Leslie saw me and froze.
Ascanio turned and I glimpsed the thing he was trying to protect. A horrible face gaped at me, its lower jaw protruding, its face like a blob of melting wax, the eyes little more than tiny slits. It was the face victims of Lyc-V wore when the shapeshifter virus first infected their bodies.
The small brown eyes looked at me from the monster’s face. Julie. Oh my God, Julie.
Leslie was trying to murder the kids.
I charged.
Leslie roared and hurled the shattered chair at me. I dodged and stabbed her in the chest, aiming for her heart. Slayer slid off the ribs—I’d punctured her lung instead. Like poking a normal human with a needle. Claws raked my shoulder. I sliced across her stomach. She leaned back and kicked out with both feet. I saw the kick but there was no way to avoid it. The blow took me square in the chest. I flew into the main room, curling into a ball. My back slammed into the wall. The world swam.
Leslie leaped at me through the gap, claws raised, giant teeth snapping.
I dodged. She hit the wall full speed and whipped around, carving the air, her claws like daggers. I dodged, left, left, right. She swung too wide and I lunged into the opening, turning Slayer into a metal whirlwind. Left thigh, side, right thigh, left shoulder, chest . . .
She snarled and backhanded me. I’ve been hit with a hammer. It hurt less. My head snapped back and she raked at me with her other hand. Pain cleaved my stomach. I stumbled back.
Blood filled my mouth. Leslie bled from a dozen places, but not enough to slow her down. She was fast, Lyc-V was healing her cuts, and my sword wasn’t doing enough damage.
I kicked at her. She hammered a fist into my thigh. I swayed at the last moment and the fist grazed me. My femur screamed from the impact. She was aiming for my injured knee. I drove Slayer into her liver.
Leslie screeched and roared, “Die alrrready!”
I cleaved at her right arm, severing the tendon. Unless I won, the kids died. I would kill this bitch. I’d tear her limb from limb if I had to.
She grabbed at me with her left hand, clenching my shoulder, lifting me off the ground, and jerked me to her teeth. I pulled my throwing knife and stabbed her in the throat, quick, like hammering a nail. She gurgled, tore me off, and hurled me aside.
I hit Andrea’s desk with my back, dropped to my feet, and started toward her. I hurt so much, the pain kept me from passing out.
Leslie grabbed a filing cabinet and hurled it at me. I dodged. She threw a chair. I ducked and kept coming. Leslie heaved a bookshelf. It would hit me; I had no place to go.
A black dog the size of a pony burst through the doorway. Grendel, you stupid magic poodle.
The dog hit Leslie in the chest like a battering ram. The render went down, knocked off her feet by the impact. I ran at Leslie. This was my chance.
Leslie clenched Grendel by the scruff of his neck and flung him aside. He crashed into the wall with a snarl.
Leslie leaped to her feet and bared her teeth at me. Blood dripped from between her fangs, stretching in long red threads to the floor.
Don’t black out. I just had to stay conscious.
“Osanda.” The power word left my mouth, tearing out a chunk of my magic in a flash of pain. I didn’t care. I sank everything into it. Kneel. Kneel, you bitch.
She gasped. The bones of her shins snapped like toothpicks and she crashed to her knees. I swung Slayer. The sword’s pale blade smoked, feeding off my fury. I cut, severing the spinal column. Leslie’s head dropped to the side. I chopped at it again. It rolled to the floor. Her headless body toppled toward me. I kicked her head into the corner and dragged myself to the loup cage.
Julie whimpered in a thin tiny voice, her breath whistling through the space between her mangled jaws. Ascanio lay on his back. His eyes looked at me, flashing red. Still alive. They were both still alive.
I grabbed onto the bars. God, my chest hurt. “She’s dead. It will be okay. It will be okay. Give me the keys.”
Ascanio cried out and flipped onto his side. A rib had pierced his chest, sticking out. His hand opened, the key a gory bloody mess in his palm. He shut his eyes.
I thrust my hand through the bars, grabbed the slick, warm key, and unlocked the cage.
“Help us,” Julie whispered. “It hurts, Kate . . . It hurts.”
