Club Monstrosity (13 page)

“How did the sale go, Rehu?” he asked softly.

The corner of the other man’s mouth lifted in a slight smirk. “Better than it would have here, actually. Americans have too many laws to prevent the looting of tombs. Even one’s own. But there are other countries where they are more . . . lax on their enforcement of international treaties.”

Alec’s frown deepened. If Rehu had unloaded his items overseas and made even more money, the motive for him to kill was certainly lessened.

“And just when did you haul your sorry ass back to the city?” Alec pressed.

Rehu looked at him with distrust and hesitation. Alec almost couldn’t blame him. After all, he had just burst into the guy’s apartment, and not on a friendly welcome-home kind of call.

“How is that your business, Wolf?”

Alec glared. “Just tell me.”

“Two months,” Rehu admitted.

Alec shook his head. The timeline worked for Rehu to be their killer, plus his being out of the country explained why he hadn’t turned to his revenge earlier. So some of the story fit . . . but other parts didn’t.

Which left Alec in a bit of a quandary. Did he tell Rehu he was a suspect in the murders and hope the mummy would react? Or did he keep it to himself and try to figure out another way to wheedle the truth out of him?

“Why the fuck are you here, asshole?” Rehu growled.

Alec arched a brow. Accusation was more fun.

“I’m just here to see what a murderer of his own kind looks like.” He smiled, though he felt no warmth toward the jerk. “
Asshole
.”

Rehu tensed. “Murder . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do, buddy.” Alec moved toward him a couple of steps. “I mean, if you and Kai are secretly hooking up like old times, if she got you this apartment . . .”

He trailed off as Rehu flinched slightly. Alec snorted in disgust. The normally strong Kai always fell for this guy’s bullshit.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, you dried-up gigolo.” Alec shook his head. “You always knew how to push that girl’s buttons.”

“What’s it to you?” Rehu snorted. “She tells me you’re banging the Frankenstein.”

“She’s not a Frankenstein—” Alec began, then shook his head. He was getting as bad as Natalie, always correcting that assumption. “Whatever. The point is, Kai
must
have told you about the murders in our group, since she’s so desperate to take you off the suspect list.”

Rehu only shrugged and his expression was unreadable.

Alec shifted in annoyance. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. But you’re on it, Mummy. As far as I’m concerned, you’re at the top of the suspect pile.”

Rehu’s nostrils flared. “You had best shut it, Wolf. I had nothing to do with it.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you because a couple of millennia ago you were second or third in line for a throne in Egypt?”

“You will believe me because I’m telling the truth,” Rehu said through tightly clenched teeth.

Alec grinned. “You know Drake is way more royal than you are. At least he’s got a title.”

Rehu moved on him. “Get out.”

“I don’t think it was a mistake that you picked the weakest among us to attack,” Alec pressed, interested in Rehu’s response to his accusations, but also just because he enjoyed screwing with him. “I mean, you turned a crowd on Ellis, not exactly brave of you. And then Blob . . . a four-hundred-pound hoarder? Could that have possibly made you feel all tough, coward?”

Rehu rushed forward and swung, not with a fist but with an elbow. It slashed across Alec’s forehead, breaking the skin and sending him sprawling backward with stars flashing before his eyes.

The mummy took the opportunity and flung himself on top of Alec, swinging fists and throwing knees like he’d been watching UFC pay-per-views in his spare time.

Alec shook off his surprise and swung back, catching Rehu on his square-jawed mug a couple of times himself.

“Fuck you, asshole,” Alec grunted as he absorbed another set of punches. They hurt, but both of them knew they weren’t going to permanently injure him.

Still, his body
was
breakable and he could feel ribs popping and capillaries exploding.

This wasn’t going to be fun over the next few days. And with the full moon less than a week away, all his feelings and sensations were beginning to heighten. So it was going to suck even more, even if he healed all the faster.

“Enough,” Rehu grunted, and flung himself off. “I haven’t killed anyone in your pathetic group . . . yet. They’re not worth my time or my sweat.”

He reached down and caught Alec by the neckline of his T-shirt and dragged him to the door. He tossed him in the hallway.

“And neither are you.”

Rehu slammed the door, leaving Alec to lie on the dirty carpet, blood seeping from his head, his lip, even his arm, though he couldn’t remember if that was from throwing or receiving a punch.

