by Rhys Ford
His meaty hand gripped my knee as he went. I wasn’t sure if he thought I was going to twitch or kick him, but Jason worked in a silent grunting storm of fury and pain. He was a shave-pated gorilla of a man, a dirty-blond scraggle of chin fuzz held up by a curl of muscle and attitude, and as he bent over my legs and dug in another line, he muttered to himself, talking about shading and my pale skin.
“You were almost done an hour ago, dick,” I reminded him. Jason kept going.
He might have even laughed.
The snick-hiss-snick buzz of the tat machine initially drove Newt off as soon as Jason kicked it into gear, but he’d slunk back eventually. In the few hours since we’d begun finishing the dragon on my hip and leg, I’d seen Newt up close at least three times. A quick sniff at Jason’s heavy boot, then a couple of tentative nibbles on my toes. Since I was stretched out on the massage table Jason’d brought with him, I couldn’t nudge Newt away when I felt his teeth sink in on the meat of my little toe for the third time.
“I’m not dead yet, asshole.” I couldn’t move my foot. Not without dislodging Jason’s haphazard perch on my leg. It was one thing to shift to release a tight muscle. Quite another thing to wiggle like a worm to get the cat loose. “Get off of me, Newt.”
Jason didn’t botch the line as the cat and I dueled for possession of my toe. No, the rapid-fire needle head only jumped when someone began banging on the warehouse’s heavy wooden front door. I felt the burn of a lost line, then the jerking of the needles being lifted up before they did too much damage. The hot on my skin was followed by the sear of Jason’s temper letting his tongue have free use of every profanity he possibly knew, and the cat took off for parts unknown.
“Kai!” High court Sidhe accented and furious, the shout rattled the glass panes running along the second story landing. “Open this damned door! I need to talk to you!”
“Well, you’re done, and no damage on that scrape. You’re all good.” Jason’s swearing rant was doused in a flash of amusement, and he patted at the scorched patch of skin along my lower thigh. “Who’s that outside? Ex-boyfriend? Or future ex?”
“Neither. Never going to be a current or ex-boyfriend. Asshole’s nothing but trouble,” I grumbled, scrambling to sit up. “Where the hell are my jeans?”
“Found these.” Jason jerked his head up, holding a pair of sweats I’d tossed on the couch. “Crap, dude. I don’t think I locked the door behind me.”
What I didn’t need to hear was the snick of the doorknob being unlatched as I was searching for my pants, but I heard it anyway. Instinct is a funny thing. Years of living on the edge of monsters’ teeth and bloodthirsty mercenaries tends to make for a bit of paranoia and knee-jerk reactions. Before the door swung open, Jason had guns in hand, and Ryder stepped into the sun-drenched warehouse to stare down the barrels of two loaded Berettas.
Ryder might not have known the guns were primed to punch holes through his soft meat, but he’d known me long enough to suspect no one I knew ever pointed a weapon at anyone or anything without a full commitment to using it.
No one just walks into my place uninvited and unannounced. It was a good way to get dead, and fast.
Caught between the drawn guns, Ryder stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth parted in midshout. Clearing his throat, he slowly raised his hands, the sun licking at his golden hair, his too-damned-pretty face draped in a tangle of light and shadows.
“The door was open. So I came in,” he purred at me, heavy with promise and a hint of anger. “I came to talk to you. Not to die.”
There was a fire in his eyes, one not even the promise of death could douse. Ryder was a creature of passion and ideals. It was a pity we lived in a world where those two concepts would soon get him killed if he didn’t temper them with common sense.
Ryder rode his passions like the nightmares flowed over the prairies out past Borrego. His bright emerald eyes glittered with fragments of gold and silver, rimmed with black lashes at odds with his metallic gold hair streaked with wheat and goldenrod strands. Even from across the room I could smell his skin, elfin pheromones be damned. He carried vanilla and green tea hints with him, throwing off a sweet spiciness that set my blood to boil.
