by Rob Thurman
One of my earliest memories as a kid was around the time I was four. I’d been sick. Who knows with what? It was mostly fuzzy, but I did remember vomiting miserably all over myself. And I remembered it had been Niko cleaning me up while Sophia drank whiskey in the next room. He would’ve been eight. And when I was well enough to eat again, it was Niko who fed me soup and crackers. It was Niko who walked me to school and picked me up afterward. Niko who bought me birthday presents, complete with a grocery store cupcake and candle. Promise wanted to know what he was like as a child?
“He never was one,” I said soberly.
That was when Boaz walked through the door. I didn’t need his description to know who he was. He strolled in like he owned the place . . . owned the world. He, like the higher wolves, was able to convert completely to human form. Whippet lean, he had his pale brown hair shaved close to his skull and a face carved from cold white marble. With eyes so black that they swallowed the light, he looked over the crowd with a curl of thin lips. Then motioning to the four wolves flanking him, he moved toward the back and disappeared through the only door. So much for ingratiating our way into a game.
“Well, shit,” I growled succinctly.
“That does seem to sum it up.” Promise rose and discarded her cape over her chair. “Give me a moment.” With that, she then moved toward the one wolf left guarding the door.
It was something to see, Promise at work. It brought home how much she truly cared for Niko. I had never seen her use on him what she laid on that poor goddamn wolf. It wasn’t sex or even the hint of it, although it was erotic as hell. I’d compared her to royalty before and that was part of it. She was a goddess come to earth; at least she made you believe that. She didn’t walk; she flowed. And when she smiled, she put the Mona Lisa to shame. Promise was a promise of more than you could ever imagine.
Five rich husbands . . . it was a wonder she hadn’t had a hundred.
I whistled low under my breath. “Nik, she’s going to eat you alive.” That was all right. He was going to enjoy every minute of it.
In less than five minutes she was back. Scooping up the pile of violet silk, she said lightly, “Come along, Caliban. We have an invitation to a very private and exclusive game.”
“Lucky us,” I offered blandly. Carrying my beer, I followed in her wake.
The room was the same as a thousand others like it. Spare, smoky, and marginally clean. The owner wasn’t wasting any overhead prettying the place up—that was clear to see. Although the painting of dogs playing poker that hung crookedly on the wall was a weirdly appropriate touch. Maybe that sociopathic puck had a little of Goodfellow in him after all.
As we stepped through the door, all eyes locked on Promise. The circle of black, brown, yellow, and pumpkin orange eyes held an identical emotion: awed lust. Then those eyes moved to me, but the looks I received were a helluva lot less complimentary. It was the same reaction I received from most nonhumans. There was the incredulous sniff, followed by expressions of sheer disgust and revulsion. This time, however, as the cherry on top, one of the wolves actually peed himself. Now, there was someone who’d obviously actually crossed paths with an Auphe at some point.
To most, the Auphe were a legend. Real and true, but with such a dwindled population that chances were good you might luck out and never see one in your lifetime. It was the kind of luck to pray for. But Auphe had always been the top of the food chain, and wolves, full-blown egotistic predators that they were, didn’t like being reminded that once in a while they too were prey. And I wasn’t about to tell them that a new spot had opened up for King of the Mountain.
The wolf in urine-stained jeans moved out of his chair and slithered past us through the door, giving me the widest berth he could. I lifted an arm and gave my pit an experimental whiff. “What? Do I offend?” In reality I didn’t blame him. There had been times that the Auphe had me wanting to piss my own pants.
Boaz ignored me for a more pleasant subject. “We have a new player, I see,” he said, unreadable icy eyes resting on Promise.
“May I take a seat?” She gave him a slow smile. “Preferably a clean one.”
Nodding at the wolf across the table from him, Boaz ordered flatly, “Leave.” The guy scrambled to obey, scattering cards before him like leaves. As I held the chair for her, Promise took a seat and I took up position behind. With arms folded and eyelids drooping, I did my best to look sleepy and harmless. Niko would’ve said that was essentially my natural state. There might have been some truth in that, but pulling it off in a room full of werewolves wasn’t as easy as all that.
