Axlam groaned. “Frank!” she yelled.
St. Martin nodded over his shoulder. “I was going to do this slowly. Savor my treats. It is Halloween, isn’t it? Your American spawn dress up and demand tribute, do they not?” He did his little dance again. “But you had to go digging around on my lands.” He waved the gun at my face. “You ruined everything.”
“You harassed the elves at the park. You harassed me at Raven’s Gaze.” He’d spent the weekend running around town yelling look at me! And he’d come after Axlam this morning.
He bounced on his heels and rubbed his glove against his cheek.
“I have ten months’ worth of photos of the Alfheim Pack. Ten. And you think finding that one camera made a difference?” He sidestepped. “I had a plan. A lovely slow boil. I was going to make this little town so afraid. Terrified! What is this horrid wolf magic that’s come to our home!” He air-quoted ‘wolf.’ “Then you’d want my help.” He paced again. “Need me. Pray for me. Oui, oui.”
Did he even understand his own plan? “You are insane.” Of course he was insane. He was some dark magic’s pawn.
He cackled out a laugh. “She murdered my father!” he screeched. “Mon papa. He’d always bring me dolls from the countries he saved.” He held the gun as if it were a toy.
“The elves can help you.” Not that they would. Not after he’d taken the children. But he was insane enough the offer might get him to pause.
“The elves can help you,” he mimicked. “The genie said you’d say that!”
Genie?
He worked for a dark wolf genie?
He pointed the gun at me again. “You be quiet, jotunn.” He danced a little to side. “Jotunn. The genie didn’t tell me there was a jotunn in Alfheim.”
All this was because of a genie? A djinn?
“You got yourself into something bad here.” I held up my hands and slowly moved toward him.
“Oh no you do not!” he shrieked.
I stopped.
He pointed the gun at Axlam. “I’m saving that murdering bitch for last. I’m going to put her in a cage in the City Administration parking lot. I can make the entire Alfheim Pack rampage that way.” He rubbed at his nose with his gun hand, and thankfully, didn’t point it at my chest again. “No one turns me down.”
The nose rubbing suggested he was inhaling more than some genie’s magic. The way he bounced on his heels meant he was distracted.
I snatched his gun wrist, squeezed, and slammed my other palm into his face. The gun, now pointed up, fired. My palm met granite.
Not granite. His magic shell.
And Bastien-Laurent St. Martin snickered.
Chapter 22
After the episode with my brother and the vampire quagmire that came with him, Arne believed we were about to face what he so wryly called “an escalation.” He hadn’t been specific about who he thought would cause said escalation, or what we were going to do about it. He simply shrugged and said that escalators were pervasive and a natural part of life.
Escalation was what got Remy and me sent to Las Vegas. Alfheim, with her welcoming enclave and her healthy and wealthy werewolf pack, was on many a magical radar. Alfheim was “modern,” and being modern meant that you got all the perks and pits of the modern world—cellphones, electric cars, Cold War vampires who were really the ultimate Old World villains, and an ever-escalating crew of bastards with also-escalating weapons who thought they could take Alfheim down a peg or two.
I had one such weapon by the neck and gun wrist. The smug little toad sneered even though I had the upper hand and he was nothing but a tool.
“Who do you work for?” I demanded. “Axlam!” I bellowed. “Get Dagrun!”
St. Martin rolled his eyes. “She can’t heeeaaaarrrrr yooooouuuu,” he sing-songed. “You aren’t the brightest of the elves’ pets, are you?”
She didn’t hear me, not directly—but her magic noticed.
St. Martin twitched. He tried to wiggle to look at Axlam but I held him—not him, but his shell—tightly.
Her eyes were still golden. She hunched, too. Her wolf wanted out into the physical world. Sending her off to find the elves like this was dangerous—but so was keeping her within St. Martin’s reach.
“Axlam! Go!” I yelled.
If she was going to fall to these magicks, she would have already. But she was alpha, and she stood against St. Martin and Samhain’s pushes and pulls on the veils. She’d get Dagrun and return.
She sniffed the air more like Marcus Aurelius than a person, and let out the closest thing to a wolf howl a human throat could make.
Then Axlam Geroux ran into the woods along the same path as our Queen.
“I’m going to pluck out her eyeballs!” St. Martin screeched. He tried to kick me, but I continued to hold him far enough away that he couldn’t do real damage.
I might not have been able to knock the gun from St. Martin’s hand, but I held his wrist in a way that kept it aimed away from my body. I could not feel his skin, but I did have him by the throat.
The sniveling toad snickered. “Won’t do her any good to run.”
“I could snap your neck,” I responded, “and take care of the problem once and for all.”
He sniffed again. “No, you cannot,” he said. “And even if you could, you wouldn’t. You have standards.”
He was correct that I wouldn’t kill him. If he died, we might never learn whose magic he wielded, and that would for sure come back to bite Alfheim.
“Perhaps I should snap your collarbones instead.” I stared down at his puckered face without releasing his neck or his hand. I might not break a bone now, but he needed to understand that I would the
