by Karen Chance
I wasn't happy, but neither was anyone else. Pritkin hadn't bothered to worry about firearm regulations, having simply thrown a leather trench coat over his collection. He had the shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other, and was pointing them both at Jimmy. Louis-César had his rapier out, which looked really weird considering that he'd changed into more normal-looking clothes for the trip outside MAGIC. He was wearing a tight-fitting T-shirt and a pair of jeans faded almost white. They molded to his lower body so tightly that they might as well have been painted on, and I decided that I'd been wrong before; modern clothes showed off his physique just fine. He was looking the weres over as if trying to decide which to carve up first. They must have thought the same thing, because the attention of most of the rats was focused on him instead of me.
"Tomas, take Mademoiselle Palmer back to her suite and see that she is comfortable. We'll be along presently." Louis-César sounded as calm as if all he and Pritkin planned was to have a couple of drinks and maybe play some blackjack.
I was getting really tired of people ordering me around. "No! There is no freaking way I'm leaving until—"
"I will take her." Pritkin spoke at the same time I did and moved towards me in a sort of sideways shuffle to let him keep his weapons leveled on the rat pack and their vamp outriders. I was about to tell him to go to hell—I wasn't going anywhere with him and his arsenal—when Tomas picked me up and started backing away.
"Tomas, put me down! You don't understand—I've been looking for him for years!" I may as well not have bothered talking for all the attention he paid me, and struggling would only be a waste of time. I gave up and raised my gun, hoping that the close quarters would compensate for the lousy angle and let me get at least a couple shots into Jimmy. I doubted that I'd do much damage, both because of my lack of skill and because weres are notoriously resilient, but all I needed was to slow him down enough for Billy to do his thing. He could find out what I wanted to know and fill me in later. But before I could fire, Tomas shifted me into one arm and snatched the gun away with the other. I was beginning to be very tired of his doing that, but, armed or not, I wasn't giving in. This might be my only chance to deal with Genie's killer, and I wasn't about to miss it. "Billy Joe—what the hell are you waiting for? Do it already!"
The hovering cloud gathered itself and dropped onto Jimmy like a stone. Tomas tried to pull me away but I fought him. He didn't want to hurt me and it slowed him down a fraction. A second passed, no more than that; then Billy Joe burst out of Jimmy as if he'd been fired from a cannon and slammed straight into me. I didn't resist him, thinking that he might not have had enough energy left for the possession and needed a draw to complete the process. But the force kept pushing on me until I thought I would suffocate, as if there was more of him than usual and there wasn't room inside my skin for both of us.
I had no time to think, much less react, before a tremendous explosion rocked me from the inside out, like an airliner losing cabin pressure. I felt something tearing and thought it was my blouse, what little there was of it. I instinctively clutched at it since I'd had to leave the ruined bra behind, but my hand didn't encounter my familiar curves under spandex. Instead, my fingers slid over well-worn denim. I looked down to see the top of my head. I blinked, but the view didn't change: I was still clutching myself to my chest. I had a complete sense of disorientation, but no time to deal with it because Jimmy decided to rush me and all hell broke loose.
Jimmy tore into me, literally, latching on to my arm with those knifelike teeth. I screamed and dropped the body I was carrying onto the ground. I had time to see a pair of huge blue eyes looking up at me in amazement before Jimmy started to shake his head, trying to rip my arm off. I reacted without thinking, pulling away from the piercing pain, and stared in shock as his body went sailing past me and crashed into a nearby car. Throwing him had been unbelievably easy, like he weighed no more than a doll.
I looked around and it seemed as if everyone was moving in slow motion. I watched Pritkin blow a basketball-sized hole through the unfortunate car Jimmy had been standing in front of before I sent him sailing. I could see the explosion as it blasted out of the muzzle of the gun, and the glass that burst out from the windshield seemed to float to the ground as slowly as leaves falling from a tree. Pritkin turned equally slowly to meet the tide of furry bodies coming towards him at a gentle lope instead of an all-out charge.
