Magic after midlife omni.., p.18
Magic After Midlife Omnibus, page 18
“Don’t you dare,” Emmett growled. He wobbled up to standing on his one leg and motioned for his errant limb. “Give it back.”
“Go get it boy.” I flung the leg back at Emmett. It hit him in the stomach, knocking him over. “Wow. Your balance is shit. Try yoga.”
At Emmett’s loud thud, Laurent stopped and looked back at the golem. That’s when the crescent of light flared up next to the wolf.
“Laurent!” I flung my shadow at him, but didn’t reach him in time.
The blindspot engulfed him. I threw my hands up against the dazzling light with a cry, but when it winked out, the wolf stood there, unconsumed by the ohr, that supernatural life force that fueled their magic.
“Tha—that’s impossible,” I stammered.
The wolf flashed me a very familiar look of impatience, flicking his tail at me, his shadow echoing the gesture with its normal fluidity. He threw back his head and howled a torrent of rage, pain, and frustration that echoed off the walls. At least the compulsion was gone.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to kill me all on his own initiative for clubbing him.
“Feel free to thank me for returning you to your right mind.” I backed away in quick jerky steps that turned into a sprint as the predator charged me in a cloud of explosive violence. I tensed for the bite of his jaws tearing through bone, but the wolf raced past me, ramming the door until it splintered open and he escaped.
I gusted out a breath and dropped my magic.
“How the hell am I supposed to walk now?” Emmett flung his broken shin at the wall.
“Stick it back on.”
“I’m not Play-Doh. My bits have to be cast and fired. Help meeee,” he whined.
“You sold me out.”
“I had to. The vamps got me and I had to prove my worth.”
“Didn’t you? You told them about the dybbuk.”
“I confirmed the dybbuk’s involvement. It wasn't new information and I couldn’t answer other questions because I can’t control when my magic works. I’m defective, and BatKian knows it.” Emmett rubbed his hands over his face. “They’re going to destroy me.”
This was not my problem. I had to find the wolf and get us both out of here before Zev came back and finished us off himself.
“I’ll try to return for you, okay?” I gestured at the door. “But I have to go.”
“Fine,” Emmett said, in an Eeyore voice. “Go. Abandon me, like Jude did. I’ll just lay down and wait to die. Maybe you could roll me over to that smashed sculpture before you go, so they don’t have to clean up two messes?”
His divination might be defective, but his guilt-tripping was top notch.
“I liked you better drunk.” I did a quick sweep of the room and ran over to the office area.
Emmett theatrically flung an arm over his eyes. “Me too.”
I wheeled the rolling desk chair over and helped him into it. Awesome, now I was committing grand theft desk chair. To make matters worse, it had a wonky wheel that pointed in a different direction from the other three. I had to lean into the back of the chair to make it move, but I bumped us out the door.
“Could you push it more smoothly?” Emmett said.
“No, but I could break off your other leg and shove it down your throat so I don’t have to listen to any more complaints.”
“Touchy. Did the wolf even go this way?”
We turned a corner and I stopped so abruptly that Emmett almost fell out of the chair.
Laurent had made short work of the two vamps he’d encountered here. And by short work, I mean that I slid in their blood as I stopped the chair, booting the half-mangled torso of one vamp into the wall.
“I’m going to go with yes,” I said in a warbly voice.
The other bloodsucker lay on his back, his fingers twitching just out of reach of his torn-off face that looked like an undead pancake.
Why couldn’t they all turn to nice piles of ash?
Gagging, I drove the chair over the corpse blocking our way. It took a few tries because office chairs aren’t ATVs, but we resumed our journey, following the wolf’s trail of bloody pawprints and adding our own tracks to the mix. The sound of the squeaking wheel pinched the muscles from my butt to the top of my neck, at which point it burrowed into my brain.
The trail of destruction turned grislier—and gristlier—the farther along we got.
Wet smacking sounds trailed over to us from a hallway branching off to the left, where Laurent gnawed on a vamp’s arm like a chew toy.
