Death's Mistress

Page 3

God, how I loved easy money.
Chapter Two
The gray weather we’d been having for the last few days was making an encore, but I made it home before it started to rain. I parked my latest rusted hulk—a Camaro that had once been blue and was now a sort of mottled gray—on the overgrown driveway to one side of the house. My key hit the lock as the first few droplets spattered down.
The leaden skies made the battered old Victorian look even more dilapidated than usual. It had been built by a retiring sea captain back in the 1880s, when Flat-bush was Brooklyn’s happening new suburb. It still sat on a decent-sized lot with old-growth trees, but its glory days were over. The paint was peeling, the porch was sagging and the gingerbread trim was missing a number of pieces. It made the house look a bit like an old person with broken teeth. But it was home, and it was glad to see me.
After a moment, a frisson of welcome spread up my arm, and the door opened. I hopped over a hole in the floor, set a couple of takeout bags on the counter and lit an old-fashioned hurricane lamp. On full power, the wards caused the electricity to go bonkers. And while it still worked okay for larger appliances, constantly blinking lights made me dizzy.
I snared a beer out of the fridge and stood at the counter drinking it, flipping through the day’s mail. Someone had thoughtfully left it on the table, maybe because it was mostly composed of bills. My onetime roommate Claire had inherited the house from her uncle, and when she went off to bigger and better things, she’d left it in my care. And it needed a lot of it.
Most important, it needed a new roof. There was a worrying stain on the ceiling of my bedroom, which had started out roughly the shape of Rhode Island, but now looked more like North Carolina. Another few days of rain, and it was going to be Texas. And then it wouldn’t be anything at all because the battered old shingles were going to cave in on my head.
I filed the bills in the usual spot—the breadbox—and started to unpack the takeout when a clap of thunder struck directly overhead. It sounded like a grenade going off, and was near enough to shake the house. I froze, my heart in my throat.
Oh, please, oh, please, I begged, listening with all my might.
For a long moment I didn’t hear anything, except the rumbling aftermath of the weather and my thudding pulse. And then a thin, tremulous wail filtered down from upstairs. My blood ran cold.
Within seconds, the cry had intensified to orchestra-like crescendos. A glass in the kitchen sink trembled and then shattered, along with what remained of my eardrums. I put my head down on the counter and thought about sobbing.
In my somewhat extended lifetime, I’d been through war, famine and disease. I was a strong woman. I was a warrior. But I’d never had to face anything like this.
I really, really wanted to kill something, but there wasn’t anything handy.
There was nothing to do but pick up the shards of the tumbler and dump them in the trash. The horrible wailing that was threatening every window in the house stopped for a second, then two, and I took a cautious breath—before it began again with renewed vigor. I put the beer back and went to the liquor cabinet for whiskey.
I was cursing my roommates, who had cleaned out all the liquor in my absence, when I heard the soft scrape of a footstep in the hall. It should have been impossible, even with my hearing, to detect anything over that din, but some desperate instinct brought it to my attention anyway. Maybe because it was so unusual.
There were a lot of creatures around the house these days, lumbering and stomping across the old wooden boards at all times of the day and night. But there was no one who just stepped. No one who was here by invitation, anyway.
I could feel the muscles bunching under my skin, ready to explode outward into motion. My breath started coming faster, and a bead of sweat slid into my eye. It could just be the house settling, I told myself sternly as I reached for the cleaver. Don’t get excited.
Then the tiny sound came again, along with a squeaky protest from one of the boards in the hall. My mood lifted. Maybe I’d get to kill something, after all.
I crossed to the hall door and grasped the green glass knob, but didn’t turn it. Normally, the kitchen door was left open because the hinges screamed with protest whenever they were used. But someone had closed it, and now I couldn’t open it again without letting whatever was out there know I was coming. I was going to have to wait for it to come closer.
I expected to be able to tell a lot about the intruder even without sight. The weight could be guessed from the heaviness of the tread, the height by the soft susurration of breath, possibly even the sex if he or she was wearing cologne. But when I extended my senses, all I received was the shock of contact as my humanness brushed up against something Other.
My hand jerked back from the knob, but I still felt it: a fluttering sensation cascading along my skin, a sort of electric prickle. It wasn’t painful, sharp or hot. It was like being caressed by fingers of water, a gentle, melting touch that soothed and reassured and calmed.
And made my skin crawl.
