Night Blade

by J. C. Daniels

As he came prowling toward me, my palm started to itch.

  “We don’t listen to human whores from that pack,” he said. “But if you want to be my little whore…”

  I looked away. “I’m on official business. I’m a registered member for the Assembly and this contract was also duly registered. I’m expected to check back in with them in…” I checked my watch and then smiled. “Roughly two hours. If I do not, a Banner unit will dispatched to check on me. If I’m not found, your mountain will be searched and any wolf on it will be exterminated. No questions asked.”

  He snorted. “Humans don’t get registered…and stupid humans should know better than to come onto wolf land.”

  He took another step.

  Sighing, I shifted my attention to him. “You don’t want to come any closer, kid.”

  “Oh, yes I do…”

  I drew my sword before he’d managed to take another step. As the silver kissed his flesh, he yelped.

  All around, people shifted.

  Megan lost her skin.

  As she went from a lovely, graceful brunette to a monster, trapped between human and wolf, I twisted my sword, watched as the silver bit into his flesh. Smoke drifted up from it as he whined, frozen in place by the shock of it. Never felt silver before, it seemed. Badly trained, stupid.

  What were they were doing up here? He had to have seen the blade…what did he think I was carrying her for? Looks?

  “Again. I’m here on official business and I’m a member of the Assembly. That means…”

  “It means you ain’t human.” A voice spoke from the crowd. “It also means you’re afforded certain protections, bitch, but if you harm my boy, those protections are rendered void.”

  Ahhh…there’s the pack leader. From the corner of my eye, I watched as he came striding my way. “Please take note, I told him not to take another step and he did so anyway. I carried my sword in plain view and he ignored it. Now…I’ll put the blade away when you tell him to step back.”

  Growls rose in the air around me.

  Megan was the one who decided things. She cleared her throat and damn if that’s not an odd thing to hear from a creature that’s almost seven feet tall, covered in gray fur and looks like something out of a nightmare. And although her voice was a deep bass growl, her tone was still so very polite. “If I may…Kit. You’re wearing a bracer. Please remove it.”

  I would have glared at her if I dared to look away from those in front of me. “Not the time, Megan.” And how the hell did she know?

  “Oh, it’s exactly the time.” And her clawed hand struck, slicing through the leather cord that held the bracer in place. I managed, barely, not to flinch as the bracer fell to the ground.

  “I’d like to ask you all to look at Ms. Colbana’s left wrist. What do you see?” Megan said, her voice calm and cool, despite the fact that she sounded like something out of a nightmare.

  If I wasn’t so busy staring down the idiot kid in front of me, I would have glared a hole through her hairy head. No. Forget glared a hole. I would have put a hole somewhere in her furry hide.

  The boy’s eyes shot to my wrist.

  To the bite marks left there by Damon.

  “I was sent as her…companion,” Megan said. “Because my alpha doesn’t wish to cause unrest between my pack and the cat clan should anything happen to Ms. Colbana. The Alpha would be so very pissed.”

  “Why would the cat Alpha give a fuck?” the kid demanded.

  The pack leader swore. “Shit, boy. Who the fuck do you think marked her wrist?”

  He summarily jerked his son away with enough force that the kid went flying across the small clearing. I turned my head and stared at Megan. She shrugged.

  Nothing to be done for it now. After I snagged my bracer, I stepped back from the cooling unit. I was not opening that thing, nor was I touching the nasty presents inside. “You have something in there,” I told him, nudging the grisly container with one foot.

  He stared at me. “Well. Open it.”

  I just tugged a cloth from my back pocket and cleaned the small bit of blood from the tip of my blade. That done, I slid her back into the sheath. She went back with a disgruntled sigh. She’d wanted a fight—I could tell. My weapons liked a good bloody brawl, the bloodier the better and they didn’t have much sense. It didn’t matter that Megan and I wouldn’t have been able to fight our way free of this many wolves.

  He growled at me.

  I just stood and waited.

