CHAPTER 2

PILLAR ROCK THRUST OUT of the ground among the ruins of North DeKalb Mall, a little over five miles away. He could’ve run it in half an hour, even if he took his time and carried Julie, which would be faster than her horse picking her way through the treacherously degraded streets. But Peanut had to come along and she trotted at about eight miles per hour, so he kept pace with a light jog.

 He’d pointed out before that the horse was neither brown nor peanut-shaped, so the name didn’t describe her in any way, and he was told that was the point. He let it lie. Some things you simply accepted, the way you accepted the sunrise or the winter cold. They called it lupine fatalism, but in reality it was plain common sense.

The moon lit their way. The north side of the city fought a never-ending battle with encroaching wilderness. On some streets, the pavement had worn away, surrendering to the forest growth, but North Druid Hills Road was still somewhat clear, if overgrown. Here and there a rusty car poked through the spring weeds, pushed or driven off the road just far enough to not block the way. The trees grew thick here, their massive branches shading the road, painting it in patches of shadow and light. Behind them houses crouched, most still occupied. The closer they got to North DeKalb Mall, the fewer houses would be occupied. The wilderness was frightening now to most humans. They sought safety in numbers, migrating toward the center of the city.

The wilderness never bothered him. He loved it.

He wondered idly if Julie liked it, too. He’d never asked her.

He wondered about many things he never talked about—most of the time there was no need for questions. He would get his answers if he waited long enough. However, she had said something that required a clarification.

 “Herald?” he asked. He’d never heard Kate use the term.

“That’s the official title,” she said. “Before one becomes a Warlord, one must be a Herald. That’s what Hugh d’Ambray was before he became the Preceptor of the Iron Dogs. “

Hugh d’Ambray. The name raised invisible hackles on his back.

He fought to keep the snarl out of his voice. “I didn’t know Kate needed a Warlord.”

“She doesn’t. She has Curran. He is her Consort and her general.”

His mind struggled for a few seconds. Those terms were usually flipped. To him, Curran was the Beast Lord, ex-Beast Lord now, and Kate was his Consort. That was the official title, and Kate had hated it. She would’ve never used it to refer to Curran. He knew where this was coming from, and he didn’t like it.

“You’ve been talking to him again.”

She didn’t say anything, her gaze fixed on the street ahead.

Damn it. “Why the hell do you keep talking to him?”

“Because Roland teaches me things.”

“What could he possibly teach you? How to be an immortal megalomaniac dickhead who kills his own kids? That’s some great lesson.”

“He teaches me magic.” She glared at him.

“Stay away from him. He is dangerous.”

She opened her eyes really wide and blinked at him. “Oh really? You think so? I had no idea.”

He killed another growl. “You don’t need to be talking to him. Nothing good will come from it.”

“No, you are right. You are totally right. Let’s not talk to the enemy we are all going to fight at some point.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Let’s not try to figure out how he thinks or what weapons he might use. Honestly, Derek? You did all that spy stuff for Jim for years. I can’t believe you.”

“Believe it.”

“I know!” She clapped her hands together. “Maybe we could all go into battle blindfolded.”

He had an urge to pull her off her horse and shake her until some sense appeared in her brain.

“I can sew you a cute grey blindfold with some little scars on it—”

“He’s a homicidal tyrant who’s been alive for five thousand years!” he snarled.

“Six. Longer, probably, but he admits to six.”

“Do you honestly think he’s going to let you see anything he doesn’t want you to see?”

“There are things he can’t hide from me. Things that only I can see.” She leaned forward. “He’s teaching me, and that means I’m learning how he thinks. Someone has to talk to him, Derek. Kate isn’t going to. That leaves me. I’m learning. I can make my own incantations now. I know how to build them and infuse them with power. That’s something Kate doesn’t know how to do.”

“Incantations?” She was out of her mind. “Have you used one in an actual fight?”

“Not yet. It’s dangerous.”

“So he’s teaching you something that may or may not work.”

She glared at him. “It will work. I haven’t used it yet, because it takes a crapload of magic. It’s my last resort, and I haven’t needed it.”

“Kate doesn’t need to incant. She uses power words.” He had no idea how they worked. He knew only that they came from an ancient language and commanded the magic.

“That’s what you think,” Julie said.

