I didn’t waste any time. I ran to the Peccatum and plunged both my daggers into its head. I moved the blades around, making as much contact with the oily mist as possible. Tentacles thrashed. More norms, possessed by Anger, barged into the room. Barely glancing at me, they were drawn to where the Anger was strongest, the three people pummeling each other on the floor. The newcomers leapt into the brawl.
Anger lashed at me, too, cutting into me with fiery whips. I gritted my teeth. Let it. I channeled the fury into my attack on the demon, stabbing and slicing and slashing the disgusting blob. I hacked through the Anger tentacle at its root. My rage diminished, but that didn’t slow down my attack on the head.
The Peccatum began to deflate. It tried to regenerate its Anger tentacle, but the result was thin and pale, barely flickering. One by one, tentacles dropped from the body and withered, curling like dried-up slugs. Across the room, the grunts and smacks of fighting ceased. I moved the bronze blades through the demon’s body like I was stirring a big vat of sludge. The vat got smaller and smaller, until the Peccatum collapsed on itself. A puddle of grayish glop spread across the table. Thick, viscous strings oozed over the edge.
I wiped my blades, resheathed the daggers, and turned around. People stood in the room, looking dazed. The Anger had worn off, and they weren’t quite sure what had hit them. The bodybuilders were helping the dieter to her feet. Her dress was torn and she had a black eye, but she’d held her own. She clutched a big clump of hair (once she noticed it in her hand she flung it away with a gasp), and the faces of both bodybuilders bore long, bloody scratch marks. All three apologized profusely to each other. Those who’d joined the fight late slunk quietly out the door.
As I left the conference room, one of the bodybuilders was making a date with the dieter. “Dinner?” he asked. The idea made her turn green—not surprising after all that pizza. They agreed on a movie instead.
Back in the lobby, the receptionist looked bewildered and a little green herself. She dialed the gym owner to come and fill out the final paperwork and cut me a check. He’d been smart enough to stay far away from the club once the Peccatum got out of control. Now, I assured him over the phone that it was safe to come back, and he said he was on his way.
I hoped he’d hurry. This job had taken way longer than planned, and I still had to get ready for dinner at my sister’s house. Mmm, dinner. I wondered what we’d have. For some reason, I was feeling kind of hungry.
2
IN MY APARTMENT IN DEADTOWN, THE PARANORMAL-ONLY section of Boston, I checked myself in the mirror, wondering if pearls were too formal for a family dinner. Probably not for this family dinner. To my boyfriend, Kane, a high-profile lawyer as well as a werewolf, “casual” meant loosening his tie. And my sister, Gwen, was all about appearances. Ten to one there’d be a silver candelabra on the table tonight. Now that I thought of it, pearls might not be enough. Oh, well—they’d have to do. Too late now to rent the crown jewels.
The phone rang. It was Kane, letting me know he was waiting in the no-parking zone in front of my building. I threw on my jacket—the mid-March evening was chilly—and headed for the elevator, before some zombie meter maid threatened him with a ticket.
Downstairs, though, I paused at the mailboxes. Mine held an electric bill and a couple of junk-mail flyers. I shoved them back into the box to deal with later, disappointed that the one piece of mail I was hoping for hadn’t arrived: a postcard from my vampire roommate, Juliet.
Six weeks ago, Juliet had gotten mixed up with the Old Ones, shadowy super-vampires so reclusive most vampires thought they were a legend. Then she’d disappeared. Since her disappearance, she’d sent me a series of postcards with cryptic messages, suggesting she was on the run from the Old Ones but letting me know she was okay. I’d received five postcards so far, mailed from locations all over the world, but the last one had arrived nearly a week ago. I was worried. The Old Ones prey on vampires the way vampires prey on humans—and they have no scruples about killing their victims. If they’d caught up with Juliet, she could be in serious trouble.
There was nothing I could do to help her now. I didn’t even know where she was.
I went outside. Kane’s BMW purred at the curb. My Jag was in the shop again—one of the hazards of owning a vintage car—so he was driving us out to Needham.
I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat, tugging the skirt of my dress to a reasonable level of decency.
“Wow.” Kane gave a low whistle—I’d call it a wolf whistle if I were into puns—and leaned over to kiss my cheek. “You look great.”
“ Thanks,” I said, putting my hand on his face. I turned his head until our lips touched. He smelled like summer forest at midnight. His lips, slightly rough, pressed against mine.
With a sigh, I sat back in my seat. “We’d better get going.” It took about half an hour to drive out to Needham. Traffic should be light on a Saturday night at seven thirty, but I didn’t want to keep Gwen waiting.