“I know, baby. I know.” I had to get them to Doolittle. A quarter of Lyc-V’s victims didn’t survive their first transformation.
Tears slid from Julie’s eyes. “The boy’s dying.”
I looked over Ascanio. Broken ribs, torn-up back. I touched Ascanio’s neck. Pulse. Weak, but steady pulse. He opened his eyes slowly. “I trrrried.”
“You did great.”
The roar of an enchanted engine thundered outside. Jim’s backup. I forced myself upright.
“Don’t leave me!” Julie sobbed.
“Just to the door. To get help. I’ll be right back.”
I ran out into the living room, wrapped in my pain like a cloak, and saw a gray van pulling up in front of the office. The Pack didn’t own gray vans.
I sprinted to the door.
The van door opened. An older man stepped out and leveled a crossbow at me. A tiny green spark winked on the end of the crossbow bolt. An exploding arrow head.
I slammed the door shut and barred it.
The explosion shook the building.
I pulled the internal shutter on the left window closed and dashed right. The crossbow bolt got there half a second before me and bounced off the grate, falling back. I pulled the shutter down. The burst of magic energy was like a wrecking ball. The walls groaned but held. A couple more direct hits and they would come down.
The kids couldn’t move, not fast enough to outrun a vehicle.
Grendel limped to me. I hugged his shaggy neck and ran my hands along his back. Nothing was broken.
I had enough juice for one power word. It would buy us a couple of minutes, but I would pass out, and with the kids immobile, we were trapped.
“When the shit hits the fan, you hide, you hear?”
Grendel whined.
“Don’t be a hero, dog.”
I slid the cover in the door aside, exposing the narrow viewing window. The door of the van was open. Inside, the man in the tactical vest slowly, methodically loaded another explosive bolt into his crossbow.
We were done.
When they blasted through the wall, I would take a few of them with me. That was all I could do.
The crossbowman raised the bow.
A gray shape leaped off the roof. A massive beast, a meld of human and lion, landed on the roof of the van, crushing it.
Curran.
The giant claws gouged the top of the van, and he ripped the metal sheet away, as if opening a can of sardines. The crossbowman looked up in time to see the huge paw just before it cracked his skull like an egg. The enormous jaws of the leonine head opened and a deafening roar blasted forth in a declaration of war, drowning even the noise of the enchanted engine. The beast dipped his massive head inside, pulled a kicking body out between his teeth, pinned it with his paws, and ripped the top half of the body off.
He had come for me again.
Curran’s body flowed, snapping into a more humanoid form. He plucked another man from the van, snapped his neck, hurled the broken body aside, and dove into the vehicle. The van rocked. Blood sprayed the windows, someone screamed, and he emerged from the van, bloody, his golden eyes on fire.
I unlocked the door. It swung open and he clenched me to him. I threw my arms around his neck and I kissed him, blood and fur and all.
CHAPTER 17
HELL WAS DRIVING A BLOOD-SOAKED VAN LISTENING to two children dying in the backseat, while Grendel whined as if something were killing him. Hell was watching Jezebel run out of the Keep’s gates, her face a pain-distorted mask, clench Joey’s mangled body, rock him like a child, and scream and scream and scream, as if it were Jezebel who was dying. Hell was seeing fear
in Doolittle’s eyes when Curran carried Julie, wrapped in the sheets from my office cot, into the Keep, and then sitting in the waiting room.
Curran spoke into the phone, biting off words. “Is anybody going to tell me why our own fucking render attacked my mate?”
Barabas walked into the room. The skin of his face stretched too tight over his features, making him look sharper and fragile. He came over and crouched by me. “Can I get you anything?”
I shook my head. Curran hung up the phone.
Barabas’s eyes were watering. He looked feverish and unhinged. His quiet voice shook with barely contained anger. “Did she hurt before you killed her?”
“Yes,” Curran said. “I saw the body.”
“That’s good.” Barabas swallowed. His hands shook. Technical difficulties with controlling his rage. I could relate. “Jez will be glad to hear it.”
“Was Joey a relative?” I asked. My voice squeaked. I could’ve given a rusty metal gate a run for its money in the creaking department.