“That is what I think. He’s grooming you for something.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

“Okay.” He spun around and walked backward facing her. “Tell me one thing that you’ve learned that we don’t know. One thing. Go.”

“Okay. Do you know what he did to Hugh d’Ambray?”

“He exiled him. He should’ve killed him and saved us the trouble.”

“No,” Julie said quietly. “He purged him.”

“What does that mean?”

“He took away his immortality. Roland was everything to Hugh. Father, mother, teacher. God. For sixty years, since he was a kid, Hugh did everything Roland asked exactly as he was told. All his life he tried to make Roland proud. And Roland cast him out. He stripped the gift of his magic from him and severed all magic ties between them. Hugh can’t feel Roland anymore, Derek.”

“And?”

“‘When God shall remove all his presence from a man, that is hell itself,’” she quoted. “Hugh is in hell. He’ll feel himself age slowly and know that eventually he’s going to die.”

“Good.” He had no problem with that. Hugh had tried to kill Kate, he’d done his best to murder Curran, he’d almost started a war between the People and their vampires and the Pack, and he’d kidnapped Kate and nearly starved her to death, all in the name of trying to force her to meet with her father. The man’s list of transgressions was a mile long, and Derek would happily take a payment in blood for every single one. If Hugh happened to step out of the shadows now, only one of them would leave this street.

“It would’ve been kinder to kill him,” Julie said.

“Why are you so concerned about Hugh?”

“Think about it,” she said, her voice sharp. “It will come to you.”

He mulled it over. She was right. It came to him. “You are not Hugh.”

“I am. I’m bound to Kate by the same ritual Roland used to bind Hugh.”

“You’re nothing like Hugh, and Kate is nothing like Roland.”

Julie turned in the saddle and pointed to the northwest. “I can feel her. She’s there.”

He tried not to lie to her, so he said the first thing that popped into his head. “That’s creepy.”

“It is.” She put a world into those two words.

“But creepy or not, you know Kate won’t do what Roland is doing to Hugh. Roland doesn’t love Hugh. She loves you. You’re her child.”

She sighed. “I know she loves me. That’s why I’m worried. Derek, she still hasn’t told me that I can’t refuse her orders.”

Alarm dashed down his spine. He hadn’t realized she knew. “How long?”

“Roland told me months ago,” she said.

“She hasn’t told you because it’s hard.”

“I know,” she said. “She tries not to order me around. She’ll start to say some Mom thing and then stop, and you know she’s rephrasing it in her head. It’s kind of funny. Instead of ‘Stop stealing Curran’s beer out of the fridge and wash the dishes’ it’s all ‘It would make me a lot happier if you stopped stealing Curran’s beer’ and ‘It would be great if you did the dishes.’ She probably thinks she’s subtle about it. She isn’t.”

He didn’t see anything funny about it. “What are you going to do?”

“It’s not a problem now,” she said.

“And if it becomes a problem?”

“I’ll do something about it.”

He didn’t like the sound of that. “Still, you should stop talking to Roland.”

She sat up straighter. “Will you stop bossing me around?”

“Stop doing stupid crap, and I’ll stop.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Eat my horse’s ass.”

Ugh. No thanks. “What, was Desandra at the house recently?”

“I don’t need Desandra to teach me insults. And what the hell is it with all the comments about what I’m wearing? There’s nothing wrong with these shorts.”

“Don’t you own any jeans?”

“I do.”

“You should wear them.”

“Why? Is the sight of my legs disturbing you, Derek?” She stopped Peanut and stuck her left leg out in front of him. “Is there something wrong with my legs?”

There was nothing wrong with her legs. They were pale and muscular, and men who should know better noticed them. He was not going to notice them for a list of reasons a mile long, starting with the fact that she was sixteen, and he was twenty. He sidestepped her leg. “The more protection between your skin and other people’s claws, the better.”

“I took down a werejackal. I’m not the one bleeding.”

“I’m not bleeding.”

“You were. And there is a rip in your hoodie where he got your shoulder.”

He looked at her.

“Was I not supposed to mention it?” She put her hand to her chest. “So sorry, Sir Wolf.”

“In a few hours I’ll heal. You wouldn’t. If you got cut up by a cat’s claws, you would bleed unless we treated the wound. It would make you weak. Hours later you could reopen your wound if you turned the wrong way. Cats are filthy animals, and they carry all sorts of shit on their claws. You could die from an infection.”

