Feral Nights

  “We followed you to the parking garage,” he replies from the next enclosure.

  “We?” I echo, struggling to regain my balance. “What do you mean, ‘we’?”

  “Me and Aimee,” the Possum says, gripping his bars.

  I could just kill him. “Where —?”

  The yeti fires a Taser gun between my shoulders. “Silence!”

  I sink to the ground, sweat streaming. My muscles vibrate. My eyelashes ache.

  “So far as I know, she’s in the lodge,” Clyde says.

  So far as he knows. “Is she —?”

  “I said, silence!” the brute reminds me. He grabs my hair and yanks my head back. “You, Cat,” the yeti begins again. “You take this female as your mate.”

  Still in human form, the Lion snarls. If I set paw one in her cage, she’ll tear me to fleshy wet pieces. “No, thanks,” I say. “She’s quite the hottie, but I’ve got my eye on somebody else.” I address my next comment to the lady in question. “No offense.”

  The yeti lets go and tases me again.

  “Frore!” calls yet another furry fiend, this one wearing round eyeglasses. “What do you think you’re doing?” He’s winded. These yetis live pampered lives.

  “I’m asking you to reconsider your decision,” Frore replies, motioning for another yeti to guard me. “Boreal, we have two male Cats.” He points to Paxton, who’s just arrived on the scene. “That one is even gold in animal form, but she resists —”

  “I volunteer,” Paxton puts in. “Least I can do, really.”

  What a letch.

  “You were planning to breed her behind my back?” is Boreal’s answer. “After I said no? You were always such a spoiled child, Frore. Did you honestly believe that because we are kinsmen, I would tolerate this act of defiance?” Without pausing for an answer, Boreal adds, “I have been too indulgent. It’s past time you learned your place here.”

  To them, we’re nothing more than flesh-and-bone commodities to be reproduced, kept as curiosities, and destroyed at whim. It’s not the slightest bit personal. They don’t care enough for that, which somehow makes the whole thing more disturbing.

  The leader cleans his glasses, which have fogged from the humidity. “Toss the new Cat back into the jungle. We need to pack up and move out. The clients will arrive soon. One of them will enjoy terminating it and pay handsomely for the privilege.”

  Without warning, Paxton tackles me, and the yetis scatter. I catch the traitor with my claws, shredding his left eyebrow. He slams his boot into my gut. The blow sends me soaring, and by the time I’ve landed, Paxton has already pounced again.

  With a twist, he’s caught my neck in a choke hold. I recognize the move from gym class — he’s a trained wrestler. Almost inaudibly, Paxton whispers, “Aimee’s going to lower the sound barrier between the lodge grounds and the jungle. Once the horn blows, run for the main building. Take the stairs from the foyer down to the dock.”

  My back is still fried from the Taser blasts. “I don’t believe —”

  “Cupcake kisses,” Paxton replies.

  WHEN I ENTER the formal dining room, only Boreal and Crystal are seated at the long table, one at each end. Frore is kneeling as if before a throne.

  Meanwhile, Boreal is using a napkin to furiously clean his spectacles. “For daring to question my authority in front of our brother deific and, worse, those shifter vermin, you are hereby demoted to dock security until further notice. Now, go.”

  Frore storms off, casting a sidelong glance at Crystal, who’s added sparkly pink barrettes to her hair.

  Once the door shuts, she says, “He was merely trying to help. To prove his leadership qualities by taking the initiative —”

  “Help?” Boreal snorts. “Help run us out of business! If he wasn’t your brother —”

  “Well, he is,” she replies, taking a sip of V8. “And your cousin, and . . .” She pets her furry, protruding belly. “Therefore, the uncle-cousin of your heir.”

  Talk about a shallow gene pool.

  According to Cameron, they don’t normally eat in the late afternoon. But today is special. The entire lodge is readying for the clients’ arrival. Among other things, the portraits depicting Boreal have been stored away and the everywhere lime-green linens with white trim have been replaced by others in a tropical orange and red.

  I deposit a plate of mutton over wild rice in front of Crystal, who cocks her head at me. “You’re the English speaker. What’s your name?”

  I swallow hard. “Aimee.”

