A knock at the door sent me into high alert. Let’s just say trust was at a premium these days. Argos rolled off the couch, landing snout first on the scuffed hardwood. He let out an indignant yelp.
“W-who is it?” The border collie, already high strung, had been a nervous wreck ever since the Sol Council had stolen the blood sample. You could do plenty of bad shit with a creature’s blood: curses, potions, mind control, instant death. Scenarios that Argos, as a scholar of the occult, understood all too well.
Sometimes knowledge isn’t power.
“Don’t get it, Kal.” His collar jingled as he rose to his feet, shaking. “Please, just don’t answer the door.”
I wasn’t expecting any visitors. Which meant only one thing. The Sol Council was making house calls, now. Idle threat time was over.
“We can’t hide forever,” I said.
“But we can hide a little longer.” His ears sat flat against his black-and-white head.
“They burned down the office.” I put my hand on the .45. “It’s time to end this.”
“Please.” His sharp snout whirled around the loft, searching for a hiding place. “Don’t let them do anything to me.”
“You’ll be fine.” He almost wilted into the ground when I patted his flank.
Eyes flaring mildly hot, I walked to the door. I checked the peephole, but my visitor had their hand over the glass. Sick of hiding in the loft with my head in the sand, I reached for the knob.
“Don’t open it,” Argos said, the words punctuated by whiny growls. “Come on, Kal.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
Knock.
Knock.
I hesitated. Emotions were getting the best of me. Demons tended to run hot, and chewing up little bits of my soul over the past few months—an unfortunate byproduct of demonic black magic—had left me more deficient than usual in that area.
Fuck ’em, Kal. Show these Council bastards you’re not a pussy.
My hand hovered next to the knob.
Someone outside made the decision for me.
A woman yelled, “No!”
Nadia Santos. But my brain had no time to process what her presence meant before a symphony of machine gun bullets streamed through the brickwork. Red dust rained from the walls as I dove to the ground, realizing one thing.
The timer on that Semtex had just hit zero.
And I was sitting right on the payload.
2
Argos, hysterical before, attempted to jam his forty-pound form under the two inches of space beneath the couch. I scrambled along the rough hardwood and threw my body over him as bullets ripped through the expensive loft.
The barrage stopped as quickly as it began. I peeked over my shoulder, toward the door. All the bullet holes were high, well above a standing human.
“Kal!” Nadia’s voice was frantic, uneven. “Just come out. We need to talk.”
We.
I seethed at the betrayal. Nadia working for the Sol Council was bad enough. But peppering my home with gunfire as a scare tactic? That bordered on unforgivable. I didn’t care what baggage she had: how pissed she was that I had reneged on a promise. Or that Charon, my former warden, had been responsible for killing her mother at the Crimson Conclave’s behest.
Vengeance was a hell of a motivator. Not in a good way, either. An old saying came to mind: embark on a journey of revenge, but first dig two graves. Start making deals with the devil—or the Fae—and you quickly found yourself on a slippery slope. Like becoming a Vanished, except with your conscience and soul intact.
Which meant plenty of guilt.
“I’m not coming out there,” I finally yelled back, trying to control my rage.
“You haven’t returned our calls.”
“Would you?”
“We’re not asking, Kal.” The woman who had protested the assault moments before now hung the threat of violence over my head like a noose.
Slippery slopes, people.
“Then come in and get me.” I reached into the waistband of my jeans and yanked out the .45. Plenty of stopping power, although lacking a clip large enough to put down a small army.
“Please.” Nadia sounded like she almost cared.
“Fuck you.” I fired twice over my shoulder, aiming at the top of the door. She screamed and tumbled down the front stairs. Even though the Sol Council had seen fit to promote her to a position of stature, they’d made a key miscalculation.
A thirty-year-old workout instructor hadn’t seen the same type of shit as me.
It was a matter of experience.
“Drag him out!” Her voice was surprisingly steely.
Underestimating your enemies can be lethal.
I heard the assault rifles ratchet and reload. Argos shivered beneath my body, breath hot.
“I’m gonna pee, Kal.”
The only way the situation could possibly get worse. “Let’s not do that.”
“You feel her aura?”
I hadn’t. But once Argos dialed in on it—between fearing for his life—I noticed something different about Nadia. Mortals all have pretty much the same signature. Boring stuff that you quickly tune out.
Magical creatures, on the other hand, each have their own aura—based on age, species, power and so forth. Their energy causes ripples through the supernatural ether that, if one is perceptive, could tell a lot about another creature’s history.
Sometimes I keyed into it.
Other times—okay, most of the time—I winged it.
But Nadia’s aura had big implications. Because it meant she’d gotten the Council to transfer essence into her veins. She was now a full-blown member of the supernatural. Although I couldn’t quite make out what creature.
“There’s something darker,” I said, eyebrows furrowed. That didn’t make any sense. The Sol Council would have used light essence. Which didn’t mean she was an instrument of good—only that her aura would vibrate on a certain frequency.
But there was interference here.
