I shoved open the door and rushed around the car, but it was too late. The cockatrice was dead. It had died the second it saw its own reflection in the mirror.
“What’s all the ruckus?”
“Really?” I spun on Brum. “Now you show up?”
He ambled toward me, hesitating by the nest. “Heard your caterwaulin’ over the TV.”
“Mr. Brum.” I dug deep for the tattered shreds of my professionalism as I stood with the dead cockatrice cradled in my arms. Tears leaked down my cheeks, but that was from the smell, not sentimentality. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Ringo—”
“Whee-doggie,” the farmer crowed as he lifted a rock. “Would you look at that? Ten eggs. Ten.”
“Eggs?” I glanced at the dead bird. “But Ringo is—”
“Damn shame.” He spared a frown for the bird. “Least now I know why he wasn’t laying before. Been trying to squeeze eggs out of him for two years. No one told me they had to be free range.”
The rumble of Shaw’s engine made my shoulders sag with relief. Brum didn’t even notice.
I extended my arms toward him. “What should I do with the, uh, remains?”
“Leave ’em there.” He waved a hand. “I’ll dress ’im for dinner later.”
My mouth fell open. “You’re going to eat it?”
The stink almost curled my nose hairs, and this guy was going to fry it up and put it in his mouth?
Brum scratched behind his ear. “What else would I do with it?”
“I—” I had no idea. “Enjoy your dinner, Mr. Brum.”
Brum didn’t respond. He knelt in front of that nest and kissed each egg as he lifted it as though they were made of gold.
Heck. For all I knew, they were filled with twenty-four karat yolks.
From the safety of his truck, Shaw hammered the wheel with his palm while a grin split his face. But I wasn’t laughing. I smelled like the devil’s armpit thanks to my cuddle with the cockatrice, and I was ready to go home.
I settled the limp body on the ground and got in my car before something worse happened.
My phone was blaring rock music before I shut the door. I grimaced as I answered it. “Yes?”
Shaw chuckled in my ear. “Why did the—?”
“—incubus call me with a chicken joke if he expected to get lucky tonight? Good question.”
The incubus cleared his throat and ended the call. I stomped on the gas and got the hell off Brum’s property. It wasn’t until after I pulled up to my apartment that I remembered the reward.
I had been so shocked by Ringo’s ignoble end, it hadn’t crossed my mind to ask Brum about the bounty on the cockatrice.
Killing it had probably voided the offer. Then again, he wouldn’t have a clutch of cockatrice eggs if Ringo hadn’t gone wandering in the first place, and they might have been stolen or eaten if not for me.
Still. Maybe I was better off not reminding Brum of my role in the discovery of the eggs or the demise of the father—mother?—considering how ecstatic he had been kneeling in the dirt. I had all but seen the dollar signs flashing in his eyes, and I had nothing but lint to offer him if he decided to spin the reward into a bill for damages. Not even the pack would reimburse him once they found out the bird’s death was my fault.
Oh well. I might not have a check burning a hole in my pocket, but there was a smokin’-hot incubus upstairs waiting for me, and that was kind of the same thing.
Heir of the Dog
Black Dog, Book 1
Heir of the Dog Blurb
Black Dog, Book 1
Thierry Thackeray is having the worst week ever. Her ex is back in town, death omens are camping out on her mother’s lawn and her estranged father has gone missing. Then there’s the small matter of the High Court requesting her presence in Faerie.
Now the wrong fae has answered her summons, and she’s stuck with a not-so-charming prince who offers to fix all her problems…for a price. She can’t afford to tell him no, but with her luck, she might not survive saying yes.
Chapter 1
Flaming red hair. Check. Pasty white skin. Double check. Breath like a slaughterhouse in July… I inhaled deeply then wrinkled my nose. Yep. Houston, we have a troll sighting.
Now would be a great time to have a partner. Too bad mine was an ex in every sense of the word.
Buzzing at my ear preceded a manic giggle as a drunken sprite landed on my shoulder and dry-humped my earlobe. Gross. I thumped him in the stomach and sent him tumbling through the air. Four of his buddies zipped past me, whooping with amusement.
