Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  Ladies’ Fight

  CAITLIN KITTREDGE AND JAYE WELLS

  Tailed

  SEANAN MCGUIRE AND KELLEY ARMSTRONG

  Sweet, Blissful Certainty

  STEVEN SAVILE AND CRAIG SCHAEFER

  Pig Roast

  JOSEPH NASSISE AND SAM WITT

  Takes All Kinds

  DIANA ROWLAND AND CARRIE VAUGHN

  The Lessons of Room 19

  WESTON OCHSE AND DAVID WELLINGTON

  Blood for Blood

  CHARLAINE HARRIS AND CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  Spite House

  C. E. MURPHY AND KAT RICHARDSON

  Crossed Wires

  JEFF SOMERS AND STEPHEN BLACKMOORE

  Weaponized Hell

  LARRY CORREIA AND JONATHAN MABERRY

  Related Works

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Ladies’ Fight

  CAITLIN KITTREDGE AND JAYE WELLS

  AVA

  I watched delicate fingers of mist uncurl as Leo’s car rolled silently down the highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. We were passing through a nowhere pocket of swamp country, the road raised up on a causeway between the thick tangle of mud, grass, and cypress that filled the windows.

  The sun was barely up, and aside from a heron we startled with our passing, it was like we were the only two people left on earth.

  “You hungry?” Leo said at length, his thin tattooed fingers tapping the steering wheel. “I think I saw signs for a diner a few miles up.”

  I shook my head. I still wasn’t used to this. Just the two of us, sitting in a car gliding through Louisiana like we were on a road trip. “I’m fine,” I said.

  Leo sighed. The car was so quiet I could practically hear his heart beating. His annoyance sounded like a hurricane.

  “You and me are gonna have to actually talk to each other sooner or later,” he said. “I think we’ve said maybe six words that weren’t bickering between here and Nevada. That’s gotta be some kind of record.”

  I stayed quiet. If he thought this was me being recalcitrant he hadn’t seen anything yet.

  “Fine,” Leo said. “I’ll talk for both of us. ‘Gee, Leo, it’s been weird since you died and woke up a Grim Reaper.’ It sure as shit has, Ava, but I’m glad that I’ve got you around to have my back.”

  I ran a hand across my throbbing forehead. “It’s not about that,” I said finally.

  “She speaks,” Leo exclaimed. “Welcome back, kid.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I’ve been there. I died and I woke up as a monster. It’s not you and me. It’s everything else.”

  Leo reached over and squeezed my hand. His hands were delicate and long-fingered, like a musician’s. If it weren’t for the Russian tattoos inking every joint you’d think he was a piano player and not a hardened killer. “If I learned one thing from growing up the way I did, it’s that gangsters are always going to fight and the best thing people like us can do is keep our heads down and move forward when the dust settles.”

  “If some cranky Russians were all we had to contend with, I wouldn’t be worried,” I grumbled. I didn’t say what I was really thinking—that the “gangsters” fighting were angels and demons. That both Leo and I were game pieces being pushed around a board by the sort of creatures whose main purpose was to make life miserable for everyone around them.

  “So we’ll go to NOLA, get the Grim Reaper’s Scythe and then you really won’t have to worry,” Leo said with that easy grin he could muster even in situations like this. I would have kind of hated it, if I didn’t like him so much.

  By the time we hit the outskirts of New Orleans, the fog had cleared off, just a low coating of it clinging to the Mississippi as we crossed the bridge. I’d gone back to being silent. The misgivings I had about the whole Scythe thing were a fight Leo and I had already had, repeatedly, on the way from Nevada.

  Scythes were a reaper’s tool for taking souls, when the warlock or mage they’d made the deal with ran out the clock. Every one was different, and at first Leo and I assumed his was the sweet ride we currently inhabited. What else could you think about a muscle car that ran completely silent and never needed gas?

