What kind of Wolf wore cologne? It was a wonder he wasn’t in the throes of a doggy asthma attack. Their sense of smell was better than my Auphe one. So why would he… shit. There was only one reason a Wolf would coat himself in something that strong. He was trying to cover up the scent of something-or some one else-and hadn’t taken the time or had the time to shower. I leaned back, out of the way of his snapping jaw, and took a deeper whiff.

Delilah.

My Wolf with benefits. She’d saved my life at least once in the past. I knew for a fact she’d saved my sanity by giving me that semiregular sex. Delilah was sterile. When you got to be the age of twenty-one, more or less, before you finally found someone you could sleep with and not run the risk of making babies even an Alien-Predator combo couldn’t love… well, you knew what true friendship was. It didn’t mean Delilah wasn’t trouble, though. Not that she particularly cared one way or the other. Delilah was Delilah-exotic, erotic, and predatory to her bones. That meant one thing: Delilah looked out for Delilah. Period. And if you couldn’t take care of yourself, then that was a damn shame.

For you.

Yeah, my furry fuck buddy. I’d never for a second thought I was her one and only hump day special. I was a lot of things, not all of them good, not all of them especially smart, but gullible? Ever have your mother spit at your feet when you were seven and tell you with drunken venom that there was a Hell, but you were an abomination so horrific that even it didn’t want you?

No? Huh. Just me then.

Regardless, that cured gullible pretty damn fast. I knew there was no way Delilah was faithful and true and brimming with Hallmark’s warm and fuzzy best: hugging bears and hearts and puffy silver balloons chock-full of Romeo and Juliet-style undying love. Why would she be? Friends with benefits tended to spread those benefits around. I knew if I weren’t carrying around sperm potentially toxic to the concept of continued human existence, I might have had my eyes open for the occasional opportunity. But “Hey, great band and are you sterile?” isn’t the best pickup line in the world.

So the cologne lover could’ve been just one of her other “friends.” A jealous one-or if he’d found out about what I was, a bigoted one. She had a special spray of her own, lacking the sneeze quality, that covered up my Auphe-tainted scent, but nobody’s perfect. She could’ve forgotten to hose down her den in the abandoned school once or twice. She didn’t give a damn who knew about us outside the Kin, but within the Kin she was careful. Delilah had ambition, and screwing around, in all senses of the word, with a half-breed Auphe wouldn’t help her at all.

And hanging around here wasn’t going to help me either. I’d have the cops after me for grave robbing and murder, and PETA after me for animal abuse.

I’d take the cops any day.

Despite it all, if this did involve her, it didn’t matter. I still liked her. Just… hell… liked her. Because she liked me. She wasn’t disgusted by my Auphe half or afraid. To her I was just a guy… one with shoulder-length black hair, skin a shade paler than your average human, lots of guns, and a foul mouth-your average New Yorker, in other words. And her treating me that way definitely made her worth liking.

I holstered the guns and ran on into the darkness. I veered off my original path. I had been making up for missing my run this morning. If I didn’t, Niko would make me run the five I’d missed, plus five more, and probably run backward ahead of me so he could mock my athletic failures to my face. Even though it wasn’t conveniently located to our new SoHo apartment, I’d been running in Central Park as usual because it kept me on my toes.

Some people sparred in the gym boxing ring. Some of us ran through the habitat of a nest of mud-wallowing humanoid alligators on massive steroids. A workout is a workout. But this time I’d already had a different type of workout. And now I was late-later than usual-which was saying something. If I waited around to catch a bus or cab, I’d set a new record.

Bartending didn’t pay much; the real money was in the supernatural ass kicking. At least usually, but this was the one bar where I could use the fire axe to take off the head of a drunk and rampaging homicidal lamia before dragging her body to the storage room, and no one would raise an eyebrow. Actually they’d probably be taking bets on who went down first, her or me, and although they knew better, they’d bet on her.

The bar patrons didn’t much like me. They didn’t like my human half, my pale-skinned Auphe half, or my sarcastic and heavily armed whole. Oddly enough, it didn’t much bother me. Maybe it had some at first. But now if you didn’t want to like me, I could not like you right back and with an enthusiasm you might not want to see. The job wasn’t a bad job, and I wanted to keep it. So I took a shortcut-my shortcut.

There are shortcuts and there are shortcuts.

My kind came courtesy of my Auphe father… sperm donor… sire. Whatever you call a thing that pays your mother to breed a bouncing baby interspecies bastard. I don’t know if it-he-was disappointed I looked human, but in the end it didn’t matter. I had enough Auphe on the inside, but I didn’t let it control me-much. I used it.

I just hoped like hell my brother didn’t find out.

Taking that shortcut consisted of ripping a hole in reality and stepping through. I called it traveling. Niko called them gates. Whatever you called them, you could cover miles in a split second-the entire country in the same-to another dimension that was the next best thing to Hell if you wanted.

Actually, radioactive Hell now, thanks to Niko, me, and a de rigueur secret society that had access to suitcase nukes instead of secret handshakes. And the Masons thought they were hot shit.

The gray light rippled before me in the night-gray, dirty, and wrong, but a tool, and a tool I could control and use. The sight of it even quieted the howling Wolf. “Hearing great things about prosthetics. Check it out,” I told him, then stepped through.

Right behind my boss, Ishiah, in the bar’s storage room. I don’t know if he heard me, saw the light from the corner of his eye, or just sensed it. But his wings sprang out of invisibility into a banner of gold-barred white feathers as he turned and was already swinging a fire axe. We had one mounted in every room-less for fire; more for beheading.

“Whoa, boss. I’m not that late,” I said with a grunt as I hit the floor hard to avoid a haircut that would’ve started about chest level.

“Do not do that in this establishment,” he snarled. “Do you understand me?”

Ishiah was my boss and he was a good boss, which meant he paid me and hadn’t killed me. But he had a temper like Moses seeing the Golden Calf and breaking the Ten Commandments. No, that was more like a temper tantrum. Okay, Ishiah had a temper like God taking out Sodom and Gomorrah for being the Vegas of biblical times and turning Lot ’s wife into a saltshaker just for wanting a look. Biblical references… Niko homeschooled me, and I knew a lot of obscure information when I bothered, which, according to everyone I knew, was rarely. But in this case it wasn’t applicable. Ishiah wasn’t an angel. There were no angels or demons, no Heaven or Hell. Fairy tales built on myths built on more myths, all built on the first caveman who refused to believe his kid, his brother, his mother, were gone for good. Who knew what the truth really was? Who wanted to know? Not me.

But here’s what it wasn’t. No angels. Ishiah was a peri, probably where the angel myth began… there and with all the Greek gods with wings. After all, the Auphe were where the elf myth had started and if you took away the hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth, the scarlet eyes, the black talons, shredding jaws, nearly transparent skin, and a raging desire to destroy humanity, then I guess you were close enough. The pointed ears were the same, right?