Ilona Andrews - Hex Appeal

“If he was just a shifter, he’d be ashes. He can change into anything with the use of his robe.”

“Robe?” Jimmy gave Sawyer another scornful once over. “Did it burn off?”

“My skin is my robe,” Sawyer murmured. And he could become any of the beasts that he wore there.

“He was created in fire, birthed of smoke,” I continued. “He controls the lightning. He can bring the storm.”

“How do we kill him?” Jimmy asked.

“He’s one of the most powerful sorcerers ever known. There is no killing him.”

Jimmy’s eyes widened. “Everything that breathes can die.”

“Everything but him.”

“Why would Ruthie—” he began.

“She didn’t,” Sawyer interrupted. “This was your test, boy. You failed.”

“Failed?” Jimmy waved at Sawyer’s still-bloody chest. “I got you.”

“Not as good as I got you.”

Honestly. I gave a mental eye roll. Men. Boys. Ancient supernatural creatures. The only difference was the size of their—

Jimmy’s switchblade suddenly appeared once more in his hand. He must have palmed it while still on the ground. I was impressed. Annoyed as hell. But also impressed.

He flicked his wrist, and the dying sun sparked off the edge as it opened. “Let’s go again.”

“No,” I said, and when Jimmy moved, I growled, the sound surprising him enough to make him pause. “Do not make me spray you.”

“You’re taking his side?”

“We’re on the same side.”

“If that’s true, then why were all those people…” Jimmy curled his lip, “ his people, roasting him? He must have done something to set them off.”

“It makes them feel better to burn me every generation or so.” Sawyer shrugged. “I let them.”

“You let them?” Jimmy snorted. “Sure you did.”

“You think mere humans could capture me?” Sawyer gave a delicate snort of his own. “They’ve seen me become my animals, watched me turn humans to ashes—”

“Why did they see you?”

Sawyer spread his hands. “Why not?”

“It adds to his legend,” I said. “Makes people fear him. Probably keeps them from burning him more than once a generation.”

“When they watch me die, then they see me a day, a week, a month later unharmed…” Sawyer didn’t exactly grin—I doubt he could—but his oddly light gray eyes sparkled. “It’s one of the few things that amuses me after all these years.”

“How many years?” Jimmy asked suspiciously.

“Sawyer’s as old as I am,” I said. “Maybe older.”

“This is Sawyer ?”

Something in Jimmy’s voice made me turn, but he was already past me. I should have taken away that damn knife when I had the chance.

The blade descended, headed straight for Sawyer’s eye, but while Jimmy was fast, Sawyer was faster, and he snatched Jimmy’s wrist, giving it a quick, vicious twist. The sound of the bone snapping warred with the thud of the knife against the ground and my own startled gasp.

Jimmy let his injured hand flop at his side as he stepped in close. “She sobs your name in her sleep, you son of a bitch. What did you do to her?”

“What didn’t I?” Sawyer whispered, then flicked one hand through the air as if batting a fly.

By the time Jimmy landed, and I’d run to him, Sawyer was gone. I don’t know if he shape-shifted, or ran off on his own bare feet. Maybe he just went poof —with him, anything was possible. In truth, I didn’t care how he’d gone, I was just glad that he’d gone.

“You okay?” I asked, but Jimmy was already getting up.

He stared at the place Sawyer had recently stood; the only indication that the man had been real and not a mirage was the imprints of his toes in the dust.

“I don’t care what he is.” Jimmy retrieved his knife. The wrist Sawyer had broken still hung limply at his side, but the fingers had begun to move, curling into a fist I wasn’t even sure he knew he’d made. “I’m gonna kill him someday.”

Only one thing could make men—even those who weren’t completely men—behave like this.

“Who is she?” I asked, proud when my voice didn’t break even though my heart was.

Stupid to feel betrayed. I might have known Jimmy Sanducci intimately for eons, but he’d only met me yesterday. And, from the way he’d said she, another had already captured his heart.

“No one,” he murmured in a voice that clearly said the one.

He walked to the car and got in without glancing my way at all.

I pulled into the first motel I saw, a small, single-wing, once-white place with a neon sign that announced SLEEP EAP. It wasn’t until I parked beneath it that I saw that the C and the H had burned out.

“Why are we stopping?”

Those were the first words Jimmy had said in the hour we’d been on the road.

“I’m tired.”

“I’ll drive.”

“If a cop sees you behind the wheel like that…” I waved at his torn and bloody shirt, his even bloodier chest.

“You’ll magic them, and we’ll keep right on going.”

“It’s easier to stop here, take a shower and a nap, start fresh in the morning.” Besides, I’d magicked so many people today, my hands hurt.

I figured he’d argue, so when he laid his head against the seat and closed his eyes, I palmed the keys and got us a room. There was no way I was letting Jimmy out of my sight until he was back under Ruthie’s thumb. I wouldn’t put it past him to sneak away in the middle of the night and try to kill Sawyer again.

Unfortunately, Jimmy didn’t wait for the middle of the night. By the time I got back to the car, he was gone.

“Fuck!” I kicked the tire. I should have put a leash on him.

I looked up and down the road, but in the middle of nowhere, even with fairy eyesight, the highway disappeared into a black maw of nothing after a few hundred feet.

I honestly had no idea which way to go, or even if I should go. Jimmy was a big boy. He wasn’t my responsibility.

No matter how much I might want him to be.

I turned toward the motel and got a shimmy of déjà vu so hard I staggered. I’d dreamed this.

The Impala right there, the hotel in front of me. Jimmy was gone. I was worried. Everything was the same, right down to the ache in my fingers, except …

The sign had been off—black and still—not flickering like it was now.

In the next instant, the neon died with a sizzling phzaat. Darkness settled over me like a cool spring mist. I held my breath and waited for reality to catch up with the dream.

The animal-like shriek rent the night, and I lifted into the air without benefit of wings.

I flew toward the scream, already knowing what I would find.

A cottage miles away from the nearest neighbor, at the end of what would have passed for a decent road in the year 2, the night so dark the figures that surrounded it were mere wisps darting in and out of the light that shone from the windows.

One man battled a multitude of hunched and decrepit crone-things, with tails like dinosaurs and bony, bald heads. Despite their ancient appearance, they moved fast, and they had very sharp teeth. It wasn’t until one of them bleated like a goat that I remembered what they were.

Chupacabras.

Mexican vampires. The stench of rancid garlic was so strong, my eyes watered. Jimmy had probably smelled them from the car.

He seemed to be doing just fine on his own. Ashes flitted through the dim light. He whirled and jabbed, plunging a wooden stake into chest after naked, scaly chest.

However, I’d been here before, and I knew what happened. The king chupacabra—a much bigger, badder vampire, with spikes down his spine and gigantic bat wings—would swoop from the sky and drive first his right talon, then his left, through Jimmy’s throat.