by Kat Bellamy
“If you touch either of them, I’ll fucking kill you,” Colt snarled. He was so enraged that he forgot to modulate his voice and he saw the look of shock on Jason’s face at his guttural tone, but the other man didn’t say a word.
“A little late for that, but if you’d like to see either of them again, you’re going to want to hurry. Even a ghoul burns if the fire’s hot enough.”
Colt froze. The crematorium. “They’re your family,” he said in disgust. “Your nephew. Your brother’s wife.”
“Which makes the betrayal all the more bitter and the vengeance all the sweeter,” said Miles. “Do you know what it’s like to have your own family turn on you for an outsider? Living in Stan’s shadow was one thing, but to know they all chose you over me? It just made it clear that all the talk of ‘amends’ my brother made over the years was just that. Talk. I, on the other hand, am a man of action. But I’ll give you one chance, which is more than you deserve. Their lives for yours. The choice is yours.”
Miles hung up and Colt turned to Jason, who’d been listening in silent concern the entire time. “Colt, who was that?”
“The man who killed Liam Carver, and he’s going to kill Ronnie and Susan if I don’t stop him,” Colt said, deciding to trust Jason with that sliver of the truth, even if he didn’t have the option of trusting him with the rest of it. “Can I borrow your car?”
Jason reached for his keys without hesitation, but held them back when Colt tried to grab them. “I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not,” Colt growled. “Are you really going to make me choose between their safety and yours?”
All of Jason’s defiance disappeared in an instant. He shoved the keys into Colt’s hand and shook his head sadly. “When you get tired of fighting alone, you know where to find me.”
Chapter 41
When Colt arrived at the crematorium, he found the back door locked. It caved in with relative ease after a few tries and he rushed down the hall until he found the cremation room. Fire blazed behind all six steel doors and at the end of the hallway, Colt saw Ronnie and Susan bound to twin chairs, facing away from one another. They’d been gagged, but the terrified looks on their faces and their attempts to warn him anyway made it clear that he was walking into a trap.
He just didn’t care.
Before Colt could reach them, he felt something blunt strike the back of his head. The impact threw him to his hands and knees and he felt hot, sticky blood trickling down his scalp. He barely managed to roll over in time to see a strangely feline Alpha with skin a sickly shade of gray and little fur to speak of standing over him with a steel pipe that looked as if it had just been ripped out of a wall. Judging from the steam billowing out of one of the crematories, it had.
“Miles?” he asked in disbelief as he caught a glimpse of the familiar ink on the other Alpha’s upper arm. Miles’ pupils had become catlike slivers set in orbs of nuclear green, but Colt recognized them still. So he was a variant, after all.
The ghoul’s only response was to bring the pipe down, aiming right for Colt’s neck. He barely rolled out of the way in time and grabbed the edge of the pipe. With one heave, he flung Miles across the room.
Colt’s fangs broke through his gums all at once and his claws scraped the cement floor as he scrambled back to his feet. Miles charged him but this time, Colt had prepared himself. He grabbed the other ghoul by the neck to hold him at arm’s length. Miles slashed and clawed and hissed while Colt reached behind him, groping for the latch to the nearest crematory.
Before he could open the latch, Miles managed to break his grasp and rushed forward, slamming Colt back against the opening. Colt felt the fire lapping at his back and the smell of burning flesh filled the air anew. He strained against Miles, not expecting to go up against another Alpha. Judging from the extent of his transformation, it wasn’t anything that had happened overnight.
Colt braced himself and gripped Miles’ arms as tightly as he could before throwing himself back into the fire. The action was enough of a shock to break Miles’ grip on him and he slammed the door shut on the other ghoul. Miles looked like the devil himself trying to break out of hell as he thrashed and clawed at the glass. Colt held the door shut with every ounce of his strength until he could no longer see Miles raging in the flames, and he waited longer still, convinced that if he released the door, Miles would explode out of the crematory and the battle would begin anew.
