Page 19 of Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter #10)

I stood up and got my legs clear of the picnic bench before looking up, and up, and up at Yannis.

Not only was he packed with muscle, he was pushing seven feet tall, too.

It was like somebody from Central Casting decided I shouldn’t fight anyone my height or smaller lately.

“Hey buddy, no need to make a mess in the mess hall. Get it?”

My fake laugh got no more reaction than my dad joke. Tough room. Of course, given that most everybody in here was competing in the supernatural edition of Bloodsport , that tracked. Yannis just glared at me for half a second, then seemed to dismiss me as irrelevant and focused back on Anthony.

“You tell new guy I am pussy. That makes me look bad. Now I rip your head off and shit down your neck,” the wall of muscles with a mouth said, his lips twisted into a snarl.

“You ever seen anybody do that?” I asked.

“Because I have. It’s way more disgusting than it sounds, and that’s a high bar.

So why don’t you give Tony one good slap across him overactive mouth, then go back and finish your brekkies with your pals over there.

We don’t need to get blood and entrails splattered all over everybody’s eggs, do we? ”

That got his attention. The big wolf turned his glare fully on me, and I could see this was a glare that cowed men’s souls, as it were.

I mean, normal men who haven’t had a sliver of demon wrapped around said soul since birth.

To me it just looked like another overgrown shithead making weird faces at me while his nostrils flared. But I’m not easily cowed.

“You want to die in his place?” Yannis asked. “You want me to shit down your neck?”

I raised both hands in a sign of supplication.

“Trust me, big guy, I do not want anything to do with you shitting, either down my neck or anywhere else. I’ll go so far as to say I have less than zero interest in any part of your digestive system, your asshole, or anything in between.

I just want you to fuck off so I can get another one of those yummy parfaits.

I’m a sucker for granola and yogurt with the little chunks of fruit in them. ”

This obviously confused Yannis. I was neither cowering in fear nor bowing back up to match aggression with aggression, and the predator side of him, which seemed to be like ninety percent of his makeup, was baffled.

I have that effect on people. Snark is my superpower.

Along with strength, speed, durability, healing, and magic—you know, my actual superpowers.

But confused predators only react in one of two ways.

They either attack, or they flee. And with a dining hall full of people he’d have to fight soon watching, Yannis’s flee reflex was pretty well suppressed.

Which I’d expected when I first opened my mouth.

I knew there was going to be a fight, and I knew I was going to get dragged into it.

At least this way, I could control when the violence popped off.

And pop off it did. Yannis didn’t bother going over or around the table to get to me.

He just reached down and yanked the table up, shearing the aluminum legs off from the bolts holding them to the concrete.

He tossed the whole thing over his shoulder without looking, and a couple of other fighters had to scurry to get out of the way.

Neither of them had the presence of mind to save their literal bacon, I noticed.

I didn’t have much time to feel smug about my culinary reflexes because in one big step, Yannis loomed over me, panting and flaring those nostrils.

I might not have any interest in his asshole, but I was giving serious thought to poking a couple fingers up those noseholes and pulling him around by the snout. And this was in his human form.

Not for long, though. He immediately went into a half-shift, growing another foot and packing on even more muscle, if that’s possible.

His face elongated, and his nostrils grew even larger, another thing that stretched credulity.

I stopped worrying about his nose at that point and focused on his throat instead.

Namely, I focused on putting my fist in it, wrapping my right hand in a glowing shield and punching Yannis right in his Adam’s apple with magically enhanced might.

That kind of explosion of pain in the middle of a transformation does one of two things to a were—it either reverse their shift entirely, leaving them curled up in agony for several moments in their human form, or it pushes the shift all the way to their full animal form, where they lose all sense of humanity and become a snapping, snarling death machine with no real sentient thought, only knowledge of pain and hunger.

It’s a lot like throwing a lycanthrope back to their first turn, and it’s really mean.

But either a helpless human or a mindless wolf is better than dealing with a fully focused half-wolf, who has the best traits of both human and animal.

And hey, I might get lucky and punch Yannis back into a sobbing human curled up on the floor choking and blowing snot all over the place.

Spoiler Alert: I did not get lucky.

Second Spoiler Alert: Yannis was a really goddamned big wolf. Like, he was a Game of Thrones dire wolf-looking son of a bitch. And now he was right in front of me, with a sore throat, a bad attitude, a lot of fucking teeth, and one enemy in his sights: Quincy Fucking Harker.

I looked for Anthony, but he was ten feet away, brandishing one of the legs of the picnic table at a trio of fighters who didn’t look all that enthused about attacking me in the first place. “I’ll hold these guys off, Murray! You take care of Yannis. I got your back, buddy!”

Great. He had my back. I wasn’t worried about my back.

I was worried about the giant fucking wolf in front of me.

