A shadow loomed up in front of him, and Jack didn’t have time to move before Parker slammed a fist into his face. “Bad luck, pretty boy,” he told Jack, taking Kim by the arm and pulling her behind him. “The bitch doesn’t belong to you.”
“I doubt she belongs to you either,” Jack said. “Unless you’re the proud father.”
Kim’s eyes went wide at the idea. “I don’t know this asshole!” she exclaimed.
“Not someone you want to know, either,” Jack said. His cheekbone felt flat and numb—Parker hit like a hammer. Trying to hit back would just end with him in an emergency ward pissing into a tube.
He hit with a curse instead, the leg-locker flinging Parker to one side of the tunnel and chipping a dent out of the cinder block wall. Jack grabbed Kim’s hand and jerked her along. She couldn’t run very well, more of a waddle, but Jack jerked her up the steps and burst into the foyer of the building next door, coming face to face with a surprised Japanese man holding a long-lensed camera.
“’Scuse me,” Jack said. After the claustrophobia of Anna’s lair, the light made him squint.
Kim pressed close to him. “What’s going on?” she whispered. “Who was that guy?”
“An arsehole,” Jack said. “Somebody who doesn’t have your kid’s best interest in mind.”
“Excuse me.” A heavyset woman in a blue blazer tapped Jack on the shoulder. “The lower level is strictly off limits to visitors.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Jack said. Sunlight dappled the red tiled floor, and a spike of pain went through his forehead when he looked up. He was surrounded by cold iron—run under the water of a free-flowing stream—iron rails, iron decoration, iron elevators running up and down on iron chains. The entire building was seamed with iron, a box designed to kill anything magic that crossed its threshold.
“Well,” Jack muttered to himself. “Shit.”
Kim blanched, putting one hand on her stomach and one on her mouth. “Oh my god. This place sucks.”
A tour group, consisting of a pod of tanned twenty-somethings chattering in German, entered the lobby, and Jack pulled Kim into the midst of the crowd. He couldn’t throw hexes in here, but nobody could find them from the outside, either. Sanford and Parker could watch the street, but with the steady flow of tourists and bored-looking office workers that Jack guessed were cops, he’d have to spot them first. A little luck, and he could have Kim on a bus back to Bum Fun, Kansas, or wherever the hell she’d come to this city from by nightfall.
“This is the Bradbury Building,” intoned the tour guide. “Built in 1934.” A translator repeated, and the Germans cooed appreciatively.
Parker burst out of the cellar door, and the security guard started for him. He hit her, one jab straight into the throat, and she collapsed to her knees on the tile, choking.
“Dammit,” Jack muttered. There went his plan to slip out unnoticed when the Germans returned to the filth, noise, and vomiting hobos of downtown LA.
Parker made a beeline for them, and Jack did what came naturally, ran like hell, up the stairs and past a cord blocking the unwashed masses from the second floor. He pelted down the landing, and against a normal bloke he and Kim would have had a head start. Parker, however, eschewed the stairs entirely, leaping straight from the lobby to the first balcony, landing on a floor with a crash that cracked tiles. His knobby muscles rippled under his black shirt and he dropped into a crouch, nostrils flaring at Jack as he used his body to make a barrier between him and Kim.
“Holy shit,” she squeaked from behind him.
A demon would never be able to form-shift amid all this iron, which left Jack with several distinctly unpleasant possibilities as to what, exactly, Parker was. Not a werewolf—the enchantment would have been obvious during all the contact they’d had, in the form of Parker kicking the hell out of him.
Something organic, something in the blood. Something that was causing black claws to erupt from Parker’s hands and his teeth to overshoot the bounds of his mouth.
He crouched on his haunches and hissed at Jack, the back of his coat splitting to allow two long, leathery wings to erupt, covered in effluvia from his shift from ugly man to fuck-ugly bat-creature.
