“And duty is everything?”
“Without it, chaos reigns. Which is why we must stop your father. He threatens the true order of things.”
Whose true order? I wanted to ask, but kept the question to myself. I very much suspected that it wasn’t one he’d be willing to address.
Besides, did I really want to know the answer to a question like that?
“But what about the little girl? If you’re following me about, how can you also track down whoever stole her soul?”
“You must sleep. I will use that time to hunt. And others will hunt when I’m unable to.”
“And if you find the thing responsible?”
“I will kill it, of course.”
“So sending it back through the gates is not an option?”
“For the Mijai, no. As I said, we are not gatekeepers. Whatever is doing this either broke through or was brought through the portals to get here. Besides, if it was powerful enough to break through one time, what makes you think it will not do so again?”
“The fact that you lot will be waiting?”
He didn’t immediately answer, studying me for several seconds before asking, “Why would you worry about the fate of whatever stole that child’s soul?”
“I’m not. You can chop it into little bits and serve it to the nearest rat for all I care. I just wasn’t sure if that was your intention or not.”
“As I said, the Mijai are not soul guides. We are hunters. Killers.”
And I had one intending to follow me everywhere. Joy.
“So how are you going to stop this thing from killing again?”
He shrugged. “We may not. There were few clues left in the young girl’s room and no trace to follow.”
“Trace?”
He hesitated. “Dark energy has a certain resonance. Often it leaves a trace—a scent, if you will—that we can use to track the perpetrators down. But whatever is behind this theft left no such trace.”
Fay Kingston’s comments echoed briefly through my mind and I said, “There may not be any trace you can follow now, but the thing did have a presence. The mother mentioned it.”
His gaze seemed to sharpen. “What did she say?”
“She felt something cold and evil in the room that made her skin crawl.” I hesitated. “She said that reading from the Bible made it flee, but personally I doubt that. The thing remained long enough to steal Hanna’s soul.”
Something akin to disappointment crossed his features, though the expression was so fleeting I might well have been imagining it. “The Bible would only affect those beings who were religious during their time here, and her description gives us no real clue to follow. Could you not question her further?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t tell her Hanna’s soul had been stolen. I told her she’d moved on peacefully.”
That seemed to surprise him, though again, his expression didn’t change. It was something I felt rather than saw. “Why would you lie?”
“Because the truth would only cause her more pain. Losing a child is enough to cope with.”
“But it is the truth. That is always the correct choice, whether painful or not.”
I smiled at the simplicity of such a statement. “It would be nice if things were that straightforward, but in this world, they rarely are.”
“Hence the need for the dark path.”
“So all of us liars go to hell?”
Again the ghost of a smile touched his lips. “To repeat your own words, it would be nice if things were that straightforward.”
“It’s just as well that they’re not. Otherwise, hell would be one crowded place.”
“The way this world of yours works, it certainly would.” He pushed back his chair and rose, drawing my gaze up his long, magnificent length. “If by chance you are contacted by your father when I’m not on watch, will you contact me?”
“And how am I supposed to do that? I’m presuming reapers don’t carry cell phones around.”
“That would hardly be practical when we are not often of this world or flesh.”
A smile touched my lips. Again he didn’t seem to get the sarcasm, but I guess a being that was more energy than flesh—and who spent most of his time walking the twilight realm—didn’t have much call or experience with emotion of any kind.
“Then how am I supposed to contact you?”
“Simply call my name. I have been tuned to your Chi, and will hear your summons.”
So not only did I have a reaper following me about, but he’d been tuned to my Chi. Or life energy, as Ilianna preferred to call it. This day was going from bad to worse.
“And your name is …?”
“Azriel.”
I snorted softly. “Even I know that Azriel is the generic name all reapers go by.”
“It may be generic, but when you say it, you will be summoning me.”
“Because you’ve been tuned to me?”
“Yes.”
Great. Not. “Do you have another name?”
He hesitated. “Yes, but that is private. No guide or Mijai will ever tell you his true name.”
“Why?”
“Because names are things of power, and to give one freely would be placing yourself in another’s control.”
“So why even give yourselves a true name?”
“Having a family in which all are called Azriel would get a little confusing.”
Meaning reapers had family units? Interesting, given that the Aedh didn’t. “So where are you off to now, Azriel, if you’ve been assigned to follow me?”
“I will retreat to a viewing distance. It would be better for us both.”
It would be better for us both if he wasn’t following me at all, but that didn’t seem to be an option right now. “So you’re just going to sit back and watch? You’re not going to do anything else?”
“I am not here to interfere with your life or anything that happens to you,” he said softly. “I merely wait to see if your father will contact you.”
For how long? I wondered, but didn’t bother voicing the question simply because I doubted he would answer. “I’ll talk to you later, then.”
“Or not,” he said, and disappeared.
No one in the restaurant seemed to notice or care. He may have been visible to everyone, but there was obviously some sort of magic at work, because it was simply impossible for anyone to disappear in the middle of a crowded room like that and not have anyone notice.
