“Three pieces of a rock. Rick said the rock had broken . . . into three chunks. Rick said Caleb already had one and wanted all three. He sent . . . two crews out. I don’t know where the other crew went. I told you . . . everything. Don’t kill me.”
Derek’s lips stretched into a smile on their own, driven not by humor but by the instinctual need to bare his teeth as the wild inside glared through his eyes. “There is gunpowder stench on your hand and blood spatter on your shirt. It smells like Michael Ives.”
The man froze.
Derek smiled wider. “I don’t make deals with child murderers.”
THE NIGHT WAS BLUE.
The deep sky breathed, as if alive, the small glowing dots of distant stars winking at him as he ran along the night streets. The moon had rolled out and soared, huge and round, spilling a cascade of liquid silver onto the half-ruined city. It called to him the way it called to all wolves. If he didn’t have a job to do, he would’ve run right out of Atlanta into the magic-fed forest beyond, abandoned his human skin for fur and four paws, and sang to it. His human vocal cords had sustained too much damage in the same fight that had altered his face, but his wolf voice was as good as always. He would soak in that silver glow until it shone from his eyes and sing a long song about hunting and running through the dark wood in the middle of the night. On nights like these he remembered that he was only twenty. But he had someplace to be.
Caleb’s five killers hadn’t gone too far from the house they destroyed, barely five miles, so he dropped into an easy run, a four-minute mile at best, and let the night air expand his lungs. The Casino flashed by, a white castle turned green by moonlight. He could just make out the gaunt, inhuman shapes of vampires crawling along its parapets, each undead telepathically driven by a human navigator. He made it a point to kill them when the opportunity presented itself. It didn’t come up too often—vampires belonged to the People, and the People and Kate had an uneasy truce. He didn’t agree with it, but it was necessary. Sometimes you had to put your personal feelings aside and do what was necessary.
A magic wave flooded the world, snuffing out the rare electric lights, and ignited the charged air within the twisted glass tubes of fey lanterns. The magic-fed light was blue and eerie. Power filled him. His muscles turned stronger; his heart pumped more blood with each beat; the scents and sounds sharpened. It was like walking through the world with a translucent plastic hood covering your head and having it suddenly ripped off. The air tasted fresh. Pure joy filled him, and for a brief moment he forgot the slaughtered family, grinned, and just ran.
The right street loomed too soon. He leapt, bounced off an oak to make a sharp turn, and dropped into the deep indigo shadows by a house. His ears caught noises of furniture being knocked around. Someone was rummaging through the Iveses’ home. The neighborhood was too nice for looters.
The crashing stopped.
He waited for a long moment.
Nothing.
He was upwind from them. It was possible that they had stopped for their own reasons. It was also possible that they smelled him. Only one way to find out.
Derek straightened and walked toward the house.
Three people walked out of the building and spread out on the street, moving with telltale balance. Shapeshifters. Definitely not one of the Beast Lord’s city crews. He knew all of the shapeshifters who worked in the city, and they knew him. These three didn’t look familiar. A Pack city crew would have no business being here anyway. The Iveses were human, and the house sat way past the invisible boundary that carved Atlanta into Pack territory and the rest of the city.
The three guys stretched their shoulders. He stayed in the shadows. They probably couldn’t see his face clearly, not with the hood up, but they had caught his scent and showed no reaction. They had no idea who he was. That left two possibilities: Either they were intruders into Pack territory, in which case they were suicidally stupid, or they were new to the Pack, probably part of the seven-family pack Jim, the Beast Lord, had formally accepted into the Atlanta Pack last month. And here they were, looting a dead family’s house.
Jim would just love that.
All three were young: late teens, early-twenties. A jackal on the left, the tallest of the three, with a loose mop of red hair. A wolf on the right, compact, light brown hair. He hadn’t thought he recognized the scent at first, but now that he’d sampled it for a while, the wolf did smell faintly familiar. The guy in the middle had the build of a wrestler. The scent said cat and a large one.
The cat leaned back and raised his chin. Long dark hair, big round eyes. Confident. They were about the same age, and the cat was clearly sizing him up. His eyes said he liked to fight and didn’t lose often. There was a first time for everything.
“You’re a long way from the Keep,” Derek said.
“You stink like blood,” the jackal said.
That would be a clue, if you weren’t stupid.
“He smells odd.” The wolf wrinkled his nose, trying to figure out what was under the blood. “Almost like a loup.”
He’d heard that one before. Sometimes memories he kept hidden deep under the last six years broke out, and his body reacted. It was the corpse of Lucy Ives that had done it. He’d found his youngest sister just like that, curled into a ball in her own blood. She’d been ten, too.
“He isn’t a loup,” the cat said. “Loups can’t stay human. But he isn’t Pack. If he was, you’d know him. Which means he’s got no business hanging around here.”
“Walk away,” Derek said.
“What?” The cat squinted. “I can’t hear you, outsider. Maybe we should show him what the Pack does to trespassers.”
They were too stupid or too new to know that official Pack policy dictated that uninvited guests were to be politely but firmly directed to visit the Keep or clear out of their territory in three days. The Pack didn’t threaten or intimidate. They didn’t need to. It was a lesson this dumbass would learn quickly. Pain was an excellent teacher.
The Pack had become the largest shapeshifter organization in the country, with the exception of Alaska’s Ice Fury, and it claimed a vast territory, covering the entire states of Georgia and North Carolina, and stretching down to Florida. Unaffiliated shapeshifters weren’t permitted within the Pack borders. They had three days to present themselves to Pack authority and petition for admission to the Pack or be asked to leave. The Pack was strong and many wanted to join, but absorbing the newcomers and settling them into the existing power structure took time. Back when Curran was the Beast Lord and Kate was his Consort, Curran had capped the admission to the Pack. Jim, the current Beast Lord, followed that policy. He didn’t want the Pack to grow too fast, especially not now, since the title of the Beast Lord had changed hands only months ago and his hold on power was still tenuous. For some reason, this particular small pack had been allowed to join. Right now Derek couldn’t see why.
A loud clopping of hooves made them all turn. A rider emerged from the side street. You noticed the horse first. You couldn’t help it. Built like a small draft horse, with powerful hindquarters and a solid body, she had a muscular neck and the stupid hair on the shins that made it hard to see where her hooves were when she kicked you, which she’d tried to do the first time she’d smelled him. The horse itself was black, or rather almost black, spotted with very faint grey dapples, but the leg hair—feathers, he remembered, although why the hell they called it feathers made no sense to him—was white. The mane was white too, ridiculously long, and wavy. It was wavy because the horse’s owner braided it and sometimes put flowers into it. Because she couldn’t get a normal horse. She had to have a draft version of My Little Pony.
“What the hell kind of horse is that?” the jackal asked.