I couldn’t remember ever seeing one in person before, but I’d watched enough nature shows to know one when I saw it. I supposed it made sense for a descendant of a jackal-headed god to have a pack of them at his beck and call.
By the time I reached the man and put my arm around his waist to help support him, the jackal had become insubstantial again, just a vaguely dog-shaped shadow against the grass.
“What the hell?” the dazed victim murmured as the shadow lost its shape and dissipated into the darkness of the night.
I didn’t have time to contemplate the latest dose of weirdness before something slammed into the guy’s back, knocking him to the ground despite my arm around him. When he fell, there was a jackal on his back, its jaws clamped on his shoulder. I pointed the gun, but even with supernatural aim, I had no shot. Anything that hit the jackal would hit the man, too.
Another jackal coalesced out of the air in midleap, landing at the victim’s feet and grabbing hold of an ankle. The one on the guy’s back could have torn his throat out by now if it wanted to, but it settled for sinking its fangs into the flesh of his shoulder. His screams were swallowed by the emptiness of the night and the silence of the dead.
Two more jackals appeared and dove at the victim, jaws snapping and releasing as the first two maintained their grip, holding the victim down so the rest of the pack could attack with impunity. I still had no shot at the one on the guy’s back, but I took aim at the one holding his leg. My bullet hit it square in the head, knocking it back, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, because another immediately took its place. Shooting the jackals was like chopping the heads off the Hydra, so I whirled around, looking for the Liberi who controlled them.
He was standing about twenty yards away, leaning against a lamppost, watching the action. He looked like a homeless dude, with lank, greasy hair, filthy sweats, and tattered Windbreaker. He was so skinny it was a wonder the light breeze didn’t blow him away. His breath steamed in the night air as he stared at the jackal I’d just killed, his expression one of rage, madness, and, it appeared, raw grief.
I took aim at his head. Because he was Liberi, I couldn’t kill him. However, I could incapacitate him, and hopefully if he lost consciousness, the jackals would go poof.
The jackal I’d shot disappeared, and the Liberi’s eyes snapped to mine. The feral smile that shaped his lips gave me about half a second’s warning, but it wasn’t enough. I tried to dodge and shoot at the same time, but the jackal slammed into me so hard even my supernatural aim couldn’t compensate.
The gun fired into the ground as the jackal grabbed hold of my arm with crushingly strong jaws. White-hot pain drew a scream from my throat, but I kept my head enough to transfer the gun to my left hand. Gritting my teeth as my eyes watered and I fought desperately to stay on my feet, I fired at the jackal from point-blank range. It let go, but another one was instantly on me.
I knew the jackals couldn’t kill me. I was Liberi, immortal. I’d seen Jamaal recover from being decapitated. None of that logic did anything to quell the primal panic that coursed through my blood as I fell.
Another jackal came at me, its jaw clamping down on my left wrist, shaking me until the gun fell from my limp fingers. I slammed my other fist into the side of its head. My body was fighting on autopilot, the pain and terror overwhelming conscious thought. The jackals were everywhere, winking in and out of their solid forms as they darted in for attacks.
I was sure I was about to find out exactly what it felt like for a Liberi to die. The magic of the Liberi meant that I would revive, but logic is no match for panic. The jackals were going to rip me into bloody shreds, devour me, and they were going to take their time about it.
But all at once, they disappeared.
I lifted my head and saw their master give me a mocking salute before he, too, faded into the night.
Seconds later, a collection of shadows drew together, and Jamaal emerged from their depths. It looked for a moment like he was going to take off in pursuit of the killer, but it was pretty damn hard to follow someone who was invisible. And as big and powerful as Jamaal is, I don’t know if he’d have had any better success against the phantom jackals than I had.
I was bleeding from bites on both of my arms and one of my legs. I was pretty sure I’d broken a finger or two punching a jackal in its hard skull. It would all heal in a matter of hours, but goddamn, did it ever hurt.