The only person moving at normal speed was Louis-César, who skewered a rat through the heart and, as I watched, pulled out his blade to turn it on another. "Did you not hear me? Get her out of here!" He was looking at me, and I blinked at him, wondering what he was talking about. Then he whipped out a short throwing knife, which he sent into the throat of a rat that had somehow snuck up on the body lying at my feet. The knife caught it in the back of the neck and it squealed, pawing at the knife with claws extended so that it cut its own flesh. It rolled away from the person it had been about to attack, and I stared down at the sight of myself lying on the asphalt.
I finally noticed that the bloody arm Jimmy had been gnawing on wasn't mine. I felt the pain, saw the blood, but the flesh underneath the gore was a light, even honey tone, a color I couldn't get unless I had it sprayed on. The hand was long fingered, the arm was muscular and the chest supporting this new arm of mine was as flat as a man's. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a man's, and that it was wearing Tomas' cobweb shirt and denim jacket. I staggered against a nearby Volkswagen and the body at my feet sat up.
"Cassie, where are you?" My blue eyes shone with anger and what looked like fear. It was hard to tell; I wasn't used to reading my own expression. "Answer me, damn it!"
I knelt beside what had been my body and looked into those familiar eyes. The face looked wrong for a second, until I realized that I was seeing myself the way everyone else did, instead of the usual mirror view. There was no way to deny it: somehow, I had ended up in Tomas' body. Which left the question, who the hell was in mine?
"Who are you?" I grabbed my arm, trying not to notice that Jack had had a point about my wardrobe lately, and my body let out a shriek.
"Cut that out, goddamnit!" If blue eyes could let off sparks, mine were doing a pretty good job.
"Who are you? Who's in there?" Before I could get an answer, Jimmy shook off the blow I'd dealt him and came at us again. I had plenty of time to grab my gun from Tomas' waistband and shoot him. I saw a crimson flower bloom on his chest, slightly below the heart, if a rat's heart is in the same place as a human's, but he kept coming. I shot him again, in the arm this time. It was a mistake—I was aiming for his head—but it turned out to be a good thing because he had been in the process of raising a gun. He dropped it and scrabbled at his chest, while I knelt there wondering where he'd hidden a weapon in the few remaining pieces of his suit. He paused a few feet away, giving me plenty of time to finish the job, but he wasn't looking at me.
"Call off your pet gorilla or you'll never find your dad." The voice was unmistakably Jimmy's, so I learned another new thing—weres could talk in their altered forms, or at least half satyrs could.
"What?" I eased my finger off the trigger, and Jimmy threw me a dirty glance.
"I wasn't talking to you." He looked down at whoever was in my body and grimaced. "We can make a deal; don't be stupid—call him off. Tony ain't gonna tell you what you want to know. He likes Rog too much where he is."
"My father is dead." I couldn't understand what Jimmy thought he was playing at, but it wasn't going to work.
He looked pissed, although that could have been because of the blood seeping out from between his fingers and splattering the asphalt. "Damn it, I'm not talking to you!"
An explosion caused me to look up, and I saw that Pritkin and Louis-César had been busy. Six furry bodies littered the lot, sprawled over cars and slumped on the ground, about the same number that were still active. Louis-César was methodically butchering two of the remaining ones while dodging the flying talons
that were trying to decapitate him. Pritkin, though, was really tearing loose, and by the expression on his face loving every minute of it. He blew up another car, shooting through a large wererat who looked down at his missing middle in surprise before keeling over. Then he stopped another that had leapt at him from the roof of a minivan by yelling something that caused the were to burst into flames in midair. Blazing pieces rained down on Pritkin's shields—I could see them spark in electric blue wherever one hit—but none got through.
I couldn't believe that no one from the bar was concerned about the noise. Shotgun blasts are not exactly quiet, and neither were the grunting, squealing and scuffling that accompanied them. It was also strange that the vamps weren't attacking but hadn't left, either. Five of them stood around, watching the action as if waiting for something.
