Armageddon Rules (5 page)

Ari rocked back in her chair, her mouth crumpled into a frown. “I don’t want someone to love me for what I am. I want them to love me for
who
I am.”

I understood that. “You’ve at least got to tell me his name.”

“Wyatt.” Her eyes got this distant haze in them, and a smile crept across her face in spite of the bite marks.

“What are you going to tell him when he sees you bitten like that?” I went to the cupboard and took out a box of adhesive bandages, sticking them to her until she looked like a mummy.

Ari grinned. “I’m going to say I volunteer at a shelter for dogs with neurotic biting tendencies, and I tried to take six of them for a walk at once.” The only dog walking Ari did was when she’d take Yeller out for a walk at night, when people could mistake him for a Clydesdale.

“All right. But you have to tell him the truth at some point. Now we need to get going. Grimm’s going to be upset as it is. I need to feed blessing and curse.” I kept a pet cat once. We won’t go into exactly what happened to Mr. Sniffers, but let’s just say after that I kept things I didn’t have to feed or water, and planted an azalea bush in the courtyard in Mr. Sniffers’s memory.

My current pets were a mix of spells and creature, called harakathin. You can think of them as a combination ghost and cat. I’d say psychotic cat, but that would be redundant. In theory, these two were charged with giving me good fortune. Unfortunately, they rarely took my personal safety into account.

When Liam moved in, my jealous harakathin turned from silver-eyed monsters to green-eyed monsters. They spent the first few weeks tripping him in the dark, setting his clothes on fire, or turning the boiler up to 300 degrees while he was showering. The usual stuff.

So we bought two cat beds, one for each of them, and most days I dumped a can of cat food on a plate. Harakathin fed on attention. My daily routine mollified them, and I considered it practicing for a real cat. I opened two cans and put them near the cat beds.

Ari wrinkled her nose at the smell of cat food. “You’ve been making offerings to them?”

“Works even better than naming them. Call it community service. Feed my blessings, feed the hungry.” I left the plates sitting for a minute while I waited. The lights dimmed and flickered, but at least the pipes didn’t break and the drywall didn’t crack. “Can you see them?”

Being a seal bearer, Ari had spirit sight. That meant she could see all the things that went bump in the night, whether they wanted her to or not, whether she wanted to or not. Being relatively normal, I relied on her to tell me where my pets were. Ari glanced around. “No. They’re here, but I can’t see them.”

I’d never seen them even take a bite of cat food, but just offering it to them made all the difference. Most days, they simply stayed at home unless called. I opened the window and picked up a wrought-iron triangle Liam made for me. When I clanged it, a man’s head popped up out of the Dumpster. “Rapunzel?”

“How many times do I have to tell you that’s not my name?” I went to my kitchen and pulled the steak and potatoes left over from Liam’s birthday dinner out of the fridge, then lowered them down in a basket tied to a rope made of hair. “You can have steak. The cat food goes to—”

“Rapunzel.” He handed the paper plate to a mangy tabby, who rubbed up against him. “She’s my good girl.”

I shut the window, grabbed Ari, and headed back to the Agency. Definitely a Monday.

Four

THE MOMENT I passed the staff door, I heard Liam’s deep laugh coming from Grimm’s office. I ran to meet him, not bothering to knock. Liam stood nearly six feet tall, with a barrel chest and arms that could tear your own off. Being a blacksmith will do that to you (give you arms, not tear them off).

“M!” He crushed me in a hug, picking me up off the ground. “Sorry about this weekend.”

I was still angry, but it was hard to be held and angry at the same time, so I put my head on his shoulder and relaxed. Then my eyes snapped open. I pushed back and looked at him again as he set me down. Bruises covered both of his cheeks, and bloody patches clung to his knuckles.

I ran a finger along his eyebrow, wiping blood from it. “What have you been doing?”

He took my hand in his and put the other on my cheek. “The usual Monday things.”