Yeah. Real funny. Pick on the marshal. Pests. Sprites were the fae equivalent of mosquitoes, and the town of Wink, Texas was infested.
My flicker of inattention cost me. The troll had gained more ground.
I tugged on the cuff of my glove from habit then tightened my grip on my satchel and followed my mark deeper into the crowded back streets heading toward the O’Leary Bazaar, a nightly street fair held by fae vendors, mostly Unseelie, where you could buy anything your heart desired as long as you were willing to sell your soul to afford it.
No refunds or exchanges.
“Love charm for the pretty lady?” A damp palm grasped my wrist. “Find a man—fall in love.”
A trow, a bowlegged woman with a gangrene complexion, jerked me a step toward her booth. Leather bags hung from twisted cords around her neck. The one she jangled in my face boasted a red anatomical heart on its front. As its innards tinkled and its spell awakened, the bloody outline pulsed.
Shrugging free of her, I wiped her slimy residue off my skin and started walking. “No thanks.”
The last thing I needed was a man. My heart was still mending from my last breakup.
“Two coppers for the charm,” the trow cried. “Pretty lady. Charming lady needs a charm.”
I shouldered through the crowd until a head of flame-bright hair came back into view. Bodies parted to ease his brisk passage then clumped together to slow my pursuit. Unseelie solidarity. Nice.
“Charm.” That same toad-skinned hand closed over my arm. “Lady needs a—”
Gritting my teeth, I spun toward the trow and noticed the cloudy pink sweat dotting her forehead and dribbling into murky eyes frantically darting between my face and some point past my shoulder.
“Trows,” I said thoughtfully. “They’re troll cousins, right?”
Her answer involved peeling her eel-skin lips from her ichor-stained teeth and hissing at me.
“We can finish this later.” I scanned the street until spotting a flicker of ginger bobbing over the sea of inky-haired sameness. I bolted in that direction as pain razored across my forearm. Dark blood welled and glistened in the furrows the trow had raked in my flesh, but I healed before a single drop fell.
“Finish this now,” she growled. “Pretty lady.”
“Fine.” I was closer to the troll than I had been all week, and I wasn’t leaving the bazaar without him.
I raised my left hand, let the trow see the shimmering wards stamped into the black leather glove I wore, let her wonder what all those bindings meant. And then I showed her. Murmuring my Word, I sensed the protective magic locking the glove at my wrist relax. I removed it and flexed my fingers.
Runes covered my skin from wrist to fingertips, casting a soft peridot glow around my hand.
Her rheumy eyes flared. “Cú Sídhe whore.”
Every person on the packed street craned their necks. Mouths fell open. Bodies shuffled the hell out of my way. No one spoke. They barely breathed while I strolled the narrow gauntlet they formed, taking time I didn’t have so all saw the markings, my birthright, and understood what they meant.
Sometimes it paid having Macsen Sullivan for a father.
Ahead of me, the troll glanced back. His bone-white face contrasted with his scalding hair. Stark blue eyes pierced mine. Freckles crawled like ants over his bulbous nose. His teeth, when he smiled, were so much worse. Square pegs, each thicker than my thumb and made for
grinding, edges too dull to slice through flesh.
Trolls were fond of chewing their victims to a squishy pulp without breaking the skin. They cut off the head and rolled up the corpse starting from the toes, the same way humans used a tube of toothpaste, squirting out the goo then discarding the empty wrapper in the nearest trash bin.
Grinning, the troll licked his lips. He flipped a table then darted behind a row of booths. When he bolted between two buildings, I broke into a sprint. If I lost him now, I might not get another chance, and I wanted that bonus.
Magic sucker-punched me when I reached the mouth of the alley. No subtle push here. This was a seasoned uppercut while your head was turned. Usually charms like the one I sensed made the location emit nothing to see here vibes that spun most folks on their heels. This one blared fuck off.
