by Rob Thurman
The Kin were the werewolf version of the Mafia; just insert “butt sniffing” instead of “ring kissing.” We’d had our run-ins with them once or twice. On the other hand, we’d hired a few for extra bodyguard help in the past. Then there was my dating one off and on, although that was not common knowledge. Some Alphas might keep the occasional succubus or incubus around for sex slaves, but no one was really good enough to actually date a werewolf, except another werewolf. They were Old Country orthodox that way and since I’d been born half sheep (human) and half Auphe (unclean nightmare from the beginning of time—try fitting that on a name tag), I didn’t qualify either way. And as Wolves—again, no matter what the mythology told you—were born, not made, I never would be good enough.
“I mean, you crotch sniffers know who I am, right?” I waggled my Glock at the one on the left. “You. Speak. Arf arf. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I wasn’t vain enough to think every Wolf in the city had my picture with a big heart drawn around it up on his wall. Far from it. In the toilet bowl to piss on, maybe. But while every Wolf might not have known what I looked like, they all knew what I smelled like. Lucky them. It was the rare creature that could pick up the Auphe taint to my scent: dogs, werewolves, and trolls. There wasn’t a Wolf in the city who wouldn’t know who I was at first smell: the half-Auphe freak.
Humans told their kids about the bogeyman under the bed. It might grab your foot in the middle of the night and say boo. The supernatural told their rugrats about the Auphe. It might grab your foot in the middle of the night, drag you under the bed, disembowel you with one clawed hand, and pluck out your eyes with the other. I might look human, but to a Wolf I smelled like the darkness under the bed.
The bogeyman times a hundred; a monster to monsters. So attacking me with one revenant and two Wolves? It was a good way to hump your last leg. Although no matter what they thought, that wasn’t because of my Auphe genes. Good guns and a pissy attitude were enough for that. I wasn’t the monster they smelled in me. Maybe I wasn’t all human, but I wasn’t a raving maniacal killer either.
Raving was a little too much work.
I tightened my finger on the trigger of the Glock. “I’m not hearing anything. I was in a good mood, too, one with the fucking universe, full of happiness and joy and all that crap, and now you’ve ruined it. Unless you want to find out how good my aim is by my neutering you, you’d better talk. Now.”
He was a high-breed Wolf, no recessive traits at all from what I could spot. No furry ears, no lupine eyes or misshapen jaw with trash compactor teeth. To your average human (blind, deaf, and dumb) that’s what he looked like . . . your average human—until he would turn. But he wasn’t. He could go from man to beast in a helluva lot less than sixty seconds. It didn’t make a difference to me. He could wear all the Abercrombie and Fitch he wanted, do the fake bed hair look, sport those retro preppy glasses. He could spray on a gallon of Axe. The commercials lied. He wasn’t being tackled by a crowd of horny women, and I could still smell the Wolf under it.
The Wolf scent was better, trust me. My half-Auphe sense of smell was fairly close to being as good as a wolf’s, Were or otherwise. This cologne was not my thing—so much so that as my finger was tightening on the Glock in a threat for info, my sneeze accidentally carried it through to a done deed.
Ouch.
“Goddamnit,” I swore. “Sorry about that.” Not sorry that I had to shoot him. He had attacked me—he had it coming. I was sorry that I’d shot him in the crotch, though. I had meant that as a bluff. I still would’ve shot him, but half monster or not, there were things even I wouldn’t do if I didn’t have to. Head, heart, sure—but in the block and tackle? You really had to work at earning a shot there. I winced in sympathy as he curled on his side, turned to a giant wolf in an instant, and howled his lungs out.
This meant, of course, I had to put his pal down with one to the brain. No partner—no good partner—is going to let that happen to his buddy and not do something about it.
He tried. He failed.
Great. Now I was stuck in the park with a dead revenant, a dead Wolf in human form missing a good chunk of his head, and another Wolf screaming for his mommy. That was if you were in the know. Nonhuman. Supernatural. Preternatural. Whatever you wanted to call it.