  Finally, he glanced at one of the women and she came scurrying. Literally, chin tucked to her chest, shoulders hunched, like she was trying to make herself seem as small as possible.

  Once she had it open, she dashed away, like she couldn’t stand to be any closer to him than she had to be.

  I couldn’t blame her.

  I sensed the energy shifters carried. Actually, it wasn’t just confined to shifters. I could peg a shifter, a witch, a vamp, a human…and just about anything else with just a look. It had to do with the energy that wrapped around them. Their souls. All of it.

  And this guy’s soul was dark and dirty, the energy of his beast a dirty, snarling thing like a rabid monster, crouching and ready to bite.

  As he looked down, I braced myself.

  A snarl escaped him as he bent over and hauled the heads out, one in each fist.

  “You dare…?” he whispered, staring at me through near colorless lashes.

  “I didn’t kill them.” I watched as he hurled the heads. One went flying into the trees. The other almost hit somebody. The unfortunate person barely managed to catch it and stood there looking at it in dismayed horror for long, long moments.

  The pack leader took a step toward me.

  My hand itched. Burned. Call me, the sword whispered in the back of my head. I’m here…we can fight, we can fight…

  No. Not the time.

  “I didn’t kill them. I’m here on official business, as a member of the Assembly. I’m to deliver this, its contents within, and a message,” I said quietly. My heart rate started to skip and immediately, I focused on Damon’s voice. The low, growling rumble. His strength. My strength. I am aneira. My sword arm is mighty—

  “Give me the fucking message, nugget, and get the hell out of my territory,” the pack leader rasped.

  “Alpha Alisdair MacDonald cordially requests that you cease and desist sending your men to his territory to hunt for ‘bitches to take back to the mountain’.” As MacDonald had indicated, I made little quotation marks in the air, keeping my voice flat and impersonal. “You may or may not be aware, but the ‘two bitches’ they tried to grab were his teenaged daughters. The oldest killed one of your men. He killed the other. The next time one of your pack members tries to abduct one of his people, he will lead his enforcers into your land and kill every last man among you. You will be the last and he will kill you slowly, strangling you with your own entrails.”

  The pack leader was red by the time I was done.

  My heart was racing.

  Megan placed her hand on my shoulder. “We have one hundred enforcers, pack leader. Our pack numbers at five hundred. My Alpha awaits my call and if he doesn’t receive it, you will be exterminated. You’ve been warned.”

  “Get the fuck out!” he screamed.

  * * * * *

  “You do good work,” Megan said cheerfully as we made a quick stop in Gatlinburg. “Hey, you wanna hang around here for the night? There’s this bar on the strip—they don’t have many of our kind around here thanks to that bastard, but the guy who runs the place keeps a stock of decent liquor. We can go get plastered and head back in the morning.”

  “No.”

  I stared at the bracer as I tried to figure out a way to get it back on. It wasn’t going to happen. Screw it. New laces would fix it and I had plenty of those. Tossing it through the open window of the car, I eyed the marks on my wrist and debated.

  I could let it go.

  Maybe I should.

  Megan turned a
way and that’s when I moved. Yeah, it’s a dirty trick, but when somebody is strong enough to rip you apart with their bare hands, dirty is the best way to fight. I drew a blade I’d kept sheathed at my thigh. As I turned, I palmed another blade and threw even before I turned. A pained scream ripped from her as the silver buried itself deep in her thigh. I was on her in the next second, kicking at her left knee and listening as it crunched.

  Her body trembled under mine and power rolled through the air. “Don’t shift,” I warned, pressing the tip of my other blade to her neck. “You know what Night is?”

  She stilled.

  “I think that means you do. This is a spelled blade…it’s coated in Night—” Night was a narcotic that had been formulated to hit shapeshifters hard enough to render them unconscious. It would kill humans…and probably me. That’s why it was spelled. “All it takes to break the spell on it is shifter blood. So if you’re up for a nice long nap, just keep moving around.”

