Page 134 of The Bones in the Yard

The car—one window down with a middle finger extended out of it—whipped around another corner at the end of the block. The part that really had me on edge was that it turned left—the same direction it had turned to cut us off. That meant that it could be circling around.

“Val?” Taavi’s voice was tight.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.” His answer was harsh, almost aggressive. He was nervous, clearly, but when I looked down at him I saw defiance, not fear. And it occurred to me that if things got seriously gnarly, Taavi might actually be in better shape to protect me than the other way around, with or without a broken arm.

Yeah, he’s fucking tiny, but shifters are tough as goddamn nails, and I needed to remember that. He came out of a vehicle-on-pedestrian hit-and-run with only a few bruises and a broken arm and had survived a feral vampire attack with a broken leg and a couple stitches.

Hit a human with a pickup and there won’t be much human left. Ditto for the feral vampire. Hell, I’d seen what the vampire had done to at least three other shifters.

Apparently I was a fucking idiot, because I should have realized long before now that in order to survive what he’d lived through, Taavi Camal had to be a fucking badass.

Okay, then. Time to reevaluate which one of us was in deeper shit right now. Because a minute earlier, I’d thought it was him, and now I was pretty sure it was me.

He tilted his head to the side, the movement sharp and inhuman.

“They’re coming back around,” I guessed.

A nod.

I sighed. “Fucking great.”

I hadn’t wanted to bring my gun with me today. I’d thought about it, because I had known about the MFM rally. But I didn’t want to be the macho dickbag who had to carry all the time just because it was legal. I usually wore or took it to work because my job might require me to have it—I might not be a cop, but PIs can end up in situations where having a gun might be better for survival than not, too. Especially elven PIs who get dragged into investigations involving murderous cults.

But this had been a nice afternoon with my boyfriend and my friends. The fact that I had both of those things was still surprising enough, but even I knew that it would be gauche to bring a gun with me on a walk through the park followed by ice cream and an old-time movie.

Except apparently not.

“Stay up by the houses,” I told Taavi, getting us moving again.

“We should get off this block,” he argued, and he wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t want to get caught out in the street again.

“Okay, alley,” I agreed, leading him around the next corner.

Both of us heard the car come around the corner a block or so back.

We ducked quickly down the next alleyway, the kind that led between the backs of the houses on either side, lined with trash and recycle bins and awkward little garages. It didn’t smell great, and I felt bad for subjecting Taavi’s nose to whatever that apartment building had made for dinner a few nights ago.

He didn’t say anything about it, though. Just trotted down the alley.

Brakes and tires screeched behind us, and I turned to find the car—grey, with a handful of rusty spots at its seams—stopped at the mouth of the alley, driver and rear passenger windows rolled down, two white guys in their thirties or forties leaning out of them, jeering.

“Run, pretty boy!”

“Think you can magic your way out of this one?”

“Being a fuckin’ fairy wasn’t enough without bein’ a faggot, too?”

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before, although not quite in those terms. I stopped to let Taavi continue down the alley. Because I’m a fucking dumbass, that’s why.

“You think you can take us, fairy?” the guy in the back seat called.

I didn’t answer. Discretion may be the better part of valor, but valor had nothing to do with it. I’m not quite stupid enough to tell these dicksteaks what I thought of them, but I also wasn’t going to back down. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited.

And then damn near jumped out of my skin at the low growl that came from behind me. Somehow—donotask me how, because I couldn’t fucking tell you—I managed not to do more than slightly twitch.

It helped that I knew that growl.

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