Rob Thurman - Blackout

Remaining on all fours, she said, “Where have you been, pretty boy? You leave, who is here to play games?” Beauty like hers took; it never gave. And if it pretended that it did, it was only to soften you up to make your fall that much harder.

The same kind of hard fall that Wolf I’d shot in the head had taken. “Delilah.” I didn’t remember her face or her body or her unique lupine smell, but Niko and Goodfellow had said the Alpha of the Lupa pack liked to play games. And as my ex, she especially liked to play them with me.

Also, the first night we’d been in the city, while I slept, Leandros had made index cards. Memory joggers. Who was who. Who could be trusted and who could not. The guy was brilliant in everything he did. The way he fought the boggle, when he sparred, all the books he had—each one weighing twenty pounds minimum—the precise way he made his tea, the equally precise way he disarmed me when I thought I was a hotshot back in South Carolina. Not even a week and some of those days were cloudy, but I saw what I saw: Niko was an expert in everything he did, mental or physical. He was the kind of man the world saw only every few centuries. Born to rule and gifted by nature beyond all others.

But nature does hate perfection. The guy couldn’t draw his ass out of a wet paper bag. I’d thumbed through my stack of cards on the subway to the Ninth Circle. The first had been a stick figure with circles for breasts, long blond hair indicated by two swoopy lines, a fluffy dog tail, and a fang-filled smile. Delilah (bad) was written in machine-perfect calligraphy at the top of the card. There’d been stick men with angel wings, Ishiah (good) Samyel (good), a stick woman with vampire fangs, Promise (good) , a round thing with Mickey Mouse ears and a skinny tail marked Mickey (debatable) . Then there’d been one stick figure with curly hair and three legs. I didn’t need the Robin Goodfellow (Run for your life) to ball it up and throw it at Leandros, which I had.

“I thought the Lupa pack wasn’t committing to this fight,” Niko said at my shoulder.

She stood and shrugged as more Lupa rained down around her. “I can change my mind—did change my mind. Spiders took four of my pack. What the Kin is learning, what the vampires know, I want this bitch to feel . We Lupa are untouchable. To kill Lupa is to take your last breath.” The Wolves around her smiled in a lightning-swift shadow of hers. They smelled her arousal. I smelled it. “Except for you, pretty boy.” The muzzle of my Desert Eagle was pressed against her forehead as her fingers ran along my jaw. My brain might stay out to lunch forever, but my body always knew what it was doing.

“Any present I give to you, you are free. Do as you wish. Play, kill, eat.” She laughed, the gun not existing in her reality at all. She slapped me in the face, playfully to another Wolf maybe, but it was a damn hard smack to a human. She laughed again. “Stop with the silly puck cologne. Who do you hide from in this city? Yourself?”

I didn’t have a chance to wonder why she’d think I was into cologne, much less Goodfellow’s cologne when she was under my gun, feinting, and leaping over me, a diver into water far below. That it wasn’t water, only more stairs, didn’t matter. She landed on her feet and kept running. Her pack moved around us. I felt the swipe of claws and pulled a combat knife with my other hand to slap back hands and paws and several elongated jaws with fangs ready for one tiny opening. Play to them, following their Alpha’s lead. Except for Delilah, they all were obviously All Wolf—stuck in between. Wolf eyes, human face. Wolf face, human eyes and hands. Some used hooded jackets to hide and some needed nothing; they simply were exotic-looking women. But if you knew …

“Delilah is Alpha, but the whole pack is that All Wolf cult?” I asked, rubbing my burning jaw as I watched them all disappear down the stairs in the blink of an eye, wolves on a rabbit. Run, run, run.

“Her vocal cords.” He answered the question I hadn’t asked. “That’s not an accent. Delilah’s All Wolf is hidden inside her, but she’s All Wolf, and more than that, she’s Kin; make no mistake.” He tapped my arm and pointed. “Kin.”

There were bloody fingerprints, footprints, and paw prints on the stairs. Kin were killers, I’d been told—every last one of them. I touched my jaw where Delilah’s fingers had been. There was a smudge of blood there too. “You think Delilah is now our only client?”

“I think she may be,” he said as he started running up the rest of the stairs.

But the boardroom he charged into was empty except for a card with neatly written letters, Fourth Alternate Location , resting in the middle of the table. The blood was from a dead security guard at the end of the hall. He wasn’t human. He looked human … until I lifted his upper lip to see small fangs, right before they slid out of sight, the gums sealing over them. Nature—keeping the vamp’s secret for them. I checked his vitals just in case, although I wasn’t precisely sure what made a vampire dead. “No heartbeat,” I was informed. Born, not made—live, not undead. They were the same as humans that way with the same vital signs or lack of them after a she-Wolf Alpha took one down. And they even bled red like humans. Made sense. They used to drain humans. You wouldn’t eat what you couldn’t digest. I hadn’t seen a scratch on Delilah, and Leandros said vamps were fast and strong—very fast, very strong. She was something all right.

“They must’ve suspected the Lupa were coming for them,” Leandros said, tapping the card against his palm. “They took precautions and moved the meet.”

Precautions. In other words, you did not fuck with the Lupa, but, damn, they would fuck with you if they felt like it. If you wanted to be noticed you had to make a big bang—such as taking out an unprecedented council of the supernatural joined to fight Ammut. Delilah was ambitious and hot. She was also a matter-of-fact killer, but we couldn’t all be perfect.

“So …,” I said casually as I straightened, “that was Delilah, huh?”

Leandros already knew where this was going. I could tell by the twitch of his jaw. “Yes, that was Delilah as the conversation on the stairs and the index card I gave you made perfectly clear.”

“And I nailed that?”

The roll of his eyes indicated I was beyond immature.

I gave a smug grin. “Damn, I’m good.”

We ended up at not the first, second, or even third, but the fourth alternate location, which had to be Leandros’s idea. Who else would have four? Two days and I’d seen enough of his ways to know that. I was surprised he could stand up without a chair sticking to his ass, the gravitational pull of his anal-retentive nature too strong to be overcome by mere furniture.

We’d taken another cab up until about a twenty-minute walk away. Leandros wanted either to determine if the Lupa were following us or to simply kill my tired ass, one of the two. I missed the Landing with its twelve streets where everyone walked slow and in a hurry meant not stopping to sit on your neighbor’s porch to “chat a spell.” All right, an exaggeration about the porch thing, but I damn sure missed the twelve streets.

“And the fourth alternate location would be?” I asked as I hunched in my jacket, tired of the cold, the endless walking and running, and not too happy with the smell.

“Brooklyn. Gowanus Canal.”

“I liked the Central Park place better,” I grunted. “It didn’t stink.” I didn’t know if the water stank to him, but it did to me—like a chemical-coated rotting body. “And there were hot Wolf chicks.”

There weren’t many … Correction, there weren’t any people I could see hanging around, ready to jump in for a swim as we moved through several rusted-through tanks to a scrap metal yard. As for Gowanus Canal, an up-close look said they should’ve called it Gowanus Ditch. Encased in concrete forever as far as I could tell from the lights reflecting off the dank, fetid black water, it wasn’t close to being a tourist attraction. You weren’t going to see any gondolas with singing guys in striped shirts around here. If they fell in, they’d crawl out a mutated creature with superpowers that involved killing you with a massive wave of stench.