They timed it perfectly. Jan and Rick pulled up to the curb, and the three of them dove into the backseat. Rick, behind the wheel, got them turned around and heading away from the café.
“Okay, what the fuck is going on?” he asked. “And do the three of you have anything to do with the hellacious roadblock a few streets over?”
Lina blushed. “Um, sort of.”
Jan shook his head. “Don’t tell him while he’s driving. He’ll get us killed. We’ll be back at the hotel in a few minutes.”
Zack pulled the books out of the bag they’d taken from the shop. “Well, at least we have one question answered. If not the dead guy, someone in the shop had something to do with carving those statues.”
“What dead guy?” Rick yelled.
“Shut up and drive,” Jan snapped. “I asked you not to do that, Z.”
“Sorry. He was already dead when the girls got there.”
The car swerved a little as Rick tried to look into the backseat. “What? Why weren’t you with them?”
“Stop it!” Jan yelled.
“Who are you yelling at?” Zack asked.
“Both of you! Let’s get back to the hotel safely then we’ll talk.”
Lina thought she saw tufts of steam wisping from Rick’s nostrils, but he clamped his jaw shut and pressed down a little harder on the accelerator as he wove through traffic.
* * * *
They looked over the books. Callie, Zack, and Daniel took the address book, cross-checking addresses and info with the Internet to see which ones were still good.
So far, they were striking out.
“He obviously didn’t make the cuffs,” Callie said as she sat back and stretched. “He wasn’t a silversmith. I didn’t see any evidence of it there at his shop.” They’d sent Wally, Brodey, and Jocko to the man’s house to scope the place out and were waiting to hear back from them.
Lina was pouring through the small journal. The first entry was dated 1 March, 1879, and it had been only sporadically updated from that point on. The last entry was only three years prior from the current date, and at least a quarter of the pages were still blank.
Most of the notes didn’t make sense. They seemed to be formulas, or material lists, or even random comments. She finally handed it off to Jan and Rick, who’d been working the phones with Andel to get more backup.
“My brain’s fried,” she said. She flopped back onto the bed. “I can’t handle this. I can’t believe I couldn’t fry Fat Boy’s balls. I am such a sucky Goddess! That fucktard is still running around loose out there somewhere!”
“Stop it,” Jan said. “Quit talking like that.”
“Well, that’s exactly what happened. He got away because I didn’t fry his ass. No telling how many more people he’ll kill.”
Uncle Andel sat down on the bed next to Lina and shooed Jan away. “Lina, listen. No one is blaming you for anything. You are expecting far too much from yourself. Quit beating yourself up so much.”
She looked at him. His amber eyes focused on her. She tried not to focus on the scar splitting his face from between his eyes to below his chin. “How can you say that to me after what they did to you?”
He kindly smiled. “Listen to me, what happened to me and mine happened many, many years before you were born. You bear no responsibility for that. The cockatrice are to blame, pure and simple. From what Zack and the Cailleach—”
Across the room, Callie cleared her throat at that.
“Excuse me. From what Zack and Callie told me—”
“Thank you,” Callie said.
“—you performed admirably.”
“I let him get away.”
Zack let out a celebratory hoot. “I think I found something!”
“What?” Callie asked.
“I think I found our silversmith. And good news, looks like he’s still here in Brussels.”
* * * *
They all piled into the rental van and headed for the address. The house was located just outside the city, in a rural area. On a couple of acres of land, it was relatively isolated from its neighbors.
Just as they pulled up to the drive, Jan’s phone rang. “Yeah… Crap. Okay. No, we’re out on an errand. We’ll meet you back at the hotel in a little bit… Okay, thanks.” He hung up. “That was Wally. They struck out. The house was ransacked, and they barely got out of there before the police arrived.”
They all looked up the drive at the house. “We need to do this,” Lina said, anxious to get up there, to obtain any clue to finding Fat Boy again.
“Yeah, but we don’t want to walk into a trap,” Zack said.
