City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  I flee farther into the building. There’s construction equipment everywhere, an obstacle course. Nails sticking out of boards that skim my feet. Missing panels in the floor that threaten to drop me into the basement. Low-hanging wiring that may or may not be live.

  Up the stairs I go, as fast as my spent legs can take me, until I reach the second floor—everything above it is barebones. Below me, the Wolves tear into the ground floor, slinging loose boards and power tools and stacks of cinderblocks all over the place, destroying weeks’ worth of work.

  Searching the available rooms on the hallway—only two have finished walls—I pick the first one on the right and head inside, quietly locking the door behind me. In the dim light, I seek out something to barricade the door with, but beyond a basic toolbox in the corner, some tiny barrels covered with a tarp, and a couple of fold-out chairs, there’s nothing I can use to keep the Wolves out. Not that blocking the door would save me for long. The walls, for an office, clearly, aren’t much more than drywall and insulation. If the Wolves try hard enough, they can break through.

  I’m dead. There’s nowhere else to go. Except back out into the hall, where the Wolves are currently prowling around, having made it up the stairs. Or…there’s a window on the far wall.

  I shuffle over to the window to peer out and—summarily trip over the tarp. I fall flat on my face and bust my chin open on the scratchy unfinished floor. Cursing, I roll over and grab the tarp to toss it away, only to notice something I completely missed before. The tarp isn’t covering small barrels, like I assumed when I first came in. It’s covering tanks.

  Propane tanks.

  My hand drops the tarp and sinks to my back pocket. The matches.

  The Wolves reach the locked door and nudge it.

  I rush across the room, to the toolbox, and grab a hammer. Next, I return to the window, snagging a propane tank on the way.

  Hammer held high over my head, I hesitate. What if it sparks when I hit it and I blow myself up? Would death by Wolf be better or worse than death by fire?

  I bite my tongue and hiss out, “Worse.”

  Then I bring the hammer down as hard as I can with so little strength left, and the nozzle of the tank pops off with a clang, skittering across the floor. Propane spills out, spreading across the plywood in a shallow pool.

  I brace the bottom of the hammer against the floor and balance the metal head against the underside of the tank, pointing the nozzle at a downward angle so the propane will continue to pour out until the tank is empty.

  Someone rams the door. It cracks down the middle.

  I back up to the window, jimmy the lock, and slide the left pane open to the right. The resulting gap is just wide enough for me to fit through.

  Another impact with the door. Splinters fly out and bounce across the propane-covered floor. But the door holds.

  As the pool of propane circles back toward me, I climb up into the window, knees bent. A story below me, a large snowdrift promises to cushion my landing. I can’t be sure it’s deep enough. Or not hiding anything sharp and pointy. But again, I’d rather break my neck or skull than go out as Wolf food.

  My fingers slip into my pocket and tug out the matches. I tear the cover off the pack and press the striking strip horizontally against the match heads. Then, after a nervous breath, I drag the strip across all the matches at the same time. They don’t all light at once from the friction, but enough do to set the whole pack ablaze.

  I stare at the wavering flame clutched in my hand, whispering prayers to a god I don’t worship.

  The Wolf rams into the door one last time, and it shatters.

  I toss the match pack on the floor and tip backward out the window.

  Halfway to the ground, my world is consumed by the blinding glow of fire. Flames burst out the window, breaking the glass. The unfinished ceiling of the second floor explodes from the force of ignition, and smoke roils up through the skeleton of the building-to-be, curling around the metal bones. The floor of the room buckles beneath the blast and falls through to the unfinished lobby beneath. And somewhere, in the office that never was, inhuman shrieks of agony are nearly drowned out by the inferno’s roar.

  My body hits the snow.

  I lie there for minutes that feel like hours, watching the fire consume months’ worth of hard work, hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one point, I spot something tumbling down the stairs, hard to see through the tongues of fire curling over every piece of wood, through the dense smoke snaking around the corners. But that something is big enough and familiar enough for me to identify: one of the Wolves. Injured. Badly.