But for, say, your average cop who heard a screaming wolf and came into the depths of the park as opposed to patrolling the outer edges—to that cop, my little problem would look more like a half- rotted corpse, a freshly dead human, and a mutilated big-ass dog. That was a hat trick that would put me in the running for murderous nutjob perv of the year. Worse yet, the murderous nutjob perv of the year with two unlicensed guns equipped with illegal silencers, a matte black combat knife, three more knives, and a few other surprises hidden away.
One side of my heritage, the human Rom half, told me exactly what to do in a situation like this: run. My experience in the supernatural business world was of the same opinion—but one thing first. I knelt by the Wolf in a tangle of once purposely distressed clothing, now the real deal as claws had shredded it during the change. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why the three of you jumped me, ball-less wonder?”
Foam-flecked jaws and bared teeth were all the answer I needed. “Your choice.” I shrugged. “You know they normally charge sixty bucks for neutering. I’m a bargain.” I doubted I’d have been in a talking mood in his situation either. I thought of putting him out of his misery, but, hell, he’d brought it on himself. He tried to kill me. Him and that cologne.
What kind of Wolf wore cologne? It was a wonder he wasn’t in the throes of a doggy asthma attack. Their sense of smell was better than my Auphe one. So why would he . . . shit. There was only one reason a Wolf would coat himself in something that strong. He was trying to cover up the scent of something—or some one else—and hadn’t taken the time or had the time to shower. I leaned back, out of the way of his snapping jaw, and took a deeper whiff.
Delilah.
My Wolf with benefits. She’d saved my life at least once in the past. I knew for a fact she’d saved my sanity by giving me that semiregular sex. Delilah was sterile. When you got to be the age of twenty-one, more or less, before you finally found someone you could sleep with and not run the risk of making babies even an Alien-Predator combo couldn’t love . . . well, you knew what true friendship was. It didn’t mean Delilah wasn’t trouble, though. Not that she particularly cared one way or the other. Delilah was Delilah—exotic, erotic, and predatory to her bones. That meant one thing: Delilah looked out for Delilah. Period. And if you couldn’t take care of yourself, then that was a damn shame.
For you.
Yeah, my furry fuck buddy. I’d never for a second thought I was her one and only hump day special. I was a lot of things, not all of them good, not all of them especially smart, but gullible? Ever have your mother spit at your feet when you were seven and tell you with drunken venom that there was a Hell, but you were an abomination so horrific that even it didn’t want you?
No? Huh. Just me then.
Regardless, that cured gullible pretty damn fast. I knew there was no way Delilah was faithful and true and brimming with Hallmark’s warm and fuzzy best: hugging bears and hearts and puffy silver balloons chock-full of Romeo and Juliet-style undying love. Why would she be? Friends with benefits tended to spread those benefits around. I knew if I weren’t carrying around sperm potentially toxic to the concept of continued human existence, I might have had my eyes open for the occasional opportunity. But “Hey, great band and are you sterile?” isn’t the best pickup line in the world.
So the cologne lover could’ve been just one of her other “friends.” A jealous one—or if he’d found out about what I was, a bigoted one. She had a special spray of her own, lacking the sneeze quality, that covered up my Auphe-tainted scent, but nobody’s perfect. She could’ve forgotten to hose down her den in the abandoned school once or twice. She didn’t give a damn who knew about us ou
tside the Kin, but within the Kin she was careful. Delilah had ambition, and screwing around, in all senses of the word, with a half-breed Auphe wouldn’t help her at all.
And hanging around here wasn’t going to help me either. I’d have the cops after me for grave robbing and murder, and PETA after me for animal abuse.
I’d take the cops any day.
Despite it all, if this did involve her, it didn’t matter. I still liked her. Just . . . hell . . . liked her. Because she liked me. She wasn’t disgusted by my Auphe half or afraid. To her I was just a guy . . . one with shoulder-length black hair, skin a shade paler than your average human, lots of guns, and a foul mouth—your average New Yorker, in other words. And her treating me that way definitely made her worth liking.
