The merc opened his mouth, wide eyes staring into the violent gold in Curran’s irises. “Mwa maah maaah . . .”
Curran unhinged his jaws. If he took that man’s head into his mouth and bit down, the merc’s skull would burst like an egg dropped on concrete.
“No,” I repeated.
“He’s gonna kill him,” Camo Pants wheezed. His eyes were watering. Being kneed in the face will do that.
Curran’s fangs emerged from his jaws, becoming longer and longer . . . I never realized how creepy it was to see teeth growing in real time. Here’s one for my nightmares.
“Curran, you can’t bite his face off.”
“Yes, I can,” Curran said in a monster voice.
“You shouldn’t.”
“He stole George’s car. And he shot me.”
“He missed.”
“He missed, because I’m fast and I moved out of the way. If I bite his head off, he won’t shoot me again.”
“He’s gonna kill him!” Camo Pants tried to pull out of my grip and I twisted his arm a little higher.
“If I need your help, I’ll ask you for it,” I told him. “Curran, please don’t bite his head off.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s illegal. Technically you assaulted him first when you threw him across the lawn.”
“I didn’t throw him very far.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I could’ve thrown him straight up and let him land on the pavement.”
“That would also be illegal.”
“You keep bringing this ‘illegal’ thing up as if it means something to me.”
I couldn’t tell if he was just scaring them or if he really intended to kill them.
“As a favor to me, please hold off.”
“Fine.” Curran loosened his grip slightly. “Want to add anything to this discussion?”
The big merc sucked in a hoarse breath. His face shook with the strain of making words come out. “. . . Fuck you!”
Oh, you dimwit.
“Fuck you!”
“Leroy!” Camo Pants barked.
“And fuck your bitch, too!” Leroy declared.
Curran looked at me. “How about now? Can I twist his head off now?”
“Still illegal,” I told him.
Curran squeezed Leroy’s shoulder. Bones groaned. Leroy clamped his mouth shut.
“Don’t!” Camo Pants yelled.
Since Curran was playing with Leroy, this knucklehead had to be Mac. “Don’t worry about him. Worry about me. What did you do to Eduardo?”
“I don’t know any Eduardo!” Mac wheezed.
I twisted his arm a fraction more. He cried out.
“I know your name is Mac. I know that’s your redneck cousin Leroy. I know you’re in Eduardo’s territory, muscling in on his gig, and I know that you stole the FJ Cruiser from his fiancée. Look at me. Look at my eyes.”
Mac looked up at me. His face went white.
My voice was barely above a whisper, but I sank a lot of rage into it. “Eduardo is my friend. His fiancée is my friend. She is his sister.” I pointed at Curran. “Tell me everything you know or I’ll break your arm right here.” I tapped his shoulder. “Then I’ll keep breaking it here and here and here. No amount of medmagic and steel pins will fix it. It’ll never work right again and it will always hurt.”
Mac stared at me, his eyes glassy. Words came tumbling out. “We don’t know what happened to Eduardo. This was his gig, but the lady called this morning and said Eduardo didn’t show up yesterday. We took the one-armed chick’s car. We were going to do her man’s job anyway, and it’s a nice car, so we were just going to borrow it.”
“Lie better,” Curran said, his voice cold. “She came looking for Eduardo last night. You didn’t know you would be doing this job until you got a call today.”
Mac’s voice broke. “What the hell do you want from me, man? Yes, fine, we took the damn car! We took it! Do you know how much a double-engine car costs? It was just sitting right there. We figured if that dickhead didn’t come home, he was probably dead anyway. What the hell would his woman do with that car? She’s got one arm anyway. We needed a car, so we took it.”
And they would do it again. I could hear it in his voice. I’d met his type before. Some people had a moral code. It might not have matched the current laws, but it was still a code. Mac and Leroy’s code consisted of one sentence: do whatever helps Mac and Leroy. It didn’t matter who got hurt. It didn’t matter that a person they stole from would have to do without or could’ve been injured or killed. If George’s half-eaten corpse were discovered this morning because she was murdered while walking home, they wouldn’t feel bad about it. They would simply keep going.