Uncle Andel let out a sigh. “I’ll do it.” Before anyone could stop him, he hauled himself out of the front passenger seat and walked up the short drive. At the front door he knocked, waited, and knocked again. After a minute, he walked around the house, out of their sight for a moment. When he returned, he waved them up.
“Here we go,” Rick said as he pulled the van up to the house.
“Yeah, this isn’t inconspicuous,” Lina snarked. “We look like a geeky SWAT team.”
They all piled out. Andel tried the front door and found it unlocked. “You two stay here,” he said to Lina and Callie.
“Excuse me?” Lina said.
“He’s trying to be chivalrous,” Zack said. “Give him the win.”
“Fine.”
The men disappeared into the house while Callie and Lina kept watch. After just a moment, Zack called out to them. “Come on in.”
They walked in and stopped in the foyer. The house was a disaster. And not in a Hoarders: Buried Alive kind of way, either.
Lina was afraid to ask. “Is he…?”
“Yeah,” Zack said. “Very.”
Callie and Lina followed the sound of his voice. A man lay dead on the kitchen floor.
Lina didn’t want to see. She walked outside and got into the van, Callie on her heels. She felt numb.
Christ.
A few minutes later, the men wordlessly returned to the van. Rick climbed behind the wheel and they departed.
“Find anything?” she finally asked.
He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
“I…” Lina shut her mouth. She suspected what they didn’t want to tell her. “How many kids?” she whispered.
Zack found his fingers suddenly very interesting. “Three,” he softly said.
“Was this our guy?” Callie asked.
Rick nodded. “Yep. No doubt about it. He had a setup and tools in his basement. He was definitely a silversmith.”
They rode back to the hotel in silence. When they reached their floor, Lina headed for their room. Zack tried to stop her, but she shook his hand off. “Please, I just need to be alone for a while.”
“Okay.”
She let herself into the room and collapsed facedown on the bed, where she cried herself to sleep.
* * * *
The next morning, after breakfast, they all gathered in Zack and Kael’s room. The men looked grim. “We think we know where one of the cockatrice are, based on info we recovered,” Kael said. “He lives about twenty minutes away. Name’s Gunther Hodgson.”
“We’re working on locating the nest,” Jocko said. “We think we’re close.”
“Nest?” Lina asked.
“That’s what they call it,” Kael said. He looked like he’d eaten something sour. “You know, like a nest of rats, or roaches.”
“How do we know this guy is one of the cockatrice?” Lina asked. “Are we sure? Did you see him sprout feathers?”
“Don’t worry,” Kael assured her. “We won’t hurt him unless we’re sure.”
“I can tell,” Callie said. “Send me in.”
“Without a doubt?” Lina asked.
She nodded. “Without a doubt.”
Lina refused to be left behind. She didn’t want to risk missing Fat Boy again. “We’re going to kill him if he is, aren’t we?” she asked. Part of her
had a hard time wrapping her head around that notion.
Part of her wanted blood when she thought about the nightmare of Kael’s family’s murder.
Zack nodded. “Yeah, honey. We are. Cockatrice are worse than mobsters crossed with cockroaches. They have no priority except self-preservation and reproduction. If you don’t stomp them out completely, they keep coming back. That’s the only thing that stops them.”
“But only if we’re sure?” she asked.
Callie nodded. “Only if we’re sure.”
“Then let’s go.”
They took both the van and the car. Kael, Daniel, Callie, and Wally went in first. That left Lina sitting in the van with Jan, Rick, and the rest of them and nervously drumming her fingers on her thigh.
“Why haven’t we heard back from them yet?” she nervously said.
“It’s only been five minutes,” Zack said. “Calm down, sweetie. They’re fine.”
They waited another five minutes. Finally, Zack’s phone rang. “Yeah?... Okay. We’re on our way.” Jan started the engine and they drove to the house.
The older house looked run-down. Weeds and scraggly bushes controlled what little yard there was.