Taller than I was—not a great feat since I’d spent my formative years struggling to stay alive with what little nourishment I got—Ryder was still leaner, an elegant, sleek statue carved by a beauty-loving god and brought to life by a demon who hated my guts. He drove me mad. I wanted him like my body needed water to survive. Thankfully my brain held my urges in check, and I’d tucked my lust behind a thick door I hoped he’d never crack.
Because unlike my damned tattoo artist, I wasn’t just going to leave the door to my inner sanctum unlocked and unprotected.
“Well, this was nice. I’m going to head out, seeing as you’ve got company.” Jason sounded casual, as if he’d spent many a late afternoon pointing a gun at a sidhe lord. “Since the carb’s already in my car, mind if I just leave the table here until I come back in a few weeks? You know how to wrap that shit up, right?”
“You’re not leaving the machine, right?” I eyed the instrument of torture he’d used on my body. “Because you know, that would just give me ideas I shouldn’t have.”
“That I’ll take with me.” He lowered his guns, tucking one into his jeans’ waistband then shoving the other into the holster he’d left on the table. “Have fun with Elrond here.”
“You’re going to shoot your balls off doing that,” I cautioned. “Use a holster. There’s living dangerously and then there’s living stupid.”
“Like you’re one to talk. Let me break this stuff down and then I’ll get out of your hair. Wouldn’t want to cramp your style.” Jason glanced at Ryder, dismissing his presence with a soft snort. “You know, now that you’ve got a boyfriend.”
“YOU TOLD him we were lovers?” Ryder ghosted after me as I limped to the kitchen to grab more paper towels. He’d become my long golden shadow once Jason was out the door, standing to the side while I wrestled to close the massage table up, but he’d made no move to help.
“Please. I’m crazy, not stupid.” I sidestepped a crate Jason’d used to unpack his stuff on. “It was a joke. Dude thought he was being funny. People—human people—like to poke at each other because it’s funny.”
He chuckled. “In your case, it would be like poking at a wasp’s nest with a very short stick.”
My leg ached a bit, my skin dappled with new gritty ink and blood. The dragon Jason’d started a month ago was complete, a swirling weave of red, gold, and blues, a pretty stylized rendering of the dragon who’d torn Oketsu to shreds and then died in a blaze of fire and asphalt after I’d tricked it into going after the Mustang’s rear lights.
That dragon was a source of contention between me and Ryder. Now the bones of another lizard and a prismatic egg were added to the list. The way we were headed, the mountain between us was going to be made of dead lizard parts and would be too big for either of us to climb over.
Pity we were both just too damned stubborn to walk around it to settle our differences. It was a good theory to have but impossible in practice. I didn’t see either one of us bending our heads down on the subject, and judging by the scowl on Ryder’s face when I wiped antiseptic wash over my newly finished tattoo, that coming round the mountain was a long ways off.
I’d gotten a clean pass on the paper towel and debated putting on pants. Sure, my boxers weren’t exactly high fashion, but they covered what they needed to, and my T-shirt, while it’d seen better days, was going to be as formal as I got for His Lordship.
There were several dragons on my thighs, hips, and the small of my back, inked by different artists I knew. All of the lizards were ones I’d had a hand in killing, a marking of my body in exchange for the life I’d taken. His Lordship’d seen them before. I’d nearly been killed during our last Pendle run, and he’d taken me here—home—to get me patched up. He and Dalia played doctor with me and I got less dead,
but Arioch only knew what they’d done to me while I was out.
Probably nothing, but I didn’t like to be unconscious and naked while other people poked at me. I’d spent too much of my childhood years in that exact same situation, and it wasn’t something I cared to relive.
“Are you going to answer me, Kai?” Ryder’s scowl deepened as he studied my legs, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned against one of the steel columns supporting the upper landing.
“How about if we get to the real reason you’re here so you can go back home?” I found the meatpacking rectangles I was looking for on the coffee table, right where I’d left them. A few strips of paper tape and I’d covered the tattoo enough for me to put on pants without worrying about getting the fabric stuck in my healing skin. I’d already gone through enough of that only a few hours ago. “Let me guess. Someone called you to rat me out about shaking the museum guy down for money.”