Translation: making weekly rounds, reminding a few people that whatever else they had planned, this week was a bad week to get revenge on me. I’d made a lot of enemies. At least two queens wanted me killed on sight. An entire army of wolves wanted me dead for shooting their leader, and at one point the entire postal service wanted to see me returned to sender. For a while, I had assassins showing up every couple of days. All that changed when Liam moved in. My enemies probably still wanted to kill me but valued their intestines too much to try.

Grimm cleared his throat. “Now that you are finally here, I’d like to talk to both of you about an opportunity.”

“He’s not going to pose nude for the art college. We already had that discussion.”

Liam blushed and looked at the floor. I didn’t care how many times he did that before, I had my rules, and one of them was my boyfriend kept his boy bits between us.

“Tell me you’ve found a way to dull the curse. I’ve reached my yearly limit of burn cream. Any more and I have to register as a wholesale dealer.”

Liam snorted and a bit of smoke curled out of his nostrils.

Grimm crossed his arms. “Actually, I had quite the opposite in mind. I’ve been researching ways to trigger the curse and keep it active even when he goes to sleep.”

“You’ve been doing what?” My face flushed, and I put my hands on my hips. “Why?”

Liam looked to Grimm in a panic that I found completely appropriate.

Grimm disappeared for a moment, and flowing script filled the mirror, though in no language or alphabet I’d ever seen. His voice came from the mirror, though I couldn’t see him. “See for yourself, my dear.”

“Neither of us read hieroglyphics. Translation?”

Grimm reappeared in the mirror. “I will arrange to have you taught Vampirese at some other time. For now, let us simply say that the time has come for the oldest undead family to take their once-a-century dirt nap.”

I glared at Grimm, waiting for him to get to the part that involved Liam and me.

“Now, in the old days, this would be when peasants would descend on castles, coffins would be overturned, steaks driven through vampires’ mouths, and then garlic salt sprinkled on them.”

I nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Put me on a plane to Europe and I’ll get it done.”

“The vampires of today are not bloodthirsty monsters, Marissa. Sunlight won’t kill them, holy water only upsets them because their clothes have to be dry-cleaned. And I don’t want them killed. I want them protected for two weeks while they sleep.”

“But I never got to put a stake through a vampire’s heart before.” I’d accomplished most of the things on my bucket list in the first six years I worked for Grimm. I’d been buried alive in a coffin three times before I turned twenty-one. Found love with a man who loved me back. Heck, I scratched off “Get in a fistfight with a mime” my first week in the city. But vampire slaying remained on my to-do list.

Grimm sighed. “Marissa, sit down. A vampire’s heart does not beat, so I can’t believe you actually fell for such a simple ruse. It was the steak in the mouth that killed them. Today’s vampires are more enlightened. More evolved. They are vegans. If they consume meat products, the fire of their own hypocrisy burns them to a crisp.”

“What about drinking blood?”

“Honestly, my dear, do you believe everything you read? If it weren’t for vampire families celebrating Thanksgiving, tofurkey would have failed long ago.”

I always figured Vampire Thanksgiving involved carving up a redhead or something. We ate goose every year, because Grimm said it was more traditional. Also, every couple of months I had to find and kill another gold-egg-laying goose before it upset the markets. I could only fit so many of them in my freezer.

My frustration with the hours spent learning useless facts mounted. Particularly as Grimm must have known that it wasn’t right. “And crosses? I bet they can’t hurt them either.”

Grimm creased his brow, thinking. “No, I believe that a cross could in fact harm one.”

“How?”

“Well, if the cross weighed several tons and fell on them. Or if it were mounted on wheels and moving at, say, thirty-five miles per hour and ran into one. Or if one sharpened the edges and swung it at a vampire.” Grimm nodded, more to himself than me.

“If they don’t drink blood, they don’t hide from the sun, and crosses don’t hurt them, they aren’t vampires. They sound more Californian than Transylvanian. Where, exactly, do we come into this?”