I didn’t want to be reassured when there was a danger in the house. I couldn’t afford to lose my edge. But I could feel it slipping away anyway, my heartbeat slowing, my breath coming easier, the sweat that had popped out on my arms a moment before cooling in the night air.
Even more worrying, the house itself wasn’t reacting. The wards usually relished doing nasty things to trespassers. But the kitchen remained dim and silent, the only movement the flickering flame inside the lantern.
Its light danced off a row of chef’s knives on the wall, some battered copper cookware hanging from a pot rack, and a broom with a solid wood handle in the corner. Any or all of them would have been useful against a large range of creatures, but probably not one who could so completely fool the house wards. And that went for anything I had on me, too.
I was contemplating sneaking out the back way and doing a Spider-Man impression up to my room, where I had a cache of much nastier weapons. But then the shrieking upstairs stopped. It didn’t taper off; it just cut out between one breath and the next, like a hand had been clenched around a small neck. And suddenly I forgot about subtlety, tactics and strategy. I threw open the door and dove into the dark hallway, knife raised, a battle cry building in my throat.
And got slammed against a wall hard enough to rattle my ribs.
Rolling back to my feet, I threw a small table at my enemy, trying to buy myself a second to figure out what the hell I was fighting. But no such luck. I got a glimpse of huge, luminous eyes, with horizontal pupils like a goat’s, and then a ball of fire came out of nowhere, reducing the table to cinders and sending rippling shadows up the walls. I leapt forward, looking for a vulnerable spot, but a massive clawed foot covered in gleaming scales slammed down on me with the force of a jackhammer.
My back hit the floor with my neck wedged between two curved talons the length of daggers. My own knife had lodged in the ball of the paw pinning me to the boards, between a couple of overlapping scales, but I doubted it was more than a thorn prick to the enormous creature. I thrashed and fought to free my weapon, but only succeeded in driving it a little farther into the thick hide.
And somewhere above my head, someone cursed, “Cut it out already!”
I paused at the very human-sounding voice, but I still couldn’t see. And then a thin ribbon of flame shot out of the darkness and lit a row of candles on the wall, all at once. It was a good trick, but I was in no position to admire it. I was too busy staring at the sight of a large dragon wedged into my narrow hallway.
It didn’t look very comfortable. Its small black wings were squashed against the ceiling, its huge legs were up around its neck and its elongated snout was sticking haphazardly out between them. The only part it appeared to be able to move was its foot, which was leaking a stream of black blood.
“That hurts like a bitch!” It bent its massive head a little closer to take a look at the damage.
I just stared.
An acre of pewter scales was broken by a ridge of gleaming amethyst down its back. Two horns the color of molten glass sat on its head, framing a tuft of absurd lavender hair. It matched the creature’s eyes, which were creepy as hell, but had irises the color of pansy petals.
A nictitating membrane slid first across one great eye and then the other as the dragon regarded its wounded foot. After a moment, it transferred that alien gaze to me, and the whorl of scales across its cheeks took on a vaguely purple tint. “You stabbed me!”
“You broke in,” I said slowly, in complete disbelief. Because I’d seen a lot of strange things in Brooklyn, but a dragon wasn’t one of them.
“I did no such thing!” The huge snout grimaced, showing an awful lot of teeth. But the voice was melodious, almost hypnotic, sliding like a drug into my veins. It soothed my racing pulse back to normal in spite of everything I could do to stop it. I needed the energy of anger to fight, but all of a sudden my body was contemplating having a snooze, and my muscles were going limp and noodle-y.
“I don’t usually argue with anyone capable of crushing the life out of me,” I said, fighting back a yawn. “But yeah, you did.”
“It’s my house!” A fold of skin that had been held flat against the creature’s back suddenly opened, spreading upward like translucent fan to frame its long snout. “What are you waiting for?” it demanded. “Get it out!”
I assumed “it” meant the knife, so I resumed tugging on it. “It would help if you’d let me up,” I said after a minute.
“Are you going to throw anything else at me?”
“Are you going to eat me?”
The eyes did the creepy sideways blink again. I was starting to wonder if that was the dragon equivalent of an eye roll. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dory! You know damn well I’m vegan.”
The foot rose and I slid out from between the gigantic toenails. They were black at the roots, shading to gray and then clear at the ends like the horns. Except for a few spots where flakes of bright red appeared. They looked suspiciously like nail polish, which was when I decided to stop thinking at all.