by Sierra Dean
This wasn’t going to be that week.
“Now,” she screamed to Shane. There was no pause between her command and her attack, she simply assumed if Shane was smart enough to hunt the undead and not die, he was also smart enough to follow directions.
Her bow sighed as she released the wire, sending an arrow through the air in a slight upward arc until it met its target with a satisfying and meaty thunk. The troll bellowed its protest, but Siobhan was already stringing another arrow, and this time it sailed directly into the troll’s tiny, blinking eye.
A car alarm went off, and from an apartment window a would-be witness shouted obscenities, demanding they “Shut the hell up before I call the cops.”
Siobhan was used to this, to bystanders ignoring things like a giant fucking troll in the middle of Harlem, because it was easier to pretend it wasn’t there than it was to accept that trolls existed in the first place.
Shane fired off two bullets in quick succession before clambering up next to her on the car roof.
“I thought you said the brain was a pointless target.” His own shots had taken out the troll’s rather substantial knees, and now the beast was teetering like a drunk on a carnival ride.
“It is.”
“Then why the hell should we shoot him in the eye?”
Siobhan strung another arrow onto the wire and cast Shane a sidelong glance before firing the next arrow into the troll’s other eye. The troll wailed and stumbled forward, collapsing onto the street with a monumental thud. “Because blind trolls are easier to kill.”
Slinging the bow across her chest, Siobhan pulled a long-bladed knife from her boot and hopped off the car. The troll was moaning, and the worst part about that was it made her feel a little bad for it. Sure, it was breaching inter-dimensional laws, and it had no right to be here, and it was really hard to reason with, but she still felt shitty for killing it. When your biggest motivation in life was to gorge yourself on small children, the human realms were a veritable buffet of willing victims. The trolls didn’t seem to grasp that humans didn’t want their unprotected children to be kidnapped and eaten.
“Does blood make you woozy?” she inquired without looking at Shane.
“Does…what?” When she didn’t repeat herself he said, “No.”
“Good.” Siobhan knelt next to the troll who flailed out weakly in an attempt to swat her, but she’d crouched next to his midsection and his efforts were so halfhearted he wouldn’t have knocked her over even if he did manage to hit her. The traditional chant slipped off her tongue in Gaelic more easily than any English turn of phrase would. These were the words she’d been born knowing how to speak, the very meaning of her life.
As she spoke, the blade in her hand began to glow faint blue, shimmering in the night and illuminating the whole street with its surreal brightness. The troll groaned but stopped flailing.
“What the fuck?” Shane asked.
“If you can’t say it in Gaelic,” Siobhan growled, “I would appreciate you not saying it at all.” With that, she slammed the knife into the troll’s spine all the way down to the hilt. The monster gave one final cry before falling limp, either from exhaustion or death. Trolls weren’t exactly easy to kill, so she wasn’t counting on him being dead from one stab wound.
It was what she’d do next that guaranteed death.
Once more cast into darkness with the glowing blade buried inside the troll, Siobhan began to work the weapon back and forth in a sawing motion until she’d cut a hole in its back wide enough for her to stick her hand into. She gave Shane a challenging look and smiled.
“What are you—?”
“You were warned,” she said before he could finish, and jammed her arm into the hole until she was elbow-deep inside the monster’s guts.
When she didn’t hear any retching noises from behind her, she decided Shane might be more than a pretty face after all. She jerked her arm free and slid the knife out as she did, casting the street in a more purplish hue thanks to the blood coating the weapon’s blade. In her formerly free hand she was now clutching the troll’s heart.
“Oh,” Shane said, his eyes growing wider. “Wow. Okay.”
Siobhan used the blade to cut open the heart, then moved around the body in a circle until a path of blood outlined the corpse. She stopped where she’d started, dropped to her knees and whispered the rest of the incantation, touching her forehead once with the troll’s blood. Once the whole chant had been spoken, she took the knife to her own skin, cutting the tip of her finger open and letting one drop fall into the circle she’d drawn.
All of the sound vanished from the street, and she and Shane were suddenly in a vacuum. There was no noise, no air to breathe, nothing. Siobhan gritted her teeth and slammed the knife into the asphalt, combining the troll’s blood, her blood and the weapon that had cut them both before shouting the sealing word, which had no English translation but as close as she could explain it meant I banish.
Light exploded outward from the circle, sending her tumbling back onto her ass and blinking into the chaos she’d created. Unlike the knife earlier, this new light was pure white and impossible to look at without being drawn into it. And this was not a light you wanted to follow to the end of the tunnel.
“Don’t look at it,” she told Shane, realizing she should have warned him sooner.
Too late. The idiot was stumbling towards her magic with an awestruck expression on his face. Siobhan got to her feet and dove at him just before he touched the edge of her circle. Not only would it suck him into an alternate-reality hell void, but it would fuck up her whole ritual.
And no one fucked up her rituals.
She landed on top of him and clapped her hands over his eyes while he struggled to get free. He was a strong bastard too.
