Green Flame Assassin (Demon Lord series, book 2) (26 page)

She turned, bringing my mouth back to her breast.

I bit her nipple, tugged with my teeth, released her, and licked where I’d inflicted injury.

Her arm tightened around me.  “Inside, now!”

I ignored her demand, moving my mouth to her other tit, using a hand to caress the breast my lips had just abandoned. 

Her moan became a gasp.  She bared fangs at the ceiling. 

I kissed her lips with bruising force, my self-control crumbling as my tented pants ground against her.  Our tongues were mingled flames in each other’s mouths.

I starred into her pink-star eyes.  Their radiance masked her features with a haze of light, stealing a bit of her humanity.  “Finish the job,” she said, “or I’ll find someone who will!”

A harsh bark of a laugh escaped me. 

She blinked, surprised by whatever she saw in
my
eyes, clawing at my clothes, ripping them to tatters in seconds.  My belt fell away.  I kicked off my boots, a cold gust of air-conditioning coming out of nowhere like a phantom caress.  I hung over her, preparing to thrust home.

“No.”  She shoved me across the coffee table to the floor beyond.  “I told you before, I will not be one of your whores.  I do the taking.” 

A goddess of the hunt, she towered on the couch, unconcerned about the weak light that slanted across her lean body.  Her hair lifted like raven wings as she sprang over the coffee table, falling on me like a curse, biting my neck lightly, playfully, drawing a little blood.  She seized my manhood, and guiding it into paradise.  Releasing my throat, her lips sought mine.  She crushed her breasts against me, rasping her whole body against me in fierce demand.

As she bounced magnificently, my voice matched her roughness.  “Fine, but next time, I have a schoolgirl uniform you’ll be wearing.”

“Bring it, and you’ll be wearing it.”

EIGHTEEN

“Never Superglue diamonds to the bottom

of a pool, too many women will drown”

                                  
          —Caine Deathwalker

The morning sun was a bright blaze, not at all intimidated by the body parts strewn about.  The blood splatter was easy to see, not so the tracks left behind by the assassin’s beast.  The sand was not good at keeping imprints.  We were a few miles east of downtown Sacramento, along the American River.  The water color was off from what I’d imagined, too much gray.  And the level was low, revealing a modest strip of beach.  The thick sand, mixed with small rocks, was nothing like the tidy beaches in L.A. 

Josh had a broken branch.  He poked a chunk of dead pookas on the beach.  The water pony had definitely seen better days.  The human-looking water fey from the restaurant last night stood in a knot.  Their natural skin tone was showing now, an icy blue.  They had closed slits in their neck, gills not currently in use.  They were taking pains not to get blood on their bare feet.  Their silken clothing—what little they wore—shimmered aqua blue, purple, and sea foam green.  Pale-faced, arms crossed as they murmured to each other, they radiated a fierce anger.  I left it up to them to cover the scene with their magical glamour so clueless humans entering the area might stay that way. 

Nothing here, move along.

All we needed was someone calling 911, or snapping a phone picture of us for their Facebook page.

Kat was by a sapling, studying one of the smaller pooka.  I walked over for a better look.  Its long, graceful neck was marred by skin flaps that didn’t quite hide its gills.  The foal couldn’t have been more than a few years old.  The legs were ripped away.  Claws had left deep gashes.  Its chest gaped, broken ribs poking out like misaligned fangs.  The creature’s heart was gone, probably eaten while fresh.  I suspected the same was true for other internal organs.  With its mouth open, I saw its second row of teeth were still breaking the gums.  The foal had not yet made its first kill.

That’s no way to go.

Josh followed me over to Kat.  His stare skimmed her, feeding hungrily.  “Kat, you’re all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”  Her crisp voice was cool, untroubled.  Fey carnage might be part of her regular day for all the emotion she showed.  I wondered how often she left dead birds on the bed back home for Josh.

He studied the blood-soaked ground and scattered body parts, and looked at me.  “Caine, what do you think?”