They made a right onto Birch Road. To the left the ruin of the mall spread out. During the mall’s life, a narrow strip of lawn had ringed it, dotted by ornamental trees. Now the trees had grown, and thorny bushes sprouted between the trunks, forming nature’s answer to a barbed wire fence and offering only glimpses of the mall beyond. Most of its buildings had long since crumbled into dust. The rains had washed it away, and an occasional sign was all that remained of the shopping center. He read the names—Burlington Coat Factory, PayLess Shoe Store, Ross . . . They meant nothing to him.

“Did you share this cat view with Curran?” Julie asked. “Or are werelions slightly less filthy than other cats?”

He refused to take the bait. “A wound that’s a minor inconvenience to me could be a death sentence for you.”

Julie sighed. “Do you really think that if a wereleopard attacks me, jeans would stop him? Clothes don’t have magic powers, Derek. They don’t mystically protect you from three-inch claws, rapists, or murderers. If someone decides to hurt you, they will do so whether or not you have a thin layer of denim over your skin. Lighten up.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

She narrowed her eyes, looking sly. He braced himself.

“I saw a picture of Hugh when he was your age,” she said.

“Mhm.”

“Hugh was a hottie.”

His reaction must’ve shown on his face, because she threw her head back and laughed.

 

THE ROAD CURVED GENTLY. They kept going around the bend, to the mouth of Orion Drive. Here no trees hid the mall, and the view was wide open. He stopped. Next to him Julie jumped off her horse, tied Peanut to a tree, and took a cloth backpack from among the saddlebags, hanging it over her left shoulder.

The parking lot unrolled before them, about fifteen hundred feet wide and probably two thousand feet long. Irregular holes pockmarked the asphalt, each filled with mud-colored opaque water. No way to tell how deep they were. A thin fog hung above the water, and in its translucent depths tiny green lights floated, their weak light witchy and eerie. In the center of it all, a spire of dark grey rock jutted out at a forty-degree angle, like a needle that had been carelessly thrust into the fabric of the parking lot. Rough and dark, twenty feet wide at the base and tapering to a narrow end, it rose about thirty feet above the parking lot. Pillar Rock. They would have to clear the parking lot to get to it. The three idiot shapeshifters had been told to meet their contact there.

Derek inhaled. He’d smelled swamp before; it smelled musky and green, of algae and fish and vegetation, like a heap of grass clippings that had been allowed to turn into compost, so new plants could grow from it. It smelled of life. This place smelled of mud and water, but no life. Instead a faint fetid smell of something foul, something rotting and repulsive, slithered its way to him.

Julie tensed, her hand on her tomahawk.

“What do you see?”

“Blue,” she said.

Blue stood for human.

“Ugly, bleached-out blue, almost grey. This is a bad place.”

He took a few steps back and sat on the curb. She moved into the scrub behind him. He heard the tomahawk bite wood. Leaves rustled, and she handed him a six-foot-long dry sapling. A walking stick. He took it and nodded. Good idea. She disappeared again, came back with a walking stick of her own, and sat next to him.

They waited quietly, watching, listening. Minutes dripped by. Mist curled above the dark water and shimmered in the moonlight. Julie didn’t move.

A few years ago, when he was only eighteen, Jim, then Security Chief of the Pack, had put him in charge of a small group of twelve- and fifteen-year-olds who showed potential for covert work. Of all the things Derek tried to teach them, he found patience was the hardest. By now all of them would’ve scratched, or sighed, or made some noise. Julie simply waited. It was so easy with her.

They saw it at the same time: a brief flash of something pale as it moved within the deep blue shadow of the Spire. The hair on the back of his neck rose. Someone stared at them from those shadows. He couldn’t see it clearly, but he felt the weight of its gaze, saturated with malice. It stabbed at him from the gloom. He pretended not to notice. Sooner or later it would get impatient.

The mist began to wane, thinning as if boiling off. It was luring them in.

“It will get foggy once we enter,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” Julie agreed.

There was no need to tell her to stay next to him. He knew she would.

“Look to the right, where the tree trunk splits,” she murmured.

It took him a moment, but he finally saw it: the remnants of a small bundle of dried mistletoe hanging from the tree, tied with a leather cord. A small wooden medallion hung from the cord. A druid had been here, recognized it as a place of evil, and tried to contain it.

