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Pompaedius made a dash for the door. Just as he stepped through it a foot stuck out, catching his ankle. With a whoop, the priest went tumbling. I saw the soles of his sandals for an instant, and then he was gone. There came a meaty crash, then a howl of horrified agony.
“Nasty tumble, that,” I remarked. “Those steps are steep.”
“I don’t think the fall made him bellow like that,” Caesar said. “Let’s go see.”
We went to the doorway and then out to the portico. Hermes was nursing a sore ankle. “Haven’t done that since I was a boy,” he said, “but it still works.”
Pompaedius was still convulsing and flopping about, but he was probably already dead. His flesh was swelling and darkening, the skin beginning to sport huge blisters. The people who had been gawking panicked and jammed the alley with their bodies, trying to flee. They thought this might be some new and horrible disease, and they wanted no part of it. Several were trampled, but I think none fatally.
For a while we watched bemusedly. We could see about half of the snake protruding from beneath the body, wriggling weakly. Then it was still.
“It’s always about power, isn’t it, Caesar?” I said. “Whether you get it with politics, legions, money, or snakes, power is power.”
Hermes borrowed a lictor’s fasces and levered the body over. “The snake’s dead. He crushed it when he fell.”
“Bad luck for the Marsi,” I observed.
“I’ll have a lustrum performed and endow Angitia’s temple,” Caesar said. “That will satisfy them that the curse is lifted.”
“But their sacred snake is dead,” Julia said.
Caesar shrugged. “They’ll find another. There are always other snakes in the swamp.”
These things happened on two days of the year 709 of the City of Rome, during the third Dictatorship of Caius Julius Caesar.
IN RED, WITH PEARLS
by Patricia Briggs
New York Times bestseller Patricia Briggs is perhaps best known for the Mercy Thompson series, detailing the paranormal adventures of a coyote-shapeshifting car mechanic embroiled in the world of vampires, werewolves, and gremlins, and the related Alpha and Omega series, but she has also written traditional fantasy series such as the four-volume Sianim sequence (Masques, Wolfsbane, Steal the Dragon, When Demons Walk), the two-volume Hurog series (Dragon Bones, Dragon Blood), and the Raven duology (Raven’s Shadow, Raven’s Strike), as well as the stand-alone novel The Hob’s Bargain. Her most recent book is River Marked, a new Mercy Thompson novel.
In the thriller that follows, we accompany werewolf private investigator Warren Smith, who will be familiar to readers of the Mercy Thompson series, as he races to crack a case involving zombies, witches, and lawyers. Just another day at the office.
I’M REAL GOOD AT WAITING. I RECKON IT’S ALL THE TIME I SPENT HERDING cows when I was a boy. Kyle says it’s the werewolf in me, that predators have to be patient. But Kyle knows squat about herding cows. I’d say he knows squat about predators, too, but he’s a lawyer.
I stretched out my legs and put the heels of my boots on the desk of Angelina the Receptionist and Dictator of All Things Proper at Brooks, Gordon, and Howe, Attorneys at Law. Angelina would have thrown a fit if she’d seen my feet propped up where anyone could just walk in and see me.
“Image, hijo,” she’d said to me when I started working for the firm. I kinda liked it when she called me hijo. Though I was a lot older than any son of hers could possibly be—she didn’t know that.
She’d given me a disapproving look. “It is all about image. Your appearance must be just so to get the clients to spend their money, Warren. They like expensive offices, lawyers in suits, and private detectives in fedoras and ties—it tells them that we are successful, that we have the skills to help them.”
I’d told her I’d wear a fedora when the cows came home wearing muumuus and feather boas. I consented, however, to wearing ties to work and to play nicely during office hours, and she was mostly happy with that.
Office hours had been officially over for a good while, the tie was in my back pocket, and Angelina was gone for the day. I’d have been gone for the day, too, but one of Kyle’s clients had come bursting in all upset and he’d taken her into his office and was talking her down.
Kyle was usually the last one out of the office. This time it was a sobbing client who suddenly decided that the jerk who’d slept with her best friend was actually the love of her life and she didn’t really want to divorce him, just teach him a lesson. Tomorrow it would be a mound of paperwork that would only take him a few minutes to straighten up and a few minutes would stretch into a few hours. He tended toward workaholism.
I didn’t mind. Kyle was worth waiting a bit for. And, like I said, I’m pretty good at waiting anyhow.
A noise out in the hall had me pulling my feet off the desk just before the outer door opened and a young woman in a sleek red dress with a big string of pearls around her throat entered the office in a wave of Chanel No. 5; she was stunning.
“Hey,” she said with a big smile and a dark breathy voice. “Are you Kyle Brooks?” Her ears had pearls in them, too. Her hands were bare, though I could see that she’d recently been wearing a wedding ring. Dating a divorce attorney makes me notice things like that.
“No, ma’am,” I told her. “After hours here. Best you try him tomorrow.”
She leaned over Angelina’s desk and the low-cut dress did what sleek little dresses are built to do in such circumstances. If I ran that way, I might have counted it a treat for the eyes. “I have to find Kyle Brooks.”
She was close enough that the feel of her breath brushed my face. Mostly mint toothpaste. Mostly.