He lay there for a long time, long enough for his body’s natural healing ability to start to go to work, then he dragged himself up and made his way back toward Natalie’s apartment.

When she got home, they had a lot to talk about. And he could only hope she would be nice enough to apply ice to his bruises while they did that.

13

Natalie checked her phone for what was probably the twentieth time in the last half hour. There were no messages. No texts. In the past, that would have been normal. Damn, in the past she wouldn’t even have checked.

But now things were different and the silence was starting to freak her out. She shoved the phone back in her purse and used her key to open the door to her apartment building. She glanced up the stairs with a frown.

It had been hours since she’d texted Alec the first time about Kai and Rehu. Then she texted again. And again. Then called his cell. Then the apartment.

Nothing. No response. In her heart she knew he was probably ignoring her, maybe even hooking up with some random chick he had met at a bar or something . . . but though she was annoyed, Natalie was also worried.

“Where are you, you stupid mutt?” she muttered as she trudged up to her floor and to her door. She knocked lightly and waited, but there was no sound from within the apartment to greet her. No dog-howling or breakfast-making today.

“The jerk isn’t even home,” she said with a sigh, and pulled out her keys to open the door. But when she turned the knob, the door opened without her clicking the lock open.

She froze out of pure instinct.

Yeah, she was a monster and that meant she had little to be afraid of in the scheme of things. But she was also a woman and a New Yorker. She did
not
leave her apartment unlocked. Ever.

Especially now, when someone was out there trying to figure out how to roast her alive in some kind of monster cleanse.

“Hello?” she called into the dim apartment. Did murderers, robbers, and rapists really answer to that kind of thing? In movies . . . except she knew movies were wrong, wrong, wrong when it came to most stuff.

“Natalie?” came a weak voice from the living room.

It wasn’t the voice of a murderer or a rapist that lilted through the hallway. It was Alec.

Natalie crossed the threshold, slammed the door behind her, locked the deadbolt, and raced into the living room. She skidded to a stop and stared.

Alec was spread out across her couch, but it wasn’t a comfortable, casual sprawl. His eye was black, his lips were swollen, and blood was caked along a big gash on his forehead and dried on his white T-shirt.

“Alec?” she whispered, almost as if talking too loud would make his injuries worse. In a few slow steps she came fully into the room. “Oh my God, are you okay?”

She dropped down to her knees on the floor next to the couch and started looking at Alec’s various injuries. Gash on the forehead, cuts and bruises everywhere, maybe even a couple of broken bones.

“I’m awesome,” he groaned. “Ow, don’t poke that.”

Natalie jerked her hand away from the cut she had been examining. “I need to call nine-one-one. We have to get you to a doctor.”

Alec lifted himself slightly from the couch as she moved for the phone on the table and the movement resulted in a yelp of pain from him. But he also said, “No! No doctors, no hospitals!”

“Is this a dogs-don’t-like-veterinarians thing, Alec? Because, seriously, grow up,” she said as she started dialing, but he swatted her phone away with a growl. She stared at him. “Alec, you got the shit kicked out of you. You could have a concussion or broken ribs or something very serious. Monster healing or not, this isn’t something to fool around with.”

He shook his head and his eyes suddenly glinted bright yellow in the dim light. “No. The full moon is, like, five days away, Natalie.”

She blinked. “So?”

He growled in frustration. “Things are starting to get . . .
complicated
for me. A doctor would notice. They would see I’m not . . . normal.”

Natalie stopped trying to reach her phone, which had slid across the floor just out of reach, and stared at him. To be honest, he did look a little more . . . wolfie.

“I guess I hadn’t thought about that,” she admitted. “I mean, you’re the most . . .
human
of all of us, at least most of the time.”

“Thanks, I think,” Alec groaned.

She edged closer. “So what exactly do you mean by ‘complicated’? I think I should know, if we’re living together.”

He flopped back against the couch and shut his eyes. “Everything is heightened, including pain unfortunately, but so is my ability to heal. All my chemistry is going crazy. A few tests and I’ll end up being a pincushion for some new disease . . . until I go all Wolf Man in the middle of the intensive-care ward. So please, please, no hospital.”

