07- Black Blood Brother Read online

  Yeah, I’m going to turn my back on you. As if.

  I looked at Chrys and said, “Tell your brother not to hurt me.”

  She looked at him. “Donner?”

  He looked back and said nothing.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I will beat your ass like a taiko drum.”

  His brows pinched together between his eyes. “Fine.” He walked away. “But I want to go to Pancake Villa.”

  We caught up with the rest of her family. Dad said, “I could do chicken and waffles.”

  “Long as they serve alcohol,” I muttered.

  “It’s settled,” Chrys said. “There’s a Pancake Villa a few blocks from here, I think. We’ll meet you guys there.”

  She and I headed for my Mustang. The rest went toward a black SUV with tinted windows. We’d just reached the Mustang when I caught motion from the corner of my eye. I grabbed Chrys and spun her so she was between me and her brother. I kissed her, hard. Donner faced us from twenty feet away. He’d spun into an attack pose, palms extended and facing each other, his fingers curved to form a cage. Between his hands, a formless whirl of shadow built. I had the sense that he’d been about to throw shadow magic my way, until I used his sister as a human shield.

  Her lips clung to mine as she moaned. Her hands were tight on my coat.

  While she was thusly distracted, I formed a hand of darkness with my own shadow magic, making it appear right in front of him. My shadow hand stabbed between his fingers and absorbed the shadow he’s summoned. My now larger shadow hand flew into his throat, gripping, lifting. He went up on tip-toe, then dangled several feet off the ground, choking. His fingers clawed at the shadow hand, trying to pry himself loose. His parents were in the SUV, buckling up. They looked oblivious to what was happening.

  Chrys broke the kiss, pulling away.

  I let Donner go. He fell on his ass.

  I let Chrys see me looking back. I said, “Oh, your brother tripped and fell. He seems to be having a fit of some kind.”

  She turned and looked. Then turned back to me. Her eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

  I put on my best look of astonished innocence. “What? I was kissing you at the time. How could I have had thought for anything else. I think you underestimate yourself.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Besides, if I did do something, I can assure you it was in self-defense. I may be a violent and morally challenged, but I do have a code of conduct. I don’t kill children unless absolutely necessary, and sometimes, not even then.”

  Her expression warmed. “You know, I think I believe you.”

  And that’s exactly why I’ve spent so many hours practicing my expressions in front of the mirror. Okay, so maybe I like looking at myself, too. I am ruggedly handsome. Ask anyone I’ve fucked.

  Donner was back on his feet now, his face a mask of rage. He screamed at me. “How the hell did you do that?”

  I clouded my face with confusion. “Me? That was probably your mom. I don’t think she loves you.”

  He stormed off to the SUV, climbing in the back.

  “That was mean,” Chrys said, “but funny. My brother can be a jerk sometimes. He needs to spend more time in the human world, developing empathy for lesser beings.”

  “Said like a true Villager.” I opened the door for her. She ducked into the car. I closed the door and went around to my side, getting in. I let the security system read me before the timed delay ran out. I started up the Mustang, enjoying its rumble and roar. “How is it,” I asked, “that your family has a corporate empire in the human world when Villagers are supposed to stay in their own dimension?” I headed the Mustang into the street.

  She said, “It’s not that we’re obligated to avoid your reality. Our ancient treaty with humankind is a non-aggression pact. As long as we’re passing for human, and not annihilating major population centers, it’s all good. Besides, we have millions in our hidden society. We have needs: goods, cultural importation, and genetic material for our experiments.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  She laughed. “Do you know why we created Slayers?”

  “Playing God?”

  “Besides that,” she said.

  “Enlighten me.” Looking ahead, I saw the sign for the Pancake Villa in the next block. I changed lanes and stopped at the next light.

  “We created the Slayers as an act of compassion. We saw how the fey, the werewolves, shifters, the undead, and witches all preyed upon humankind. Along with the demons.”

  “Clan Lauphram has always acted with honor, but yeah, other demon clans know little of restraint. I’ll give you that.”