“Why is that with you?” The repulsed sneer on Boaz’s face as he bared teeth in my direction needed no faking at all.
Promise reached back and gave my arm a proprietary pat. “He’s here to carry my winnings.”
At least she hadn’t said to carry her purse. It was nice having a shred of masculinity left to my name. As she gathered the cards before her, Boaz grunted, “A dangerous pet to keep.”
“Where is the pleasure without the peril?” With a fathomless gaze from beneath sable brown lashes, she handed the cards to the hulking figure to her right and asked, “Shall we play, then?”
The game started and I was witness to some of the most subtle flirting I’d seen in my life. Granted, with my social agenda, that wasn’t saying much. Still, I recognized excellence in the field when I saw it. Surrounded by creatures both lethal and of questionable hygiene, Promise was as at ease as she was at a charity event or dinner party. Soft conversation, pale polished nails touched to ivory skin. The hair of a jungle cat. Those pooches didn’t have a chance. Grinning to myself, I watched the players and tried to keep my eyes from settling on Boaz too often. It didn’t stop the doubts. Caleb had said that Cerberus’s rival was a drinker and a talker. From what I’d seen so far he didn’t seem the type. Cold, controlled, he was a wolf of ice and steel. But after an hour passed, my skepticism was proved wrong. Boaz started tossing them back. It started slowly, but by the end of hour two his drinking hand was in near-constant motion.
Despite a discipline that I would’ve guessed ruled his business as well as his personal life . . . kinky . . . he was really putting the booze away. It was a fact that everyone had a weakness, and the more common ones were common for a reason. He stuck with the hard stuff as the game wore on, and finally, just as my legs started falling asleep, he began to talk.
It wasn’t exactly a river of information, more of a vodka-flavored trickle, but it was what we were there to hear. “That two-headed son of a bitch.”
The human wolf to his left hunched slightly, ears twitching with an unlikely flexibility. Apparently this was a familiar and potentially explosive refrain. “He’s a shit all right, boss. We all seen it,” he offered in a placating tone.
Boaz was in no mood to be soothed. “Misshapen thing, he’s no good for the pack. No good for the hunt. He should’ve been culled.” He drained his glass. “Culled a long time ago.”
“Culled.” It was whispered around the circle. Heads nodded, some human, some shaggy.
“He’s deformed, weak, wrong.” Knuckles blanched white around the cheap glass tumbler.
The heads nodded again. “Deformed.” “Wrong.” None repeated the word “weak.” They seemed sure that while Cerberus was many, many things . . . disturbing things . . . weak wasn’t one of them. As much as Boaz didn’t want to admit it, that telling omission said that Cerberus was strong, cunning, and a power to be reckoned with. And wasn’t that really what got Boaz’s goat?
“He’s an aberration.” The glass shattered in his hand, blood-coated shards falling to the table, and a homicidal grin of suddenly lengthening teeth was aimed in our direction. “An aberration who sends his spies among us. Did you like the show, spies? Were you entertained?” Growing nails speared through the table as if it were cheap cardboard and his gaze focused on me. “You smell like Auphe, but I think you’ll taste of human.”
Spies. It was either a pa
ranoid and freakishly good guess or someone under Cerberus had loose lips. And I wasn’t a big believer in good guesses. It was a safe bet that someone had given us up, but I didn’t wait around to ponder the subject. Neither did Promise. She performed a flip over my head that was a quicksilver study in deadly grace. I heard her land behind me and I wasted no time in pulling my Glock. I was going to get off only a few shots in these closed quarters; I had to make them count. Boaz was my choice for deadliest flavor of the month and I popped off my first shot in his direction. He was already half-changed as he catapulted across the table toward me, twisting to avoid my bullet. It was a lost cause. It took him high in the chest. Then his lost cause became mine; he kept coming. Silver bullets, like so many other things, were a myth. Your average lead worked just fine . . . eventually. But right now his jaws, about the size of a Kodiak bear’s, were headed inexorably for my throat. I blocked him with my left forearm, ramming my arm far enough into his mouth that I could’ve tickled Boaz’s tonsils. Less than that and my bone would’ve snapped like a twig. But back where the leverage was weaker, it held . . . barely. Granted, there was a white-hot pain from my fingertips to my shoulder that had black spots clouding the edges of my vision, but that was the absolute least of my concerns. I still held the gun in my right hand and I pulled the trigger again and again. With his chest against mine I couldn’t aim for his heart, but there was someplace else open and vulnerable. Every one of my bullets found a home in Boaz’s center torso, about diaphragm level. If that didn’t stop him, nothing would. He might be the biggest baddest son of a were-bitch to walk the earth, but he had to breathe.
