BROKEN BLADE (2 page)

“Heya, Kit,” TJ said, her voice a rough, gravelly drawl. She didn’t glance at me as she continued to go over things with Gio. She’d been doing the same thing every day for a week. The same material. Almost the same words. I think she was trying to get him used to her, the way she’d get a stray dog used to her voice before she tried to pet him.

If she tried to pet Gio, he’d try to take her hand off.

“Sexy-Sexy left in a bad mood,” TJ said once she finished with Gio. He disappeared into the back, like he couldn’t wait to be away from us people. People, bad. Smart kid.

I curled my lip at TJ.
Sexy-Sexy
. Yeah. Justin was that. And I didn’t care. He could be as sexy as Adonis and it wouldn’t matter. I didn’t care if he was in a bad mood, either.

“So what was up his very fine ass?” TJ stared at me as I moved to settle in behind the bar.

A werewolf took the seat just off to my right and grumbled something. I heard the words
beer
in there and served him up, added a floater of Red to it, the specially-made grain alcohol that would hit even the metabolism of shifter hard. Of course, if a human tried it, they’d likely keel over dead of alcohol poisoning after more than a few sips.

Shifters still burned through it pretty fast and it took a lot to get them drunk. We didn’t let them get drunk in here. Drunk and powerful didn’t mix well. Especially when you were a werecreature. But there was something just...relaxing about sitting in a bar, talking crap, shooting pool.

It wasn’t the best stress reliever in the world, but it worked as well as anything else, I guessed.

Giving him his drink, I turned to look at TJ. She was still waiting for me to answer her about Justin. I glared at her. “How am I supposed to know what his problem is?”

The werewolf dumped a fistful of bills on the counter—a hell of a lot more than the price of a beer. I scowled at him and fished out what I needed, leaving the rest.

Behind me, I heard a familiar whine—somebody else trying the wards. Anybody who came into TJ’s place had to fight them. Most people could get inside, but it wasn’t just as easy as opening a door and walking through. The wards would have their way with you and it wasn’t a fun way, either.

The wards resisted for a moment and then yielded, spitting somebody out onto the floor.

For a second, my heart stuttered.
Dark haired…cat
…

No
. We don’t think about him. Not ever.

But it wasn’t him. This werecat was tall enough, but too leanly built. Too elegant.

Dressed too nice for Wolf Haven and that had my instincts humming. As he started for the bar, I turned my attention back to TJ, still keeping half of my attention tuned on the newcomer. He didn’t belong in Wolf Haven. Didn’t belong here at all.

That right there had me wary. People didn’t come to Wolf Haven just for the ambience. Either they came because they wanted to hide, because they had no place left to go…or because they were looking for something. Somebody.

And automatically, even though it did me no good, I flexed my wrist.

“So what did Sexy-Sexy want?” TJ asked.

“You realize he has a name, right?” I asked, although I didn’t know why I bothered. If TJ had decided she was going to call him
Sexy-Sexy
, then Justin might as well add that to his Banner ID. “Look, he’s just aggravating me. I pissed him off. He pissed me off. End of story.”

“What’s he want?” TJ asked.

“Shit. What is this, twenty questions?” I glared at her and then looked at the werecat sitting at the bar, regarding us with unreadable eyes. “What do you want?”

“Redcat whiskey. Neat.”

I sighed and got it for him. High-end stuff like that never used to be served here, but over the past month, more and more weres were showing up, asking for it.

TJ believed in supply and demand.

I dumped it in front of him as TJ said, “He ain’t wrong, you know.”

“TJ. Drop it.”

“This isn’t your place anymore.”

“TJ...” I picked up the bottle of Redcat and turned to face her. “If you don’t drop it, I’m dropping
this
.”

Her eyes narrowed on my face. “That shit costs a thousand a case. If you drop it, I’ll beat it out of your ass.”

Somewhere out in the bar, somebody growled. Swinging my head around, I glared out over the bar and tried to figure out where it had come from. The wolf still sitting at the bar? The cat? What the hell—?

Both of them seemed fixated on their drinks and it had seemed too faint to have come from so close.

