Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Read online

  “Okay, so what we have here is a problem. Several of them, actually. But first, let’s dispense with the formalities.” I pointed to myself. “I’m Sabina Kane, the Chosen of the Dark Races.” They both blinked at me, as if I’d just spoken a foreign language. I sighed. “That means I’m sort of the queen of all the non-humans on earth. I’m also part vampire and part mage.”

  “We call her a magepire,” Giguhl said.

  Ignoring my smart-assed sidekick, I nodded toward Adam. “That’s my partner, Adam. He’s a mage.” I tipped my head the opposite way. “That’s Giguhl, he’s a fifth-level Mischief demon and the son-in-law of the King and Queen of the Dark Races underworld.”

  Both of their eyes widened. For some reason they were both way more worried about being in a room with a demon than they were knowing there was also a vampire and a mage in the place.

  “Your turn,” I prompted.

  They exchanged a look. It was obvious the guy was in favor of telling me to fuck off, but the chick, who seemed the more rational of the two, shot him a look that threatened bodily harm if he didn’t pull his head out of his ass. I liked her despite the fact she’d tracked her muddy paws all over my rug. Finally, she won and spoke first.

  “I’m Ava and that’s Leo.”

  “You’re a . . . weredog?” I asked.

  She snorted. “Hellhound.”

  Giguhl made a dismissive sound.

  “What are you looking at?” Ava said. “You’re some sort of weird demon-slash-mole-rat shifter.”

  The demon’s black lips sputtered with indignation. “I—I—mole-rat? I can’t even.” He waved a claw to indicate I needed to defend his honor.

  “Not a mole-rat,” I said. “A hairless cat.”

  “Really?” She tilted her head. “That’s weird.”

  “Whatever, were-bitch.”

  I stepped forward before Ava could make good on the threat in her eyes. “Anyway, we’ve established what everyone else is. How about you, Leo?”

  “I’m a reaper,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Where’s your robe, hotshot?” Giguhl said over a snicker.

  Leo’s eyes narrowed but he clearly was uncomfortable being around the demon, so he didn’t respond.

  “Wait,” Adam interjected, “I’m confused. If you’re the Grim Reaper, does that mean someone stole your Scythe?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not like that. I’m not the Grim Reaper. That’s just a job title. I’m in charge of a lot of other reapers. The Scythe we’re looking for is a special weapon that allows reapers to drain the souls of their target, trap the soul, and transport it to Hell. It’s pretty self-explanatory.”

  “We obviously don’t have it since we didn’t even know reapers were a thing. We know why Boyd wanted to screw us over, but what does he have against you guys?”

  Leo’s eyebrow shot up. “That’s exactly what I’m going to ask him while I’m kicking his ass.”

  I sighed and shot a look at Adam. “This is gonna be a real shit show, isn’t it?”

  He smiled. “Yup.”

  Ava asked Leo, “Do you know where he is?”

  Leo shook his head. “We talked on the phone. He didn’t tell me where he’s staying.”

  Adam smiled. “Oh, I have a pretty good idea where we can find him.”

  “Okay, since we’re all on the same side here, let’s stash our weapons and take this to the kitchen so we can figure out our next steps, because I sure as shit could use a drink,” I said.

  “Amen, sister,” Giguhl said.

  I shook my head at the demon. “No drink for you until you find some pants, Mr. Giggles.”

  AVA

  It didn’t take long to decide that Leo and Adam should stay put and try to hunt for Boyd with scrying while Sabina and I went to visit a contact she had at a bar off Bourbon Street.

  The place was one of those dives that tries a little too hard to pretend it’s still Prohibition, just a red neon sign hanging over a flat black door to indicate there was anything except apartments behind the vine-covered brick walls. I sighed as Sabina pressed the buzzer, and she gave me the sharp look I was starting to recognize as her stink-eye.

  “Problem?”

  “You really think this guy of yours knows Boyd?” I said as an answering buzz from the interior let us inside.

