“You want jokes, talk to Ascanio.” He yawned. “He’s the funny one.”
“Maybe you need a girlfriend.”
“I left my pack. You know what that makes me?”
She sighed and recited, “A lone wolf?”
“Lone wolves don’t have girlfriends.” He put a little snarl into his voice. The injuries to his vocal cords didn’t need much to make his voice into a low lupine growl. He’d used it more than once to make opponents rethink their battle plans and start looking for an exit. “We move around the city unseen, congealing out of the shadows when there’s trouble and melting back into them so someone else can do the cleanup.”
Julie laughed.
He grinned at her.
“Why is everything so grim all the time?” she asked.
For some people, the stars aligned and everything went right. For him everything went wrong, every time. When he wanted something, when he reached for it, life broke him, yet somehow he always survived.
All he’d wanted was to be a kid in the Smoky Mountains. His father had turned loup. He’d watched him torture and rape his mother and his sisters until he finally murdered the thing his father had become. The house had caught on fire. He’d been meant to die in that fire, but he’d survived.
When the Pack had found him, he smelled like a loup. The Code said he had to be killed on the spot, yet Curran had saved him. Again, he’d survived.
Then he’d wanted to be a shapeshifter, just a rank-and-file wolf, but by the time Curran finally coaxed him out of the deep dark mental well where he’d curled up and hid, it was too late. He was Curran’s wolf, held to a higher standard. He was mocked. Normal avenues within the Pack were closed to him. The Renders wouldn’t take him, so he went to work for Jim. His face was an asset. He could walk into a room and start a conversation with the prettiest girl and she would talk to him and smile, and her eyes would sparkle when he said something funny. He was good at gathering information, and he won respect, at first grudging, then well-deserved. He was good at being Jim’s spy. They called him “the Face.” He’d decided then that this was it. This was what he would do. This was his place.
He’d met Livie. She was beautiful, vulnerable, and gentle. She was trapped. She needed his help. She told him she loved him. He tried to help, but it ended with molten metal poured onto his face. He’d survived again, and went after her, putting everyone and everything at risk. In the end they broke her free, and the first free moment she had, she thanked him, said good-bye, and walked away to never return. He’d survived that, too.
The Face was gone. He still had the skills. He could throw witty one-liners, he could be charming without sounding smarmy, and he knew how to get people to open up and tell him things they normally kept to themselves. But his face was a barrier he couldn’t overcome. Working for Jim had no longer been an option.
He’d tried other things after that. None of them felt right, until Curran and Kate separated from the Pack. He’d signed his separation contract half an hour after Curran signed his. He was the Grey Wolf in the city; the one who came and found you if you fucked up and hurt the wrong people. He helped those who needed it. He stood between those who were hurt and those who did the hurting. He removed threats, and soon his name alone would be enough of a deterrent. This new thing, it felt right. His face matched him now, matched how he felt and matched the role he chose. Jokes didn’t.
There were other things he sometimes thought about. But those things were out of his reach. He got the point. Reaching for what he wanted would bring him pain. There was no need to share it with anyone. Explaining all this would be too long, and it would sound too melodramatic.
“Is there any cheese left?”
“Swiss?”
He wrinkled his nose. Swiss stank.
“Picky, picky, picky.”
He liked cheese in general. Mozzarella was best. He snagged a piece of Swiss and held it on his tongue inside his mouth to see if the taste would make up for the smell. It didn’t.
Julie leaned over. “The water is receding. Another half an hour and we can go.”
A shadow dropped from the sky. He lunged forward, pulling Julie out of the way. A basketball-sized rock smashed into the pillar, a foot from her legs. He looked up in time to see a black bird shadow block out the moon and sickle-sized talons aimed for his face. He jumped to his right and up, punching into the bird from the side. It whipped around, huge wings beating, enormous yellow beak coming down on him like an axe. Talons tore at him in a flash of blinding pain. He locked his left hand on its throat, his right on its left leg, and pulled, trying to rip the huge raptor apart. It screeched, the high-pitched shriek nearly deafening him.
Julie screamed behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder. The rock was empty. Fear bit at him with icy teeth. He looked up and saw her dangling from a second huge bird twenty-five feet in the air.
He hurled the bird away from him, sinking all of his strength into the throw.
Julie fell.
Desperation propelled him into an insane leap. He caught her in midair, relief shooting through him as his arms locked around her, and then he twisted, trying to land on the pillar. The rock punched his feet. He landed hard, the shock reverberating through his legs, and fell backward, trying to keep them from hurtling over the edge. She landed on him. For a tiny moment they were face-to-face, and then she jumped off him. “The bag!”
He rolled to his feet. The two birds soared above them, melting into the night sky. He squinted and saw Julie’s backpack hanging from the right bird’s claws.
“They have the rock! And the sample! Damn it.” Julie stomped on the pillar. “Damn it!”
She’s alive, he told himself. Relax. She made it.
“They’re flying northeast,” he said. “That’s the opposite way from the Warren and Adams’ base. Can you see anything?”
She stood up and walked to the very edge of the rock and stood an inch from falling, looking into the city as if it were an endless indigo ocean and she was searching for that one sail at the horizon. She turned slowly and pointed. “There.”
“Another glowing rock?”
She nodded.
Predictably, he couldn’t see anything. “Where?”
She pointed northeast, in the exact direction the birds flew. “Maybe five, six miles.”
He glanced behind them. “The Warren is there.”
She turned and looked at the Warren. “Nothing there. If the birds belong to Adams, then he took what he had over there, or else the birds belong to someone else, and Adams knows how to hide his rock.”
He searched the dark city. “And you haven’t seen it before?”
“No.”
“Let’s say I’m Caleb. I want the shiny rock, but I don’t like getting my hands dirty. I send some assholes to retrieve the two pieces of the rock. They get one from Luther, but they botch the other job, kill people, and cops are called. So I hire some idiot shapeshifters to go get the rock for me and bring it here. I break the linked ward guarding this place, so the fucked-up mermaids will eat the shapeshifters.”
“Then, when it’s daylight, the lobasti will hide and I’ll come and get the rock,” Julie said. “Easy.”
“Except that if I were Caleb, I’d want to make sure that everything went according to the plan.”
“You’d stay and watch.” Julie’s eyes narrowed. “You’d see us kill the lobasti and then hide on the pillar. You’d know we would be trapped up here for at least an hour. Plenty of time to make a new plan, summon some birds, and take the rock away from us. And then have them take it there?” She pointed to northeast. “Why?”