6. Zuri
ZURI
Ibarely slept. Around dawn I gave up and got dressed with the lamp on. All night I’d been listening to the radiator and the pipes, waiting for a sound that didn’t belong.
I want out of this mess, and the fastest way out is backward: put everything back where I found it and mind my business. Last night I was going to warn a town full of strangers. That was before the dog, and the dark, and a whole night of ceiling.
The folder and the little white bottle sit in my desk drawer where I left them.
I put both in my tote. If I can slide the folder into any box on that cart before the guards count anything, this never happened.
The soap goes back on the sink. I become the most boring employee Stillwater has ever paid.
I slip on my shoes at the door, pull my coat over everything, and step out into the cold morning.
I’m three steps down from my building’s door when I see it. A black sedan sits up the block, unmarked, engine off, two shapes in the front seat.
Oh shit. I’m already in trouble.
I make myself keep walking, same pace as any other morning, eyes forward. I cross the street and don’t glance at the car again.
The engine never starts behind me. They don’t need to follow. They already know where I’m going.
I check my phone at the corner and again at the light, and there’s nothing from Whitney. She starts every workday in my ear before I even reach the building. This morning she has nothing to say to me.
Quiet from her on a workday means someone told her not to call me.
I make it near the end of the block, and the engine turns over behind me. I hear the car swing wide in the street, coming back my way.
I clutch my tote to my side and pick up the pace. Then I quit pretending and run.
Thank god I went with flats this morning. Something in me said skip the heels, and I listened. My spare pair is under my desk at Stillwater.
The engine gets louder behind me.
I break into a full run at the corner. The car takes the turn behind me, and it’s faster. On a straight block it catches me.
I cut into the alley between the laundromat and the shoe repair, too narrow for anything with doors.
Screaming crosses my mind. So does banging on a back door until someone opens it. But this is Millbrook. If I bang on a door, whoever opens it might help load me into the car.
I try every handle I pass, and every one of them holds.
Brakes squeal behind me, and the car swings across the mouth of the alley, blocking the way I came.
Great. I ran myself into a box.
Both front doors open, and two big men climb out in jackets too heavy for the weather. Neither of them rushes.
I put my hand in my tote and close it around my pepper spray. It’s the only weapon I own, and it’s from a gas station.
“What do you want with me?” I plant my feet.
The bigger one answers. “You’re coming with us. Be a good girl and cooperate, or you’re going to get yourself hurt.”
I get my first good look at them, and their faces are what scares me.
They’re Black men, close to my own shade, but their color sits wrong.
They’re ashy like winter knees, except the gray runs under the skin instead of on it.
Lotion doesn’t fix whatever that is. I don’t have a word for it, and I don’t want one.
“Leave me alone.” I back up a step.
They come closer without a word between them. The quieter one reaches into his coat, pulls out a gun, and holds it low against his leg where only I can see it.
Oh shit. I’m in serious trouble.
“Put the mace down, pretty,” the one with the gun says. “Let’s go for a ride.”
I bolt for the gap between them.
The big one catches the back of my jacket and yanks me off balance. I fall back against him. I twist and drive my heel into the side of his knee, and when he buckles, I bring the pepper spray up and empty the can into his face.
He screams into his hands. Behind him, the one with the gun starts laughing. Nothing this morning has scared me like that laugh does.
The big one drags a sleeve across his streaming eyes. Then he punches me.
The alley tips. I’m on the ground with my cheek against the concrete. Then the pain arrives, and it starts numb and far away.
I roll onto my side. My face is killing me, and my ears ring in one long tone.
Something passes over the alley. Two shadows come down fast, and the shadows have wings, big ones. I blink and blink and the picture won’t resolve.
Something lands beside me hard enough to crack the ring in my ears.
“Zuri!” The shout comes from whatever landed.
Something else lands by my feet. Then the gunfire starts, and someone scoops me up off the concrete.
The ringing thins out long enough for me to see him. He turns his back to the shooting and spreads wings out of it, real wings, wide enough to wall me in.
What the hell is this man doing with wings?
Shots hit his back and his wings. He jolts around me with every hit, and he still doesn’t put me down.
I know this face. He’s the one from the Stillwater lobby with the dropped lunch bag and the eyes too green for a person.
I narrow my eyes at him. “You.”
“I got you, baby,” he says against my hair.
“Jalen!” the one by my feet barks. “Go! Get her out of here!”
He turns with me in his arms in time for me to see the second winged man swat the gun away and punch its owner clean off his feet. The man sails backward, lands on the sedan’s roof, and the windshield goes white underneath him.
“Jalen,” I say.
He looks down at me, and I go dizzy all over again. I can’t blame the punch for all of it.
He smiles. Then he carries me to the second winged man and hands me over like a casserole dish.
“Watch her face, she’s hurt,” he says. Then he walks back to the one I maced, who is on his knees dripping tears and pepper spray, and crouches to his level.
“Ghoul.” He clicks his tongue. “Your soul wasn’t enough, huh? She had to take the moisture too. Snatching women at daybreak, ashy as a January elbow.”
“Ghoul?” I say it mostly to myself. “What the hell is a ghoul?”
No one in this alley answers me.
I press my palm to my cheek, and the ache spreads under it. I should not be this close to laughing.
“You’ll get used to Jalen,” the man holding me says.
“Jalen.” I try it out.
“We’ll explain everything,” he says, and he smiles down at me.
“Who are you?” My hand stays on my cheek. “What are you?”
“My name is Malachi. I’m the Alpha of the Carter clan, and my baby brother answers to Jay.” His grip on me doesn’t change. “We’re dragon shifters.”
“Ohhh,” I say, and it comes out long and stupid.
Across the alley, Jay sneezes. I turn toward the sound, and thin smoke rolls out of both of his ears.
Jay wipes his nose with the back of his wrist. Then he crouches back down to the ghoul’s level, and there’s no play left anywhere on him.
“You put your hands on the wrong woman this morning.” He takes the ghoul’s chin and points his ruined red face up at his own. “She’s mine. Tell your witch I said so.”
Behind his shoulders, the bullets are working their way back out of him. They pop loose one at a time and ping off the concrete.
“You tried to hurt her,” Jay says. “My mate.”
“I didn’t know.” The ghoul gets his hands up between them.
Jay opens his mouth, and the roar that comes out of him is nothing a man could make. The alley walls throw it back doubled. Fire follows it, one short burst, and it catches the ghoul’s raised right hand.
It’s the hand that hit me.
The scream is worse than the roar. I don’t look away.
“I want to kill you for it,” Jay says over the sound. “But I don’t have a good enough reason.” He rises out of his crouch. “Soon I will.”
Then he turns to us, and the monster is gone off his face, and the smile he aims at me has nothing in it but warmth. My mouth is still hanging open. I leave it that way.
“You okay to fly?” Malachi asks him.
Jay answers by spreading his wings to their full reach. They’re the deep brown of him, shading black at the tips, and they stretch wider than the alley. Thin morning light comes through them at the edges. The bullet holes are already closing.
Malachi’s own wings open over me, and we leave the ground.
The last thing I see is the sedan getting small below us, one ghoul still laid out across the windshield. After that I don’t see anything at all.