“Well, I can feed them and he can watch then,” I tell the three men as I pause at the bubble tea stand and order my drink—sanguinated is the special term to get it nice and bloody—and a bag o’ bones to go. The owner gives me a good deal and then glares at the three super powerful vamps as they stand there not ordering anything.
“Oh, fuck it,” Sorrow says, picking up a rose milk tea to go, before following me the last block into Broke Oak cemetery. Yep. Broke Oak. Apparently the name’s a throwback to the first man who was buried here, killed during a storm that broke the branches of the oak above his burial plot. But whatever. Now, it’s a haven for ghouls, these skinny, long-limbed creatures with wide mouths and too many teeth.
They avoid humans, but the second they smell vamps they come sniffing around. Because, let’s face it, ghouls eat dead flesh and vampires…well, they leave chaos and destruction in their wakes.
The first two ghouls to approach us have long, stringy gray hair and hideous gray-purple skin that looks like an old bruise.
Taking a chunk of beef bone from the bag, I toss it into the grass where it clatters against a rounded headstone. The two creatures scrabble over to it, hissing and clawing at each other, until the one with the tiny, malformed breasts manages to get the bone and swallows it whole.
And that is the reason why ghouls make such good garbage disposals; they eat every bite and don’t leave a drop of blood or a single tooth behind.
“There’s a bench just down the way,” I tell them, chucking another bone out into the grass for the male ghoul. I stick the wide pink straw into my mouth and take a big sip as we walk through the thick silver streams of moonlight. “If you’re here, then that means Rumpel Stiltz himself went for the deal?”
Vyce crosses his arms over his chest as I plop down on the bench and toss a few more bones across the walk and into the grass. Four more ghouls creep out, doing their strange squat-crawl toward the food and hissing at the three men now ringing me in a half-circle.
“You know the boss’s name?” Sorrow asks and I shrug, picking off pieces of meat and feeding the hideous, smelly little creatures while I sip my milky tea.
“Not many people know about House Stiltz, but the ones that do, know as much about Rumpel Stiltz’ kin as well as they know about Rumpel himself.” Glancing up, I bounce from one man’s gaze to the next, pausing on Wolfe’s cold, gray stare. It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking with that stone-cold fa?ade, dressed in a brown leather jacket and black cowboy boots. A different man wearing that outfit might look ridiculous, but with those stern eyes and dark hair, the ink flashing just beneath those long-sleeves…Wolfe is hard to look away from.
“Rumpel is willing to strike a deal with you,” he says, voice gruff and businesslike. I bet he’s a kinky fuck in the bedroom. The stern, brooding ones always are. “But it’s going to cost you.”
“My firstborn child,” I insert, because that’s the standard price for any big spell. A whole person, someone for Rumpel to train and mold into a Stiltz kin, the perfect lackey, assassin, and mage all wrapped in one. “I already said yes, I know.”
Wolfe narrows his eyes on me. “You’re either full of shit or else you’re the most fucking heart—”
“Don’t you dare fucking judge me,” I snap, shaking out the rest of the meat scraps onto the ground and tossing the bag down with them. The ghouls, well, they’ll eat that, too, just like they ate the clothing off my marks and their victims. “You don’t know the shit I’ve been through or the shit I’ll have to wade through the rest of my life.”
I give him my fiercest face and whether I believe what I’m about to say or not, who knows. But I’ll never have kids, so it’s not a big deal. I’m infertile. The only dhampir doctor in the country diagnosed me when I started having irregular periods. I’m not upset about it; it is what it is.
“Why bring a child into this world at all, the way things are for me? What a miserable fucking life it would lead.” I stand up, bubble tea in hand, and stare up into Wolfe’s face. Good thing I’m tall, or else he’d be seriously fuckin’ intimidating. I’m guessing he’s what, six foot four? Maybe six foot five? “So yeah, to have children at all, I need this. And it doesn’t look like you’ve had such a terrible life to be honest. Fine. Take my firstborn, and one day they’ll grow up to be just like you—rich, gorgeous, powerful. Big fucking deal.” Sucking in a deep breath, I decide to continue my tirade while I still have the upper hand. “Besides, you’re an Unnatural, you’d think—”
Before I can finish that sentence, Wolfe is tackling me to the ground and spilling my tea all over the damn place. At first, I think he’s retaliating because I called him an Unnatural, a seriously racist term for a human-turned-vampire. But then something smashes into the spot where we were just standing and I realize this stern asshole just saved my life.
Wolfe rolls off of me and comes to his feet with two revolvers in his hands, revolvers that I didn’t even see him grab he moves so fast. He lifts them up and fires six alternating rounds from each into the side of a massive, sinewy, doglike creature.
“It’s a fucking hellhound,” I choke out as I scramble to my feet and try to figure out who or what would send one of these things my way. But that’s when I see its collar and the giant tag hanging from it that’s as big as my face.
House Sullivan.
Shit.
Lenora, that vamp I recently killed, she’s from House Sullivan—or was.
This is not good. The Family Sullivan won’t know it was me that killed Lenora, but the hellhound is spelled to seek out and kill her murderer. Since it flickers in and out of this reality, it’s impossible to track as it searches, thus the collar. Once the hellhound stops following the trail and gets ready to take down its prey, the Family can follow it here.
And find me.
And blow my cover.
“Why is a House Sullivan hellhound trying to kill you?” Wolfe asks, firing several more shots into its meaty hide. The thing has no visible skin. It’s just muscles and bones and sinew with a thin, translucent layer of flesh holding it all together. While the shots make it bleed, all they do is annoy it and slow it down.
Hellhounds are seriously fucking hard to kill.
“It’s complicated,” I say, diving in the opposite direction of Wolfe as the creature storms us and smashes into the gravestones where we just stood, scattering chunks of cement and making grassy divots with its claws.
As soon as he finds his feet, Wolfe spins his guns and tucks them under his jacket, presumably into a pair of holsters. And then he just stands there and glares at me. To be fair, Sorrow and Vyce are also just standing there staring at me.
“If we don’t know why it wants you,” Wolfe says as the hellhound circles me. “Then we can’t help.”
“Are you fucking serious?” I snap, dodging as the creature lunges again, just narrowly missing me with those snapping jaws. Damn thing has a mouth the size of a gator and twice the bite force. That, and a long tail covered in spines. Poisonous spines. Like, really fucking pleasant, right? “You’re just going to stand there and watch me get torn apart?!”
Yanking Ricky from the sheath on my back, I drop into a crouch and wait for the creature to stalk toward me again, slaver dripping hot and sticky from its jaws as a small horde of ghouls surrounds us, hissing and just waiting for the kill so they can hop in and tear the loser apart. Fortunately for me, they only eat dead flesh or else I’d be afraid they might attack. Unfortunately for me, I’m going to be dead flesh if these assholes don’t jump in and save me.
The hellhound rushes me again and I swing my sword up in a tight arc that should rightfully sever its head. Instead, Ricky meets bone and tears from my hand when the monster dog moves, shaking itself out and sending the falchion flying. I go for it as fast as I can, but it lands on the roof of a mausoleum with a clatter. By the time my fingers curl around the cement edge and start to haul myself up, the hellhound is there and grabbing me around the waist with its massive jaws.
It yanks me down and then tries to use its paws to pin me in place so it can rip me apart.
Well shit.