Armageddon Rules

by J. C. Nelson

  I ran a finger along his eyebrow, wiping blood from it. “What have you been doing?”

  He took my hand in his and put the other on my cheek. “The usual Monday things.”

  Translation: making weekly rounds, reminding a few people that whatever else they had planned, this week was a bad week to get revenge on me. I’d made a lot of enemies. At least two queens wanted me killed on sight. An entire army of wolves wanted me dead for shooting their leader, and at one point the entire postal service wanted to see me returned to sender. For a while, I had assassins showing up every couple of days. All that changed when Liam moved in. My enemies probably still wanted to kill me but valued their intestines too much to try.

  Grimm cleared his throat. “Now that you are finally here, I’d like to talk to both of you about an opportunity.”

  “He’s not going to pose nude for the art college. We already had that discussion.”

  Liam blushed and looked at the floor. I didn’t care how many times he did that before, I had my rules, and one of them was my boyfriend kept his boy bits between us.

  “Tell me you’ve found a way to dull the curse. I’ve reached my yearly limit of burn cream. Any more and I have to register as a wholesale dealer.”

  Liam snorted and a bit of smoke curled out of his nostrils.

  Grimm crossed his arms. “Actually, I had quite the opposite in mind. I’ve been researching ways to trigger the curse and keep it active even when he goes to sleep.”

  “You’ve been doing what?” My face flushed, and I put my hands on my hips. “Why?”

  Liam looked to Grimm in a panic that I found completely appropriate.

  Grimm disappeared for a moment, and flowing script filled the mirror, though in no language or alphabet I’d ever seen. His voice came from the mirror, though I couldn’t see him. “See for yourself, my dear.”

  “Neither of us read hieroglyphics. Translation?”

  Grimm reappeared in the mirror. “I will arrange to have you taught Vampirese at some other time. For now, let us simply say that the time has come for the oldest undead family to take their once-a-century dirt nap.”

  I glared at Grimm, waiting for him to get to the part that involved Liam and me.

  “Now, in the old days, this would be when peasants would descend on castles, coffins would be overturned, steaks driven through vampires’ mouths, and then garlic salt sprinkled on them.”

  I nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Put me on a plane to Europe and I’ll get it done.”

  “The vampires of today are not bloodthirsty monsters, Marissa. Sunlight won’t kill them, holy water only upsets them because their clothes have to be dry-cleaned. And I don’t want them killed. I want them protected for two weeks while they sleep.”

  “But I never got to put a stake through a vampire’s heart before.” I’d accomplished most of the things on my bucket list in the first six years I worked for Grimm. I’d been buried alive in a coffin three times before I turned twenty-one. Found love with a man who loved me back. Heck, I scratched off “Get in a fistfight with a mime” my first week in the city. But vampire slaying remained on my to-do list.

  Grimm sighed. “Marissa, sit down. A vampire’s heart does not beat, so I can’t believe you actually fell for such a simple ruse. It was the steak in the mouth that killed them. Today’s vampires are more enlightened. More evolved. They are vegans. If they consume meat products, the fire of their own hypocrisy burns them to a crisp.”

  “What about drinking blood?”

  “Honestly, my dear, do you believe everything you read? If it weren’t for vampire families celebrating Thanksgiving, tofurkey would have failed long ago.”

  I always figured Vampire Thanksgiving involved carving up a redhead or something. We ate goose every year, because Grimm said it was more traditional. Also, every couple of months I had to find and kill another gold-egg-laying goose before it upset the markets. I could only fit so many of them in my freezer.

  My frustration with the hours spent learning useless facts mounted. Particularly as Grimm must have known that it wasn’t right. “And crosses? I bet they can’t hurt them either.”

  Grimm creased his brow, thinking. “No, I believe that a cross could in fact harm one.”

  “How?”

  “Well, if the cross weighed several tons and fell on them. Or if it were mounted on wheels and moving at, say, thirty-five miles per hour and ran into one. Or if one sharpened the edges and swung it at a vampire.” Grimm nodded, more to himself than me.

