Iawoke abruptly the next morning from another nightmare. I’d been clinging to a pole while shadowy men watched and hooted. Staring into the darkness, I tried to see who they were, but the floor opened up and swallowed me down. I dropped into a dark, dank basement. Skittering sounds moved relentlessly closer. I opened my mouth to scream and then clear gray eyes filled my vision, startling me awake.
Clicking on the lamp, banishing the shadows, I went to the kitchen to make toast and coffee. A strange noise sounded out in the bar. Not again. I eased the door open to look into what should have been an empty bar and saw movement out of the corner of my eye. A squeak escaped before I realized it was Dave, stretching and yawning, walking out of the bathroom.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Dave rubbed his eyes and rotated his shoulders. “That couch is shit for sleeping.”
“How did you even get in? I haven’t opened up my wards yet.” It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of Dave, but that a protection I relied on had failed. Helena and Nathaniel, the wicches who had created them, were out of the country. If my wards were failing, I had no way of fixing them.
“Maggie kicked me out, and I needed a place to crash.” His jeans were unbuttoned, his shirt rumpled. He reached behind the bar for a glass and drew himself a beer from the tap. He continued to rotate one arm, trying to loosen it up.
“Was she upset about you visiting Tara?” Clearly not the most important part of this conversation, but he’d never mentioned a girlfriend before last night. I found it hard to imagine Dave living with someone.
“Because I talked to a woman? No.” He rolled his eyes at me. At least, I think he did. When there were no whites it was hard to tell. “She might have an impulse control issue—”
“Her, too, huh?”
“Hardy har. Do you want to hear this or what?” He finished his beer while giving me the stink eye. It was impressive.
I mimed ticking a lock on my lips.
He poured himself another pint and downed it in one gulp. “We went out dancing, instead of staying in, which is what I wanted. This smokin’ waitress kept leaning over, showing me her rack, and yeah, okay, I was still revving from spending time with Tara. So, I looked her up and down. I didn’t touch her. Maggie got all huffy. By the time we got home, there was no talking to her. Banshees are pretty unforgiving, so I decided to leave. Give her some space to cool off.”
He rolled his shoulders. “That’s why I came here. I didn’t want to wake anybody up to ask if I could crash, and I knew you had a couch sitting here. If I’d known how fucking uncomfortable it was, I would have slept in my car.”
“But how did you get in?” Not that the Banshee revelation wasn’t fascinating.
“Your wards don’t work on demons. I thought you knew that.” He ran a hand over his bald head.
“My wards will keep out hostile, lesser fae, but allow demons in?” I thought of the men last night, and a chill ran down my spine. Sitri could walk in here anytime he wanted and enslave me with a touch, a word.
“Your problem is relying on white wicches. They can’t keep out demons. Don’t have the juice. You need a black wicche or a demon to perform the rite. There has to be a blood sacrifice, and white wicches refuse to do that shit.” He looked at his watch. “Maggie should be at work by now. I’m going to go home and catch a few. See you tonight.” Dave took off and left me wondering if there was anywhere I was truly safe.
Later, wiping down the bar, I contemplated demons and wicches and wolves, oh my. Loud flapping sounded overhead. Much like the magical entrance I have for water fae, there was another one in the ceiling for our winged brethren. To the untrained eye, it appeared to be a skylight but there was no glass, only a warded magical membrane. I stepped out of the way as a woman with long, dark hair, gray, scaly skin, and massive, black wings descended into the bar.
“Hey, Meg. How’s it hanging?” I pulled a bottle of scotch from under the bar and poured her a double as she regarded me with humorless, oil-slick black eyes.
Megaera was one of the three Furies, the goddesses of vengeance. She was terrifying, but strangely likable.
“Sam.”
Meg’s clothes were covered in blood. Her skin, while gray and scaly, was blood-free. Her skin absorbed the blood of those upon whom her vengeance was wrought. Her clothes didn’t. Consequently, she often looked like she dressed in emergency room cast-offs. I think that was why she preferred to wear black. It forgave so much.
“Tell me, why do humans insist on having children they hate? I do not believe you can beat a child to within an inch of his life and then beg for your own. Tripping is an accident. Backhanding into a wall is not.”
Reproduction was a touchy subject in the magical community. Many would give everything they have in order to bear young. Being long-lived alleviated the urgency to procreate, but not the desire. The fact that humans could have children so easily, relatively speaking, and then abuse or neglect them was unfathomable, and a source of rage.
I’d never have children. Wolves needed to change every month and fetuses didn’t survive the shift. Hell, women have miscarried when they’ve fallen down stairs or had a big shock. Changing from a human to a wolf was a great deal more of shock to the system.