  But it was just a steed, not a weapon. The Grim Reaper’s Scythe wasn’t like the Scythe that had belonged to Gary, the reaper who’d made me into a hellhound. It was something as ancient and primeval as the Grim Reaper himself. And since Leo was the first Grim Reaper in almost a thousand years, his Scythe was lost somewhere in the metaphysical attic of space and time, under almost a millennium of demon meddling and reaper politics that kept his office vacant so any demon could swoop in and use the reapers as their own personal servants—with a side of heavy muscle.

  So now we were heading to New Orleans on a tip from a friend of a friend of a scumbag warlock that Leo’d dealt with when he was alive and just a plain old necromancer.

  Leo exited the highway in the Garden District and slowed, crawling through streets just beginning to wake up. My breath fogged the window as I looked out and I rubbed the spot away. The last time I’d been here the streetlamps had been gas and I’d been alive, barely twenty years old and in love with the man who’d eventually betray and murder me.

  “After we pick up the Scythe we should go for breakfast,” Leo said. “I could really go for some of those tiny donuts. You know. They’re called something French.”

  “Beignets,” I murmured as we slowed, parking across the street from a mansion that was, by anyone’s standards, extremely fancy. Even if I weren’t really just a hillbilly from Tennessee at heart, I would have thought the place was swank.

  “Yeah, those,” Leo said. He swung his door open and looked at me when I hesitated. “You coming or what? Boyd said that the owner’s a vamp, and daylight is the way to go if we’re going to be in and out.”

  “I can’t believe we’re breaking into the house of somebody who clearly has enough money to see we’re sent to a deep dark hole if we get caught,” I said. “Never mind breaking in on the advice of somebody named Boyd.”

  “Hey, Boyd may be a scumbag but he’s a scumbag who loves having somebody owe him a favor,” Leo said. “He’s not gonna screw us over.”

  “And the owner,” I said, refusing to cross the street just yet. “Vamps tend more toward dank basements and caves, not beautifully restored Greek Revival mansions. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, about that.” Leo rubbed his chin in the gesture I recognized as him lying his ass off. “I don’t think she’s strictly a vamp in the venomous, blood-drinking crackhead sense you and I understand it. I mean, until a couple weeks ago I thought demons were a creepy bedtime story, so maybe we don’t know every critter in the Monster Manual just yet.”

  “Did you just use Dungeons and Dragons to convince me to fight off some kind of super-vamp collector of magical artifacts who basically lives in a fort?” I said, folding my arms.

  Leo shrugged. “Did it work?”

  “Fuck you,” I said, heading across the street. “If we get thrown in jail, I’m leaving you there.”

  The house wasn’t as fortress-like as it appeared from the outside, but it was still big and fancy and had a really nice non-magical security system in place. A camera whirred at me and I turned quickly, stepping behind a thick oleander bush to hide my face.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Leo said. “Boyd gave us the security code.”

  “Boyd is just a magical helper elf when it comes to getting in good with the Grim Reaper, isn’t he?” I grumbled.

  Leo turned on
me, his good mood draining out like a drunk’s piss into a Bourbon Street gutter on a Saturday night. “Ava, we need the Scythe if we have a chance of making this work. I’m not going to be caught with my dick out when I run up against the next demon.”

  I shut up. After almost a century of living with Gary, who had a temper that would make the average rabid dog look cuddly, I knew when to play the quiet game. Besides, Leo was right. He’d been a powerful necromancer and the demon who killed him had still sliced through his magic like a hot knife and planted said knife between his ribs up to the hilt.

  Leo punched in the security code, and the side door we’d found popped open. But I grabbed him by the shoulder before he could step over the threshold.

  “Magic,” I said quietly. Leo really was desperate if he’d ignored a barrier spell. It smelled like burning trash wafting across the wind, hot and sharp, ready to knock back anyone it didn’t read as friendly. It wasn’t blood conjuring, though, or dark magic. And I didn’t think light magic could pack that kind of punch.

  All of that was a story for another day. For now, I had to stop Leo from frying himself.

  “Hold on,” I said, standing back a bit and rolling my shoulders. Usually when I became the hound it was on the fly, my adrenaline was pumping and it wasn’t a big deal. I’m always in both states—there’s no breaking bones and wolfman shit going on. I’m both a human and a hound, always. I try not to think too much about how that’s possible—discussing pocket dimensions and string theory isn’t usually my idea of fun.

