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"Delilah!" Camille's voice brought me out of my sparring match. Her expression was a mixture of disbelief and wariness. "I know what was here."
"What? What was it?" I leaned against the oak, waiting. Not a demon. Please don't let it be a demon, I thought. I was tired of demons. While I could kick ass with the best, I didn't like conflict. When my sisters got into arguments, the stress turned me into a pussycat.
"You were right, there was a Were around here," she said, her eyes flashing with silver. "And unless I'm off my game, I think he's a werepuma." She looked up at me. "He's marked the tree."
"Eww…" I wrinkled my nose, hoping he'd been in Were-form when he'd taken his territorial piss.
A werepuma? I stared at the trunk, then at our house, which you could just barely see from this vantage point. Why had he marked the tree? He didn't own this land, we did. Was he in league with Shadow Wing and the demons? Or was he a free agent? And if he wasn't aligned with our hellion friends, just what did he want?
* * *
CHAPTER 2
My sisters and I lived in a funky three-story Victorian in the suburb of Belles-Faire, one of Seattle's seediest districts. Sure, it was a crummy neighborhood, but we had the necessary acreage to provide us with the privacy needed for our work. Menolly's apartment was in the basement, Camille had the second story, I had the third, and we shared the main floor as a common living area. We'd given Iris a spare room near the kitchen. It was small, but so was she, and we let her live there rent free in exchange for her help around the house.
A couple days after the full moon, I was putting the finishing touches on a three-cheese omelet when Camille sashayed into the room.
"Food ready?" she asked, her eyes lighting up. I nodded. We took turns with Iris making breakfast. "Omelet. Toast is on the table." I divided the eggs and dished them out onto the waiting plates.
"That smells good," Camille said. She was dressed to the hilt in a crimson halter dress with a low V-neck. A silver belt slung low across her hips, and she was wearing fuck-me pumps to die for. I gave her the once-over. "New guy?" I asked, grinning.
She laughed. "As if I didn't have trouble enough with the two I've already got. No. If you want to know, the Faerie Watchers Club is meeting at the store today. I play it up for them when they come in. They like the show, and it gives me a chance to dress up.">"So what happened? No pervs out last night?" I winced as I stretched. My muscles needed a good workout. I'd head down to the gym toward evening. They loved me there and had given me a free lifetime membership because men signed up just to watch me work out. Being half-Faerie in a world enchanted with our presence had its perks.
"Not that I could find. I drank a little, then wiped the guy's memory and sent him on his way. I only took enough to stave off the worst of my thirst, but I'm going to need a real hunt in a few nights." Her frost-blue eyes flashed against the copper of her Bo Derek braids. As she shook her head, the ivory beads she'd had woven into the braids clattered like the bones of a dancing skeleton. Menolly made no noise, except when she chose to. The beads reminded her that she had once been alive. That she hadn't always been a vampire.
"You mean a full kill," I said. The phone rang, but it stopped after one ring. Iris must have picked up.
"You nailed it." Menolly shrugged, but I could hear the craving in her voice. A young vampire, she still needed to drink deep and often.
Looking at her, it was hard to believe my sister was a vamp, except for that Butoh dancer complexion. Petite, she barely made five three, if that, but she could toss a dead demon over one shoulder and carry him like a child, and she could drain a person of blood without blinking. She was the youngest, but sometimes she felt old as the hills to me.
Camille, the oldest, was a buxom and curvy five foot seven witch. Long waves of curly black hair cascaded down her back, and her eyes were violet with silver flecks. She was the practical one, although you wouldn't know it by the way she dressed, which was one step shy of a fetish bar.
And me? I was the middle child, though both Camille and Menolly annoyed the hell out of me by treating me like the baby. At least I had them both beat in the height department. I topped six one, and my body was muscled and lean. No couch potato kitty for me, except during my late-night TV binges.
My hair would have been called flaxen by a poet, and until recently had fallen almost to my waist. Tired of the constant upkeep, I'd marched into a salon and asked for a layered shag that barely skimmed my shoulders.
The three of us looked about as much like sisters as we did like goblins. Our mother had been human, and our father was one of the Sidhe. We fell at odd points along the spectrum. Unfortunately, our half-breed status upset the status quo with Father's relatives. Worse, it upset our internal balance.
Camille's magic proved chaotic and was as erratic as her choice in men. Menolly could climb a hundred-foot tree, but she fell off a simple perch when spying on a rogue clan of vampires. They, in turn, tortured and turned her into one of them.
As for me… my shapeshifting was unpredictable, and I couldn't always control it. And even though I was a Were, no gorgeous lioness appeared when I transformed. Just a golden, long-haired tabby, whose tail occasionally got stuck in the briar bush and who ended up with fleas. Damn it. I smelled like Advantage and the beginning of a rash was climbing up my back. It seemed Iris had dosed me a good one. I needed to take a shower before I broke out in hives.
"Where's Camille? I have to talk to her about something I felt out in the woods last night." I glanced around, looking for signs that she might be home. No stilettos, no corsets lying around, no stench of sulfur from misfired magic.
"She said she was stopping off at Morio's before coming home," Menolly said.
Just then Iris appeared in the doorway. "Camille just called. She's on her way home. I'm going to take off for the store. She should rest for a while before coming in," the house sprite said. "Tell her I'll expect her in around one?"
I nodded, watching as Iris bustled off. Camille ostensibly owned the Indigo Crescent, a bookstore in downtown Belles-Faire, a grimy suburb of Seattle. In truth, it was a front for the OIA—the Otherworld Intelligence Agency—for which we worked. They'd sent us Earthside because, bluntly, they thought we were a bunch of bumbling bimbos. Klutzes we might be, but a pack of vacuous T & A? Never. We had brains! We had looks! We had… the worst record in the service. However, thanks to the bureaucracy, instead of getting us out of the way, the OIA had put us right on the fast track to Hell.
A few months ago, we'd had a nasty bit of business with a Degath Squad, a trio of demons from the Subterranean Realms who were on a scouting mission. They were looking for the spirit seals—ancient artifacts that, when joined together, would open the portals and allow Shadow Wing and his minions to take over both Earth and Otherworld.
We'd barely managed to squeak through the assault alive.
When we returned to Otherworld to prove that things weren't so hunky-dory back on Earth, we found our home city in an uproar with a full-scale civil war going on. We reconsidered our options and showed up on the doorstep of the Elfin Queen.
When we dropped the dead demons and other assorted goodies at her feet, Queen Asteria promptly proclaimed that, like it or not, as of that moment we were now working for her. Oh, and one other thing—a little thing, really—just don't tell the OIA about this arrangement. When a millennia-old magic-wielding queen tells you to do something, you don't argue.
