by Nalini Singh
“Dali,” my Jim said. “Focus. Help me kick his ass.”
The loup Jim snarled.
My Jim went furry. One second he was there and the next his clothes ripped and a half man, half jaguar spilled out, seven feet tall, corded with muscle and ready to fight.
I had to change shape. At worst I had about a minute of disorientation, at best fifteen seconds. I didn’t have fifteen seconds. Jim was in danger. I grabbed onto that thought and chanted it in my mind, trying to dedicate everything inside me to that one idea. Jim was in danger. Jim was in danger . . .
The world dissolved into a thousand bokeh, blurry, colorful points of light. They swirled and melted, chased away by a revolting scent.
. . . in danger. Jim was in danger. Jim was in danger.
There was a loup in the middle of the room. He smelled like Jim, but he wasn’t Jim, because Jim was in danger. Sharp spikes of adrenaline shot through me. My legs trembled in fear. I was small and weak and I . . .
The loup lunged. He was going straight for Jim. He didn’t think I was a threat.
Complete commitment. I charged and rammed the loup. My shoulder smashed into him. The loup went flying and bounced off the ward. Jim flashed by me and carved at the loup’s midsection with his claws. Blood spattered on the floor. The loup spun and kicked Jim. I heard bone crunch. Jim flew past me, knocked backward.
I had to keep this thing occupied. I charged the loup again. He sidestepped me, so fast, and raked my spine, from the hackles to the tail.
Oh my gods, that hurt. That hurt so much. He’d ripped me open. I smelled my own blood.
Don’t you faint. Think! Use your brain. I whipped around and roared at him so loud, the windows shook. It was the kind of challenge no cat would ignore.
The loup turned to me and roared back. Jim seized the opening and lunged at him, his claws like blades, slicing and cutting. They rolled across the floor. I chased them, trying to get in a bite or a claw, but they were moving so fast, they were almost a blur. The loup whipped around, matching Jim blow for blow, and raked its talons across Jim’s chest. Blood drenched the fur. Jim roared, pissed off and hurting. I lunged for the loup’s leg. He spun and kicked me in the face, right on the nose. Blood drenched my eyes, as his claws tore my skin. I still lunged, missed, and ran into a wall. Ow. Everything hurt now. My wounds were burning.
I shook my head, flinging the blood from me and willing my skin to seal, and spun around.
The loup got ahold of Jim’s arm, bent it back, exposing his chest, and thrust his claws into it.
No!
I charged, roaring.
He let go of Jim and whirled to face me. I put myself between Jim and him. The loup lunged at me, sinking claws into my fur. Pain burst in me. I didn’t think I could hurt that much. I snapped at him and sank my teeth into his thigh. The hot burst of blood on my tongue was the most disgusting thing I ever tasted. I locked my big teeth on his leg and flung him from me.
The loup rolled to his feet. He was hurt, but we were hurt worse. The floor in front of me was wet with blood. Everywhere. Jim was outmatched. He fought so well and tried so hard, but that thing was so big.
Jim landed next to me, bloody, his eyes glowing so bright they looked on fire. “Remember what I told you in the car?”
He told me a lot of things! I scrambled to remember. Blah blah blah, strength, weaknesses, sit on him? Sit on him? What kind of battle strategy is that?
Jim roared. It was the rolling, coughing jaguar roar. The loup was a male jaguar. He wouldn’t be able to resist.
I made a move forward.
“No!” Jim barked.
What? What was he thinking? He didn’t want me to help?
Jim roared again. The loup leaped across the room. They ripped and clawed at each other.
Jim wanted my help. Some men tried to do it all on their own, but Jim didn’t have that kind of ego. Jim cared only about results and objectives. It had to be a diversion. What would he need a diversion for? For me to sneak up close.
I padded forward on soft paws, circling, carefully staying out of the loup’s field of vision. I was getting light-headed and I couldn’t even figure out if it was my body going into overdrive trying to repair me or if I was finally going to pass out from all the blood fumes that were making me sick. The memory of pain flashed through me. I was so scared to get hurt again.
