A Wolf at the Door

Dante frowned, looking me up and down. “Who the hell are you?”

This is the point where I started thinking “Oh shit.” I looked to Felix for answers, which should probably tell you how confused I was. “What happened to him?”

The eccentric sage shook his head sadly, his dreadlocks swaying with a clatter of beads. “Things are not always what they seem, warrior. I tried to tell you…”

“I’ll tell you what happened. Some fucking psycho snatched me off the street and locked me up in a dark room for weeks, draining my goddamn blood like a fucking vampire! That’s what fucking happened!” Dante thrust a hand at my fact, showing me a wrist rubbed raw and blistered by some kind of restraint, and multiple needle-stick sites. “He took my goddamn face! How is that even fucking possible??”

Half an ice cream sundae shifted and slid off the heaping bowl to splatter on the floor around my feet. The melted slop almost covered up the graying clay, drying on my combat boots. I’d tripped over him, I realized, in the elevator not fifteen minutes ago…I stepped on his hand, and there was drying gray mud in the tread of my boot when I checked the sole.

“Gretchen…” I dropped the bowl and heard it shatter into a thousand wet, sticky pieces behind me as I dashed for the elevators. A businessman was just getting into the first open car, and I grabbed him by the collar of his nice suit, tossing him to the side like a rag doll. “Hey!”

I didn’t have time to make stops on the way up. The guy would thank me later. I fumbled as I swiped my keycard for the penthouse, and was faintly relieved when the light flickered green and the doors slid closed. Come on, faster, faster…

It was up there with her. I knew that now. It had been with us all along, maybe. Longer than I’d been in L.A., anyway, ’cause Dante—the Dante downstairs—had no idea who the hell I was. But he’d passed the test! The blood test, he passed. Dante passed through the wards, passed the pin test…

The blood, I decided. Had to be the blood the creature had taken from the real Dante. Made it easier for him to hold the form, maybe allowed the soulless construction to steal the voice. Maybe it let him bleed, too.

“Fucking come on!” I slammed my fist into the wooden paneling in the elevator, as if that would make it climb the floors any faster.

At the penthouse level, I squeezed through the elevator doors before they’d fully opened, startling Spencer who was standing in the hallway with his food cart. The wannabe screenwriter blinked at me in surprise. “But…I just saw you get on the other elevator with Gretchen…”

“You’re sure?” I grabbed his jacket, shaking him once. “You’re sure they got on the elevator?”

“Yeah, completely.” I released him, dashing for Gretchen’s suite. Spencer called after me, “I think it went up to the roof, if that helps…”

I was intent on getting my sword first and foremost. No way was I facing that thing empty-handed again. We were gonna see how well he liked being in giant clay chunks. But I was brought up short by the sight of Tai’s body sprawled facedown on the floor between the two sofas. The remnants of the glass coffee table littered the carpet and crunched underfoot as I scrambled to get to him.

“Tai!” Pulse, pulse, where was the damn pulse…I found it, thankfully, slow but steady in his thick neck. My hands came away stained with sticky blood though, and I found a nasty gash in his raven hair, just behind his left ear. He’d been attacked from behind, clubbed like a baby seal. And his gun holster was empty.

“Holy shit, what happened?” Spencer stood at the top of the stairs, eyes wide in shock. “Is that blood?”

“Don’t just stand there, call 911!” At my sharp command, he seemed to snap out of it, and lurched for the phone.

I carefully rolled the big Maori over, checking him for other injuries, but there didn’t seem to be any. Tai was breathing. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do for him. My sword case was still under the sofa where I’d left it, and I snatched up The Way, headed for the door.

“I called 911!” Spencer reported, like he expected a treat for being such a good puppy. “The ambulance is on the way. Now what do I do?”

“Stay with Tai until they get here. Tell them he has head trauma.”

“And then what?”

“If you value your life, go home, Spencer. Go back to Chicago.” I slammed the door behind me and ran for the elevator again.

19

The roof was deserted, as it should be this late at night. The paper lanterns had been supplemented with string after string of party lights in preparation for the New Year’s festivities, but for now everything was dark.

I stepped out of the elevator, cursing inwardly at the cheerful “ding” I couldn’t prevent. My presence was known, whether I wanted it to be or not. Still, I took care to step softly on the white stone path, straining my ears for signs of where Gretchen and the thing had gone.

It wasn’t hard to find them. Above the sound of the distantly trickling waterfall, all I had to do was follow the sound of Gretchen’s outraged protests. “Get your hands off me! Let me go!” Her strident voice carried through the darkness. I tracked the sound through the narrow pathways until I arrived at the open area where tables and chairs had been clustered around the central reflecting pool.

Dimly, I knew that Spencer said he’d seen me get on the elevator with Gretchen, but I hadn’t truly thought about what that meant until that moment. A tall, slender man held Gretchen by the arm, not even budging as she struggled against his grip. His clothes…well, those weren’t mine. In fact, they’d been on Dante, last I’d seen. The few inches difference in my height from Dante’s made the blue jeans a bit high-water, and the difference in our weight made the shirt hang loosely on the wiry frame. His blond hair was unconfined, hanging at shoulder length, but the last few inches were fire-engine red, the remnants of the dye in Dante’s short dreads. When he turned, I caught a glimpse of his face. It was mine, sort of. The right nose, kinda pointy. Sharply angled cheeks, but they were smooth, my newly acquired scar only a faint blemish on the surface. The jaw was strong, but without the reddish stubble I’d started to grow. Me, but slightly off. Only someone who didn’t know me well would