Steal the Sun (24 page)

“No, Neil.” I never meant to cause turmoil between the two of us. Sometimes Neil was my only touchstone. There were times when I couldn’t talk to Danny and Dev, and that only left Neil. He was my best friend. “I was being stupid, babe. This has to do with me making dumbass moves not with me being angry with you. I don’t blame you for anything. I was just out here because I thought it would save Dev.”

Shuck started to bark and Barghest joined in, but Neil and I were too busy working on our relationship to really pay attention. “Daniel blames me. He blames me for what happened in Vegas. It’s why he won’t talk to me except to bark orders since we came home from Colorado.”

“Danny will come around,” I promised. I meant it, too. Danny had to come around because I knew deep down he cared about Neil. There were years when no one in Daniel’s life had known the truth about him, but he’d trusted Neil and Neil hadn’t broken his trust until Chad had decided to become Daniel’s spy. It was easier for Dev to forgive Neil since he wasn’t as invested in their friendship. Dev had forgiven Neil because he knew it would make me happy. Danny’s feelings about the situation went a lot deeper than that.

“I doubt that he’s going to come around if he hasn’t already. You just have to face facts. Daniel is done with me and we just have to be civil for your sake.” He was quiet for a moment before relaxing slightly. “So, let’s have the story. How exactly did you end up playing a bondage girl? Have you found a fourth to tie you up and play dirty games with?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Would he be a fourth or a fifth?”

Neil smiled. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about Bris. I don’t think he should count since he looks just like Dev.”

“If you think about it that way, then Declan would be a freebie.”

A look of complete horror passed over Neil’s face and he shuddered at the thought. “Oh, there’s nothing free about that hot mess. He looks exactly like Dev so he’s hot as hell but god…not even I would go there. Now stop trying to derail my important venting session with sex talk,” Neil commanded as both the black dogs were now on their feet, growling low in their throats at something in the distance.

“Neil, it’s time to head out.” I pulled and tugged at the ropes in absolute earnest. I trusted the black dogs’ instincts.

“Furthermore, what made you think you had to lie to me? I can see lying to Daniel and Dev. They’re just husbands. They cause all sorts of trouble. But me? I’m your best friend.”

“Neil,” I growled as I saw the trees start to move across the pond.

“I’m the guy who helped hide the whole ‘I’m probably pregnant’ thing until you had to ruin it by actually being pregnant. I’m the guy who didn’t tell Danny it was you who ‘accidentally’ left a Justin Bieber CD playing full blast on his stereo while he was in a dead stupor and couldn’t get up to turn it off. And you hit repeat. I’m the guy who didn’t tell Dev that the boo hag who took up residence in Ether last year was your client.”

“You’re also the guy who’s about to be eaten by an ogre if you don’t stop bitching at me and get me the hell out of here,” I explained to him in a bitter groan as I saw the shadow of the ogre moving toward us.

“What?” Neil practically screamed the question and then did what he should have done in the first place. He breathed in the night air. He let it saturate his senses, and it was obvious he didn’t like what he smelled. He shuddered. “You followed the Hunter out here and he tied you up to feed you to an ogre and there’s something else, something rotty and gross.”

Now he was trying to get me untied. He tugged as hard as he could. “The Hunter didn’t mean to feed me to the ogre. He meant to use me as bait. The rotty gross thing is Lee’s new girlfriend, who also happens to be a
baobhan sith
.”

“Honey, I don’t know what that is.” He pulled one of the knives out of my thigh sheath. He brought it around to my back, slicing through the rope. “Use your English words.”

I sighed as the rope went slack and my hands were finally, blissfully free. “It’s a faery vampire. She lures hunters away in the night and has her way with them. She has both Lee and the Hunter.”

Neil looked over my shoulder as I massaged my wrists, trying to get them to come back to life. I took the cold iron knife back because Neil wasn’t big on weapons. He preferred to use his claws and teeth. “Holy shit, that’s big. We should run, Z.”

I pulled the gun out from the back of my denim shorts and clicked the safety off. “Running won’t help. He knows we’re here. He’ll follow us. You should change now, Neil.”