I looked him up and down and sighed. “Normally, when it’s my time of the month, I want chocolate and salty snacks, but you do you.”
The fiend’s other arm had been so thoroughly shredded I could have stuffed it in a sausage casing and served it up at the International Hellhouse of Pancakes with the creature’s severed head as a garnish.
If this was the “in-control” version of the wolf, I never wanted to encounter him during a full moon.
“Laurent.” I crouched down with my hand outstretched. Blood matted his fur, not all of it from the vamps, and some of his gashes were still bleeding. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
The wolf looked at us, his nostrils flaring. He pulled his lips back, baring his incisors, then he dropped his toy and jumped over the dead vamp.
Emmett tried to spin himself around, but the wolf nosed up to the chair and backed us into the wall.
“Quit it, you bully.” My black mesh swam up from the ground to knee height and flickered out.
I swear the wolf smirked.
“Wow, nice gratitude when I came here to save you.” I pulled out the lighter and jabbed it at the shifter, but shockingly it wasn’t as effective a deterrent as a flaming branch. “Back up.”
Laurent head-butted me towards a door marked “boiler room,” growling when I stopped. Questions and arguments were poised on the tip of my tongue, but one look at the untamed light in his eyes and I sighed, continuing to our destination.
“Is he going to cook you before he eats you?” Emmett said. “Aren’t wolves supposed to like raw meat?”
I tilted the chair and dumped Emmett on his ass.
“Kidding.” He hoisted himself back into the chair.
Laurent pawed at me until I opened the door.
I clung to the doorframe with all my strength, but he nipped me in the ass, and then knocked Emmett and me into the room, growling some more.
“I don’t know what you want. Shift and talk to me.” Unless he couldn’t. Unless he was stuck in wolf mode? Was this why Laurent hadn’t wanted to come here on the night of a full moon? Was its hold on him still too powerful, even now in the waxing gibbous phase? Holding the top of the chair, I ducked under pipes, the wolf steadily herding us backward until I tripped over a heavy metal ring.
“A trapdoor?” I hoisted it up, peering into the darkness. Delilah’s vision might have had the same green tinge as night vision goggles, but I couldn’t actually see in the dark, even with that magic. “I’m not going down into God knows whaaaaaaa—”
He’d pushed me, sending Emmett and the chair over the edge as well.
Emmett hit something with a grunt, while I cracked my funny bone on the metal arm of the chair. “Fuuuck!” I waved my arm, trying to shake off the pain.
It wasn’t much of a fall and I wasn’t injured, but it was very, very dark. Something ran over my back and I screamed.
“A little help,” Emmett said.
I groped around until I found him and assisted him back into his makeshift wheelchair.
Green eyes glowed from next to me in the darkness and the wolf huffed.
“Now what, asshole?” I said. “I can’t see anything.”
Laurent had yet to hurt me in wolf form and I was so tired that it was easier to assume that if he hadn’t torn out my throat yet, it wasn’t going to happen and I could trust him.
“Where to?” I said.
His tail brushed my hand. I flinched and it flicked my skin once more.
“This better not be the wolf equivalent of pull my finger,” I muttered, and gently caught hold of the tail.
The wolf led us through what I presumed was a tunnel, hewn from rough rock, that scraped my fingers when I accidentally bumped into it. The path sloped downward for quite some time, but the universe cut us a break, and we didn’t encounter anyone—or anything else.
We hit a dead end and the wolf rammed against it until something gave way and moonlight streamed in. We exited through a hole in a wall into in a boarded-up storefront. Dirt, used condoms, and cigarette butts littered the floor.
Emmett had his leg draped over the arm of the chair, and was snoring away.
The wolf shoved the decrepit wall paneling back against the tunnel’s entrance.
“Wait here and I’ll get my car,” I said. It was only a couple blocks away.
He tossed his head and snarled.
“Have whatever pissy fit you want. You aren’t walking home like that, and I assume if you were capable of shifting, you’d have done so already.”