  “If they don’t drink blood, they don’t hide from the sun, and crosses don’t hurt them, they aren’t vampires. They sound more Californian than Transylvanian. Where, exactly, do we come into this?”

  Liam took my hand. “The old vampire families are obsessed with the best guards money or magic can buy. They wanted a family of dragons to guard their keep, but ever since the treaty put dragons on the endangered species list, they aren’t available.”

  The light went on in my head. See, agents were usually magical. Princesses. Half djinns. Liam accidentally got cursed a few years ago. He wasn’t half djinn, and if he ever wound up with even a trace of princess on him, I planned to take my knife and carve it out. He was, however, a were-dragon, doing time-share in his body with a curse older than the Roman Empire. A curse I accidentally put on him.

  That’s why my enemies decided every week that this week they’d take up knitting or lean on the local grocer. Liam belched hellfire when he wasn’t angry. When he got upset, it was like the Incredible Hulk had a child with a Komodo dragon and a napalm factory. “No. I’m not letting you turn him into a dragon. You have any idea how many princes would love to add ‘slew the dragon’ to their list of accomplishments?”

  “Tell her about the pay.” Liam looked at Grimm.

  “I’d rather be dirt-poor than rich and alone,” I said, unwilling to look at either of them.

  “Marissa, I give you my word I didn’t take this offer at face value. Indeed, I believed it some form of mistake until clarified. The senior royal family of the undead court has had thousands of years to accumulate money, and hundreds of years where they have collected magic.” Grimm stopped and waited for me to look up, where the page waited, the glowing script pulsing.

  The number on the page looked like an international phone number or two. The second number had to be the amount of Glitter they offered. Since I’m completely non-magical, the metric system never made sense. Grimm tried to teach me once. He gave up when I told him Pedo-liters were how many creepy old men fit in a jar.

  The numbers were big. Really big. So big, in fact, they stank of something rotten. “Fake,” I said, holding my hand over my nose to emphasize that Grimm got taken.

  “I assure you, my dear, this is no mistake nor a fake. I have an escrow agency who assures me that they have in fact taken delivery of the payments, pending our agreement.”

  I shook my head. “Still doesn’t make sense. Why would they need me?” I waited in the silence as the two of them looked at each other.

  Liam turned toward me. “I need you. Need you to let me go. Need you to keep yourself safe for a few weeks. Not go challenging anyone to duels, or opening cursed sarcophagi, or running into poodle-filled warehouses.”

  My stomach turned cold like I’d drunk a gallon of ice water. The last two years had been the happiest years of my life. I finally found someone who loved me, really loved me. I had friends and respect. “You really want to leave me?”

  Liam got down on one knee like he was about to propose, and my heart skipped several beats. “No. Truth is, I’d rather die than leave you. But I want to be able to be with you. I’m tired of worrying about setting the house on fire, or having to swallow my steak tartare in order for it to arrive in my stomach well-done. I want to have a life with you. I want to have children.”

  Grimm cleared his throat again. “Marissa, with that much magic, I could do almost anything.”

  He meant he could finally cure Liam’s c
urse.

  “No one has that much Glitter.” I ransacked my mind for reasons this couldn’t happen. “Even if they did, they’d use it, not give it away for two weeks of protection.”

  Liam leaned in to speak to me face-to-face. “You’ve said Glitter is basically magic, right? And magic is basically hope, right?”

  I nodded.

  Grimm cut in. “My dear, you have to consider that hope would be poisonous to an undead creature. Of course they’d be willing to pay with it. It’s like when I pay the kobolds in nuclear waste. They believe they are getting a fantastic deal.”

  I sat back in the chair with my eyes closed. Two weeks for enough magic to un-work the worst curse Grimm had ever seen.

  Ever.

  The deal still stank. “No. He’ll get killed by a prince. Or a team of princes. Or a nuclear strike.”