Liam took my hand. “The old vampire families are obsessed with the best guards money or magic can buy. They wanted a family of dragons to guard their keep, but ever since the treaty put dragons on the endangered species list, they aren’t available.”

The light went on in my head. See, agents were usually magical. Princesses. Half djinns. Liam accidentally got cursed a few years ago. He wasn’t half djinn, and if he ever wound up with even a trace of princess on him, I planned to take my knife and carve it out. He was, however, a were-dragon, doing time-share in his body with a curse older than the Roman Empire. A curse I accidentally put on him.

That’s why my enemies decided every week that this week they’d take up knitting or lean on the local grocer. Liam belched hellfire when he
wasn’t
angry. When he got upset, it was like the Incredible Hulk had a child with a Komodo dragon and a napalm factory. “No. I’m not letting you turn him into a dragon. You have any idea how many princes would love to add ‘slew the dragon’ to their list of accomplishments?”

“Tell her about the pay.” Liam looked at Grimm.

“I’d rather be dirt-poor than rich and alone,” I said, unwilling to look at either of them.

“Marissa, I give you my word I didn’t take this offer at face value. Indeed, I believed it some form of mistake until clarified. The senior royal family of the undead court has had thousands of years to accumulate money, and hundreds of years where they have collected magic.” Grimm stopped and waited for me to look up, where the page waited, the glowing script pulsing.

The number on the page looked like an international phone number or two. The second number had to be the amount of Glitter they offered. Since I’m completely non-magical, the metric system never made sense. Grimm tried to teach me once. He gave up when I told him Pedo-liters were how many creepy old men fit in a jar.

The numbers were big. Really big. So big, in fact, they stank of something rotten. “Fake,” I said, holding my hand over my nose to emphasize that Grimm got taken.

“I assure you, my dear, this is no mistake nor a fake. I have an escrow agency who assures me that they have in fact taken delivery of the payments, pending our agreement.”

I shook my head. “Still doesn’t make sense. Why would they need me?” I waited in the silence as the two of them looked at each other.

Liam turned toward me. “I need you. Need you to let me go. Need you to keep yourself safe for a few weeks. Not go challenging anyone to duels, or opening cursed sarcophagi, or running into poodle-filled warehouses.”

My stomach turned cold like I’d drunk a gallon of ice water. The last two years had been the happiest years of my life. I finally found someone who loved me, really loved me. I had friends and respect. “You really want to leave me?”

Liam got down on one knee like he was about to propose, and my heart skipped several beats. “No. Truth is, I’d rather die than leave you. But I want to be able to
be
with you. I’m tired of worrying about setting the house on fire, or having to swallow my steak tartare in order for it to arrive in my stomach well-done. I want to have a life with you. I want to have children.”

Grimm cleared his throat again. “Marissa, with that much magic, I could do almost anything.”

He meant he could finally cure Liam’s curse.

“No one has that much Glitter.” I ransacked my mind for reasons this couldn’t happen. “Even if they did, they’d use it, not give it away for two weeks of protection.”

Liam leaned in to speak to me face-to-face. “You’ve said Glitter is basically magic, right? And magic is basically hope, right?”

I nodded.

Grimm cut in. “My dear, you have to consider that hope would be poisonous to an undead creature. Of course they’d be willing to pay with it. It’s like when I pay the kobolds in nuclear waste. They believe they are getting a fantastic deal.”

I sat back in the chair with my eyes closed. Two weeks for enough magic to un-work the worst curse Grimm had ever seen.

Ever.

The deal still stank. “No. He’ll get killed by a prince. Or a team of princes. Or a nuclear strike.”

Grimm disappeared again and the mirror scrolled for minutes, page after page of mind-numbing legal jargon. “I’ve been drafting this contract for more than six months, Marissa. I assure you the vampires will take every precaution. The penalties against them if Liam were even wounded would cost them their castles, their bank accounts. He would be the final line of defense in an arsenal of traps designed to maim all-comers. Assuming one survives the labyrinth, then one of six teams of assassins would kill them.”