He roared his fearsome roar and gnashed his fearsome teeth. And then his legs buckled from exhaustion and he crashed onto his belly.
“Uh-huh,” I said, and left.
18
The city had fallen into a 3AM dream-like hush. This stretch of the downtown east side was deserted, save for a couple of downtrodden men trudging wearily to one of the single room–occupancy hotels nearby. Vancouver was full of contradictions: gentrification butted up against one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada down here, a mandate to be green and bike-friendly warred with luxury gas-guzzling vehicles, and attempts to situate it as a world-class destination contradicted its local nickname of No Fun City.
The marginalization in this predominantly Sapien neighborhood was hard to reconcile with the lush seductiveness experienced in Blood Alley.
I jumped at every little sound while I hurried to my sedan, dropping into a crouch with my keys thrust outward between my fingers when a car backfired. I peered into my back seat for any more vamps trying to get the jump on me, and only once I’d made absolutely certain it was safe did I get in my car.
The vampire had been a rabbi, so the myths of holy water and crosses were out. Could he enter my home without an invitation? Lindsey had broken into my car. Was that the same thing?
I actually took a moment when I was locked in my vehicle to search online for industrial flashlights that took full spectrum bulbs, but didn’t find any useful options.
When I got back to the storefront, the wolf was prowling back and forth inside the door, his tail stiff, and the golem was still asleep. I motioned to the open back door on my car. “I’m tired, so skip past your temper tantrum and get in.”
Laurent’s compliance was less obedience, more sheer exhaustion, because the second he scrambled onto the spacious seat, he lay his head down on his paws and closed his eyes. I covered him with an old blanket that I kept in the trunk, mostly so that anyone who looked in the car wouldn’t see a giant wolf, but also in case he shifted.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty, wake up.” I touched Emmett’s shoulder.
He jerked awake and karate chopped my forearm, ducking his head when I glared at him. “Sorry.”
I wheeled him to my open trunk. “Get in.”
“Oh sure.” He stabbed a finger at Laurent. “Pretty boy gets to ride in the chariot, but I have to role play an Amber Alert victim.”
“Red clay isn’t a normal skin tone and I have nothing else to hide you with.” I crouched down so I was eye level with him. “I am going to count to three and if you’re not in that trunk, then I will leave without you. One…”
He notched his chin up at me.
“Two…” I slammed the trunk shut.
“You said I had until three.”
“I lied. Bye now.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll be good.”
I unlocked the trunk again.
He climbed in unsteadily, his broken leg left behind in Zev’s office, and curled into a ball, resting his head on my emergency kit. “See? A perfect angel.”
“Uh-huh.” I slammed the trunk shut again.
A werewolf and a golem walk into a bar… damn, a drink sounded good.
I drove with the windows down to stay awake. A few blocks before we reached our destination, there was the sound of skin tearing.
All I could see in the rearview mirror was a rolling, bumpy movement under the blanket. Ripping skin sounded remarkably like roughly crinkling a paper bag, which wasn’t so hard to listen to, but I flinched at the ongoing percussion of breaking bones. Laurent’s guttural groans and heavy breathing reminded me of being in labor. If that was the level of pain he had to go through every time he shifted and he didn’t have a cute baby at the end of it, I didn’t see how it was worth it.
After a few minutes, I heard a deep sigh and the final pop of a joint falling into place.
It had taken me years to let my guard down around Goldie, and a lot of that growth had regressed when my marriage fell apart. Everyone was shaped by negative experiences, but there was a wariness with those of us who’d lived through deep trauma. I recognized them by certain smiles that never quite reached their eyes—which matched the ones I’d practiced in the mirror when I was younger—and the way they angled their bodies slightly away from others.
Laurent fought hard for people, but who did he let into his corner? The first time I’d been around him when he shifted, he’d chased me off. Had he done it with me here out of necessity, or was this, even as much as he’d hidden under the blanket, a sign of trust?
The battered front illusion of Hotel Terminus came into view.