I looked at the ground where sand became actual dirt.  There were prints an inch and a half deep leading into the woods.  “I think I’m standing on the paw print of a five-thousand pound bear.”

“Damn,” Josh said. 

“Gonna be hard to kill,” Kat said.

I nodded.  “One big-ass bear.  Look how far apart the back and front paws are.  We’re talking about a beast that’s at least twenty-four feet.”  I caught Josh’s gaze.  “You ever see anything like this when you were with the PRT?”

He shook his head no, drawing a deep breath.  “I smell fading magic along its trail, cleaning away the animal’s natural scent.  The creature has power to burn.  Funny, how I never heard of a werebear this big.”

Squatting, Kat reached out and closed the baby pooka’s wide, shocked eyes.  “For no one to know of it until now, the bear must be new to the area, maybe even the planet.  Something that big doesn’t hide easy.”

“Which is exactly why we have so many dead,” I said.  “It’s using the river to get around.”

“Its trail doesn’t return to the river,” Josh pointed out.  “That might be a break for us.”

I saw movement in the trees.  The werekitties were helping us poke around.  Their bright chatter showed they thought this all some kind of game.  “Have your pussycats look for a den.  If we find a lair, we can get it while it’s pinned down.”  I moved under the canopy of the woods.

Kat punched a number on her phone’s speed dial.  Her voice was slightly brittle, “On it.”  I turned, feeling her stare a hole in the back of my head for the calling her people
pussy
cats, not really a respectful term I supposed, not that I cared.  Beyond Kat, the female leader of the water fey came up to us, her male companions a few steps behind.  They seemed nervous without the safety of the river immediately at hand.

Ignoring the rest of us, she spoke to Josh, “What are we dealing with here?”

I took a few more steps into the trees, following the bear tracks.  From the corner of my eye, I saw Kat press in close to Joshua, giving silent support, a sign of solidarity.  We might be helping the fey, but only a fool ever really trusts them.  I turned back, wanting to see how the wereliger would handle things.  He met the fey woman’s jewel-bright stare, making sure her attention was on him, not on Kat. 

“Best guess is some abnormal form of werebear that could hold its own with a Kodiak.  It’s a magic user as well, unless it’s hunting with the woman it travels with and the magic is hers.  These are the same two we ran into in Old Sac on the riverfront.  It looks like they’ve been using the river to get around.  That may change now that it’s been uncovered.  Its trail is headed away from the river now.”

“What do you want us to do?” the woman asked.

That she would ask that of a human male surprised me.  Something about Josh’s easy-going competence kept politics out of things.  The guy would make a great Master of the City if he only wanted the job.  

I kept pulling away, walking deeper into the woods, voices fading with distance.  I warmed up my
Dragon Sight
tattoo.  Along my spine, the skin burned like hellfire.  I blinked a few times, clamping down on a breath that wanted to
hiss
past my teeth.  The pain backed off, fading, leaving me with the ability to see lingering traces of magic.  The paw prints had a phosphorescent green glow.  The edges of the light tattered, fraying as I watched.  Following the glowing hotspots was easier than reading impressions.  This would let me move a lot faster. 

As I slipped past tree trunks, I noticed the glow-prints becoming smaller, but not suddenly weaker.  The spacing between tracks became smaller and smaller.  I stopped and felt the trail, using my fingers to read a print.  I straightened up as Josh and Kat caught up to me, and pointed at the trail ahead.  “He turned human as he went through here.  We’re not looking for a beast anymore.”

Joshed looked at the trail.  “Still not leaving a scent.  If he gets some clothes on, he can hide by blending in with the first people he meets.”

“We still have to follow the trail,” Kat said.  “Who knows, he might run out of magic and we could get a sniff to make a later identification.”

  Eventually, the tracks crossed a bike trail.  Soon after, we found a bike with a bent tire and its near-naked owner.  Someone had knocked him over, broken his neck, and taken his clothes, leaving only a tee shirt spread over his manhood to leave him some dignity in death.  The tee shirt had John Lennon’s face on it and the phrase: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.