Or so went the theory.
In reality, Boaz was doing his damnedest to rip my arm from my body. With the last shot in the magazine, I blew off a good hunk of the lower part of his jaw. Pulling my arm free, I wedged a knee between us and flung him off. The brown wolf, half again bigger than a Shetland pony, tumbled onto the table, which promptly shattered beneath his weight. Dropping the gun, I staggered to my feet, unsheathed my knife, and whirled to slash at the throat of the next wolf in line. Vision clearing, I kept Promise in sight out of the corner of my eye. I’d made a pledge to my brother; I wasn’t about to break it. Lucky for me, being a little occupied at the moment, she was more than holding her own. In a pirouette as flowing as that of any dancer, she spun her cape of purple silk around one wolf’s head, blinding him, and then tossed him headfirst into the nearest wall. I heard something crack . . . wall or skull, I couldn’t say for sure. Then she leaped backward and up, clinging high to the wall and facing the fight with calculating eyes. Now that was something I hadn’t seen out of her before. It was kind of . . . well, spooky as shit just about covered it.
“Okay, Princess,” I called out, “you are seriously freaking me out.” I didn’t mention her real name. Wouldn’t do to put any of us on the radar of Cerberus’s enemies. Life was complicated enough. She didn’t acknowledge the comment, instead descending again into the milling pack with the grace of a diving falcon. Wolves scattered beneath her. Yeah, she was holding her own all right. Now time for me to do the same.
Gushing blood from his carotid artery, my wolf went down and two more rose in his place. These were a little more wary. From the panicked flaring of wolfish nostrils and the rolling of white-ringed eyes, they were far more impressed with my Auphe heritage than Boaz was. What had been a bald guy and a black one had turned into a sadly mangy wolf and a rangy, long-legged obsidian one. Growling and snapping at each other to bolster their courage, they finally managed to get up the furry cojones to make their move. Patches went down with a blade in the eye. I felt queasy on that one. He was a Were determined to rip me into Snausage-sized pieces, but that moth-eaten coat gave him the last-dog-in-the-pound look. Albeit a rabid dog with a thirst for blood and pain. As I pulled the blade free, his pal hit me from the side, and down I went again. This guy had nothing on his boss. He growled like an entire pack of wolves and lunged at my face with snapping jaws, but hesitated for one critical moment when I snarled back.
I took advantage and broke Bowser’s top teeth out with the blade of my knife. Pointed fangs half the length of my hand went flying accompanied by a pained howling. If a wolf had vanity, it lay in his pearly whites. Snatching a glance over my shoulder, I saw the spike heel of Promise’s elaborately strappy shoes take one wolf directly between the eyes. He somersaulted head over paws backward with a glazed sheen across his yellow eyes. We had six wolves down for the count, or so I thought. That left three more . . . three until Boaz resurfaced from the wreckage of the table. Goddamn, what did it take to keep that hairy bastard down? Even in wolf form, oddly enough, his eyes were still black, and they held the same pitiless and implacable chill of death.
It had been barely two and a half minutes since the fight had begun. Still, it didn’t surprise me in the slightest when Niko came through the door, a dark-clad missile of destruction. I was wearing a wire for a reason, and my brother wasn’t one to let the grass grow under his feet. The wood of the door was sturdy enough; it didn’t matter. It disintegrated under Niko’s kick. Boaz didn’t turn; he didn’t have a chance. The gape-jawed wolf was the recipient of Niko’s sword through his broad brown chest. “Let’s go,” Niko ordered tersely. “This isn’t what we’re here for.” Gee, a little death and dismemberment wasn’t on the schedule? What a pity. I dodged a big gray wolf—all of them by now had turned—and booted it in the ass hard enough to send it flying into a still-thrashing Boaz. Goddamn, that was one tough wolf.
