Not a troglodyte like a creepy guy, or even a caveman in the original sense of the word, but a type of troll that mostly lives in caves and sometimes wanders into towns for a drink or two and a bite to eat—usually taken right out of the locals. Troglodytes are a type of monster, one of the many that can almost blend in with humanity, and I’d been tracking him for almost a week while he’d been stalking the tourists in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The local cops had found two of his victims and were worried they might have a serial killer on their hands. I guess they did, technically, but I was about to make sure they wouldn’t have to worry about him again.
With the help of my relatively new traveling companion, a werewolf who wouldn’t—or maybe, I was beginning to suspect, couldn’t—shift into his human form, I had managed to knock the troll face-down in the dirt. Wolf stood on its back and growled every time it tried to get back up.
I raised the machete I’d grabbed out of the back of my van high into the air and had just started the downstroke when Cassidy’s ring-tone sang out—“California Gurls” by Katy Perry. God, I hated that song. That was part of why I’d assigned it to Cass.
But right now, all it did was mess up my killing blow so the short sword I was using lodged in the troll’s neck. Beheading is a hell of a lot harder than TV shows make it look. The tune, cheerfully annoying, continued playing.
“Hang on, dammit.” I needed to install one of those voice-activated control thingies so I could tell some female-voiced computer what to do. But I hadn’t bothered yet.
There were a lot of things I’d left undone since my cousin Gracie had died.
Like actually talk to Cassidy, our other cousin.
I tugged at the sword. As soon as I could get it loose, the troll was dead—but that fact hadn’t entirely caught up with its brain yet, so it continued to struggle. From his position on its back, Wolf hopped once, a stiff-legged, hard thump designed to make the troll be still. Then he glared up at me with the lupine equivalent of a scowl.
With a jerk, I dislodged the blade and brought it back down again. As the troglodyte’s head rolled away, blackish-red blood spurted out from its neck, drenching my jeans.
“Oh, that’s nasty,” I complained, shaking off one gore-spattered hand. Wolf shook his shaggy head and huffed in amusement as he flowed down off the monster’s back. Digging in my back pocket, I finally pulled out the phone and flicked one thumb across the screen to answer it—just as it quit ringing. I blew out a breath through gritted teeth, determined to keep my cool. Still, though—that was just like Cass, to give up on calling me just as I answered.
I refused to admit to myself just how glad I was to have voicemail answer for me.
Until I listened to the message, anyway.
Wolf sat at my feet, ears pricked. He could probably hear every word, but I didn’t acknowledge that.
“Blaize, it’s Cassidy.” Her voice was higher pitched than usual. She sounded almost frantic—and also peremptory. “I need you to come out here. Now.”
Classic Cass, making demands without any explanation.
But after a short silence, her message continued. “Please.”
My stomach clenched. That wasn’t typical. Cass didn’t beg.
I wiped the blood off the short sword, sheathed it at my hip, and rolled the troll’s body toward the cave he’d been preparing to take me to. I had originally planned to bury it far away, where the locals would never find it. Now I just had to hope that the troglodyte den was remote enough to hide his remains.
“Come on, Wolf,” I said. “We need to get this done. We’re going to San Francisco.”
3
Cassidy
Blaize still hadn’t called me back.
I cursed under my breath as I dragged myself out of the bathtub, the pink water having gone cold hours before. Uncle Ronnie had told us—drilled it into our heads—that if we were ever bitten by a werewolf that we had to soak the wound before applying colloidal silver to it to kill the lycanthropic infection.
Granted, he never did say what to do if your whole body was broken and bleeding from werewolf bites and scratches.
I probably needed to get a damn rabies shot. Who knew where those werewolves had been.
A low whine escaped my throat as I reached back into the tub and unplugged it. The pink water swirled around the drain. It had been a long time since I was this injured.
I rolled my shoulder and grimaced. I opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out my bottle of colloidal silver. I looked at it and laughed grimly to myself.
This was nowhere near enough silver for my wounds. Apparently, I wasn’t prepared for a werewolf attack. At least one of that scale.
I pulled out my phone and logged into my online shopping app. One of the perks about living in the big city was one-hour delivery of most items, including colloidal silver. The minimum order was $35. Buying five bottles easily covered that, and I marked the time when I should expect the delivery. Shortly after midnight. Just as well.
Honestly, I should have thought about ordering the silver before I went for a soak in the bath, but I wasn’t thinking straight when I stumbled into my apartment.
“Lesson learned,” I muttered, snapping some rubber gloves on—I didn’t want to spread lycanthropy anywhere on my body it hadn’t already reached. I unscrewed the one bottle of silver I had and began pouring it into my wounds.
Tears stung my eyes as I clamped my jaw shut to keep from screaming.
“Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit!” I growled, rocking myself.
A few minutes later, I tried slipping into my bathrobe. I popped a few painkillers in my mouth and turned on the TV, doing anything I could do to take my mind off the ache spreading in my body.
Twenty minutes until the rest of the silver arrived. A whole fucking mine of it.
And then—hopefully—Blaize would call me back.