I holstered the guns and ran on into the darkness. I veered off my original path. I had been making up for missing my run this morning. If I didn’t, Niko would make me run the five I’d missed, plus five more, and probably run backward ahead of me so he could mock my athletic failures to my face. Even though it wasn’t conveniently located to our new SoHo apartment, I’d been running in Central Park as usual because it kept me on my toes.
Some people sparred in the gym boxing ring. Some of us ran through the habitat of a nest of mud-wallowing humanoid alligators on massive steroids. A workout is a workout. But this time I’d already had a different type of workout. And now I was late—later than usual—which was saying something. If I waited around to catch a bus or cab, I’d set a new record.
Bartending didn’t pay much; the real money was in the supernatural ass kicking. At least usually, but this was the one bar where I could use the fire axe to take off the head of a drunk and rampaging homicidal lamia before dragging her body to the storage room, and no one would raise an eyebrow. Actually they’d probably be taking bets on who went down first, her or me, and although they knew better, they’d bet on her.
The bar patrons didn’t much like me. They didn’t like my human half, my pale-skinned Auphe half, or my sarcastic and heavily armed whole. Oddly enough, it didn’t much bother me. Maybe it had some at first. But now if you didn’t want to like me, I could not like you right back and with an enthusiasm you might not want to see. The job wasn’t a bad job, and I wanted to keep it. So I took a shortcut—my shortcut.
There are shortcuts and there are shortcuts.
My kind came courtesy of my Auphe father . . . sperm donor . . . sire. Whatever you call a thing that pays your mother to breed a bouncing baby interspecies bastard. I don’t know if it—he—was disappointed I looked human, but in the end it didn’t matter. I had enough Auphe on the inside, but I didn’t let it control me—much. I used it.
I just hoped like hell my brother didn’t find out.
Taking that shortcut consisted of ripping a hole in reality and stepping through. I called it traveling. Niko called them gates. Whatever you called them, you could cover miles in a split second—the entire country in the same—to another dimension that was the next best thing to Hell if you wanted.
Actually, radioactive Hell now, thanks to Niko, me, and a de rigueur secret society that had access to suitcase nukes instead of secret handshakes. And the Masons thought they were hot shit.
The gray light rippled before me in the night—gray, dirty, and wrong, but a tool, and a tool I could control and use. The sight of it even quieted the howling Wolf. “Hearing great things about prosthetics. Check it out,” I told him, then stepped through.
Right behind my boss, Ishiah, in the bar’s storage room. I don’t know if he heard me, saw the light from the corner of his eye, or just sensed it. But his wings sprang out of invisibility into a banner of gold-barred white feathers as he turned and was already swinging a fire axe. We had one mounted in every room—less for fire; more for beheading.
“Whoa, boss. I’m not that late,” I said with a grunt as I hit the floor hard to avoid a haircut that would’ve started about chest level.
“Do not do that in this establishment,” he snarled. “Do you understand me?”
Ishiah was my boss and he was a good boss, which meant he paid me and hadn’t killed me. But he had a temper like Moses seeing the Golden Calf and breaking the Ten Commandments. No, that was more like a temper tantrum. Okay, Ishiah had a temper like God taking out Sodom and Gomorrah for being the Vegas of biblical times and turning Lot’s wife into a saltshaker just for wanting a look. Biblical references . . . Niko homeschooled me, and I knew a lot of obscure information when I bothered, which, according to everyone I knew, was rarely. But in this case it wasn’t applicable. Ishiah wasn’t an angel. There were no angels or demons, no Heaven or Hell. Fairy tales built on myths built on more myths, all built on the first caveman who refused to believe his kid, his brother, his mother, were gone for good. Who knew what the truth really was? Who wanted to know? Not me.
But here’s what it wasn’t. No angels. Ishiah was a peri, probably where the angel myth began . . . there and with all the Greek gods with wings. After all, the Auphe were where the elf myth had started and if you took away the hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth, the scarlet eyes, the black talons, shredding jaws, nearly transparent skin, and a raging desire to destroy humanity, then I guess you were close enough. The pointed ears were the same, right?
Thank God I hadn’t gotten the pointed ears. Who wants to pass as a Star Trek or Lord of the Rings fan boy for the rest of their natural-born lives?