  “If not for the Slayers, humans would have become penned-up cattle, owned and bred by supernaturals in past ages. Bred for stupidity and docility.”

  I thought of how the media machines and liberal education system had churned out idiots that thought socialism was a good thing. Humanity had dumbed itself down just fine, all on its own.

  “Too bad the Slayers hadn’t managed to save humanity from itself.”

  She shrugged as we rolled on through the green light. “We only play at being God. The reality is still out of our reach.”

  We pulled into the parking lot of Pancake Villa. I used a gravely serious voice. “At least we still have pancakes.”

  FIVE

  “Is there a note stuck to my back

  that says: JUST KILL ME?”

  —Caine Deathwalker

  Pancake Villa was not only a family restaurant, but kid friendly to the max—in an Italian sort of way. The outside had a striped awning, white, green, and orange.

  Inside, landscapes were painted directly on white plaster walls. The hills were pancakes dripping butter and syrup. There was a sunny yoked-egg painted on a pale blue sky with whipped crème clouds, and trees made of sausage links and parsley. There were houses made of waffles and cows made of crepes. Scattered tables were mostly empty, it being so early in the morning. Beyond them, were niches with large tables, half screened with indoor trellises supporting plastic ivy. The tiled floor had a rusty stone look.

  My gaze took in an arcade with machines exchanging dollars for tokens, and flashing games. I saw my favorite: Zombie Carnage III, a shooter game.

  And then there was the company mascot: Red-Eye Crow, a guy in blue jean coveralls, with crow wings, and a crow’s-head mask. On top of the mask was a battered straw hat. Old Red-Eye went around pretending to steal pancakes from kids. The kids would wave their hands and yell to drive off the thieving bird. They found Crow funny. I found the fraudulent avian stalker irritating. In fact, when he came to our table and eyed the boysenberry glazed crepes in front of me, I made two PX4 Storm Berettas appear in my hands. It was all I could do not to pump a half-dozen rounds of sizzling lead into the mascot.

  He hurried on to the next table.

  The guns disappeared. Chrys’ father and little brother stared at my hands. “Interesting party trick,” the dad said.

  “With me, death is always a thought away.” As is sex, booze, and treasure. “It’s who I am, what I do.”

  My inner dragon spoke: Don’t leave out greed. Greed is good. Self-denial is way overrated. Boring, too.

  I looked at Chrys’ parents. “So, do you have names or am I just supposed to point and say ‘hey, you?’”

  “The names we last carried in your human world are Ismene,” he gestured to his wife, “and Dimitur,” he touched his chest to indicate the second name was his. These were names for common use. They were guarding their real names. Many cultures believed that giving a person your true or secret name gave them power over you. A spell against a person, using their true name, had far more potency.

  Donner was studiously ignoring me now, face buried in a stack of pancakes. Ismene sat on the other side of Chrys. They were popping in and out of whispered conferences, sharing secrets, confidences. At one point, Chrys held up her hands, moving them well apart. I assumed she was passing on a rough estimate of my cock’s
impressive great length. Ismene stared in shock, then looked at me.

  “Half-dragon DNA has a few benefits,” I said.

  We were having a tense meal—most of the tension on my side. I didn’t let myself forget that these people were monstrously powerful, that three of the four of them wanted me dead. Before this was all over, I was going to find the key to beating them at their own game; countering their shadow magic with my own. The Old Man had been training me for this all my life. He’d known all about my father; he’d just never bothered to tell me.

  While eating, I kept a webbing of micro-filament shadow magic around us all. I hoped the lightness of the webs and their difficulty to seen would keep them unnoticed. Not a sure thing however, the webbing was a magical early warning system. Should anyone else’s shadow magic impinge on mine, I’d know an attack was coming and would have an extra moment to respond.

  Reaching for a large glass of orange juice, I felt a twitch on my web. It ripped where shadow magic played at alchemy. I looked over Donner’s head and saw six new-formed needles of blue glass hovering. They were aimed at my eyes and throat.