I texted both Orin and Avery, although I doubted they’d get the messages until they came back to the human realm. Once they entered the fairy mounds—the passages from our world to theirs--they couldn't use our technology or get reception. We all knew that was a risk whenever they returned home.
It just so happened that two of my boyfriends were gone when one was kidnapped. You would have thought the werewolves had planned it.
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I needed my cousin if I had any chance of finding Drake. The longer I waited, the less of a chance I’d find him in one piece.
My phone beeped with an incoming text, and I scrambled to check it, to see if it was Orin or Avery.
To my surprise, it was Blaize with a simple message: Will be there in about 17 hours.
She always did have a penchant for hanging out in places far from civilization. I closed my eyes and hugged my phone to my chest, ignoring the pain in my shoulder.
“Thank you,” I whispered to the air, and I hadn’t realized until then how much I’d been hoping she would come through. She was going to help me. Werewolves were her thing—she’d be able to save Drake, no problem.
A smirk played about my lips as I thought on that. As miserable as I was right now, Blaize would be hurting, too. She was deathly allergic to silver, just like I was allergic to iron.
This would be funny if Drake’s life wasn’t on the line. Just like old times.
“C’mon,” I whispered, glancing out the window to the moon. “Please get here quickly, Blaize.”
After Gracie’s death, I hated having Drake’s life in her hands.
4
Blaize
Grief makes me ugly.
It was the only thing I could think. I’d been sitting in my van in a parking garage in downtown San Francisco, staring into my rearview mirror and trying to work up the nerve to call Cass, let her know I’d made it.
I had managed to avoid thinking about Gracie’s death for weeks now. She had come to Tombstone, Arizona when I needed her—she’d been there to help me fight werewolves—and she had died for it.
Gracie’s death wasn’t my fault. I knew that consciously. All the responsibility for that belonged to the demon. He cursed our families generations earlier, and he killed Gracie. Cass and Gracie and I weren’t really cousins. Our ancestors had simply had the bad luck to be monster-hunting together when they ran across an earth-demon with a sense of humor. The details were fuzzy, but the basics were clear: one member of each family inherited the curse, binding the heir to the southwestern United States, forcing him or her to hunt monsters, and inflicting a metallurgic allergy that made hunting more difficult.
I can’t touch silver, so more often than not, I’m Called to hunt werewolves. Of course. Usually it’s a stabbing sensation in my gut instead of a phone call, though.
Oh. Wait. The phone call from Cass also left me with that gut-stabbed feeling. Great.
Cass is allergic to iron. If her troubles ran true to form, I was pretty sure we would be up against the fae again.
I hated those winged fuckers.
Of course, that would only happen if I could drag my ass out of the van. I reached up and ran one fingertip over the dark circles under my eyes. I was tired, too—the drive was long, but I’d stopped twice for short naps and downed about a gallon of coffee, so I was still functioning. This was grief.
From his spot in the passenger seat, Wolf whined.
“I know,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “But I miss her.” If not for Wolf, I’d be dead, too. He saved me in Tombstone, then again in a tiny town in Colorado, and here I was, about to drag him into some big family drama. I flicked my gaze toward him, and then back to my reflection. “You know we’re going to have to do the leash thing, right? We’re in a city. They’ve got laws and shit.”
That being said, I wondered how a wolf would look next to the French bulldogs these city dwellers were walking when I was looking for a place to park.
Wolf’s low growl probably should have frightened me, but instead I laughed—and a glance at his wolfy grin told me that had been his goal. “You’re the one who doesn’t shift. If you’d turn human, we could skip the whole charade.”
He blew out a snort and shook his head. I’d seen his human form just once, on Christmas Eve, when he’d changed long enough to carry me out of an old silver mine where I’d been dying. I don’t think the change had been on purpose. In fact, I was pretty sure he wasn’t able to change except under extraordinary circumstances.
Someday I’d figure out why.
Not today, though. Today, I was going to introduce him to my prickliest cousin. Also the prettiest. Squaring my shoulders, I straightened the rearview mirror so I couldn’t look at myself any longer and hit the button to call her.
“Hello?” Her tired voice filled the speaker, but at the same time, it felt empty and battered.
I smiled, trying to act like everything was all right. “Hey, Cass. It's me. I'm here.”
A pause. "Oh."
I licked my lips nervously. Even though she'd only said two words, she didn't sound right, and it was throwing me off. "Uh, where are you? And how do I get to you?”
Cass still sounded weird, but she gave me her address and instructions for getting up her apartment. We left the van in a nearby garage, and I hooked the leash to Wolf’s collar. That was another fashion statement he had protested in his wolfish way, but one I insisted on. It was bright turquoise with rhinestones, and the unnatural color screamed this one’s a pet. As much as he didn’t like it, I was certain it helped keep him safe—safer than he would’ve been without it, anyway. Safe from hunters of the non-supernatural kind, the ones who might mistake him for a wild animal that needed killing.
I still hadn’t told Cass about him. How could I even bring up something like that? “Hey. I know we’re monster hunters, but I have a werewolf friend now?” No, better to wait and explain it when she could see him for herself, when he could show her he wasn’t a danger to us.