“That was…. Yes, I heard about it. You shot a prismatic dragon egg in the middle of the museum’s main hall, Kai. Right where the wood lobby meets the hall’s marble tiles. The smell alone—” Ryder shuddered. “They are going to have to rip up everything to get the stench out. You destroyed the egg and still took the money. The director—”
“Of course I took the money. He paid for the egg. The contract was met,” I grumbled. “Asshole also said they were just going to throw it away. So I helped them along with that process. Easier to pick up pieces than carry the thing out whole. Why are you here, Ryder? To get the money back? To yell at my head for handing over a sacred pile of dragon balut to an asshole who bows and scrapes down to the first sidhe lord he meets? Screw that. I almost died getting that damned egg for him, and he was going to throw it out like it was nothing.”
Kind of like I was nothing, but I wasn’t going to toss that correlation into Ryder’s face.
“They were going to dispose of it with all due ceremony. It’s called diplomacy, Kai. The museum agreed to honor the court’s beliefs and withdraw some of the more offensive exhibits. Compromise. Something you know little about. You didn’t have to shoot the egg.” Ryder sighed as he sat down on the love seat Newt usually claimed as his own. “I asked the museum to remove all the dragon artifacts from its collection because they are offensive to the sidhe. To glorify a dragon’s death… its bones—”
“A lot of us make our living off of those bones, Your Lordship. Did you ever think about that? And don’t tell me you paid the museum for its troubles. No amount of money is going to make up for the loss of visitors to the museum, and when those people don’t come in, everyone who works there suffers. Stalkers? We’ll manage.” I continued to clean up the debris left over from my inking, stuffing a few paper towels into a bag. “There are lots of private collectors who pay big bucks for us to retrieve bones and eggs. We’ll manage, and there are rules, Ryder. No taking live animals and no killing a lizard to meet a contract.
“Every damned retrieval off the lava has to be dead or inert. No harm, no foul. Museums are a drop in the bucket for us, but that one damned dragon skeleton that was hanging up in that hall?” I gritted my teeth. That missing dragon made it personal, hitting me where it hurt the most, my pride. I’d sooner take a shot to the balls than to my pride. “Those bones meant people working around it could eat, pay their rent, and maybe even keep their kids in school.
“And sure as hell don’t talk to me about how precious and sacred dragons are.” I took a breath and continued, “Because you’re sitting there with leather shoes on, and there’s a whole bunch of people who think a damned cow is the pinnacle of life. So you can go take your self-righteous shit with you as you close the door behind your scrawny ass when you leave.”
Four
I WAS about to grab Ryder by the lapels of his expensive jacket and toss him out when the banging on the door began anew. Since the person I least wanted to see, after my megalomaniac father, was already in my living room taking up space and breathing my air, I went for my shotgun.
“Who the hell is—” I started and turned, but Ryder being the asshole he was, of course opened the door before I could get to the latch.
“It’s cold out there,” a beak-nosed old human grumbled at me through her chattering teeth. “Are you the Stalker? He doesn’t look like much, Lord Ryder. Are you sure he can do the job?”
Skinny to the point of scarecrow and topped with a wild mane of silver hair, she frantically rubbed her liver-spotted hands over her skinny arms and stamped her feet on the doormat. Wearing nothing but a pair of tweed trousers, a thin cotton button-up shirt, and loafers, she’d have frozen to death if we weren’t in San Diego.
She was also oblivious to the shotgun I practically shoved up her wide, flaring nostrils.
A couple of things wiggled past the shoot-him-first response in my brain. She’d come looking for Ryder. Literally spitting out Ryder’s name as soon as the door was open. And she’d been expecting a Stalker.
I don’t like people knowing where I live. The elfin-human wars were still going on in some people’s brains, and while I didn’t hide my existence, I also didn’t advertise where my front door was. Someone looking for a little bit of elfin fun wasn’t going to look in a row of old warehouses, but word got around. I’d pissed off more than a couple of other Stalkers over the years, so….
“Who the hell is this?” I didn’t lower the shotgun, and the old woman finally blinked her pale green eyes behind her wire-rimmed spectacles. “And why is she looking for a Stalker? Here? And not at the Post, where everyone else does their business?”