“Is the spell active?” he asked under his breath.

“No. It doesn’t radiate magic. It’s a linked ward and someone has broken it.”

Magic and wards weren’t his expertise, but he’d learned what he had to from Kate. A linked ward meant that identical wards had been placed all around the perimeter of the mall, forming a ring, each ward a link in a chain. If one link was severed, the chain broke, and the containment failed.

She shuddered. He felt her fear. Something about this place deeply creeped her out.

The mist thickened to the right, twisting. He pretended not to see the woman who stepped out of it. She was about twenty-eight or thirty, white and very pale. A ragged dress hung off her shoulders, once probably blue or green, but now faded to a dirty grey and damp. Her stomach bulged out—she looked either dangerously bloated or about seven months pregnant. She didn’t smell pregnant. She wore no bra, and the fabric snagged on her erect nipples, tracing the contours of breasts. Her dishwater-blond hair fell to below her waist, framing her face like a curtain. It might have been a pretty face, he reflected, with sharp but delicate features, except her eyes were too hungry.

She walked up to the edge of the parking lot and stopped. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re waiting to meet someone,” Julie said.

“This is a dangerous place. Come with me. I have food.”

Julie looked at him. He read hesitation in her eyes.

“She has food,” he said, keeping his voice neutral.

“Then we should come.”

“Come with me,” the woman repeated, backing up. “Come.”

If he were alone, it probably wouldn’t have been food. It might have been sex. Or both.

He stepped into the parking lot, moving slowly, careful where he put his feet, tapping the stick in front of him. Julie followed closely. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the mist flood behind them, a milky impenetrable curtain.

“Come,” the woman repeated, moving deeper into the lot, toward the spire.

He followed. The mist was swirling now, dense and thick. Ahead their guide stepped to the side and vanished. He reached out with his left hand. Julie took it, her strong dry fingers grasping his. He reached forward with his stick and tapped like a blind man, listening for the splash. The stick landed into water. He tapped until he found solid pavement and they carefully skirted the hole, making their way toward Pillar Rock.

He kept tapping, guiding them between the holes. They passed another. Then another.

His stick landed into the water again. Something yanked it. He jerked back, pulling with all his strength. The mist burst, and the bloated woman lunged at him from the water. His mind registered the long claws protruding from hands with a scaly membrane between them and the enormous fish maw with the sharp pike teeth, but his body had already moved. He dodged, grasped her arm, and used her momentum to slide behind her, clenching her to him, her back to his chest, pinning her arms. Julie swung, her expression flat, and buried the three-inch spike of her tomahawk in the left part of the creature’s chest. The scent of blood shot through him, like a jolt of electric current.

The woman flailed in his arms, trying to rake at him with her claws. He strained, keeping her still. He could snap her neck, but the fear still rolled from Julie. She needed this kill. Once she killed one, everything would fall into place.

Julie pried the tomahawk free and chopped at the woman’s bulging stomach. It split like a water skin, and a half-decomposed human head rolled out. The sour stench drenched him and he nearly gagged.

The woman thrashed, kicking. Julie dodged, jerked a knife out of the sheath on her waist, and drove the six-inch blade into the woman’s chest. The blade sank in with a scrape of metal against bone. The fish-woman screeched, her spine suddenly rigid, and sagged. The mist around them turned red and thinned, melting.

“Heart’s on the right side,” Julie said.

Claws grabbed him from behind and yanked him into the cold muddy water. He went under.

A body rushed at him through the coffee-colored water, long, pale green, clawed hands outstretched, a fish mouth on a human head gaping. A white light exploded in his head. The chain of will and restraint imposed by human part of him creaked, and he let himself off it. A knife was in his hand, and as she came at him, he locked his hand on the rough lip of that gaping toothed mouth and stabbed his knife into her side. He yanked the blade free and stabbed her again and again, driving the knife in with controlled frenzy. She clawed at him. He ignored the sharp flashes of pain and kept stabbing. Her side turned into raw butchered wound. She jerked now, trying desperately to break free, but there was no hiding from his knife or the white burning rage inside him.

Circles swam before his eyes. He realized his body was telling him it was running out of air. The creature floated limp, the right side of her chest a bloody hole. He thrust his hand into it, felt the deflated sack of the dead heart, and tore it out. Never leave things unfinished.