Inside, a young, angry-looking man she assumed to be Gunther Hodgson had been tied to a chair. His left eye was swollen, and someone had put duct tape over his mouth. Callie stood next to him, flexing her right hand. “You punched him?” Lina asked.
She smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Felt good, too.”
“Did he tell you anything?”
Kael emerged from another room, a cell phone in his hand. He held it up. “Contacts are in here. He’s one of them.”
“You’re sure?”
He nodded and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Go look. We didn’t even need Callie telling us he was to know.”
She walked back into the room he’d emerged from. A laptop stood open on a desk. She bent over and looked at it. The screen showed his e-mail, which was open to a message dated yesterday.
Whoever had sent the e-mail was confirming that both the carver and the silversmith were dead.
No witnesses.
Apparently Fat Boy’s a liar as well as a killer. He’s covering his ass about us seeing him.
They spent the better part of an hour there, going through Gunther’s contacts and cross-checking them to the information they obtained from the carver’s phone book and information they’d retrieved from the silversmith’s house. Several of the contacts in his book were also in the carver’s phone book, only this guy had updated information.
Lina pulled a chair up in front of him and ripped the duct tape off his mouth. “Why can’t you assholes just give up and live in peace?”
He spit in her face.
Before Lina or any of the men could react, Callie punched him squarely in the nose, hard. His head rocked back. “That’s why,” she said as she wiped his blood off her knuckles onto his shirt. “Because they are animals. Worse than animals.”
Lina wiped the spittle off her cheek with a wet cloth Zack brought her. “Why hasn’t he shifted yet?” Lina asked. If she was perfectly honest with herself, she was hoping he would so she could try firebombing his feathered ass.
“He’s a younglin’,” Andel said.
“Fuck you!” Gunther yelled.
Callie decked him again.
“Cockatrice,” Andel continued as if not interrupted, “aren’t like the rest of us shifters. Every other shifter, as long as nothing has prevented their shifting, start when they’re adolescents. Late teens at the most, usually. Cockatrice have to be mature to start shifting, at least fifty or sixty years old, usually. He might not ever be able to shift if his genes are weak. A lot of their kind can’t shift anymore, even though they have other abilities.”
Gunther started coming around again. This time, Lina punched him.
Callie high-fived her. “See? It’s fun, isn’t it?”
Lina shook out her fist. “Yeah, it sort of is.”
“Can we kill him now?” Callie asked Daniel.
“Not yet, my bloodthirsty little mate,” he said.
Kael walked over and slapped Gunther so hard his head rocked back again. Kael started questioning him in something that sounded like rapid-fire German. Lina realized she could understand a little of it, but Kael was speaking far too fast for her to understand it all.
Gunther sneered at Kael.
Before she realized what he was doing, Kael reached out and grabbed the man by the throat. A blank, unreadable expression on his face, Kael squeezed harder and harder until Gunther’s eyes bugged and he tried struggling in the chair against his bonds.
Then, with a sickening pop, Kael’s fingers punched through the man’s throat. Gunther’s shoes beat a quick, staccato beat on the hardwood floor for just a moment before he went limp. Blood flowed down his neck from the wounds, where Kael’s fingers impaled him.
Kael’s cold expression nearly frightened Lina. He let go of the cockatrice and wiped the blood and gore off his hand on the dead man’s shirt. Without a word, he left the room. They heard the sound of water running, followed by the unmistakable sound of retching, followed by Kael’s gut-wrenching sobs.
“I’m on it,” Zack said, a grim look on his face as he hurried after him.
“I suggest,” Andel said, “that we grab his computer and any other information we can and get out of here.”
Daniel nodded. “Yep.” He went after Zack and returned a moment later. “I gave him the car keys. Let’s let them have some time. They’ll come back later. We can all fit in the van.”