Male wolves have been known to get their human mates pregnant, but the percentage of miscarriages was higher than in the general public and the baby, if born, was almost always fully human. It was not unheard of, though, for a human mother to give birth to a werewolf child. Marcus’s son Mick was a born wolf, but such cases were extremely rare.
“Sorry, Meg. I guess you’ve had a lousy morning.” I refilled her Scotch when she’d drained the first.
She nodded, swirling the amber liquid in her glass. “Why do you smell of demon?”
“Still?” I sniffed myself. “I showered again this morning.” Leaning over the bar, I whispered, “Should I be worried?” I hoped Meg would use some of that goddess power to protect me from the sulfurous bastards.
She shrugged, which for Meg could mean anything from ‘I don’t particularly give a shit’ to ‘No one is planning to gut you and steal your soul today.’
“How goes the dating?” I filled a bowl of nuts and slid them in front of her.
Taking a handful, she responded, “As expected.”
“That bad, huh? I told you to let me write your profile for you. I could have—” How did I phrase this? “Softened the edges a little.”
“I like my edges sharp. Nothing about me is soft, Sam. Stop trying to humanize me.” She threw back her whiskey and slammed the glass back on the bar.
“You know what we need? A dating app for supernaturals!” I refilled her glass again. Alcohol didn’t affect her as it did most. She drank it like water. “You wouldn’t need to waste your time with humans who are all wrong for you.” This was all my fault. Meg had mentioned that without her sisters—who were currently living on the other side of the world—she was alone too much. I suggested a dating app and we had then spent an entire evening creating her profile, adding pics, and swiping left and right, while Dave plied us with cocktails.
“It’s been tried. It was a dumpster fire.” Meg ate another handful of nuts.
“Why? That sounds like the perfect solution.”
“You are so very young and innocent. I have no idea why I like you.” She took a sip. “Imagine, please, DMs asking if you’d like to get together and lay waste to a small village, maybe spread a little black plague. It became the go-to app for very powerful and bored supernaturals to find one another. Many miss the days when mortals would prostrate themselves in awe of our power. When human sacrifice was seen as our due. Remember that tsunami a couple of years ago? That was an IM couple having a little too much fun.”
“IM?” I glanced around the bar, but no one needed me.
“Immortal Match. The death toll rose too high. They shut it down.” Meg’s gaze traveled over the other patrons, as well. “Where’s your demon? I thought he was supposed to be here to guard you?”
“Dave? No. He’s not my protection. He’s my cook.”
At a sudden sound, she turned her head to the stairway. “That’s good, because as protection he sucks.”
Footsteps thundered down the stairs, two sets, accompanied by the scent of wolf. I warded against wolves. Unless they were demon wolves—and wasn’t that a charming thought—how did they get in?
The first down the stairs seemed vaguely familiar. There was something about his scent. I reached into the past, looking for a name. “Randy?” The last time I’d seen him, he’d been a teenager, maybe thirteen or fourteen, hanging around my uncle’s campgrounds. Now, he had to be well over six feet, muscular—like all wolves—with sandy-colored hair and blue eyes. Three thin scars ran through an eyebrow and down the side of his face. I didn’t know why, but the scars made me uneasy. Hypocritical, I know.
I hadn’t seen Randy in seven years, since that week and a half I spent with my uncle in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I remembered him as a strangely intent kid. I often found him staring at me, but I hadn’t been able to summon the energy to care. My mother had just died. I was reeling, lost in grief but trying to hide it in front of all those strangers. My uncle included.
Randy studied the bar before his gaze fell on me. “It’s been a long time. I’ve gotta say, it was a shock hearing your voice in my messages. We’d thought you were dead until last week. We were going through the pack’s paperwork and found records of wire transfers from this business with your name attached.”
“But…” How had Marcus let this happen? The whole pack knew where I was. My mouth went dry. He’d done nothing to threaten me and yet the need to change clawed at me. I wanted sharp teeth to protect myself.
“You called about a dead wolf, sent a picture of Claire. It looked like someone really went to town on her, carved her up.” He shook his head, but a predatory glint in his eyes belied the sorrow. “Why don’t you show me the body, Sam, so I can take it off your hands.”
Clenching, I stabbed my short nails into my palms, centering myself, trying to not feel vulnerable in a male wolf’s presence. The Kraken and rats, now demons and wolves. The chances of my surviving this week kept get getting slimmer and slimmer.
Movement caught my eye, and I remembered there was another wolf. Two male wolves. “Marcus sent you?” Marcus knew what happened to me seven years ago. Why would he send male wolves into my den?