  The Wolf drags himself through the fire—he can’t avoid it, it’s everywhere—and outside via an unfinished wall on the bottom floor. Half his fur is gone. The visible skin beneath is blackened and burned away, down to the bone in some places. One of his ears is missing, either eaten completely by the flames or sheared off by a piece of debris. And lastly, he’s dragging both his hind legs. Something collapsed on his back and paralyzed him from the waist down.

  Werewolves are hard to kill.

  But I wonder, watching this wounded Wolf who nearly murdered me, as he limps away from the battlefield, defeated…I wonder just how much a man disguised as a beast can truly survive. In spirit, if nothing else.

  The Wolf disappears into the woods and doesn’t return. The second Wolf who was in the building never emerges (the one who broke the door, I guess). The initial blast must have killed him on the spot. And—

  A dangerous growl to my right.

  I sit up. Brace my hands against the compacted snow beneath me to stay upright. Suck in a breath with tired, tortured lungs, surrounded by cracked ribs. Let it out as a cloud of steam in the cold winter night. And then, resignation sour on my tongue, I turn my head to face McKinney.

  He’s standing at the corner of the building. His Wolf eyes reflect the churning inferno before us. And those eyes of fire are focused on me. Nothing but me. Not the flames eating through the walls. Not the tracks of his surviving minion leading to the woods. Not the distant flicker of blue and red that might, might be a police vehicle heading this way. Cal Kinsey is the singular thought in this werewolf bastard’s mind. Because Cal Kinsey, wretched human, has killed one of his subordinates.

  Vic Martinez’s unsolved murder started this whole fiasco.

  Now either Zhang or Donahue is dead. At my hands. So if McKinney didn’t want to butcher me before…

  The Wolf charges.

  There’s nowhere for me to go. A fire in front of me, too hot to survive. Bare ground behind me, too far to run. To my left, a stack of thin metal pipes, secured with taut cords. And McKinney on the right, teeth bared, snarling, as he closes the distance between us to eat me alive.

  There’s nowhere for me to go, but I run anyway—because I refuse to head to my unknown afterlife with the weight of surrender on my shoulders. I scuttle backward to the stack of pipes and climb as fast as I can. The stack is maybe ten, twelve feet tall, and the snow-slicked metal is slippery against my calloused hands. My feet slip off twice on my way up, and I glance over my shoulder each time, catching glimpses of McKinney’s massive Wolf form growing larger and larger in my field of vision. The fire in his eyes seems to burn through my skull.

  I’m almost to the top when he reaches the base of the pipe stack. He rams it, trying to throw me off, but the pipes are small enough to wrap my hands around, so I hang on, brace myself, as the stretchy cords strain to hold the stack together. The whole thing wavers, back and forth, as if trying to decide whether or not to topple. It stays upright. Barely.

  McKinney backs away a few feet and roars, furious I didn’t fall to my doom. I ascend the last few feet up the pipe stack and straddle the top, all four of my limbs quaking so hard I can hardly balance. The Wolf paces at the bottom, throwing fiery glares at me in between his steps as he tries to figure out his next move. He can’t climb up after me with Wolf paws, one tiny disadvantage to his animal form. But at th
e same time, he’s so large that he might be able to jump high enough to grab me with his teeth and yank me off the pipes.

  I scrutinize every twitch in his bulky muscles. Waiting, tense, for the moment he decides to leap at me. If I roll over the back side of the pipe stack, he might miss and…

  McKinney doesn’t go straight for me at all. Instead of jumping up to get me, he prowls over to one of the cords holding the stack together. With an outstretched paw, claws extended, he flicks the cord to test its strength. The outer fabric layer of the cord unravels at his touch. He can cut through the cord, both cords, and then ram the stack again, collapsing it and throwing me to the icy ground below. Where my battered flesh will be easy pickings for his teeth.

  Shit, what can I do now? There must be something.

  A tall stack of heavy pipes held in place by two cords. How can I upend McKinney’s plan to knock it over?

  Think. Think! You made the DSI elite for a reason, Kinsey!

  McKinney lines up his claws with the first cord to slash through it in one swift blow.

  Stack of pipes. Two cords.

  Stack of pipes that can fall in multiple directions.

  Two cords that McKinney can’t break at the same time.

