Another cut stung his left shoulder. The cat had little training but good instincts. The trouble with instincts is that they can be used against you.
Derek rolled down onto his back, bending his knees and bringing up his feet. The leopard lunged at him without thinking, reacting to the falling prey. Derek kicked, ramming his feet into the cat’s furry stomach, reopening the freshly sealed gash. The big shapeshifter hurtled over his head. Derek flipped onto his stomach and into a crouch, the movement practiced so many times, he didn’t even have to think about it. The cat was scrambling to his feet. He was fast, but nobody had taught him how to fall. It cost him a precious half a second.
You could do a lot with half a second. Derek spun, picking up power, and snapped a roundhouse kick to the leopard’s head just as the big cat finally rose. His lower shin connected, the powerful muscles of his thigh delivering hundreds of pounds of force to the leopard’s ear and temple. It would’ve burst the eardrum and cracked the skull of a human, causing an incapacitating concussion.
The leopard swayed, still snarling, his swipes sluggish.
Derek lunged forward, dodged the claws, and smashed the heel of his right hand into the leopard’s left shoulder, shoving him back just as he kicked the leopard’s calves, sweeping his legs from under him. The big cat crashed down, his head bouncing off the pavement. Derek followed, hammering punches onto the cat’s face. One, two, three. He’d broken baseball bats with a punch before.
Five, six.
“You’re going to kill him,” Julie warned.
“No.” But he won’t be smiling at any girls for the next three months.
“Derek?”
“Yes?” One more.
Suddenly he was aware of her standing next to him. A metal chain dangled in his view.
The cat’s body deflated. The fur melted back into human skin. His face looked like raw hamburger. By morning the skin would be back to normal. The broken jaw and the three teeth he’d knocked out would take a couple of months to heal and grow back.
Julie shook the handcuffs at him.
“Fine.”
He took the handcuffs, flipped the woozy cat over, pulled his arms over, and locked them on the cat’s now-human wrists. The handcuffs were a shapeshifter edition: Each band was lined with silver spikes. Trying to snap the chain by pulling the cuffs apart drove the spikes into the skin. Silver burned like fire. He was sure the cat would stay put.
Derek tilted his head. The jackal lay on his back in a puddle of his own blood, trussed up like a hog, wrists and ankles tied together. The wound on his chest looked deep, but Julie had missed the heart. Knowing her, on purpose. He would heal.
Derek tilted his head and looked at the remaining wolf. He knew his eyes glowed, reflecting the moonlight.
“We were at a bar,” the wolf said. “Eli and Nathan are new to the city, so I took them to the Steel Horse. A guy came up to us and asked if we were up for making a quick five hundred bucks.”
There was no such thing as a quick $500, especially not in Atlanta after dark.
“He gave us the address of this house. We’re supposed to go in and sniff out a rock.” The wolf lifted his hands, holding them apart, fingers almost touching. “About this big. Glows in the moonlight. We went into the house and smelled the blood. We were trying to decide what to do when you showed up.”
“Four hours ago someone killed the human family who lived in this house for that rock,” Derek said. “Husband, wife, two kids.”
“I didn’t know,” the wolf said, his voice pleading. “I swear I didn’t know. You’ve got to believe me.”
Julie squinted at the house. “Is that the Iveses’ house?”
He’d hoped she wouldn’t recognize it, but she had just been there two weeks ago, buying a knife with Kate. He nodded. There was nothing else to do.
Her eyes went wide. “All of them?”
He nodded again.
She clamped her hand over her mouth. He put his arm around her before he knew he’d done it. She stuck her face into his shredded T-shirt.
He hugged her gently and wished he could make it better.
The world was a fucked-up place. A girl like Julie shouldn’t know people who had been violently murdered. He shouldn’t know them. Instead they met in front of a slaughterhouse. He’d killed five people tonight, and she’d opened a man’s chest with her tomahawk.
“What were you supposed to do with the rock?” he asked, still holding Julie.
“Take it to Pillar Rock,” the wolf said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Go down this street until you run into Manticore. Turn left, go two blocks. You’ll see a white building with a green roof. That’s the Pack safe house for this quadrant of the city. Tell them what happened and call your alpha.”
“Should I call their alphas, too?” he asked.
“No. Just call Desandra. She’ll handle it. Tell her I consider the matter closed.” Knowing Desandra, she would enjoy informing the other alphas that their new members had stepped in it.
The wolf exhaled, turned, and sprinted down the street at fifty miles per hour. In ten minutes the pickup team would swarm the area.
Julie pulled away from him. Her eyes were red. She never sobbed when she cried. She used to, but something had happened in the last year, and now she cried like that, without moving or making a sound. It was worse somehow.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Did you find out who killed the Iveses?”
He nodded again.
“Are they dead?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said, sudden viciousness in her voice. She sidestepped him and went into the house.
He knew this was it, all of the grief she would show. He’d seen her go through things like that before. Julie had spent three years on the street, where people lived by animal rules, and she’d learned them well: Never show a weakness; never show pain. The vulnerable get eaten. She would break down later when she was alone, but neither he nor anyone else would ever see it.
Yellow crime tape was too expensive to produce in the world that hated factories and plastics, and the cops rarely used it anymore. A single white sticker, slapped across the door and frame, barred entry to the house, and the shapeshifters had already cut it. The door stood wide open, and she went inside. He followed her.
Before the Shift, the processing of a murder scene could take days. Now it took three hours, because murders were plentiful and cops were stretched thin. It was all the time they could spare.
Julie walked straight to the built-in bookcase in the living room, took several books off the shelf, picking them up together, and set them on the floor. Behind the books, a single narrow slit indicated a hidden niche. She pried at it with her nails, and a small section of the wall fell forward, revealing a dark opening and a plastic box inside. Julie pulled it out and popped the lid.
They stared at the rock. A little larger than a softball, it resembled pyrite, fool’s gold, except it was bluish white and glowed gently with a cold, dispassionate light. Most of it was rounded, but on one side the stone ended sharply, as if a part had broken off. The hair on the back of his neck rose. He couldn’t explain why, but something about that rock made him wary. If he were in his wolf form, he would’ve circled it on careful paws and left it where it lay.
“Do you see anything?”
Julie frowned. Sensates like her saw the magic in an array of colors, something other people tried to duplicate by building m-scanners.
“Pale bluish silver glow.”
“Divine?” Divine objects and creatures glowed with silver.
“No, not divine. White and blue. Different kind of white.”
“What registers this kind of white?”
“Elemental magic.” She looked at him, her eyes bottomless. “They killed the Iveses for this?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and peered at the rock. “What are you?”
He half expected the rock to answer, but it stayed silent, glowing weakly.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Someone jumped Luther,” she said.