“Come on, you bastard, go down,” he growled, probably disliking the fact I could actually get by on a lot less oxygen than the humans he’d more than likely pulled this on before. Another squeeze and another crunch, this time one farther up across my chest. The damned asshole was powerful, I had to give him that. “More money for you if you’re alive, but if I’ve got to take you in dead, I’m good with that. Won’t be the first time I’ve gotten a bounty on a pair of pointed ears.”
Jonas was still moving. I spotted his foot jerking up and a brush of his knee at the corner of my eye. Still, Gibbons would take him out if he could, eliminating any witnesses. It didn’t matter that I was elfin. I was still a Stalker and an official law enforcement officer for SoCalGov. The cops might hate Stalkers, and not many people love my species, but I still carried a badge. That had to count for something, and Gibbons’s endgame was to get me down and taken out before anyone could see him. It was a good plan.
One I had no intention of letting him execute.
“Die, you damned son of a bitch,” Gibbons practically shouted in my notched ear, his teeth too close to my lobe for my liking. “What’s it going to take to kill you?”
“Hell of a lot more than what you’ve got,” I muttered between my teeth, unable to force more than a whisper out of my lungs. Red splashed across my vision, anger and frustration seeping over any rational thought I had left. I’d survived a hell of a lot and didn’t plan on dying in a parking lot, being squeezed to death by some overgrown bald yeti with bad teeth. “Ain’t dying today.”
Pressed up against Gibbons, I went with the weapons I’d come into the world with.
My teeth.
I sank my fangs into his face, digging down into the meat of his cheek, and latched on tight. His blood was hot and bitter, pumping out onto my tongue and down my neck. A bit dribbled down my throat, and I fought not to gag on its metallic taste. Rage and pain shifted the odor of his skin from an unwashed, embedded grime to something sour and ripe. Clamping down harder, I felt my teeth meet, and I jerked my head quickly, rending off a bit of flesh, and with a hard yank, I ripped his cheek clean off the bone.
Gibbons dropped me, howling and clutching at his torn-open face. Landing on my feet, I spat out the foul mouthful on my tongue, grabbed my knives, and went in for the kill.
Okay, sometimes there were more than two ways to win a knife fight, but it always comes back to the blade. Even with my face painted red with Gibbons’s gore and my teeth filled with the shreds of his flesh, I was going to peel him apart and crack his bones open so Odin’s ravens could suck out his marrow and shit out his fingernails like discarded shrimp shells.
“Kai, no!” Ryder yelled at me from somewhere past the murderous fog I’d pulled around me. I had Gibbons on his back, shoulders pressed into the asphalt, blood running in rivers down his increasingly ashy skin, and there was Ryder, begging me to be… merciful.
I was in no mood for mercy.
I wanted Gibbons dead. I wanted him to be splayed out on the ground, spatchcocked and bled white with only the thinnest flaps of skin holding his meat together. There were other voices, shocked murmurs and rumbles, warning someone else to stand back while another deeper voice—a woman’s voice, Sarah’s voice—urged people to let her through.
My knives were against Gibbons’s throat, their edges dipped down into his skin, and I dragged them down toward his Adam’s apple, peeling back a layer until a bit of pinkish serum dripped down the curve of his wattle. My knees were pressed down into his belly and crotch, pinning him. He could have tossed me if he wanted to risk slicing his own throat open, and I half wished he would try. Any shift of his limbs would be enough of an incentive for me to carve him open, and I wasn’t even sure I would wait for that.
“Kai,” Ryder murmured this time, his hand on my shoulder to pull me back. Gibbons groaned, the changing angle of my body digging into his crotch, and he pounded at the ground with his fists, barking his knuckles raw. “Come on. Get up. Jonas is fine. You’re fine.”
“Bastard tried to kill Jonas.” I debated driving one blade through his hand, twisting it around until the bones broke and he’d never be able to hold another weapon again, but I had a feeling in my gut his license was already in ashes, and the sirens on the wind meant Gibbons would be spending a lot of time staring at blank walls. “Tried to kill me. Give me one good reason I should let him walk.”
“Because you’re not a killer,” Ryder said, and from behind him, the small group of Stalkers who’d pounded up the walk to stop Gibbons snorted in a wave of varying disagreement. He gave them a lordly, dismissive stare, which they ignored.
It was always a good day when the Sidhe lordling got a good kick in his ego to remind him he was just another piece of meat like the rest of us.
“Boy, I’m okay,” Jonas said, shakily on his feet with Sarah propping him up. “Let the guys in blue handle him. You’ve got enough on your plate. You don’t need to be worrying about where you’re going to hide three hundred pounds of rotting flesh, especially since you live in a damned warehouse with no backyard. And you sure as hell aren’t putting that in my ground. Dogs will dig him up and play fetch with his skull before all the meat’s worn off.”
I got up off of Gibbons, moving gingerly when my ribs protested my straightening up, and he gave out another tortured groan when I gave him a final dig with my right knee. A police cruiser screamed up the curved drive, followed by two more, and an ambulance from Medical rode their tails. Sarah lodged Jonas onto the bench, ordering a couple of the Post’s security guards to keep Gibbons busy while she got the cops straightened out.
Ryder wiped at my face with a cloth and shook his head. “I can’t even leave you to patch things up with Jonas without you drawing blood. What happened to just talking?”
“I was talking.” I fought the swiping for a bit, then finally let him get it out of his system. My ribs were throbbing but seemed to be doing fine otherwise. Breathing in deeply didn’t make me wince, so as far as I could tell, my lungs weren’t pierced through. “Stop that. And if you put spit on that cloth and wipe my face, I’ll do to you what I wanted to do to Gibbons, but with my fingernails.”
Rubbing at my side, I spat again, trying to get the taste of human blood off my tongue. Then I spotted Martins, one of the guys I’d done runs with when Dempsey first brought us down to San Diego. Nodding at me, he smiled and held out his hand to another Stalker, a gaunt scrawny man barely old enough to grow a whisker on his chin but already with the cold, hard gaze of a seasoned hunter. The young man sighed and dug into his pocket, then handed Martins a wad of cash. Frowning, I cocked my head at Martins, wondering if I was going to have to worry about him next, when he cracked a grin at me.
“Told him you bit, but he didn’t believe me,” Martins called out, turning to head back down to the Post now there was nothing else to watch. “Drinks on me next time, Gracen. I owe you a beer.”
Twelve
NEWT WAS there to greet me by the time I dragged myself up to the top level of the tower the Court built for me. I’d left Oketsu in the courtyard below, eyeing the long garage still growing up out of the cobblestones near my tower’s front entrance. I didn’t trust the place enough to park my Mustang in something still struggling to grow walls, and if the damned tower took offense by that, there’d be nothing I could do. I still patted the wall and thanked it for thinking of me.