With my head reeling, I braced my bare left hand against the nearest brick wall and shook off the oily threat permeating my senses. Entering the alley alone was a Very Bad Idea, but I didn’t get paid to let fae eat humans. Our race was a nibble away from discovery as it was. Both Seelie and Unseelie houses agreed if the fae had to come out, they wanted the big reveal to be on their own terms. Having an ass-ugly troll with people stuck in his teeth for their poster boy? Probably not the smoothest move in the campaign to convince humanity our races could coexist in harmony.
That first step into shadow made my bones creak. Pressure built in my ears until I swallowed to pop them. Runes on my hand provided the only light, a faint green glow. Given tonight’s full moon, I chalked the pervasive darkness up to black magic. Someone had gone shopping tonight.
“Smells of dog, it does,” the troll’s thick voice boomed. “What business does it have with I?”
Paper crinkling on my left made me squint that much harder. “Are you Quinn O’Shea?”
“Aye.” He crushed something underfoot, closer to my right.
He was circling me.
I raised my palm, hoping to distract him with the immediate threat while I tugged a daylighter flare out of my satchel. “In that case, O’Shea, I bet you can guess what I’m doing here.”
Hot air blasted my nape as his damp nose snuffled me. “You’re Black Dog’s get.”
I suppressed a shudder. “That’s what they tell me.” I had never met the guy myself.
“Black Dog knows I.” He exhaled near my ear. “Thinkin’ he won’t want it to hurt I.”
“The conclave sent me.” I twisted the cap off the flare. “My father has nothing to do with this.”
“It has Dog’s black hair.” His chuckle slithered over me. “Does it have Dog’s black heart?”
I was nothing like Mac. Our magically radioactive left hands were the only things we had in common, not that I had ever seen his to compare.
“The conclave bids you come with me of your own free will to stand trial.”
He chuffed. “Don’t much like I’s odds if I goes to court.”
“If you’re convicted of the murders—” and we both knew he would be given his starring role in the convenience store surveillance video, “—you can appeal the verdict. But if you don’t report, and if you really do know my father, then we both know what happens next.”
“It don’t have the power.” The troll grunted. “It wouldn’t be set loose here if’n it did.”
“Last chance.” I gripped the flare with one hand and its cap in the other. Each flash of my runes telegraphed my movements. No hope of concealing them. The glow didn’t come with an off switch.
“Don’t fear death.” Claws scraped asphalt when he shifted his weight. “Don’t fear you neither.”
I rubbed the coarse striking surface of the cap against the button on the flare. Nothing happened. Damn it. Trolls turn to stone in sunlight. I had planned to identify Quinn, whip out my daylighter flare and then babysit the hunk of troll-shaped rock until the conclave dispatched a unit with a flatbed for pick-up. But Quinn’s nasty little charm must protect him by dousing all forms of artificial light, like my flare.
With a sigh, I tossed the worthless daylighter aside. “You aren’t coming peacefully, are you?”
His answer was to hook his meaty forearm around my throat and yank me against his chest. My lungs burned while his bulging muscles flexed, crushing my larynx. I dug the nails of one hand into his wrist. Runes eased beneath my skin, shining like beacons, banishing the gloom.
Damp and fleshy, his tongue slid down my nape. The glide of his blunt teeth followed.
A shudder cemented my resolve. Kill or be killed. I had a choice to make. An easy one.
I clamped my bare left palm over his thick wrist. “This is going to hurt.”
Chapter 2
Quinn’s startled bellow when my magic threaded through his veins to his heart was deafening.
My ears rang as much from his screams as the collapse of his charm. Moonlight filtered through the fading tendrils of darkness, casting faint light between the squat buildings sandwiching the alley.
Glittering bones, each one picked clean and most gnawed to splinters, littered the street. Tossed aside like trash to rot among the wet newspapers and crumpled soda cans. Hard to know who or what left those behind. They weren’t troll kills. That much was for certain. They weren’t fresh kills, either.
Trolls were opportunistic. The odds Quinn had squatted in another fae’s territory were high. Yet another use for that blackout charm. Tack it up, say a Word to activate it, and the charm did the rest.