  So what if I…?

  McKinney swipes his sharp claws at the first cord, and it snaps in half like a rubber-band, the sheared end flying up into the air. As soon as I feel the stack of pipes unsettle near my feet, no longer restrained, I lurch toward the remaining cord in front of me. Six inches from the top of the stack are the natural ends of the cord, held together by two black hooks.

  I swing my torso off the peak of the stack, grab both ends of the cord, and slide one hook out of the other’s grasp. I let the cord go, and both ends zip off in opposite directions.

  Finally, I push off toward the back side of the stack, rolling away from McKinney in somersault formation. Halfway down the destabilized mountain of pipes, I curl my legs in and kick with all my might. My feet slam against the center of the stack, knocking numerous pipes out of alignment. There’s a second, as my body sails away from the pipe stack, through the freezing air, closing in on a snowdrift, that I’m a hundred percent sure my plan will fail, the pipes won’t fall, McKinney will come reeling around the stack and rip my head off.

  And then…the pipe mountain collapses. On top of McKinney.

  A cacophony of clanging metal rings out into the night as I crash into the snow, glimpsing the Wolf through the narrow gaps between the pipes. McKinney is pelted by them, over and over, dozens of pipes beating his limbs, his back, his head, his face. The end of one pipe whips sideways when it collides with another, and the rough edge gouges out a chunk of McKinney’s abdomen. The Wolf howls in pain, but the sound is drowned out by the metallic downpour. Then another pipe comes wheeling by and smacks McKinney in the face, knocking his jaw out of its socket.

  McKinney falls. The pipes keep coming.

  When all is said and done, McKinney is half-buried under the toppled mountain of metal. He struggles to cast the pipes off, every part of his body battered and broken. I watch him writhe from my place on the snow bank, where I lie limp, my limbs so weak from exertion and injury I can barely move. Payback isn’t sweet, I think, but it isn’t bitter either. Even so…

  McKinney’s a werewolf, and they heal fast, so I can’t just lie back and enjoy the creeping hypothermia. This Wolf man won’t stop chasing me until one of us is dead, and if someone else interferes…A faint police siren is growing ever louder.

  You know what you need to do, Kinsey. So do it.

  I get up. My walk is more a shamble, but I manage to make my way around the bulk of the pipe mess, to where McKinney labors to extract himself. A single pipe sits a few feet off from the rest, like it’s waiting for someone to pick it up. Like someone laid it out for me. I hobble over to it, bend down with knees that don’t want to support me, and lift the pipe with a swinging motion that lets me rest the bulk of the weight on my shoulder. Then I continue on to McKinney.

  The Wolf is on his back, the lighter fur on his chest and abdomen exposed. He growls when I draw near, exposing his bloody teeth, but the threat is empty. All but one leg is trapped underneath the crisscrossing pipes, and the free leg looks broken, jutting out at an unnatural angle. I stop less than a foot away from the Wolf who has terrorized and brutalized me for days on end. I don’t know what expression I’m wearing on my bruised and swollen face, but it’s hostile enough to make McKinney snap his busted jaw at me.

  I wiggle my bare, bluish toes in the snow—there’s no feeling in them now—and sigh deeply as I wrap my hands tighter around the pipe. “You know, McKinney,” I rasp out, “this could have ended so much better if you’d just taken I don’t know for an answer. But you let your prejudice against the ICM—against humans—get the better of you. And now we’re here.”

  The Wolf shoots me a grim look of determination, the fire still burning in his eyes. But then, the animal form recedes, the fur giving way to hair, the limbs cracking and snapping into different shapes, the snout shrinking back into a smaller nose and jaw. In seconds, the Wolf is gone, and the man within lies before me. He’s covered in oozing lacerations, broken bones poking through shredded skin, and massive, mottled, half-formed bruises.

  McKinney’s face, smeared with blood, tilts toward me, and another of his feral grins peeks out through his matted beard. “It’s funny,” he says, wheezing between each word. “I thought only DSI’s veteran elites held any real threats over our heads. Like your two lady friends back in town.” He chokes out a laugh. “Got to admit, you surprised me, kid. Pulled some damn good tricks. Don’t know how you got someone to help you with my car, though, but…” Blood dribbles down his chin. “I don’t guess it matters now.”

