Raphael gave me a dazzling smile. My heart skipped a beat. “Could it be that you want some alone time with me?”
I dropped the safety off my gun.
He raised his hands palms out, still grinning like an idiot.
I put the safety back on and dialed the number.
“Kate Daniels.” My best friend’s voice filled my ear.
“Hey, it’s me. How’s your stomach?”
“Stopped hurting. What’s up?”
“I need to ID a twenty-foot-tall three-headed dog with blood-red fur and burning spit.” That’s right, routine, casual, business as usual, I encounter giant three-headed dogs every day . . .
A small silence filled the phone.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Everything is fine,” I assured her, smiling brightly at the phone, as if she could see me. “Just need an ID.”
“Does the tail look like a snake?”
I considered the long, whip-thin tail with a barb on the end. “Sort of.”
“Are you in the office?”
“No, I’m in our Jeep, out in the field.”
“Look under the passenger seat in a black plastic bin. There should be a book.”
Raphael hopped out, dug under the seat, and pulled out a dog-eared copy of The Almanac of Mystical Creatures.
“Got it,” I said into the phone.
“Page seventy-six.”
Raphael flipped the book open and held it up. On the left page a lithograph showed a three-headed dog with a serpent for a tail. The caption under the picture said CERBERUS.
“Is that your dog?” Kate asked.
“Could be. How the heck did you know the exact page?”
“I have perfect memory!”
I snorted.
She sighed into the phone. “I spilled coffee on that page and had to leave the book open to dry it out. It always opens to that entry now.”
I examined the dog. “It definitely looks similar. Ours was bigger.”
“Ours? Who is there with you?”
“Raphael.”
Kate’s voice snapped. “I’ll be in Atlanta in three hours. Where are you?”
“I said it’s nothing major.”
“Bullshit. You wouldn’t work with Raphael unless the Apocalypse was imminent and that was the only way to prevent it.”
Raphael put his hands over his face and shook, making choking sounds that suspiciously resembled laughter.
“Hardy har har,” I growled. “We’re completely fine on our own, thank you very much. If you want to help, tell me more about Cerberus.”
“He belongs to Hades, god of the Greek underworld, where souls spend their afterlife. His primary function is to guard the front entrance. Also Hades occasionally sends him on an errand, according to myths. He’s supposed to hate sunlight.”
“This one had no trouble with the sun. Can you think of any possible reason he would manifest?”
“Well, a defilement of Hades’ shrine might do it. But Hades didn’t exactly have shrines. The ancient Greeks were scared to death of him. They averted their faces when sacrificing to Hades. They refused to even say his name. So I’m not sure.”
“Thanks.”
“You sure you don’t need me to come?”
“Positive.”
“Call me if anything.”
I hung up and looked at Raphael. “Your mother’s mate, what was his name?”
“Alex Doulos.”
“Was he a Greek pagan?”
A frown twisted Raphael’s face. “I have no idea. It didn’t come up. We had a careful relationship. He didn’t try to be my dad and I didn’t try to be his son. We met at holiday dinners and talked about sports mostly. It was a safe topic. What are you thinking?”
I shook my head. “I’m trying very hard not to think anything. I’m just collecting data at this point. Did you see the way Fido fell?”
“Like he was on a leash and it ran out.” Raphael drummed a quick rhythm on the dashboard.
“It probably means he’s somehow bound to a specific area. I think we should go and look at it.”
“I’m game.” Raphael shivered. “I don’t suppose you have any spare clothes?”
“You should’ve thought of clothes before you decided to go human.”
The sinful smile was back. “I always dreamt of being naked with you. Couldn’t pass up the chance.”
I started the Jeep. “Could you get any more full of yourself?”
“I’m mostly interested in getting you full of me.”
The vision of being full of Raphael zinged through my brain, short-circuiting rational thought. “Come to think of it, there is something on your lips. Why don’t you use that side mirror over there to check it out?”