  Now, though, the shift was more of a whisper than a scream. I opened my eyes and I was at knee height to Leo, staring at the world through the red-tinged vision of a hound. I could see the spell dancing in front of all the doors and windows, crisscrossing the house like a laser show. I took a deep sniff and stepped forward, tentatively putting one foot over the threshold. The spell hissed and crackled, but didn’t tear me apart or set off alarms. For whatever reason, it didn’t react to me in hound form at all.

  I looked back at Leo, who held up a hand to indicate he’d stay where he was. With his other hand he slid a sheet of paper through the barrier with Boyd’s crappy hand-drawn map on it. I memorized the way to the library, where the Scythe supposedly was, and padded down the hall. It smelled a little damp and of dry rot, like most old homes in New Orleans. There were pictures on the walls, but I didn’t bother to check them out—I could tell by the smell of old paint and wood that they were expensive, but I was much more focused on where I was headed.

  The library was indeed stuffed full of magical crap. I still wasn’t convinced that Boyd wasn’t punking Leo—it seemed way too easy. Break into the house of a sleeping vamp during the day, with nary a bodyguard in sight? Find something as significant as the Scythe just sitting around?

  Maybe they didn’t know what they had, I reasoned as I nosed through a few of the dusty shelves, letting out a sneeze.

  “What the hell!” a voice exploded from behind me. I jumped and spun, baring my teeth. The figure in the chair, who appeared to be one of those freaky hairless cats, just extra large and, well, talking, also bared its teeth, letting out a scalding hiss. “Damn!” it shouted, jumping to its feet. “What in the fuck are you supposed to be—Cujo Junior?”

  I opened my mouth to say I wasn’t there to hurt anybody, even though on four legs I could only speak in the hellhound’s native language of mostly growls and grunts, but before I could, the “cat” started to scream like a broken siren. A puff of purple smoke exploded and when it cleared, a seven-foot-tall green-scaled demon had taken the cat’s place. Before I could react, it started screaming again.

  “Sabina! SABINA! Get in here!”

  SABINA

  Something woke me from the sleep of the dead. At first, I thought it was Adam’s hand, which was snaking over my hip and curving toward my chest. But then a shout from downstairs broke through my sleepy haze. I jackknifed upright.

  “Hmm,” Adam groaned.

  “Shh!” I cocked my head to listen. The mage I loved didn’t have my preternatural hearing, so he probably hadn’t heard anything. “Something’s wrong. I think—”

  “Sabina!”

  I leapt out of bed, threw on my robe, grabbed my gun from the bedside table, and zapped out of the bedroom. I reappeared downstairs in the foyer. Adam flashed in a split second later. I started off, but he grabbed my arm.

  “Wait,” he whispered. “What the hell?”

  A volley of shouts—two male and one female—from the direction of the library answered the question for me. Our gazes met for a split second before we both took off down the hall. As we ran, the air sizzled as Adam called up his magic. I gripped my gun tighter and mentally ran through possible scenarios. Things had been really quiet lately in New Orleans. The Dark Races Council had been getting along, and there hadn’t been any threats from enemies in months.

  We burst through the library’s wooden double doors to find the largest dog I’d ever seen, a sketchy-looking dude, and a very naked and pissed-off demon.

  The dog growled and the hackles on its back rose like spikes.

  I pointed my gun at the male, who had one pointed right back at me. “Call off the mutt.” The male wasn’t giving off any of the typical physical clues a dark race being might—no lavender smell that would indicate he was a faery, no copper penny scent of a vamp, and, while I detected some traces of magic, it wasn’t the sort of power I’d expect from a mage. There was a chance he might be a werewolf, but it was hard to tell if the dirty dog smell came from him or from the actual dog.

  In response to my command, the dog growled again, as if it could understand me. I moved the gun’s aim from the dude to the dog. I didn’t plan on shooting the mutt. These two were hardly threats to the combined power of a mage, a Mischief demon, and the Chosen of the Dark Races.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Adam asked.