  Grimm disappeared again and the mirror scrolled for minutes, page after page of mind-numbing legal jargon. “I’ve been drafting this contract for more than six months, Marissa. I assure you the vampires will take every precaution. The penalties against them if Liam were even wounded would cost them their castles, their bank accounts. He would be the final line of defense in an arsenal of traps designed to maim all-comers. Assuming one survives the labyrinth, then one of six teams of assassins would kill them.”

  “And if they survived?”

  Liam put his hands on my cheeks so I would look at him. His eyes began to glow with fire, and when he spoke, the curse spoke as well, in a second voice. “Then I will unleash the fires of hell on them. Two weeks, M.”

  “How are you going to keep Liam a dragon?”

  Grimm nodded toward Liam, who leaned his head back like he was going to take a nap. “I’ve had Mr. Stone take a few naps in the Agency. When he’s asleep I can talk to the curse directly.”

  Curses were like blessings—alive, and intelligent. From what I knew, this one had been ancient when the Romans were wearing diapers and Rome was a fishmonger’s hut on a hill. “So you asked it how you could keep it active? Why didn’t you ask how to get rid of it?”

  “Really, my dear. It was the first thing we discussed, and I have to say the subject was poorly received. It would be simpler to make a list of people the curse did not threaten to disembowel, devour, or disembowel and then devour.”

  “I get it. The big bad curse wants to eat me.”

  Grimm raised his eyebrows. “No, my dear. You were to receive a burst of hellfire, blown directly into—”

  “I get it. Didn’t want to negotiate.” I turned toward Grimm’s mirror and leaned forward. “Are you sure you can do this?”

  He frowned and narrowed his eyes at me. “Of course I can.”

  One look at the set of Liam’s jaw told me he’d already made up his mind. He had known about the offer. Two weeks of work for a thousand years’ worth of Glitter. I’d have to be crazy to tell him not to take it. That seemed okay to me, but I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around him and held him for a while.

  Five

  WITH THREE DAYS until Liam’s flight to eastern Europe, I booked Liam’s tickets myself, first-class. Grimm had a tendency to try to ship his agents as cargo, to save a few bucks, but took one look at my face and chose to pick a fight with the kobolds instead. With the only thing I could do done, I resolved to bury myself in work rather than dread each hour.

  In the meantime, I had a piper to deal with and a Poodling to get ready for. Ari had managed to listen to her alarm that day, and when I passed the rental truck in the Agency loading bay, my day started looking up. We met almost-Piper Beth at the elevator to avoid the usual round of hysteria and screaming.

  The elevator door slid open and rats gushed out into the hall. Beth followed them, stumbling, nearly collapsing. Sweat beaded on her like she had a fever, and red splotches traveled out like spiderwebs from the skin under her nose ring. Ari took one arm, I took the other, and we headed down the hall, through the service entrance, and straight into a conference room.

  Inside, a golden glow of reflected light lit the tables. Beth squinted and then, as her eyes adjusted, they grew wide. “Is this all for me?”

  On the table sat a huge assortment of instruments. Coronets and trumpets, saxophones and recorders, and of course a few flutes in case she was an old-school piper. I gestured to the instruments. “You tell me. One of these is going to really light you up. You take piano lessons as a kid?”

  She shook her head.

  Ari handed her a flute. “How about this?”

  Again, no. I patted the girl on the back, where her shoulder rings sported fiery red welts. “Ari, would you mind helping her check out a few of these while I grab something?” It wasn’t really a question, and even if Ari did mind, she could whine about it later.

  I went to the kitchen and took an insulated box from the fridge. “Human organs,” read the label. I dumped the contents into the trash—the “use or freeze by” date passed the Friday before, so it wasn’t like anyone was going to eat them.

  Box in hand, I marched back to the conference room and set it in front of Beth. “Every piercing, chain, and ring goes in the box, now.”

  She snarled at me, showing enough teeth to make a wolf proud. “I have every right to look how I want.”

  I’d been snarled at by things that would eat my organs without putting them in a lunch box first. “You have an infection. Probably subcutaneous, possibly staph. Chains, safety pins, and rings in the box, please. I don’t care if you make yourself into a human pot rack once we are done, but I’m not letting you die on my watch.” I tapped the box for emphasis. “Did you fill the prescription I got you?”