Brushing it aside, I switched my attention back to TJ. “You are so full of shit, it’s amazing you don’t reek of it. You won’t touch me and you know it. Now are you dropping the discussion or am I dropping more than a hundred bucks worth of booze?” I waggled the bottle in the air and held her gaze. She might be bluffing, but I wasn’t. Maybe it made me childish, but I’d decided a little bit of regression felt good. I hadn’t felt
good
in a long while.

“You can’t hide forever, Kitty.” She blew out a sigh and then shrugged. “You know that.”

“I don’t plan to.” I put the Redcat back on the shelf and washed my hands. “I’ll die sooner or later. That’s good enough for me.”

Chapter Two

Two vampires walk into a bar...and naturally, it had to be mine. Of course, it wasn’t the opening for a funny joke, either.

Gio had been on his way out, two cases full of booze in his skinny, strong arms, but from the corner of my eye, I saw him. Absently, I noted the way he stopped in the doorway, just out of sight of the vampires, watched the way he eyed them, saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. And then, as quiet as he could be—and being a were, that was pretty damn quiet—he backed away.

I might have thought more of it, except I was dealing with my own level of panic and it was climbing higher and higher all the time as the vampires decided to settle at the bar just a few feet away.

Vampires.

My hands were sweating.

Why were
they
here? Vamps didn’t come to TJ’s much. She didn’t like them and the feeling was pretty mutual. She didn’t offer safe passage to people she didn’t like and the blooddrinkers were outnumbered five to one in Wolf Haven. Wolf Haven was pretty much lawless territory and everybody knew it.

The few vamps who managed to survive here usually did so because they struck bargains with the right people.

But no vamps struck a deal with TJ. TJ just didn’t strike deals. She did business and if she disliked you, it was entirely possible she would sooner set your ass on fire than do business. Part of me hoped desperately that TJ would take a rampant dislike to them.

I shouldn’t have lingered around to help cover tonight.

The wererat who usually handled the bar after dark wasn’t coming in and Gio had just hightailed it out of here. Just thinking about the vampires was enough to leave me half sick. My gut clenched into a tight knot and bile battled its way up my throat.

I swallowed it down and made sure I had everything under control before I approached them. Lingering over the empties, I shoved them into the dishwasher, then checked to make sure my hands were steady.

They weren’t. The fine tremor would have been unnoticeable to humans, but a vampire would notice it in a heartbeat. Instinctively, my mind started to fall back on the one thing that had always steadied me.

I am aneira
…

Immediately, I stopped myself.

That wasn’t true anymore. I wasn’t the warrior I’d once been so I had to rely on something else to get me through.

I shot them another look from the corner of my eye.

Evaluate your target, Kitasa
—

The voice of one my aunts crept up from the well of my memories. Unwelcome at most times, but just then, it served to focus me. Target. Enemy. Same thing, right?

Okay. Evaluate.

They were young—younger than Jude. And they were on my turf now. I had a mean-ass gun strapped to my thigh. TJ had no issues with me carrying the weapon in the bar now, although before she would have raised hell. The ammo in that gun would take down an elephant. Or a vamp.

The sight of them still had my mind spinning away to dark and ugly places where time had no meaning and everything was pain and blood and hopelessness.

Now you’re mine, and nobody will come for you
...

Jude’s voice, a sly whisper in the back of my mind, even now.

It didn’t matter that he’d been wrong.

It didn’t matter that people had come for me.

It didn’t matter that I’d even managed to get out of that hell-hole on my own.

Yeah, I’d had a different idea of escape planned—the
permanent
kind.

It didn’t even matter that he was locked inside a silver-lined box for the next five decades, his punishment for kidnapping a fellow member in good standing with the Assembly. That was how they’d phrased it. He’d kidnapped me and his punishment was confinement within a box.

I still had nightmares.

And I didn’t know what was going to happen once he got out.

The fear was still enough to choke me.

A hand jabbed into my ribs and I looked up, found myself staring into TJ’s dark brown eyes. She didn’t say a word, but her nostrils flared wide and she breathed in slowly. I caught the drift.

