Bad Blood

by L. A. Banks

  “How do you want it?”

  She looked him up and down, trying not to read too much into the sexy tone of his voice or his loaded question. He had the nerve to come to the door with a deep V of sweat now making the shirt cling even more to his torso.

  First Geoff and now this one, she thought with a sigh. It must be the full moon. “Real sweet, with cream. Thanks.”

  He nodded. “Don’t have milk, but can make it real sweet.”

  She didn’t say a word; he didn’t move off the top step. Just stared. For a second she wasn’t sure she was breathing. Was he about to attack?

  “Hey, I’m sorry. Full moon aftermath,” he finally said, and disappeared into the building again and then reappeared with her coffee mug in one hand, his green-tea-filled mug in another. “Last night, the whole pack had to respond to a call to arms.” He set her cup down on the steps and backed away so she could pick it up. When she just stared at it, he let out a weary breath. “Well, if you think I drugged it, then why would you let me go to all the trouble of making it?”

  “I didn’t think about that until just now. Sorry.”

  She glanced at the mug and allowed it to remain where he’d left it and just continued to lean against the wall. What did he and his pack having to respond to a call to arms have to do with her? He was speaking to her as if she knew what he was talking about. Having another entity within the same hour messing with her head annoyed her no end. Beyond that, the fact that werewolves were organized into packs and not lone rogues who occasionally ventured out to snack on a human was blowing her mind. Dangerous or not, she needed to gather more data from him.

  He picked up her mug and took a sip from it and then put it where he’d left it, then bounded up the steps to sit yogi style on the landing. “I guess now you don’t want it because I have werewolf germs, huh?” He took a slow sip of his green tea, eyeing her over the rim of his mug.

  What could she say? Werewolf cooties were on her list of things she didn’t need in her life; besides, that’s why she was taking meds—she already had them.

  “I just don’t get it,” she said, ignoring this comment. “You say you’re a werewolf, but you’re—”

  “Not slobbering on myself and pulling out people’s entrails?” He shook his head. “Don’t ever believe vampires. Snobs, the lot of them.”

  “All I know is, thirty years ago a war between supernaturals broke out in rural Colombia—”

  “Those were demon-infected werewolves that your military encountered,” he said sharply, cutting her off. “The vampires try to act like their kind hasn’t had rogues . . . What the hell was Jack the Ripper other than one of them gone insane?”

  Sasha felt as if a boulder had fallen on her head. She blinked furiously and said, “What?”

  He just stared at her for a moment, incredulous. “You really don’t know, do you? You don’t know the politics behind the war, either, do you?”

  She shook her head, dazed. “Uh, no.”

  “The demon betrayal is a long story, one that children are told growing up. Your parents never explained?”

  Sasha shook her head again. “I never knew them,” she said. “They died when I was young.”

  Compassion filled his serene gaze and she prayed it wasn’t pity. She had grown up during the second half of her childhood with Doc’s housekeeper as the closest thing to a mother, though the woman was dear and loving. But she hadn’t felt that vacancy in her soul in years and wondered why looking into Shogun’s understanding gaze made her feel it again as if it were yesterday.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said in his low-key, dignified manner.

  Sasha shrugged. “I got a good deal, raised by the man who found me . . . He was pretty well-off, even had a housekeeper who watched out for me.”

  “Then I really am sorry,” Shogun said, his voice now nearly a murmur as his gaze coated her with empathy. “To be raised by humans . . .” He shook his head and looked down into his tea for a moment and then released a long sigh. “The pack is everything, family is everything. To be raised without one’s history and native language is incomprehensible.” When his gaze captured hers again, she was rendered temporarily mute.

  “I did okay,” she said after a while.

  “But we teach our children the history of the packs from as far back as—”

  “Hold it.” She pushed off the wall. “Kids?”

  He smiled as he took a liberal sip of tea and she could feel him baiting her mind, but she didn’t care.

  “Yes, Sasha . . . I heard the fanged one call you that. May I?”