  “Ai-mee.” She tries it out like a confection and reaches to feel my bicep. “This one is stronger than she looks, sturdy enough to carry a twenty-pound newborn.”

  I don’t want to be her nanny. I don’t want to be her anything.

  I scurry to deliver Boreal’s plate. He scoops up a hearty spoonful, hurries it to his enormous toothy mouth, and a second later shouts, “Cameron!”

  The demon slips in from the kitchen and gives a punctilious bow. “You rang?”

  As Boreal berates Cameron for his overabundant use of salt, I take advantage of the opportunity to make a brisk retreat to the kitchen.

  I’m slowly stirring the carrot pudding when the demon returns.

  “You are a lifesaver!” he exclaims. “Well, not literally, because I’m immortal, and I don’t care one wit about bitchy Boreal except that I am bound to his service and —”

  “What do you mean by ‘bound’?” I want to know.

  “Conjured.” Cameron scowls. “He sacrificed a yak, chanted in some long-forgotten ice language, and — voilà — here I am, a diabolical status symbol to impress the clientele.” The horned cook trips over a cracked kitchen tile. “A pathetic purse puppy.”

  The relatively new lodge’s workmanship is shoddy. Not only are the tiles cracked, but the windows have been painted shut, and I haven’t spotted a single water sprinkler.

  “It’s interesting that they’re willing to risk calling on the demonic at all,” I say.

  Cameron shrugs. “Only for show. They’re not letting me do anything remotely interesting, even in the kitchen. Yak, yak, yak. Goat cheese. Yak. Yawn.”

  “Why you?” I ask, handing him the ladle. “What kind of demon are you?”

  “Nothing fancy,” he replies. “Generic hell spawn, and that’s the problem. A million years go by in Lucifer’s kingdom. Two million. Now we’re going on three. You’re assigned to torture the eternally condemned, and it sounds fun, right?”

  “Uh . . .” Not really. I busy myself, fetching the bowls from the cabinet.

  “So you tear off fingernails, unleash scorpions, rip flesh. But whatever you destroy grows back, so you can ravage it again and again. Sooner or later, even the most enthusiastically evil get bored.” Cameron sighs. “Hell’s all about connections, and I’m a nobody. I’m not buddies with any of the fallen angels or the big-name damned souls. What I wouldn’t give to chat up Tomás de Torquemada or Al Capone.”

  “I’m sure it’s rough,” I say. It probably should be, being hell and all.

  At the stove, Cameron strikes a meditative pose. “At least this gig is a step closer to my one true dream.”

  I can’t resist asking. “Which is?”

  The demon hesitates. “I want to be a fry cook in hell.”

  Sandra has declared that she’ll be occasionally borrowing me from Cameron for the duration of the hunters’ stay.

  “Your assignment is simple,” she says, tapping a feathered pen on her parquet desk. “Escort the clients around the property, leading up to the hunt. That’s your job: escort. But if no one else is around and they need something to drink, fetch it. If they need someone to drink, fetch that, too.”

  I scan the itinerary, and then glance meaningfully at my ankle cuff. “You want me to take them outside the lodge?”

  “Yes,” she replies, holding up a key. “You’ll accompany them and Cameron across the grounds to the edge of the jungle for the commencement of the hunt.” Her flinch
is almost imperceptible. “The demon requested you personally.” The snowmen don’t seem at all skittish around Cameron — quite the contrary — but Sandra does.

  I make a grab, too eagerly, for the key, and she pulls her hand back. Sandra continues, “Afterward, we’ll process their kills, and as for parting gifts . . .” She reaches into one of the desk drawers and sets a pair of fancy red-and-silver cups between us. “Fifteenth-century, ruby-encrusted poison chalices. An Austrian archduke used them on his grandchildren upon discovering his son’s wife carried werewolf DNA.”

  “How clever of him,” I say. They look like props for the TV show Merlin.

  “You’re not appalled?” she asks. “I feared you were a beast lover. You came into Enlightenment Alley with that Cat boy and were captured in the company of a Possum.”

  That is tricky to explain. “I considered their temporary companionship a necessary evil in my quest to find the she-Cat believed to have devoured my late boyfriend.” I don’t mention that said would-be boyfriend was himself a werearmadillo.