Pulling up to the curb with a lightness in my chest, I put the car in park. “You okay?”
Laurent sat up, once more human, the blanket draped over his head and held tightly together in the front. Good. I didn’t want him flashing his tight abs or powerful thighs or…
I cleared my throat and disengaged the child locks.
With his bleary eyes and curls falling into his face, he looked like a little kid. I smiled at the image of a smaller, curly-haired version of him grubby and happy, tramping through the woods, catching frogs and climbing trees.
“That bastard compelled me.” His voice was raspy, his accent thicker, but the hate was crystal-clear. “You know the dybbuk’s HQ?”
“Why?” I said, unlatching my seatbelt and twisting around to face him. “So you can storm the castle without me?”
“I want to go in now before they get a heads-up, and you look like the walking dead.”
“You’re one to talk. You are literally covered in blood. You have eaten undead people. And let’s take a moment here to recognize that I’m the one who got the address. The Kemp substation off Highway One. You’re welcome.”
Laurent shrugged. “I got it too.”
“From who? The vamp whose face you’d Hannibal Lecter’d or the one with his rib sticking out of his eye? Besides, there’s no way you’re some ball of energy, post shift, post compulsion, and post fighting off five vamps.” I shook a finger at him. “Don’t be an idiot.”
“Six. Heh.” He laughed, reliving the good times. “And I’m fine.”
“Yeah?” I jabbed his shoulder and he winced. “The blood on you isn’t all vamp. If you go, I go.”
“You gonna take me on, Mitzi?”
I refused to smile at his diminutive of my name, even if it was cute. “Miri. And yeah. I killed a vampire tonight. You’re not half as scary, Huff ’n’ Puff.”
“You didn’t kill Zev.”
“I didn’t mean Zev.”
His eyes narrowed and he pursed his lips. “We might be up against more than magic with these Ohrists. Some could have guns.”
I scraped at a small stain on the hem of my sweater, trying not to think about what had caused it. “I can cloak us so we walk in, grab Jude, and leave. The only one who’s been able to sense me under my magic was Zev, and this dybbuk isn’t as powerful as he is, right?”
Laurent closed his eyes with a sigh. He was silent so long that I leaned over to wake him up when he spoke. “Okay, but we can’t stay here until I’ve fixed things. It’s not safe.”
“Did you invite a vampire into your house?” I crossed my fingers that he’d answer in the affirmative because at least then my house would be off-limits.
He opened his eyes to roll them at me. “No, but I screwed myself over with that demon illusion on my door. It was a loophole that allowed the vamps to walk right in.”
I nodded in relief. “How many did they send?”
“Two,” he said.
“Did they compel you to go with them?”
“They tried but they weren’t skilled enough.” He gave me an address and settled back against the seat, the slash of a streetlight illuminating his fatigued expression. “They were stronger than me,” he said grudgingly.
I headed east to the Capitol Hill area of Burnaby, about ten minutes away. “Where are we going?”
“A friend’s house.”
“You have friends?” I gasped in an exaggerated fashion.
He slid the blanket off his head and settled it around his shoulders. “The ones I haven’t eaten because they pissed me off.”
“So this is your only one?”
“Ha. Ha.”
The house I pulled up to was a lovely Arts and Crafts bungalow with low-pitched eaves, a welcoming front porch, and narrow stained-glass windows on either side of the front door.
“We’ll take an hour to rest,” he said, “and when we go to the substation, you do as I say and don’t fight me.”
“No problem.”
He shot me one last searching look, but I kept my most pleasant and innocent expression on my face and finally got a tight nod.
Even with a ratty blanket wrapped around him that hit mid-thigh, Laurent didn’t walk; he prowled. He stalked. Dress him up in a suit and he still wouldn’t lose all vestiges of his predatory nature. And yet, this beast of a man chose to surround himself with books and music, and made his home into a work of art.
There was still so much I didn’t know about him.
We made our way up the front sidewalk and he rang the bell.
