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Shane opened one eye and gave her his most incredulous look. “You had to save my life and now you’re asking me for help. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Well, you see…I’m sort of desperate.”
Chapter Five
Siobhan didn’t work with partners.
Not since the whole messy debacle with Percy. But she’d been fifteen when Percy died, and she’d made sure the goblin that’d killed him followed him to the grave. The image of your first partner getting sucked into a bright burning light pit to an alternate dimension isn’t all that easy to forget, though. And it didn’t make you want to run out and find a replacement.
Yet, here she was asking a total stranger to help her.
She couldn’t put her finger on the exact reason she trusted Shane. Either it was his no-questions-asked willingness to help her kill the troll, or the fact he hadn’t run screaming like a girl when she’d ripped the creature’s heart out with her bare hands. Her job got messy, and she would need someone who wasn’t going to balk when the situation got hairy.
Shane seemed like he could be reliable.
Or—at the very least—he seemed like he could last a few rounds before getting himself killed, and that was all she really needed.
“You’re desperate?” he parroted. “Wow, lady. Be still my throbbing heart.”
Siobhan shot him a look. “I can take care of that throbbing-heart problem for you.”
Shane mimed zipping his lips shut.
“You know about some of the supernatural things lurking in the city, right? What do you know?”
He paused, and Siobhan let herself take a good look at him. His face was rough with dark stubble except for one spot on his right cheek where a silvery white scar showed bright against the rest of growth. Scars were usually good for a story, and Siobhan liked them because it meant somewhere in a person’s past they’d been able to walk away from something bad.
His dark, almost black hair was styled into a sort of Mohawk with the sides cut close to his scalp and the hair on the crown allowed to grow long. It probably usually stood tall, but right now it lay flat and gave the unfortunate impression of the styles she’d seen German SS officers wear. Without thinking about it Siobhan reached out and fluffed up his flat hair so it stood at attention rather than making him look like a battered Nazi.
Now he looked like an outcast from the Sex Pistols, but it was an improvement.
His nose had been broken at some point in his life, and it hadn’t healed right, giving the bridge a slight zigzag appearance.
When she’d touched his hair, he’d opened his eyes and stared at her while she looked him over. Eyes the color of bluebells or midafternoon sky weren’t what she expected from his otherwise dusky features.
When he grinned at her, she realized she’d been cataloguing him too long. She had crossed the line from passing interest into creepy.
Shane pretended not to notice and answered her question like nothing strange had happened. “Vampires are the big ones. For me, anyway. I mean the vamp council cuts my checks, and in return I kill their lost boys and girls.”
“How peculiar.”
“Well, the way they put it to me, better to deal with you
r own problems before they become somebody else’s, right?”
“I wouldn’t have anticipated that kind of logic from vampires.”
“Hell, lady, vampires have an overabundance of logic. Those bastards spend all damn night debating this and that, and it’s a goddamn wonder they get a single thing done.”
“What else?”
“Werewolves.”
Siobhan nodded. “Yes, thankfully not something I have to deal with in my line of work. My people made a pact hundreds of years ago that we wouldn’t interfere with the wolves as long as they didn’t become a problem for us. So far they haven’t.”
Shane laughed hoarsely, and she wasn’t sure if it was at her expense. “Monsters are everyone’s problem,” he clarified. “Some are just too close to human most days for it to matter.”
“Any others?” She wasn’t in a mood to ruminate on the philosophy of what kept a good person with bad luck from becoming an all-out bad person.
