It was unexpected enough to put Madoc back on his heels. He stared at Took’s tight, set face for a moment, and the memory rose up through his mind as though he’d hooked it on a line.
Hope had died six months before. What was left was anger.
Madoc slammed one of the Goats, feral and ruined by blood addiction, against the wall. The man bared yellow, chisel-edged teeth and swung the broken edge of a butcher’s knife at Madoc’s face. It skimmed over Madoc’s jaw—a cold kiss with a hot lick at the end of it. The Goat’s eyes caught hungrily on the bead of blood, and in the moment of distraction, Madoc unceremoniously snapped his neck.
The chatter in his earpiece rose and fell in ragged cadence as the rest of the team cleared the house—Lawrence and Pally’s clipped professionalism, Kit’s ragged, off-kilter humor, and the silence that should have been a body at Madoc’s back. It nearly drowned out the sound of a door as it slammed upstairs. Not quite, though. Madoc tossed the dead Goat aside and took the stairs two at a time. He shouldered open the door at the top of the stairs and hit a wall of stench that was almost solid. It stung his eyes and stuck greasily to his tongue—rancid meat and something sour underneath it.
In the corner of the room, a tall, half-turned woman, her throat one ragged scab from overlapped bites, tried to drag something out of a splintered wooden box as a little gray cat, grubby and leggy, swore at her as it chewed on her leg.
“Get off. Get out,” she screamed as she struggled with whatever was in the crate. “He’ll come back for you. If I have you—”
Madoc pulled his gun and blew her head off. Her face splattered over the window, and her body pitched gracelessly to the floor. The cat screeched as it leaped free and shot across the room and under the neatly made white bed. There was a man in the box, filthy and raw. He stared at Madoc with pale, lost eyes and then cracked a surprisingly familiar smile.
“W… was just about to do that,” he said in a rusty, disused voice. “Always… always gotta hog the glory.”
There were cuffs on his wrists and a collar around his throat—heavy links of iron coated with silver. Someone had worked magic into the metal as well. It was sticky and painful as hot tar against Madoc’s hands as he snapped the locks. His fingertips blistered and peeled, the raw meat underneath turned dry where the curse touched it until he could see bone as he worked.
Took—not that anyone called him that yet—clung to Madoc. He was all wasted arms and sour breath—broken and ruined. Then he laughed, a crazy sound in that horrible room, and swore that he knew Madoc would come for him.
That was the moment that Madoc realized two things—that he would slowly kill whoever had done this and that Madoc had been in love with the man in his arms for a while.
Three days later Took turned Madoc away from the hospital and refused to see him or even talk to him.
That day was still vivid and raw for Madoc, but Took probably remembered it as the best day in a year’s worth of raw-meat memories. Seen from the wrong side of the bars, the narrow little cell was just a better-ventilated box.
“Half an hour,” Madoc said. He reached through the bars and cupped his hand around the back of Took’s neck. The long straps of muscle were set like stone under his fingers, too cold to the touch. It would be too much to expect, he supposed, for the sheriff to fetch his prisoner lunch from the blood bank. “I’ll get you out. Can you hang on?”
Took coughed out a ragged laugh and leaned forward to rest his forehead against the bars. The skin pinked where the silver irritated it, but Took ignored it.
“What are you going to do if I say no?” Took asked. He slid his arms through the bars and let them dangle, as though the fact that part of him was on the right side of freedom would make it easier. “Rip the door off the hinges?”
They both knew he could. Madoc knew that he would. Maybe one day he’d tell Took that, but not while all that was left of their friendship was reluctant civility.
“Yell at them faster,” he said instead as he drew his hand back. “Hang in there, Bennett.”
He turned to leave. As he banged the door to get the deputy to let him out, Took called after him. “You know, I don’t work for you anymore, Madoc. You could just use my name.”
Madoc didn’t look around. The door rattled and creaked as the deputy unlocked it. “It’s not your name,” he said. “It’s what was done to you.”
SHERIFF ANDERSONlooked like a strip of rawhide dressed up like a man. His weathered, darkly tanned skin was pulled tight over wiry muscles and long bones. The backs of his hands were flecked with liver spots, and his knuckles jutted up through his skin like tombstones.
“Ain’t never had any problems with your lot here,” Anderson said bluntly as he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves back. Black, blunt crosses were inked onto the backs of his forearms. The ink didn’t injure Madoc—it wasn’t so easy to package divinity; even a pure heart and a real threat weren’t enough sometimes—but it was an open insult to flash it at Madoc. That was telling. “Then people start disappearing, your friend turns up with all the answers and some patter about being VINE, and now I got two deputies in jail and that hotshot human consultant? Well, it turns out he’s a wetmouth with no official reason to be here.”
The slur dropped ripe and casual into the room. It wasn’t clear if Anderson knew it wasn’t something to say in polite company or if he just didn’t give a damn. Madoc chose to ignore it. He’d been called worse.
“No official reason that you need to know about,” Madoc said coldly. “I want my agent out of that cell.”
Anderson picked something out of his teeth with his thumbnail. As his thumb pushed his lip up, he flashed a black hollow where his incisor should be. It made Madoc’s skin crawl, and he licked his tongue over the back of his own teeth, the edges of his fangs still sharp enough to draw a drop of blood. The crosses on Anderson’s arms weren’t just superstition, then. There was real piety behind them. Even most of the Hunter cells balked at yanking their own eyeteeth out, if only because the Embrace would bestow fangs on a mewling infant or gummy elder if anyone was ill-advised enough to turn them. Only a few of the more extreme Pentecostal sects—the Levites, the Proverbials—still unfanged their children with regularity.
“Your agent,” Anderson said. He rolled the word around his mouth as he said that. “Yeah, Gunnar said you looked real… close… down in the cells. Real cozy. Tell me, VINE going to approve of you pulling rank to get your—”
Madoc’s temper slipped. He reached over the desk and grabbed Anderson’s arm. He smiled wide enough to flash fang and dug his fingers down into the inked skin until Anderson blanched. The gray smoke of anger wriggled in his throat and swam across the back of his eyes. There was a faint sweetness to it, like an applewood bonfire.
Experience told Madoc there was much he could do from inside the smoke, when he let the part of him that had never been human out to play unfettered, and he wouldn’treallyregret it. He might say he did, mouth the right words and make the right face, but he’d never feel it. He could rip Anderson’s fucking, cross-scrawled arm off, see if God cared as he beat the man to death with it, and never care about the screams.
He choked it back, for the moment, and kept the smile on his face.
“Mind your tongue,” he said pleasantly. “Or I’ll take it with me to Philadelphia, slice it up thin, and let every member of VINE have a taste so they know why your poison flicked my temper.”