None of it mattered. I couldn’t allow this thing to emerge into the world. It would kill and rape and devour and it would cut a path of destruction through the city before it could be stopped.
I couldn’t let Jim die. I loved him. He was my everything.
I was directly behind the loup. Jim saw me. The loup had him in a death grip, his arms around Jim, his claws digging into his back.
I braced myself.
With a roar knitted of fury and pain, Jim tore out of the loup’s grip, leaving shreds of his flesh on the abomination’s claws. Jim jumped and kicked the loup in the chest with both legs. The loup’s body hit me, and he fell over me, landing on the floor.
I jumped on top of him and dug my claws into the wooden floorboards.
The loup strained, trying to push me off, and carved my back with its claws. It burned like fire.
I just had to hold on for a few seconds.
The loup clawed me again. It hurt. It hurt so badly. I didn’t know I could hurt any worse. I was wrong.
The loup howled and bit my shoulder. My bone crunched under the pressure of his teeth.
I just had to hold on.
Jim landed next to me. His enormous jaguar jaws gaped open, wide, wider, wider . . . His bite was twice as powerful as that of a lion. He could crack a turtle shell with his teeth.
The loup reared his head.
Jim bit down, his massive fangs piercing the temporal bones of the loup’s skull, just in front of his ears. The bones crackled like eggshells. Jim’s teeth sank into the loup’s brain. The abomination screamed. His claws raked my back one last time and went limp. Jim squeezed harder. The head broke apart in his mouth and he spat the pieces onto the floor and crushed the sickening remains with his foot.
I crawled off the body. Every cell in me ached. Wounds gaped across Jim’s frame. He was torn up all over.
Jim landed next to me, leaned over, and gently licked my bloody face with his jaguar tongue. I whined and rolled my big head against him. He kissed me again, cleaning my cuts, his touch gentle and tender. I love you, too, Jim. I love you so much. Guess what? We won. It was worth it.
“You can’t get me,” Steven said. His voice shook a little. “I’m in the ward.”
We turned and looked at him with our glowing eyes. Silly man. We have faced our worst fear. There was nothing he could do to us now.
“We’re cats,” Jim said, his voice a rough growl. “We can wait hours for the mouse to leave the mouse hole. And when the magic wave ends, your mouse hole will collapse.”
Steven’s face turned white as a sheet.
“Squeak, little mouse,” Jim said, his voice raising my hackles. “Squeak while we wait.”
“DO I look okay?”
“Yes,” Jim said. “You look gorgeous.”
“Is my lipstick too bright?”
“No.”
“I should’ve braided my hair.”
“I like your hair.”
I turned to him. We were sitting in a Pack Jeep in front of a large house. The air smelled of wood smoke, cooked meat, and people.
“Don’t be a chicken,” Jim said.
“What if they don’t like me?”
“They will like you, but if they don’t, I won’t care.” Jim got out of the car, walked over to the passenger door, and opened it for me. I stepped out. I was wearing a cute little dress and a sun hat. My back was a little scarred and Jim was limping and careful with his right side, but that couldn’t be helped. In a month or two, even the scars would dissolve. Steven wouldn’t be so lucky. The world was better without him in it.
Jim was ringing the do
orbell.
Help. Help me.
“Don’t say anything up front,” I murmured. “We can just let them sort of come to terms with it . . .”
The door swung open. An older African-American woman stood in the doorway. She wore an apron, and she had big dark eyes, just like Jim.
“Dali, this is my mother,” Jim said. “Mom, this is Dali. She’s my mate.”
LUCKY CHARMS
LISA SHEARIN
The beep from the tracking chip was continuous and the dot had stopped blinking.
Yasha pulled over where Ian indicated.
McDonald’s?
It was four in the morning. I was in a stolen bakery delivery truck that’d been nearly totaled by three gargoyles. In the truck with me were two hungover elves, a pair of stoned leprechauns with the munchies, a naked Russian werewolf, and a hot partner, who was actually more of a bodyguard, in a race against a goblin dark mage to retrieve a leprechaun prince with a tracking chip embedded in his left ass cheek.