  Giguhl spoke first. “I’ll tell you what’s going on! I was sitting here minding my own business when these two snuck in through the side door.”

  I frowned. “How is that possible?”

  Instead of answering my question, the guy said, “Where’s the Scythe?”

  “What Scythe?” I glanced at Adam, who shrugged back. Giguhl shook his head to indicate that he, too, was in the dark. “Look, dude, you’ve obviously made a big fucking mistake here. I don’t own a Scythe, but I have a variety of other weapons I would be happy to introduce you to.” I flashed my fangs and hissed a little to see how he reacted.

  He didn’t react to the fangs, but he kept shooting sideways glances at Giguhl. I couldn’t blame him. Most humans have never seen a demon. He might spend part of the time in a hairless kitty body, but when he was full demon, he was a scary son of a bitch.

  “Ava?” the dude said. I assumed he was addressing the dog. Ava seemed like a really weird name for a dog that big and ugly.

  But before I could continue judging his weird taste in pet names, the dog’s body started vibrating and writhing. I wondered if I was going to have to clean a dead dog off of my carpet, but instead it was like the lights had flicked off for a second, and in that blink the figure changed from a dog to a petite, dark-haired woman with a Bettie Page bob and a pissed-off look on her face.

  “What the fuck?” I’d seen werewolves shift before, so I wasn’t too impressed by the display. What did unsettle me was that this chick wasn’t a werewolf. She was clearly a human who had some sort of magic ability to shift into the form of a dog, sort of like how Giguhl could shift into cat form without being a were-being. But it made no sense for a Daughter of Adam to have these abilities. “Who are you people?”

  “Where’s the Scythe?” The female’s voice was hoarse but her tone was surprisingly demanding.

  Giguhl put his hands on his naked hips. “It’s right here, sweetheart.”

  Her eyes dipped and widened before she quickly looked away. Her cheeks didn’t redden, like mine had the first time I got an unwanted eyeful of the demon
’s forked . . . scythe.

  “The reaper’s Scythe,” the guy said. “We were told you have it and we’re not leaving without it.”

  “Reaper? Like the Grim Reaper?” I said, not bothering to hide the amusement in my voice. “Look, I don’t know what you two have been smoking, but there is no Scythe in this house, reaper or otherwise.”

  The chick tossed a look at her partner in crime. I didn’t know her, but I certainly was familiar with the what-the-hell-have-you-gotten-us-into glare known the world over by women who hang out with men who are trouble. Judging from the Russian gang tats and the stink of mundane magic coming off that guy, he wasn’t just trouble, he was Big Trouble—capital B, capital T. He met her look with an untroubled one of his own. “Boyd said it’s here, so it’s here.”

  Adam held up a hand. “Boyd? Boyd who?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the Russian said.

  Unperturbed by his rudeness, Adam soldiered on. “You’re not talking about Boyd Rothrock, are you?”

  The Russian stilled. “What if I am?” He squinted, trying to look all tough, but I noticed the hint of uncertainty that crept into his posture.

  Adam crossed his arms and shook his head. “Unbelievable.” It was my turn to hold up a free hand. “Who’s Boyd Rothrock?” Even though I was the head of the Dark Races on the mortal plane, it’s not like I knew every vampire, faery, were, mage, or demon alive.

  “He’s a Recreant,” Adam said, referring to a type of mage who’d been disavowed by the Hekate Council because they refused to follow the rules of conduct. “He’s also a major asshole.”

  “It’s true,” the Russian admitted. “He is an asshole. But being an asshole doesn’t make him a liar.”

  “No, what makes him a liar in this case is that he’s been gunning for me for decades,” Adam said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I am kind of to blame for him being kicked off the council.”

  I nodded. Adam’s old job was being a Knight of Pythias for the mage Hekate Council. Acting as a sort of special ops mage, he’d had the opportunity to make lots of enemies in his past. But now wasn’t the time to rehash the past. We’d get to that. For now, we had more pressing issues.