Natalie flinched. She got his aversion, for sure. She avoided hospitals, too, for fear they’d figure out the origins of all her kooky scars, or discover that she had the DNA of ten people floating around inside of her, making life interesting.

“Okay. I get it. I’ll, um, get you some ice and some bandages and some antibiotic ointment and I’ll see what
I
can do for you, okay?”

He let out a long sigh of relief. “Yes. Thank you.”

She looked at him for a moment more, then got up and moved toward the kitchen just a few steps away. As she opened the freezer and grabbed a couple of packets of frozen peas, she called out, “So what happened to you, anyway?”

There was a moment’s pause from the other room and then Alec replied, “I found Rehu.”

Natalie nearly dropped the frozen vegetables. “You did?”

“We were both right in our suspicions. Kai was hiding him in an apartment in the Meatpacking District.”

Natalie scowled. “That bitch.”

Except her nasty words didn’t really reflect how she felt. In that moment, she wasn’t mad . . . okay, she
was
mad, but she was also hurt. Since the beginning, she and Alec and Kai had been working together on this sticky problem. She had begun to like the Mummy Girl, despite her gruffness. Maybe they weren’t friends, but they were close to it.

And now Kai had betrayed that for a guy who’d gotten her killed, reincarnated, and then nearly killed, like, twenty times since then.

“After she left the place where I followed her, I knocked on the door and there he was.” Alec sighed. “Needless to say, he was a little pissed about (a) being found, (b) being found by me in particular, and (c) being accused of the murders in our little group.”

She moved into the space between the kitchen and the living room and stared at him. “So you just told him we suspected him? Way to go, Sherlock Holmes.”

He shrugged one shoulder and winced. “I wanted to see his reaction. Just for the record, it was displeasure. And he expresses displeasure with his fists.” He motioned at her. “Can I have that ice or what?”

“Oh, sorry,” she said and hurried over to him.

She knelt down and pressed one of the makeshift ice packs against the bruise on Alec’s eye. He winced and a low growl rumbled in his chest.

“Sheesh, okay, okay,” she muttered.

“Sorry about the growling, it’s out of my control,” he said with a shrug. “Stupid moon.”

He took the other ice pack and slowly lifted his shirt to reveal toned abs and a big bruise on his ribs. It was already purple and ugly and would only get worse.

“Alec,” Natalie whispered as she shut her eyes.

“It’s okay,” he reassured her. “You can hurt me, but there’s only one thing that can kill me, right? And Rehu didn’t have a silver bullet. Or at least he didn’t use it.”

“I
knew
Kai was lying about not knowing where he was,” she said as she got out the antiseptic goo and started dabbing it on the cuts on Alec’s face.

Alec nodded. “Yeah, me, too. Though I didn’t quite expect her to be visiting him with fucking coffee. Like Kai was in a chick-lit book that involved hot boys and Manolo Blahniks.”

Natalie blinked. “Which one? Wait—you know about chick-lit and shoes?”

Alec shifted and then winced in pain. “When the moon gets close, I have a hard time sleeping. I read a
lot
.”

“Okay, well, tell me more about Rehu,” Natalie encouraged, though she couldn’t help but smile at the thought of Alec flipping through girl books. She’d have to get him a few for this moon’s cycle . . .
if
they could work out this person-trying-to-kill-them thing.

“Once I managed to get inside, we had a . . . shall we say,
heated
exchange.” Alec flinched as he shifted the ice pack slightly. “He denied,
strenuously,
any involvement in the murders.”

Natalie shook her head. “So, let me get this straight. While he was beating you up, he told you he has no reason to hurt us.”

“Pretty much.” Alec sighed.

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m
totally
believing that.”

“But like I said, he didn’t shoot me with a silver bullet. Small favors.”

Before Natalie could reply, there was a pounding on the door behind them. Both of them tensed and Natalie peered over her shoulder.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Okay, you stay here. If that’s him on the other side of the door, he’s about to experience a damn monster he’ll never forget.”

She got up and started for the door as Alec called out, “Wow, my hero!”

Natalie ignored him and peeked into the peephole. To her surprise, and just a tinge of disappointment, Kai stood on the other side. Her arms were folded and her body language was angry and annoyed. But Natalie’s own anger and annoyance were a lot stronger and she almost pulled the door off its hinges as she opened it.

“What the fuck, Kai?” she snapped.