  “Yeah, sure, but get back to the kids part.”

  “We’re alive, Sasha. The vampires aren’t. We reproduce like any other species; they don’t. They build their numbers through the bite and death. That’s why we despise them, and they’re viciously jealous of us.”

  “That’s . . . wild.” She moved closer to the steps but still wasn’t ready to take a sip of coffee after he’d drunk from the mug, even though it smelled divine. “But I’ve seen the real McCoy—full-blown werewolves. You can’t be a werewolf!”

  A wry smile overtook his face as his gaze hunted hers.

  “Oh . . . Sasha, you have no concept how wrong you are.”

  His five o’clock shadow began to spread across his square jaw as he closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled slowly through his nose. Sasha quickly backed up, drew her Glock, and pointed when jet-black bristle began to emerge from his scalp in hard spikes, to finally give way to a long, lustrous, blue-black silky curtain of tresses that framed his body to his elbows.

  He opened his golden-amber eyes. The mug of tea he held trembled between his palms, but she was certain that it wasn’t from fear. His gaze was steady, like her aim.

  “Thousands of years ago, the territory wars began. The vampires blame the genesis of it on us, but if they hadn’t fed so outrageously, the scenario would have never played out to tragic conclusions.” He spoke in a low, controlled, modulated voice, intermittently sipping his tea and closing his eyes, seeming completely unfazed that she held a weapon on him.

  “Our side was suffering heavy casualties, and a militant faction decided to go against clan policies to strike a strengthening bargain with demons. Those that went into that ill-fated alliance soon learned why the International Federation of Clans had banished such practices. The demons’ pact created bad blood, literally within the veins of the recipients. Those werewolves were strengthened, but at a devastating cost. We began to fight among ourselves while also warring with the vampires. Neither side of the internal civil struggle is particularly proud of its part in this disturbing history, but it is what it is. As all demons are known for duplicity, there was a catch of course. What was spawned from the strengthening through a demon alliance created human flesh-eaters within our species—not all of us are infected, but those that are . . . Tragic.”

  He sighed and set his tea mug down very precisely on the edge of the concrete wall near him.

  “Because we are living beings that can breed, we sometimes pass on the demon infection through a recessive gene. Not all of us have it and, like I said, it is a recessive trait. But it did get into our gene pool. The werewolves that humans know about are those that have this viral defect. We have quarantined many, but some escape from time to time. Hence, the strongest voting bloc on the United Council of Entities, the Vampires Cartel, called for an open-season hunt thirty years ago that erupted into a civil war that humans should never have seen. The Werewolf Federation of Clans couldn’t stop it. None of the other entities took a stand beyond lip service. The damned Fae Parliament is ruled by factions that couldn’t come together, and the mythics, like the Order of the Dragon, are still disorganized and feudal . . . not even the phantom realms could stop their contentious debates to form a voting bloc from their lodge halls that would go against the vampires, because half of them, like the succubi and incubi, are heavily embedded in the vampires’ cartel enterprises.”

  Sho
gun stood in one lithe move and paced on the landing. His posture was regal and the sunlight glistened on his silky black hair that now hung down his back.

  As she watched him pace while he struggled to find the right words to continue, she knew in her soul she wouldn’t tell the brass. At least not right away. They kept things on a need-to-know basis and she was always blind to the big picture. She hated that. But as soon as she got back and could get Doc to a secure location, she would drop this on him. He, if anybody in the world, needed to know how wide and deep this went. He’d know how to play this politically; that was his forte, not hers.

  “So, uh, all supernatural politics aside, real bad werewolves began eating people in the Colombian hills and it took the human U.S. Government in coordination with—”

  “It is still up for debate whether your nuclear tests weakened the demon doors that caused that environmental hazmat or vampires somehow let out ten infected wolves so that they could begin the war that they already wanted to wage,” he shot back, cutting her off. “We reasoned that the escapes should have happened near where there was heavy testing. Colombia didn’t fit. The vampires, of course, claimed that it weakened the overall dimensional fabric, and the escapees chose to exit where they could easily blend into the dense foliage but eat very well near populations that were not heavily protected.”

