Page 17

Angelo

“Why did you bring in the mundane?” I muttered under my breath. “Are you trying to make this more difficult than it already is?”

Taliyah didn’t say anything, but her displeasure with my tone was clear. Frost began to spread across the desk, crackling into existence seemingly without cause. To her deputies outside, it would look like a magic trick. And it was, in a way. Taliyah Morgan was the queen regent of the Winter Court, and she could be downright scary when she unleashed her faerie powers. Thankfully, she had better control than that. I could see her toying with the idea of locking me in icy manacles or gagging me with snowballs.

“Erm... boss?” the mundane asked, watching in alarm as the ice spread rapidly across the desk. At least he wasn’t screaming and shouting, “Burn the witch!” That was better than most of them could manage, even on a good day.

Taliyah glanced at her fingers, swore viciously, and yanked her palms away from the wood grain of her desk. The frost almost immediately evaporated, leaving the desk chilly but otherwise unharmed.

“Sorry, Roland,” she said, offering the mundane police officer a weary smile. “I’m usually better than this. Priss has been keeping me up. She’s breaking curfew left and right. Scares me to death.”

Priss. I’d heard about her from Fifi. Apparently, it was short for Apricity, Queen Olwen’s illegitimate older sister. By all rights, the crown should never have been hers, but Taliyah’s unwillingness to take up the mantle meant alternate plans had to be made. Through legislation and harsh measures, Taliyah had laid down her laws to ensure no one like Janara could ever perform a violent overthrow again. So far, there hadn’t been much dissent. The faeries I’d heard from (though there were admittedly few who lived nearby) seemed to approve of the move. Taliyah hadn’t been born and raised among them. She was the faerie with the mind of a mundane, and the consensus was that she wasn’t fit to rule for at least a lifetime, which suited Taliyah just fine. Molding her teenage-presenting half-sister into a leader was much better over the long term.

Roland pulled a sympathetic face. “I get it. My oldest keeps sneaking off to see boys. It’s annoying, but we can’t stop them from living their lives.”

“I can,” Taliyah said darkly. “I can form a wall of ice so thick she won’t be able to chisel her way out of her bedroom.”

“I think that’s unlawful imprisonment, Chief,” Roland said, though the grin on his face softened the words. He was a bland man in his forties or fifties with thinning hair and round cheeks.

And peering closer, he was also the source of sexual frustration in the room. I’d caught him looking at me more than once. It wasn’t overt, but I knew when I was being checked out. It was an incubus thing, which meant someone wasn’t out of the closet yet. Ah, lovely. A repressed bisexual cop.

Roland’s cheeks flushed an interesting shade of pink when I caught him looking at me. He dutifully looked elsewhere in the room, pretending not to notice. But he had noticed. In fact, his interest was almost painful. He needed to find a man, and soon. Maybe I’d send him Ty’s way. Ty was one of the few completely gay incubi I’d ever met. He’d rock Roland’s world if the man was interested in experimenting.

“While I’m sure your day-to-day lives are fascinating,” I said, speaking louder for the human’s benefit, “it’s not really the point of the meeting, is it? You said you had something to show me. And I still want to know why he’s in the room with us. I thought mundanes were supposed to stay out of Council politics.”

“He’s not in politics,” Taliyah argued. “But he needs to be in the know. Astrid was right when she came to me, saying we needed more infrastructure. If we’re going to keep the secret in this age of technology, we need people outside our circles who can go to bat for us. I’m planning to get most of my deputies on board. Roland is the first to be in the know.”

I thought about telling her that she ought to inform him about the supernatural encounters he’d forgotten. Roland’s face would be quite a bit ruddier if he knew that I knew he’d been seduced by an incubus. Even if they hadn’t gone all the way, he’d been nearly naked by the time Taliyah intervened. I decided it wasn’t my problem—neither the mundane nor the secrets being kept from him. My purpose in coming here wasn’t to tell Taliyah Morgan how to run her department. I’d come for answers.

“Fine, can we just move this along? I want to get a good look at the bastard who hit me.”

Roland winced. He’d been the one to drag my whiskey-soaked ass to jail last time. “Sorry, I didn’t know you weren’t...”

“Drunk and hurt?” I finished. “Well, I was. Here’s a tip for living in a Hollow: Don’t attribute to alcohol what can be explained away by monsters.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Taliyah said, giving me an arch look. “It can and often is both. You wouldn’t believe the amount of drunk or high shapeshifters I’ve had to drag out of tight spots. Sometimes it’s a monster acting maliciously, sometimes it’s an accident, and sometimes it’s not even one of our people doing it.”

I waved at the computer screen. The grainy image hadn’t shifted since I entered the room. All I had to do was jab the start button, but they’d rather talk about teenagers and curfews. Honestly, it was a wonder anything got done in this Hollow without busybodies kicking our asses into gear.