The poor man I’d been trying to help was in considerably worse shape. He lay facedown on the grass, blood seeping from about a dozen wounds. I could tell he was still alive, because his back occasionally rose and fell with a breath, but I didn’t think he would stay alive much longer if he didn’t get immediate medical attention.
I forced myself into a sitting position, the pain almost making me black out, then scooted nearer to the victim. I got a better look at him and wished I hadn’t. There was a lot of blood, and so many wounds I didn’t know which one I should try to put pressure on first. I glanced up at Jamaal, meaning to snap at him to get over here and help me, but the words died in my throat when I saw him.
He was not himself. Literally. I mean, yes, it was Jamaal standing there, but not the Jamaal I knew. The small crescent-moon glyph in the center of his forehead was glowing with a golden light, as were his eyes. His expression was of a man in a trance, seeing nothing of the world around him. He took one slow step toward the bleeding man, then another. His hand rose as if guided by an invisible puppet string, reaching out toward the victim.
I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do or say. Jamaal wasn’t easy to reason with even when he wasn’t out of his mind, and I wasn’t sure he knew I was there at the moment, his attention entirely focused on the victim. I wanted to at least put myself between the two, but my own pain was making me light-headed and wobbly.
The victim’s eyes flew open suddenly, but, as with Jamaal, there was no sign of human intelligence in them. Jamaal’s reaching hand tightened, fingers curling into a fist. He was still about five feet away from the victim, not within touching range, but I knew he was doing something. Something not good.
The victim’s eyes stayed open, but even so, I could see the moment his life slipped away. I couldn’t have told you what was different about him. His eyes were no more vacant than they had been from the moment he’d first opened them, but he was dead.
I looked at Jamaal in horror. The glow in his eyes and his glyph faded, and for one moment, I saw an expression of clarity on his face, like he’d come back from wherever he’d been. Then his eyes rolled up into his head, and his knees went out from under him.
SEVEN
I wanted to sit there on the grass and take some time to gather myself, try to make sense of what I’d seen. But I was badly wounded, sitting by the side of the road with one dead man and another unconscious one, and I didn’t have the luxury. It was dark, but not dark enough to hide the carnage if someone drove by, and though traffic was sparse, it wasn’t nonexistent. I suspected we were far enough away from the residential area that no one had heard the shots, but I couldn’t be sure of that.
With shaking hands, I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Anderson. He answered on the first ring.
“Have you found him? We heard gunfire.” He was slightly out of breath, and I realized he was running. I cursed the cemetery for being so big, for forcing us to spread out so much.
“N-need help,” I managed to stammer out, my whole body now racked with shivers. I didn’t know if I was reacting to my own wounds or if I was having a well-deserved panic attack, but I was having trouble getting words out of my mouth and breath into my lungs.
“Nikki? Are you okay? What happened?”
I tried to spit out an explanation, I really did. But what came out was a gasp, followed by something that sounded suspiciously like a sob. My throat was so tight I could barely breathe, and I was shaking so hard it was a miracle I hadn’t dropped the phone.
“We’re coming, Nikki,” Anderson said. “Hang
on. Are you still on Rock Creek Church?”
I managed a hiccuped affirmative that, amazingly, he was able to understand.
“Just hang on. We’ll be there soon.”
He hung up on me, which was just as well, considering I was practically incapable of speech.
I’d always thought of myself as something of a tough chick. I’d spent years in foster care, getting passed from one family to another like an unwanted present that kept getting regifted. I’d been a loner, a rebel, a troublemaker. But becoming Liberi had taught me in a very short time just how far I was from being the tough chick I’d imagined. Girls like me weren’t supposed to sit by the side of the road and have hysterics after a fight. No matter how horrifying the attack. No matter that they were bleeding from multiple and very painful wounds. No matter that the guy they’d tried to save was dead or that one of the good guys had killed him while in some kind of altered state.
