A Wolf at the Door

“Oh…um, yeah. It’s in my purse.” She fumbled it out.

“Call Tai. Tell him to meet us at the car. We need to get back to the hotel where it’s safe, okay?”

“I…” Nearby, someone knocked over a barrel, and she almost jumped out of her skin. I admit, I flinched too.

“Hey.” I tipped her chin up with one finger, making sure I could look into her eyes. “Call Tai. Let’s go.”

After a moment, she swallowed and nodded, making the phone call. There was no mistaking the tremor in her voice as she spoke to her bodyguard, and I noticed that Tai never asked what was wrong.

I kept hold of her elbow as we marched back toward the Town Car, ready to bolt and run if we had to, but there was nothing there. No stomach-twisting nausea, no goose bumps, no cold wind, no smell of damp soil. Just a plain, ordinary, movie lot, full of plain, ordinary movie people. No one even looked at us twice.

“Dante’s not answering his phone.” Just once, Gretchen hesitated in our hasty retreat. “We have to find him.”

“Do you have any idea where he was going, here?”

“No.”

“Then he knows his own way home. We’re not waiting.” I wasn’t going to be happy until I could get her back behind wards. Sorry, Dante. I wasn’t here to protect him.

Bobby had the Town Car door open when we reached it, Tai already behind the wheel with the engine running. I shoved Gretchen inside with little ceremony, then climbed in beside her. “Get us back to the hotel.”

We rode in tense silence all the way back to the hotel, Gretchen turning to look behind us often enough that I finally had to look too. Now, I’m not an expert at spotting tails or anything, but I truly didn’t see anyone following us. Still, I didn’t relax until we’d made it up to the penthouse and I felt the thin bubble skin of Cam’s protective wards slip over my arms.

Gretchen slumped onto the couch and dropped her head into her hands.

“What the hell happened?” Bobby finally broke the silence.

“He tried to kill me.” Gretchen’s whisper was barely audible. “He really tried to kill me.”

“Who? Who tried to kill you, honey?” Tai crouched down in front of her, gathering her hands into his, and I caught the faintest whiff of cloves. Almost instantly, I saw some of the color come back into Gretchen’s face, and the trembling in her fingers stopped. She took a few deep breaths, then gave Tai a grateful smile. Did she understand, I had to wonder? Did she realize he’d just magicked her into calm? Hell, did he even know what he’d done? It was a mystery to be pondered another time.

“I don’t think he was trying to kill you, actually.” Everyone looked toward me, puzzled. “I’ve been replaying that fight in my head, and he never went for you. He went straight for me.”

It was true. Twice, in my mind’s eye, I could see openings, moments when I’d left him with a clear path to Gretchen. Mega-bad on my part, but he hadn’t taken advantage of it. Either he sucked worse than I did, or he wasn’t interested in her.

“So what does that mean?”

I found a seat on the back of the sofa, picking at the leather stitching a bit. “It means this is about that.” I nodded toward her tattooed arm. “Your contract. Someone wants something from you, and they don’t want me in the way.”

Bobby frowned, waving his hand to get attention. “So who was this asshole? Did security get him? Did you call the cops?”

Gretchen snorted weakly, and I shook my head. “The cops can’t help. This thing…I’m ninety percent sure it wasn’t human.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘not human’?”

“I mean, I kicked that thing hard enough to put four ribs through a lung, and almost shattered my knee in the process. I don’t care how much muscle you have, a human body doesn’t stand up to that much punishment.”

“On drugs, maybe?”

Again, I shook my head. “Even on drugs, bones break. Joints fold.”

It took Tai, the nonbeliever, to ask the important question. “So…if it wasn’t human, what was it?”

“No freakin’ clue. I’ve never seen anything like it before. But I will say that this thing didn’t make a sound. Not one peep, not one groan, not one hiss. In my experience, that means whatever it was, it had no soul.” Voices came from the soul, offered a direct line to it even. People that I called soulless, like Gretchen, really weren’t. I mean, the soul was still in the body. But if it got yanked out? Poof, voice all gone. A creature like that would be able to mimic back other voices, but their own was forfeit.

The thing had looked human. Not unusual in the demonic world, really. Much easier to slip by unnoticed if you look like one of your prey. But like most otherworldly things, it had been off slightly. That blank, mannequin-like face, for example. Even in the era of Botox and silicone, I’d never seen a face that devoid of identifying marks. It meant something. I just had no idea what.

“Great.” Bobby sighed, running a hand over his cropped hair. “How the hell do you protect against something if you don’t even know what it is?”

“And there’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” I pushed off my seat, stretching a little. “First things first, I’m moving my gear in here. I can’t do any good if I’m clear down the hall when the shit hits the fan.”

“And what do you want us to do?” Bobby wasn’t standing at attention, but it was a near thing. The good soldier, waiting for orders.

Despite the fact that I desperately did not want to be the one in charge, there really was no way around it. I was that guy. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. “If this was a normal stalker type, what would