  Stunned by his revelations, Sasha stared at him without blinking as he railed on.

  “However, our federation was fully prepared to contain the problem without human intervention. We had militias readied. We could also have brought in Fae peacekeeping forces on the ground to scour the mountains—a terrain they prefer—and teamed with members from the Order of the Dragon for an aerial assault!”

  “All right, I admit it,” Sasha said, raking her fingers through her hair. “This is real, real new.”

  “Well, then, be advised,” he said, seeming vindicated and somewhat mollified that someone, a human, was truly hearing his side of the story. “That was the argument presented at the UCE, but without evidence, it was considered unsubstantiated rhetoric. However, the one thing that wasn’t just rhetorical werewolf opinion was the fact that the vampires finally transgressed the ultimate rule among all supernaturals, considered sacrilege at the council— they made humans aware of us with hard, cold evidence of our existence and are willing to help exterminate us.” He pointed at her angrily. “That’s a fact, and the only reason your military can find us now!”

  The whole thing was incomprehensible . . . supernaturals had something akin to her human U.N.? Get the hell out of here. Federations, parliaments . . . wha? It was crazy enough that they knew vampires had certain business connections and were embedded in what seemed like normal human enterprises. Now the cartel thing she’d picked up from Geoff made sense—so did the animosity between him and the guy pacing on the landing of an apartment building. But she didn’t know what to tell that very upset being.

  “Our brothers, the ones that can shift at will, have long since separated themselves from us,” he said, drawing back his arm but his voice still booming with rage. “Even they have cast out those of us beholden to release our wolf only under the full moon . . . afraid that we could pollute their bloodlines. None of the others, not the Faeries, or Yeti, or Phantoms, or even castes as old as the Dragons— none of them would stand with us. We are the only ones strong enough to go against the vampires, but none of the others wanted to incur their wrath. So, an edict issued thousands of years ago, which allows them to hunt our rogues rather than letting us contain and remove our own, was established to combat the virus . . . and the crafty senior vampires dusted off their ancient scrolls and reminded the UCE of this thirty years ago when several rogues got out of their quarantine zones.”

  “Okay, okay, hold it,” Sasha said, placing one hand on her head while she gestured with the gun, forgetting it was in her grip. “Councils, multiple entities—”

  “Yes! Anything written in legend and mythology has a basis. Humans just don’t have all the facts! All of these ancient beings have coexisted with humans for eons, and until there was the war between the preternatural superpowers that got visibly out of hand, all was well. We had our own checks and balances, and humans hadn’t so polluted the planet or crowded the open spaces that we had to come into constant contact with them. The biggest problem we have now is that humankind has evolved to the point where its technology can eviscerate the planet. Dragons need not worry about dragon slayers, you have F16 fighter jets, nukes—anything living is in peril . . . but vampires do have the advantage of already being dead.”

  “Okay, okay, I hear you—just give me a second to take it all in,” she said, trying to regain her mental equilibrium. If what he said was true, the old man with the yappy, annoying little dog who lived down the block from her might well be the gnome he resembled, or the short, roly-poly little lady who made pies for the local church could be a brownie? Her known world was deconstructing in milliseconds. “So there’s good werewolves and bad werewolves, good vampires and—”

  “Of course. No different than humans that are a varied lot. The supernatural is all around you, Sasha. I’m amazed, given your heritage, you can’t see it. But the second part of your statement regarding vampires is a subject for debate, although I admit bias.” He gave her his magnificent back to consider and took several deep, cleansing breaths. “Stop waving the gun at me. Please. Brandishing a weapon if you don’t intend to use it . . . is . . . aggressive foreplay right after an unfulfilled full moon.”

