Night Life

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "You made me bleed," he rambled, pressing into me again. I groaned and leaned forward, my nipples swelling where they touched cold porcelain.

  "Make me," I begged, and meant it. Dmitri's hand snaked up into my hair and whipped my head back, exposing my shoulder and neck. He entered me again with a force that made the mirror rattle on the wall.

  "Dmitri…," I warned him in a half moan as the lights started to spin in front of my eyes. He snarled.

  "Not yet." Abruptly the pumping stopped and Dmitri licked slowly across my trapezius and up my neck, tasting my sweat and my scars. I watched his eyes as he bared his teeth and sank them into the juncture of my shoulder, drawing two fine droplets of blood. It wasn't the bite, and it hurt a lot. I screamed as he latched on to me, half pleasure and half fear.

  Dmitri snarled and yanked back on my hair again, holding me totally vulnerable. The stroke of him inside me was harder, and he reached around to grab my swollen tits, twisting the nipples to the point that they swelled to blood-red buds and I screamed again.

  This time it was all pleasure.

  Dmitri responded to my cries and growled, shuddering against me and in me. His hands sprouted talons and I felt a soft pelt grow against my back as we moved. I met his eyes in the mirror and they were gold, his teeth fanging out as his lips pulled back. I pushed into him, all sense gone as the scent of him hit me and the phase swelled his cock into something that pierced me like I was a virgin again.

  "Dmitri," I whispered again.

  He pushed me down, my cheek against the porcelain, his talons raking along my hips and ass. I gasped incoherently as he mated with me, until he threw back his head and snarled, then pumped twice and came, the hand curled in my hair tightening until I moaned because it hurt.

  Dmitri stood, naked and erect again, watching me splayed across the vanity. I couldn't move, not if Alistair Duncan himself suddenly jumped out of the shower.

  The were growled softly, a human grin splitting his fanged mouth, then he picked me up and laid me on my back, the cool tiles slicking with sweat. "Don't… please," I moaned. I hurt so much that I'd probably faint if he entered me again.

  Dmitri moved my legs open and lifted my hips, inhaling deeply and then closing his mouth and rough tongue over the soaked patch between my thighs. He licked me, repeated and insistent, and my orgasm ripped through me after only a few strokes. Dmitri dropped me back to the tiles and let me scream until I was spent, then rolled his shoulders and let the phase retreat until he was completely human again. He grinned at me, reached over, and cupped my cheek without a word.

  After we could stand upright, I wrapped myself in a huge fluffy bath towel and sat on the edge of the tub. Dmitri felt in his jeans and lit a cigarette, staring at me. I squirmed.

  "What?"

  "Nothing," said Dmitri with a smirk. "Just, most women would have something to say after that."

  "Now is not the time, Dmitri."

  "Okay, Luna. You just let me know when it is the time." More smirking. What a self-satisfied alpha male.

  "You know," I commented, "you're acting very smug. It wasn't that kinky."

  He grinned, tongue flicking his teeth once. "That comes later."

  I couldn't think about just how delicious that sounded because Dmitri's phone shrilled from somewhere in his blood-soaked clothes. He checked the number and flipped it open. "Yeah. Sunny? Sunny, calm down. Who's gone?"

  He listened for another second and then shut the phone, looking at me with saucer-eyed panic. "Something came to the pack house. They're all dead."

  I jumped up, towel falling away and me not even noticing. "Is Sunny okay?"

  "She's the one who called me …" Dmitri trailed off, the phone dropping from his hands with a clatter. It took me a clock tick to realize why he was in shock.

  "Hex me. Olya."

  * * * *

  We took a different way into Ghosttown, an abandoned on-ramp that had once connected with downtown. The road was much smoother and showed signs of patching. Dmitri reached the main intersection, Hotel Raven glowing above us like a neon juggernaut, and swung a hard right toward the Crown.

  He stopped the bike in the center of the street without a kickstand and let it drop as he sprinted into the theater. "Olya!"

  The doors of the Crown had been unceremoniously knocked in, glass crunching under our feet. One of the Redback door guards who'd hassled me the first time I showed up lay on his back, blood streaming from every opening including his eyes. I checked for a pulse, but it was long gone.

