Page 29 of Blind Date with a Werewolf
He could see in the dark, but not as well as the wyrm could.He wasn’t sure about the witch. Some of them could see just fine in the shadows.
He opened his case and drew out his sword. It was a fine weapon, a gift to himself that he’d purchased a few years ago. Its modern steel was better than his beloved old Toledo blade had been, broken centuries ago on the battlefield of a forgotten war. He still missed his old sword every time he drew the new one.
Tami made a surprised sound, then asked, “How did that sword come out of a case ten inches shorter than the blade?”
As if she couldn’t help herself, she bent and reached for the case where he’d laid it on the snow. Before she could touch it, it disappeared. It was picky about who it allowed to touch it. So far, it had found its way back to him, usually to a mantelpiece—and he had two fireplaces in his home.
Still crouched on her heels, she looked up at him.
“Lady, I am old,” he said. “And well-traveled at a time when magic was less rare than it is today. One tends to collect a few useful oddities.”
The case was less useful around curious witches. He’d have to carry the blade home naked.
She stood up, rubbing her fingers together. He couldn’t tell if she was sampling the leftover magic from the case’s leap, or if she was trying to feel magic that was no longer there.
A soft sound—scales dragging on a piece of newsprint or paper perhaps—drifted out of the gaping, slanting doorway.
“Wait up here until I make it safe for you,” Asil told the witch.
Stepping toward the house, Asil shrugged off the guise of civilization like a too-small coat. He leaped lightly over themound of the rotting stairs onto the cleared, rough-finished concrete floor.
Other than the remains of the stairs, this room of the basement was almost empty. It made sense that the wyrm would keep an escape route clear—the chain and padlock would have slowed it down scarcely as long as it had slowed Asil. But there were small piles of garbage lying in the corners of the room, wires and strips of colorful plastic hung from the walls, and the hoard seemed poised to grow like mold and take over this last clear space.
Tami sat on the edge of the defunct stairway, then jumped. Asil caught her and swung her over the rapidly disintegrating debris onto the bare cement.
Tami brushed his touch off uneasily—some people reacted that way to werewolves or to understanding just how much stronger Asil was than they were. Sometimes his immense beauty made people uncomfortable with his touch, too.
“Can you tell where the wyrm is?” Tami asked; he thought it was to distract both of them.
Asil raised an eyebrow. Her sense of magic should be better than his. “Can’t you?”
After a moment she shook her head. “No. It feels like it’s all around us.”
He nodded. “Smells like that, too.”
He heard someone running outside—too light for the footsteps to belong to the boy, too heavy for the other children. He pulled Tami away from the open doors, shoving her, not ungently, behind him.
“Thieves,” accused a shrill voice. A woman—Helen, he presumed—jumped into the basement. She landed in themiddle of the stair rubble, falling because she didn’t have a friendly werewolf to catch her. She scrambled awkwardly to her feet.
She was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall and half-starved at that. Her hair had recently been shorn by an indifferent barber using scissors, leaving little tufts sticking up from her vulnerable scalp. She wore a dirty white T-shirt and ragged fuzzy pajama bottoms with purple unicorns dancing incongruously on them. Her feet were bare and scratched, toes reddened from trekking through the snow without cover. She looked younger than her son and far more defenseless.
“Thief!” She directed her accusation at Asil specifically this time, growling at him like a scared kitten.
“Killer,” Asil corrected under his breath, because they weren’t here to steal anything.
Tami gave him a sharp look.
“I believe that this task is yours, Tami,” he reminded her. She needed to do something before the poor thing in front of them forced Asil to deal with her.
“Mine,” agreed Tami. Her magic swept over him and engulfed the smaller woman.
He stepped out from between them. Tami could deal with Joshua’s mother without harming her. He didn’t know how long it would take. Such things could be nearly instantaneous or take several hours. But that was Tami’s business.
The wyrm was Asil’s task. Its hoard might disguise its odor well enough for the wolf to be unable to find a scent trail, but it was difficult to move soundlessly in a place so filled with things. As it slid between boxes, its scales scraped the cardboard. Plastic bags crunched under its weight.
The doorway between this room and the wyrm-occupiedone was closed with a pair of old pallets tied together with yarn. The pallets held back the sea of stuff that filled the room beyond, though a few things were starting to slide over the top.
“Helen,” said Tami behind him—her magic making his skin crawl. “Listen to my words.” And then she started a chant, slow and melodic and filled with power. For a white witch, he noted, most of his attention on the wyrm, she had a lot of power.