In the distance, a pair of headlights approached, and I knew there was no way whoever was in that car was going to miss the carnage. The strip of grass we were on wasn’t wide enough for us to huddle outside the range of the headlights, and there was nothing to hide behind—even if I could have moved both the dead guy and Jamaal. Not to mention the splatters of blood everywhere.
I was coming close to panic again, frozen where I was, my brain trying to think of what to do and coming up empty. That was when a large black dog came galloping through the cemetery, leapt over the iron fence like it was only an inch high, and landed on the grass beside me. Another burst of adrenaline flooded my system, but before I had a chance to react, the dog shimmered, and suddenly, it was Jack kneeling there in the grass beside me—stark naked, though I was too fuzzy-minded to take much note of it.
The headlights were coming closer, and we were sitting ducks, nowhere to hide. Without a word, Jack grabbed my arm, his hand fortunately not landing on one of the bite wounds, jerking me to the ground beside the dead guy. I tried to voice a protest, but Jack ignored me, forcing my hand against the dead guy’s mauled shoulder and holding it there with an iron grip while reaching for Jamaal with his other hand.
I tried to pull away, shuddering with revulsion, but Jack turned and hissed at me. “Hold still! Just until the car passes.”
I didn’t want to. My hand was sticky with the dead guy’s blood, and my stomach wanted to rebel at the thought of what I was touching. The car was slowing down as it approached us, and I figured adding a naked guy to this scenario wasn’t doing much to improve the visuals. I cringed when the headlights hit us, hoping the driver would go shrieking off in terror at warp speed, giving us time to do … something … before he called the cops. Instead, the car cruised slowly past us. I had the brief impression of a man’s face, taking a good look at us through the driver’s-side window, then turning to face front with a grimace.
The car picked up speed as it passed, but there was no squeal of tires as the driver put pedal to metal, and it didn’t look to me like he was going more than a little faster than the speed limit.
Jack let go of me, and I jerked away from the dead guy. My head swam at the sudden movement, and I closed my eyes to avoid passing out.
“What the hell was that about?” I snarled at Jack.
“What good is a trickster if he has no illusion magic?” Jack responded, sounding smug. Apparently, the blood and gore didn’t bother him nearly as much as they did me.
I forced my eyes open, and though my head still swam, it wasn’t quite as bad. Jack was sitting on the bloody grass between the victim and Jamaal, showing no sign of self-consciousness. I kept my eyes pinned on his face as I realized something.
“I’ve seen you change forms before. You don’t have to be naked to do it.” When he’d changed in the living room, his clothes had changed right along with him.
He grinned at me and stretched out his legs to give me a better view. “I don’t technically have to, but it’s more fun this way. You should see the look on your face.”
If my gun had been in easy reach, I might have shot him. “Some poor bastard just got mauled to death by jackals, Jamaal is lying there unconscious, I’m bleeding, and you think this is a good time to yank my chain?”
He met my eyes as the humor left his. It was the first time in my memory I could remember seeing Jack look serious. His expression was strangely chilling, maybe only because it looked wrong on a face that was always smiling.
“I’m a descendant of Loki,” he said in a tone that suggested I’d ticked him off. “Deal with it.”
Loki, who was a trickster and who didn’t much care about the feelings of those around him.
“That may be true,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you are Loki. You could show a little compassion every once in a while.”
The grin was back. “Why would I want to do a silly thing like that?”
I guessed appealing to his better nature was a lost cause. Which I should have known before I opened my mouth. Tricksters aren’t known for being nice. I shook my head.
“You’re an asshole,” I told Jack, who was not the least bothered by it.
Down the street a bit, I could see a couple of people turn the corner at a run. They were far enough away that I couldn’t tell who they were yet. I supposed I should be grateful that Jack had gotten there as quickly as he had. If I’d been in trouble, the others would have been too late to help me. Assuming Jack wouldn’t have sat on the sidelines eating popcorn if I had been in trouble.