  Her eyes said no, what little I could see of them under the half ton of makeup she was wearing. Ari stood up and started for the door. “I’ll be back. I’m going to head down to the pharmacy and pick it up. Are you hungry, Beth?”

  It was only nine thirty in the morning, but the girl’s bony ribs gave me an answer before she could.

  Ari looked over her shoulder. “Do you want Chinese? Pizza? Subs? What do you like to eat?”

  Beth looked up, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Food.” A rat nibbled at the chain that went from her nose to her left ear as she pulled it out. “I don’t understand why you want to change me.”

  “If looking like a circus clown crossed with a heavy-metal drummer suits you, fine. Go to it. Just don’t die in my office, in my Agency.” I grabbed my purse and stood up.

  “Do I have to leave?” Beth’s eyes widened, still brimming with tears.

  I opened the door. “This room, yes. The Agency, no. Come on, we’re going to get you cleaned up and find some clothes that don’t look like rats gnawed on them.” I turned and acted on pure instinct, the only thing that saved me so many times.

  I pulled the gun out of my purse without thinking and fired two bullets right into the chest of the young man in the hall. I followed them with another bullet through his left leg, and one in his right, then lined up to put one through his head.

  He looked up at me and smiled, flecks of blood on his teeth. “Morning, Marissa.”

  I think that’s about when Beth started screaming, and that brought Grimm. Well, that and the gunshots, though in this building, this office, neither were rare.

  “Marissa, how many times have I told you not to shoot the intern?” Grimm yelled at me.

  Beth grabbed a prepaid phone from one tattered pocket and attempted to dial 911. I took the phone from her and closed it. She went back to screaming.

  The young man slowly stood up, leaving a smear of blood on the wall behind him. Then he walked into the room and began to cough until he spat something out in his hand—my spent bullet. “Nice blossom on this one. Think your rifling is getting worn though.”

  I took the bullet from him. “Sorry, Mikey.” He was right. I’d make an appointment with my gunsmith. I went every few months. Think of it like a dental cleaning, only not as scary.

  Grimm spoke from behind me. “That’s the fi
fth time, my dear. Even Mr. Stone has figured out that there’s no need to kill my employees. I expect this will be the last time. Correct?”

  I nodded. “Got it. Sorry again, Mikey.”

  Mikey bent over and pulled a bullet out of his leg and handed it to me, then repeated the process with the other leg.

  “I am so calling the cops,” Beth said. “You shot him.”

  Mikey tossed Beth a bullet, then lifted up his shirt to show smooth skin, with no trace of a gunshot wound. “And what are you going to tell them?”

  I walked over to put a hand on her shoulder, but she flinched. Some people, you shoot even one person in front of them, and their entire opinion changes. I patted Mikey on the back. “Mikey here is different. Like you, in some ways. He’s a . . .” I tried to make my mouth say it, but all it did was make me want to shoot him again.

  Mikey grinned at me, showing those pearly white teeth that grew back in every time I knocked them out. “Go on, say it and we’ll call it even.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Mikey’s a wolf.”

  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Mikey smoothed out his T-shirt, ignoring the bloodstains.

  I never wanted Grimm to take a wolf as an intern. I might have mentioned that I killed the leader of the wolves. I might have mentioned that they’d made a few attempts on my life. At one point it was “Wake up and shoot the wolf outside the door. Make breakfast, shoot the wolf outside the door. Go to work, and shoot the wolf in the elevator, the two in the garage, and the one that shredded my backseat.” Old habits, like wolves, died hard.

  “I’ll try not to do it again. Mikey, meet Beth. Beth’s going to be a piper.”

  Mikey looked down at the cloud of rats and picked one up by the tail. “You mind?”

  I shrugged. “Be my guest.”

  He bit the rat in two and chewed thoughtfully. “Tastes like Dumpster. Much better than sewer rats. Those taste like ass.”