“You promise?” she asked, looking up at me through her eyelashes.

“I promise. This just means I don’t have to come up with stupid excuses when I have to work. Maybe you and I can even help each other out sometimes. You can learn more about North American cryptids before you have to go back to Australia.” I walked over to the bed and sat down next to her, taking her hands. “Does this change things? Well, yeah, and it’s probably good that we’re talking about it, even if I might have waited to have the conversation until there wasn’t a cockatrice running around the zoo and—anyway, what I’m trying to say is that we can make this work without it turning into anything we don’t want it to be.”

“I’m glad you think so.” Shelby turned her head enough to smile at me, suddenly radiant even in the harsh white light of her bedroom, and my heart gave a lurch.

Oh, hell, I thought, almost distracted, even as she leaned over and pressed her lips against mine. My body, noting the lack of guiding intelligence coming from the brain, decided to get on with things. Even as she pushed me over backward on the bed, I was thinking, and what I was thinking was simple and complicated all at the same time:

I could tell her I wasn’t going to make things serious on her, and I could tell her I was done lying, and I could do both those things as much as I wanted.

I was still lying.

I was in love, and I was so screwed.

Eighteen

“Love doesn’t care what you want. Love doesn’t care if it’s convenient. Love pursues its own agenda, and there’s no bullet in the world that can take it down. More’s the pity.”

—Jonathan Healy

A rundown apartment in Columbus, Ohio, sometime after midnight, waking up on a bed that could really use more lumbar support

SHELBY WAS NESTLED AGAINST my side when I woke up. Some subtle change in the atmosphere of the room had disturbed me, although I had no idea what it was. Grainy gray light filtered in through the half-closed blinds, providing enough illumination for me to find my glasses, fumble them open, and slide them onto my face. Shelby made a small protesting noise, her arm still draped across my chest. I moved it carefully out of the way. This time, the protesting noise was louder, and continued as she rolled over, taking the blankets with her. By the time I finished standing, she had formed a cocoon, with only the crown of her head proving that there was a woman inside the mass of bedclothes.

Clothes . . . our clothes were in the bathroom, along with all my weapons. Swearing softly but steadily under my breath, I crept out of the bedroom and started down the hall, listening for clues as to what had so abruptly awakened me. I’m not a heavy sleeper—no one in my family is a heavy sleeper; waking easy comes with the job—but I don’t wake up for no reason at all. Something in the apartment was wrong.

Whatever was making the hair on the back of my neck stand up didn’t put in an appearance as I made my way to the bathroom. A pair of pants, three knives, and a handgun later, I felt confident enough to slip back into the hall.

I took a glance into the bedroom. Shelby was still sleeping soundly in her blanket cocoon. Holding my gun in front of me, muzzle to the ground, I stepped into the living room. The blinds were open, letting the streetlights shine right into the room. That made it a little easier for me to assess my surroundings, looking for anything that was out of place. I found nothing.

I was starting to think I was being paranoid, and that Shelby had kicked me in her sleep or something, when I heard a sound from the hall. It was soft, and probably would have been inaudible if the carpet had been less than twenty years old: just a foot striking against the floor. Not that unusual—people walk—but most people don’t walk with the distinctive gait of someone trying not to be heard. This late at night, whoever was out there should either have been hurrying to their door, or drunkenly weaving without giving a damn who they woke up. This person was creeping.

Shifting my gun to my right hand, I crossed the living room, undid the deadbolt, and opened the door with my left hand—or tried to, anyway. The deadbolt turned easily, but when I tried to twist the knob, it refused to move. The whole mechanism had somehow been jammed from the outside.

“Shit,” I muttered, and put my gun on the knickknack table before dropping to the floor and trying to peer under the door. I couldn’t quite manage it, but my change in perspective did let me do one thing: it let me smell the gasoline soaking into the thin carpet of the hall.

“Shit,” I said again, with more fervency. Shoving myself back to my feet, I grabbed my gun and ran for the bedroom. “Shelby! You have to wake up now! Shelby!”

She didn’t respond.

Only the fact that she had rolled herself in blankets when I woke up kept me from panicking, deciding she was dead, and making things even worse. Instead, I clicked on the light, shoved my gun into the waistband of my pants, and crossed to shake her shoulder through the blankets. “Shelby. Wake up. We have to move, it’s not safe here anymore.”

“Fuck off,” she mumbled sleepily.

It says something about me that I found that endearing. This wasn’t the time or the place, however, and so I shook her again, harder this time. “Shelby. I’m not kidding. Your door is jammed, and someone’s getting ready to set the building on fire. Wake. Up.”

“What?” She finally stirred, pulling an arm free of the cocoon in order to push herself into a half sitting position. Her hair was a tangled mess, covering her eyes. “Alex? What are you yelling about?”

“Building. Fire. Get dressed, we’re leaving.”

She shoved her hair back as her eyes widened. “The building’s on fire?”

“No, but it’s about to be. Now move!” I ran back to the bathroom to grab the rest of my things, trusting her to at least find pants before I got back. This was not a situation that I wanted to go into without as many knives as I could carry, and possibly a few more, just in case.

Panic is a remarkable motivator. By the time I had my shirt on and my weapons tucked in the appropriate places, Shelby was running down the hall, fully clothed, with an old-fashioned travel suitcase in one hand. Before I could say anything, she snapped, “I’m not running around naked for the rest of the week if this place burns down.”

There was no point in arguing with her, and if my house were on fire, I’d have a lot more to worry about saving. “Do you have an ax?”