“He was the youngest of our generation,” Barabas said. “Jezebel used to babysit him. We all did, but she had done it the most.”
The door swung open and Jim blocked the light. Tall, dark, grim, and wrapped in a black cloak, he looked like death walking in. Jim reached into his cloak and pulled out a thin gold chain. The light of the feylanterns clutched at the gold and slid down to a small pendant. A lighthouse. A tiny diamond winked from the spot where the lighthouse lamp would have been.
“Boyfriend had it,” Jim said. “Leslie broke the chain. He was getting it fixed for her birthday.”
Leslie Wren was a Lighthouse Keeper.
It wasn’t the hundred-mile walk through rough terrain that had hurt Julie. It wasn’t a freak accident or a render gone loup. No, it was my case. Had she not been in that office, she wouldn’t have been attacked. Had I ordered the trackers to bring her back to the Keep . . .
“Leslie’s father was an engineer in Columbia,” Jim said. “Made good money. About fifteen years ago the man lost his shit, quit his job, and moved the family north of Atlanta, to the countryside. He’d inherited the house from his parents. Leslie had an older brother, but he stayed in Columbia. The locals say they never saw the family much. They remember Leslie—a quiet kid in threadbare clothes. She went to school, but the parents wouldn’t leave the property.”
“How did they survive?” I asked.
Jim put the pendant on the table. “Lived off the land. There are deer in the woods, raccoons, small game. They must’ve hunted a lot. Three shapeshifters need a lot of food.”
Curran glanced at me. “Explains why Leslie made a good render. She probably spent more time in her fur than in her skin growing up. It’s not good for children. Messes with your head.”
Jim shrugged off his cloak. “She came straight to the Pack the moment she turned eighteen. She’s been with us for nine years. She was squared away. No warning signs, no problems, nothing. In hindsight, I should’ve asked myself why there were no problems. Most renders miss a step once in a while. She never did. She was the go-to render when we had an issue.”
I leaned back. “Why would you look for trouble, when there is none?”
“She was with us for a third of her life. We treated her well.” Curran leaned on the table. “I want to know why.”
Jim squared his shoulders. “Teresa, one of my people, tracked down Leslie Wren’s brother. She came back this morning. We’d just missed her. She says that Leslie’s father, Colin Wren, had a serious case of paranoia. The mother, Liz, was a go-with-the-flow kind of woman. The brother says she was passive, didn’t like confrontations. They weren’t the most stable couple.”
A paranoid shapeshifter with a passive mate who’d do pretty much anything he wanted to avoid a fight. That was a recipe for disaster.
Jim kept going. “When Leslie was twelve and her brother was seventeen, their mother had an affair with Michael Waterson.”
“Local cat alpha of Columbia,” Curran said for my benefit. “Not a bad guy. Capable.”
“The affair didn’t last long,” Jim said. “When Colin found out, he snapped. From the way the brother tells it, he took Leslie with him out of Columbia and went to his parents’ house. He gave Liz a choice: if she didn’t come with him, she’d never see Leslie again.”
“Used his daughter as collateral,” Curran said.
Jim nodded. “The brother says she was afraid he’d do something to Leslie, so she went with him. Waterson never followed her. He says she told him not to look for her and that she was going to save her marriage. They holed up in the house. Liz wasn’t allowed to leave the property. The brother was in high school at the time; he stayed behind to finish the year out. He came to visit them on his break. The dad tried to kill him. Said he was competition.”
Living in that house must’ve been pure hell. It didn’t make me regret killing Leslie. “She must’ve blamed Lyc-V for driving her father crazy.”
Jim nodded. “Yeah.”
“Bullshit,” Barabas spat. “Dozens of shapeshifters deal with affairs. Marriages break. People die. We carry on. We don’t abuse our mates and children.”
“When did the Keepers recruit her?” Curran asked.
“We don’t know,” Jim said. “Had to be early on.”
Something awful had happened to Leslie Wren in that house. Something that convinced her that the shapeshifters were evil, that the very magic that made their existence possible had to be destroyed. She believed it so deeply that she joined the people who hated her kind, signing her own death warrant. She had a life with the Pack, respect, friendships, a future. But whatever happened had scarred her so deeply, she threw it all away when the Keepers called.
