Good question, I thought, feeling the room tilt dangerously around me as I stared into the face of a Relic, the prehistoric version of a Were that haunted my dreams.
Good goddamned question.
Chapter Twenty
Istared at the massive, hunched-backed, hideous creature with muscles piled on top of muscles, a maw bigger than my head, at least twelve feet in height, and with claw-tipped arms almost dragging the floor, and couldn’t think.This was impossible.The formula that had resulted in the abomination of nature that I was looking at had been destroyed, with its only remaining remnants in the hands of the Corps.
And yet, here it was.
Did we have another traitor in the ranks?Because we’d had them before.In fact, the man who had invented the potion that brought out long-lost versions of magical creatures had been a Corps scientist.
Jenkins had hoped that his handiwork would give us an edge in the war, as creatures like Weres and vamps had once been much stronger and more terrifying than their modern-day counterparts.But all he’d succeeded in doing was releasing prehistoric monsters onto Las Vegas.Was there someone we’d missed who had continued his work?
Or was some of the leftover drug still on the streets?Punch, a popular street drug from Faerie, had served as the basis for his potion, and some of his stash had been stolen and sold by the people he’d talked into brewing it for him.But their customers had been human, not Were.
But drugs get sold on, don’t they?And stolen, traded, and generally passed around, and end up in places no one could have anticipated.Like here, I thought, staring at the latest, hideous victim.
But even if that were the case, nothing else made sense.Like the fact that the body on the floor underneath the floating image was still human-sized, which Relics most definitely were not.It looked like it had been killed partway through a Change, so someone had had split-second timing, and without magic…
No, just no.
I shielded my hand again to examine the actual body further, kneeling in the middle of the Relic projection because the other side was a heap of roofing.
A pair of dirty sneakers and the sliced-up remains of some faded, stained jeans had been discarded to one side, along with an expensive designer hoodie.The former went with the victim’s scraggly brown beard and yellowed teeth, which would have been gray if he were a few years older, but the hoodie sold for a thousand bucks plus in shops on the Strip.He looked like half-street person, half-trust-fund baby who had flown into Vegas for the weekend on Daddy’s private jet.
And gotten into something way worse than cocaine.
Then I turned the corpse over, and had a sudden, violent urge to just run screaming.And not only because it had been gutted, with the whole body cavity basically empty.But because of something else that made me want to claw at my throat, to the point that I dropped my face shield and still couldn’t breathe.
“Damn,” Caleb said with feeling, staring at the eye glaring back at us.
The other was missing, and this one was cloudy with death, but that didn’t make it easier to meet.That thing was in a human head but bore no resemblance to anything that had a right to be there.No right at all!
It was huge, to the point that it had cracked the cheekbone as it bulged outward, resulting in the discoloration of the skin that mimicked a black eye.I’d seen one like it before, just prior to its owner trying to kill me.And staring at it this close had taken me right back to that night.
The fight had happened in an RV my fiancé no longer owned, because the monster in question had ripped it in two.I’d flung open the door, expecting to see Cyrus, who had been out for a run with the boys.And had instead been confronted with something that looked just like that, and from just about this distance.
It then attacked me and killed Jayden, Jace’s brother, when he tried to protect me.And almost wiped the floor with a dozen more of our boys thereafter, before a combined effort from all of us had managed to put it down.The fight had been too close for comfort, and I could feel my blood pressure redlining just thinking about it.
Calm down, I told myself savagely.What the hell is wrong with you?That, part of my brain screamed.
Just… God.
“I’m too old for this shit,” Caleb muttered, staring at the eye, because it was basically impossible to look at anything else.Rigor had set in, causing the lid to stay open on its own, and leaving us facing the creature’s death glare, frozen in time.And me doing calculations I didn’t want in my head, to force myself back into some kind of grounded headspace.
Someone had dosed a street person with Punch, which, even in the case of the not-fucked-around-with version, was known to bring out latent abilities in humans.Jenkins hadn’t invented the wheel; he’d simply upped the effectiveness of the Fey drug, causing it to reach farther back in the genome than the regular street-variety ever could.But the regular old stuff could still pull forth surprises, some of which might be marketable.
So, somebody had wanted to create a subject for reaping, someone nobody cared about or would miss, and just happened to grab a Were.He lured his victim out here, away from prying eyes, and administered the souped-up version of the drug that he’d accidentally acquired.And was surprised by what emerged—
No.
Whoever had done this, he’d gotten away, and no one could have done that when taken by surprise by a Relic.Ihad barely done that, and I was a trained war mage who’d had a lot of help.No, someone had known what was coming, had lured a Were here on purpose, and had taken precautions because hewanteda Relic.
And I was pretty sure I knew why.
Hunters were bad, but they were also a menace as old as Weres themselves.The war had created something worse.Something that had seized on the idea of utilizing Were pelts for their magic and taken it further.
A lot farther.