The trail ended at a McDonald’s in the Bronx.
This had to be weird, even by SPI standards.
It was a hell of a night for my first day on the job at Supernatural Protection and Investigations.
Six hours earlier
“How the hell did you lose five horny leprechauns in a strip club?”
I paused just outside the conference room door and mentally filed that shouted little gem under “Questions you don’t usually hear in an office setting.”
Five SPI agents—three humans and two elves—stood in front of their manager, sheepish or flat-out embarrassed expressions on their faces. They looked nervous. They had every reason to be.
Their manager looked human, but his behavior—and bulging yellow eyes—suggested he might have a smidgen of ogre blood swimming around in his veins. The popular belief that ogres were dumber than a stump wasn’t true. They were raging, type A overachievers, which might be good in the corporate world but was definitely bad for tolerating failure.
“But, sir, we—”
“Don’t ‘but, sir’ me, Agent Phelps.” His voice was getting deeper, more gravelly, and definitely ogreish with each word. “You had an assignment, and since all five of you are back here, that means there are five unguarded leprechaun royals out there.”
A skinny elf opened his mouth to speak.
“No more excuses! Bodyguard means you guard that body.” The manager looked out in the hall, saw me, scowled, and slammed the conference room door so hard it shook the wall around it. It didn’t do much good, because every agent in every cube between here and the employee breakroom could still hear him yelling.
I just stood there. “I don’t report to him, do I?”
“Oh my, no,” said a petite older lady from behind me. “As the agency seer, your assignments come directly through your manager, Mr. Moreau.”
Jenny from HSR (that’s Human and Supernatural Resources) made it sound like a good thing, but I still wasn’t entirely convinced.
My manager was a vampire, and our CEO was a dragon.
It was my first day at work. First night, actually. Full moon. Busy, all-hands-on-deck kind of busy.
My name is Makenna Fraser, a small-town Southern girl with my first job in the big city; well, at least the first one I’d be willing to write home about. I work for Supernatural Protection and Investigations, also known as SPI. They battle the supernatural bad guys of myth and legend, and those who would unleash them. Bottom line, if you were human, you called the NYPD; if you were a supernatural living in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, you called SPI.
Yep, creatures from myth and legend were real.
And for them, our world and dimension now ranked at the top of their “Best Places to Live, Work, Play, and Eat” list. Unfortunately, the “eat” part often included humans.
Why all the attention? From what I understand, it all started with two little words: indoor plumbing.
Folks usually think of creatures of myth and legend as living in fairy-tale castles, enchanted forests, and having magical this, that, and the other thing—but it’s basically a medieval kind of existence. And I don’t care how it sounds in books or looks in movies, that kind of life ain’t pretty. It doesn’t matter how highfalutin a Seelie royal you are, or how much magical mojo you’ve got going on, or how much gold and jewels you’ve got piled in your treasure room, you still gotta go. So for a Seelie royal, their chamber pot might be gold, but they’re still pissing in a pot. My grandma Fraser told me that the big influx to our world was kicked off by the invention of the flushable toilet. Heck, I’d cross over for indoor plumbing.
And now that human technology had reached smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets that would have previously been called magical, there was no keeping supernaturals away. Think about it. What would you rather have: one guy singing off-key with a half-tuned lute in your great hall, or Lady Gaga, the Stones, Hank Williams, Jr., or anyone else you wanted to hear. on your phone, anytime, at your fingertips? That there’s a no-brainer.
The wealthier supernaturals (Seelie Court royals and the like) or those with long life spans (or death spans, if you prefer) like dragons, vampires, and werewolves, have had time to save their pennies into hoards to be able to bankroll any lifestyle to which they wanted to become accustomed. Other less well-to-do supernaturals have come here wanting the same things as the rest of us: a good job, nice house, 2.5 kids/spawn, and a dog.
