enforcement mode. “Let’s see, how many felonies does that make, Cicereau? How many life sentences—and you’ll live a long time, from what I’ve heard—for kidnapping, human trafficking, false imprisonment, slavery—”
While Ric paused for inspiration, I leaped in. “Animal abuse . . .”
“Animal abuse?” Cicereau was indignant. “I have a hunting license from the state. And I
“I’m referring,” I told him, “to the anaconda that served as my sole sarong during the run-through of that magic act you forced me into. No one got legal permission from the snake, much less me.”
“Look.” The salt-and-pepper pelt on Cesar Cicereau’s chest was growing thicker and thornier. “This heat is . . . killing me.”
His coarse features were elongating in the nose and jaw, and the middle-aged bald spot was lost in a widow’s peak of furred thatch that dipped to the bridge of his muzzle . . . I mean snout.
Even Ric backed off from his macho nose-to-nose duel with the werewolf mob boss. The man was shifting before our eyes and the moon wasn’t full yet.
The mob boss looked around, beady eyes glazed, panting painfully.
As a dog owner—companion—I forgot my major beefs with the guy, including his pack hunting me down like a wounded deer at Starlight Lodge—to feel, well, a teensy bit sorry for him.
“How’d. How’d I g-g-g-et heh-heh-here?” he panted, dropping into a crouch as long curved nails from his hands dug into his own thighs until they brought up blood.
I owed Cesar Cicereau one long revenge fantasy, but this was not it. More like him being hog-tied naked onstage by a boa constrictor that emphasized every fat roll and made his weenie look like an earthworm, but otherwise I’m not really the vengeful type. So far.
Ric pulled back to whisper something less than romantic in my ear. “I don’t have any silver bullets in my semiautomatic, but I can probably strangle him if he goes lobo and attacks us. He looks more attacked himself than aggressive. What’s going on here?”
I knew. And I knew we were next, Ric probably first. That would be Loretta’s strategic mistake. Taking her revenge out first on her father.
“This elevator is disabled,” I said, punching the Main button one last, useless time. “Maybe it only goes down. Loretta has got to be lurking somewhere.”
“Then, let’s force her into the open.” Ric grabbed Cicereau’s elbow and hustled him over gray slabs of slate toward an aurora of light dead ahead.
It was like running into a close-up of the sun, but that was a visual effect only.
After a few steps we had to stop. We stood on the brink of a river of blood, with corpses floating by just beneath the surface of the current. Cicereau seemed to recognize some. His clawed half paw reached toward the bodies rolling gently over as they passed.
“Victims?” Rick asked.
I eyed Cicereau, now cowering on his human haunches beside me. The atrocious teal of his sweatpants was turning black up to his knees as the blood river water lapped at his ankles like a liquid tongue.
“Murderers,” I guessed. “He’s offed a lot of other werewolves and rivals and inconvenient humans in his time, most fiendishly his young daughter and her ancient vampire Romeo.”
“And we messed with Loretta’s plans for resurrection and revenge, so she’s out for blood,” Ric concluded. “Plenty of it here.”
As we watched, a splash to our right let us glimpse a fresh body rolling into the river. The man lifted a horror-stricken face above the gentle waves, then an arm and shoulder.
Ric leaned forward, instinctively planning to drag the guy out. I grabbed hold of Ric’s collar, fearing the worst. It came with the swiftness of a wedge of arrows that pierced the drowning man’s arm, neck, and face. With a primal groan he swept past us, sinking.
More arrows shot into water, striking the submerged forms that rose up with horrible cries before sinking again.
I glanced at Cesar Cicereau, crouched trembling at our feet in a half-shifted state of overheated panting and shivering cold. The sharp sound of something hard striking stone echoed behind us. I turned farther to squint into the shadows behind us and jumped back to glimpse a seven-foot-tall naked male with long shaggy hair and a horned head.
“Centaurs patrol this place,” Ric breathed, nodding to the boulder-strewn ground we all stood on. “Their role here is to torture the murderers.”
Only then in the bloodred shifting light of the river did I notice the horse chest and body and hooves that made up the vision’s lower half.
“He is.” He looked down at Cicereau, who seemed on the verge of slipping into the bloody river to escape the hooved nemesis that shot the searing arrows.
Ric looked up at me. “And you are.”
“Prince Krzysztof, you mean. But . . . he was slaughtering tourists and Cicereau’s bodyguards. Krzysztof wasn’t even truly alive. He was animated bone and pieces of ancient organs and skins from the mummifying process. I stopped . . . it . . . from destroying innocent life.”
I heard the hooves of the single centaur drawing near behind me, and whirled back to face it. In the crimson light cast by the river, I saw the centaur had a rider, not a ghost rider but a physically solid girl.
Girls and horses had gone together like anklets and Mary Jane shoes since
Loretta Cicereau’s long tangled hair still trailed the once-imprisoning webs of Sylphia as if she was wearing a macabre bridal veil. She rode the man-beast barefoot and astride, her floor-length blue taffeta forties gown bunched up bustlelike behind her bare flanks, an oddly Teen Amazon look.
She carried the arrow-strung bow while the centaur paused, snorting through his flared human nostrils, fists akimbo on his hips, which were also shining sorrel equine shoulders. He was naked skin and muscle above the human hips, nude except for the diagonal slash of a leather band across his chest that held a quill full of arrows an elbow bend away from him and right at Loretta’s fingertips behind him.
“You and the centaur you rode in on don’t have any power over us,” I told her. “We’re not truly dead, not fair game for your kind.”
“But I can torture and kill you.” Turning, she aimed the bow past the centaur’s broad shoulder, “and what would torment you most, murderess, is
She drew back the bowstring, but I rushed the smooth-hided horse-belly she straddled, grabbing a bare foot to drag her off the bizarre mount and to the ground.
The arrow in her bow shrieked free, blurring as it passed the edges of my vision, aimed at Ric, who’d been standing right behind me.
I screamed and turned, still clawing for Loretta’s bare ankle.
From my feet, a snarling lupine figure bounded up in attack, sinking claws and fangs into the centaur’s left shoulder. The man whinnied as the horse’s lower limbs stumbled sideways. I’d momentarily thought Quicksilver had attacked, but it was a half-werewolf Cesar Cicereau whose repeated, growling lunges drove the beast off its stride and to the ground.
Loretta was falling sideways toward me. I caught the ends of her long hair and wrapped it around my hand, jerking her head around and her body hard to the ground, my eyes fixed on Ric, still standing.
What had she done?
Ric held out his left arm, dazed by blood-river red coloring the inside of his pale jacket sleeve, the outside of the pale suit coat.
By then my boot was pinning Loretta’s all-too-solid flesh, her bow-holding wrist, to the stony ground and the silver familiar was binding that same wrist to the empty half of the handcuffs I now wore. Despite being down and immobile, Loretta was screeching with mad triumph, a banshee announcing a fresh death.
I turned again to stare, horror-struck, at Ric.
He looked down cautiously, lifted his left arm farther out.
“I’m all right.” He sounded more surprised than I was by those words. “The arrow . . . must have skimmed