  Dmitri had already pelted through the seating pit and up to the projection booth, and he shouted, "Get your ass up here!"

  I ran, picking my way through the bodies of every Redback who had been in residence when Alistair's apprentices came through. Most of them had similar wounds to the first; a few bore silver burns in the shape of clubs and crosses.

  Sunny was in Olya's closet, crouched behind a row of designer boots. In happier times I would be envious, but now I noticed the cut on Sunny's head way more than I noticed Olya's impeccable taste in footwear.

  "Dmitri, I tried," she was sobbing. "These people in black came and just… started killing weres."

  "Duncan's thugs," I murmured.

  Dmitri gripped her shoulders. "Where's my sister?"

  Sunny disintegrated again. "They took her with them."

  "But she's alive?" He shook Sunny when she only choked out another apology. "Sunflower! Is Olya alive?"

  She nodded once. "She was when they left. She was screaming … I couldn't do anything …"

  I nudged Dmitri gently aside and gathered my cousin into my arms, where she heaved out her tears and clung to my jacket. Olya's jacket. I gripped Sunny tighter. "It's not your fault." Magick words she had soothed me when we were kids, even though I was older and taller and tougher. When Rhoda made me cry, Sunny always knew that it wasn't my fault.

  "They died," Sunny sniffled. "How is that not my fault?"

  "No one could have stopped them," I whispered, rubbing her back like she would have when I couldn't sleep. "Now, do you think you can help Olya and Dmitri for me?"

  She managed to stop sobbing hysterically, always a good sign. Either that or she was going into shock. Please gods, don't let it be option number two.

  "Did you bring the things I asked for? To read the spellbook?"

  Thank the moon for my stubborn, bossy, tough-as-an-old-leather-purse cousin. She accepted the plastic shopping bag I handed over and checked inside, rubbing tears off on her curls. Dmitri passed her a bandanna, slightly greasy.

  "Thank you." She blew her nose into it. "This is all I need." She pulled the spellbook from where she'd been sitting on it and stood up. "It will be a few minutes."

  She took her caster and chalk out of the bag and began drawing on the cover of the book, a simple pentagram and circle. "I've never unlocked someone else's spellbook, so if it explodes it's not my fault," she warned us, setting the book on the floor and stepping back. She lit a taper out of the bag and touched it to the chalk, which absorbed the flame and spread a soft glow up the walls of the closet.

  The cops showed up just as Sunny touched her caster and began to chant.

  Twenty-Five

  A dozen squad cars screeched to a stop in front of the Crown with flashers spinning crazily against the façade. A SWAT van and an unmarked followed them, also with full lights and sirens.

  "Well, now we know how Bonnie and Clyde felt," I told Dmitri as we watched them from the second floor. "Not as exciting as I imagined."

  "How the fuck did they find this place?" Dmitri shouted, slamming his hand against the sill.

  A portable spotlight caught us in its gaze. "Luna Wilder!" a robotic voice bellowed over a megaphone. "You are wanted for the murder of Thomas Thorpe! Exit the building with your hands up!"

  The door of the unmarked swung wide, and Captain Roenberg exited with a handcuffed figure in tow. Pete Anderson. I pointed for Dmitri's benefit. "That's how he found us."


  "Give me that!" Roenberg demanded, yanking the megaphone away from the SWAT officer. "Wilder! Get your cop-slashing ass out here or Anderson goes to jail in your place!"

  "Hex you, tool," Pete snapped before Roenberg could hold the megaphone away.

  "Sunny," I said, not moving from my spot in the window. Across the street, on the roof of a tenement, two black shadows moved as snipers set up a firing position on Dmitri and me.

  "Luna, what in the name of all things Hexed and holy is going on?" she asked. Her caster was enveloped in the same soft orange light, which pulsed softly in counterpart to the spinning lights outside.

  "I need you to get the spellbook readable," I said. "And I need you to do it now."

  "No pressure," said Dmitri, who also hadn't twitched a hair.

  "I have what you want!" I shouted down to Roenberg. "Let Pete go and we'll talk!"

  "No negotiations!" he shrilled back. "You surrender this moment or I'll send in SWAT!"

