Chapter One

Chapter One

THE CAR HAD been built for open roads and speed—long, cool, and black. It had been left cracked open at the side of the road, stranded on its back while hot fluid dripped out slowly and ran over the scarred concrete. A scraped-thin reflection of the fat white moon wavered greasily in the shallow puddle.

Marlow opened his eyes and squinted at the abstract collision of color and light that filled his field of vision. Nausea hit him in the throat, and he squeezed his eyes closed. That didn’t help. It only made him aware of the fact his heartbeat hurt in his sinuses and it felt like someone had shot him in the shoulder again.

He tried a second time. The nausea curdled unpleasantly in his chest, but after a couple of hard blinks Marlow realized what was wrong with the world.

It was upside down through a broken windshield.

Or rather, he was upside down. Lines of light from the streetlamps smeared over the road at angles he didn’t usually see.

Marlow exhaled hard and watched a fine splatter of blood droplets spray over what was left of his windshield. That wasn’t good. Marlow registered that and filed it away for later. There wasn’t much he could do about it right now. Not until he got out of the car and worked out what had happened.

His thoughts were scattered. The last thing he remembered was… the rough scrape of Cade’s hand on the back of his neck, the heat and heaviness of him as he dragged Marlow away from the wheel.

“Shit,” Cade hissed against his ear. Then Cade’s arms tightened around him until it hurt. Sharp knuckles dug into his shoulders, and the awkward angle made it hard to breathe.

Then something smacked into them hard enough that, for a second, Marlow felt weightless. Until he wasn’t.

Marlow reached up and fumbled with the seat belt. It was jammed—the nylon tangled and the metal buckle battered and twisted under Marlow’s fingers. Panic washed over him, a salt-sharp realization this was bad, and he wrenched violently at the buckle for a second. It gave slightly—although that might have been his imagination—and locked again.

The panic crested and faded. He could still feel the effects. His breath was hot and ragged in his throat, and his heartbeat—still echoing painfully behind his eyes—was too fast. It was just, the more adrenaline his body pumped out, the quieter his mind was.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Everyone Marlow knew had it. When you spent your nights fighting seven-foot-tall werewolves with impulse-control problems, things gave. It would probably be easier for the department therapists to treat if it wasn’t useful sometimes.

Cade groaned next to him. Sort of. It started as that, anyhow, before it thickened on its way out through his teeth.

Marlow glanced over at his passenger. Blood plastered Cade’s hair to his skull, dark against the shaggy blond curls, and stained his shirt in thick, wet patches. His arms hung limply over his head, one sleeve of his shirt torn off completely, along with a good chunk of skin.

What was left of his arm suddenly prickled with goosebumps, stark against tanned skin, and the fine scruff of pale hair visibly darkened.

Marlow swallowed a mouthful of blood and spit and went back to the problem of how to unbuckle himself. If he couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t matter how long they’d been here. Eventually, it would be too long.

He kept a pocket knife in the compartment on the driver’s side door, but being upside down had added more variables to that. Marlow twisted around the best he could—pain radiated out from his ribs as they grated against each other—and scanned the roof of the car.

Nothing.

Shit.

He swallowed the slow roil of nausea and reached down to fumble over the roof of the car in search of something he could use. All he came up with was a pen, which wasn’t much use.

It could have been thrown out of the car. Marlow checked the window next to him. It was shattered, chunks of diamond-sized pieces scattered over the road outside. In the middle of it, the bright red handle of the knife stood out in the moonlight.

Which reminded Marlow…

Next to him, Cade sucked in a quick, eager snort of breath that didn’t sound quite… right.

Not quite human.

“How long?” Cade asked.

“Welcome back,” Marlow said, his voice strained as he stretched his arm out of the car. His fingers nudged against the pocketknife, but he couldn’t quite get hold of it. He braced his foot against the console and pushed himself out as far as he could, the seat belt a vice across his shoulder and ribs as he strained to reach it. Close. Closer. Marlow finally managed to grab it and pull it back into the car. His hand felt numb from the pressure of the seat belt, but he managed to get his thumbnail into the notch on the blade to pull it open. “You okay?”

Cade laughed, a rough, not exactly amused sound. “I will be,” he said. “How long do we have?”

The dashboard had cracked on impact, the instrument panel buckled in and broken. Marlow pointed at it with his chin as he worked on the seat belt. The handle of the knife was cracked too, the sharp edges rough against his fingers as he sawed.? “Clock isn’t working,” he said. “How long do you think?”

“Not long,” Cade said. He coughed and cleared his throat. Or tried to. It sounded like something was stuck in there or had been damaged in the crash. “If I can get far enough from—”

“From the can of fresh meat bleeding out next to you?” Marlow snorted as he sawed against the edge of the strap. “You can’t move that fast.”