  “Do you have any idea just how much pain I can put you in?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I sighed and looked around. We were parked next to a small convenience store just outside the National Park. It wasn’t exactly busy, but we wouldn’t escape notice forever. “You know how often I hear this song and dance, Megan? Listen, sweetheart. The next time you pull a trick like that, I’m going to get pissy.”

  “A trick like what?”

  Glaring at the back of her head, I said, “You know what. Who I’m sleeping with doesn’t have a damn thing to do with my job. I’ve worked jobs for your Alpha before I hooked up with Damon. The next time you bring him up on a job is the last time I’ll ever work one for the wolf pack again. Pass the message on.”

  I shoved back and immediately put distance between us.

  She shifted with a roar of rage, reaching around pulling on the silver blade I’d buried in her thigh. I smelled her blood and saw it gush out as she flung the blade to the ground.

  I left it lying there, still gripping the spelled blade, my stomach in knots as I watched her.

  I really had to work on that fear thing more.

  “You crazy little bitch,” she growled. “It worked, didn’t it? We got out of there, no harm, no foul, right?”

  “Did it occur to you that if I wanted to tattoo Damon’s girl on my forehead, I’d do that?” I held the knife ready, wondered if I was going to have to use it. “Do you go around parading the fact that you’re screwing MacDonald and think that’s going to open and close doors?”

  In the form she wore, it was hard to read facial expressions. But something in her alien eyes flickered. And then, I felt the blast of her power against my skin as she shifted back to her human form. The shift from human to were had healed her leg and she stood before me now unharmed…unharmed, but still pissed and looking confused. “You’re not a shifter,” she pointed out. “You’re just barely something more than human and you’re easier to hurt. I was doing what I could to avoid that.”

  “I was the one hired to do the job.” Recognizing that the threat had passed, I slid the spelled knife away. “Was I supposed to do the job or just come along for the ride?”

  She inclined her head. “Point taken.”

  I turned away and headed around to the front of the car.

  I wanted to get home. I needed to get home.

  “You…” She paused and blew out a breath. “Look, you didn’t do bad. I’m sorry if I screwed things up.”

  I went to open the door but she came up and I paused, shifting around to meet her gaze. “You should put some clothes on. Even with the pack here, they probably aren’t used to seeing a naked woman striding around town.”

  She watched me closely. “Are you okay?

  No. I was pissed. And although I wouldn’t admit it, I was still freaked out by the monstrous pack we’d just left. Curling my lip, I replied, “I’m just super. Although it might have been nice if somebody would have mentioned the pack leader was an evil son-of-a-bitch.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” She stared at me coolly now. “You held it together and even when you got a little nervy there, you got it under control. Hell, you didn’t even let on that I’d pissed you off like that. But if we’d told you that Dex Conrad is a wolf who is rumored to butcher his own people when they try to leave him, that he rapes his own young and is pretty much everything humans think we all are…you would have walked in there throwing off so much fear, we would have needed an army to get us out.”

  “Oh, fuck off—” I started to say. Then I stopped. Butcher—

  The heat in my hand flared so bright, so painfully hot, it hurt.

  “He butchers those who try to leave him?” I said quietly.

  “That’s what they say,” she said tiredly. “Word went out after this latest mess. If he tries anything else, we’ll hunt him down. But for now, he’s keeping it to the idiots too stupid to stay–”

  I hit her.

  I heard bone crunch in my hand, felt the pain flare up my arm.

  “What the fuck—?” Megan snarled.

  TJ. That was all I could think. There had been a time in my life when I had been scared and on the run, and a woman had taken me in. Given me a place to hide, a home. The very first bed I could call my own.

  Her name had been TJ and she was a werewolf who would live the rest of her life unable to walk or run the way another shapeshifter could…all because her Alpha had amputated her legs when she had tried to run.

  Shapeshifters can heal almost anything, but if the wound is healed through magic first…he had the wounds cauterized and closed and now her legs ended in stumps at her knees.