Quietly, they all returned to the van with the gathered items and drove back to the hotel, where they assembled in Lina’s suite to go over everything. As far as they could tell, neither the carver nor the silversmith were cockatrice. They were, however, longtime associates of theirs, paid well for their work. Now with Edgar and Lenny both dead, and with the other shifters races out for vengeance, the cockatrice were cutting their losses to protect their nest.
Zack and Kael returned an hour later. “Where are we at?” Kael quietly asked.
“Actually,” Jan said, “we think we have another lead on the nest. They’re running drugs.”
Zack snorted. “Doesn’t surprise me.”
“I have an idea,” Callie said. She looked at Daniel. “I need Sir’s permission, though.”
He looked at her oddly, but nodded.
She smiled. Before Lina could blink, Gunther stood before them. “How’s this?” Callie asked, but it was Gunther’s voice that came out.
Wally’s eyes widened. “Fuckin’ brilliant!”
Using Gunther’s cell phone, Callie placed a few calls and arranged a meeting with some of Gunther’s cohorts later that night. With the calls complete, she sat back and they were once again staring at Callie.
Daniel grinned and walked over to her. “And who says you’re not a shape-shifter?” he said with a laugh.
She arched an eyebrow at him. “I never said that. I’m not a wolf.”
“I couldn’t care less if you’re a damn drunken fruit bat,” Wally said, “that was amazing.”
She shrugged. “Perk of the rank.”
Chapter Six
Despite Daniel’s reservations, he let Callie, disguised as Gunther, go in with Wally, who she passed off as an American supplier. Andel and Jocko had called in reinforcements. They had two dozen wolves and dragons awaiting the signal to attack. The meeting was being held at a warehouse in an industrial section of town that would be nearly deserted that time of night.
As Lina sat in the shadows of a nearby shipping container, she closed her eyes. She found herself in Baba Yaga’s kitchen.
Apparently expecting her, Baba Yaga stood there in her matron form. She slid a mug of coffee, already prepared, over to Lina.
“Here you go, dear.”
“I can’t be here right now. I need to be ready.”
“You will be, don’t worry. Drink your coffee.”
Lina took a sip. Perfect, of course. “Tell me we’re doing the right thing?”
Baba Yaga shrugged. “I will not usurp free will.”
“Zack told me they’re like cockroaches crossed with mobsters.”
The matron smiled. “That is not an inaccurate description.”
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to kill innocent people.”
“Like the three children and the man’s wife killed at the silversmith’s house? They weren’t involved in his dealings, yet the cockatrice, or their accomplice, didn’t hesitate to kill them.”
“I know.”
“Your parents?”
Lina clamped down on the seething rage that threatened to overwhelm her. “Yeah.” She took another sip of coffee.
“There are others. Believe me. You said you wanted to see how your parents died so you wouldn’t ever forget what the cockatrice are capable of,” Baba Yaga reminded her. “Remember that?”
Lina grimly nodded. “Yeah.” She took another sip of coffee and set her mug down. “Thank you.”
She opened her eyes to find Zack looking at her. “So, how is Baba Yaga tonight?”
“Helpful.”
Zack smiled. “Good. About damn time.”
Daniel stood up from his hiding place closer to the front entrance and waved his hand. Around the building, the signal was passed and everyone advanced. Lina pushed her way to the front of the attacking force despite Zack’s best efforts to grab and hold her back. She shouldered Daniel out of the way and charged through the door first.
Callie—disguised as Gunther—wheeled around and saw Lina charge through the door. Callie let out a squeak and grabbed Wally. She pushed him down to the ground and threw herself on top of him. Lina, seething with rage by the time she spotted the eight young men there for the meeting, hurled two large balls of icy mist at them.
The blast knocked all of them off their feet and coated the warehouse’s concrete floor in ice. Before they could regain their footing, they’d been swarmed and disarmed by the shifters.
Zack put his hand on Lina’s back. “Babe? You okay?”
She set her jaw. “I will be shortly.”
Callie, who was now back to looking like her normal self and helping Wally to his feet, shouted at Zack. “Get her out of here. Now! She’s going to kill them!”