“You think you can?” Cade asked. “How’s your knee doing after being T-boned?”

Good question. Marlow couldn’t answer it yet. He could feel the steering wheel where it dug into his thigh, uncomfortable but not painful, but had no idea how functional anything was. He guessed he’d find out.

The strap split under the edge of the knife and snapped. Marlow grunted as the lap belt took his weight. He dangled for a breath, and then it went slack as the fabric scraped through it. He pulled his leg out from under the wheel and dropped awkwardly onto the roof of the car.

The knee was… not great. Marlow clenched his jaw as he squirmed around in the space until he was flat on his stomach. Glass dug into his elbows and knees as he squeezed through the window, arms stretched out in front of him to narrow his shoulders. The road was wet as he pulled himself out.

“Marlow. Kit,” Cade said. His voice was thin, like it had been dragged through his teeth on a wire. “I really liked you.”

“You don’t know me,” Marlow said. He rolled over and scrambled onto his knees. His back was sweaty despite the evening chill, his T-shirt stuck to him. “That probably helps.”

It was the wolf’s smile that flashed over Cade’s face, wild and careless. Then Cade’s face was gone. Marlow sucked in a sharp breath.

Ten years on the Night Shift, his whole life as a null, and Marlow had never seen a wolf shift before. Why should he? It wasn’t a crime to be a wolf, so until they did something that meant Night Shift got called in, they weren’t Marlow’s business.

He didn’t think he’d missed anything.

Bone shattered and reformed, then broke again as anchored muscle thickened from cords into heavy ropes. Skin split and peeled as coarse, tawny fur burst through in matted, slimed tufts. Humanity peeled back like a shed hoodie as the wolf’s broad muzzle and heavy skull pushed through. Torn clothes were dragged off impatiently by clawed hands as the previously tailored fit suddenly pinched and rubbed.

Marlow exhaled. That was how quickly the man was unmade and the werewolf stitched over what was left. It felt like it should have taken longer.

The huge sandy wolf was crushed into the low-slung black wreck, half-strangled by the seat belt that dug into the flesh of its broad, thin-furred chest. He snarled, exposed teeth white and jagged, and the car jolted violently from side to side as Cade thrashed against his constraints. The seat belt went first, snapped in half, and then Cade shouldered the door out. It burst off its hinges and flew across the road to smash against the metal shutters drawn down over the storefront opposite.

Cade shrugged the car off like it was a too-small jacket. He shook himself and shed splinters of glass from his thick coat. He threw his head back, ruff thick and knotted around his neck and shoulders, and howled at the moon.

A few other wolves answered from around the city, drawn up and stretched out between the high-rise buildings and down from the buttes. Not many yet. There would be more as the moon rose higher, until up to 80 percent of the city were ready to throw their heads back.

Marlow scrambled to his feet. He took a step backward. Then another. His heel hit a puddle. The splash was faint, barely there, but it was enough.

One of Cade’s pointed ears twitched toward the sound, and his broad muzzle followed. They stared at each other for a second.

“I liked you.”

The words repeated in Marlow’s head. If he thought about it, he could still pull the taste of Cade’s mouth up from his short-term memory. Under normal circumstances, it would be a nice way to pass the time. Not so much when those same kisses were buried somewhere in a wolf’s hungry brain.

Cade cocked his head to one side and then lunged forward. He leaped easily up onto the undercarriage of the car, balanced on the frame, and snarled at Marlow. His eyes hadn’t changed much, still amber and wolfish.

Marlow pulled his gun in one smooth movement and took aim. The silver ammo was still locked up back in the station, but the hollow points loaded in the magazine would blow a hole the size of his fist in whatever they hit. Werewolves included. The problem was that would only slow Cade down.

And not enough.

“Sorry,” Marlow said.

The first shot punched through the side of the car and took out the radiator. It exploded with a crack of stressed metal and a spray of overheated steam and rusty water that forced its way up through the undercarriage to blast Cade’s feet and legs. The pain of scalded flesh made Cade snarl and lash out at the car. He ripped the suspension out, muscles corded over his shoulders, and swung it like a hammer. The car rang with a flat, off-tune note as Cade battered it.

Marlow winced. The Impala might have survived the accident—eventually. He had a good mechanic—but not Cade’s temper tantrum.

Or this.

He dropped his aim a few inches and skipped a bullet off the road. It sparked as it chipped a divot out of the concrete. And that was it. Marlow clenched his jaw against the jitters that his body decided he needed and tried again. Two bullets into the road and another into the ticking engine. This time the spark caught and the fumes from spilled gas went up with a flash. It was a fast burn, thin and smokey, but the glossy ribbon of oil caught like a wick and flickered back to the breached tank.