I rose and headed out of the restaurant. It was still raining, so I flicked the collar of my jacket up and ran for the underground parking garage. After finding the ticket machine and paying, I headed for the stairs and walked down to sublevel two, my footsteps echoing sharply in the silence.
I’d parked my bike in the slots near the elevators, which were on the opposite side of the garage from the stairs. I waited for a car to cruise past, then stepped out, but as I walked through the half shadows, the awareness that I was not alone hit. Which, given this was a multistory underground parking lot, wasn’t exactly surprising. But the sense of wrongness that came with the realization was.
I glanced around. Cars were parked in silent rows and there was no one in immediate sight, walking either toward or away from them. The air was thick with the scents of dirt, oil, and exhaust fumes—aromas that seemed to be leaching from the concrete itself. There was nothing that suggested anything or anyone was near.
Yet someone was. The sensation of wrongness was getting stronger, crawling like flies across the back of my neck.
I’d lived with clairvoyance, warnings, and portents all my life. I wasn’t about to start ignoring them now.
I slowed my steps a little and flared my nostrils, drawing in more of the air and sorting through the flavors.
And I found him.
Or rather, them—because there wasn’t just one person nearby, but four. One ahead, one to the left, one to the right, and one attempting to sneak up behind me. Effectively, they had me b
oxed in, and you didn’t do that unless you wanted to ensure your prey couldn’t escape.
I flexed my fingers and wondered how I should play it. I could fight—years of sparring with Riley and Quinn had seen to that—but they’d also impressed upon me the need not to fight unless it was absolutely necessary.
I wasn’t sure yet that it was necessary. It was possible my stalkers intended nothing more than to talk to me. They might even be intending to follow me. Hell, I already had a reaper playing tag, so why not four strange-smelling men?
But if these men had intended to do nothing more than talk, they wouldn’t have bothered boxing me in so completely.
They were here to attack. Nothing more, nothing less.
I reached into my pocket as I neared the bike and wrapped shaking fingers around my keys. Doubt skittered through me, but these men left me with little in the way of options.
I couldn’t see the man up ahead, but his scent suggested he was standing behind the cars to the left of the bike. The two to either side hadn’t moved in closer, but the one behind had—although he still wasn’t close enough to react to.
Obviously, though, none of them had any idea I was part wolf; otherwise they would have used a scent-erasing soap. Or, at the very least, eaten less garlic last night.
The back of my neck continued to crawl with the nearness of the man behind me. I resisted the growing need to turn around, and flipped my keys up between my fingers so that the sharper ends stuck out like little metal prongs. Just about anything could become a dangerous weapon if you had the know-how—and I certainly did. Then I shrugged off my backpack, holding it in my free hand as I walked on. The air was thick with the scent of garlic and the musk of the man behind me. He was human, not wolf. Not shifter.
I had no idea what the others were. I might be able to smell their body odor, but there was precious little else coming through. And that was weird. If I could smell them, I should have been able to tell what the hell they were.
Maybe the garlic was deliberate. Maybe they were using it the same way someone might use scent-erasing soap. And if that was the case, it was working.
Although if this was a chance robbery attempt, why would they reek of garlic? Even humans had noses good enough to catch a whiff.
And yet, despite my certainty otherwise, what else could it realistically be? Why would these men be sitting here waiting to ambush me when they couldn’t have even guessed that I’d be here?
No one had followed me from home, I was pretty sure of that. Then again, I might not have noticed given I had no reason to look.
The garlic stink suddenly sharpened and the air stirred with movement. It was warning enough. I spun on my heel, letting the backpack fly, hoping to distract my attacker as I lashed out with a booted foot. He dodged the pack but saw the second blow too late, and my foot took him high in the chest. He staggered backward, arms flailing to keep his balance.
As the other three erupted from their hiding spots, I lunged forward, my right fist swinging upward, hitting the human as hard as I could under the chin. I might be only half werewolf, but that still gave me a whole lot of strength. The keys dug deep into his neck even as the force of the blow threw him off his feet. Blood gushed, but I was already spinning around to meet the next man, and heard rather than saw the first hit the concrete.
The man who’d been hiding behind the car nearest my bike was in the air—literally in the air—his shape shifting, pulsating, becoming something less than human but not actually cat: a panther who retained human characteristics and height. He was grotesque—like something you saw in a bad horror movie—but that didn’t make him any less dangerous.
I dropped under his leap, but as his body flew over mine he twisted, his arm sweeping down, his thick, cat-like claws slashing through the leather of my jacket and down into flesh. Blood gushed—and pain, unlike anything I’d ever felt before, rolled up my arm and through the rest of me in a heated wave.
All I wanted to do was curl up into a little ball and cry, but girlie reactions like that really weren’t an option.
The other two were almost on me—and they were also changing, becoming something less than human but not quite animal.
I couldn’t stay here.