If they killed Eduardo, it would have to be a shot to the head with a silver round from far away. There was no way they could’ve beaten him in a close and personal fight, and they knew it. And if they somehow managed it, they would’ve taken his car and his equipment and they would be wearing it, because they were too stupid to hide it.
I glanced at Curran. He shook his head slightly. Leroy didn’t smell like Eduardo’s blood.
“Do you know what the Guild does with mercs who steal equipment from other mercs?” I asked.
Mac shook his head.
“They fine them. Ten grand. Poaching in another merc’s zone is another ten grand. That’s forty grand between the two of you. Guess what I’m going to do when I go back to the Guild?”
“Nobody knows you,” Mac squeezed out.
“You’re wrong. Everybody knows me. I have nine years in.”
Mac’s face went slack.
“So you have a choice, Mac. You can take your idiot cousin and you can leave this city. Or you can go back and face the Guild and work overtime for them for the next five years or so. But we’ll be around and I promise you, I’ll make your life as hard as I can.”
I let go of his arm. Curran casually tossed Leroy on the pavement. Leroy landed on his ass, jumped up, and rushed at Curran. Curran let him get close and backhanded him, almost as an afterthought, the way one would swat a fly. The blow landed on Leroy’s ear. The big merc spun, stumbling. Mac caught him.
“Our gear is in the truck,” Mac said.
“You can pick it up at the Guild,” I told him.
“You’re a fucking bitch, you know that?” Mac said.
“I’ll have to live with myself.”
“This isn’t over!” Leroy jabbed his finger at Curran. He probably meant it to look aggressive, but he was swaying on his feet.
“Yes, it is,” Curran told him. “Go before I change my mind.”
The corpse of the wolf griffin shivered. Flesh bulged in the middle of it, like a bloody red tumor, growing bigger and bigger.
“What the hell?” Curran snarled.
“I don’t know.” I pulled Sarrat free.
The tumor ruptured.
CHAPTER
5
CURRAN AND I backed away. A three-foot-long orange-brown spike shot out of the griffin’s corpse, stabbing to the sky. The second spike pierced the corpse from within. The spikes bent, resting on the pavement, each bristling with six-inch-long rigid hair. The corpse shuddered, as if it were being sucked into something from the inside.
The spikes flexed and a huge insectoid head emerged, covered with bristles. Two pairs of dark brown mandibles jutted from it like two crab pincers the size of scimitars. Dark, nearly black serrated teeth lined the inside of each pincer.
Holy crap.
The creature kept coming out of the griffin’s corpse: two fat chelicerae supporting the mandibles, a big round blob of a head with a bump in its center crowned with two black baseball-sized eyes, legs, more legs emerging segment by segment, thorax, a long segmented abdomen. The wolf griffin corpse shriveled, d
eflating, and vanished, pulled into the new creature. The giant insect landed in the driveway. Ten legs, the first pair huge and long, the others smaller, thrust from its ten-foot-long body, held about five feet off the ground. The damn thing was the size of the FJ Cruiser parked behind us.
The giant insect ground its mandible pincers. A grinding screech split the quiet. I winced.
“What the hell is that?” Curran growled, moving to the right.
“I don’t know.” I walked to the left. It looked like a scorpion and a really hairy spider had somehow mated and their offspring grew to fifty times its normal size. I’d never seen anything like it. Those mandible-pincers looked like they would slice through bone like it was butter. We couldn’t let it get into the house. It would rip the whole family apart.
The legs were all chitin. Trying to cut through them with Sarrat would just break the blade. Trying to claw at it wouldn’t do any good either. Its fat abdomen was softer, but getting to it would be a bitch.
A deep dry voice rolled through the street, so saturated with magic, it almost reverberated on my skin. “Die.”