“Put some damn clothes on,” I snapped at him, only to realize that in the brief moment I’d looked away, he’d somehow managed to clothe himself.
The rest of the Liberi converged on us in the next couple of minutes. I was still light-headed and woozy, and the bite wounds hurt like a son of a bitch. I didn’t feel like reliving what had just happened multiple times, so I waited until everyone was there before I gave them the play-by-play.
I debated whether to tell everyone about how Jamaal had wigged out and then ended up killing the victim, but he was still lying there unconscious, and I figured I had to explain. I hoped I wasn’t condemning Jamaal to a fate worse than death by telling Anderson what had happened. But I knew it hadn’t really been Jamaal who killed the victim; it had been his death magic, which had taken him over completely, possessed him like a demon. I hoped Anderson would understand that.
There was silence among the gathered Liberi as they contemplated everything I’d said. Anderson knelt by Jamaal’s side and lightly tapped his cheeks, trying to wake him up, but he was still out cold. Another car passed by, and Jack did his thing, reaching down to touch me and the dead guy and Jamaal. I noticed more than one Liberi grimace and look away, and, as before, the car went right on by the bloody murder scene without stopping.
“Do I want to know what you’re making people see?” I asked Jack.
“No,” several people answered at once, and I realized that I was probably the only one who hadn’t seen the illusion. I bit my tongue to resist asking him why I couldn’t see it. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to start up a conversation with him.
“We’d better get back to the house,” Anderson said, standing up and brushing dead grass off the knees of his jeans. Somehow he’d managed not to get any blood on him. “The killer isn’t going to come back here tonight.”
“What about Jamaal?” I asked.
Anderson gave me a neutral look. “I’m not making any decisions until he wakes up and gives me his side of the story. Maybe he had a good reason for what he did.”
But Anderson hadn’t seen him, hadn’t seen the absolute lack of humanity in his face. I wondered if Jamaal would even remember anything when he woke up—assuming the death magic hadn’t pushed him over the edge permanently.
Anderson moved around to Jamaal’s feet and squatted, glancing up at Logan. “Help me carry him, will you?”
I didn’t know how much Jamaal weighed, except that it was a lot. It probably would be easier to use a fireman’s carry, but we had a consid
erable walk to get to where we’d parked, and I figured the guys were going to have to take turns, so maybe two at a time would be more efficient in the end.
Logan was just starting to bend down when Maggie grabbed his shoulder and tugged him back.
“I can carry him,” she said, then bent and slid one arm under Jamaal’s shoulders and one under his knees, lifting him like he weighed no more than a toddler. “See? Light as a feather.”
Maggie had told me once that although the guys all knew about her supernatural strength, testosterone poisoning made them really uncomfortable with letting her carry stuff. I could see she was right by the way the guys shifted uncomfortably on their feet. Maggie smiled tightly, and I knew it bothered her that they were threatened by her strength.
I forced myself to stand up, though it seemed to take a massive amount of effort, and putting weight on my wounded leg made a reluctant whimper rise in my throat.
“I guess I should carry you instead,” Anderson said, and before I had a chance to protest, he’d swept me off my feet. I instinctively put an arm around his neck to hold on.
“I can walk,” I insisted like an idiot.
“Yeah, if we don’t mind it taking three hours to get back to the cars,” Anderson retorted.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Jack bend down and feel around the dead guy’s pocket until he found a wallet, which he promptly transferred into his own back pocket.
“You’re stealing his wallet?” I asked, my voice a little shrill with my indignation.
Jack shrugged. “It’ll have ID and credit cards, which might help us find out more about him and maybe figure out why he was targeted.”
I didn’t think that had anything to do with it. He could have just glanced at the ID to find out who the poor guy was, then left it at the scene.
Anderson turned away before I had a chance to tell Jack what an asshole he was—for the second time in the last ten minutes—and we started down the road toward where we’d parked.
“The best way to handle Jack is not to engage with him,” Anderson told me.