Argos’s tail thumped beneath my arm. “I figured out who it is, Kal. It’s—”
A stream of glass shattered above, shards of the broken skylight clinking off the scuffed hardwood. The glint of a shotgun sliced through the air before I glimpsed the owner.
I heard the blast before I saw her face.
But that was enough to know exactly who it was, even after two centuries.
Ruby Callaway, bounty huntress extraordinaire.
Which left only one question.
Which of my enemies had paid to put the contract on my head?
3
My ears rang from the single-barreled blast. A sizzling coil of lightning rode through the air, sparking and crackling as it hit the bullet-marred brick. The blue electricity left a blackened scorch mark on the chipped stonework.
Ruby hit the ground boots first, rolling deftly with a parkour athlete’s agility to cushion her landing. Brown hair streaming past her shoulders, she shook her head and stood up straight, even as Nadia’s men returned fire.
“It’s been too long, Kalos.” Bullets smashed off the overhead fixtures and refrigerator as she stared at me. Her slate-gray eyes penetrated the depths of my soul, catching her up on my past two centuries without saying a word. “You’re angrier than I remember.”
Realmfarers. I’d never met one in the flesh, but I’d heard stories. She didn’t disappoint.
Not quite the wide-eyed young woman I’d met in 1812, when I’d stumbled into her print shop with my chest half-torn apart.
With relief, I realized that she wasn’t here for me. And that dark aura was definitely hers. I should’ve known: I was the one who had performed the transfusion of dark essence from an Alpha wolf named Albin to save her life.
Or at least attempted to. The jury was out on
whether I’d been truly successful.
“Get the hell down.”
Ruby let the rope drop from her long, slender fingers and brought the shotgun’s crosshairs up to her eye. Instead of finding cover like a sane person, she strode toward the loft’s front door. Right into the maw of seemingly endless automatic weapon fire.
I squeezed off a couple rounds from the .45 to cover her, panicked shouts outside responding to my efforts. Ruby shoved the shotgun’s barrel through a fist-sized hole in the brick.
In a preternaturally cool voice she said, “Ride or die. Your call.”
Apparently Nadia chose ride, and in a hurry, too, because a phalanx of SUVs roared to life and sped away without so much as another word from Ruby. Pistol arm trembling, I pushed myself off the floor.
“Good to know you’re still getting yourself in trouble.” Ruby didn’t move away from the wall.
“So you’re not here to bring me in for the Council.” Or the Conclave. Or just straight to Marrack. Or the cops.
Goddamn, paranoia was a bitch.
Dried plaster and chunks of plywood sprinkled down from the ceiling as a brisk winter breeze rushed through the broken skylight. But, for once, I hadn’t emerged from a gun battle with a shiny new hole in my chest.
Or shoulder.
Or—you get the point. I’d been shot and stabbed enough for one lifetime.
Argos zipped through my legs, temporarily forgetting his fear of death to leap into Ruby’s arms. She laughed, tumbling to the ground, the border collie wagging his tail as he licked her face.
Behavior unbefitting of a man of wealth and taste like himself. But hey, at least he hadn’t peed.
“I missed you too,” she said between giggles, her grip on the shotgun not loosening. I’d heard fragments of rumors about Ruby through the supernatural grapevine. Few of them tracked with this scene: pet lover and big softie.
It was enough to understand she wouldn’t shoot me or Argos. Beyond that, Ruby Callaway remained a major wild card.
“So what job brought you here?” I asked, fishing for clues. Unlike a Realmfarer, I couldn’t simply see the strands of life—truths, lies, intuitions, possibilities—floating through the ether. I had to ask the right questions.
“It’s a dangerous world, Kalos,” she said cryptically.
In his excitement, Argos bounced headfirst off her waist and flopped like a beached fish on the scuffed hardwood. Ruby took the break as an opportunity to get up and stretch. She returned the shotgun to the leather holster on her back.
The way she moved was even like a ghost.
A nervousness pulsed through my chest. Her limbs were taut, sinewy, well-earned muscle snaking up her exposed forearms. The sleeves of her oxford shirt were rolled up to elbow length, giving her the appearance of an explorer just emerged from a mysterious tomb. Its top button was undone, striking a tightrope balance between chastity and sex appeal.
Same with the way her shirt was just snug enough to expose the barest hint of midriff.
I jammed my .45 into my waistband and broke the silence with, “I heard you’ve been busy.”
“Don’t believe every story you hear, Kalos.” She bent over and coiled up the rope. With a hard jerk, she loosened a hook attached to the roof. It fell to the ground with a clang. “I prefer blending in.”
“Is that what you call shooting out my roof?”
“You looked like you needed help.” She finished with the rope and hooked it to her belt. The slate-gray eyes knifed through me again, searching for answers and secrets that I didn’t want to share. I didn’t remember her eyes being that shade. Must’ve been a quirk of being a Realmfarer. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
“I knew you were alive. Took a while, but I figured it out.”
“I suppose you did.” It wasn’t an accusation.