I was throwing off fear so badly, she could scent it on the air. So could everybody else in there. I had to pull it in.

I couldn’t rely on my sword, but I could rely on other things. Like the gun strapped to my thigh. I knew how to use it and I was fast. I could draw it in a second. I knew, because I’d timed myself. Turn, sight, fire. All in a blink. And a vampire’s blood would run dark, ugly red across the floor.

Slowly, the fear eased back, because I knew I could do it.

I was terribly aware of how quiet the bar had become. I twisted the top of a bottle of Corona and delivered it to the were in front of me. She was a jaguar and although the Corona had no effect on her whatsoever, it was the only thing she’d drink.

She smiled at me but the look on her face was distracted and even before I turned around, I knew who she was looking at. The eerie glow rolling across her eyes was worrisome. TJ was going to get pissed if all of them lost it in here.

“Oh, somebody had fun with you...”

I looked up and found myself staring into red, red eyes.

That fear tried to scream at me again.

This time, I screamed back.

Somewhere in the back of the room, a were snarled.

I blocked the sound out. The weight of the Desert Eagle strapped to my thigh was the only thing that mattered right then. Like most modern weapons, the Eagle hadn’t ever sang in the back of my head and sometimes I thought that made it easier. I didn’t miss his music and it wasn’t so painful now as I stared into those fiery eyes.

I missed my sword...I could see myself spinning, striking—

As those red eyes glowed, I forced myself to think past that. He was staring at my neck and that popped the bubble of terror as it tried to swell out of my control.

Fury punched through me, obliterating everything else.

“Not used to having vamps in here,” I said levelly. “We’ve only got some cheap blood whiskey on hand.”

Blood whiskey was the vampire’s poison of choice when it came to bars. The older one smiled, a closed-lip kind that didn’t show a hint of fang. “That will be fine.”

I nodded and went to pull it up. TJ kept the blood whiskey on hand just in case—she did like making her money. It wasn’t used often, a synthetic blood blend, mixed with alcohol. It was cut-rate whiskey, I could tell from the smell as I poured it, but TJ wasn’t going to waste her good stuff on blood suckers. I poured their drinks into the heated glasses and carried them back to the bar, set them down, but before I could I could move away, the older leech reached out, brushing my hair aside. “He was careless.”

I backed away, popping my wrist out of habit. I could imagine the weight of my blade…so easily. “No. He took great care, trust me. He did exactly as he wanted to do. Please don’t touch me again.”

The vampire inclined his head, nodded slowly.

His companion snickered. “He had a lot of fun, I think. You were all but ripe with fear just moments ago.”

My gut clenched and although the magic that connected me to my sword was gone, my hand started to itch and heat pooled there. It hadn’t done that in…months. The need to draw the gun was strong. The need to
hurt
something was stronger.

I could control it, as long as he didn’t make a move, but—

“I can show you it’s not always bad,” he whispered, flashing fangs at me.

I drew the Eagle and leveled it at his head before the last word had even left his lips.

The red in his eyes burned hotter, brighter.

“You can’t kill me with that.” Cold crashed through the room.

“Want to bet?” I cocked my head and studied him. “You’re no more than thirty, thirty-five at the most. That’s just a baby. If I bury enough silver in your brain, you’re dead, and I mean for-real dead.”

He swayed, the moves oddly snake-like. “You’d never be fast enough.”

I kept my focus on him. “Yeah? You sure about that?”

His partner laid a hand on his arm. “Edison. You’ve upset her. Perhaps we should—”

The younger one leaped.

Vaguely, I was aware that the older one misted away. Edison, though...he came at me in a rush. I aimed, squeezed.

His head disappeared in an explosion of blood, brain and bone.

As his lifeless body dropped to the floor, I lowered my gun.

Nobody ever thought I was fast enough.

“I meant no harm in coming here.”

The other vampire appeared behind TJ.

She tensed but said nothing, stroking a hand down her crossbow.

I stared at him.

Out in the bar, there was chaos. Shifters were snarling and growling and in general, acting the way predators did when something died. I wasn’t going back out there. Goliath was working the bar, something he only did in times of crisis.