  My fury almost blinded me as I stared at the woman in front of me. “You fucking coward. Too stupid to stay?”

  I turned away from her before I did something that would put me in more hot water than I could handle.

  Right then I was so pissed I didn’t care.

  But I knew what would happen if the two of us went head to head.

  I’d get hurt.

  And the man who shared my bed would take it personally. Personally enough to cause major hell and while part of me wanted that, it wasn’t right. The cats outnumbered wolves two to one.

  And as pissed off as I was, I had to keep my cool.

  For now, at least.

  I heard her coming behind me and I turned, drawing the spelled knife from my thigh. My palm itched, yearned for my sword, but unless I managed to cut her head off, the only thing I do with that was piss her off and this needed to stop and I could hear people drawing closer—we’d just been noticed.

  This needed to stop. Now.

  Gatlinburg was mostly human turf and if this didn’t stop, our asses were in major trouble.

  “If you take one more step toward me, I’m using this,” I warned her. “And I’m feeling mean enough that maybe I’ll deliver you tied and bound to that pack up in the mountains.”

  She sneered at me. “You wouldn’t.”

  No. She was right. I wouldn’t. Lifting a brow, I shrugged and said, “Probably not, but imagine what it might be like…if you were one of their young…a kid, sixteen, seventeen. Going through your spike, scared to death of your alpha and desperate to run. So you try. And you fail. What do you think happens?”

  Her lids flickered.

  “Still think all those people are stupid enough to stay?”

  Her gaze slid away from mine. Her shoulder slumped and she turned away, using her hand to wipe away the blood running down her face.

  “You all leave them there. You bunch of fucking cowards,” I whispered, throwing the words out between us. Shaking my head, I climbed into the car, still gripping my knife.

  Chapter Three

  I hadn’t gotten home until almost eleven. The good thing about Florida, it’s not overrun with feuding, hostile, hungry vamps the way South Carolina is, so I’d felt safe enough making the drive home. Colleen had been waiting for me.

  Very unhappy.

  I had called her from the road and told her I th
ought I had broken a bone in my hand and she might have to fix it.

  She had.

  By way of rebreaking it.

  It sounds terrible and feels much worse, something I’m actually familiar with, since I’ve had it done several times. The first two times happened when I was a kid. My grandmother wasn’t the loving sort and when I didn’t perform well in training, my punishment wasn’t extra training. It was lashes with a whip or broken bones or other forms of torture.

  Colleen was a much kinder healer. Instead of forcing me to remain awake as my grandmother had, she gave me something to put me under.

  I didn’t come out of it until sometime near dawn and she was curled up in the chair, watching over me.

  I stumbled to the bathroom to empty my bladder and when I came out, she was holding a mug.

  The smell alone was enough to make me want to run back into the bathroom. I could hide in there. I’d be safe. Safe from whatever vile nastiness she’d put inside that mug. I almost did it.

  Apparently the look on my face told her what I was thinking. “Don’t try it, Kit,” she warned me. “I helped build the damned wards for that room and I can break them. You need the damned tonic or you’ll be dragging for a week.”

  I hated healing tonics.

  They tasted like piss and vinegar and death.

  “No,” I said, glaring at her.

  “Take it.” She glared right back. Then she smiled evilly at me. “I can always call your sweetie and tell him you’re hurt…he can come play nursemaid and you can take the medicine for him.”

  “You know…I’m sick and tired of people forgetting I’m an adult who took care of herself before I met Damon.” Sourly, I eyed the nasty mess in the mug. It was the color of rancid milk and vomit mixed together and smelled about as pleasant. Taking a deep breath, I tossed it back as quick as I could and then concentrated on not puking it back up. After about sixty seconds, I thought I might be able to keep it down.

  It was a full five minutes before I was certain it was all going to stay down. After another glare at Colleen, I stormed into the kitchen. I needed chocolate or something to get that taste out of my mouth and I needed it fast. Once that hit my system, I was going to crash. Hard.