"Tomas, behind you!" Louis-César jumped over the body of the huge rat in front of him and started towards me. His expression, and a curse in my own voice from behind me, told me that had I picked a really bad time to be distracted. I whirled around to see that Jimmy had grabbed my body by the hair and had one of those three-inch claws pressed to my throat. "I told you to get her out of here!" Louis-César was looking at Jimmy, but he was talking to me. Or, rather, to Tomas, only he didn't appear to be home. I wasn't too worried about the enraged vampire at my side, though; the claw, which had cut a fine line across my throat, was holding all my attention.
A stream of very inventive curses poured out of my body's mouth, some of which sounded real familiar. Well, at least I knew who was keeping house. "Shut up, Billy. Don't make this worse."
The blue eyes widened and focused on me. "Wait a minute, you're in there? Good God, I thought you were dead! I thought…"
"I said, shut up." I wasn't in the mood for one of Billy's harangues, and I needed to think. Okay, one problem at a time. It wouldn't do me much good to figure out how to get my body back if its throat had been cut in the meantime, so deal with Jimmy now and freak out later.
"What do you want, Jimmy?"
"Be silent, Tomas! You have done enough damage tonight. I will deal with this." Louis-César seemed behind on the action, but I wasn't about to take the time to get him up to speed.
"Shut up," I told him, and the expression of incredulity that passed over his face would have been funny in other circumstances. "Come on, Jimmy, what do you want to let… her… go? You wanted a deal, remember?" It was surreal, standing there in someone else's body and arguing with a giant rat, but all I could see was my body with Billy Joe's frightened expression. I couldn't rely on him to get us out of this: he'd never even made it to thirty before he ended up drowned like an unwanted kitten.
"I want out of here alive; what you think?" Jimmy glanced, not at the vamps at my side, but at the ones lounging around the fight. Okay, maybe they weren't his buddies after all. "And cutie here is going with me. Tony will forget about our little problem if I bring him Cassie, and that's exactly what's gonna happen."
"No way." I was not going to stand there and let Jimmy cart me off. None of my fantasies about Tomas' body had included taking up permanent residence. "Try again."
"Okay, fine. How about I slit her throat? Like that any better? Tony'd prefer her alive, but I'm betting even a corpse would get me outta the doghouse."
"If you harm her, I swear it will take you days to die, and you will beg for death before it comes." Louis-César sounded utterly convincing, but killing Jimmy, however slowly, wasn't going to bring me back to life.
"He's got a point, Jimmy. The only thing keeping you alive right now is Cassie. If you kill her, we'll deal with you before Tony gets the chance."
"So, what? I let her go, then you kill me anyway? I don't think so."
"You should recall that there are many ways to die," Louis-César put in, and I could have kicked him.
"How many times do I have to tell you to shut the hell up?" I heard the edge of panic in my voice and forced myself to calm down. If I lost it now, no way were Pretty Boy and Rambo going to talk Us out of this. Especially since Pritkin seemed to have disappeared, off chasing wererats probably.
"We will talk when this is done," Louis-César said quietly. "I do not know what is wrong with you…"
"Exactly. You don't. You really, really don't."
I smiled at Jimmy, but it only seemed to unnerve him. I figured out why a second later when I nicked my lip on a fang. Tomas' were fully extended, but I didn't know how to retract them. Great, bargaining for my life with a lisp—exactly my luck. "Okay, how about this, Jimmy? You give us Cassie, and we give you a head start. Say, two hours? I'll even promise to distract the vamps over there long enough for you to make a run for it. They're Tony's boys, aren't they? They'll stand there and watch us kill you, or finish the job if you get past us. But we can keep them busy and off your back for a while. Now, that's fair, isn't it?"
Jimmy licked his muzzle with a long, pale tongue, and his little rat ears twitched. "You'd say anything to get her back, then kill me or let them do it. Besides, if I don't take her to Tony, I'm dead anyway."
I sneered. "Since when do weres take orders from vamps? I can't believe you toadied to him all these years!"
Jimmy squealed; I guess I hit a nerve. "There's a new order coming, vampire, and a lotta things are about to change. You may be taking orders from us soon!"