However, regardless of species—human or supernatural—there’s always a small percentage that are power hungry, megalomaniacal, or just plain bat-shit crazy. As an added bonus, their powers get a boost when they come here, which in turn has an unfortunate tendency to supersize their greed. And when the treaties or bindings that may have made them behave back home don’t mean squat here, you might as well put out a sign for the all-you-can-take-or-conquer buffet.
SPI’s mission is twofold: keep the world safe for supernaturals and humans alike, and keep humans in the dark about things that go bump in the night. SPI has offices worldwide, and their agents are recruited from the best of the alphabet agencies, police forces, military special ops, and are supported by the sharpest scientific and academic minds.
Then there’s me.
I wouldn’t be doing my new job with a gun, blade, or hand-to-claw combat.
I was the only seer in the New York office, and only one of five in the entire worldwide company. A seer’s job was to point out the supernatural bad guys, then step aside so SPI’s badass, commando monster hunters could take them into custody—or if necessary, take them out. As a seer, any veil, ward, shield, or spell any supernatural could come up with as a disguise might as well not exist. I could see right through them. I got the satisfaction of keeping the world safe, and I got full medical coverage. If Bigfoot was on a rampage hurting innocent campers, I’d hunt him with a butterfly net if it meant having a decent dental plan.
I’d gotten the grand tour when I’d officially accepted SPI’s offer—and after I’d signed a nondisclosure agreement. In blood. Mine. The head of HSR was a voodoo high priestess, which took contracts and company loyalty to a whole new level. I was supposed to have started a week ago, but HSR called me last week to say that they needed to push my start date. They were still paying me, so I was more than happy with a week’s paid vacation before I’d even started work.
“Your office is in the main agent bull pen,” Jenny was telling me as she led the way to a pair of massive steel doors. She looked human to everyone else, but I knew that she was a river hag, though “water spirit” was the more politically correct term nowadays. Though river hags mostly looked like humans anyway—that is, if you took a human, made her skin the color of the Wicked Witch of the West, and exchanged dental work with a piranha. I always thought they had to live in a body of water. Turned out any size body would do, and I’d been told that SPI had a pool in the basement for its water-dwelling employees to use during breaks. You didn’t need seer vision to spot them; they left
wet footprints all over the place. During my two-week orientation, SPI’s hallways had always been dotted with those Warning: Wet Floor signs.
SPI’s New York headquarters was located under Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The SPI complex was deep and wide—eight stories of deep and the entire park’s worth of wide. There was a subbasement, basement, parking area, then what was called the bull pen on the main floor that was ringed with five stories of steel catwalks connecting offices, labs, and conference rooms. The bull pen was filled with desks, computers, people, and not-people. The largest shift was on duty right now—the night shift. Even supernaturals who weren’t nocturnal tended to do their thing at night. Humans were essentially the same, but without the fangs, claws, and paranormally bad attitudes.
“Our seers have always been assigned the corner office,” Jenny was telling me.
“Corner office” was right. My office was against the wall, in the corner.
“Our seers have preferred to be seated where they can see everyone,” Jenny explained at my less-than-enthused reaction. “No one else would know the difference if one of our more physically imposing agents walked up behind them, but as a seer, you see everything all the time.” The woman giggled and smiled, her perky petunia lipstick framing a mouthful of dainty fangs that were at odds with her pink sweater set and pearls. “That must be terribly exciting. How I envy you.”
I stood absolutely still as a troll who had to be eight feet tall lumbered down the aisle next to mine and into the IT department’s cube farm. He sat down in an office chair that shrieked in a torture of steel. Of course, everyone else saw a slight, blond, and bespectacled man in a white shirt, tie, and khakis.
I swallowed. “Yes. Terribly.”
Some supernaturals who could pass for human didn’t bother with glamours most of the time. They’d just use clothing to cover their more identifying features. Coats or jackets to cover wings. Hats to cover horns or pointed ears, or sunglasses to cover larger or brighter-than-human eyes.