there was a narrow channel carved within the tentacle, visible only if you came at it from above and were looking for it. With a grimace, I stuck the tip of my pinky finger inside and rubbed it along the channel.
"Hey, guys, I found the 'Open Sesame'." I held up my red-stained pinky finger. "Looks like they're Old School occultists here. No shirt, no shoes, no blood, no entry."
"Gross!" Melanie jumped off the fountain and dusted herself off like she worried she'd become contaminated.
Vale stepped off with less fanfare, his attention on the mini tentacle I'd found. "We could try our blood, but I'm sorry to say, Melanie, that I think this might require animal or shifter blood."
"No," I protested, but Melanie waved me off and rolled her eyes.
"It's no big deal, Anne. Weirdly enough, when I get cut as my monkey it doesn't hurt as much. I don't know why. So hang on a sec!"
In a blink her little blue-haired monkey stood within her puddled steampunk outfit. She stuck a tiny finger in her mouth and bit it with her sharp monkey teeth. Once Vale turned his back on her respectfully, she shifted back to her human form. I helped her do up all the buckles and laces on her clothes so she could keep her bleedi
ng finger extended and out of the way.
"Okay, Vale, I'm decent!" she said as she hopped up onto the fountain ledge again. She waited until Vale and I were ready and then held her bleeding finger over the channel in the tentacle. Only a few drops were needed before the fountain jerked into movement.
"Ack!"
Vale caught Melanie as she fell off. "Careful," he murmured.
The base of the fountain slid far enough to reveal a crescent-shaped opening in the ground from which a pale yellow glow emanated. A metal ladder painted red extended down to what looked to be a tunnel.
"I don't want any tunnels," I complained.
"I'll go first." Without waiting for a discussion on the matter, Vale cautiously climbed down. Melanie and I leaned down to watch him investigate the area. He disappeared for a few seconds as he checked out the tunnel.
"Don't go through it!" I hissed.
He reappeared, a knowing smirk on his face. "I wouldn't go without you, Moody. Shame on you for thinking that."
He took the bag and Tupperware container from me and I climbed down next. Once Melanie was in, we all looked back up at the sickle slice of the starry sky.
"Are we supposed to close it again?" Melanie whispered.
"No idea. I guess it'll close on its own. Or maybe it's supposed to stay open and we close it once we're out." I was making the big assumption, of course, that we were going to get out of here.
But what in the world was here?
The tunnel's ceiling was low enough that we all had to duck walk it. It led back beneath the house about forty feet. The golden glow came from a ball of light that hovered at the end of the tunnel beside a second ladder, this one a black one.