Why me? “We don’t do requests. Try Iowa. I hear they’re more accommodating.” Hey, Dad, I found a lovely present for this coming Father’s Day. Enjoy.
The insect pointed a leg at me. “Die.”
Curran’s eyes went gold. His clothes tore, falling in shreds to the street, as the massive meld of human and lion spilled out. “Let’s see you try that shit on me.”
The insect lunged at Curran, shockingly fast. Curran jerked his arms up, catching the insect’s front pair of legs in his grip. His feet slid.
Holy crap. His feet slid.
I dashed to the side, trying to circle the creature from the left. A leg stabbed at me like a spear. I dodged and it scoured the concrete where I had stood a moment ago, gouging a chunk from it. The other leg swung at me. I saw it coming, but I could do nothing about it. It swept me off my feet. I flew across the grass. My back smashed against something solid, wood snapped with a dry crunch, and I crashed through the fence.
Ow. I rolled to my feet.
Curran stood in the middle of the street, his hands still locked on the insect’s front pair of legs. The spider-scorpion was lunging at him again and again, trying to grip him with its pincers. If those mandibles closed on Curran, they’d slice his arms off.
Oh no, you don’t.
I charged the spider. The legs stabbed at me. I dodged back and forth. How the hell could it even see me? A leg landed in front of me; I ducked left and saw one of the black eyeballs swivel, following me. It could look back and front at the same time.
I thrust into the opening between two legs. Sarrat sliced into the insect’s abdomen and I ripped the blade back, opening a cut. A leg cut at me, scraping against my back and side as I spun to avoid it. Pain lanced me. I jumped back. Clear ichor dripped from the cut, revealing clumps of translucent guts, like clusters of fish bladders. An acrid stench, sharp and fetid, like the odor of rotting fish, washed over me. The insect didn’t even notice.
“Kate,” Curran ground out. “Hit it with magic.”
“I can’t.” The legs sliced at me like a windmill of blades. “You’re holding it. You’ll be hit, too. Let go of it.”
“If I let go of it, it will tear me apart.”
He couldn’t throw it either. The insect’s center of mass was suspended too high above the ground. Curran didn’t have the leverage.
The only word that wouldn’t cause him direct harm would freeze the spider-scorpion for four seconds. I wouldn’t be able to do enough damage. The moment they both came to, the insect would cut Curran to pieces.
He couldn’t hold it forever.
The leg directly above me rose, aiming to pierce my chest from above. I dove under it, right under the abdomen pulsing with contractions, and stabbed straight up. Ichor drenched me. My eyes watered from the stench. I stabbed again and again, ripping the slippery fish-bladder innards. The guts spilled through the gashes, hanging like some gross fruit. I wasn’t doing enough damage.
Curran snarled. The abdomen moved up half a foot. The thing was gaining on him.
I thrust my left hand under my T-shirt, where the leg had cut me. My fingers came out bloody. I sat straight up and thrust my wet hand into the cut I’d made. The magic in my blood screamed, eager to be unleashed. I gave it a push. The blood streamed from my wound up my shoulder, up my arm, into the spider-insect, and turned solid. A dozen thin spikes pierced the creature from within.
The spider-scorpion screeched. Felt that, did you? Have some more.
The abdomen plunged at me. The insect had reared, trying to crush me. I thrust my arms up, crossing them to block. Suddenly the abdomen disappeared. I rolled right and jumped to my feet.
On the street the spider-scorpion dashed at Curran. The meat chunk of its head that powered the left mandible looked mangled. Curran must’ve punched it when it reared.
I ran at it.
The spider thrust with its front leg. Curran batted it aside. The second leg stabbed, too fast. The narrow blade of the front segment sliced into Curran’s shoulder. He grabbed the leg with his left hand and smashed his right palm against the joint. The front segment broke off.
I lunged between the insect’s back legs, jumped, and landed on the spider-scorpion’s back. The creature flailed. I stabbed Sarrat as deep as it would go and clung to it.
