“I’m bleeding,” he said. Amazement, surprise . . . pleasure.

Her anger vanished, dwindling as quickly as a body falling from a rooftop. Two souls, Tatya had said, and she’d mistaken him for a beast. Two souls in possession of a single scrap of flesh. This was Demalion talking.

“I would have thought you’d had enough of seeing your blood spilled.”

He turned his head to look at her, drawn finally from his exploration of mortality. She fumbled for the first-aid kit, propping it open against his hip, and reached blindly for the roll of gauze, the jumbo tube of antibiotics, the antiseptic wash and pads.

“It hurts,” he said. “Deep down, deeper than the nerves admit. Blood makes the bones ache. Makes them remember what all flesh is born knowing. We will die. We must die. It is our destiny.”

“Not on my watch,” she said.

He laughed, a rich bubble of sound made scratchy by Wright’s throat. Sylvie, heart pounding at the familiarity of it, poured antiseptic on his wounds with a callous lack of concern.

The wild laughter gave way to a yelp; the crazy talk changed to a muttered oath.

“Hurts, does it,” Sylvie said. “You can pull back from it, the blood, the pain. Let Wright own it. It’s his body.” She sponged the dried and seeping blood away, preparing for the bandages. The punctures were many—werewolf teeth were sharp—but they weren’t deep. Marisol really had been holding back.

“That an order, Shadows, or a question?” he asked. His breath stirred her hair, moist warmth touching her skin, warmer than the swamp about them. Another sigh. “He let go, you know. Ceded the body to me. He got too scared, sitting in the dark, alone and bleeding in this strange new world, with a wolf standing on the hood of the truck, watching him with burning eyes. He wanted to not see any of it. I spared him that.”

“We need to talk,” she said. “But not here, not now.”

“Wolves are hunting,” he said, in agreement. The night felt charged about them, quivering as the predators passed through it. “Wright’s twitchy anyway.”

“His body,” she murmured.

He let out a long sigh, and Wright jerked, swore, and said, “God, where’d you come from?”

“Been here,” she said. She made layers of antibiotic cream and gauze, wound it about the long bones in his palm, covering up the blood.

“Ghost time, huh,” he said.

“Yup,” Sylvie said. Down to monosyllables. “Hand. Here. All done.”

“Thanks,” he said.

His courtesy, ingrained, was a weight on her. Thanking her, when she’d been the one to lead him into the wolves’ den.

She slapped the first-aid kit back together, pushed it beneath the seat. “Passenger’s seat for you,” she said.

“And the briefcase?”

Sylvie paused in climbing into her seat, unrolled another couple of hundred in fifties, held it out toward him. “They’re coming home with me. You don’t have to. This’ll get you a hotel room. Even with a witch’s name, we won’t manage to see her tonight. And I can’t just leave them lying around.”

It was a con of sorts. A gamble that Wright’s mingled trust-distrust issues would keep him close. Keep Demalion close.

Her fingers trembled. She didn’t want to make the offer, but she thought if she clutched as tight as she wanted, he’d pull away. She wanted to drag him and Demalion home and keep him. She wanted her second chance. Wanted to keep him safe.

Too late for that, her little dark voice growled.

Wright said, “That’s blood money, Sylvie. You might be able to call it a client fee, but I know where it came from.”

“Then you know more than I do,” she said, but tucked the money away.

At his disapproving expression, she said, “Enough attitude. You may doubt my morals; god knows you wouldn’t be the first, but I’m honest enough.”

“Still not going to a hotel,” he said. “You’ve got me on your couch until I’m better.” She turned her face toward the windshield, hid her relieved smile with a sweep of hair, and relaxed. She had him. She had both of them.

He settled back into the seat with the awkwardness of a man who had just insulted his host. Given that, she wasn’t surprised when he cast about for a subject, any subject, and landed on the most obvious.

“They’re bigger than I thought, not that I ever thought about ’em. Outside of movies anyway. Werewolves, I mean.”

She started the engine, bumped them back onto the main road, and said, “Dire wolves, actually. The wolf half.” Relief made her expansive—it always did—and these were answers she could give without watching her words.

“Dire wolves are extinct.”

“Oh, someone spent time in museums,” she teased.

He smiled, the first easy and uncomplicated expression she’d seen on him, born of a happy memory. “Jamie’s crazy ’bout the Natural History Museum. He outgrew dinosaurs, but doesn’t care for live animals yet. It’s all mammoth, sabertooth, dire wolf, and a weird obsession with some giant shrew thing that bites.”

“Dire wolves didn’t go extinct. They just learned to spend more time on two legs than four.”

“You’re telling me that dire wolves were werewolves.”

“What, you’d feel better if werewolves were a purely modern phenomenon? Symptom of some strange corruption happening to the world? Sorry. The Magicus Mundi’s been around longer than we have.” She flicked her brights at an approaching car, got the bastards to turn their own down. The scrub brush along the narrow road caught the warring headlights and sparked luminous eyes. “Werewolves have been around for ages. They used to harass mankind a lot. Until mankind harassed back.”

“You’re making it up.”

“Am not. Just ’cause you didn’t know doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. Detect for a moment. Why do you think there were so many in the tar pits? What predatory animal blindly follows another into death? You listen to Tatya tell it, the humans rounded them up and drove them into the pits. Ushered in a whole new era of peace founded on mass slaughter.”

“You know a lot about them.”

“Occupational hazard,” she said.

Her mood swung to a grimness she fought to hide. What would he have thought if she’d told him the truth? That she shared an ancestor with the werewolves? That Lilith, mother to vampires, succubi, werewolves, had deigned to have a human child that might carry just as much monster in her blood as the rest? Sylvie had never confessed her ancestry to Demalion, who had iffy ancestry of his own—thanks to his mother the sphinx—she sure as hell wasn’t sharing it with Wright.

12

Crystal Clear

JUGGLING KEYS, THE BRIEFCASE, HER ATTENTION ON WRIGHT, WHO was all but zombie walking in her wake, Sylvie nearly fell into her apartment when the door opened as she touched it. Wright, hand still curved protectively against his chest, followed after her blindly, walking into a situation that had Sylvie reaching for her gun.

She always locked the door.

“Just me!” Alex said. She stuck her head out of the kitchenette, waved her hands in surrender, then grinned. It was a far more pleasant surprise than Sylvie had been anticipating, and she felt a little dizzy with the relief. “What’s with the gun?”

“Door was unlocked and half-open,” Sylvie said. “You need to work on your self-preservation skills. Anything on Zoe?”

“I locked it, and nope,” Alex said, ducking back into the kitchen. Her voice carried easily across the few feet. “You’re carrying a briefcase full of magical tools designed to open doors. You think?”

“They’re not lit,” Sylvie said. She set the briefcase down; traded that weight for the intangible weight of her resurgent worry for her sister.

“Does that make a difference?” Wright asked.

“It should,” Sylvie said. “Like a loaded gun. You still have to pull the trigger.”

“Some guns are for crap,” he said. “Ask me how many accidental shootings I’ve seen.” His expression was bleak; bad memories, exhaustion, pain all ganging up on him.