Rane’s breaths came fast and regular as she ran the last mile in near total darkness, clutching a warm white paper bag in each hand. The night was alive around her, insects scratching, frogs croaking, leaves rustling in the faint breeze. Rane followed the edge of the river, a mossy-smelling blackness lit only by the rippling reflection of distant city lights.
She would be the first to admit it was a weird place to hunt down a giant man-eating bat. But really, it wasn’t like there was a normal place for that sort of thing.
This part of the river didn’t have any kind of official trail running alongside it. But a hard dirt track had been worn along the bank by the constant footfalls of people who wanted to walk unseen through the outskirts of the city. Mostly homeless people, Rane knew from experience. And the creatures of the night that sometimes hunted them. And then there were people like her, who were there to protect and defend by kicking ass as needed.
Right now, thankfully, the trail was empty. Rane’s feet pounded along the hard dirt in a steady, merciless rhythm. She was in her element. In the zone. Ready to rumble. She sucked in the scents of the night air and blew out the stress of being cooped up inside. Every breath made her feel more alive.
Hunting, stalking, running, this was what she lived for. That, and the sinful contents of the paper bags clutched in her sweaty grip.
Ever since she’d gotten back together with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Salem, the most powerful sorcerer she’d ever met, he’d been a little weird. Even for him. It was like her near-death experience had made him decide to shut himself away from the world and keep her closed in with him. It was suffocating. She hated being stuck indoors.
Sure, earlier this summer, it hadn’t been a whole lot of fun flying face-first into an undead motorcycle gang at sixty miles an hour, then pancaking onto the stone floor of an underground nuclear bunker. Things like that tended to leave a mark. Luckily, at the time, her entire body had been transformed into solid metal. So it wasn’t fatal or anything.
But it had hurt like a mother. And being laid up with injuries was a punishment she had never been able to handle well. Despite Salem’s uncharacteristic sweetness, her recovery had been slow and painful. Luckily, nothing was broken, and everything else healed fast. Considering how much weightlifting and fight training were a part of her daily routine, soft tissue injuries were practically an old friend.
Now, the bruises had faded, her muscles were building again, and she was almost back up to full strength. On one of her long runs along the riverbank this morning, she had heard about this supposedly vicious giant bat stalking the homeless population. Hearing that had given her exactly what she needed.
A mission to get out of the house and kick ass.
Salem, on the other hand, being the gloomy indoor sorcerer type, had needed a little more convincing. He had no interest in improbable rumors about giant carnivorous bats, he’d said. Her enthusiasm hadn’t convinced him. Neither had complaints, threats, or even sultry looks.
Finally, what had won him over was mystery. She had promised him a surprise. Something he’d never expect. Something that would blow his gigantic sorcerer brain. And then she refused to tell him what it was.
That, finally, had gotten to him.
And it had led more or less directly to the toasty little paper bags hanging from her fists.
Spotting light up ahead, Rane slowed down and stopped, ears straining for any sounds that didn’t belong. Fighting, screaming, maybe some giant flapping wings. But, slightly disappointingly, there was none of that.
Just the dry, crackling voice of the Brigadier as he babbled through one of his long, meandering stories. He was probably talking to Salem. But the Brigadier had been known to spend hours telling his stories to thin air, too, due to his slippery grasp of reality.
Rane waited, listening, as her breathing slowed down to normal. Idly, her fingers played with the brand-new titanium ring she wore on her middle finger, a gift from Dru after her previous titanium ring had been spectacularly burned out by magic. At will, Rane could transform into any metal or rock that touched her skin, and she was ready to do it at the first sign of danger if this giant bat materialized.
But since the Brigadier sounded boringly calm, Rane decided to save her energy and remain in human form. She gave herself a quick check to make sure her blonde ponytail was still in place, her underwear wasn’t poking out of her floppy pink running shorts, and her armpits didn’t smell unusually ripe.
She sniffed again, unsure, then shrugged. What the hell, Salem already knew what she smelled like. And the Brigadier probably couldn’t tell anyway. Holding the bags up high, Rane jogged toward the light.
Up ahead and above, a little-used service road crossed the river on a crumbling old concrete bridge. The only light came from a single cobweb-choked safety light set beneath the crest of the bridge. Countless generations of spiders had wrapped it in enough webs to reduce its glow to that of a candle. It might have been almost romantic, in a super creepy way, except for the presence of the Brigadier.
He’d been a fixture of the riverside homeless community ever since Rane could remember, a wiry old man with a stern face turned leathery by the relentless Colorado sun. Rane had never seen him dressed in anything but old camouflage fatigues, with a stained black beret perched atop his scruffy white hair. She didn’t know his real name, so she’d taken to calling him the Brigadier, and the name had stuck.
He sat on the riverbank with his gnarled hands clasped on his knees as he talked, the cuffs of his torn fatigues tucked into his dirty combat boots. One of his boots was held together with frayed duct tape.
Next to him, Salem leaned against a concrete bridge pillar, dressed all in black. Black ruffled shirt, tight black pants, tall black boots. The night was too warm for his black trench coat, apparently. But he still wore his favorite silk top hat. His long, wavy hair fell down around his shoulders.