Only when he was sure Miles was gone for good did Colt pull away long enough to wedge a busted steel rod into the latch to keep the door shut. The burned skin on the back of his head and shoulders was still only beginning to heal over by the time he made it over to untie Susan. She bolted out of her chair to help him untie Ronnie immediately, before she even bothered with her own gag.
Colt stepped back and watched as Susan took her son into her arms and held him tightly, stroking his hair as she sobbed. He tried to pull away and assured her he was fine, but she wasn’t having any of it. When he finally did manage to break away, he threw his arms around Colt’s chest with such force that it knocked the wind out of him.
At first, Colt wasn’t sure what to do. Renee and Gerald had never been ones to shy away from hugs or effusive praise, but no matter how much love they showered on him, he’d never been anything other than awkward about receiving it. He finally hugged Ronnie back, then Susan when she threw her arms around both of them. He could barely make out any intelligible words through her strangled sobs, but “you came” was clear enough.
“Of course I did,” he mumbled into her hair. The physical contact made his burnt skin hurt even worse, but it was worth it. “Like you said, we’re family now.”
Once Susan had finally calmed down enough to speak, Colt asked her, “What the fuck was wrong with Miles? I know he’s an variant, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“It’s called a feline ghoul. They’re rare,” she said breathlessly. “Very rare.”
“Thank God for that,” Colt muttered. “Come on, let’s get you guys out of here. Ronnie?” he called, noticing that the younger ghoul had gone silent. He was staring off into the crematory that was now Miles’ final resting place like he was looking for something in the flames. “You okay, bud?”
After a few tries, Ronnie responded to his name by looking up sharply, like he’d only just heard Colt calling it. “Yeah,” he said quickly, putting an arm around his mother’s shoulder. “Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s go home.”
Chapter 42
In the days that followed, Ronnie and Susan had taken to referring to the clusterfuck that had ended in Miles’ and Grayson’s deaths euphemistically as “Waterfire.” It worked for Colt. If he never caught a glimpse of the festival for the rest of his life, he’d die happy.
Well, maybe happy was a strong word. He was still saddled with the unenviable task of being a figurehead for a city of ghouls he barely fit in with, let alone felt qualified to lead, and Jason still hated him. Probably even more now because in his haste to park at the crematorium, Colt had scraped the bumper of Jason’s car on the curb. At least offering to pay for the repairs would give him an excuse to see Jason for a few minutes, once everything blew over.
Convincing Roland not to kill Andrew had been a challenge, but convincing Andrew not to tell the world about the existence of ghouls even moreso. He’d finally convinced the DA to give him the chance to explain everything. If Andrew still wanted to out their secret after that, Colt wasn’t sure what he was going to do.
In the beginning, his role within the city had been nothing more than an inconvenience, but now that he’d saved his “subjects” once, he felt responsible for their continued wellbeing, even if it meant protecting them from Andrew and Evelyn. Sometimes he wasn’t sure who posed the greater threat.
At least he had a few more days to decide what he was going to do when Andrew made his decision.
Colt was on the sofa in the Browns’ living room, looking over some papers Evelyn had given him
to sign. She was insistent on making Providence a more hospitable sanctuary for members of the Assembly and hadn’t been remotely pleased with Colt’s desire to read the papers first before he signed them.
Evelyn might have been convinced she was the one in power, but if she had taught Colt anything, it was that the Assembly was all about rules. He wasn’t opposed to using those rules against them if it meant looking out for the people who trusted him, for some bizarre and ill-advised reason. The Moreaus might have been corrupt, but they had at least been a barrier between the Kin they ruled and the Assembly. Colt knew Evelyn had been hoping for a compliant puppet, but she was the one who’d forced him into the role and he had already decided to start taking it seriously. If it made her life hell in the process, that was just icing on the cake.
