The SOD had gone by many names in his life; the most recent was Joses Santana, preceded by Joses son of Judas, and before that, Yosace Bar-Ioudas. He was one of two sons of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Jesus. Joses and his brother were the fathers of all fangheads. His blood was so strong that he had survived poisoning by a rainbow dragon, silver poisoning, and the removal of his heart. I was particularly proud of the heart removal as that had been my coup, but I should have broken my word and taken his head, because he was still a threat and a danger to us all.
I could hear people talking just ahead and below, and no more blood scent than usual. No battle. No danger. At the moment there was no threat of the SOD getting away and no humans or vamps to protect, so I eased up and pressed against the wall in the shadows to evaluate everything. Why were they here? What did they want? And why were they all together? I was downwind from the group. The stench of SOD and various were-creatures was overpowering, rushing up the stairs.
Two guards lay on the clay floor, bound and gagged, mad as heck, but not out cold. Over them was chained Joses Santana. The SOD had begun to heal, even without a heart, and looked human rather than like a sack of broken bones and slime. His legs and arms were in the right places, his joints aligned the correct way, and his eyes seemed to be focusing on the group in front of him, though his mouth hung open at an angle and his dry triangle of a tongue protruded to one side between oversized fangs. He was a little more hairy than once before, but that was likely just an oddity of his healing. Or of the werewolf who bit him from time to time. Life in vamp HQ was weird.
The mixed were-group stood in a small semicircle facing the vamp prisoner, but slightly to my left, in front of me. Asad, the African werelion, and his wife, Nantale, in human form, were in the forefront of the grouping. Were-creatures mostly corresponded with the body-weight-to-mass ratio, making Asad a huge man and his lion a midsized-to-smaller cat. He was black skinned, with coarse hair in shades of black streaked with lighter brown, and he wore white robes in the Arabian style. Asad looked human enough until you saw his eyes, a lion-gold with a predatory gleam. The man was a war chief for his human tribe, the Fulani, and his wife, Nantale, looked like a Nubian goddess, even without the cloth of gold and all the beaten gold jewelry she had worn when I saw her last. She was tall and muscular with broad shoulders and long legs.
The other werecat was my personal pain in the butt. Tall and thin, his muscles were well defined, his ebony skin stretched over a frame without an ounce of fat. Beautiful, he had the sculpted features of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus with full lips and tip-tilted eyes blacker than a moonless night. Like Asad, he was dressed in the flowing white outer robe of an Arabian prince, and beneath it, he wore black that vanished into the shadows, regal garb, which . . . I stopped. Dang it all. Kemmie was wearing an emblem sewn on his robes, a lizard eating his tail. I hadn’t seen that emblem in months, and hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but the tail-biting lizard looked like something that had been stitched into the clothing worn by the blood-servants of Jack Shoffru, one of Leo’s sworn enemies, now dead. Some of Shoffru’s people had survived, and the living and the dead had been wearing a similar emblem embroidered on their inner shirts. Had someone taken over Shoffru’s clan, suborned Kem, and come back for Leo? Was this happenstance or a declaration of war?
There were three werewolves, four if I counted my wolf. And I did. Brute stood in front of the SOD as if guarding him, fangs bared at the grouping, growling low, a sound that shivered up through the clay floor and the walls like the vibration of a generator. He had seriously huge teeth, and at over three hundred pounds, the white werewolf was big enough to take on Asad and maybe live to tell about it. He’d put on weight in the time I’d known him, but even bulked up he couldn’t defeat the whole crew. I could envision the werewolves bearbaiting Brute while the cats tore the SOD to pieces. Or stole him off the wall.
Unless Brute timewalked.
The wolves were in human form, and I spared a glance to take them in. Two white, one black, all of them young, hip, dangerous. There had once been half a dozen small packs in the Mountain States. Then a new guy had emerged, taken over, and united the packs from several states into the Bighorns, making a megapack. The social structures of were-creatures were nothing like human social structures, and werewolf packs were the most abnormal of the weird and strange, having no wolf females. Werewolves were temperamental, and without a strong pack leader, they fought. A lot.
On the floor behind the wolves was Tequila Antifreeze, putting a hand to his skull. Someone had knocked him down. He’d been injured the last time he followed orders. I didn’t want him—or anyone—hurt like that again. For now, they hadn’t killed Antifreeze.
Beast stared at the bad guys. Beast is best ambush hunter.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. I thought, trying to decide who to take out first.
Asad took a step closer to the SOD, licking his lips, his wife at his side. Had they gotten a taste of the SOD before Brute got there? I looked up at the cameras and made a mental note to get someone to check the feed.
The midsized grindylow hiding above the weres wasn’t a surprise, as the creatures tended to appear whenever were-creatures went near humans. This one was bigger than Pea and Bean, but still the neon green of a juvie, and cuter than any steel-clawed killer had any right to be. She was perched on a beam up high, watching.
At that moment Brute must have caught my scent because he stopped growling and glanced at the stairwell. Into the sudden silence, the visitors started speaking.
“What is it?” one of the wolves asked in a British accent. It was the black guy. He leaned in, sniffing the SOD. To the wolf beside him, he said, “I can’t believe that you brought me here to look at this. Pathetic artwork, if that’s what it is. And the stench is dreadful. The vampire bitch must have no nose at all.”
Vampire bitch? I thought.
“Not art. This thing is alive,” Asad said. “The fanghead female told me it is very powerful. The blood drinkers value it greatly. If we take it and drink from it we will grow in strength and power and be able to defeat the bloodsuckers.”
“Do tell. It bloody well reeks of several old vampires, rotting blood, and wet wolf.”
“You smell the dog at his feet,” Nantale said, dismissive.
“Call werewolves dogs again and I’ll slit your throat and eat your entrails before you can blink,” the British wolfman said with a patently false smile. “As long as we rescue the white wolf, I don’t really care what you do with the artwork.”
Rescue?
Stupid dog thinks Brute is prisoner, Beast thought at me.
The werecats took a collective step forward, crowding Brute. His growl came back, louder, deeper. His hackles rose, shoulders hunched.
“Phillip, I don’t think he’s a prisoner,” one of the wolves said, warning in his tone.
The third wolf drew a weapon and racked back the slide.
The faintest footsteps sounded on the stairs behind me. Help was on the way. Beast-fast, I drew a vamp-killer and the Walther PK .380. Stepped from the stairs into the shadows, into a decent firing position.
“Bugger it all. Are you insane?” the Brit demanded of the wolf with the gun.
Overhead, the grindylow shivered and gathered herself for a launch.
The armed wolf pointed the business end of the gun at Phillip.
“What the bloody hell?”
Raising my voice I said, “Who let the kitties and puppies down here?”
The small group whirled to me. The wolf with the gun snarled. Stepped away to get a line of fire and pointed it at me, back to Phillip, then at Brute, indecisive, his body rotating slowly, leaving him open to attack. My own aim was steady on him, but I didn’t want to fire into what sounded like internal werewolf politics. My killing a were in HQ could complicate a lot of things.
“Antifreeze, you okay?” I asked.
He mumbled, “I was taking them to the library. They said they had an appointment with Ernestine. It wasn’t on the calendar, so I called her. She said to send them up, that she’d meet them there. After that, I don’t know. I don’t remember how I got here.”
It hadn’t been willingly. Ernestine was the vamp accountant, a withered, wrinkled ancient woman I called Raisin. People met with her all the time, but not usually in the library, and the mention of a female vamp indicated that the weres had had inside help in staging this FUBAR. Dang it.