His chest hurt as if a red-hot band squeezed it. The first pangs of drowning panic scraped at his insides.

Darker shapes streaked toward him. Fish, he realized. Narrow and long, as long as his arm, with big mouths studded with teeth. They swarmed the body. He let go of the heart and kicked himself up.

He broke the surface and took a huge, lung-expanding breath. The air tasted so good.

Ten feet away, Julie spun like a dervish, her tomahawks slicing. She rammed the butt of her left axe under the third fish-woman’s chin. The blow snapped the woman’s chin up. Julie buried her right tomahawk in the creature’s exposed chest. Blood gushed.

He pulled himself out of the hole.

The fish woman swung at Julie. The girl leaned back. The claws raked the air inches from her nose. She chopped at the woman’s right side with her left tomahawk. Ribs cracked. The fish-creature dropped to her knees. Julie cleaved her neck. He heard the steel slice through the vertebrae. It sounded sweet.

The thin mist turned red again.

A shadow appeared behind Julie, rushing at her from the fog. He ran, picking up momentum, and leaped over Julie and the prone fish-woman. He rammed into the charging creature and tore into her. She broke like a rag doll in his hands, and he laughed. He snapped her arm, wrenching it out of the socket, her leg, her neck, her other arm, happy to finally release the rage he kept carefully pent up inside him.

A hand came to rest on his shoulder. “I get that this was terribly exciting, but she is dead. We killed everybody.”

He snapped his teeth at her, playing, and broke the woman’s forearm with a dry snap.

“De-rek,” she said, turning his name into a song. “Come back to me.”

Not yet.

“Look up,” she whispered. “Look up!”

Fine. He raised his gaze. The moon looked back at him, cool and calm, glowing, serene. It washed over him, sinking deep into his soul, soothing the old scars and closing the new ones as it rolled through him. He felt the hot rush of fury receding, dropped the corpse, and stood up.

She handed him his knife. He must’ve dropped it during the jump. The parking lot spread before them, the mist a mere memory above the dark holes. He inhaled deeply and caught a trace of familiar blood.

“How bad?”

She lifted her shirt, exposing her side. A long scratch marked her ribs, swelling with angry red.

He opened his mouth.

The water exploded out of the holes, shooting up in filthy geysers. Julie swiped her backpack from the pavement. He grabbed her hand and sprinted to the pillar. They dashed, zigzagging between the water. The evil dark fish churned within the geysers. Dirty water chased them, flooding before them. He picked Julie up and ran. Pillar Rock loomed before them, and he leapt onto it. He ran all the way to the apex and lowered Julie next to him.

Below them, the parking lot became a lake. Long sinuous bodies writhed in the shallow water, feeding or panicking, he couldn’t tell. He and Julie watched them quietly.

“Looks like we’re going to be stuck here for a few minutes,” she said, then gave him an odd look.

“Yes?”

She raised her backpack. “I have food.”

He laughed.

 

NO MATTER HOW HARD KATE tried to remind him that he was first and foremost human, Derek knew himself to be separate. He was a shapeshifter. He never forgot it, and if he had, things like watching Julie wince as she smeared antibiotic ointment over her scratch reminded him. He could vaguely remember when he was human too, but that memory felt false, almost as if it had happened to someone else. Between it and his current reality lay things he didn’t want to remember. If he reached down to stir them up, like old ghosts, he would recall them, but he didn’t want to.

“Okay,” she said.

He unrolled the long sticky strip of adhesive bandage and carefully placed it over her skin. The ointment would keep it from sticking to the wound itself.

Her ribs were no longer sticking out. He remembered when she was so skinny, he was worried she would walk into a lamppost by accident and break something.

She pulled her shirt back down and rummaged in her backpack. A plastic bag came out, with the second bag inside it filled with jerky, a bag of nuts and granola, and cheese. His mouth watered. He’d burned too many calories, and now he was ravenous.

She passed him the bags. Julie always had food. And she always wrapped it so it was hard to smell. It came from living on the street.

He snagged a long piece of jerky and chewed, reveling in the taste.

“You skipped the hunt again,” she said, snagging a piece of cheese and a cracker.

The monthly hunts in the Wood, a big forest sprawling north of Atlanta, were a pleasant diversion for most shapeshifters. A way to blow off some steam. For him it was a necessity. He needed the wilderness. Without it the rage grew too fast. It would always be with him. Curran had told him there was no cure, and he was right. It was the price Derek paid for not turning loup like his father.

