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  Ivar, who’d managed to stop short of tearing out the throat of the black Wolf, eased his jaws away from it and my gun. In a shimmer of fur and a ripple of flesh, he was that average man again. But this time he was naked with a bullet wound to the right of his chest. I hadn’t aimed for the heart. This was, after all, just the testing ground, not the war. “The interview is done,” Ivar agreed with a begrudging lift of his upper lip. We passed, but we weren’t Wolf and we weren’t Kin. He had to respect our skill, but he didn’t have to like it or us.

  The faint breathlessness to his voice, the result of a bullet-nicked lung-a very familiar sound-would fade quickly. Probably before we left. Wolves healed fast. He waved off the other Wolves, still in lupine form and snarling with displeasure, and they limped from the office. Ivar sat back down behind his desk, unbothered by his nudity-Wolves have no sense of modesty. Why would they? They were Wolves first, people a very distant second. “One hundred thousand for the job.” His nails extended to the thick blunt ones of the Wolf and he tapped them on the desk. “We have someone whose ambition has become. . irritating. . to the Kin. We respect the way of the pack, the order of domination and submission. Alphas rising, falling-same as it has been since the beginning of time. But this one, she cheats. She denies the honor of the Wolf. That cannot be tolerated.”

  She. That answered any question we might have had on what the job was. There was only one “she” that the Kin would subcontract out on. Delilah. Delilah definitely did cheat and considered honor something puppies cowered behind. Not to mention stupid. Last I’d known my ex-fiend with benefits had taken over half the Kin with her all female pack. The Kin allowed females membership in the Kin, but it didn’t allow female Alphas.

  Delilah didn’t give a rat’s ass what the Kin allowed. She wanted to be head of the Kin and given enough time, she would be. Ivar and his three Wolves. . she’d have eaten them alive literally-howling, screaming, and all-as a lesson to others who dared get in her way.

  Niko had put his katana away. “We do not get involved in politics. Assassination is a slippery slope that tends to rebound with endless blood feuds and vengeance-vows. We prefer to keep our killing clean.”

  That was Niko’s line and I stood with him on it. Although I had to admit it was a tempting offer. I wanted Delilah dead anyway. We hadn’t had friendship. We hadn’t had love. But we’d had companionship, acceptance, and unbelievably wild sex. The never knowing if she’d try to hang the head of a half Auphe on her wall as a trophy had been a price I’d been willing to pay for that. Acceptance for a half Auphe was a rare thing, even more rare among sexual partners. Bottom line: I didn’t trust Delilah, but she had liked me as I was. I didn’t get that often.

  Then she tried to kill another Wolf friend of mine, her first ploy to rise in the Kin. I didn’t have many friends. I could count them on one hand and have that all-important middle finger left over to put to good use. Trying to kill me was one thing-my eyes were open when it came to Delilah’s sociopathic ways. But trying to kill my friend; I wasn’t letting that go. I had one rule. She knew it, and she’d broken it without regret. Killing her was on my list; being paid for it would’ve just been a bonus.

  But this was between Delilah and me alone. The Kin wasn’t invited to that party.

  “Don’t worry,” I told Ivar. “She is dead. It’s only a matter of when my vacation time comes due.”

  Ivar didn’t like it. I didn’t blame him. However, he did have something to add before we left. “We’ve heard about the body from last night-the skinned one.” His upper lip wrinkled in distaste. If a Kin Wolf found a piece of violence to be excessive, that was something indeed. “Don’t come to the Kin with questions about it. We want no part of it.”

  “What? You afraid?” I was more incredulous than anything else. Ivar was a Kin Beta. Admitting he was afraid, or insinuating the rest of the Kin were, would have ended up with him dead a long time ago. The Kin took their reputation seriously.

  “We want no part of this trouble,” he repeated flatly. “No Kin will speak of it. Don’t bother asking. Don’t bother us with anything right now or we’ll decide we want you as dead as Delilah.”

  I didn’t like having the Kin put me in my place, but if the word was out to keep quiet, they’d die before they broke with the edict of the Alphas. Whatever this thing was flinging bodies around, it had to be one truly evil, badass son of a bitch to have the Kin lying low.

