She knew all this because she’d catered several parties that he’d attended. He’d ignored her, other than grunting a curt “thank you” when she served him drinks. If anything, he was more abrupt with Zoey than he was with the other servers, although he didn’t flirt with anybody. So she tended to avoid him – because he seemed to almost have some kind of grudge against her.
But Zoey hadn’t known that he was aCapo. That meant he was one of a very few men who served directly under Arturo Moretti, theCapo di Tutti Capos. Arturo tore people’s limbs off for just looking at him wrong – or so she’d heard.
Zoey paced in front of Kalinda’s desk, her butt cheek aching with each step.Stupid bite!It figured that the only time Dominic’s mouth was near her nether regions, it was in wolf form, sinking his fangs in.
She mentally slapped herself for that thought. Dominic was nothing but a very naughty fantasy. Even if she could have him, she wouldn’t, because of who he worked for.
“The no-shift potion is guaranteed, right?” Zoey asked.
“Of course,” Kalinda said. Her gaze slid away. “I’m pretty sure.”
Zoey spun around and pinned her with a glare of fury.“Pretty sure?” she screeched.
Kalinda threw up her hands in frustration. “Warlock Cyrus is the best in the district. I have never heard a complaint against him. The only way we can be sure, though, is if someone was bitten and went through the next full moon without turning. And none of my girls have ever been bitten before. The potion is strictly a precaution; a couple of times, the Blood Oath men got a little frisky when they were in wolf form and maybe, ah, nipped a girl. Or two.”
“Or two? So, like five or six?” Zoey glowered at her boss.
Kalinda’s gaze slid to the left. “Three or four. Through their clothing. They didn’t even draw blood, but I didn’t want to take any chances, so I started using the no-shift and I have never, ever heard of it failing. So we’re good there.” The fake smile she tried to summon up was the opposite of reassuring; it looked as if she was having gas pains. Kalinda was not a smiler.
“You never mentioned the nipping when you hired me,” Zoey said indignantly.
Kalinda looked her up and down with a critical eye, ignoring her complaint. “Do you suddenly crave raw meat? Are you unusually hairy?”
Zoey sank down into a chair gingerly, favoring her right cheek, and gave Kalinda look of annoyance. “I was bitten at 2 a.m. Seven hours ago. It’s probably too soon to tell. The next full moon isn’t for 28 days. And the werewolves don’t have any craving for raw meat when they’re in human form. You know that. Do they order a hundred pounds of hamburger? No, the pack gets filet mignon and prime rib.”
“Right, right.” Kalinda sat down in the chair next to Zoey’s, tapped her fingers on the chair arm nervously, her long gold-painted nails clicking on the scarred wood. “Pardon my panicking, this only involves one of my employees possibly accidentally offending a pack of wolf-men who delight in eviscerating their enemies. Why would I be a little tense? OK, walk me through what happened. Tell me everything that led up to him biting you.”
Zoey leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “Let me think a minute.” She tried to stifle an enormous yawn. She hadn’t slept all night. The room that she rented had paper thin walls and she lived right above a nightclub. And it was hard to sleep after having been bitten in the butt by a werewolf.
“Fine, fine, I’ll get you some coffee,” Kalinda said grudgingly. She liked to act like a hardass – she had to, to run any kind of business in Encantado – but she was protective of the girls who worked for her.
Zoey nodded gratefully. “You’re a lifesaver.”
As Kalinda hurried off to the kitchen in the back, she replayed yesterday through her mind, searching for clues.
Why had Dominic chomped on her gluteus? Was it because she’d asked to talk to his boss? That wouldn’t make sense; it wasn’t even him that she’d asked.
Yesterday morning she’d reached her boiling point. There were rats crawling around the piles of garbage that had been rotting in the streets for the last few months, as the trash pickup became more and more sporadic. She had stepped in the runoff and ruined her new sneakers. And the potholes? Forget about it. She worked as a bike messenger during the week, and riding through her neighborhood was like running a slalom course.
The residents of District 17 – informally known as the Northern Warehouse District - paid good money to the Blood Oath pack just like everyone else in the entire western sector of Encantado. In exchange, the pack was supposed to “protect” the waste disposal company from anything, magic or otherwise, That meant that the garbage trucks were guaranteed to arrive safe. But apparently all the garbage trucks were getting lost on their way, because she couldn’t remember the last time they’d picked up the trash.
At this point, Zoey and the other residents were paying their extortion money just for the privilege of not being murdered by a pack of corrupt furry goombahs. Yes, they didn’t pay as much as the wealthy districts, which meant they could only expect the bare minimum of services, but over the past few months, they’d stopped getting even that.
When citizens tried to take the trash to the city dump themselves, they were charged an outrageous fee – even after paying their protection money to the Blood Oath Pack.
They’d tried to talk to Jordan Smythe, the pack’s neighborhood liaison who collected their fees and passed them on to the Blood oath Pack. The results? Crickets.
And more garbage.
It wasn’t as if they had the option of leaving. Nobody in the Portal Cities was allowed to move out without permission from the Council of Mages, and even then, they would have to pay a steep fee and find another portal city that would accept them.
Magic-bloods weren’t allowed to live outside of the Enchanted Zones. Non-magics tended to get very nervous about magical folk living among them. They were afraid that the magic-bloods would cast spells on them or bite them. That was only sometimes true.
And from what Zoey had heard, most of the other portal cities weren’t much better – and the ones that were, only accepted very powerful mages. Since the Pendulum Swing of the 1950s, when magic again tore through the areas where the veil between universes was thin, the cities near the portals had mostly sunk into crime and poverty.
There was no paradise, no happy safe suburb, for those who had so much as a drop of magical blood in their veins.
Zoey’s tired mind was drifting. She forced herself to think about the party last night.
