Page 23 of Aleko
“No,” said Alex, letting his teeth lengthen. He took a firmer grip on his sword, readied his power, and watched the woman for a move. On the other side of the pool, he knew that Sebastian had his gun trained on her, but he wasn’t sure that would do any good.
The woman snorted and said something else. Alex was lacking in Latin, but he thought he caught the word Anubis. Then she raised her arms, and the space between her body and arms began to fill in with feathers. Then she turned and jumped over the railing, quickly becoming a winged shape in the dark.
“Well,” said Colin, picking himself up off the ground, “that was defo not what I was expecting.”
Alex relaxed and felt his teeth shorten and the velvet of fur that had been creeping across his face retreat.
“What did she say?” asked Alex as Luca stepped cautiously out into the open, followed by Pellos. Alex was annoyed that Luca had brought Pellos along. Although he doubted that Luca couldactually have stopped Pellos, Alex would have preferred that Pellos stay safely at the warehouse. Pellos was wearing a Kevlar vest and had one of Hudson’s axes strapped to his leg.
“Conversational Latin is not my strength, but I believe she said something to the effect of, Anubis children, always the same,” said Luca. He was staring after Anuket with an intensely thoughtful expression.
“Should we be offended by that?” asked Sebastian. “Wasn’t Anubis a jackal?”
“Funny thing, that,” said Trevor, ringing water out of his shirt. “Recent research shows that the Egyptian jackals are actually wolves.”
“Cops are here,” said Pellos, putting his hand up to an earpiece—probably listening to the police band radio. “What’s our plan for that?”
Alex looked down at his girl and felt his pulse settle as he saw her chest rise and fall.
“We take the girl.” Everyone nodded. No one would argue with that—a human who had seen as much as she had couldn’t be allowed to wander off.
“A good idea,” said Luca, still staring across the steadily darkening horizon. “Anuket will most likely return for her.”
“Swell,” said Alex. “But we’ll cross that demon we get to her. For now, let’s get the hell out. Can we do a little nudge the police toward a drug deal gone wrong?” he asked, looking at Luca.
“What?” asked Luca, blinking.
“Push the humans to believe it was a drug deal gone wrong?” repeated Alex.
“Um, sure,” said Luca, nodding.
Alex knelt down and picked up the girl. Even limp and unconscious, it felt entirely too good to have her in his arms. Luca pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and marked a pentagram on the cement next to the pool. He muttered a quickincantation, and then the chalk seemed to dissolve.
“We should go before it takes hold,” said Luca. Alex made a grunt of agreement and headed for the exit. They had to hop over the wall at one point to avoid the police as they came in, but after a few minutes of hiding in a lemon grove, they were free.
Alex spent the moments in the dark with his nose buried in her hair. When he finally had to put her in the back of the car, he had to make his hands let her go.
“I’ll call my lawyer and see about taking his businesses. With any luck, we can find out where he got the tablets,” said Alex, hoping to distract everyone from his obsession.
“Finding more projects for me,” Pellos muttered, and Alex grinned.
“But you’re so good with ours,” said Alex. “Think of it as an expansion.”
“Is that going to work?” asked Colin, looking skeptical.
“None of this should work,” said Alex with a shrug. “But it will anyway. Humans rewrite the rules to make things easier all the time, and it’s a whole lot easier to be on my good side.”
The others chuckled and went with Luca, who had brought the van. Sebastian got in the car with him but, after a quick glance at the girl in the back seat, said nothing.
They were right, of course. It shouldn’t work. Alex had no claim to anything of Sergio’s. But it would work. Alex had more leverage and history with the town than anyone else, and he had Luca’s power of confusion and illusion to support him. So he was going to get away with it. The only real question was what he was going to do with the girl. Somewhere down inside, where the wolf lived, behind the human shape in the guts and blood of him, the answer echoed like a whisper:keep her.
Episode 16
Awake
Eliandra
Lia woke up slowly. Somewhere, seagulls were cawing, and dimly there was the sound of waves. Her face was pressed into something soft, warm, and knitted. Her bunk at the hostel was covered in a thirty-year-old sleeping bag and a cheap sheet. She held those two thoughts together for a long time before realizing that soft and knitted were incongruent with either the slick feeling of her sleeping bag or the rough texture of her sheet. Her eyelids flew open, and then she winced, immediately closing them again against the brightness of the room around her. Slowly, she cracked them again and peered cautiously at the view in front of her. The walls were a bright white plaster of the kind that Greece was famous for. There was a sturdy-looking bedside table with a lamp and an olive wood chair with faded green and gold brocade cushions on the other side. A painting hung on the wall in front of her. It appeared to be a lovely impressionistic painting of a Greek harbor scene. Lia squinted at the rounded looping signature in the lower right-hand corner.