  “Probably,” she said. “If anyone in the city does.” She strode ahead as the darkness of the bar closed in around us, down a narrow hall and into a low musty room with a water-stained ceiling. A jazz combo composed of guys who looked almost as old as the building was playing on what could only charitably be referred to as a stage. Most of the bottles behind the bar were dusty as tombstones.

  Sabina took a seat on a bar stool, positioning herself so she could see the whole room and both the kitchen and the front doors. I sat down and faced her, so I could cover the corners she couldn’t see. She nodded approvingly at me.

  “Leo teach you that?”

  “A hundred years of hanging around crappy speakeasies taught me,” I said.

  Sabina twirled one finger at the bartender, a guy wearing one of those straw hipster hats who was the only person under sixty in the joint. Her hair gleamed molten in the low light, and her pale skin managed to look even more flawless. I glanced in the cloudy mirror over the bar and discovered that sexy, discreet lighting just made me look dead.

  “So you and Leo,” she said. I grimaced as the bartender ambled over.

  “It’s really not a girl-talk-style story.”

  “I’m not interested in girl talk,” Sabina said. “I’m interested in if your feelings for each other will screw this up.”

  “You’d have to ask Leo,” I said as the bartender leaned over to get our order. “I don’t do feelings.”

  Sabina opened her mouth and I cut her off. “Any feelings.”

  “What can I get you, Ms. Kane?” the bartender asked her, and I dropped my eyes from hers, hoping my lie was convincing. It was easier than admitting that Leo and I couldn’t feel those things, even if we wished our situation could be different.

  “The usual.” Sabina slid a folded piece of paper with Boyd’s name across the sticky bar. The bartender opened it, read the name, and then shook his head.

  “Sorry, Ms. Kane.”

  He went to make her drink and Sabina sighed, pulling out her cell phone to call her pet mage.

  “That’s it?” I said. Sabina shrugged.

  “If they’ve never heard of him, they’ve never heard of him.”

  I nudged her arm as I turned on my stool. “Watch the bartender,” I said quietly. Sabina frowned.

  “You have some kind of power to tell when people are lying? There’s no way Boyd could have convinced anyone in this place to lie for him. I told you—I’m the Chosen of all of the world’s Dark Races.”

  “I have the power of meeting a lot of liars,” I said. So what if I didn’t have perfect hair and a fancy title? The bartender was acting so squirrelly he might as well have been chewing acorns.

  I slid off my stool and started down the bar, but the guy saw me coming and backed up, pushing into a rear room through a swinging door. I caught a glimpse of a guy I figured was Boyd before it slammed shut in my face, and I heard a dead bolt click.

  “Move.”

  Sabina was behind me, and when I shifted to the side she put her foot to the door, shattering the wood around the lock. We were just in time to see Boyd go out the window. He moved faster than a man should be able to, and I figured he was juiced with magic. Great.

  “Go around front!” I hollered at Sabina as I pulled myself onto the sill. “Try to cut him off!”

  The bartender cowered in the corner, holding up his hands as Sabina gave him a snarl in passing. “He made me! He threatened my family—I had no choice!”

  “Whatever helps you sleep at night, dude,” I said, and then my boots hit the ground ten feet below the window and I was running through the dense air of Bourbon
Street, trying to keep the mage in sight.

  SABINA

  Bourbon Street is thirteen blocks long, and on the average weekend night, it is packed with thousands of humans in various states of sobriety. The air smells of cigarette smoke, vomited daiquiris, and raging hormones. But there was also an undeniable energy to all those vulnerable bodies gathered together to dance and sing like there was no tomorrow. It was the one thing I envied about humans. It was the curse of immortality that time never felt precious, so life never felt worth celebrating.

  However, it’s one thing to wax poetic about mortals celebrating being alive and another thing entirely to have to dodge puddles of vomit and piss and staggering frat boys while you’re chasing an asshole mage.

  Boyd didn’t have much of a head start, but he wove in and out of groups of stumbling humans like he’d been doing it his entire life.

  “Should I change?” Ava asked. She was asking about switching into her hellhound form. “Can’t risk it,” I said. “Too many people with smartphones and cameras.”

  “So?”

  “So, I can’t risk being the reason humans find out paranormal beings are real.”