  It was annoying. As was having to go through an “interview” for nothing. Okay, the second wasn’t true. I had liked the fighting. What was life without your daily dose of exercise? And this exercise was more enjoyable than Niko’s preferred ten-mile run. It put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

  The night was a different story.

  I’d brushed my teeth, for the third time. That onion breath was persistent as hell. The towel covered the bathroom mirror as always. I could manage quick glances when I needed to. That was enough for me. It was a phobia I’d come by honestly. I didn’t waste time trying to overcome it or being embarrassed by it any longer. Life was too short.

  One last rinse and spit of toothpaste and I was in my bedroom. I changed into sweatpants and flopped on my back on the bare mattress of my bed. I’d been forced two weeks ago to wash my sheets and blanket at knifepoint, Niko’s knife, but I’d forgotten them at the Laundromat. I had a short attention span if carnage wasn’t involved. I’d wandered off to find some. By the time I remembered what I’d been doing, the sheets were long gone. I’d have to end up buying new ones. Whenever I got around to it. Or I’d wait for my birthday. Nik was a practical gift giver.

  It was late, hours past midnight. Not that it mattered. Early, late-I could sleep anytime, anywhere. A lifetime on the run taught you that-among other less legal skills. Ten seconds after I hit the mattress I was gone.

  A medium-length pornographic dream following that, I was catapulted to consciousness by the shattering of glass, something slicing into my stomach, the sharp spiking stench of ozone in the air, and fingers or something like fingers fisted painfully tight in my hair. And a voice, one that bubbled and flowed thick as tar, words from lungs dead and drowned. “Black hair. Like the dark within you. I covet it. I covet the skin that binds it within you.”

  Our skin-loving serial killer hadn’t waited long at all after dumping that body on us. Serial killers are bad, but impatient ones-they’re the worst.

  “I’ve waited for you and your skin,” the voice spilled on. “I shall take your darkness, wicked creature. I shall save you.”

  Lying in the warmth of my own spilled blood, I gathered his understanding of “save” was a hop, skip, and a fucking minefield away from my definition. Unless he meant save a chunk of my flesh like a nowhere mint condition stamp-a trophy of his raving psychosis. It was a good guess. Those who mixed their raving and their potpourri bag of psychotic issues loved trophies.

  I may have misheard though. Save was only my best guess as to what the jackass said. I had to catch the words between the sounds of the breaking glass. The window was gone, but impossibly the sound went on and on all around me-an endlessly flowing, then crashing, waterfall of fracturing crystal. Amidst that were the gunshots of the Glock I kept under my pillow. The gun had a silencer, but they’re not as quiet as they make out on TV. The shots did get louder as I neared the end of the clip. Nothing happened other than my running out of ammunition. He didn’t move except to keep cutting me and slamming my head up and down by my hair. With my left hand, I pulled the combat knife from under my mattress and took a swing. Other than a shimmer running through blackness, I would’ve sworn he didn’t move, but the knife didn’t connect. He was quick, too damn quick for me and that was quicker than most.

  Son of a bitch.

  The thing wasn’t made of mist, no matter first appearances-more like surrounded by it, concealed by it. The pounding in my head and the pain in my stomach would’ve made the inner solidity clear alone, but I could see, as well. The room was dark, a
nd what squatted on top of me almost as dark, but inside of the smoke I could see serrated razors of midnight obsidian slicing through the haze. A multitude of overlapping angles, sharp and deadly, just barely visible, but they were there.

  Hell’s own geometry.

  There were shards upon shards stabbing out from the core, each two to three feet long. Hundreds of pieces of volcanic glass come to life. Jagged pieces of. . what? How had my knife missed him, a hunchbacked creature practically made of primitive blades?

  Then there was a hint of movement, a shadow growing within the shadow, as if the crystalline daggers shifted in unison, spread, and fanned out above me like wings. There was a sound that set my teeth on edge, the hollow chime of shattered glass pieces scraping and breaking as they ground ominously against one another. It had me gripping my own useless knife even tighter against the threat of the phantom blades articulating in the murk above me.