“Freeze!” One of the cops—anyone anywhere could tell he was one, rumpled suit and cheap shoes and all— aimed his pistol at Parker’s back. When Parker let out a screech, the copper fired. Two rounds caught Parker between the shoulder blades. He jerked and turned on the man, closing the space and his teeth around the copper’s throat. A spray of arterial blood hit the wall and washed the tiles. Jack shoved Kim.
“Move your arse.” There was a second landing, a set of stairs near the rear door of the building. They had to move, before Parker realized he’d lost track of them. Before Sanford showed up. Before the LAPD decided to ventilate his torso just for the fun of it.
Parker gave a great flap of wings, and with a screech leaped over Jack and Kim and landed in front of them. Kim let out a moan. “What the fuck
Parker’s ears had elongated, and a patch of ugly, wire-brush fur had grown across his face like the world’s most unfortunate set of mutton chops.
“I said the bitch wasn’t yours,” he hissed. “She’s going to whelp, and the kid is Abbadon’s. You promised the boss Abbadon. This is the quickest way and fair’s fair, Winter.”
“Fuck off, bat boy,” Jack told him. “Go back to sucking on diseased goats.” He moved a step to the right, experimentally, and Parker matched his move. Jack pulled Kim close, so he could feel her swollen stomach against his back. “When I move you run like fuck for those stairs and don’t stop until you’re in broad daylight. Find a cop in a uniform and stick to them like glue.”
Kim shook her head, her eyes going wide. “No…”
“Don’t give it a thought, luv,” Jack told her. “I’ll be right behind you.”
He let go of her hand and put his attention on Parker. Try to avoid a stand-up fight, and fate saw that you got exactly that. Bitch that she was. “About the teeth-kicking,” Jack said to Parker. “Now seems as good a time as any.”
Parker grinned at him. “Big words for a little man.”
“Words at all coming from your ugly mug,” Jack told him. “Amazing, really.” He cocked his head, put the weight on the balls of his feet. Prepared himself to take the hit. He was used to that, at least. Sometimes you just had to take it, taste the blood, spit out your ruined teeth, and get on. “Tell me,” he said to Parker. “Are you mean because you’re ugly? Or are you ugly because your mum sucked the cock of a rabid werewolf and vomited you out afterward?”
Parker launched at him. Kim screamed, but she ran, caroming off the wall, digging her feet in and heading for the stairs.
Jack went over on his back, slamming into the rail with Parker on top of him. The lobby below was in chaos, some tourists screaming, some snapping away with their cameras. The coppers were rushing about, but after what had happened to their mate, none seemed anxious to get close to Jack and Parker.
Parker’s breath smelled like a sewer in the height of summer and was as hot as an oven on Jack’s face as Parker snapped his black teeth. Jack threw up his arm, and Parker clamped down on his leather, and through it to flesh. The pain took a moment to come, but it did, hot as coals and deep as marrow. The only bright spot was that it wasn’t his neck.
Jack jammed his boots into Parker’s belly, the steel toes meeting soft flesh, and shoved with all his strength. Something gave out in his back, but Parker went flying over his head, slamming into the cage that blocked the elevator shaft. The car was on the top floor, and he fell, hitting the bottom of the shaft with a scream.
Getting his feet under him was a trial. Jack felt the sting of cold air on his arm, and saw a half-moon of bloody, rent flesh under his shredded leather. He could deal with it later. If there was a later.
The elevator shaft rattled, and Jack went to the edge. Parker was climbing. One wing was twisted and broken, leaking brackish-colored fluid, but his claws still worked, and he scaled the shaft, snarling and screeching with each movement.
Jack shot a glance over his shoulder. Kim was nowhere to be seen. Good. One less thing he had to worry about.
“You son of a bitch,” Parker rasped. He wasn’t moving fast, but like a high tide, he’d inevitably reach Jack. “You fucked up now. You should’ve killed me.”
Jack looked upward into the lift shaft. The car hung above his head, near the peaked roof of the shaft. It was suspended from the three landings of the building like a cage, and the chains that raised and lowered the car rattled as Parker climbed.