A slight increase in the weight of the axe on the back of my neck redirected my attention to where it belonged. Peris, per the mythology book that Niko had swatted my head with on regular occasion, were supposedly half angels /half demons or something midway between the two. In other words, I had no idea what Ishiah was. It didn’t matter. Mythology was always wrong . . . like the whisper game. You started with one thing and by the time it was passed around the circle, it was something completely different. If you had even a seed of truth in mythology, you were doing damn good. Werewolves and vampires were born, not made, and were not all uncontrollable sex addicts, no matter what the local bookstore’s fantasy section might tell you. Puck, Pan, Robin Goodfellow were all one trickster race; all looked exactly alike; were all male; and they were all uncontrollable sex addicts. Revenants and ghouls had never been human. I could’ve gone on, ticking them off in my mind, but the axe blade was getting uncomfortable.
“Got it. No traveling in the bar. I’ll make a note.” I didn’t think he’d really chop my head off, but with Ishiah, you could never be sure. Can’t say I blamed him, because you couldn’t always be sure about me either . . . especially when I opened gates.
Why did I travel at all then? To avoid being late? Honestly? If it could bring out the worst in me and it wasn’t to escape imminent, messy, ugly death, then why did I do it?
Good question.
And no good answer. No answer at all, only the excuse that it hadn’t brought out the worst in me lately . . . not like before. So why not use it? I had control now, so it wasn’t that big of a chance. Not anymore, although getting anyone else to believe it, especially Nik, wasn’t something I looked forward to. But my brother wasn’t the problem at the moment; it was my boss.
“Can I get up and sling some beer or are you going to cut my head off?” I asked Ish. “Either way, I really need to take a piss. It’s been a long day.”
He thought about it, then grunted and lifted the axe. “I’m docking you two hours.”
It was better than having my head docked. I got to my feet and peeled off my jacket. It was summer in New York, which made it too hot for the leather jacket, but when you wore two guns in shoulder holsters, a cheerful smile wasn’t quite camouflage enough—if I could even pull off cheerful, which was doubtful. I didn’t need camouflage in the bar. Humans tended to avoid it like the plague—some instinct passed down from caveman ancestors who knew there were monsters in the world and a woolly mammoth wasn’t the only thing that could squash you flat. The few random humans who did walk through the front doors were pred
ators themselves—arrogant ones who ignored their instinct because they thought they were the shit and no one was more of a badass than them. Those humans usually didn’t leave the bar . . . except in pieces. The bar didn’t serve food, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be found there once in a while.
I made my way to the bathroom, then out to the bar to toss the jacket under it and grab an apron. “Good crowd tonight,” Sammy commented. Samyel was another peri, dark to Ishiah’s light blond, with wings barred with gray. “Quiet.”
Quiet was good. We didn’t get it that often. I leaned on the bar and took in the small crowd. Vampires, lamias (kind of a combo between a vampire and a leech), three incubi, two vyodanoi (predatory, rubbery, man-shaped water creatures), but no Wolves. Not a one. While quiet was good, that was not . . . especially on top of what had happened in the park. There were always wolves in the bar.
I fished my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and called Delilah. Modern-day werewolves had modern-day accessories. I got her voice mail. I usually did. She had a busy life, between being a bouncer at a strip club and her Kin work, which could be anything from stealing to fighting rival Kin packs to things I might not want to know about. I had asked if she killed humans. She’d said no—she preferred real prey, real challenge, not bleating sheep. I thought she was telling the truth; she was all about the challenge. But I’d asked her that before I’d killed a few humans myself, so I wasn’t sure I was in the position to judge. Mine had been bad men, but wasn’t “bad” a matter of who was holding the gun and who was getting shot by it?
I left her a message that someone who smelled an awful lot like her had tried to kill me in the park and I hoped he wasn’t a regular hookup, because he had nothing left to hook up with now. I also asked what was up with all the missing Wolves.
Ishiah, wings now gone, came out of the back room with a beer keg and scowled at my making personal calls on my first five minutes of company time. “Two and a half hours,” he said.