Power that rich could make any spot with a kernel of darkness blossom into an abyss.
One corpse, the girl whose disappearance tipped off the conclave about our rogue troll problem, sprawled in a heap of broken limbs. The toothpaste trick didn’t work as well on humans as it did on fae. Poor kid. I hated breaking bad news to parents who actually cared whether their children lived or died.
The troll’s wheezing forced my attention back to him. Enough stalling. Time to finish this.
“By the power vested in me as a marshal of the Southwestern Conclave, I condemn you to death for your crimes against humanity.” I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached and braced against the coming pain. “Your soul will now be extinguished and your remains claimed by the Morrigan, as is your right as a subject of House Unseelie. If you have sworn fealty to another deity, and if you wish your remains to be an offering to them, speak their name now or forever hold your peace.”
I took his silence as consent and willed a pulse of magic through the runes contacting his skin. A heartbeat later, searing heat cut across my jaw, a scalpel-sharp ache zigzagging past my temple and over my scalp. Razors slashed under my skin with every wicked slice my magic dealt O’Shea.
I hated this part, the severing of a soul from its host, the trimming away of the fat of life and the cauterizing of immortality. Fae were built to weather eternity. Few grasped true death in any context.
But we were all tangles of muscle and bone, flesh and blood, heads and hearts, weren’t we?
We could all die if the time was right. Sometimes we did even if it wasn’t.
I held O’Shea’s terrified gaze while the top layers of his skin peeled away from muscle like ripping off an old bandage. I owed him that. I was ending a man’s life and could damn well look him in the eye while I did it. The vicious teeth of my magic savaged his soul, rent the tatters of his self and devoured it whole.
Pleasant warmth suffused my limbs, sating the darker part of me who stared at carnage a little too long, watched each death too closely and enjoyed a soul-induced high just enough to shove me spinning down a shame spiral only one person could stop.
I wish Shaw was here.
No. No, I didn’t. Sure he might pull me out of my guilt tailspin, but that meant talking to him, and if he got me on the phone, I knew what he would want to talk about. Us. Except there was no us. Not anymore.
The troll’s pupils had faded to milky white. He was an empty shell suspended by an intricate web of misery. Magic knifed under his flesh, jolting his corps
e, seeping out his pores until his skin released with a wet kiss of sound and puddled at his ankles where the pinky-white folds withered into a dried husk.
What remained was a meat and bone sculpture of troll musculature ready for disposal. Time to ring the dinner bell.
Before gloving my hand, I tugged a quarter-size silver medallion from my shirt by its chain and palmed the cool metal. Rubbing a rune-covered thumb across the triskele stamped into its center, I summoned the Morrigan.
A breeze smelling of wood smoke and embers ruffled my hair. A pulse of black magic beat in the air before me. The ball of swirling mist drifted on the breeze. That…wasn’t right.
A carrion crow swarm that blotted out the sky then swooped to encircle an offering in a cawing black feather tornado complete with glowing ruby eyes? That was more her style.
This was something else—someone else. But who had the balls to claim her feast in their name?
I lowered my hand to my side where its luminescent threat remained visible.
“You summoned the Morrigan.” A thickly accented voice throbbed across my skin.
“I did, and you aren’t her.” The cadence of those words shivered through me. “Who are you?”
“Whoever you want, a stór.” His chuckle was worse, all buttery rich and inviting. Dangerous.
“I’m not your darling.” I raised my left hand. “By whose authority have you answered my call?”
A moment of silence passed. “I am the Morrigan’s son.”
“The Raven,” I breathed.
Her son and heir, Raven, an Unseelie prince. A prickle of unease quivered along my nape. A prince in the mortal realm. What on earth had lured him here? And did the conclave know? They had to, right? The prince must have used a tether to get here, and for visiting dignitaries, that required permission from the Faerie High Court on his side and the Earthen Conclave on this one.
Straightening my shoulders, I gestured toward the body. “Then you are welcome to your feast.”
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