“In this case, it was done maliciously,” I said. “I obviously didn’t bash myself over the head with a whiskey bottle or cut open my own stomach. I’d like to see what I’m dealing with, if you don’t mind.”

Taliyah leaned forward with a sigh and pressed the keys more gently than I would have. The still image blurred into motion. At first, I could only make out the parking lot. Not every car was visible, but I made it a point to park far away from Fifi most days. There was a spot close enough to a streetlight to be seen in the dark, but not so bright that I couldn’t use shadows to conceal what I was up to. It was helpful when you were with a woman in the backseat and didn’t want anyone to see. In this case, it just made locating the attacker harder.

“I can’t see anything,” I admitted, even as I watched myself settle into the driver’s side.

“It’s coming,” Taliyah said. “It took me a while to spot it.” Then she looked at Roland. “Was it the third or fourth viewing?”

“Fourth,” Roland answered. “And it’s pretty subtle. You have to be looking specifically to see.”

“See what?” I asked, unable to stop a little growl from seeping into my words. I wanted to know whose teeth I needed to knock loose. It seemed only fair since they’d bashed my head in, stolen my reserves, and put me in the doghouse where Lydia was concerned.

Rodney jabbed a finger at the screen. “There.”

I still didn’t spot what he was getting at. I winced when the bottle burst in a spray of glass and sticky liquid. It had been a pain to scrub all of it off. I was shown the attack another few times before I could see what they were pointing out. Most people wouldn’t have noticed the flicker of light as something hazy settled on top of the light pole. I had just a moment to see leathery wings fold against the back of a female figure before the shape blended once more with the night sky. Magic. A flying monster with enough power to shift its form and remain essentially invisible, even to the most observant of demons. Granted, I’d been preoccupied, but I’d known it hadn’t been a human that attacked me.

What looked like a gleaming rope of intestines flickered into being above my vehicle, swaying in the breeze. To a human eye, it wouldn’t have been visible. Even to Tally and my keen senses, it was barely noticeable.

“What is that?” Roland asked. “Rope?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was looking at grayish intestines. Some things were better left unsaid.

A second, longer appendage pooled next to the intestines that had lowered to the ground, coiling like snakes beneath the figure.

“That is a tongue,” I said, trying to keep my tone deadpan. I wasn’t sure I succeeded. “I was right. Whatever attacked me also fed. They probably cut me with glass and shoved the tongue in to take what it could.”

The thought made me vaguely ill. I’d taken energy from women through little touches: a brush of fingers, the caress of lips. No one I’d fed on had asked me to do so first. I’d certainly never knocked anyone unconscious and had my way with them. But that was exactly what the creature had done to me—shoved its tongue through my flesh and taken something important from inside me.

“Do you know what that is?” Taliyah asked, mercifully pausing the video before a tongue darted through the window to embed itself like a Capri Sun straw in my skin.

“No,” I admitted. “I’m not like Fifi—I don’t do the kind of research she does on monsters. She wants to make all of them feel welcome and see to their needs. I don’t really care. Although, after seeing that thing, it might not even meet the standard for being in a Hollow.”

“Standard?” Roland repeated.

I nodded at him. “There are dangers we have to consider that other Hollows don’t. Anything that views humans as prey and feeds in an involuntary or painful manner can’t come here.”

“Can you call your sister?” Taliyah asked me.

“And interrupt the celebratory sex she and Roy are no doubt having?” I responded, shaking my head. “No, thank you. I don’t need to hear the house-shaking routine they do every time. She’s engaged, and if our parents have anything to do with it, they’ll have her undergoing rituals back home to get her pregnant soon. I’ll let them have their fun before kids come along.”

Taliyah looked torn between amusement and irritation. “Is there anyone in town who might know more about predatory monsters than you do?”

I did. There was a witch’s son and prolific monster hunter in town. He lived only a few blocks from Lydia, in fact, he was always making moon eyes at her. Anthony Boline wanted Indigo, but that didn’t stop me from feeling irritated every time he glanced Lydia’s way. It was Lydia’s body, not Indigo’s. He had to accept that, or we were going to have problems.

I sighed and pulled my phone out of my pocket, putting it on speakerphone. I didn’t like having to turn to the arrogant son of a bitch, but I had his number, anyway. He was Lydia’s assigned protector. He’d take the call, just in case it had something to do with her.

Sure enough, he answered on the second ring with a crisp, “Anthony Boline speaking.”

“Angelo Stedham,” I shot back. “I need to ask you a question.”

He let out a mirthless chuckle. “And I doubt there’s any way I can prevent you. This ought to be good.”

“I was attacked yesterday. We’re reviewing the footage now, and we’re seeing a winged creature with an abnormally long tongue and... erm... intestines, I think. It’s hard to tell with the footage being this grainy.”