He glanced into the side mirror and stared, slack-jawed. His lips were solid black. A thick black line of guy liner outlined his deep-set eyes and a little black tear dripped down his left cheek-bone. He touched his cheek, stretching the skin to better examine the tear, his face a flat mask, glanced at me, and exploded with laughter.
I stood atop the Jeep’s hood and slowly swept the vast network of ravines with binoculars. The Jeep itself sat on the edge of a shallow gap, just beyond the spot where Cerberus almost took a bite out of our backseat. Raphael, still gloriously naked, sat in the passenger seat and plucked random Hades-related trivia from the book.
“A fun guy, this Hades. Apparently he bridenapped his wife.”
“Things were much simpler in ancient Greece if you were a god. I’m sure he got himself a harem of mistresses, too.” The wind swirled with Raphael’s scents: the light musk of his sweat, the delicious redolence of his skin . . . I was having trouble concentrating.
“No,” Raphael said, flipping a page. “Actually, Hades didn’t screw around. His wife was the daughter of Demeter, goddess of youth, fertility, and harvest. After Hades stole Persephone, Demeter refused to let the plants grow, starving everyone, and they had to reach a compromise: Persephone spends half of the year with him and half with her mother. The guy only had her for six months out of the year, and he still remained faithful. That must be some sweet sex right there.”
I took the binoculars down so I could roll my eyes. “Do you ever think of anything but sex?”
“Yes, I do. Sometimes I think of waking up next to you. Or making you laugh.”
I was beginning to regret this.
“Of course, I do occasionally get hungry . . .” he added. “And cold.”
A white speck caught my eye. I adjusted the binoculars. A house. A two-story colonial, seemingly intact, sitting in the bottom of a ravine. I could only see the roof and a small slice of the upper story.
Interesting.
“Kate was right: the Greeks lived in fear of this guy. Instead of speaking his name, they called him the Rich One, the Notorious One, the Ruler of Many, and so on. Despite his sour disposition, he was considered to be a just god. The one sure way to piss Hades off was to steal one of the shades—souls—from his realm or to somehow avoid death. This dude Sisyphus apparently finagled a way out of death a couple of times, and Hades had it and made him drag an enormous boulder up a mountain. Every time Sisyphus almost gets to the top, the boulder rolls down and he has to do it all over. Thus the term ‘Si syphean task.’ Huh. I never knew that’s where it came from.”
He showed me a page. On it a man and a woman sat side by side on simple thrones. To one side of the pair stood Cerberus. To the other an angel with black wings and a flaming sword.
“Who is that?”
“Thanatos. Angel of death.”
“Didn’t know the Greeks had angels.” I turned back to watching the house. And just in time, too. Cerberus trotted out of the ravine to the left of the house. I could barely see his back. He passed by the building and began to circle it.
“I see a house,” I said.
Raphael landed next to me with inhuman agility. I passed the binoculars to him and he straightened, almost a foot taller
than me. Standing next to him was a trial: his scents sang through me, the warmth of his body seeped through my clothes, and his skin practically glowed. Everything about him said “mate” to me. It wasn’t rational. It was the animal me, and I had to be better than that.
“I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “Here is Fido. Going round and round. I wonder what’s in that house?”
“I wonder why he doesn’t just go in and get whatever it is.”
“I think we should find out. Andrea?”
“Yes?” I wished he would stop saying my name.
“Why are your eyes closed?”
Because you’re standing next to me. “It helps me think.”
I felt the heat wash over me and knew he had leaned to me. His voice was a soft masculine rasp, entirely too intimate. “I thought you were trying not to think.”
I opened my eyes and found the deep smoldering blue of his irises right next to me. I lifted my index finger and pushed his chest. He slid on the Jeep’s hood, distorted by the charged-water engine underneath, and had to jump off, landing with the grace of a gymnast on the ground.
“Personal space,” I told him. “I protect mine.”
He simply smiled.
“How do we get to the house with the dog making shark circles around it?” I asked.
“Fido doesn’t see that well,” Raphael said. “It took him a while to find the crevice where I was hiding before, and he had to sniff me out. We fool his nose by masking our scent, we can probably get close enough.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“The old-fashioned way.”