  She shook her head and kicked up her speed a notch. I shook my head and easily caught up with her. Truth was, if I ran at my full speed—or used my magic to flash through the crowd—Ava wouldn’t have been able to keep up with me, hellhound or not. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned through the years, it’s that impatience complicates things. We had no idea what motivated Boyd to set up Adam and Leo. Chasing him down like prey might feel good but it might not get us any answers. So I was content to follow him and see what happened.

  Music spilled out of bars as we ran past, creating a sort of mix tape of disco, rap, and country music. Flashing lights and neon signs of naked women winked against the dark sky.

  Up ahead, I saw Boyd’s stupid hat bobbing and weaving above the crowd. We were nearing the end of the busy part of Upper Bourbon, where the cops blocked the road off from cars at night. Once he got out of the crowd, he’d be easy picking because Ava and I could bring some of our magical favors to the party.

  “Once he’s past the barricades, you can change,” I called to her.

  She nodded and dodged a couple who were painted silver from head to toe. The guy wore a pair of running shorts that had been spray-painted to match his skin. The lady wore a pair of silver panties, and two fleur-de-lis stickers covered her nipples. As we passed, the guy lifted his lady friend and put her legs over his shoulder so he could pantomime cunnilingus for the crowd. I rolled my eyes and kept running. Almost there. Boyd had maybe a block left before the crowd gave way to a shadowy street beyond.

  “Shit!” Ava said.

  I pulled my eyes from the silver people and looked in time to see Boyd cut a hard right on Orleans. “Godsdammit.”

  We turned to follow him. At the end of Orleans, the cathedral loomed. Lit from the front, a statue of Jesus with his arms spread wide cast an ominous silhouette on the cathedral’s façade. If Boyd made it past the cathedral to Jackson Square, it would be almost impossible to catch him. There were too many side streets and alleys to keep up without the help of magic.

  Ava hit my arm and pointed with her other hand. On the left side of the street, Boyd was scaling a gate. “Got you, asshole,” I said under my breath. Once we were off the street, all bets were off.

  Ava and I beelined for the gate. She made a running jump for the top of the gate. I reached to help boost her up, but she kicked at me. “I got it.”

  With my brows raised, I backed away and crossed my arms. I used to be like that. Never wanted help from anyone. Needed to prove I could do it all on my own. Maybe one day Ava would learn that asking for help didn’t make you weak. But it wasn’t my lesson to teach her. I just hoped when she learned it, it wasn’t the hard way.

  Her fingers gripped the upper ledge and she grunted as she pulled herself up. She kicked out her leg and swung it over the top. Perched there, straddling the top, she took a moment to glance back at me to flash a victorious look.

  I shook my head and started to open my mouth to tell her to quit screwing around, but a movement beyond the gate caught my eye.

  “Ava!” I yelled. But I was too late. Before the word even left my mouth, a ball of black light hit Ava. Her mouth dropped open in a silent scream as her eyes rolled back in her head.

  I leapt forward in time to catch her before she hit the concrete.

  Boyd watched her fall. Holding her too-still body, I glared at the asshole.

  “Tell Lazarus I said hi.”

  I started to lower Ava to the ground so I could rise to shoot this bastard between his eyes with a spell that would make his balls shoot out through his head. But before I could, Ava gasped and her body began convulsing in my arms. At the same moment, a flash of light accompanied Boyd’s exit from the courtyard beyond.

  “Fuck!”

  Ava’s eyes opened. Thin veins of black webbed across the whites of her eyes.

  My phone rang with Adam’s tone in my pocket. Using my free hand, I grabbed it. “Adam—”

  “Sabina! You need to back off on Boyd. We just found out he’s into some serious dark necromancy.”

  “No shit,” I said. “He blasted Ava. I’m bringing her home.”

  The black veins were spreading across her pale face now. Her mouth opened and closed like a carp’s as she gasped for air.

  “And Adam? Be ready to go.” I looked down at Ava. Her body felt limp, as if the burden of staying alive was becoming too heavy. “She’s barely hanging on.”