  She looked at him and then looked at the gun, put the safety back on it, and then quickly tucked it in her waistband again. “Sorry.”

  He spun on her. “You came after a full moon, and we haven’t fed or anything else, but I’m trying to make you understand. Thank you for destroying the threat that got smuggled to North Korea. That’s the only reason we’re having a conversation. Normally, for obvious reasons, we don’t allow those outside our packs and clans to see us. But since you’re in the elite corps of humans who already know we exist but might have a skewed view of who we all are, I wanted to give you the other side of the picture. Not all of us deserve to have a target on our foreheads and we despise the profiling propaganda campaign that the vampires so effectively launched after that recent war. But regardless of how we’ve been depicted, we’re not all monsters. Besides, what you’ll need to worry about is the rumor that your kind is trying to get their hands on lab-created demon-infected toxin, so they can introduce it to a wider audience.”

  What? And what did he mean by “your kind”? Did he mean people infected with the virus? The military? Oh, shit . . .

  Shogun walked away and punched a huge section of brick out of the wall. “We got the other demon-infected werewolf that escaped here, in the southlands. But I’d swear on my mother the vampires had a hand in releasing the threat years ago, as they might have now. I cannot prove it, but my gut tells me this is so. It gives them an open hunting license against us each time a demon-infected is spotted. And, as you can imagine, more than the one or two escaped, infected werewolves get assassinated. It’s the vampires’ shrewd way of controlling our numbers, culling our packs, and reducing our ranks with full multientity sanction—and that’s why outright war broke out decades ago.”

  She didn’t know if there was any way to get her trusted source inside the military, Doc, to absorb all this, nor was she sure it was accurate. There’d have to be more proof, even though it was one hell of a story. She needed something more to go on before they draped this on the brass and asked the entire Black Ops mission to stand down . . . something beyond Shogun’s mere word. But the fact that he’d transformed from clean shaven to not, right before her eyes, but hadn’t flipped into a nightmare, gave her some trust. Still, in the preternatural world, just like the human one, nobody did anything without a damned good reason. The key thing she needed to know now, after he’d shared all this significant intel, was what was in it for him.

  “What do you want fro
m me?” she said, her tone earnest.

  He stopped pacing and stared at her. “Short term or long term?”

  “Both.”

  “Come inside,” he said. His voice was raw and quiet. “The building is deceptive . . . there’s beautiful caverns beneath it, furnished by thousands of years of Silk Road caravans. Be my guest for as long as you’d like . . . whatever you’d like to eat can be procured.”

  There was no way in the freakin’ world. “Long term,” she said.

  “An alliance,” he murmured, clearly disappointed.

  Sasha said nothing.

  Shogun sighed. “I wish you would trust me for just a few hours, then, Sasha,” he said in a quiet rumble. His intense gaze raked her in a hot sweep that lingered on her mouth for a moment and then captured her eyes. He started down the steps. “You cannot tell me you do not feel the moon’s fullness still pent up within you demanding release. Last night other matters prevailed for both of us . . . we hunted but did not conclude the beauty of the moon’s promise. I can feel your wolf struggling . . . her breaths so shallow. Do not give that vampire bastard credit for what is natural among our kind.”

  So he thought she was a natural-born werewolf. Interesting that he couldn’t sense otherwise.

  Shogun reached the bottom of the stairs. He reached out and brushed the pad of his thumb over her mouth.

  Sasha stepped back. “Now, wait a min—”

  Suddenly he closed the gap between them, pulling her tight against him. He nuzzled her hair as his hands slid down her shoulders and then lower and lower.

  Sasha was just about to flip him when a cold dash of water from somewhere above solved her dilemma. She jumped back with a yelp, dripping water. Also soaked, Shogun spun around and took one lunge and leapt up to the landing, furious. A female was hanging out one of the upper windows gesturing violently and shouting in Korean. Sasha didn’t need to understand her to know that she was cursing Shogun and his two-timing ways. Shogun shouted back at her in Korean then turned to look down at her.