  I shot a hard glare at him. “If you follow through on that attack, I will kill you. Your parents might be able to kill me immediately after, but you will be dust. And it will be considered an act of war against the L.A. hub. Do you really want a thousand demons hitting town, taking on every Villager they see? I would also think such a move against a demon clan leader would be a violation of your own laws. It would certainly violate your non-aggression pact with the human world. By the way, killing me will bring down the wrath of two fey kingdoms on you as well. I am a fey lord aligned to the Winter Court. I’m also the most direct heir for the dragon throne. They might not care much for me, but they won’t suffer the indignity of having dragon royalty murdered by outsiders.”

  Dimitur said, “Donner. Stop.”

  “But Dad, you know he needs killing.”

  “And there’s one more thing you ought to know.” I finished my OJ and put the glass down. “Do you understand why I am called the Red Moon Demon when I’m not a demon?”

  Chrys glared at Donner, but at this last question, she turned a confused expression my way. “They do call you that. Why is that?”

  To guarantee my long-term safety, I needed to tip my hand, just a little. “When the moon turns red, what you are seeing in the sky is not the real moon, but its twin from an alternate universe, another reality breaching our time-space continuum. There is a being on that moon, the Red Lady. She was once a dragon, before magically evolving into a goddess. The fey’s Wild Hunt once went against her. They were mercilessly crushed. She is psychotically obsessed with me. If I die, she will appear in the Village. You might stop her, but not before she kills hundreds of thousands.”

  “You have a girlfriend?” Chrys asked.

  “I have a harem actually. The Red Lady isn’t in it. She doesn’t wait in line. When she gets needy, she just magically pops in and kidnaps me. It’s hell being so irresistible.”

  Donner’s floating glass needles dissolved away. His eyes were wide as he stared at me. “You have a harem?”

  I smiled back. “Sure. It’s hard keeping so many hot women happy. If only I had some strong young Villager to help me with that. Ever fucked three were-kitties at the same time?”

  His eyes glazed over as he imagined it.

  His mom frowned at him. “Wipe the drool off your chin, Donner. You are not sleeping with the enemy. You’ll get fleas.”

  Dimitur suppressed a smile, nodding agreement. “All we need is for you to get taken hostage by a harem. Talk about Stockholm Syndrome waiting to happen…”

  Donner’s face clouded with disappointment. Scowling, he returned his attention to his pancakes, stabbing them viciously with his fork.

  Dimitur said, “The Red Lady, huh? I see we in the Village are not as well informed as we need to be.”

  “Is she better in bed than I am?” Chrys asked.

  “You are beyond comparison,” I lied.

  “Can we hurriedly change the subject?” Dimitur asked. “There are some things a father doesn’t want to hear.”

  “Change the subject to what?” Chrys asked.

  He pointed his fork at her. “You were told to keep in touch. We all nearly died of cardiac arrest when we went to your hotel room and found it had been turned into a battlefield complete with dead bodies. The police wouldn’t tell us anything. We had to bribe the hotel desk clerk to learn that you’d been carried off—nearly naked—by a man who may well have been a serial killer.”

  I thought back to the phone call she’d made in her bathroom while I killed my attackers. I’d assumed she been contacting her family, letting them know about me. Apparently not. That left me to wonder exactly who she’d been tipping off.

  I smiled sweetly at her. “Excuse me. I’ve got to visit the boy’s room. Be right back.” I stood, scooting back my chair, edging out of the screened-off niche. I crossed the main space of the restaurant and followed a sign to the restrooms. Inside the men’s room, I locked the door and wandered to the back wall, taking out my cellphone. I called Imari. Her voice spiked into my ear. “Caine! Where the hell are you? You were supposed to pick me up, not Zero-T. You are supposed to be under lockdown while we investigate these mercenary assaults.”

  “I’ve got it all under control.”

  “Under control? Half the cops in Vegas are looking for you as a person of interest in numerous mass murders.”

  “Just call in the local magic-users guild and have them spell-wipe the witnesses. Blame it on the Trucker’s Union, or maybe the Navajo mob.”