My dad had died when I was little, so it was just Mom and me when I was growing up. One evening—I was still really young—when I’d left my bed to use the bathroom, I heard Mom on the phone arguing with someone. Hiding in the dark, I’d listened. It sounded as though Uncle Marcus wanted to see me, but mom whisper-shouted that it’d be over her dead body. She’d said things that didn’t make sense at the time, calling him jealous and inhuman. She’d said other things, but I hadn’t recognized the words and therefore didn’t retain them.
Marcus had spoken with me at my mom’s funeral, said he’d promised my dad he’d look out for me. I’d wanted to believe and so agreed to go with him, to visit for a few weeks while I figured out what to do.
It was my fault, my mother’s death. We’d stayed in one place too long. I’d begged my mom to let me finish the school year, to walk at graduation. Turned out, I never even went. The diploma was probably still filed in the secretary’s desk. Instead of putting on a cap and gown, I’d been standing over a grave. Guilt and grief had warred. And then there was Marcus, a hand on my shoulder, saying he’d promised to look out for me. I’d stumbled after him in a daze, happy there was someone who knew what to do.
The sky had filled with a dark, roiling smoke as we neared the apartment I’d shared with mom. I wanted to pick up some clothes before I went with Uncle Marcus. Instead, I found the charred remains of our latest home. Marcus wouldn’t let me out of the car. He scanned the parking lot, looking for something, and then spun the car and shot down the street in the opposite direction. He drove into the mountains to his home, a large, rustic house with a sprawling campsite of cabins in the woods. I’d met Mick, a cousin I’d never known I’d had, as well as other men I’d assumed were campers and hikers. Men, I was soon to discover, who were werewolves. A week and a half later, I’d been attacked by one of those men and sent here to recover or die.
Shaking off the memory, I glanced around the bar, my heart swelling. Everyone was staring down the wolves, some hands were already moving, readying a spell. I wasn’t alone in the dark. Not this time.
“Marcus doesn’t send anyone anywhere anymore. You called Claire’s Alpha. That’s me.” Randy patted his chest.
My stomach dropped. “How can you be Alpha? Aren’t you—what—twenty, twenty-one?”
“Take us to Claire.” Tendrils of his Alpha power pushed at me. He was trying to rein me in, get me to fall in line with his pack. He was destined for disappointment.
I shook my head. I couldn’t explain it, but I didn’t want them to have her. They’d done nothing wrong, and yet I didn’t trust them. To be fair, the fact that they were male wolves was probably enough to push them over into enemy territory.
“Sam,” Randy lowered his voice. “It had to be done. I know he was your uncle, but he was weak. Our people were drifting off. A pack needs a strong leader in order to keep the wolves under control. Marcus couldn’t do it anymore.” He glanced at the other wolf and then continued. “There’d been a death. A hiker. The authorities put it down as death by misadventure, but we know a wolf kill. For the safety of both humans and shifters, Marcus had to be put down.”
He was dead. I hadn’t seen him in seven years, but we’d spoken on the phone occasionally. I sent money every month to repay the loan for my bar. He wasn’t my father, but he’d been a connection to my dad. Another connection lost.
“What about Mick?” Marcus’s son was older than me. He should have taken over as Alpha.
“Mick died years ago. About the time you disappeared. We found his body in the woods. Animals had gotten to him.” Randy didn’t sound too concerned. There had to be at least fifteen years difference in their ages. Maybe they hadn’t been close.
As uncomfortable as they both made me feel, Claire was a member of their pack. She had nothing to do with me. I had no right to keep her from them.
“I’ll show you where she is.” They followed me through the kitchen and to the storeroom. It took every ounce of self-control not to run with two male wolves at my back. I opened the door and gestured for them to go first. Her body lay under a blanket in the corner of the room. The other wolf hunkered down, tucked the ends around her, and picked her up. When he nodded at Randy, they both turned to leave.
“We’ll take care of her now,” Randy said.
When the wolf shifted her body to get through the door, an arm slipped out from under the blanket. Scars. She was covered in scars. Why hadn’t I seen them for what they were before? My stomach dropped, head spinning. Above her wrist, carved into her flesh, was an infinity symbol. Hands fisting, I stared at the symbol, envisioning my own wrist. Mine was thicker, the scarring corded, but otherwise identical. The wolf, eyes intent on me, tucked the woman’s arm back under the blanket and followed Randy out.
Locking my knees to keep from hitting the floor, I breathed deeply. It was no accident. She hadn’t been cut up on rocks or bitten by sharks. She was like me. The past wouldn’t stay buried. It kept coming back to knock me off my feet. I wasn’t the only one.
I ran, barely making it to the bathroom before I was sick. Not again. I couldn’t do this again. I needed more information, and I needed it now.