The explosion knocked Marlow on his ass. His chest ached, and his lungs cramped as he tried to suck in a breath of hot, unsatisfying air. On top of the car, Cade burned. Tawny fur singed black against red skin as he threw his head back and screamed.

“Sorry,” Marlow rasped out, his voice raw and hoarse.

He grabbed the gun he’d dropped on the way down and picked himself up. Cade tore one of the tires from its moorings and threw it into the street with a roar. Strings of rubber stuck to the road like taffy as it bounced.

Marlow ran.

That was step one of his plan. He hoped that step two would come to him soon. He cut diagonally across the road and took a right into a narrow, high-walled alley that smelled of cigarette smoke, fried cauliflower, and greasy water. A rat, well-fed and healthy despite the missing half of its tail, watched him with glossy ink-drop eyes from the top of a dumpster.

It held its ground until Marlow was close enough to kick it; then it flicked that truncated tail and scuttled up the wall to the fire escape. It swung briefly from the steps, like a rodent gymnast, and then shinnied up the railing toward the second floor.

Marlow broke stride for a second as he tilted his head to track the rat’s progress. Half a plan flashed through his mind—climb onto the dumpster, grab the bottom rung of the fire escape, head up—and was rejected. It might have worked… if the wolf wasn’t Cade.

A chance hunt might be abandoned if the trail went cold or it got too hard. There was other meat to be had in the city. But Cade’s wolf had imprinted on Marlow when the moon pulled it out; the memory of an interrupted kiss and the delicate tension between flirtation and complication refined down to simple, hungry want.

It was hardly the sort of doomed, bloody romance that Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet about. Cade wouldn’t follow the ache in his chest across a whole city to find Marlow and eat his heart. But he didn’t need to. Marlow had been right there, ripe with sweat and fresh blood, to whet Cade’s appetite.

And then Marlow had set him on fire.

That was the sort of thing that kept a werewolf on your heels all night long.

Marlow pushed himself back into a run. It was hard. The brief pause had filled his legs with lead, heavy and sore as he dodged around the dumpster and loped past sealed delivery doors and padlocked garages. A sprawl of graffiti over the brick wall back of a building, paint sprayed thickly over small square windows, caught his attention. A cartoonish Ganesh hung placidly in the middle of a swirl of symbols and images. In the daytime, he’d be vivid bubblegum pink and cyan, but the moon dimmed him to grays and flesh tones. He was supposed to be lucky, protection against the wolves.

Either way Marlow recognized it. He’d been here before. Last time there’d been more blood and a half-dead boar someone had let loose in city limits holed up in someone’s garage.

He’d known roughly where he was—the impact couldn’t have thrown the car that far—but this was a solid landmark. The mental map of the city in his head reoriented around it, and he might even have a plan.

Not a great one, but a plan.

There was a homeless shelter at St Anne’s over on Irving. If he could get there in time, they’d let him in. Father Bellamy was told a couple of times a year to keep his doors locked once the moon was up, leave the Night Shift to deal with any problems, and he’d never listened yet.

It was a ten-minute run. Five, if he cut through the skate park.

Marlow risked a glance over his shoulder. A greasy pillar of smoke from the burning car eddied up into the air, but he couldn’t hear Cade’s enraged howls anymore.

He didn’t have ten minutes.

The end of the alley was a few yards ahead of him when something dropped out of the sky and landed in front of him with a wet splat. He stepped on it, and it gave under his boot with a crackle of thin bones. Blood and guts squeezed out of it, and instinct made Marlow stagger as he tried to shift his weight off the thing.

It was a rat. Most of a rat, anyhow. The head had been torn off, and it still only had half a tail. Marlow hopped away from the little corpse and looked up toward the rooftops. A shadow hunched up there, half lost in the darkness, and then it was gone.

“Shit,” Marlow said softly.

If Cade had caught up with him already, he probably didn’t have five minutes. He didn’t have any other ideas though, so he bolted for the end of the alley. His focus narrowed to the ground immediately in front of him and the route he’d laid out in his head. Two yellow stripes flashed by under his feet, and he stretched his legs to take the curb in his stride.

A narrow path jinked down between two black cast iron fences—overgrown grass on one side and a cracked patch of concrete on the other, bleached patterns on the ground to show where the playset had been dragged in out of harm’s way. A gate swung off warped hinges, something to repair in the light of day, and blocked the way.

Marlow vaulted it. It cost him when he landed, a jolt of pain in his knee that spiked up to his groin and nearly buckled his leg. He forced the next step and the next. By the third, his body accepted the pain wasn’t going to make a difference and rerouted it to a less insistent ache.

A naked man, a joint between his lips, watched placidly from the roof of his garage as Marlow raced past.

Six minutes now. The gate had cost him.

