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“Cut that out, goddamnit!” If blue eyes could let off sparks, mine were doing a pretty good job.
“Who are you? Who’s in there?” Before I could get an answer, Jimmy shook off the blow I’d dealt him and came at us again. I had plenty of time to grab my gun from Tomas’ waistband and shoot him. I saw a crimson flower bloom on his chest, slightly below the heart, if a rat’s heart is in the same place as a human’s, but he kept coming. I shot him again, in the arm this time. It was a mistake—I was aiming for his head—but it turned out to be a good thing because he had been in the process of raising a gun. He dropped it and scrabbled at his chest, while I knelt there wondering where he’d hidden a weapon in the few remaining pieces of his suit. He paused a few feet away, giving me plenty of time to finish the job, but he wasn’t looking at me.
“Call off your pet gorilla or you’ll never find your dad.” The voice was unmistakably Jimmy’s, so I learned another new thing—weres could talk in their altered forms, or at least half satyrs could.
“What?” I eased my finger off the trigger, and Jimmy threw me a dirty glance.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” He looked down at whoever was in my body and grimaced. “We can make a deal; don’t be stupid—call him off. Tony ain’t gonna tell you what you want to know. He likes Rog too much where he is.”
“My father is dead.” I couldn’t understand what Jimmy thought he was playing at, but it wasn’t going to work.
He looked pissed, although that could have been because of the blood seeping out from between his fingers and splattering the asphalt. “Damn it, I’m not talking to you!”
An explosion caused me to look up, and I saw that Pritkin and Louis-César had been busy. Six furry bodies littered the lot, sprawled over cars and slumped on the ground, about the same number that were still active. Louis-César was methodically butchering two of the remaining ones while dodging the flying talons that were trying to decapitate him. Pritkin, though, was really tearing loose, and by the expression on his face loving every minute of it. He blew up another car, shooting through a large wererat who looked down at his missing middle in surprise before keeling over. Then he stopped another that had leapt at him from the roof of a minivan by yelling something that caused the w
ere to burst into flames in midair. Blazing pieces rained down on Pritkin’s shields—I could see them spark in electric blue wherever one hit—but none got through.
I couldn’t believe that no one from the bar was concerned about the noise. Shotgun blasts are not exactly quiet, and neither were the grunting, squealing and scuffling that accompanied them. It was also strange that the vamps weren’t attacking but hadn’t left, either. Five of them stood around, watching the action as if waiting for something.
“Tomas, behind you!” Louis-César jumped over the body of the huge rat in front of him and started towards me. His expression, and a curse in my own voice from behind me, told me that had I picked a really bad time to be distracted. I whirled around to see that Jimmy had grabbed my body by the hair and had one of those three-inch claws pressed to my throat. “I told you to get her out of here!” Louis-César was looking at Jimmy, but he was talking to me. Or, rather, to Tomas, only he didn’t appear to be home. I wasn’t too worried about the enraged vampire at my side, though; the claw, which had cut a fine line across my throat, was holding all my attention.
A stream of very inventive curses poured out of my body’s mouth, some of which sounded real familiar. Well, at least I knew who was keeping house. “Shut up, Billy. Don’t make this worse.”
The blue eyes widened and focused on me. “Wait a minute, you’re in there? Good God, I thought you were dead! I thought…”
“I said, shut up.” I wasn’t in the mood for one of Billy’s harangues, and I needed to think. Okay, one problem at a time. It wouldn’t do me much good to figure out how to get my body back if its throat had been cut in the meantime, so deal with Jimmy now and freak out later.
“What do you want, Jimmy?”
“Be silent, Tomas! You have done enough damage tonight. I will deal with this.” Louis-César seemed behind on the action, but I wasn’t about to take the time to get him up to speed.
“Shut up,” I told him, and the expression of incredulity that passed over his face would have been funny in other circumstances. “Come on, Jimmy, what do you want to let…her…go? You wanted a deal, remember?” It was surreal, standing there in someone else’s body and arguing with a giant rat, but all I could see was my body with Billy Joe’s frightened expression. I couldn’t rely on him to get us out of this: he’d never even made it to thirty before he ended up drowned like an unwanted kitten.
“I want out of here alive; what you think?” Jimmy glanced, not at the vamps at my side, but at the ones lounging around the fight. Okay, maybe they weren’t his buddies after all. “And cutie here is going with me. Tony will forget about our little problem if I bring him Cassie, and that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.”
“No way.” I was not going to stand there and let Jimmy cart me off. None of my fantasies about Tomas’ body had included taking up permanent residence. “Try again.”
“Okay, fine. How about I slit her throat? Like that any better? Tony’d prefer her alive, but I’m betting even a corpse would get me outta the doghouse.”
“If you harm her, I swear it will take you days to die, and you will beg for death before it comes.” Louis-César sounded utterly convincing, but killing Jimmy, however slowly, wasn’t going to bring me back to life.
“He’s got a point, Jimmy. The only thing keeping you alive right now is Cassie. If you kill her, we’ll deal with you before Tony gets the chance.”
“So, what? I let her go, then you kill me anyway? I don’t think so.”
“You should recall that there are many ways to die,” Louis-César put in, and I could have kicked him.
“How many times do I have to tell you to shut the hell up?” I heard the edge of panic in my voice and forced myself to calm down. If I lost it now, no way were Pretty Boy and Rambo going to talk us out of this. Especially since Pritkin seemed to have disappeared, off chasing wererats probably.
“We will talk when this is done,” Louis-César said quietly. “I do not know what is wrong with you…”
“Exactly. You don’t. You really, really don’t.”
I smiled at Jimmy, but it only seemed to unnerve him. I figured out why a second later when I nicked my lip on a fang. Tomas’ were fully extended, but I didn’t know how to retract them. Great, bargaining for my life with a lisp—exactly my luck. “Okay, how about this, Jimmy? You give us Cassie, and we give you a head start. Say, two hours? I’ll even promise to distract the vamps over there long enough for you to make a run for it. They’re Tony’s boys, aren’t they? They’ll stand there and watch us kill you, or finish the job if you get past us. But we can keep them busy and off your back for a while. Now, that’s fair, isn’t it?”
Jimmy licked his muzzle with a long, pale tongue, and his little rat ears twitched. “You’d say anything to get her back, then kill me or let them do it. Besides, if I don’t take her to Tony, I’m dead anyway.”
I sneered. “Since when do weres take orders from vamps? I can’t believe you toadied to him all these years!”