“Maybe,” he said.

“What was so important?”

He shrugged. “Work.”

She chewed her little sandwich, taking small bites out of it. She ate like a human too—a shapeshifter would’ve stuffed the whole thing in her mouth and would’ve been on her third sandwich by now. It was a test, he knew. She ate slowly to prove to herself that she could, that there was enough food and no need to rush because she wasn’t starving.

“Lobasti,” she said.

“Mhm?”

“The women. I think they were lobasti. Mermaids.”

“Mermaids?” Somehow they didn’t seem hot enough.

“Evil mermaids,” she said. “I was so glad when that head rolled out. I thought I was fighting a pregnant woman. If I’m right, they only attack at night.”

“Makes sense. The plan was to have those idiots recover the rock and bring it here. The mermaids would kill them, and then Caleb Adams would come in the morning, pick up the rock, and go home, his hands clean.”

“That wereleopard doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

He won’t feel lucky when he wakes up. He laughed quietly under his breath.

He was on his fourth piece of jerky. The burning fire in his stomach was subsiding. He would eat a big breakfast when they were done. Pancakes and sausage and bacon, and then he would sleep. . . .

“If we find out why the Iveses died over that rock, I’ll make you all the bacon you want.”

He startled.

Julie shrugged and bit her jerky. “I can always tell when you’re thinking about food. You forget to be the Serious Wolf, and you get this dreamy look in your eyes. You know, most people would think you were thinking about a girl. They have no idea that her name is bacon.”

“Dreamy look?”

“Mhm. Lighten up.”

“I’m light enough.”

He lay down on his back and looked at the moon, a strip of jerky between his teeth like a cigar. He slowly chewed on it.

“Thanks for the food.”

“You’re welcome. You used to joke more.”

“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?”

If Caleb watched, it was from afar, because Derek hadn’t smelled him. He could’ve hidden in any one of the ruins around the place. Tracking him down was pointless—he’d left already, gone northeast with his own chunk of the magic rock. He would expect they would follow. He had all the time he needed to set a trap.

“Two possibilities. Either he has to do something with the rock over there, or he has figured out that you can see it. We keep interfering and screwing up his plans. He could be baiting a trap.”

Derek wished he knew what the rock did.

Julie was looking into the distance, probably at the glowing rock, with a pinched expression on her face. She knew a lot more about witches than he did. Kate was related to one of the three witches on the Witch Oracle. Her name was Evdokia, and Julie had lessons with her every Tuesday.

“What do you know about Adams?” he asked.

“He’s a warlock.” She said the word as if it tasted bitter.

“A male witch.” He knew that much. He also knew that Adams was feared. People didn’t like mentioning his name.

“No.” She shook her head. “He isn’t a witch.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A witch strives for balance. For a witch, everything is connected. Everything is a tangle of binding thread; pull on one end too hard and you could make a knot nobody can untie. If you’re sick, a witch will heal you, because plague is imbalance, but if you come to the same witch asking to give you another year of life through magic, he’ll turn you down, because you’re asking for something unnatural and there is always a price. The word witch comes from Old English wicca, an ancient word meaning a practitioner of magic. There are words similar to it, like wigle or wīh in Old German, and they always mean things like divination, or holy, or knowing. Caleb Adams isn’t a witch. He’s a warlock. That word comes from Old English wærloga. It means traitor, liar, enemy. Oath-breaker. He cares only about his own gain, and he’ll cut every thread he can to get what he wants. That’s why they cast him out of the coven. He broke his covenant. There’s no limit to the fucked-up things he’ll do to get his way. Evdokia hates him. Every time she mentions his name, she spits to the side.”

A man like that would want the magic glowing rock for only one reason—power. Adams had already killed for it once. He would kill for it again, and if he obtained it, he would use it to keep killing. Derek thought of the Iveses. Of the bloodstains and blood scent, sickening because he knew the people it belonged to and because it called to him, threatening to wake up something he kept chained deep inside.

“There is only one thing to do,” he said.

She looked at him, her face apprehensive.

“Let’s go get the rock back,” he told her.

Julie bared her teeth. She wasn’t a shapeshifter, would never be one, but right now, under the light of the moon, she smiled like a wolf.