He crossed another road and into the car lot outside the skate park. A ragged pennant for the Conquistadors from Serra High School flapped from a pole near the football field, a long shadow that snapped and stretched over the pocked, uneven ground.

Maybe he’d make it after—

Something slammed into him from the side, and Marlow lost his train of thought as he went flying. He hit the chain-link and went through it, the nails-on-chalkboard scrape of broken metal on metal loud in the relative silence. Skin scraped off against the metal hooks as he rolled on the other side. The air left his body on a croak, and his lungs cramped shut behind his ribs. He wheezed as he tried to suck in air and get to his feet at the same time.

“Cade,” he tried, the words hoarse and trapped in his throat. It never worked; he always tried. “Don’t—”

It wasn’t Cade.

The wolf opposite him was wiry, muscle and skin shrink-wrapped over bone, with thick black fur and a missing ear. He grinned, lips skinned back from broken teeth, and waited.

He wanted Marlow to run.

“Fuck you,” Marlow told it.

He drew his gun for the second time and blew out the wolf’s kneecaps. Flesh and bits of bone sprayed out behind him, and his legs crumpled under him. The earless wolf went down with a frustrated snarl and clawed at the ground as he dragged himself forward. Black claws raked deep ruts in the road.

It wouldn’t have bought Marlow enough time with Cade, but he had less distance to cover now.

Marlow turned and ran. This time it took a few more steps to convince his body to quit it with the news he was doing himself harm. Half his attention was behind him, and the rest was on the thin black bars of the cross he could see silhouetted against the moon.

Nearly there.

Sweat itched at the back of his neck and under his arms. He vaulted a fence and cut through a garden, over empty flower beds. On the second floor of the house, a curtain twitched behind the heavy bars as someone looked out. Marlow saw a thin slice of a face, and then the curtains jerked closed again.

Marlow didn’t blame them. He was the one stupid enough to be out after the moon rose, and he wasn’t even getting paid for it.

The sound of voices raised in soaring chant drifted from behind the heavy shutters on the church. It nearly drowned out the hot snort of a predator’s breath as it bore down on him.

Marlow tightened his grip on the gun. It was empty, but he curled his finger around the trigger anyhow. The Night Shift went down swinging.

He reached the edge of the church’s lot and spun around, empty gun half-raised out of habit. The earless wolf crouched, muscles like steel cables in its legs, and sprang.

Marlow braced himself. That would do about as much good as the empty gun. The wolf hit him, and then both flew backward until they crashed into the fire hydrant. It snapped off, and water sprayed up. Marlow got his arm up, braced against the wolf’s throat, as teeth snapped together an inch from his nose. Slobber dripped, warm and sour with the stink of meat, on his face as the wolf bore down on him.

Then it was gone. Marlow blinked at the sky and then looked over. Cade, fur still singed and crisped, and the black wolf tore chunks out of each other as they fought in the road.

Marlow let his head drop back against the pavement and then levered himself up onto his elbow. This wasn’t even close to the worst night he’d ever had. He didn’t get to give up tonight.

He clenched his teeth and limped up the steps to the doors. The song inside crested and then broke off abruptly as Marlow hammered his fist against the wood.

“Night Shift,” he rasped through the crack. “I’m on foot and fucked.”

There was a pause. It dragged on long enough that Marlow wondered if Father Bellamy had finally listened to one of the lectures. Then he heard the bolts on the far side slide back.

He risked a glance back.

Cade punched a clawed hand into the black wolf’s stomach and ripped up toward the barrel chest. Bright chunks of intestine bulged through the tear, vivid pink as the Ganesh graffiti, and the wolf finally backed off with an attempt at a defiant snarl. The black werewolf retreated slowly, head down and mouth open as it panted, but once it was gone, Cade looked around at Marlow.

“Thanks,” Marlow said. He’d be the only one who remembered the sentiment, but he still felt better to have it said.

The sound of his voice made Cade cock his head curiously. For a moment, Marlow entertained the ridiculous idea that somehow Cade recognized him for a single breath. Then Cade snarled and threw himself at the steps, just as the parishioners pulled the door open for? Marlow.

He was dragged inside by impatient hands, and the door slammed shut behind him. Cade hit the century-old wood with his full weight, but it held.

“Thank God,” Father Bellamy, a tall, gray-haired man with a round, soft-cheeked face, said as he crossed himself piously. “I wasn’t sure we’d get to you in time.”

“Neither was I,” Marlow said. He sagged down onto a pew and leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees and fingers buried in his hair. The adrenaline had started to fade, the aftertaste of it acidic in the back of his throat, and all the aches and pains he’d collected made themselves felt. His mind wasn’t still anymore either, as the full significance of the last few hours finally sank in. He rubbed his thumb over his forehead and wondered aloud, “What the fuck happened?”