Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(61)

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You haven’t finished sharing. You seem like the kind of person who will be bothered by leaving things unfinished, so I saved you the trouble of tracking me down.”

Stay civil. “How magnanimous of you.”

“I can be. I can be a good friend or a terrible enemy.”

“So, you’re saying you’re not very good at being an enemy?”

He shrugged. “Well, you could ask my opponents for references, but none of them are around anymore.”

Right. I resumed my climb, keeping my face calm. “We had a deal. We traded information. You got yours. Go away.”

“You kept things from me. Important things.”

“Like what?”

“Like the boy in the St. Luke’s hospital and the girl the Gilliams are guarding.”

And how the hell did he find this out? “That’s none of your business.”

His eyes flashed. “That’s very much my business.”

He didn’t snarl, his tone was calm, but his voice had an undercurrent of menace that wasn’t wholly human. You could feel the wolf in him, watching, waiting, biding his time, separated from the world only by a thin layer of human skin.

My hands slid. They had greased the top third of the pole with WD-40. Assholes.

He watched me trying to scramble up. “Every time we meet, Ms. Ryder, you try to get away from me. Is there something about me that makes you uncomfortable?”

Everything about him made me uncomfortable.

I slid again. Damn it.

Derek jumped up fifteen feet in the air and sliced through the phone line in a blur.

I slid off the pole and landed by it, turning so my back was to the wood. And he was right there, a foot away. His hood was down, and his eyes were on fire.

“What’s the deal with the pole?”

“I like climbing poles in my spare time.”

“Yesterday someone killed an iron hound a mile and a half from St. Luke’s Church and called it into Biohazard.”

If you killed a weird magical thing in Atlanta’s city limits, you had to let Biohazard know so they could pick up the corpse and quarantine it on the off-chance it decided to sprout twelve legs and a mouth lined with teeth and went off looking for human snacks. I had called it in from the hospital’s reception desk.

“The Honeycomb is the only place near Atlanta that spawns iron hounds.” Derek’s voice was dangerously intimate. If he really hated someone, he would speak to them in that tone just before he killed them. “Now you’re here, cutting a cable leading into the Honeycomb. Is that a phone line?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m waiting,” he prompted.

“For what?”

“A confirmation.”

“Do you really need me to add anything? You’re doing well on your own.”

His flat demeanor broke and frustration spilled forth. “Damn, you test my patience.”

Alarm shot my senses into hyperdrive. “You gave me a vague description of a box. You didn’t tell me what the box does, what it’s made of, or who has it. Considering how little you offered me, what I told you is more than fair. Stop following me around. Can’t you take a hint?”

His eyes ignited. “Not this time!”

A vibration pulsed into my back through the pole. Another. A little aftershock shivered through my feet. Something shook the building.

Derek clamped his mouth shut.

I held still, listening.

A deep rumble announced rocks falling to the right, where the Honeycomb Gap dropped off into a chasm.

He pulled off his hood. I grabbed Dakkan out of my sheath and screwed it together.

A thick pungent stench rolled over us in a viscous cloud. It smelled like wet fur, swamp, and rotten fish, perfumed with a spritz of skunk.

I gagged.

Next to me Derek locked his teeth, making the muscles in his jaw stand out. Strong smells and sounds hit shapeshifters much harder, and this reek was beyond revolting. It stuck to you, coating the inside of your mouth.

The building trembled slightly. A dry scratching noise came from the wall that faced the Gap, a crunching of weakened concrete under claws. The dry sound moved to the left and we pivoted with it.

Crunch.

Crunch. Like some enormous lizard crawling around the building, climbing the walls in a lazy spiral.

Crunch. Tiny chunks of concrete shivered on the floor. We’d made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, following it. Now we faced the street.

Crunch.

Silence.

We waited.

Above, ragged clouds crept across the sky. A Stymphalian bird shrieked, gliding on the air currents. A wasp landed on the concrete next to me and crawled around on segmented legs.

Derek looked up.

A frog-like head, five feet wide and shaggy with long dark green fur, stared at us from above the wall with big red eyes. Two yellowed horns, stained with dried blood, curved from the sides of its head, pointing up. Two saber fangs, almost the same size, protruded from the enormous maw studded with conical teeth. The teeth fit together with unnatural precision, like a bear trap. If this thing caught you in its mouth, it would cut you in two.

Thank the universe I brought lemon juice. The next time I saw Sienna, I would bring her all the marzipan ever.

The hodag sniffed the air with a flat, black dog nose the size of a basketball. A gob of mucus slid out of his left nostril. Ewww. I had seen one of these before, years ago. They were native to Wisconsin. The Honeycomb was the last place I would’ve expected to find it. And such a big one too. There was only one way for a hodag to grow that big.