Thank God I hadn’t gotten the pointed ears. Who wants to pass as a Star Trek or Lord of the Rings fan boy for the rest of their natural-born lives?

A slight increase in the weight of the axe on the back of my neck redirected my attention to where it belonged. Peris, per the mythology book that Niko had swatted my head with on regular occasion, were supposedly half angels /half demons or something midway between the two. In other words, I had no idea what Ishiah was. It didn’t matter. Mythology was always wrong… like the whisper game. You started with one thing and by the time it was passed around the circle, it was something completely different. If you had even a seed of truth in mythology, you were doing damn good. Werewolves and vampires were born, not made, and were not all uncontrollable sex addicts, no matter what the local bookstore’s fantasy section might tell you. Puck, Pan, Robin Goodfellow were all one trickster race; all looked exactly alike; were all male; and they were all uncontrollable sex addicts. Revenants and ghouls had never been human. I could’ve gone on, ticking them off in my mind, but the axe blade was getting uncomfortable.

“Got it. No traveling in the bar. I’ll make a note.” I didn’t think he’d really chop my head off, but with Ishiah, you could never be sure. Can’t say I blamed him, because you couldn’t always be sure about me either… especially when I opened gates.

Why did I travel at all then? To avoid being late? Honestly? If it could bring out the worst in me and it wasn’t to escape imminent, messy, ugly death, then why did I do it?

Good question.

And no good answer. No answer at all, only the excuse that it hadn’t brought out the worst in me lately… not like before. So why not use it? I had control now, so it wasn’t that big of a chance. Not anymore, although getting anyone else to believe it, especially Nik, wasn’t something I looked forward to. But my brother wasn’t the problem at the moment; it was my boss.

“Can I get up and sling some beer or are you going to cut my head off?” I asked Ish. “Either way, I really need to take a piss. It’s been a long day.”

He thought about it, then grunted and lifted the axe. “I’m docking you two hours.”

It was better than having my head docked. I got to my feet and peeled off my jacket. It was summer in New York, which made it too hot for the leather jacket, but when you wore two guns in shoulder holsters, a cheerful smile wasn’t quite camouflage enough-if I could even pull off cheerful, which was doubtful. I didn’t need camouflage in the bar. Humans tended to avoid it like the plague-some instinct passed down from caveman ancestors who knew there were monsters in the world and a woolly mammoth wasn’t the only thing that could squash you flat. The few random humans who did walk through the front doors were predators themselves-arrogant ones who ignored their instinct because they thought they were the shit and no one was more of a badass than them. Those humans usually didn’t leave the bar… except in pieces. The bar didn’t serve food, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be found there once in a while.

I made my way to the bathroom, then out to the bar to toss the jacket under it and grab an apron. “Good crowd tonight,” Sammy commented. Samyel was another peri, dark to Ishiah’s light blond, with wings barred with gray. “Quiet.”

Quiet was good. We didn’t get it that often. I leaned on the bar and took in the small crowd. Vampires, lamias (kind of a combo between a vampire and a leech), three incubi, two vyodanoi (predatory, rubbery, man-shaped water creatures), but no Wolves. Not a one. While quiet was good, that was not… especially on top of what had happened in the park. There were always wolves in the bar.

I fished my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and called Delilah. Modern-day werewolves had modern-day accessories. I got her voice mail. I usually did. She had a busy life, between being a bouncer at a strip club and her Kin work, which could be anything from stealing to fighting rival Kin packs to things I might not want to know about. I had asked if she killed humans. She’d said no-she preferred real prey, real challenge, not bleating sheep. I thought she was telling the truth; she was all about the challenge. But I’d asked her that before I’d killed a few humans myself, so I wasn’t sure I was in the position to judge. Mine had been bad men, but wasn’t “bad” a matter of who was holding the gun and who was getting shot by it?

I left her a message that someone who smelled an awful lot like her had tried to kill me in the park and I hoped he wasn’t a regular hookup, because he had nothing left to hook up with now. I also asked what was up with all the missing Wolves.

Ishiah, wings now gone, came out of the back room with a beer keg and scowled at my making personal calls on my first five minutes of company time. “Two and a half hours,” he said.

Normally he would’ve made it three. I wasn’t the only one getting sex. A fire axe to the neck and docking my pay were actually mellow for him. That was the good part. The bad part was he was getting it from a friend, the only one I trusted besides my brother, and this friend and frequent fellow monster killer liked nothing better than to threaten me with the details… and that was worse than any axe.

When Robin Goodfellow, a puck, threatened you with sexual details, you didn’t need a porn channel and you didn’t need Hustler; when he claimed to have cowritten the Kama Sutra, you believed his bragging ass. And the last thing I needed was to have my boss see me looking at him and trying damn hard not to picture wings and legs and other things in positions you’d need Silly Putty for bones to achieve. That would make him lose his mellow real fast. Goodfellow would like nothing better than to see his adventures on IMAX, but Ishiah was probably more private.

And my twitching at the mental picture wouldn’t liven up the bar any.

I twitched anyway and turned my attention to wiping down the bar. It was clean, but it didn’t matter-anything to keep my thoughts from going down that road. I’d done the same twitching when Nik’s vampire girlfriend had once had some fun at my expense. There are some things about your family and friends you just don’t want to know.

There are also things that you don’t want them to know. Different things maybe, not that it mattered. Niko found out anyway. I didn’t know why I tried. He always did. I discovered that this particular time twenty minutes later when my brother walked through the door… the only human who came and went at the Ninth Circle and lived not to tell the tale. I looked up the instant I smelled him… when I smelled the annoyance on him. More than annoyed, he was completely and totally pissed off. And it took some doing to get my brother pissed off. That didn’t mean he’d hesitate in a fight to take the head off a boggle with his sword, but he wouldn’t be angry when he did it. A job was a job. No need to bring emotion into that equation.

There was plenty of emotion now.

He walked to the bar, flipped open the phone in his hand, and put it down in front of me. The small screen was open to the GPS tracker connected to my cell. “I thought we had an agreement. You don’t gate and I don’t beat you within an inch of your life. Wasn’t that it?” He leaned closer. “The agreement?”

“Shit.” I looked down at the phone blinking accusingly.

“I had a friend of mine at the university program it to alarm every time your signal disappears and reappears approximately four seconds or less later.” Which wouldn’t pick up on the dead zone of the subway. Traveling was a helluva lot quicker than the subway. My brother was smart, probably the smartest guy I’d ever known, but just once couldn’t he have taken a little more after me?

“Well? I’m listening. Were you in dire circumstances? Was it make a gate or die? I’ve always assumed if you escaped near death, you would give me a call afterward. Common courtesy.” He leaned farther. My calm and cool-as-ice brother had a temper too. You had to dig for it, had to push him, but it was there and it could rival Ishiah’s. Ice to fire, but when it was your butt in a sling, whether it was frozen or singed didn’t much matter.