The dogs were seriously agitated. The hair on the back of their necks was standing straight up and they were in a crouching position, getting ready to pounce. The ogre moved toward us, though he was moving slowly. He would adjust his speed to match ours. As long as we didn’t run, he wouldn’t overexert himself. Even moving carefully, I could hear him. He sounded like a herd of buffalo, and he was definitely a mouth breather.

Neil started taking off his clothes. He stepped out of his slippers and shrugged out of the vintage jacket. He then took the time to neatly fold it.

“Hey, Monk, no time for neat,” I taunted as I got behind the tree I was previously tied to. “Just do that thing where you change and your clothes kind of explode around you. Let’s go.”

Neil huffed as he continued his OCD ritual. As he spoke, he painstakingly unbuttoned each pearl fastener on his pajama top. “If you had been where you were supposed to be, you would know that my boyfriend gave this to me and I don’t want it to be in a million pieces on the forest floor. He said the red made a lovely contrast with my eyes. That was part of our one-sided conversation. Do you know how much of my wardrobe I have to toss out because you need me to do a quick change? Of course, if you’d been where you were supposed to be, we wouldn’t be dealing with that. OMG, that is nasty.”

The ogre was standing not twenty feet away from us, and even I could smell the nasty thing. It smelled like rotting meat and atrocious BO. It stood at least nine feet tall and had to weigh close to five hundred pounds. Someone had made a type of tunic for it to wear, but it had seen better days. It mostly hung in tatters around the ogre’s strong frame. The pieces that were together were stained and unsightly. He hunched over and from my vantage point, I could see his back was humped. His hair was scraggly and he was missing a couple of teeth. It wouldn’t matter, though. He still had plenty left to do a fine job of chewing me up.

Neil stood beside me, finally naked, having protected his precious PJs that I was pretty sure Chad would have bought him more of had he understood our dire circumstances. Neil’s hands were on his well-sculpted hips as the ogre looked us over. “Shouldn’t he be doing something? What is the thing in his hand?”

“I think that’s a tree,” I noted. The ogre did, indeed, appear to have hijacked a small tree to use as a blunt instrument.

As if on cue, the ogre lifted his club and roared. The dogs jumped into action. They each took a side and started working in tandem to torment the creature dead set on having them for a late-night snack. One would grab his attention with barking and growls and the other would rush in and take a quick bite out of a handy target. Before I could even think to line up a shot, Barghest and Shuck had taken several hunks out of the ogre’s feet and legs.

“Don’t think this discussion of ours is over.” Neil sent me a forbidding look just before he changed.

His muscles moved and flowed impossibly. He leaned over and with a preternatural grace shifted from human to wolf. Neil’s wolf was the most beautiful I’d ever seen. He was arctic white and he stared at me with his glacial blue eyes. He barked and even though he couldn’t speak when he was in wolf form, he had no problem making himself understood. That one bark told me to stay put and let him handle the situation. He joined the black dogs just as the ogre tried to bring his tree trunk down on Shuck’s head.

I wasn’t going to be able to follow Neil’s admonition, I realized as I watched the scene from behind the tree. The dogs just couldn’t make enough of a dent. The ogre was still interested in me. He was moving my direction, and I didn’t think that was going to stop anytime soon.

Neil barked and started in on the ogre’s backside, but the ogre swatted at the trio like they were pesky mosquitoes. If I didn’t do something soon, one of them was going to get seriously hurt.

I stepped out from behind the tree, leveled my Ruger, and took a firing position. I popped off three quick rounds to his chest and realized I’d probably made a huge mistake. If I had thought the big dude was interested in me before, now he was obsessed. My cold iron bullets were apparently much more painful than the doggy love bites, and the ogre roared.

I backed up instinctively, but hit the tree I’d been tied to previously. I tripped over Neil’s slippers and fell to the ground, landing on my butt just as the giant homicidal tree-wielding ogre took a swing at me. I heard a mighty crack as the tree above me took the full force of the club and split in the exact spot where my head would have been.

I rolled to the left, getting out of the way of his second attack.

Neil was swiping at the ogre with his claws when he was thrown off his prey’s back and landed right on his spine with a hurt bark. I winced, but he was up in no time, growling threateningly as he circled the ogre, trying to make himself into the target.