“Damn,” Kane said, but he pulled the BMW away from the curb. He shifted gears, then put his hand on my thigh. “I was kind of hoping you’d brought a little Lust home from work.”
I let his hand linger for a moment, feeling its warmth through the thin fabric of my skirt. His fingers curled around the hem, inching it upward, and I shivered. Then I picked up his hand and placed it back on the gearshift. “No, you weren’t. If that Peccatum had nailed me with Lust, I would’ve already scratched that itch. You forget I was at a gym full of prime, grade-A beefcake.” Most of them had been firmly held in the clutches of Sloth, Gluttony, or both, so they weren’t exactly in peak form. But I didn’t have to paint that picture in Kane’s imagination.
He growled deep in his throat and jabbed the accelerator. Almost immediately, we were at the checkpoint out of Deadtown. He hit the brake, and we jerked to a stop.
As the checkpoint guard reached to open his window, I leaned over and whispered in Kane’s ear, “Besides, I’m saving the Lust for dessert.”
Kane grinned and gave my thigh another squeeze. Then he pulled out his wallet and removed his ID. I handed mine over, too. The guard, who had the gray-green skin and red eyes of a zombie and the bored expression of a public employee in a routine job, checked our cards. He looked at each of us, comparing pictures to faces. Then he swiped the cards through his machine and handed them back to Kane. The gate raised. The guard nodded as we drove through.
“Lust for dessert?” Kane did that thing with his voice that made my insides go all fluttery. “ Too long to wait. Let’s make it an appetizer. We could turn around right now and spend the whole night feasting on it.”
His look smoldered, but tension—not lust—strained his voice.
“You’re nervous!” I exclaimed. The attorney who regularly argued high-profile paranormal rights cases, who spoke on national television more often than some people brushed their teeth, was afraid to meet my suburban housewife sister and her family.
“Can you blame me?”
Well, no. In the couple of years that Kane and I had been dating—off and on until recently—Gwen had basically pretended Kane didn’t exist. Like me, Gwen was one of the Cerddorion, a race of Welsh shapeshifters whose origins reach back to the goddess Ceridwen. Unlike me, Gwen had chosen home and family over shapeshifting. Cerddorion females gain the ability to shift at puberty, and lose it if they give birth. When Gwen decided to go norm, she went all the way, aspiring to be even more human than her middle-class, white-bread human neighbors. Although she said she accepted my decision to retain my shapeshifting powers and carry on the Cerddorion tradition of fighting demons, my sister sometimes acted like she was uncomfortable having a monster in the family. She’d never accepted my paranormal friends, and she’d tried to fix me up with a never-ending norm parade of potential boyfriend material, mostly her human husband’s coworkers and acquaintances.
So when she’d asked me to come out for dinner and casually added, “Oh, and bring Kane if you like,” the invitation seemed nothing short of miraculous.
“You’ll do fine,” I said. “Gwen is the world’s most gracious hostess.”
And Kane was the world’s most charming werewolf. It wasn’t just his good looks—silver hair, gray eyes, and a bestill-my-heart smile. It wasn’t just the coiled strength that radiated from his muscular body and gave grace to his movements. It was who he was, the way he combined the best of everything human—a passionate belief in justice, true concern for his fellow beings, an appreciation of the finer things—with the power and sensuality of his beast.
Hmm. An extended lust feast did sound tempting right now.
At the far end of the block, we reached the second checkpoint, the one into human-controlled Boston. Here, the guard was human, but his scowl made him look scarier than the zombie we’d just encountered. Again, we presented our IDs. I also passed over a sheaf of papers for the guard to inspect. Lately, restrictions had been tight on Deadtown residents who wanted to venture out of Boston’s paranormal-only section into the wider world. I’d spent half the morning filling out forms so we’d have the required permits to drive out to Needham for dinner.
The guard shuffled our papers, taking way longer than seemed necessary to rubber-stamp our permits. Everything was in order; I’d double-checked to make sure. But sometimes you got a jerk at the checkpoint. A lot of the norm border guards were card-carrying members of Humans First, a political action committee whose goal was to expel all paranormals from Massachusetts. If this bozo was one of that crowd, I’d bet he recognized Kane and was slowing us down on purpose. Kane’s white knuckles on the steering wheel showed that was his opinion, too.
I wanted to tell the jerk to hurry up, that we had places to go. But this guy could refuse to let us pass, for any reason or for no reason at all. So I waited and didn’t say anything.
Finally the guard returned our documents and raised the gate. Once we’d gone through, Kane blew out a long breath.