“You did your thing, I did mine.” You’d think that bounty hunting and retrieval were similar. Hell, one could even accuse me of occasionally skewing more toward the former than the latter. But it wasn’t true. In my line of work, death was merely a side effect.
A common one, but not the goal.
In hers, it was the aim. Which, over centuries, produced very different people.
“Why the hell are you here, Ruby?” The words came out harsher than I would have liked. It wasn’t that the two of us had parted on bad terms—but I also didn’t believe the dead gods had smiled upon me by dropping her through the ceiling in a time of need.
She smiled, knowing without being condescending. “Inonda’s become a popular vacation spot.”
“Just answer the question.” I knew she wouldn’t be offended by the forthrightness. Perhaps some of her Realmfaring intuition was rubbing off.
Ruby touched a small cut at the edge of her lip. Her face remained set in stone as we stared at one another.
“I’m here about the vamps.”
“What vamps?” My hand instinctively went toward my .45. If she meant Gunnar, then I’d have to put her down. Not that he’d done anything that would warrant calling a hunter of her stature.
“The daystriders.”
I couldn’t stop the shiver that jolted my spine. “I would’ve heard something.”
“It takes a keen ear to listen amidst the chaos, Kalos.”
“That sounded vaguely like an insult.”
“You were right to think one thing.” She paused and winked. Presumably, I wore a horrified expression that she could intuit my thoughts. “I’ve taken a contract on behalf of the Sol Council to eliminate these daystriders.”
All I could come up with was, “Why the hell would you do that?”
“A girl likes nice things. And nice things are expensive.”
“I call bullshit.”
“Fine.” She tapped her ankle boot against the hardwood, making me wait. “Because the Council doesn’t want the world destroyed before they can finish with the Journal.”
“Finish?” I thought I might throw up in the already-ruined loft.
“They’ve found two of the objects.” She craned her neck up at the broken skylight.
I stood still, silently repeating one word.
Fuck.
Ruby strode toward the door. “Coming?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“There is always a choice, Kalos,” she said, her eyes narrowed deeply into thought. “But some are better than others.”
I gave Argos a nod and said, “Call Gunnar to help clean up.”
Turns out, I was gonna work for the Sol Council whether I liked it or not.
And I definitely didn’t like it.
Not one damn bit.
4
Going to see the head of the Sol Council was not at the top of my list of things to do. In fact, had I been making the list, it would have been omitted in favor of, say, a life of eternal servitude spent scrubbing Inonda’s sewers. But seeing as how it was on Ruby’s list—and the Council was being persistently annoying regarding the matter—I saw little choice but to concede temporary defeat.
I tried to argue that this excursion fell under the purview of my code. It was rather difficult to shoehorn it into one of the three points, though.
The Council definitely deserved to be screwed over.
No one had paid me shit for the job, unless hot lead had suddenly appreciated in value.
And I sure as hell hadn’t made any promises to assist them in their pursuit of world domination.
Unfortunately, blackmail was a hell of a motivator. And they had Argos’s blood, which meant they had me.
They remained major backstabbing pricks in my book, though.
We took my car, since it was parked nearby and I wasn’t sure if Ruby had one. Despite the cold, I didn’t wear a jacket. I’d been running hot lately, and this morning’s events hadn’t changed that.
As for Ruby, well, the car wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know about.
To be honest, it was difficult sorting legend from truth when it came to her. Having been privy to the stories passed around about Kalos Aeon, salvage recovery specialist, I knew better than to put much stock in rumor.
Still, in the absence of actual information, hearsay tended to percolate into doubt.
Such was the position I found myself in as I drove the convertible along the two-lane road out of Inonda. The Porsche accelerated as we hit the open desert. It was warm enough that I could’ve put the top down, but I preferred having a discussion, given recent events.
“I don’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed,” I said, getting right to the point.
“The Sol Council is impressed by your abilities.”
“I’m sure you can handle a few daystriders on your own.”
“Your involvement was inevitable.” Ruby put her short boots up on the dash and leaned back. “They have the dog’s blood.”
“Well they just told you everything, didn’t they?” I gripped the steering wheel tight. “Those Council assholes explain the prophecy within the Journal of Annihilation?”
“It’s not cheery,” Ruby said drily as she stared at the landscape. “The emptiness reminds me of the Gold Rush.”
“Can we focus here?”
“California was wide open. The possibilities…”
“Yeah, great time to be alive. I saw the wanted posters.”
Ruby let out a perfunctory laugh. “Nostalgia is the most dangerous drug of them all.”
I could name a few that were more threatening. Ambrosia, which had ultimately led to Charon’s fall. Haelstrom, a lovely creation from Athena the Goddess Killer that, it seemed, had finally run its course. Not before turning a significant swath of Inonda into a rambling shantytown.
Instead of discussing the deadly side effects of narcotics I said, “Is it true?”
“You’ll have to be a little more specific than that.”
“The Weald of Centurions.” I glanced over, saw her eyes harden.
A grimace marred her attractive features as she said, “That’s a realm I would sooner forget.”
Moon Burn (The Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy Book 3) Page 2