  Roenberg was a small fly in Duncan's web, but I'd be Hexed if I let a blood-witch-blowing slimeball like him push me around ever again. He wouldn't be so superior when I put his boss in jail.

  "You think you've got it all figured out!" I yelled out loud. "Well, Hex you, Roenberg, and the broom you rode in on!" An insult rolling off my lips had never felt so good.

  "Have it your way, Wilder!" Roenberg hollered and threw the megaphone aside, gesticulating wildly at the SWAT squad.

  The moon came out and for a moment the spotlight wasn't the brightest thing on the block. The spasm of phase almost doubled me over, and Dmitri ducked below the window, cursing.

  Shit. Phase was the last thing on the gods' good earth I needed right then. Dmitri's hair was already a little bushier, and he was fanging out.

  "Sunny, hurry up!" I yelled at her.

  "Last warning!" Roenberg screeched from the street. "I'm sending men in!"

  There was a pop of truly vile-smelling magick and the spellbook leapt off the floor, landing splayed on its spine. Sunny bunked and then grinned. "Kid stuff. Here, the lock's broken. Take the Hexed thing away from me." Now that it was readable, the sigils on the wrinkled pages were definitely giving off pulses of something icky.

  I grabbed up the book anyway, cradling it like the gold it was. "We gotta split."

  "I'll stay," said Sunny. I heard the SWAT team kick in what was left of the Crown's door and start up the stairs.

  "No!" I told Sunny, the way you tell small naughty dogs no. "We're all leaving, right this second."

  Sunny shook her head. "I've had some practice being a diversion lately."

  "Sunny, I said no!"

  SWAT boots landed in the hallway outside, and Dmitri practically ripped my arm off as he pulled me into the next room.

  "Call Mac!" I screamed to Sunny. "I'm sorry!"

  She waved me off. "Don't be sorry, get running!"

  As Dmitri and I hauled ass down the projection room stairs, I heard the SWAT leader shout "Freeze!" at Sunny. I dug in my heels and tried to go back, but Dmitri practically carried me through the loading dock entrance and onto the next street. We didn't stop running until we could no longer hear sirens.

  * * * *

  The streets had petered out to roadblocks at the opposite end of Ghosttown before either of us spoke. "The housing authority is where he'll have Olya," I said. "I know that it's your obligation to see this thing through, so I hope you don't hate me when I say I really don't want to go there, Dmitri." The absolute truth. Alistair Duncan and everything about him scared me. The girl who hates magick, compelled straight into the lair of a blood witch.

  Dmitri stopped and cocked his head. "Well, fuck it, Luna, I don't, either. But that butcher has my sister, so I don't exactly have a big Hexed choice here, do I?"

  "No," I whispered. Dmitri stopped walking.

  "You don't have to come."

  I saw all of the staring eyes in turn: Lilia, Marina, Katya, and the three women in the Duncans' house. I started walking again. "Yes, I do."

  "Why?" Dmitri demanded, jogging to keep up with me.

  Alistair had left them abandoned in death, like trash. They had no one. "Pack duty," I told Dmitri. He gripped my hand and matched my pace.

  "I understand."

  * * * *

  The housing authority was a half-burned hulk, one side all glass and steel boasting of an atomic age and the other collapsed and charred. A single light glowed from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the still-standing side.

  "He's in there," Dmitri said. "I smell him."

  I did, too, not so much a smell as a feeling in the back of my head, a frequency that I couldn't quite make out.

  The clouds that had sprung up were scudding briskly across the sky in a high wind. A flash of silver appeared now and then.

  I walked faster.

  Dmitri stopped me just before I crossed the line from clouded moonlight to pure shadow.

  "Whatever happens in there, I kill Duncan."

  I yanked my arm away from him. "No."

  "Luna…"

  "No!" I faced him, furious. "Give it up, Dmitri! Duncan will lay you out without a second thought!"

  "What makes you think you're so much better?" he demanded as I pulled open the rusty double doors. "What makes you think he won't kill you, too?"

  "Because he wants me," I whispered. "He wants to kill me and claim dominance." I stepped into a universe of steam and red light.

  I remembered Lilia, and the neon sign that had marked her burial spot.