  A clot of the shadowed mist came up and electric blue-white eyes flared to life, studying the blood, my blood, that dripped out of the sharp-edged darkness. There was a hiss and if hisses could be disappointed, this one was. “You are not mine to save. Not of my keeping. You are not of the Flock.”

  I was a lot of things, but this shithead was right-part of a flock wasn’t one of them. Not a sheep for a monster to prey on and damn sure not a pelt to be saved and nailed to a supernatural whackjob’s wall.

  I couldn’t gate him away. Hell, we were a little too attached at the moment for that. I was about to gate myself out to the hall instead and hope not to take the most dangerous part of him with me when I heard the explosion of my door being kicked open. The weight disappeared from on top of me, taking its sharp blade or talon and what felt like a handful of my hair. I was out of bed in an instant to see Niko knocked backward out of the doorway and against the hallway wall with his katana flung to one side but remaining in his grip. My brother didn’t lose his weapons. But what happened next was quick enough that he didn’t have a chance to use his sword. It was also quick enough that I barely saw it.

  There was an impression of a long-fingered hand. . no. . the shadow of an impression wrapped around my brother’s neck, a ripple of the darkest of shades and then nothing. It was gone. If I wasn’t bleeding, head aching from the vicious jerking of my hair and mild whiplash, and Nik didn’t have a bright red handprint around his neck, I wouldn’t have been able to swear anything had been there at all.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  The cut, a familiarly clean surgical slice, the same kind Niko had pictures of on his phone from the body that had fallen into the stairwell, was about six inches long. It started a good four to five inches to the left side and barely above my navel and ran in a perfectly straight line to the right. And, yeah, it was bleeding, but it wasn’t gushing. That meant it wasn’t too deep, which was a good thing. That was the area I kept my guts and they tended to work better on the inside than out. “Some,” I dismissed, wiping a hand over it. All that did was smear the blood to cover my stomach. The new blood that welled out of the slice was steady but fairly slow. “It’s not bad. Whatever it used, knife, talon, extra-sharp press-on nail, it didn’t go any more than half an inch deep, I don’t think.”

  “Not deep enough to skin you,” Nik said. “But enough for a start.”

  “There is that, the asshole.” I covered the wound with my hand. It’d do for the moment. “What the hell did it do to your neck? I can see its handprint.” Long, knifelike fingers etched in red.

  “It’s a burn.” Niko touched it lightly. The smell of ozone, the crackle of lightning in its eyes. If all Niko had was a burn, he was lucky. “Between first and second degree, I think.” He’d already started to check out the rest of our converted garage, but neither of us had seen which way it had gone. Back out the window that sat almost two stories high among the steel beams? Through the front door, locking it behind it? Down the damn kitchen sink drain? It had moved so fast I had no idea where it had gone or what it looked like, other than impressions. There was only the sense of a black wraith hovering around a mass of smoky glass knives appearing and disappearing out of the corner of my eye. That couldn’t be right. I’d been attacked by many monsters in my life, but nothing that looked so. . inorganic. . inorganic and maybe with wings. That was some crazy shit indeed.

  Nik was scowling up at the window. It had been a problem in the past and we’d probably put iron bars on this time, but that would have to wait for the glass replacement people to wake up and get to work. As often as this happened, we might want to invest in a two-story-tall ladder.

  There wasn’t anything to be done about it now and Niko gave my shoulder a light shove. “You’re dripping on the floor. Stitches. Go.” As I turned toward my room to give him something to bitch about-that always cheered him up-he nudged me again. “To the room without the bubonic plague-ridden mounds of filthy clothing on the floor.”

  I stood in Nik’s sterile room of Zen and did my best not to bleed on his equally sterile floor. I didn’t lie on his bed and wait. I’d ruined enough of his bedding over the years to actually feel guilty when I did now. “Everything in its place” wasn’t a motto that worked as well for your brother when your bloodstains were on his sheets. When Niko, arms filled with supplies, walked in two minutes later he frowned. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “I’m waiting for the plastic. I told you last time to get a plastic mattress cover. You spent half your teacher’s salary on sheets this year alone.” Not that part-time teaching at NYU paid much.