  “Ah, now I see. That’s why you were so interested in Ruby Kitahara! Last fall, a couple of cops came around the store asking about her.”

  At my nod, Sandra’s expression softens. “Well, fear not, Aimee. All the beasts of the jungle are soon to be dead.” With that, she presents me the key again.

  I slide it into my anklet and turn it, and the cuff pops off.

  That was easy. For all practical purposes, I just got here. It seems weird that a little good behavior and a semi-plausible lie are enough to earn her trust.

  But Sandra’s stressed out . . . gnawing her fingernails, picking at loose skin on her lower lip. The crease between her eyes is deeper. However uncomfortable she makes me, I’m under the impression that my presence soothes her. She wants to believe I’m on her side, or at least smart enough to fake it if that’s what it takes to survive.

  As I stand to leave, Sandra reaches into the drawer again and provides me with a tube of “rose beige” professional cover cream. “For those holy marks around your neck. We wouldn’t want to cause our incoming guests any discomfort.”

  The first clients I meet are a middle-aged, human husband-wife couple, the Simons. According to Sandra, they hail from Boston and are worth over a billion dollars.

  As I escort them to the welcoming reception, they chat about a daughter, Vesper (an airhead name, if I’ve ever heard one), who’s beginning studies this winter semester at some exclusive boarding school in Vermont, and then mention giving each other matching wristwatches, each valued at a quarter million dollars, for their anniversary.

  “Congratulations,” I say. “How long have you two been married?”

  “Twenty years tomorrow,” Mrs. Borgia-Simon replies. “This excursion is the other half of our gift to each other.” She loops her arm through her husband’s. “We weren’t much older than you are now when we first met at school. In our first-semester Alchemy and Incantations class, my mister yanked the still-beating heart out of a twelve-year-old wereotter.” She gives him a quick peck on the cheek. “As he squeezed its blood into the open mouth of a demon fetus, I knew I’d found the fella for me.”

  I suppress a shudder. “And you sent your daughter to this same school?”

  “Of course,” he says, beaming and patting her hand. “Nothing but the best for my girls.”

  How nice. Steeling myself, I knock on the door of the second set of clients.

  A vampire dressed like a rock star flings it open. He tosses aside the newly drained body of one of the maid-interns and extends a bloodstained hand to Mr. Simon. “I’m Victor,” he announces. “How do you do?”

  As the men shake hands, I notice a necklace of what appears to be tiny human pinky bones around Victor’s neck. This monster takes pride in killing children.

  What will they do to Yoshi? Lower-class vamps sneer at shifter blood, and our undead guests are aristocrats. They’re in this for sport. Heaven help us if they get creative.

  Then again, the Simons don’t seem the least fazed by the idea that they’re in the presence of a supernatural predator, and that suggests they have the ability to call on malevolent magic of their own.

  “My consort,” Victor says, gesturing. “The scintillating Elina.”

  She sashays out the bedroom door of her suite, wearing four-inch spike heels and a black-and-red dress that plunges to her belly button. In my expert opinion as a Sanguini’s employee, it’s a clichéd choice at best.

  In contrast, she seems to like the look of me. Raking her gaze up my body, Elina licks her lips with a forked tongue.

  I go utterly still as she glides to nuzzle my ear.

  Thinking mostly of my jugular, I point down the hall. “The reception is that way.”

  Elina trails a finger from my cheek to my chin and pinches it hard enough to bruise. Her eyebrows have been plucked off and painted back on, and she’s missing her fangs. But those fingernails could slash my throat in a blink.

  Maintaining a professional air, I address the group, “Should I not have an opportunity to say so later, I wish you a hunt to end all hunts.”

  Victor bounds out, clasping Elina firmly on the butt. “The hunt!” he exclaims, interrupting our standoff. “I’m so sick of cowering in seclusion. I can hardly wait!”

  “Seclusion?” Mrs. Borgia-Simon repeats. “Whatever would you hide from?”

  Abruptly forgetting me, Elina rolls her shoulders. “We chose the wrong side in the last royal coup,” she explains. “Happens all the time, yet the piggish, smarty-pants eternal queen has banished us from court.”

