“Let Bill know on Monday and we can sort things out,” she told me. “I can throw in a mattress too, but that’s about all I can do for furniture, sorry.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I answered awkwardly. “I’m not sure how comfortable I am taking charity.”
“Hardly charity, boy,” Rhonda laughed at me. “It’s Bill’s way of making sure you keep working for him!”
I shared the laugh, but I was still feeling awkward at the thought as she walked me back up to the apartment building entrance. Walking outside, I stopped in sudden shock.
In the half hour or so we’d been inside, the temperature had skyrocketed. It was still not warm, but it was getting dark, and I was now quite comfortable inside my heavy winter jacket.
“Ah, the chinook finally came in,” Rhonda observed.
“Chinook?” I asked.
“Warm winds over the mountains—give us a boost of warmth in the winter. Are you okay to get home?” she asked.
“This is the warmest it’s been since I got here,” I told her. “Hell, I can walk home in this. Thank you kindly for the offer, ma’am; I will think on it and let Bill know.”
“Sounds good,” she agreed. “Enjoy your weekend, Jason.”
She walked over to her new silver sedan and I settled my jacket carefully on my shoulders and queried my phone for a walking route back to the motel. It looked like about forty-five minutes’ walk, which wasn’t too bad in the actually non-frigid night.
The walk took me north to one of the major roadways through the city, with several bars along the stretch I had to walk. I’d just passed one of these when I heard the sound of a scuffle on the other side of a fence along the road. For a long moment, I paused, not wanting to get involved.
Then I heard a girl scream, then stop in mid-sound. The next thing I knew, I’d run halfway up the fence, grabbed the top and was vaulting over to land in the deserted alley on the other side.
I headed toward the scream, jumping two backyard fences and coming into a deserted residential side street. A petite girl, hair dark in the shadows, backed away from her three attackers, one hand pressed against her throat.
The three attackers were my size and closing in on her. They moved with an odd grace—very similar to the inhuman grace of the fae, but not quite there.
One of them grabbed the girl’s arm and yanked her to him. “Why struggle, baby—it’ll hurt less if you don’t—you may even enjoy it.”
I had a quick sensation of cold air as I charged, and then I was next to the thug and pulled his arm off the girl.
“I don’t think so, motherfucker,” I told him, and introduced his face to my fist. The thug stumbled backward several feet, his nose broken and spewing blood.
“You’ll pay for that, food,” he snarled, and long white fangs flashed in the streetlights. Vampires. Nobody told me this city had a vampire problem.
I wasn’t quite sure where the girl had got to, but I kept myself between the three vampires—and I quickly confirmed all three were vampires, now that I knew what to look for. This was going to suck.
One of the non-bleeding vampires came for me from the left. He was an amateur, telegraphing a wild haymaker that I managed to easily deflect, only to stumble back in pain as his unexpected snap kick caught me in the stomach. Okay, so he wasn’t the only amateur in this brawl.
They had speed on me, but I was stronger, so I grabbed the feeder before he got too far away and dragged him in close. He tried to bite me, the bastard, so I headbutted him. Hard. His eyes started to glaze, so I did it again. He stumbled backward, and I kicked him in the nuts.
Each of them was faster than me and almost as strong. I didn’t have time to play fair. As it turned out, the other two had been closing while I grappled the other one, and I paid for the first vampire’s kick to the nuts with a sledgehammer blow to the side of the head.
I half stumbled, half dodged sideways and avoided the kick from the third vampire, shaking my head to clear my vision as they closed in. I faked a jab at the feeder on the left and then bodily charged the one in the middle, the one I’d junked a moment before. With him still dazed, I managed to drive him back a step or two and toss him to the ground, but then a deathly cold hand grabbed the collar of my jacket and yanked me back from him.
Panic flared, and familiar warmth flowed through me. Hoping that I could convince the girl to stay quiet afterward, I let the feeder drag me back until I could see him. Then I grabbed his arms with both hands and called faerie flame.
The feeder screamed as green fire seared up his arms, burning away his clothes and roasting his already-dead flesh with a sickening stench of burning pork. He scrambled back from me and snarled again.
A moment of silence followed, broken by the characteristic thunk of a shotgun being pumped, and I turned to face the vampire I’d punched in the face to start the brawl. His face had healed, and he held a sawed-off pump shotgun pointed at me.
“Fucking faerie,” he spat. “End of the line.”
“Suck it, motherfucker,” I answered with an obscene gesture, and he lifted the gun to aim at my head.
Then a hundred and something pounds of screaming wildcat slammed into the side of his head and the shotgun went flying. The vampire screamed as claws tore his skin, the wildcat shapeshifter returning the favor of my rescue attempt.
One feeder out of the fight, but that left two more, and the one I’d burned had regenerated his arms and found a knife somewhere. Even from a few feet away, the knife felt wrong—cold-forged iron.
I was changeling, not a true fae. That didn’t make my kind’s ancient bane much less effective on me. It just made its touch crippling, not instant death.
While I was busy staring horrified at the knife, however, the third vampire was sneaking up behind me and slammed both his fists into the small of my back, his foot into the back of my right knee, and his knee into the back of my head as I crumpled.
I hit my knees, my head spinning as I saw the vampire with the knife approach me, a sick grin on his face. From the corner of my eye, I saw the girl, back in human form and in torn clothes, get pitched away from the feeder she’d jumped. A silver blade glittering in her shoulder explained why she’d shifted back.
The vampire she’d fought rose to his feet, an aura of darkness gathering around him as he called on the blood powers of his kind to end the fight I’d foolishly joined.
Then he vanished, replaced by the front of a black Hummer. There was a blur of motion, and the vampire with the cold iron knife was suddenly in pieces, replaced by one pissed the fuck off grizzly bear.
The third vampire ran, and the bear growled. Even through my spinning head, I caught the note of command, and I saw a tall fair-haired man shift into a wolf and leap off after the feeder. If feeders deserved pity, I’d have pitied it.
The bear was gone, I realized, and the burly black-haired giant from the Wizard’s Tower replaced it, kneeling by the shifter girl, gently removing the silver knife. I felt a hand fall on my shoulder, but before whoever it was could say anything, I collapsed, pitching face forward onto the pavement.
4
I WOKE up to the feel of a warm, wet cloth being used to gently clean my face. For a moment, I had no idea where I was or what had happened, then I jerked upright at the memory of the vampires beating on me.
“Hey, hey, take it easy,” a female voice told me, and I found myself face to face with the wielder of the cloth. Bright green eyes looked directly into mine, atop an adorable button nose and a scattering of freckles. “You took quite the beating.”
“I heal quickly,” I answered slowly, relaxing back slightly and taking in the rest of the petite redheaded woman—enough to recognize the girl I’d leaped to the rescue of in the street. “What happened?”