  AVA

  I didn’t remember much after Boyd hit me with the curse. It felt like taking a power line to the chest—everything went cold and smooth and black, and I floated down through the layers of gauzy darkness until I felt something hitting me on the cheek—not hard, exactly, but not gentle either. Like I was being slapped by a baby, repeatedly.

  My eyes fluttered open and I saw that damn hairless cat leaning over me. “Well, shit,” it said. “You’re alive after all.”

  Everything was too bright and too hot, now that I was back in the land of the living. I didn’t try to move—I wasn’t so much of a badass that I was going to stand up only to keel over again.

  “Did Boyd get away?” I rasped. My throat felt like I’d been doing shots of Tabasco sauce.

  Sabina nodded, coming to stand next to her demon cat. “I had to let him go or let you die. Don’t tell me you’re pissed off at my choice.”

  “Far from it,” I said, offering her a weak smile. “I’d buy you a drink, if I had money. Or could walk.”

  “Sabina, Leo, and I managed to combine our powers to draw the death magic out of you. Luckily there were three of us because that shit was nasty,” Adam said. “You might feel some residual effects of the curse for a few hours, but mainly I’m concerned about the fall you took.”

  I waved him off. “I’m fine.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. I figured Sabina’s Amazon moves had kept my skull from cracking open, but the entire right side of my body was a knotted, bruised wreck from where Boyd’s spell had hit me. I wriggled everything and figured I had a few cracked ribs, maybe a torn rotator cuff, but I’d had worse.

  Leo appeared, holding a bottle of water, and I shoved his hand away when he offered it to me. His face twisted in a frown. “You concussed or something?”

  “I’m right, is what I am,” I snarled. “I told you it was a bad idea to come here on the say-so of some rando who probably has it out for you just as much as he does Adam.” I did struggle up then, turning my back on him as recrimination and blame exploded behind me, everyone from Leo to the demon cat yelling about whose fault it was we had to deal with Boyd’s sorry ass.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but Ava’s the one who actually let him get away,” Adam said, which made Leo growl.

  “Blame her for this again and I’ll kick your ass!”

  “Touch him and I’ll make sure there’s nothing left of your ass,”
Sabina snapped.

  Giguhl sighed. “Can we all please stop saying ass so much?”

  I felt in my pocket for a tissue, or maybe a knife to jam into my ear canal so I didn’t have to listen to the fight, and my fingers closed around the scrap of fabric I’d grabbed from the top of the fence when Boyd had caught himself on the sharp iron spikes. Served him right—what kind of respectable human man ran around in cargo pants anyway?

  I held the sticky fabric to my nose and breathed in the smell of dirty pennies. Boyd had cut himself—not badly, but there was enough blood for my purpose. My only purpose, really—at least when I was a hellhound.

  “Leo,” I said, turning back around. “GUYS,” a little louder, when they all just kept swearing at each other. I held up the bloody scrap. “I can find Boyd. I can track him.”

  SABINA

  I’d fought battles with demons and any manner of nasty dark races and beasts. I’d conquered Irkalla and become a demigoddess despite incredible odds. But nothing had prepared me for the embarrassment of walking through the French Quarter at 2:00 A.M. holding leashes for a hellhound and a hairless demon cat.

  “Watch it,” the cat hissed after I’d jerked the leash for the umpteenth time.

  “Stay on the sidewalk then,” I snapped. “And quit pissing on everything.”

  As it was, I was having trouble keeping up with Ava’s hound form as she zigzagged through the streets trying to pick up Boyd’s scent. Unlike Giguhl, she couldn’t speak when she was in her animal guise, so I had to pay attention to her body language and growls to understand what she was doing.

  At that point, we’d scoured the area around Orleans where Boyd had disappeared. Finally, Ava took off toward Congo Square. A half hour later, we’d wandered all over Louis Armstrong Park, stopping six times for Giguhl to piss on various statues and benches and—before I could prevent it—a homeless man.

  Finally, just before I was about to bring Ava to heel and call the search off, she stopped. Her hackles prickled and her nose rose to the sky. A low growl of warning rumbled from her mouth.