Page 176 of Red Rooster

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As far as plans went, this one seemed pretty shitty.

“Do you have a better one?” John –Little John– asked and sounded somehow kind in his mocking. He was a mountain of a man. Werewolf. Whatever. With a smile to match.

“No,” Rooster hated to admit, sighing.

“Alright, then. This’ll work. We do this sort of thing all the time.”

Rooster glanced over at Deshawn, who nodded.

John peeled off a strip of duct tape and said, “Hold it steady. Like that.” He taped the small little flip-phone to the inside of Rooster’s arm and then tugged the baggy sweatshirt sleeve down over it.

“Tuck,” John prompted, and when nothing happened, turned around with a sigh. “Tuck.”

The friar came awake with a snort. “Wha…? Oh, yes, right.”

John sighed.

Rooster silently berated the old man for ruining the Disneyfied idea he’d had of Friar Tuck for most of his life.

They stood in an armory roughly the size of the house Rooster grew up in, surrounded by enough weapons and tech to storm the beaches at Normandy. Their plan, though, was much simpler than that.

Tuck fumbled a pair of narrow reading glasses from his pocket and slipped them on his nose; they sat crooked; the lenses were smudged. “What am I doing now?”

Deshawn sighed.

John patiently said, “A glamour. For the phone.” He tapped the concealed cellphone taped to Rooster’s arm.

“Oh, yes! Just a moment.” He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. Wiggled the fingers of his right hand, afterward, and then passed his palm slowly down Rooster’s arm, not touching, just hovering.

Rooster felt goosebumps spring up in the wake of his non-touch, and suppressed a shudder.

They’d told him that Tuck was like Red. A mage, they called it. But Tuck, according to Rob, was much weaker. He had a rudimentary grasp of power, but nothing like the fire-wielding and wound-healing that Red could manipulate without thought.

But it wasn’t Tuck they were sending in to find Red. Nor any of the wolves.

Just Rooster. With a glamoured phone.

Knuckles rapped the doorjamb. “Ready?” Rob called.

Rooster took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

~*~

Nikita had bragged once, to a young vamp maneater just before he’d put him down, that he’d never fed from a human.

He couldn’t say that anymore.

Cut off from Val’s help, unable to contact him, it had taken nearly two days to pin down the exact location of Blackmere Manor in the deceptively deep forest outside of Richmond, but they’d finally found it. Even a half mile away, in a rental cabin, Nikita feel the hum of the place. Power – both electrical, and supernatural.

His breath came in stutters, but his hands were steady as he unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out the secondary garment bag within. He laid it out on the lumpy, quilt-covered bed, alone for the moment in the cabin’s one bedroom. Hesitated a moment.

Most would have chalked this bag – the way he’d kept it in the back of every closet of every apartment he’d lived in for the past seventy-five years – up to nostalgia. But it wasn’t that at all. It was fear. A fear that one day he’d stop kidding himself that he was somehow morally superior to all the other monsters. He didn’t kill anymore…except he had. Except he did. And he would kill today.

With a sound like a gasp lodged in his throat, he unzipped the bag. As it gapped down the middle, revealing what lay inside, the last of his nerves bled out, replaced by a calm so unshakable it felt almost like bliss.

Yes. This was him. The real him.