  Dmitri was beside me again by the time I had stepped through the steam and saw the body hanging from the hook.

  Stephen had chains around his wrists and was naked, his body flayed at the ribs and the face and torso beaten almost unrecognizable.

  He moaned when I came close. "Get… out…"

  I tugged at the chains until they released and he tumbled into my arms. "I am so sorry," I said. "So sorry …" I didn't realize I was repeating myself until Dmitri pulled him away from me and brought him into the light.

  "Shit," he exclaimed. Stephen's face was already halfway through the phase, his impossibly long teeth sprouting from a human jaw too small to contain them. His body fought the phase with every shred of will it had left, but it wasn't much.

  Stephen stared at me, with those unbearable human eyes. "Run," he rasped.

  The were face erupted, and he went down on all fours. The wounds were still there. Forcing him to phase was just the final part of Alistair's torture.

  Stephen growled and advanced on me, one front paw tucked to his chest. Now it wouldn't matter whether he became the were willingly or not. He was a predator, wounded and in pain and very, very dangerous.

  Dmitri made a move and Stephen turned on him, snapping jaws on flesh. Dmitri yelped and yanked his arm away. Blood from the bite sprayed Stephen's snout. Aroused, he tensed to spring and knocked Dmitri to the ground, aiming teeth for his jugular.

  I swung the only thing in my grip, the spellbook, at his head. Stephen latched on to it and I yanked in return, pulling him off Dmitri.

  "Yeah, that's right," I ground out as his terrible head swung to face me. "You want me, don't you?"

  He did, and he advanced, as inexorable as a black blood clot on the face of the heart.

  Just before he sprang, he faltered. I'll never know if it was his wounds, or if he saw me trying to save Dmitri, but whatever it was, Alistair had enough of his game. Stephen choked, his big head lolling from side to side, twitching on the floor as his windpipe contracted millimeter by millimeter.

  "Leave him alone!" I screamed into the steam.

  Stephen mewled, one twisted foot knocking against mine. His tongue was beginning to turn blue, but according to Alistair his suffering was far from over. I decided then that I didn't care whether Dmitri or I or the gods themselves disposed of Alistair Duncan, but he sure didn't have much longer in this world.

  "I'm sorry," I whispered once more to Stephen, and then reared back and slammed my boot as hard as I
could into his skull.

  He went still without a sound. His corpse didn't revert to human. Same jaws, same leaking yellow eyes.

  "You don't get him," I told Duncan as I closed them. "You lose."

  I turned my back on the grotesque carcass and went to help Dmitri. He groaned as he pulled himself up. "Son of a bitch. I'm bitten." The bite was black around the edges, and blood was oozing steadily from one of the big veins in Dmitri's forearm. I took off my jacket and tore a sleeve.

  "Here." I tied it off in silence, just us and the swirling steam. Dmitri touched my cheek.

  "You okay?"

  "No," I started, "I'm not—"

  A scream rocketed around the open lobby, echoing off the smooth walls and scarred vinyl. Dmitri's head snapped up and he took off. I had to jump over Stephen's body to keep up. How I was going to explain this body to McAllister and CSU, I didn't know.

  Then I realized that no one besides Dmitri, Duncan, and I would ever know what happened tonight, and at least one of us was going to be dead come sunrise.

  Dmitri bounded up metal stairs, the screams louder and more frequent. I recognized the office from my nightshade dream and yelled, "Dmitri, wait!"

  He went through the door anyway, and I came in behind, almost slamming into his back. He was stopped short, nostrils flared, dark pupils fixed on the two figures across the room.

  Alistair Duncan smiled at me from sunken cheeks and said, "So good of you to come, Detective Wilder."

  Olya Sandovsky struggled against the bonds that held her in the center of the calling circle and screamed for her brother. She was tied to the floor in the center of seven points, all but one holding the polished finger bones of the dead girls. The sacrifice.

  Candles at the edge of the circle lit the room, and tinted skylights allowed cloudy silver to illuminate the wounds seeping Olya's blood into the working around her.

  Dmitri went for Alistair, faster than I'd ever seen anyone move. Alistair seemed to breathe out slowly, and Dmitri was knocked aside, slamming face-first into the wall and falling back.