The doorbell rang and Colt groaned. He barely had a moment’s peace now that he’d taken a somewhat active role in the Kinship. He spent more time at the Browns’ house those days than anywhere else, both because it felt less pathetic than coming home to an empty apartment and because he got so many visitors that his small living room wasn’t sufficient space to house them all.
When he opened the door, Andrew Wilbur was the last person he was expecting to see. Colt didn’t have high hopes for the decision the DA was going to come to, and certainly not if it had only taken him four days.
“Andrew. Hi.”
“Jason said I might find you here,” Andrew said, looking past Colt and into the quaint living room. “Are you alone?”
“Ronnie’s back at school and Susan’s volunteering down at the church, so yeah, for a minute. Come on in.”
Andrew rolled his eyes as he followed Colt into the living room. “Selling the virtuous ghoul routine a bit hard, aren’t you?”
“If it keeps you from killing hundreds of innocents, yeah. I’m gonna sell as hard as I can. Drink?”
“Sure,” Andrew said, resting his hand on the back of Stan’s chair. Colt realized he had never actually seen the guy sit down. Andrew thanked him for the scotch and Colt found his patience waning even though it would have been an excellent time for those diplomatic skills Evelyn had been trying to teach him to kick in.
“So, are we gonna talk about the weather, or are you gonna tell me what you decided?”
Andrew sighed, staring into his glass. “This isn’t easy for someone like me. I’m used to living in a world that makes sense. A horrible, gruesome world where unspeakable things happen to perfectly decent people on a daily basis, sure, but until this, it all made sense.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling,” Colt admitted.
Andrew watched him carefully. “How long have you been here? Ghouls, I mean.”
“As long as humans have. At least, as far as anyone can remember.”
“And you’re everywhere? All over the world?”
“I’m sure there’s an island or two somewhere that escaped the plague, but yeah. Us and fast food joints.”
“And these ‘animal attacks’ Carver was investigating,” he continued. “Those are rogue ghouls? They’re operating outside the jurisdiction of your Council?”
“It varies from one place to another. The Moreaus were kinda free and loose when it came to enforcing the rules, which is why the Assembly hated them, but there are ghouls who kill humans,” Colt admitted, knowing that lying would only delay the threat, not eliminate it. Andrew was sharp and he would figure out the truth, sooner or later. Colt needed to know what to expect when he did. “As long as I’m in charge, that shit’s gonna stop, but there’s only so much I can do. You’re decent enough at your job, but there’s still crime, isn’t there?”
Andrew frowned. “In charge?”
“Yeah. I’m kind of the de facto leader of the ghouls. I didn’t mention that?”
“No,” Andrew said flatly. “You didn’t.” He paused as if in deep thought. “And if I were to take you in and arrest you for any of the myriad crimes I could pin on you just off the top of my head…who would take your place?”
“That’d be Evelyn Leiton.”
Andrew’s eyes widened and all the color drained from his face.
“I take it you’ve met?”
“Once, and it was enough.” Andrew gulped down the rest of his drink. “I can’t believe I’m seriously entertaining the idea of —“
“Of not going to the feds and telling them there are monsters in Providence and the mayor is one?” Colt asked dryly. “If you’re looking for a way to end your career, I have to admit, that’s a good one.”
“If I let this carry on, people will die.”
“And if you don’t, more people will die,” said Colt.
“Ghouls,” Andrew added.
“And humans. The Assembly came down hard on a city that was exposed once. Hundreds of humans died, too. Anyone who might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even if you don’t see us as people, the rogue ghouls who slip through the cracks won’t have anything on the bodycount if you give the Assembly a reason to power wash the city.”
To his credit, Andrew didn’t respond by lashing out like Colt knew he probably would have if he was in the DA’s position. After a few moments of contemplation, he said, “If I agree to keep your secret, I have a few conditions.”
“I’m listening.”
“You police your own. I don’t want to have to cover up anymore of your messes, and I won’t have my cops going home in bodybags because they had a run-in with one of yours.”