“I’m really sorry about this,” she whispered.
She smacked his skull against the pavement.
Chapter Four
There are headaches, and then there are headaches.
Shane awoke with what he was sure was the mother of all migraines and was absolutely certain at any moment one of the chest-bursting spawn from Alien would chew its way out of his skull. He opened one eyelid a crack and immediately regretted it. Dim light from a lamp assaulted his eyes and felt about as awesome as the time he’d gotten shot.
“Fuck my life,” he groaned.
Words. Oh Jesus, words hurt worse than the light had.
“You nearly did fuck your life,” a woman’s voice cut in.
It felt like it was literally burying itself into his brain like a knife.
A knife.
His eyes flew open in spite of the extraordinary pain as the memory of what had happened came rushing back to him. The street, the troll, the explosion of light, and the girl. The same girl who was sitting at the end of the bed he was in and giving him a look he suspected was usually shared between doctors and terminally ill patients. Sort of half pity and half just die already so I can get rid of you.
Through a haze of sharp, pointy agony that speared him in the eyeballs, he was able to recognize he wasn’t in a familiar place. The room was small and sparsely decorated, the only real personal touch peeling rose-print wallpaper gone yellow with age. The bed he was lying on was a lumpy twin with an old gray comforter, and the only other furniture in the room was the nightstand where the god-awful lamp was perched.
“Can you turn that off?” he asked.
She sighed like he’d asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Latin while juggling with one hand, but she complied with the substantial favor he’d requested. The room fell into darkness.
The alien spawn stopped gnawing on his brain. But only a little.
“Where am I?” Shane asked after the silence made the dark of the room feel almost claustrophobic.
“You’re in my bedroom.”
“Did you knock me out so you could have your way with me? Because you could have asked nicely.”
The light came back on, and Shan
e swore. The girl glared at him, then turned it off again. So that’s how this was going to work, was it? No waterboarding or bamboo nail torture. This girl was good. She’d simply threaten him with light until he started to behave.
“What am I doing in your bedroom, then?”
“I saved your life. It seemed kind of silly to do that and then leave you out in the middle of the street.”
“You…saved my life?”
“Yes.”
“You must have done a really good job. I feel fucking awesome.”
The light switched on.
“Fuck. God. Sorry. Thanks, is what I was trying to say.”
Darkness reigned again.
“For someone who claims to hunt vampires, you seem to treat the sanctity of life with a great deal of…frivolity,” she said, her voice going quiet.
“I spend all day worrying about other people’s lives. Doesn’t leave me many leftover fucks to give worrying about my own.” He winced, preparing for the visual assault, but she didn’t touch the light.
“If you don’t respect your own life, why should anyone trust you with theirs?” She sounded mystified by his response.
“No one knows I’m helping them.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“Yes.”
“And what about you? Going chasing after trolls doesn’t strike me as showing a lot of, what is it you said? Regard for life?”
“I have plenty of regard for life,” she snapped. “All I do with my life is protect people. My life is sacred because of that.”
“So you go out every night and risk your sacred life?”
“I…”
“No pithy reply?”
“Are you always an asshole when someone saves your life?”
“I have several high-ranking sources who would say yes.”
“Then it’s a wonder anyone bothers.”
“On that note, you’re sort of a wee thing. How the hell did you drag me back to your apartment?”
Siobhan made a disgusted noise. “I made a dead troll vanish into thin air. Why in Hecate’s name would I have to drag your sorry ass anywhere?”
“I’m guessing you didn’t cut my heart out and make a blood circle to move me.”
The bed sagged, and he could sense her drawing nearer. In spite of the raging migraine threatening to set up shop and never leave his head—and he was definitely helping that by talking as much as he was—he still felt his pulse trip when she bent over him. She smelled unlike any other woman he’d known, a heady aroma of spice and danger. Girls like this were, well…he didn’t know many girls like this.
“You’re an unusual man, aren’t you, Shane Hewitt?”
“I was just thinking the same thing about you.” He blinked in her general direction and frowned. “Wait, how the fuck did you know my last name? Are you a psychic or some shit?” Oh God, had he been thinking anything unwholesome? No. But now he was thinking about her boobs. Oh, Jesus, and her ass. And now he was thinking about peeling off all those layers of tight black clothing and seeing how much of her skin was covered in the freckles that colored her cheeks. “Oh, crap, okay look I’m sorry for the thing about your boobs—”
She pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m not psychic, you moron. I looked at your wallet while you were passed out.”
“Oh.”
“What were you going to say about my boobs?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re worse at lying than you are at saying thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“Can I turn the light on now?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Shane admitted.
“Well, I’d rather we not sit alone together in the dark while you think about my breasts.”
The lamp flicked back on, and Shane closed his eyes in response. It was almost the same as having a conversation in the dark only now his eyelids were glowing pink and he suspected he looked like an idiot.
Not that that was anything new to him.
“Look,” Siobhan said, “in spite of the part where you almost walked headfirst into your own untimely demise, you were sort of helpful tonight.”
