he could spend hours smelling me. Not to mention he had more hair than a woolly mammoth.”
“Aren’t those extinct?”
“So we believed,” she said, and threw some sort of belt—I didn’t want to know what it looped around—into a pile that was growing at an alarming rate.
“Don’t worry,” I said, picking up a tube of lipstick with a penis-shaped wand. “If he gets overly amorous, I’ve got your back.”
“Not necessary,” she said, yanking the tube from my hands. I picked up Luna instead. “He looks like a Hell’s Angel, but he’s relatively harmless.”
I saw what she meant when she opened her door to a six and a half foot ape dressed entirely in leather a minute later. I actually thought he looked rather like a large bulldog, complete with sunken eyes and hanging jowls, and she was right—he was hairy. I could see where Olivia might balk at banging chromosomes with a physiological mutant.
“Jo, this is Butch.”
“Yes, it is,” I muttered, giving the giant a hesitant nod.
Luna apparently experienced a similar reaction. She took one look at Butch and sprung from my arms like an Olympic platform diver. “Ouch, shit!”
The bundle of fur wheeled across the marble floor, scrambling for purchase with a click-clack of sharpened nails, and disappeared into the bedroom. As I watched, the stinging marks on my arm became angry pink ribbons, then filled with bright red blood, promising scarring.
“Shit,” I said again.
“Are you all right?” Olivia rushed over, leaving Butch in the foyer.
“He never did like me,” Butch mumbled, shutting the door behind him.
“She,” Olivia corrected as Butch joined us in the living room. “She never liked you. And maybe she would have if you hadn’t stepped on her tail. Twice.”
Butch just shrugged. Big bad bulldog.
“You two stay here,” she said, catching my eye. That meant she didn’t want him following her into the bedroom. “I’ll just get your things and find Jo something to wash off with.”
She disappeared, leaving me with Leather Man. He was practically wearing the whole cow—when he started moving toward me I almost expected him to moo.
“Want me to take a look?” He held out his hand. I hesitated, without reason, though I generally didn’t need one. I didn’t know Butch, but there was some sort of unease or smothered energy that I didn’t like. The drop-point knife was still sitting on the coffee table, close enough to see, but far enough away to be as useful as a butter knife. Still, I had the folded blade in my boot, and was confident enough to hold out my arm for his inspection, testing us both. If there was something off about Butch, I didn’t want him around Olivia, and better I find out about it than she.
He took my wrist gently, gazing at the scratch almost clinically, a concerned enough expression on his fleshy face. I relaxed a fraction. Then he raised my arm and inhaled deeply of the wound, nostrils flaring. That’s when I saw.
The pads of his fingertips were curiously smooth, almost shiny with luminescence, and unlined. Without prints. I forced my arm not to tense beneath his touch and quickly returned my eyes to his face.
The lightning flashed outside, firing the room and slashing across his features to illuminate chiseled bone and hollow eyes; a skeleton’s bony sneer with teeth shaped like daggers. His hold tightened a fraction, just the fingertips, those too-smooth pads, but it was enough to make me still and wait for an opening to reclaim my arm.
As thunder rolled across the sky, Butch smiled lopsidedly. “Do you know what time it is?”
I didn’t look at my watch. “Yeah. It’s time for you to let go of my hand.”
His fingers tightened over mine, and given one moment more I’d have broken them, but he dropped my arm suddenly and walked away. Tensed, braced for a fight, this unbalanced me. He just drifted away like he’d never sniffed at my skin in an intimate way or held a look of naked hunger in those hollow eyes. Retrieving my long blade from the coffee table, I tucked it in the waistband of my pants, then grabbed the
“I think that’s everything,” Olivia was saying. Her back to us both, she was bent over a mound of stilettos and boots emptied from her shoe closet. She continued talking, her voice a breathy staccato thrumming in the air, but I don’t think either Butch or I heard a word. There was something else going on, like the dark undercurrent stirring beneath a placid lake just before the monster struck. I inched toward Olivia, my back to the wall. Butch, strangely enough, kept his gaze on the bedside clock. It was one minute to midnight.
“Olivia,” I said in my quietest, deadliest voice. “Get behind me.”
Two pairs of eyes looked at me, but only one seemed surprised. Butch merely looked amused. I moved to my sister’s side.
“How about that. Ajax was right.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It was you all along. Hidden in plain sight. Xavier’s daughter, no less.”
Whatever the hell that meant. “I’m not Xavier’s daughter.”
He laughed. “Then whoever hid you knew what they were doing.”
“Excuse me? What’s going on here? Am I missing something?”
“I thought it was her,” Butch said, jerking his head at Olivia. “It was the closest I could come to scenting you, but once I was in her…” He shook his head in a sorrowful gesture. “I thought I was going anosmic.”
Then he slid a smoothly curving scimitar from behind the nape of his neck. I had to give it to these guys— whoever they were, they had unique weapons.
“Whoa!” Olivia’s breath escaped her in a whoosh. I don’t think I was breathing at all. “I’ve heard of unsafe sex, but this is ridiculous!”
“It was you we were after,” he said, ignoring her. “You I detected on your sister’s skin, your signature scent all along. But what I can’t understand,” he continued, looking at the bedside clock, tapping the flat edge of the blade against his palm like he was waiting, “is how you recognized me. You don’t fully come into your sixth sense for another…thirty seconds.”
Midnight. Like that homeless freak had said.
“Signature scent?” I mimicked, my eyes also on the clock. “Kinda girly, don’t you think?”
“Well, I’m a right softie at heart.” He flashed those dagger teeth. “Tell me, Joanna, been smelling things lately? Interesting things? Foul things on the wind?”
I swallowed hard. “What, Ajax tell you that too?”
“Common knowledge. You’re turning twenty-five, right? That’s when the metamorphosis begins.”
“Excuse me,” Olivia said, “but do you two know each other?”
Butch smiled and took a step forward. “Not as well as we’re about to.”
“That’s enough, Butch. One more step and this stiletto’s going up your ass.” We all looked down at Olivia’s hand. I frowned, recognizing the ebony pump as one of her favorites. The same thought must have occurred to her. She dropped the shoe and picked up another. “
I sighed. Bless her for trying.
Butch returned his eyes to me. “Get ready, innocent. Your first real breath will also be your last.”
I only had a vague notion of what he was talking about, based on snippets from a very unreal last twenty-four hours, but I knew a real threat when I heard one.
Ten, nine, eight…the seconds inched by, midnight looming. Outside, thunder cracked like a whip overhead, and the sheet of pattering rain deteriorated into a full-force onslaught of sleet and hail. Wind whistled, rattling at the walls, and the building began to shake in palsied tremors. Some of Olivia’s knickknacks tinkled, others shattered, and then the core of the building began to rock on its braces. An explosion sounded as we crossed into midnight.
“Olivia, get back!” I had to yell as the tempest blew through the bedroom. It was like being at the top of a tornado’s funnel, poised to be sucked inside. Then the glass wall began to splinter, a sound like fingernails raking a chalkboard, sending spasms up my spine. I resisted the impulse to cover my ears, and went for the blade at my back instead. Butch tensed and raised his scimitar. A bolt of lightning arrowed the sky as Olivia screamed behind me, and there was a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye.