I might be able to fight, but it was four against one and three of those four weren’t human. Those were odds that would give Aunt Riley reason to pause, and she’d once been a guardian.
Fuck, where was Azriel when I needed him most? Why the hell wasn’t he stepping in to help? Even as the thought crossed my mind, I swiped it aside. He’d warned me he wouldn’t interfere, and I had no doubt he was a man—being—of his word.
But running wasn’t really an option, either. I might be part werewolf, but I couldn’t attain that shape and I didn’t have a wolf’s speed. And two human feet wouldn’t outrun these things, whatever they were. Which meant there was only one thing I could do if I wanted to escape.
Become Aedh.
It wasn’t something I did very often—but then, it wasn’t very often I found myself in a situation like this, either.
I reached into my pocket and wrapped my fingers around my phone and keys, then closed my eyes and reached into that place inside me that wasn’t wolf—that was something far more—calling to the powers that were my Aedh heritage. Maybe it was the fear of the situation, because it surged to life immediately, flaring through me—a blaze of heat and energy that numbed pain and dulled sensation as it invaded every muscle, every cell, breaking them down and tearing them apart, until my flesh no longer existed and I became one with the air. Until I held no substance, no form, and could not be seen or heard or felt by anyone or anything.
Except, perhaps, by another Aedh, but none of these men belonged to that race.
I drifted toward the concrete ceiling, out of their way and yet close enough to hear everything they said.
The two who’d been coming in from either side skidded to a halt, and confusion crossed their half-animal features. One was lion-like, the other some sort of dog, and both of them had bodies that were deformed but powerful.
“What the fuck?” the lion one said, his voice a growl and the words barely understandable. “Where’s she gone?”
The dog-like one lifted his nose and sniffed the air. “Can’t smell her,” he said, his voice no clearer than the other man’s. “She’s gone.”
The man whose neck I’d stabbed walked up at that point, wiping away the blood with one hand. “Well, she obviously has some form of shifting ability, despite what we were told.”
“Doesn’t matter either way,” the panther-like one said. “She’s gone, and the boss is going to be pissed.”
The human glanced at him disdainfully. “Only if some meathead decides to tell him. She has to come back for the bike eventually. All we have to do is wait.”
“She’ll come back with help.”
The human glanced at the lion. “Obviously, but it won’t matter. We’ll just follow her again and wait for another opportunity. And this time, it’ll be less caution and more speed.”
“A gun might be useful,” the panther commented.
“We need to question her about her father first, remember?”
The panther gave him a disdainful look, then lowered his head, sniffing the droplets of blood briefly before his tongue flicked out. He licked it.
Eeeewwww.
“Graham, Mario, keep an eye on the exits in case she comes through before we can grab our car.” He glanced down at the cat. “Frankie, you lick that one more time and I’ll put a boot in your fucking face. Go get the car.”
The cat snarled in reply, but otherwise did what he was told, his skin rippling as he moved until what reached the stairs was human once more—albeit a human with somewhat torn and shredded clothing. The other two did the same as they walked up the ramp toward the exit level.
The human studied my bike long enough to make me uneasy, then spun on his heel and walked after the panther. I followed, an unseen force of en
ergy that crept along the roofline, flinching at the dust that rained through the pieces of me and hoping like hell they didn’t stick to the particles. Re-forming when grimy was never a pleasant experience, and it usually took days for the muck to work its way out of my system.
The human ran up the stairs and out into the street. Frankie—the cat—was half a block away, climbing into a black Toyota SUV. It wasn’t exactly a nondescript car, but I guess that wouldn’t have mattered, because under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have paid it much attention. And at least now that I knew who was driving it, it made an easier target to spot.
I glanced down at the plate, rolling the numbers through my mind to memorize them, then headed for the rear exit. The other two men were standing near an old gray Ute, one casually smoking, the other drinking a can of Pepsi. Like they had all the time in the world and hadn’t just tried to attack me.
I noted their plate number, then made my way back up to my bike. After making sure no one was on the level, I reached for the Aedh again, re-forming and rebuilding my body particle by particle, until I was once more flesh and blood.
I released my grip on my phone and keys, and dropped to the concrete on my hands and knees, my body shaking and my breath wheezing past my throat. For several seconds it was all I could do to stay upright, and if those men had chosen that moment to come back, I would have been theirs.
Becoming Aedh had its price for those of us who weren’t full blood—and, for me, it was a complete inability to do anything other than breathe for several minutes after re-formation.
When the debilitation finally started to ease, I cautiously rocked back on my heels. And that was when the headache hit like a knife through my brain and I closed my eyes, fighting not to cry out. I had no idea just how keen my attackers’ hearing was, and the last thing I wanted to do was give them warning I was back.
At least my arm had stopped bleeding, even if the wound was still raw and it hurt like hell.
Several more minutes passed, and the stabbing pain settled to a more durable ache behind my left eye. I took a deep, shuddering breath, then climbed carefully to my feet. The pain remained, constant yet bearable.