Night fell with the rain, the world darkening. Beast’s vision flared over mine, a greenish silver overlay of energy and life, everything clearer than my human vision. The Gray Between rose around me, from within me. Pain flashed through my flesh and sizzled through my neurons, intense and blinding, lighting up my nerve endings, searing my flesh. Then was gone. I stood from my crouch and growled, stalking to the door of the bar.
At the first hint of trouble, Eli had shoved his brother into a hidey-hole under the second-floor gallery and Alex crouched there, arms wrapped around himself, hiding his laptop from the mist that sprang up from the ground as the huge raindrops hit and splashed, creating a saturating mist along with the soaking rain. The Kid’s long curls were wet and dripping, plastered to his skull. But he was safe.
I got a glimpse of my hands. Pelt-covered, knobby knuckles. Beast had shifted me into my half-puma, half-human form. But there was no pain, and the change ground to a halt before my bones cracked and split, incapacitating me for way too long in the midst of a battle. Beast was getting good at this.
My hearing was already healing, and I made out screaming, the wail of a vamp dying, the nearly ultrasonic pulses that made my healing eardrums shudder.
From the bar doorway, flames flashed. Witch magic. Had to be Lucky.
I pulled on Beast’s strength and speed and jumped. Shoving off from the street and landing twenty feet away, just inside the door. Impossible for a human. Piece of cake for a Puma concolor. When I touched down, I instantly pushed off again and landed, rolling under cover of a pool table. It was on fire but only on the felt top and one leg.
I took in the fight. Vamps in the corners of the room. Witches and humans in the center, the remains of a protective ward scorched into the floor. The vinyl floor tile was on fire, melting. Draperies on a low stage were blazing, the flames not just licking up the rotted fabric, but roaring up. Smoke filled the room.
There was a burst of thunder inside. Magic parched my nostrils. A human-sounding scream was quickly cut off. Something heavy landed on the pool table over me and I heard an ominous crack. The top of a pool table is made of quarried slate, and it’s strong. I bowed my body in and rolled. Across the burning floor. To the feet of Clermont Doucette, fully vamped-out. His fangs braced at the carotid artery of a furious Bobbie Landry. A threat not yet carried out.
A shotgun boomed.
Everything went still. Silence vibrating with the gunshot. For an entire second that felt like an eternity.
A baby’s cry broke the mute waiting.
I swiveled my head, locating the sound. Gabe stood at the edge of the stage, vamped-out, lips curled back from narrow, pointed fangs, eyes blacker than the pit of hell, set in pale pink sclera. Still starving. Idiot. And then I realized he was holding a baby in his arms. A witch I didn’t know was at his feet, bleeding. Unconscious. And somehow he hadn’t fallen on her to feed. Gabe had unplumbed strengths.
Shauna was standing in a hedge of thorns. Staring at her husband and baby. She wasn’t afraid. Something I didn’t have time to examine.
Lucky Landry was inside a triangle, a ward I had never seen before. He threw something at a vamp on the stage near Gabe. The unknown vamp screamed, an ululating howl of pain, and started bleeding from his nose and mouth. He fell, writhing on the stage.
Eli raced across the room, heading for the stage. Lucky threw a second spell. It hit Eli, bowling him across the room, against the far wall, so fast it was a blur. I saw him hit. My heart stopped everything, went into some kind of no-thought-no-feel mode as Eli’s head conked the wall and he slid down it. I growled and aimed my M4 at Lucky. “I don’t want to kill you. Don’t make me do this.”
Lucky swiveled his head to me and his eyes widened.
Clermont, within inches of me, his speech impeded by his fangs, said, “What you are?”
Lucky’s eyes slid past me and he said, “What dat?”
I followed his eyes to the pool table.
Atop it was this . . . thing.
I swiveled and fired. Six shots, silver fléchette, hand-packed rounds, silver for the creatures of the dark. As I fired, Lucky threw a combustion spell at the thing. Flames rolled around it and off, onto the flaming felt of the pool table. Mud, dried by the flames, cracked and dusted down. If my rounds had done it harm, I couldn’t tell.
Part frog, part boar, part alligator. Frog body and back legs, boar tusks and bristly hair and little twirled tail, a frog mouth and snout, full of alligator teeth. And arms muscled like a gorilla but covered in horned scales. The thing was dripping mud and foul gore. Whiffs of tar, the tart stink of rotten lemons, and the perfume of the grave came from it, fish and dead birds and rotten gator meat, days dead. A demon from the deeps of the darkest hell. I had seen one before and it only took seeing one once to know them all. And from Lucky’s face, it wasn’t one he had called.