I sighed. “Which would be?”
Raphael shook his head. “You really don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.”
He trotted off to the side and dived into a ravine. I waited for a couple of minutes, and he emerged, carrying two dark objects, and tossed one of them to me. Reflexively I caught it even as the reek lashed my nostrils. A dead, half-decomposed cat.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Some people roll in it.” He grabbed the dog carcass and ripped it in a half. Maggots spilled. He shook them out. “I prefer to tear them and tie pieces on myself. But if you would prefer to rub it all over your skin, you can do that, too.”
All my fantasies of touching him evaporated into thin air with a small pop.
“Hunting one-oh-one,” he said. “Didn’t your pack ever do the hunts in Texas?”
“No. I wasn’t in that kind of pack.” And I had fought my way out of shapeshifter society before it was too late.
My face must’ve showed my memories, because he paused. “That bad?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Raphael reached to the backseat and pulled a roll of cord we kept there. He uncoiled a foot-long piece and tore the tough hemp rope like it was a hair. “You don’t have to do it,” he said. “I keep forgetting you’re not—”
Not what? Not normal? Not like him?
“—properly trained. I’ll be back shortly.”
He wasn’t better than me. Whatever he could handle, I could deal with as well.
I picked up the roll of twine. If I had been straight bouda, like my mother, I would’ve enjoyed all of the enhancements Lyc-V brought, but even though I wasn’t as strong as a regular shapeshifter, I could handle the damn rope. I tore a piece, sighed, and pulled the cat apart.
“It’s a good thing I’m part hyena,” I murmured, moving along the bottom of the ravine. Bits of the cat corpse dangled from me, strategically positioned on my limbs and suspended from a cord off my neck. To a human nose, all decomposition odors were similar, but in reality each corpse gave off its own specific scent just as it did in life. And this particular carcass reeked of something nauseatingly sour. “If I were a cat, I’d probably die of the stink and the sheer indignity.”
“You know who can’t handle it?” Raphael scrambled up the slope like a gecko. “Doolittle.”
“The Pack’s doctor?” Even carrying my Weatherby, I made it out of the ravine faster than he did. What I couldn’t match in strength, I made up in agility and speed.
“Yeah. Badgers are very clean. In the wild, foxes sometimes steal badger burrows by sneaking into them and crapping all over the place. The badger is so prissy, he’d rather dig a new burrow than clean his old one up. Doolittle will do open-heart surgery if he has to, but hand him a chunk of a putrid cadaver and he’ll run for the hills.”
An echo of a growl washed over us. He clamped his mouth shut. We’d reached the dog’s hearing range.
A few minutes later we went aground on the edge. Several ravines converged here, forming a gap almost wide enough to enclose a football field. The house sat in the center of the gap. Two stories high, with a row of white columns supporting a triangular roof, it looked at us with twin rows of windows blocked by dark shutters. Its black front door stood closed and so did the doors of the cellar on the left side. A ten-foot-tall fence topped with coils of barbed wire guarded the house.
As we watched, Cerberus trotted out of the ravine. He whined softly, spit dripping in burning clumps of foam from between his fangs, and inched toward the fence. The left head stretched on his shaggy neck and sniffed at the mesh. A blue spark jumped from the metal to his nose. Cerberus yelped, clawed the ground in frustration, and trotted off.
Electrified fencing. Peculiar. No wires stretched to the house, so the power must have come from inside. I strained and heard the faint hum of a generator.
The doors to the cellar rose slowly. Something squirmed beneath them, something pale. The right half of the cellar door fell open and a creature leapt into the open. Its gaunt, vaguely humanoid body had lost every iota of its hair and fat long ego. Thick, bloodless skin sheathed the dry cords of its muscles, every rib distinct beneath its leathery hide. Its stomach was hard and ridged. Huge yellow claws tipped the fingers of its hands and its long toes.