Promise flowed past me with, if you could believe it, her cloak retrieved and folded neatly over her arm. She paused for the briefest of moments to murmur in Niko’s ear and then passed through the door to the outer room. Niko turned his attention to the convulsing Boaz with calculating consideration. I saw his hand tighten slightly on the hilt of his sword before he came to a decision. Killing Boaz wasn’t the job we’d taken. It wasn’t one we would’ve taken. Boaz was Cerberus’s problem, not that that changed the fact there were three more wolves rushing forward to take us out. Niko looked at me sharply and repeated, “Go.”
It was a tone I’d learned not to argue with when I was in diapers. With one arm virtually out of commission I had to leave the Glock. It was stolen and un-traceable, with the numbers destroyed by acid, though no one in this crowd was going to be calling the police. It didn’t change the fact I was going to miss the hunk of plastic and metal. It had gotten me out of a jam or two in its day. Knife still in hand, I made to follow Promise. “They’re going to smell your blood,” he added grimly. “So use some speed, little brother.”
That Promise, what a tattletale. Cradling my arm against my chest, I went with one parting shot. “Nothing but my dust, Grandpa.” Ignoring his snort, I headed out. Speed was a relative term, but I liked to think I set a land-speed record for an injured man in gigolo wear. Throughout the club heads were turning in my direction, some lupine, but not all. I saluted them with my knife hand and drawled, “Good game, great company. Thanks for the hospitality.”
Some wanted those thanks personally. Two lamias drifted up and away from their table. The round and blazing gold eyes of owls peered through strands of floor-length inky black hair. Flashes of their pale skin could be seen through the black veils as they moved toward me, their lipless mouths showing round rings of transparent baby teeth in hungry smiles. There was a flutter of silk at my elbow and Promise said firmly, “No. Go back to your muck, leeches. This one is mine.” They hesitated for a moment, and taking my good arm, she goaded me into a faster pace. As the relatively fresh night air hit my nose I heard the scrape of more chairs and tables behind me. Everyone smelled the blood all right, and there was plenty of it. The cold sweat of adrenaline and pain was probably a savory olfactory side dish. I wasn’t too worried, though. They might be behind me, but Niko was behind them. And that wasn’t a fair fight in anyone’s book.
Outside, the van was only inches from the door, pulled up on the curb with reckless disregard
for the life and limb of your average pedestrian. Robin waved an impatient hand from behind the wheel. “The meter’s running, kid. Get your disco ass in here.”
Hissing as the movement jostled my arm, I climbed into the back of the van after Promise. “Your evil twin in there isn’t nearly the pain you are, but damn if his carbon-copy ass isn’t dead-on you.”
Dark brows winged upward. “There’s another puck in there?” There was definite ambivalence in his voice. “Which one?”
Yeah, that wasn’t an unrealistic expectation to dump on me. I doubted they could tell one another apart, supernatural clones that they were. I knew I sure as hell couldn’t. “The annoying, smart-ass one,” I growled. The van was made for deliveries, and there were no seats in the back. Instead, I took one on the floor and wedged myself into the corner in preparation for a fast getaway. “That narrow it down for you any?” Ignoring his caustic humph, I told Promise, who crouched gracefully by the door, “Better get back. Nik is going to be moving.”
That was an understatement if ever I made one. Niko came through the opening so fast I was halfway expecting a sonic boom to follow him. He slid the door into place with a metal-rattling slam a split second before something hit it hard enough to dent the metal. “Drive,” he rapped. “Now.”
Goodfellow obeyed with alacrity. The wheels of the van squealed as we bumped over the curb’s edge, and the smell of burning rubber followed us down the street. I’d already shoved my knife back in its sheath and used my hand to grab on to the driver’s seat. Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes. “Well, that was fun.”
“Anyone for a late supper?” came Promise’s voice. “My treat. I came out nearly five hundred ahead in the game.”
“Two hundred and fifty of that is mine,” Goodfellow reminded over the struggling engine. “And I’m not treating anyone.”
“Of course not. Your next perm should cost at least that much. I wouldn’t dream of depriving your fashion budget.”