“Thanks…I think?”
“You clearly know the general concepts of battle. I can tell you’ve been trained. There’s a reason I didn’t leave you out on the street.”
“Because you think I’m ruggedly handsome?”
“No.”
“Thanks,” he said again, this time his tone dripping with sarcasm.
“Romance is an entanglement I don’t have the luxury of participating in, Mr. Hewitt. I apologize if I’ve offended you. I think you’re very attractive, but that’s entirely beside the point.”
“Oookaaay.”
“I need your help.”
Shane opened one eye and gave her his most incredulous look. “You had to save my life and now you’re asking me for help. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Well, you see…I’m sort of desperate.”
Chapter Five
Siobhan didn’t work with partners.
Not since the whole messy debacle with Percy. But she’d been fifteen when Percy died, and she’d made sure the goblin that’d killed him followed him to the grave. The image of your first partner getting sucked into a bright burning light pit to an alternate dimension isn’t all that easy to forget, though. And it didn’t make you want to run out and find a replacement.
Yet, here she was asking a total stranger to help her.
She couldn’t put her finger on the exact reason she trusted Shane. Either it was his no-questions-asked willingness to help her kill the troll, or the fact he hadn’t run screaming like a girl when she’d ripped the creature’s heart out with her bare hands. Her job got messy, and she would need someone who wasn’t going to balk when the situation got hairy.
Shane seemed like he could be reliable.
Or—at the very least—he seemed like he could last a few rounds before getting himself killed, and that was all she really needed.
“You’re desperate?” he parroted. “Wow, lady. Be still my throbbing heart.”
Siobhan shot him a look. “I can take care of that throbbing-heart problem for you.”
Shane mimed zipping his lips shut.
“You know about some of the supernatural things lurking in the city, right? What do you know?”
He paused, and Siobhan let herself take a good look at him. His face was rough with dark stubble except for one spot on his right cheek where a silvery white scar showed bright against the rest of growth. Scars were usually good for a story, and Siobhan liked them because it meant somewhere in a person’s past they’d been able to walk away from something bad.
His dark, almost black hair was styled into a sort of Mohawk with the sides cut close to his scalp and the hair on the crown allowed to grow long. It probably usually stood tall, but right now it lay flat and gave the unfortunate impression of the styles she’d seen German SS officers wear. Without thinking about it Siobhan reached out and fluffed up his flat hair so it stood at attention rather than making him look like a battered Nazi.
Now he looked like an outcast from the Sex Pistols, but it was an improvement.
His nose had been broken at some point in his life, and it hadn’t healed right, giving the bridge a slight zigzag appearance.
When she’d touched his hair, he’d opened his eyes and stared at her while she looked him over. Eyes the color of bluebells or midafternoon sky weren’t what she expected from his otherwise dusky features.
When he grinned at her, she realized she’d been cataloguing him too long. She had crossed the line from passing interest into creepy.
Shane pretended not to notice and answered her question like nothing strange had happened. “Vampires are the big ones. For me, anyway. I mean the vamp council cuts my checks, and in return I kill their lost boys and girls.”
“How peculiar.”
“Well, the way they put it to me, better to deal with you
r own problems before they become somebody else’s, right?”
“I wouldn’t have anticipated that kind of logic from vampires.”
“Hell, lady, vampires have an overabundance of logic. Those bastards spend all damn night debating this and that, and it’s a goddamn wonder they get a single thing done.”
“What else?”
“Werewolves.”
Siobhan nodded. “Yes, thankfully not something I have to deal with in my line of work. My people made a pact hundreds of years ago that we wouldn’t interfere with the wolves as long as they didn’t become a problem for us. So far they haven’t.”
Shane laughed hoarsely, and she wasn’t sure if it was at her expense. “Monsters are everyone’s problem,” he clarified. “Some are just too close to human most days for it to matter.”
“Any others?” She wasn’t in a mood to ruminate on the philosophy of what kept a good person with bad luck from becoming an all-out bad person.
“Fae?”
Siobhan groaned. “Fae?”
“Yeah…you know, fairies and shit.”
“Oh, Shane.”
“Wow, you just channeled my foster mom to a scary extreme.”
“Saying fae like they’re one entity is like saying you’ve heard of insects.”
“A pest is a pest.”
“The fae are much more than that. You understand nothing.”
“Jesus, lady, take a chill pill.” Shane propped himself up on his elbows and furrowed his brow at her. “How about you differentiate some frigging order or genus or some shit like that? Instead of treating me like an idiot, why don’t you tell me what you want me to know?”
Just like that she boomeranged from being prepared to kick him to the curb to thinking he might have hope yet.
“It’s complicated.”
“Should I be taking notes?”
Siobhan shifted on the bed, her hand coming to rest on Shane’s knee where she squeezed in a silent message somewhere between shut the hell up and seriously shut up before I stick my giant glowing knife in you. “Have you ever regretted saving someone’s life?”