Anthony sucked in air through his teeth, sounding more shocked than I’d ever heard him. As the bounty-hunting son of a high witch and monster killer, he’d witnessed some of the worst things our world had to offer. If he sounded shocked or distressed, it was my cue to wade in swinging. I wouldn’t like the results if I didn’t act proactively to defend myself from a threat he obviously feared. His voice was sharper, more urgent than it had been just a moment before.

“Where are you? Is Lydia there?” he asked.

“No. She ran into her useless ex, who had the gall to pass out on her. She called an ambulance. I would have slathered him in honey and rolled him into an anthill, personally.”

“What did he look like before he passed out?” Anthony pressed. “Sick? Unfocused? Confused? Too pale?”

“Exactly like that,” I answered. “Are you saying whatever attacked me also attacked Rodney?”

“Yes. If it’s what I think it is, he’s probably doomed. That level of exposure to a manananggal is usually fatal.”

“A manawhat?” Roland repeated, giving Taliyah wide eyes.

“Who’s that?” Anthony asked.

“The Chief and one of her informed deputies. She’s trying to track down whatever jumped me.” I paused. “But I also second the question. What’s a manawhat?”

“A manananggal,” Anthony repeated, as if everyone in the room was stupid. “It’s a very distant offshoot of the vampire line, likely crossbred with local fauna or a demon species in the Philippines. It appears to be a beautiful woman when she approaches her victim but reveals her true colors after dark. Her torso can separate from her legs, and the winged upper half will fly around looking for prey. They mainly target pregnant women, but some prefer killing men. They tend to kill their victims over a span of weeks or months.”

“And they drink blood?” I asked.

“No, they don’t drink blood, exactly. It’s the essence they need, not the liquid. A side effect of their saliva is the destruction of blood cells and the degradation of marrow over time. They feed on life essence through magically significant places: the womb for women, usually the gut or the sexual bits on men. You woke up with your dick intact, right?”

I paled. Nightmares and numerology. Had I come that close to singing soprano? I’d have to kill the vampire just to settle the score. You didn’t chop off an incubus’ favorite appendage and get away with it. It was tantamount to taking off part of a human’s jaw.

“I did, thankfully. There was a scar on my stomach, though. This vampire of yours took almost everything I had.”

Anthony chuckled. The bastard. “If you hadn’t glutted yourself in the past few years, she would have killed you. Make no mistake about that. If this is who I think it is, she would hate someone like you, especially. She probably thought she’d taken enough from you to guarantee your death in the near future.”

“Who is she?” Taliyah asked, inserting herself into the conversation before I could get another word in.

“ Andrea is the human translation of the name,” Anthony answered. “It’s Andanarine to those in the know. She’s an incredibly deadly assassin, but usually works more quietly than this. She must have had a reason to leave you alive, Stedham.”

“She wanted me to attack Lydia, I’m pretty sure.”

“Attack her?” Anthony repeated.

“Feed on her,” I clarified. “And even if my feeding didn’t kill Lydia, she’d never trust me again, leaving her vulnerable to whatever Andrea had planned for her,” I said, following the line of logic to its chilling conclusion. “If I’d fed on Lydia without her permission, she’d hate me for it, making her susceptible to someone she might let her guard down around.”

“And then she’d be a dead woman,” Anthony said. “Do you see my problem now? Please tell me you at least suspect her human identity.”

If what he was saying was right, a lot of things made sense. Andrea’s ability to be in two places at once. My main suspect had been crossed off the list due to Fifi’s assertion that she was in the bathroom because she’d seen Andrea’s legs. Except it had only been her legs in the stall. The rest of Andrea had crept out to attack me in the parking lot. Another, more terrifying thought struck me.

“You’re right about the human translation of the name. She’s going by Andrea Reyes and she used to be a Filipino model. Allegedly. I don’t know how much of the backstory they give their operatives is actually true, though. Now she’s running for office in Haven Hollow. I don’t think Lydia is the only goal here.”

“What do you mean?” Anthony asked.

Praying I was wrong, I sucked in a deep breath. “I think the Masked Lords aren’t content to skulk in and out, attacking us individually. I think they’re putting a woman on the inside. Do you know how much harder life could be for us if the bureaucracy suddenly turned hostile to our existence here?”

Anthony cursed. My sentiments exactly.

“Where’s the hospital? I need to secure Lydia before this gets out of hand.”

“I’m coming with you,” I insisted.

“Fine. Give me the address.”

I did. He hung up, and I wordlessly strode from the door.

“Where are you going?” Taliyah asked.

“To save Lydia. You can come if you want.”

“If I want?” she almost yelled at me. “It’s my job to keep Lydia safe, Angelo.”

I nodded. “Then let’s get in your cruiser and turn on the lights and sirens, Chief Morgan, because we’re going to need them.”