How? How do you go from taking Julie on a hunting trip to trying to murder her? I had killed dozens, but I could never bring myself to take a life of a child. It was beyond me.
The door down the hall opened. Sander, one of Doolittle’s junior medics, a tall, thin man who looked like he would snap in half any second, came out and approached us. “The boy is awake.”
ASCANIO LAY ON THE BED UNDER THE COVERS. HIS face was a bloodless mask. He looked weak and small, his eyes enormous, like two dark pools on the pale face. If he were human, he would’ve been dead. Sander said he had hairline fractures in both legs, serious blood loss, a punctured lung, and two broken ribs. Leslie had thrown him around like a dog shaking a rat. The Lyc-V would knit him back together. A few days and he would be up and walking. But meanwhile he hurt.
I sat on his bed. Curran remained standing.
Ascanio’s gaze fixed on him.
“What happened?” Curran asked.
“Aunt B’s boudas came,” Ascanio said, his voice flat. “Three of them. They told Andrea Aunt B wanted to talk. Andrea said no. They said, ‘You’re coming with us one way or another.’ I figured there would be trouble. Andrea looked at me and said, ‘Someone has to stay with the kids.’ So they left Joey. He was the weakest. Grendel really didn’t like him. He kept trying to bite Joey, so Andrea took him with her. Then you called and Joey told us to stay away from the damn door. Then he went upstairs, he said to sleep.”
Damn boudas. I tell him he’s under siege and he goes to take a nap.
“About half an hour later someone knocked on the door. A woman was screaming.”
Ascanio swallowed.
“Keep going,” Curran told him.
“Julie said, ‘Come on, doorboy, aren’t you going to see who it is?’ And I said, ‘I’m not a doorboy, and if you want to know so bad, go see for yourself.’ She went.” Ascanio closed his eyes for a long moment. “The woman on the other end yelled, ‘Help me, they hurt my baby.’ Julie looked out and screamed that it was Leslie. She knew her from the Pack, and Leslie was carrying a bloody kid. We knew the Pack was being attacked. We opened the door.”
They saw a shapeshifter woman with a blood-smeared child and they let her in. Of course they let her in. I would’ve run out the door to protect h
er. I should’ve told them about Leslie. No evidence existed that the two were connected, and I didn’t know. If I had, Julie wouldn’t be losing her humanity right now.
Ascanio took a deep breath. “She was in warrior form when she came through the door. She knocked Julie aside. I shifted and hit her. She was too strong. I got some strikes in, but then she clawed me up. I thought she’d slice me to ribbons and then Julie jumped on her back. The cat pulled her off and bit her, hard. It happened so fast. And then Joey came running. The cat said, ‘Step aside, weakling. You know you can’t take me.’ And Joey pulled his knife and told me to protect Julie.”
Ascanio squeezed his eyes shut. “Julie was already messed up. I picked her up and I ran.”
His legs were broken and he’d carried Julie anyway. Whatever he did from now on, I would never forget this.
“I knew if we went out the back, she’d chase us down, so I got into the loup cage and locked the door.”
He gulped the air.
I wanted to kill Leslie again. I wanted to kill her slowly and take my time.
“The cat did something to Joey to keep him from moving, because we heard Joey cussing her out. The cat came to get us, but she couldn’t get through the bars. It really pissed her off. Joey was screaming and cursing, telling her she should come and pick on someone her own size. The cat went back out. And then we heard Joey scream. I wanted to go and help him, but I couldn’t get up. The cat was beating him to death and I couldn’t get up.”
“You did everything right,” I told him. “You did great. You couldn’t have done more.”
Ascanio’s hand shook. “He died to keep us alive. Why? Why would he do that?”
“Because that’s what you do,” Curran said. “That’s what being in the Pack means. The strong defend the weak. Joey protected you, and you protected Julie.”
“He didn’t even know us!” He stared at us, his eyes wet. “I’m not like you. I don’t want this. I don’t want people dying for me. I don’t want to walk around with it.”
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