“What the fuck,
me
?” Kai answered as she shoved past Natalie and into the apartment. “What the fuck,
you
? Did your boyfriend go harass Rehu?”

Natalie tensed. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said as she followed Kai toward the living room. “And
you
weren’t supposed to know where
your
boyfriend was!”

“Well, that was a . . .” Kai trailed off as she made it into the living room and saw Alec on the couch. She stared at him with his bruised-up face and flinched. “. . . lie. Shit, what happened to you?”

Natalie folded her arms. “You get one guess. And it rhymes with Day-who.”

Kai spun on Natalie and her eyes were wide. “He didn’t kill anyone!” she said. Her tone was pleading.

Natalie had never heard that kind of desperation from Kai before. Normally the Mummy Girl was tough, certain, and no-nonsense.

Alec sat up a little. “Actually, I don’t believe he did, either.”

Natalie looked past Kai to stare at Alec in shock. “Seriously? After what he did to you? He beat you up, numbnuts!”

Alec covered a grin. “Yeah, but he didn’t kill me. And he could have, more than once. It made me wonder: If he’s trying to wipe us out, why wouldn’t he just shoot me right then and there in the apartment? Hell, he could have called it self-defense to the cops and probably not even have to clean up the body.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t kill you today.” Natalie threw her hands up in the air. “Because he intends to kill us in a certain order? Because he didn’t have a silver bullet handy? Because he likes your hair? I don’t know.”

Kai shook her head. “No, listen, he wouldn’t hurt anyone.” She stopped and looked at Alec again. With a shiver, she corrected herself. “Okay, he wouldn’t
murder
anyone. He’s just angry and a hothead.”

“Sounds pretty killer to me,” Natalie muttered. “Sociopath.”

“No. No, really. I
know
he didn’t kill anyone,” Kai insisted.

“How?” Natalie asked.

The Mummy Girl shut her eyes. “Because he probably would have started with me if he wanted to kill anyone. We have the deepest history. I mean, we sort of killed each other before, you know. And
I’m
the one who told everyone about the artifacts and got him kicked out of the group and everything.”

Natalie was going to retort, but cut herself off. “That . . . kind of makes sense, actually.”

Kai looked relieved. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe he knows something we don’t. He could have even been confronted by Trench Coat himself.”

Natalie folded her arms and glared at Kai, but before she could say anything snarky, Kai interrupted.

“Please. He could help us, I swear.”

Natalie shook her head and paced away without another word. If Alec wanted to forgive and forget and dismiss Rehu from his list of suspects, fine. But she wasn’t about to be so naïve.

“I’m sorry,” Kai added. “Really.”

Natalie looked at Kai. She’d certainly never heard her apologize to anyone before. Even when she made someone cry. Hard.

Of course, that someone had been Linda . . .

Alec shrugged. “I appreciate the apology, but this isn’t your fault, you know.”

Kai flinched. “Maybe not all of it, but a big portion is my fault. I—I should have told you all that Rehu was back in town. Especially when his name got brought up in all this murder business.”

“Yeah, you should have,” Natalie snapped. “Why didn’t you?”

Kai’s gaze drifted somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes and stayed there, even as her cheeks brightened to a dark red. “Come on, Natalie. You must know why.”

Natalie stared at her for a long moment and then shook her head. “How can you still love that ass? He got you killed the first time around, has almost gotten you re-killed how many times in the last ninety years or so?”

“I know, I know,” Kai groaned.

Alec nodded. “He’s just not a nice guy; you deserve better.”

“Did you get that from chick-lit, too?” Natalie asked. Alec shot her a glare.

Kai looked between the two of them in confusion before she shrugged one shoulder. “He’s a hard habit to break. I wish I could explain it, but I can’t. Either way, I’m so sorry that it led to . . .” She looked at Alec again. “That.”

Alec straightened up a little on the couch. “Come on, Kai. You might have kept the truth about Rehu quiet, and that wasn’t cool. But
you
didn’t beat me up. You can’t take responsibility for your jerk of a boyfriend’s actions. I don’t blame you.”

Kai breathed a sigh of relief, though Natalie could see she wasn’t totally convinced.

“I still have to make it up to you, though. Look, like I said, I’m going to go talk to him. He owes me big time, now that I see what he did.”