  It was how we did things back in L.A.

  Imari sighed across the connection. With what was probably a great deal of effort, she shifted to a sexier, slightly wheedling tone. “Look, Caine, I’m your official war leader, the First Sword. You’re supposed to let me stand between you and danger. You are the head of the clan now. That makes me your right hand. Please. Let me do my job.”

  Damn. I hate it when woman get reasonable. It makes them so much harder to deal with.

  I said, “Listen, I’m making serious progress in tracking down these dragon-sponsored mercs. There’s an extra-dimensional connection that is going to take finesse to manage.”

  “More reason I should do it instead of you. You’re as subtle as a zombie Armageddon.”

  “Now that is a hurtful thing to say.” Manfully, I held back a distraught sob. No, wait. That was a touch of indigestion. Maybe a reaction from the poison cloud I’d been exposed to earlier.

  “But true,” Imari said. “At least take Zero-T as back-up while you go around aggravating the unknown universe.”

  “That would be cruel!” I protested. “He’s in Vegas on vacation, to play in a poker tournament.”

  “He’ll do his duty by the clan,” she said, “or I will stake him over burning coals with a honey-dew melon in his mouth.”

  I figured Zero-T was there with her, listening, possibly rolling his eyes. Imari wasn’t usually so descriptive in her speech. I figured she was impressing him with her seriousness.

  “Fine. As long as he knows it’s your idea. Send him over to the Pancake Villa on…”

  “I know where you are. I’ve just placed a magical lock on your location. Don’t leave until he gets there.”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “You were never a scout.”

  “Not for lack of trying. Girl Scouts wouldn’t have me. They didn’t believe I was a lesbian trapped in a man’s body—little bitches!”

  Imari sighed again. “I can’t imagine how you lived long enough to reach adulthood.”

  “There are some who would say I have yet to reach that goal.”

  “Everyone who knows you.” She cut the connection.

  I grinned at my phone then put it away. Just as I turned toward the door, a patch of shadow blacked it out. I expected one of Chrys’ family members to come walking through the shadow-portal. What I got was a
five-man force of mercs holding automatic weapons. From the comical expressions on their faces, they hadn’t expected me to be at their staging area when they arrived. These guys were good at finding me, but they lacked pin-point precision. I had to wonder how they were doing it.

  Pain ripped across my stomach like a chainsaw taking bites; payment for using the Demon Wings tattoo. It wasn’t real invisibility, just a You-Don’t-See-Me spell that kept their attention diverted. Infra-red goggles could see through invisibility, not my spell. Of course, that didn’t stop them from firing blindly once they got past their shock.

  Thunder filled the bathroom. Muzzles flashed. Casings clattered to the tiled floor. Slugs punched holes everywhere, shattering urinals and most of the sinks, riddling the dividers around the commodes.

  Me? I was over their heads, clinging with knees and one hand to a light fixture that wasn’t really designed to take a man’s weight. My other hand had morphed into a scaled claw with talons stabbing into the ceiling.

  The gunplay died down. On full automatic, magazines run dry fast. As the mercs reloaded, I dropped down from above, landing in their midst. The spell that shielded me not only caused them to ignore my image, but the sound of my landing. Oddly, I didn’t smell magic among them, though they wore numerous charms. I grinned. These guys had taken the gig, pretending to be paranormal, and had been hired as cannon fodder by someone who knew very well they were merely human.

  I guess I’ve been hell on the ranks of the preternatural mercs. Can’t be that many more teams out there willing to come against me.

  Rather than waste time killing these mercs—like so many cockroaches underfoot—I slammed through them, pitching myself into the shadow portal that brought them here. There was a blackout, the sensation of falling through fluctuating gravity fields, then I was in a warehouse someplace. Under me, on the concrete floor, was a shadow-drawn pattern that should not have existed in so bright a space. This was the spell that had created the portal. The surrounding walls were drywall, waiting to be painted. A high ceiling had a lower latticework dangling rows of LED lamps. The space itself was not yet in service as storage.