Her apartment building was new, everything light and airy in its construction. I pushed the buzzer, and Cass rang us in. There was an elevator up to her floor, and I checked it out. But we took the stairs. If Cass was in trouble, I didn’t want to get trapped in an elevator.
“Eleven flights of stairs,” I muttered, glancing down at Wolf. He shook his head, but started up.
It always amazed me that she could stand to live in the city like San Francisco, given all the ways iron was incorporated into its structures. When I got too close to silver, it set up a kind of hum in my head, a painful buzz that vibrated down into my bones until they ached. I assumed Cassie must feel something similar around the iron that helped make up the steel in buildings.
Then again, I’d never actually asked. With Gracie gone, I was realizing just how much she’d played intermediary for us.
She’d been our peacemaker.
Like Cass, Gracie had always preferred cities to the wilderness, though she’d been comfortable in both. Me and Cass? We hunted in different environments, given our choice. She preferred the city streets at night, claiming that the monsters we stalked preferred to hide among their prey. Sometimes I wondered if she was talking about herself—or maybe me.
I tended to take our demonic curse more literally. We were confined to the southwest, so I hunted as often as possible in the open spaces—the deserts and the small Western towns, places where I could see my enemies coming for miles. In theory, anyway. When it came down to it, there were almost as many places for a monster to hide in a small town, at least for a while, as there were in a city.
I gave myself enough time at the top to catch my breath. I was pretty sure grief still made me ugly but there wasn’t anything to be done about that at this point.
I shouldn’t have worried. When Cass opened the door at my knock, I gasped. “You look like hell.”
“Gee, thanks.” She sounded tired—and I knew those wounds had to hurt. I reached one hand out toward her face, tentatively, then recoiled with a hiss as waves of invisible fire flickered against my fingertips. “Silver? You used silver on yourself?”
“It’s the only thing that heals werewolf bites.” Her tone was defensive. She turned away and walked into the short entry, until a low-pitched growl from behind me stopped her. She froze completely, and I realized she couldn’t have seen Wolf behind me when she opened the door.
He slid out to one side, and I flicked my gaze toward him. “Not now.”
Cassie finally turned, her face completely white, her eyes wide. “That thing is with you?”
“It’s perfectly okay,” I said. “He—”
“You brought one of those monsters into my home?” Her voice shook with suppressed anger. “How dare you?”
“That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?” I tried to keep my own tone light, but I didn’t manage it.
“One of your friend’s pack-mates took my boyfriend.” She sneered at the words friend and pack-mates.
I blinked and shook my head. Wait. What? Her boyfriend was missing? Oh, hell. This was bad. Still… “Wolf didn’t have anything to do with that,” I said. “He couldn’t have. He was with me in New Mexico.”
“Wolf? His name is Wolf?”
“What? No. I don’t know what his name is.”
“And yet you think you can trust him?”
“Cass, I think this is a conversation we should have inside.”
She eyed us both, then threw the door open wide. “Come on in. But all my guns are loaded with silver bullets. And if you—either of you—make a move toward me, I’ll shoot you.” She met my eyes. “Without hesitation. I’ve had a really shitty twenty-four hours.”
We followed her into her apartment, and I shut the door firmly behind us, throwing all of the bolts into the locked position. The apartment was a single room, dominated by one large bed and a television. The kitchen counter took up one wall, a row of windows another. I sat down in one
of the few chairs, next to a small desk piled high with papers. Wolf sat in the corner behind me, attentive but quiet.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, fighting to keep my voice calm and supportive. Truth be told, grief wasn’t the only thing giving me dark circles under my eyes. I was also exhausted from driving flat-out for twenty hours to get here as fast as possible—not to mention spending the first three hours of it fretting about texting her back.
I felt extra-guilty about that delay now that I knew her boyfriend was missing. I needed to give Cass all of my attention and be prepared to help in any way I could.
That resolution lasted almost all the way through her story. When she finished, I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped loosely between them, dangling down. “Three fairy boyfriends.” It wasn’t a question—not exactly. My gaze flickered over to the giant bed as I tried not to speculate too much on its purpose in the apartment. I chewed on the inside of my lip and stared back down at the floor, trying to think what to say next.
“You might as well just come out with it,” Cass said, sounding irritated already. “You won’t be able to concentrate until you do.”
I tapped the toe of one boot against the floor, watched as the movement disturbed a couple of small dust bunnies hiding behind the legs of the desk. When I finally looked up, Cass was glaring at me.
She was also right. We needed to go ahead and have this out now. If we were lucky, it would heal, like a festering wound opened to air.
“Fairies. I thought you were supposed to fight fairies, not fuck them.” It came out harsher even than I had intended, but once the words hung in the air between us, there was no taking them back.
Cass jumped up as if she had been waiting for me to say exactly that. Maybe she had. “This from the woman who comes in dragging a werewolf behind her?”
I stood, too, taking a step closer to her. “But just one. And I’m not fucking him.” Ew. “You don’t have any room to judge. Anyway, when I got here you were drenched in silver. You trying to kill me?”
Heroines and Hellions: a Limited Edition Urban Fantasy Collection Page 2