“Hurting a cop or any other public figure is already grounds for immediate execution, and that’s one of the Moreaus’ rules I have no intention of changing. Your next condition?”
“The Sheriff and the mayor both step down. I won’t have this city run by predators.”
“We can talk about the mayor, but trust me when I say you want Roland in your corner. For one thing, half the cops downtown are ghouls. You really think they’re gonna listen to a Sheriff who isn’t one of them?” He snorted. “For that matter, the city doesn’t have the funds to train a new force.”
Andrew watched him with a blank expression, then cleared his throat. “Fine. Roland stays, but if the mayor doesn’t step down by this time next week, our deal is off.”
“Deal,” said Colt. “Now for my condition.”
Andrew arched an eyebrow. “Alright.”
“You let Stan Brown go.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“He doesn’t belong in prison and you know it. You might not like that we exist, but we do. Stan is one of the only reasons any of us are as civilized as we are, yours truly included.”
Andrew let out a heavy sigh. “You know, for what it’s worth, you’re not half-bad at negotiating. It’s a deal.”
Colt offered his hand. “Shake on it?”
Andrew reluctantly returned his handshake. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“Same to you, buddy. You have any idea how hard it was to convince the Sheriff not to ice your ass?”
“I should go. I still have to memorize the bullshit coverup he devised before my next press conference and come to terms with the fact that I live in a city run by cannibalistic gremlins.
“Yeah, good luck with that and let me know if you have any success. I’ve never been good at rationalizing.”
Andrew sighed. He turned to leave, but paused and looked back at Colt from the door. “He still loves you, you know. I asked him out and he turned me down. He didn’t say it outright, but judging from the amount of digging he does into you and your ‘associates,’ I’m sure it’s because he thinks there’s still a way to save you.”
Colt swallowed hard. “And here I thought hitting on someone who worked for you was unprofessional.”
Andrew smirked. “We all have our vices. Looks like we share the same one.”
Chapter 43
The night Stan was released from prison, Colt suggested taking the family out to celebrate, but all Stan wanted was Susan’s meatloaf and a half case of beer. Evidently, the cooki
ng in county wasn’t up to snuff.
When Colt had tried to excuse himself so the family could have some time alone, Stan had been the first to insist that he stay. When the doorbell rang, Colt couldn’t help but groan. He’d given his underlings strict instructions that he was only to be bothered that night if it was an emergency, but Evelyn’s idea of what constituted an emergency was questionable, at the very least.
“Sorry,” he muttered, standing. “I’ll tell them to go away.”
“I don’t know,” Susan said in a singsong, her fingers woven in her husband’s hair. She hadn’t broken contact with the man since his return. It was like they were on their honeymoon all over again. “You might want to invite whoever it is in to join us.”
Colt frowned, looking at Stan and Ronnie for context. They were both smirking. Sometimes the resemblance between them was undeniable.
“Okay, weirdos,” Colt snorted, going to answer the door. When he saw Jason standing there with flowers in his hand, he was sure he was in one of those weird dreams where the floor turned into melted candy and he had to try to run from a carnivorous elephant while his feet were stuck.
“If this is about the car, just send me the repair bill and I’ll take care of it.” It was hardly the romantic overture he’d planned if he ever got the chance to be in Jason’s presence again without getting served with a restraining order, but it was the only explanation for why Jason was standing there in the first place.
Jason gave him a withering scowl. “Susan invited me, so just shut up for a minute and let me talk.”
Colt blinked. This was a new side of Jason, and it was admittedly kind of hot. “Okay,” he said, letting the door fall shut behind him for privacy.
“So much has changed since you got mixed up in—” He stopped to angrily flourish his hand. “This. I hate that you’re involved in things that scare the shit out of me, things that don’t make any sense, and most of all, I hate that you’re constantly having to lie to me and everyone else who cares about you. But the one thing I don’t hate is that for once, you actually seem to know who you are.”