Curran ripped the chunk of the spider-scorpion’s leg out of his body and buried it in the insect’s side, right under the broken limb.
I dragged myself up along the abdomen, trying to get to the head and the two black balls of the eyes.
Curran grabbed the broken leg and kept stabbing, hitting the same spot. Ichor flew. The insect screeched like nails on chalkboard and flailed back and forth.
I wouldn’t get to the eyes. It would throw me off.
I yanked Sarrat out, grabbed onto the edge of the wound I’d made, and sliced into the creature’s thorax, trying to saw its abdomen from its chest.
Curran kept stabbing.
Pierce, pull out, pierce, pull out, pierce . . .
Curran bit into the spider’s leg and ripped it out.
Pierce, pull out, pierce . . .
Moments flew by.
My breath was coming out in ragged gasps. Die, damn you. Die already. Die!
The spider-scorpion shuddered.
Curran leaped onto its head. Claws flashed and the spider-scorpion went blind. I kept carving. Curran began punching the back of the spider-scorpion’s head.
The thorax broke off from the abdomen. The gut swayed and fell, splattering the translucent innards over the pavement in a wet splat. The chitin sheathing the spider-scorpion’s head caved in and broke. The front part of the creature careened and fell, taking us with it. I blinked and then I was sitting on the ground face to face with Curran, the wet ichor under us sliding out from the spider-scorpion’s crushed carapace.
My whole body ached as if I had run a long race. I was out of breath. Rapidly cooling sweat slicked my hairline. I felt light-headed. I might have pulled out too much blood.
Curran was breathing deep. The wound on his shoulder gaped with red. The edges had begun to pull together, but long brown bristles stuck out of it—the stiff “hairs” that had lined the giant insect’s leg.
“Do we have a flamethrower?” Curran asked.
“No.”
“We should get a flamethrower.”
We looked at each other. The stench was almost unbearable now. I was covered head to toe with spider-scorpion slime and my own blood. Curran leaned over and spat to the side. That’s right. He’d bitten the damn thing.
“. . . water of the speed and the spirit . . .” a male voice intoned to the right.
I turned.
Across the street Mac and Leroy were trying to chant the FJ
Cruiser’s water engine into life.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
The two mercs saw us. My stare and Mac’s connected. I forced myself to stand up.
“Oh, no, no, no.” Mac jerked his arms up. “Don’t get up. We’re leaving.”
Next to me Curran bared his teeth.
Leroy grabbed a bag out of the car. “This is my shit!”
They took off down the street at a run.
I turned to Curran and pointed at them. I had no words left. He shook his head.
I reached out with my magic, searching for small droplets of my blood. It answered my call. I pushed. The blood flowed out of the spider-scorpion corpse, pooling on the pavement into a small puddle. It turned solid and shattered into powder, all of its magic gone. The wind swiped it off the pavement as if it had never been there.
The front door of the house opened slowly and an African American woman in her forties stepped out. She was wearing a business suit. Behind her two teenage boys craned their necks, trying to see.
The woman walked over to us, carefully picking her way between puddles of slime, and held out a check. The edge of the check danced, trembling. I wiped my hand on my jeans the best I could and took it.
She turned around to her boys. “Get the animals into the crates and take what you need. Tony, call your father and tell him we’ll be at Red Roof Inn. He can meet us there.”
“If there is anything else . . .” I started.
“There won’t be anything else,” she said. “We are moving.”
• • •
MRS. OSWALD WASN’T a cooperative witness. She was mostly concerned with getting her two children, two cats, and a husky into her car and escaping the scene as fast as she could. The only reason we got anything at all was that Curran and I agreed to stand guard over her while she packed and started her SUV. She had no idea who was after her cats. She hadn’t fought with any neighbors. She had no conflicts at work, at least nothing that would warrant an attack on her cats. Her husband was out of town on a business trip.