  “Idiot. Get on the damned bed,” he ordered as he deposited the medical supplies on his spare and Spartan dresser. “I’ll invest in red sheets if you’re that concerned.”

  I gave up on the plastic and on trying to be considerate. I wasn’t much good at it anyway. Once I was flat on the bed, a gloved hand pulled my bloody one away from my stomach and wrapped it around a damp towel. I used it to wipe the blood from my palm, fingers, knuckle creases, pretty much every millimeter of skin. It didn’t distract me from hissing at the cold swipe of Betadine across the cut. Six inches long. Lots of stitches, but Niko was quick. It wouldn’t take too long. I glanced down at the sliced flesh. It was in a different spot from long ago, a lifetime ago, and longer and deeper, but similar enough that it reminded me. .

  “You remember when-”

  “We don’t talk about that,” he cut me off instantly, a little more sharply than I thought he meant to. That was a sign that he was certainly remembering it too. Hell, how could he forget? But talking about it?

  No, we didn’t. There are life-changing events and life-ruining events and sometimes there is something that falls between. Twelve years since it had happened and we still didn’t talk about it. For two entirely different but equally valid reasons, but the result was the same. I blamed the disorientation of having a fairly decent sex dream interrupted by a monster who’d tried to skin me, was impervious to hollow-point rounds, and so fast as to be almost invisible for having let the comment slip at all. Nik was right.

  We definitely did not talk about it.

  “He was right on top of me, the son of a bitch, and I hardly saw him,” I said, changing the subject. “I shot him. There was no way I could miss, and nothing. He didn’t flinch. I didn’t even see him when he hit you. It was just. . shadows of something already gone. Shadows and knives. He was that goddamn fast.”

  Niko had already injected the area with lidocaine and was using a probe to see how deep the incision actually was. He looked up at me, face somber. “I’m sorry.”

  “No big deal. I’m not feeling a thing.” Probing the cut wasn’t why he was apologizing. We both knew it and we both let it go. I didn’t want to talk about it either. The past was the past. Neither one of us wanted to dig up that mental childhood grave. It was ancient history and it was best to stay that way, especially for Nik.

  If not for the reasons he thought.

  He gave a faint but thankful curve of his lips, then went back to work. “It’s
barely half an inch deep. If it wasn’t so long, I wouldn’t bother with stitches. But with your. . energetic lifestyle”-kicking ass any chance I got-“you’ll constantly be ripping it open if I don’t.” He applied more Betadine. “Whatever he is, you were correct, he wasn’t serious. Not this time. He was simply playing.” He began stitching. “The ones that like to play are never the easy kills. Still numb?”

  “Yes, Mom. Still numb,” I snorted. “And I’m not sure it was play. He looked at my blood. Just, hell, looked at it and said basically I wasn’t his to take. I don’t know if I wasn’t good enough a specimen. Too many scars to make a nice rug or if it’s because I’m not human.”

  Niko gave me the look, the one I’d lived with my whole life. I changed it up a bit. “Not completely human. Ishiah did say it was only killing humans and Edward Scissorhands said I wasn’t a sheep. But playing or not playing, bullets, knife, sword, and neither of us touched him. He could’ve had us on a silver platter with a frigging caviar garnish if he’d wanted.” Hard to say if it was for real or just a dry run. I gave in to the inevitable. “I never thought I’d say this with your giant brain, but you might need help with the research. The next time he comes back and is serious he’ll have his choice of which of us he wants to wear as his summer jacket and which his winter coat. We need the info on this thing now. Or preferably a half hour ago.”

  “My cell is on the table beside you. Call Goodfellow.” Robin Goodfellow was our go-to guy on all things paien. What he didn’t know, chances were you didn’t want to know. Niko kept stitching while I called. He’d trained for this when we lost our last healer back to the home country. Niko could go to the hospital if worse came to worst. He was human inside and out. I wasn’t. One scan, one blood test, and that was something else not worth talking or thinking about. Nik had been taught by the best healing spirit around. He could handle most serious trauma. If it was critical. . with ventilators, heart-lung bypass machines, lacerated livers, kidneys, a nicked heart-then, hey, nobody lived forever.