Though he leaned nonchalantly against the concrete with one boot propping him up, Rane knew him well enough to spot the tension in his body. The Brigadier was obviously putting him on edge.
Salem’s onyx cufflinks glinted in the faint light as he held out his lanky arm, his two extended fingers wagging as if they were walking up an invisible wall. At his feet, pebbles from the riverbank rose up into the air and quickly stacked themselves one atop another in a precarious little column. As Rane jogged up, she spotted at least a dozen of the little stone towers. Salem had definitely been on edge for a while.
“Look who’s here,” Salem announced unnecessarily loudly, without even glancing up. The irritation was plain in his voice.
But the announcement had its intended effect on the Brigadier, who broke off his rambling story in midsentence and smiled a gap-toothed grin up at Rane. “Evenin’, sunshine! What’s in the bag?”
“Hey. You’ll find out in a second.” Rane nodded once to him before turning to Salem. “You spot anything yet?”
Salem finally turned her way. His fierce gray eyes, accented by black guyliner, peered up from under the brim of his top hat. The sharp angles of his face became pools of shadow in the dim light. “Remind me again why I dropped everything to come down here and meet your . . . informant?”
“’Cause of the giant killer bat!” the Brigadier rasped at his feet.
“Yes, thank you,” Salem said, not taking his gaze from Rane. “And what did I say about that?”
“Said there’s no bat,” the Brigadier offered.
That didn’t make any sense. Rane put one hand on her hip. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what your friend Whalen said.” The Brigadier pointed at Salem, who didn’t bother to correct his name.
“But you told me you saw a big-ass bat,” Rane insisted. “You said it was nesting under this bridge. That’s why we’re here.”
The Brigadier shrugged both shoulders.
“If one person sees it, it’s their imagination,” Salem said. “If two people see it, then it’s a pattern.”
“What if three people see it?” the Brigadier asked.
“Three people never see anything,” Salem snapped at him, “because by that point, one of them has already been eaten.” He took a deep breath and said to Rane, “Are we finished here?”
“Nope. We’re just getting started.” For some reason, Rane got a perverse sense of satisfaction out of Salem’s obvious irritation. “Hey, check you out. Getting out of the house. Making new friends. Having fun. Right?”
“Oodles.” Salem made a sweeping-away motion with his hand, and all at once his little stone towers exploded. The rocks peppered the surface of the water like machine-gun fire.
In the tense silence that followed, the Brigadier sniffed. “Hey. That smells good. You going to let it get cold?”
“Nope. Here you go. One for you, dude.” She handed one of the bags to the Brigadier and held up the other one for Salem. “And one for you. Dig in.” She thrust it into his chest, amused at the puff of white powder that blew out of the top of the bag and across his half-unbuttoned shirt.
Gingerly, Salem reached into the paper bag and drew out a golden-brown pastry dusted in a thick layer of confectioners’ sugar. The warm aroma of sweet fried dough rolled out of the open bag, making her mouth water.
The perplexed look on Salem’s face gradually softened, and Rane could only hope that the beignets reminded him of the crazy-good times they had spent in New Orleans, fighting evil together. Teaming up together. Being happy together.
The whole thing had been Dru’s idea. The problem was that Dru wasn’t exactly an expert on the whole romantic thing. Rane hoped this would work.
She leaned close to Salem until her forehead touched the brim of his top hat. At six feet one, she towered over him, but that had never been an issue for her. At times like this, it just made him that much cuter, standing there with his chest all dusted with sugar, the beignet inches from his lips. The look in his eyes slowly warmed, and she knew right then that she had finally gotten through to him.
That was the Salem she loved, the man she so rarely saw. As one doomsday threat after another had put the fate of the world in the balance, he had grown darker and colder. Now he spent most of his time hiding behind all of his seriousness and sarcasm, his constant irritation and insults. But she knew who he really was, deep inside. And she wasn’t going to give up until she got him back.
She felt the soft ripple of Salem’s magic climb across her skin, like smoke. One by one, the beignets floated out of the bag to orbit around them. A swirling halo of powdered sugar surrounded them, glowing softly in the light. It diffused into a delicious fog, making the rest of the world fade away. The moment was so bizarre, so otherworldly, so Salem.
At that moment, it felt like she could gaze deep into his eyes and that was all she needed to be happy.
A rare smile quirked up the corner of his mouth. She smiled back.
In the back of her mind, she blessed the little New Orleans chef who had agreed to stay late and fry up a batch of her famous beignets just for Rane’s version of date night.
Just as Rane went in for the kiss, the Brigadier barked, “Bat!”
Salem startled and pulled away, irritation flashing across his eyes. “For the last time, there is no giant bat, you paranoid—”
“Bat!” A cloud of powdered sugar and crumbs burst from the Brigadier’s stuffed mouth. He thrust one gnarled finger up toward the night sky.
Even before she looked, Rane heard the sound of leathery wings beating the night air, pounding straight toward them.