  My grip on the pipe loosens. Is he giving up? Should I—?

  McKinney’s left hand, freed by his transformation, lashes out and grabs my ankle.

  Gasping, I yank my leg away.

  But it’s too late.

  The blood that was on McKinney’s hand is smeared across the top of my foot. Across several open cuts.

  Lycanthropy, says a forgotten professor’s voice in the back of my head, is spread through direct contact with a werewolf’s blood. If exposed, there’s a fifty-percent chance a human will contract the virus.

  I stare at my foot in horror, nausea rolling in my gut, and then slowly raise my gaze to McKinney’s gleeful face. A gurgling snicker breaks past his torn lips. “You want to see prejudice, kid?” He gestures toward my foot with his bloody hand. “That will show you prejudice, if the gods of vengeance are smiling down on me tonight. And when you finally decide to join me in hell, in ten years, twenty…or maybe next week…let me know how you feel then about our little chats in the cabin, and my supposed paranoia, and how well the ICM treats Wolves, and—”

  I lift the pipe into the air…

  …and drive it straight through McKinney’s chest.

  Straight into his heart.

  “That’s for Liam, you bastard,” I spit into his shocked face. “And for the record, the only one heading to hell here is you. I’ll walk through oblivion for eternity before I join you in any afterlife.” I push the pipe in deeper, out his back, piercing the ground. “Human. Wolf. Vampire. Some other creature of the shadows. Doesn’t matter what I am. What matters is what I do. What matters is that I’m not a fucking monster like you.”

  McKinney’s mouth slips open, like he wants to reply. But then the light begins to fade from his eyes. And a moment later, all that remains is the dim flicker of vengeance left unfulfilled.

  I don’t see McKinney’s shade—it leaves the world too quick to follow, like they usually do—but I hope his shade sees me, one last time, kneeling over his broken body, hands still clasped around the pipe. I hope the image is burned into his mind before the Eververse spirits him away. And I hope he relives this memory, over and over, his final moment on Earth, until his soul is dragged past the iron gates into the inferno. I
hope…I hope…

  My hands slip off the pipe, and I fall back into the snow.

  The last thing I see before my vision fades to black is a snowflake dancing in the air, painted violet by a flash of red and blue.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When I come to, I’m sprawled across the back seat of someone’s car. There’s a blanket that smells like mothballs tucked around my beaten body, and my head is resting on what might be a balled-up coat. Waves of pain wash over me with every bump in the road as the car zips quickly along a darkened road. The windows reveal it’s still night outside, and no streetlamps dot the landscape. I’m not in Aurora yet, but since I’m also not stuffed in a trunk, I assume I’m heading that direction.

  Which is good. Because one of my lungs isn’t working right.

  The car slows at an intersection but doesn’t full stop, and as it turns left, somebody reaches up and flicks on the ceiling light. I blink at the sudden brightness, nudging the blanket up higher on my face to shield my eyes. From the driver’s seat, a mildly familiar voice says, “You awake, Kinsey?”

  I mumble a response with my raw throat that might sound like, “Yeah.”

  “Well, thank god for that,” the man replies. Most of his profile is hidden from my view, but there are several details about his hair and face that tickle a recent memory. Where have I seen him before? “I was worried I was going to lose you before we made it to town. Couldn’t tell how bad you were hurt, and damn if you weren’t well on your way to becoming an icicle. I’ve got the heat up. Are you warm enough?”

  “Hm, think so?” My toes and fingers are still a bit numb, but they move when I command them to. I have a feeling some of the skin on my feet might not make it. “I’m more worried about my chest, to be honest.”

  “Ribs?” asks the man. He turns to glance at me huddled in the back seat. Yeah. I’ve definitely seen him before. “Saw the bruising. Tried to be gentle with you, but I had to move fast. There were more units inbound, and several fire trucks. Somebody who lives out there in the boonies spotted the fire and called 911. Luckily, I was nearby—thanks to an anonymous tip—or you might have found yourself in handcuffs instead.”