“This is Professor Violet Marshall. She is a professor of elfin studies at the university, specializing in locating ancient elfin sites lost during the Merge,” Ryder said, pushing the shotgun away from the woman’s face. “And she’s your next job.”
I let him drop the barrel down, and the professor rubbed at her nose. “Then she goes to the Post and contracts me through—”
“I’m the one paying you for this, Kai.” Ryder gave me a number big enough for my stomach to clench in. “Under the terms of your liaison contract with the Court and SoCalGov, I’m responsible for the costs of any expedition you do for us. I am sponsoring Professor Marshall’s contract, so no Post.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, or at least long enough for Marshall to get uncomfortable and clear her throat. The open door was letting all the warm air out, and while Newt never went outside, being the asshole he was, he’d slip out while I was busy arguing with Ryder just to make me hunt for him in the cold.
The money was also really, really good. More than enough to pay for Dempsey’s medical bills if I tossed the egg’s bounty into the pile. Still, it rankled to be on Ryder’s leash, and with every tiny tug, I could feel his hold on me tighten.
Paybacks are a bitch, especially when I’m the one doing the paying. But when it was all said and done, my tombstone wasn’t going to have He was a stupid son of a bitch engraved on it. Not if I could help it.
“Come on in.” I smiled at the professor, baring my canines. “Let me put some pants on and make us coffee.”
“THESE ARE very interesting.” Marshall reached for the knotted curls of iron rebar I kept on the coffee table. “Do you mind if I handle them? They look like outsider art—”
“Don’t touch those,” Ryder barked at the same time I nodded at the professor.
“Sure, go ahead,” I encouraged, putting down the mugs of coffee I’d brought in from the kitchen area. “Knock yourself out.”
The warehouse’s living space was mostly defined by a few couches, tables, and cat hair. I was still working on the 455 motor I had up on a rolling sling near the door to the garage and the carpeted, multileveled cat tree Newt lounged on. All in all, the place was as homey and normal as it was going to get. Most of the furniture I’d either found or had been given to me by friends who were clearing out their storage spaces, with the exception of the king-sized bed I’d bought new and placed on the upper landing, using t
he top of the garage as my sleeping space.
In the middle of it all were the mottled red iron knots on the long table between the couches that nearly everyone mistook for art. Up until a few weeks ago, only a few people—Dempsey, my pseudo-uncle Jonas, Sparky, and Dalia, my favorite neighbor and friend—knew the rebar, bolts, and nuts once made their home in my shoulder blades and back, scarring me with the dragon-wings sigil of my unsidhe father’s house.
Now I could count Ryder among those select few, and only because he’d seen my scars then figured it out.
I didn’t know if there was a word strong enough for how he felt about what was done to me and his loathing at the rebar sitting out for people to play with, but I’d given it my best shot once with disgustipated. From the look he’d given me, I’d say even that fell far short of the mark.
“It’s odd you would have iron in your home, Stalker Gracen,” Marshall murmured, turning the larger coiled mess over in her hands. “Aren’t the elfin allergic to iron? Or is it just the unsidhe? From your hair, I’d assume you were Dusk Court at the door, but your eyes are amethyst, clearly a sidhe color—”
“Kai is a… special case,” Ryder ground out. “I consider him one of my own Court. He, being Kai, naturally disagrees with this because he is contrary and willful, but you may think of him as sidhe.”
I sat back and grinned at his discomfort. He couldn’t break his vow of secrecy about my chimera origins, not after I’d gotten his sidhe-honor-bound promise. I was technically as much of a monster as any one of my father, Tanic’s, ainmhi dubh, the black dogs he created out of blood magic, pain, and rotting meat. Nothing more than blood magic, his unsidhe sperm, and a sidhe woman’s egg, I’d been the only one of his experiments to look elfin. I’d seen the corpses of his other attempts, floating in cloudy liquid-filled jars and lining the shelves of his workroom, but I was viable, malleable even, and Tanic wanted me back. Sadly, after my father’d aged my body then spent his time tearing me apart, he’d lost me when one of his guards got greedy and thought to sell me to my sidhe incubator’s family.