  “Her enforcers are ordered to destroy us on sight,” Victor puts in.

  “Me, an Old Blood!” Elina whines. “I have been a treasured member of the aristocracy for centuries.”

  Oh, hell and damnation. I’m no demonologist, but I’ve picked up a bit about the undead from working at Sanguini’s and the occasional hijinks that swirl around it.

  Old Blood vampires are the reigning biggest of the baddies. They can enthrall potential victims, take several forms — including that of wolves and bats — dissolve into smoke, mist, dust, and shadows, and they’re physically more formidable than the more newly undead. Age is a power indicator, a status marker.

  Mrs. Borgia-Simon sighs. “The underworld just isn’t what it used to be.”

  In the conference room, the first row of uncomfortable chairs has been roped off for the clients. I show them to their places and join Sandra and the other interns in back.

  Suddenly, in a showy puff of rusty black smoke, Cameron appears alongside the podium, modeling flowing black robes and an imposing-looking amethyst medallion.

  Opening his scaly arms wide, he grins with pointy teeth and says, “Welcome to Daemon Island. I am your host, Cameron, the demon king.”

  IT DRIZZLES STEADILY ALL NIGHT, despite Noelle’s insistence that this is the dry season.

  A black and blue butterfly alights briefly on my nose. It’s too pretty to eat.

  I have insomnia again, and the exchange over mating with Noelle put me off my appetite. With each passing hour, the world looks sharper, even with the mist. Paxton must’ve been mixing a mild sedative in the food, something to dull our senses.

  I pick up my plate and sniff it. I can’t detect anything specific, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I dump the gruel into the straw pile in the corner farthest from Noelle.

  I gaze at her, sleeping in her hammock. Awake or unconscious, no one luxuriates like a female Cat. Every time she turns, stretches, I almost swallow my tongue. Even her soft snore is sexy, and, bonus, none of my friends has a prior claim.

  When Noelle wakes up, I’m going to try shaking my cage again. Not that it did any good the last few times. These enclosures were built for far fiercer shifters than me. But I’m hopeful the storm may have swept the crutch to an edge of the roof. A matter of millimeters could make all the difference.

  A cool wind blows through. It’s Travis.

  “Is
Aimee all right?” I whisper, careful not to disturb Noelle.

  Travis positions his translucent form as if he’s sitting on an invisible lounge chair. “She’s had a stressful couple of days, but she’s hanging in there.” Before I could ask anything else, he holds up a finger. “The albino Bigfoot things? As slow as you move, they’re never going to toss you into a hunt.”

  “Meaning what?” I reply.

  “Breathe,” Travis says. “Nobody’s going to lobotomize you or surgically alter you so you’re forever stuck between animal and human form.”

  We’ve seen the same horror movies.

  “But they might slaughter you and sell your pelt.” Gesturing toward the next cage, Travis adds, “Not the Lion. She’s special to them. They’re hoping she’ll produce several cubs over the next couple of decades. Boreal hasn’t given up on the idea of snagging a healthy breeding male, but he’s expanded his efforts, seeking out black-market vendors of shifter sperm.”

  “So some rich hunters can bag the king of the jungle,” I mutter. “Big freaking deal.” Out loud, it sounds like I have species envy.

  “It is a big deal,” Travis informs me. “From what I’ve overheard, not even the Mantle of Dracul has a male Lion head to display as a show of strength and cruelty. Boreal could charge twice what he’s asking now if there was a maned Lion in the mix.”

  A sliver of moonlight illuminates the curve of Noelle’s haunches. “I have to get her and Aimee out of here.” I caught most of what Paxton whispered to Yoshi, but I’m not about to leave the girls’ lives in their incompetent paws.

  Bad enough that “cupcake kisses” were Aimee’s code words for Yoshi. I wonder if Travis knows that she’s moving on.

  Gesturing to the roof of the cage, I ask, “Where’s the crutch?”

  Travis points to the upper-left corner, the one opposite Noelle. “Right there.”

  I shuffle over, climb as high as I can, and, bracing myself with my feet, use my free hand to try to catch hold of it. “I don’t feel anything,” I gasp.