"You could say that," I grunted, surprised. I hadn't heard her coming; she was Kin after all, but I'd smelled her behind me. Wolf and vanilla, but what in the hell she was doing here I had no idea. I turned my head and looked up at her as she twirled a lock of my black hair around her finger. "That son of a bitch Sawney."
She wrinkled her nose, eyes turning new-penny bright. "He is here. He is everywhere. The stench of insanity." Which was true. He definitely had the stink of crazy all over him. Of course he had the same to say about me. She sat beside me. "Rabid, but that is normal for him. Stop looking." She shook her head disapprovingly. "He will eat you." Her face, her mouth moved inches from mine. "Let me eat you"—her tongue touched my lower lip— "instead."
Okay, that was even more of a surprise than her showing up—not so much the offer, as the timing. I wasn't Robin—Jesus, who was?—but I knew when someone was interested in me or at least interested in parts of me. And my parts and I felt the same way about her, although half of that combo felt guilty as hell about it. Not that that mattered. This wasn't the time or the place. Two students passed, girls, blond and brunette. They looked at us and hurried on, their long legs striding faster. I might look like a punk-ass twenty-year-old kid and Delilah a cross between a model and a kick-your-ass biker chick, but we still didn't pass in the human world. Not really. Those girls wouldn't know why they felt the way they did about us, but they sensed the difference in us somehow.
"Little girls," Delilah said with a derisive toss of her ponytail. "Scared of monsters in the big bad woods."
I hung my head for a moment. She didn't mind being different. I wondered why I did. "How'd you know I was here anyway?"
She sat beside me, her own long legs clad in leather. She stretched and reclined on her elbows in the grass. "Called Promise. Puck answered. Says Columbia. From there." She touched a finger to her small, straight nose. "I find your scent."
"And what do I smell like?" I asked with a reluctant curiosity. "Flay didn't seem to care for it, whatever it is."
The copper of her eyes darkened back to light brown as she puzzled on the question. "Strange. Interesting. Good and bad. Right and wrong." She gave an acquisitively hungry smile. "Sweet and sour."
I reached over and ran a thumb along the lower curve of that smile. "I hope that's about sex and not making me a meal. You wouldn't be the first werewolf that tried to make me dinner, and you wouldn't be the first one I killed."
She wasn't impressed, snorting. "Pups."
"Not all of them. Cerberus was no Red Riding Hood reject." Never mind that it had taken all three of us … Flay, Niko, and me … to take him down. We'd done it. I wasn't sure anyone else could have.
"Cerberus." The smile was completely different now, dark and gloating. She lifted the snug white shirt she wore to bare her scars. "Not fit to bear his cub. Flay and I, our family, to Kin Alphas we are not good enough. Not high enough in pack. Not pure. We are better than pure. We are Wolf." She rested a hand on her flat stomach. "But Cerberus said there would be no cub." Her lips tightened and she pulled the shirt back down. "No cubs ever now."
I could think of absolutely nothing to say at first, although I'd suspected before from the extent of the damage that could be seen that she wouldn't be making her nephew, Slay, any little cousins. Sorry seemed wholly lacking, and I finally went with my instinct. "He died painfully, in one god-awful bloody mess."
It was the right thing. The smile returned, blazing bright as her eyes. "Sex. Now." She took my hand, stood, and yanked me up with such strength that both of my feet almost left the ground.
Not that it wasn't nice to be wanted, to be used and abused, but the screams that ripped through the air emphasized that some things have to wait. Hey, I'd already gotten laid once this year…okay, once in a lifetime. What was my hurry?
One of the girls who'd walked past us came running back. She was alone this time, with blood on her face and jacket. I didn't bother to ask what had happened. It was self-evident enough. Sawney or a revenant had come creeping out of the shadows for an evening snack. She kept running past us with white-rimmed, unseeing eyes. I ran in the direction she had come from. Delilah followed, more out of boredom than any desire to save a human, I thought. She stayed in human form, but kept up with me easily regardless. As we ran, I pulled out my cell phone, gave Nik the terse facts, and tried for more speed.