I stood still as the ogre watched the dogs and Neil. He suddenly moved his hands and swiped the ground with his club. Barghest and Shuck were struck full on by the enormous tree trunk and they landed somewhere in the forest with a thud. Neil was more agile than the black dogs and he leapt gracefully over the sweeping trunk. The ogre was plainly unhappy that his prey had avoided the trap.

He roared, his shout of rage causing the trees around me to shake their leaves. It also had the unintended effect of leaving the ogre standing still. He was a perfect target and I took advantage. I stood up and fired three more times into his huge body.

It was at this point I discovered that ogre bones are stronger than human bones. If you shoot a human straight in the sternum, said sternum will usually oblige and break under the force of the bullet. Not so with the ogre. The ogre’s sternum chose to reject the bullet and send it back to its original owner. I felt the bullet sting my right thigh before it buried itself somewhere in the forest.

I was bleeding but even without taking the time to look at it, I knew it wasn’t as bad as I’d dealt with before. I could still move the leg, so I called this round a draw.

Neil sank his teeth into the ogre’s thigh and held on for dear life. The ogre tried to shake him off, but Neil was persistent. I watched his furry body swing from side to side as the ogre slung him around. It occurred to me as his spinal column was sent shifting in new directions that his birthday was coming up and I knew just what to get him. I was going to have Dev buy him his own personal chiropractor.

Raising my gun again, I tried to take aim at the monster’s neck. Hitting him in his thick skull was an invitation to more painful ricochets, so I would go for something softer. I fired a couple of times before hitting my target. The bullet found a meaty part of the ogre’s neck and released a fountain of blood. Neil was drenched before he realized what was happening. He let go and stared at me like I had meant for the blood to hit him.

“Sorry,” I shouted across the woods.

The ogre staggered, shaking his head. He was still as strong as a bull but the black dogs were back and they were two mad pups. They leapt into the fray, not at all worried about being covered in blood. They reveled in it. As the blood coated their fur, they seemed to be drawn into the fury of the kill. They gnashed at the monster’s flesh with their sharp teeth and held on with their claws.

The ogre swatted at them, trying to get them off his body. He stumbled back, knocking the dogs against the trees around him.

Shuck and Barghest were having none of it. In fact, it seemed to make them dig in even more. As his foot hit the place where the Hunter had left his long circle of rope, I heard a small snapping sound and then the ogre was hoisted into the air by one leg. He was caught in the Hunter’s trap, his massive body dangling over the ground.

The black dogs, satisfied they had done their job, let go of their prey and came back to me, thumping their tails happily. They sat back on their haunches and looked up at me, probably hoping for a treat. I’d made a serious error not smuggling in Snausages.

Neil changed again. Now he was a lovely human coated in thick ogre blood and so obviously not happy about it. “Thanks, Z. I look like Carrie at the prom.”

“Again with the sorry.” I watched the ogre sway back and forth. He tried to pull his body up to reach the rope but he was a tubby ogre despite his obviously low carb diet. His arms just wouldn’t reach. The rope creaked, though, and I was worried it wouldn’t hold his massive weight for long.

I approached the swaying ogre, his blood flow slowing but not stopping. As a creature of Faery, he had decent healing powers, but the cold iron I had managed to pump into his body affected him. He groaned and when he looked at me his eyes were sad, like he didn’t know quite what was happening but he knew it was bad.

“Don’t you dare, Z,” Neil said, coming up behind me. “That thing tried to kill all of us. Just because he bats those big, ugly eyes now doesn’t make him any less a killer. Get it over with.”

I knew Neil was right, but I still felt bad as I leveled my Ruger and took aim. If he’d been left alone, he would be at home in his Unseelie forest where everyone knew not to roam about. He would have been fed and taken care of. Here he was a pawn and like all pawns, I had to sacrifice him.

I squeezed the trigger and the cold iron entered the ogre’s brain through his large eye. There was a mighty twitch and the tree holding him shook. Within seconds, the light that animated him was gone, leaving nothing but blankness on his face.

Lowering the weapon, I sank down to the ground and finally took a look at the wound in my leg.

“How bad is it?” Neil asked, wiping blood off his face with the back of his hands. He knelt down and took a look himself.