I backpedaled. I wanted to hit his pride, not goad him into doing something stupid. "Maybe, but it won't do you much good if you don't live to see it, right? You don't know me, so you won't take my word. But what about Cassie's? How about if she promises to guarantee our good behavior?" Jimmy looked torn, like he really wanted to believe me, and I knew why. The bullet wound in his arm didn't look too bad, but the injury to his torso was another thing. The long white strip of fur down his front had a widening red stain, and his breath sounded labored and a little bubbly. Ten to one I'd hit a lung, and even a shape-shifter was going to have trouble healing that.
"Come on, Jimmy. It's the best offer you're going to get."
"Tell your muscle to back off if you want a deal, or she dies." He spat on the ground at my feet to underline the threat, and there was blood in it. Jimmy was running out of time and, as soon as he figured that out, so was I. His whiskers twitched, and I realized with surprise that I could actually smell his fear. It was a tangible thing, to the point that I felt like I could roll it around on my tongue like wine.
It was musky with a sweet undertaste, although the latter might have been from his blood. Now that I had noticed the heightened senses of this new body, they were proving very distracting.
I suddenly understood that Louis-César was not angry; he was furious: a simmering, peppery scent radiated off him in waves, and I had the feeling that as much of it was directed at me—or rather at Tomas—as at Jimmy. It was mixed up with the myriad scents suddenly hammering me from all around: the faint, far-off whiff of the sewers running beneath the earth, diesel fumes and cigarette butts from the parking lot and the reek of sauerkraut from a day-old reuben in a Dumpster. My body, on the other hand, smelled good, really good, and at first I thought it was because it was familiar. Then I realized with a shock that it actually smelled like a favorite meal, hot and fresh and ready to eat. I had never thought of blood smelling sweet, like warm apple pie or steaming cider on a cold day, but now it did. I could almost taste the blood running under the warmth of that skin, and feel how rich it would be sliding down my throat. The idea that I smelled like food to Tomas staggered me to the point that I didn't see what happened in front of me until it was half over.
A suffocating cloud of bluish gas billowed around us, obscuring the parking lot and causing my eyes to burn. Several shots went off, and I heard Louis-César shout for Pritkin to stand down. I think he was afraid that the maniac, who had circled around to come at the fight from a new angle, was going to hit me instead of Jimmy. Since I shared that opinion, I didn't interfere. I was about to go wading into the blue, trying to find me before I ended up dead, when my bo
dy came crawling out of the noxious cloud, crying and gasping for breath. I didn't understand what was wrong with it—I wasn't having any trouble breathing—until I remembered that Tomas didn't have to breathe and that I hadn't been doing so the whole time I'd been inside him. That made me start gasping like a fish, while my body crawled up and grabbed me around the ankles. "Help!"
"Am I okay?" I dropped to my knees, almost bowling us both over in the process, and began scrambling around in my clothes. "Tell me you didn't let me get cut up!" I could barely speak past the pulse in my throat, but other than for the thin-edged wound on my abused neck and the dazed, watering eyes, I seemed intact. "Stay here," I told a very confused Billy Joe. "I'm going after Jimmy." My head nodded and a hand flapped at me. I paused to hike up Billy's blouse before anything tumbled out, then crawled into the fray.
Pritkin was yelling something, but although I could hear him, I could also hear everything else, and I do mean everything. Conversations in the locker room were as clear as if they weren't happening half a parking lot away. Music, the ring of slot machines and an argument between a waiter and one of the chefs in the kitchen were all clear as a bell. The heartbeats of the few surviving weres, some of which I could hear trying to crawl away underneath the cars, the breathing of everyone around me and the sound of a small piece of paper being blown across the lot turned the quiet night into rush hour at Grand Central Station. Maybe vamps learned how to be selective and to differentiate between trivial stuff and more important things. I guess they have to or go insane. But I didn't know how, and although I could see Pritkin's grim face, I couldn't make out what he was angry about.
Once in the heart of the swirling blue miasma, I found that Tomas' eyes could see outlines, but no distinct features. Still, it wasn't too hard to make out the fallen body of a giant rat. Damn. I knew they'd screw it up. I wasn't likely to waste any tears on Jimmy, but I'd wanted to know what he'd promised to tell me about my father. Besides, we'd made a deal, and I didn't like that my so-called allies had taken it on themselves to alter it without so much as a word in my direction.