A vampire. And where there was a vampire, there had to be a navigator. I raised the binoculars to my eyes.
The vampire’s face was horrible, a death mask sculpted with human features devoid of emotion, intellect, and self-awareness. The creature paused, perched on the edge of the cellar entrance. It unhinged its maw, displaying twin sickles of yellow fangs, leapt straight up, and clutched on to the wall of the house like a fly. The vamp scuttled up the wall, ran along the dark roof to the white stub of the chimney, and hopped in like some nightmarish Santa.
We could possibly deal with the electric fence. But a vampire would prove problematic. We had no way of knowing how many of them were in that house. Two would present a challenge. Three would be suicide. Especially if magic hit.
“Andrea?” Raphael’s voice was a soft cloud of warmth in my ear.
I glanced at him. What?
“Did you like the thing I left for you?”
The thing? Oh. The thing. Shapeshifters had an odd way of courtship. Mostly it involved proving to your prospective mate what a stealthy and sleek operator you were by prancing in and out of her territory. Because all of the land belonged to the Pack overall, “territory” came to be defined as the potential mate’s house. Most shapeshifters broke in and left presents, but boudas had an odd sense of humor. They broke into the houses of their intended and played practical jokes.
Raphael’s father glued Aunt B’s furniture to the ceiling. Raphael’s uncle lock picked his way into Raphael’s aunt’s house, flipped all the doors around, and hung them back on their hinges so the handles were inside. In fine bouda tradition, Raphael somehow snuck away during the Midnight Games, broke into my apartment, and left me the thing.
“You want to know that now?” I hissed in a fierce whisper.
“Just tell me yes or no?”
“Do you really think this is the best time?”
His eyes flashed with red. “There might not be any other time left.”
I turned and saw Cerberus crouching in the ravine behind us. He stood there absolutely still,
the three pairs of his eyes fixed on us with baleful fury.
I turned very slowly to Raphael.
“Did you like the thing?” he asked with quiet desperation.
“Yes. It was funny.”
He grinned, his face made unbearably handsome by the flash of his smile.
With a deafening growl, Cerberus charged us. Fur sheathed the monstrous bloom of Raphael’s jaws. I flipped on my back.
Cerberus’s center head dove at me, his black maw gaping, ready to swallow me whole.
I fired.
The first shot punched the back of the dog’s mouth. It yelped and I sank two more in the same spot. Flesh exploded and I saw sky through the hole where the back of the beast’s throat used to be. The head drooped down. I rolled clear just as an enormous paw clawed the spot where I had dropped. The smallest claw grazed my side and leg, ripping the clothes in a hot flash of pain.
I leapt to my feet. The left head dove for me and missed as Raphael launched himself into the air, slicing Cerberus’s nose with his claws. Cerberus jerked back and Raphael clutched on to his muzzle. The dog shook, but Raphael clung to it, flinging bloody chunks of dog flesh to the ground.
I backed up, reloading. Raphael carved huge clumps out of Cerberus’s muzzle in a frenzied whirl of fur and claws. Blood spurted in dark streams.
The right head snapped at him, great fangs clamping together like a bear trap. Raphael hooked his claws into the dog’s nose, dropped out of the way, swung his legs like a gymnast on a pommel horse, and smashed his clawed feet into Cerberus’s right head.
I snapped the Weatherby up, anticipating Cerberus’s recoil.
The huge head swung back, as if in slow motion, the ruby eye clear and bright.
Steady. Aim.
An ancient tie stretched between Cerberus and me, vibrating like a live wire. The bond between the hunter and her prey.
The head reared higher and higher.
I have time.
I fired.
Blood burst from the back of Cerberus’s head. The head jerked straight up, its nose pointing to the sky. Fire leaked from its ruined orbit. The flames surged, engulfing the head. As it crashed down, bouncing once on the hard dirt, Raphael leapt to the ground. Behind him the last head shuddered and fell, catching the flames. Raphael straightened, a dark demonic figure silhouetted against the orange fire, his eyes two points of red light.
Charlaine Harris Page 17