Until it wasn’t in front of me anymore. Suddenly, faster than even I could see, Yannis sprang at me, knocking me flat on my back and sending me skidding across the floor of the mess.

I was going to need another shower and a change of clothes if I lived through this.

I got my shield-wrapped left arm between Yannis’s jaws and my throat, then pressed my right palm against his chest. “Forzare!” I said, pushing my will out through my hand and sending the wolf flying off me.

Well, it would have sent the wolf flying off me.

Except he had a death grip on my left forearm, and a wolf has the grip strength of your average shop vise.

So he flew, but I flew with him. Right about the peak of our arc, Yannis opened his mouth enough for me to wrest my arm free, which let me control my fall just a tiny bit.

Okay, that was bullshit. I wasn’t in control of a goddamned thing, but I got lucky enough that when Yannis landed on another picnic table, crushing it like a Budweiser can against a frat boy’s forehead, I happened to land on his big fuzzy belly instead of any of the aluminum shrapnel around us.

This was not the time to see if the good boy wanted belly rubs, and besides, as I’ve recently learned, I’m a cat person, so I put both hands on his midsection and repeated the spell, this time sending myself into the air on purpose, and flipping over to make an almost perfect superhero landing.

And I swear I would have stuck that landing if my back foot hadn’t landed in somebody’s discarded yogurt, sending me skidding across the floor on my knee and making me think about parfait again.

I still managed to get to my feet before Yannis, who was wriggling around in a twisted heap of metal trying to get free.

I stalked over to my downed foe, planning on knocking him unconscious with one good punch and leaving him to shift automatically and then heal, when someone blurred into motion to stand between me and my quarry.

Maris. The vampire who had beaten Yannis and sent him down to Tier Three. “I cannot allow you to kill him while he is in this condition. It would be uncivilized.”

I was confused. Like, sincerely confused.

Here was the guy who’d beaten this shifter to within an inch of his life less than twelve hours before, telling me that killing him would be uncivilized?

Ignoring the fact that I didn’t plan on killing Yannis, who was this asshole to tell me about being civilized?

I was willing to take that shit from Luke because he was actual nobility and, despite his odd diet, one of the most well-mannered beings I’d ever encountered, and that includes all the Archangels. But this prick?

“We’re indentured servants forced to fight for the amusement of a bunch of rich pricks. What’s so goddamned civilized about that?” I asked. “I mean, seriously, it’s like we’re in a low-budget remake of Gladiator, only this sequel could use more Pedro Pascal.”

Maris cocked his head at me, a gesture so familiar I almost laughed out loud. Luke does that same shit to me all the time. That thought made my blood freeze. If he had Luke’s mannerisms, and I didn’t know him, then he might be an old vampire.

Like, really old. Like before Luke met my parents, old.

Like, from back in the old days in Eastern Europe old.

Like, old enough to be powerful beyond all fucking recognition old.

If this guy was more than a couple centuries old, he might be able to take out everybody in the room without breaking an ever-so-slightly bloody sweat.

“Nevertheless,” Maris said. “I will not allow you to murder Yannis while he is senseless. He is an honorable fighter, for a dog.” And the way he said it, it made sense. Yannis couldn’t help that he was never going to be able to beat Maris, because he was a lesser species. Just like me.

Yeah, that didn’t fly so well with me. I’d been there for a pompous little asshole talking about a whole chunk of humanity being a lesser species before, and it didn’t end well for him.

But not before he and his asshole friends killed something like eight million of those “lesser” humans all across Europe.

I hate that kind of racist bullshit when it comes from humans, and I hate it even more when it’s speciesist bullshit coming from guys who have lived long enough to know better.

There was still too much of a restriction on my power to summon my soulblade, and that would give away too much of my power anyway, but I had more than enough juice stored up to make my eyes glow red, wrap my fists in glowing orbs of power, and give Maris a really impressive death glare as I said, “I’m not planning on killing him, just knocking him out so he’ll shift and I can go get a shower.

But there’s not a goddamned thing keeping me from changing my plans and adding vampire to the menu.

So why don’t you put your aristocratic nose back where it belongs—out of my fucking business. ”

I didn’t even see the slap that sent me flying backward, but I definitely felt it.

And I sure as fuck felt the impact as I slammed against the far wall, impacting the concrete with my shoulders first, then my stupid, stupid head.

I tried to reach out to Becks and apologize for not letting her be the one to kill me, but the doors burst open and a dozen guards streamed in, including a very annoyed-looking Pete, all holding some kind of remote control in each hand.

“That’s enough!” Pete yelled, holding his right hand over his head, finger on a red button.

“You all know that if we press these buttons, your collars explode. There might be one of you that can survive with your head separated from your body, but we will make sure that your survival is very short-lived, and very painful. So stand the fuck down!”

Shit. Now I really needed to remember the name of that Rutger Hauer movie.