Mad Lizard Mambo (3 page)

“Screw you, flea ball,” I muttered while making coffee. He risked contamination long enough to hook his needle claws into my ankle to demand breakfast. I left the snarky bastard to chew on a chunk of packed tuna and headed to the roof with a cup of hot black coffee.

The best thing about living in my old warehouse was the view. Well, that and the lack of neighbors. Other than the one owned by Dalia, who lived next door and spent her hours away from Medical trying to mother me, most of the others were still used for storage and the occasional art gallery. Perched on one of the low mesas at the lip of San Diego’s downtown, I had a great view of both the city and the Pacific from my rooftop.

San Diego extended out along the coast, glittering under the rising sun. When the Underhill shoved its way into Earth—or maybe even the other way around, no one’s really sure—the world violently changed. Forests emerged where cities or prairies once stood, and entire oceans emptied only to form elsewhere, reworking familiar shapes into a patchwork of jumbled terrain. Some areas, like Orange County, disappeared entirely, replaced by the sprawling forests and floating towers of Elfhaime, while others were expanded, fanning out in ripples of torn land. Pendle was a prime example of that. It’d gone from a ten-mile stretch on the old maps to nearly one hundred miles, a craggy landscape of broken roads, lava, and dragons.

Most of the big human and elfin cities fell, their skyscrapers shattered and tumbled when the elfin world merged with ours—or rather, the humans’. It was hard to remember I wasn’t human. But San Diego was my city. My home. My world. My people. I was going to live, eat, fuck, and die here. And I was good with that.

Instead of folding back into the ground, San Diego grew, building on top of its fractured bones until it stood firm on the Pacific shore. The old city’s corpse existed somewhere deep below the under level, with its scrabble of squatters, low-rent flops, and dog-eat-dog living. San Diego’s upper level was sleek and shining, but its bowels held the foulest of existences, a blue shadow to the yellow-bright of the city above. Grime and filth found its way into everything, and the constant chatter of the city’s rich could barely be heard over the rumble-mutter of the lower classes below. I lived where the two levels merged at the edge of the shoreline, having converted an old warehouse into someplace to call home, its location accessible to both levels but really not a part of either.

I couldn’t be a part of anything. I was elfin. And not even a real one.

The world I lived in alongside smooth-eared and blunt-teethed people was human all the way through, and I’d fit into the cracks and crevices as best I could. There was no escaping my race… my species, really. As much as I tried to, I couldn’t outrun my elfin features or the aging of the people around me while I remained firmly in what will be centuries of youth. Dempsey, the man who’d taught me to be a Stalker, was getting old, wearing out in front of my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

“Things change, you cat-bastard,” he often growled at me. “I’m going to die before you ever get a damned hair on that pointed chin of yours. Best get used to it.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d never get hair on my chin. For all the humans liked to equate elfin with cats, we just didn’t get facial hair. Although from how Dempsey told it, I bit like a wild cat he’d found under his engine for the first few months of my freedom.

I still bite. Sometimes that’s the best way to win a fight. I wasn’t ashamed of that either. You get into a fight to win, not earn courtesy points in an etiquette book.

After years of roaming about, I called San Diego home, and I was thankful to get back to its multileveled mess. It was a complicated life at times, one made more difficult
because
I was elfin living among humans who had no reason to love anyone with pointed ears. After the Merge, the Wars came when the two species fought to establish dominance. Humans with their tech were no match for the elfin with magic and an uncanny knack for strategy. In the end, no one won, and now we were all living cheek-to-ass with one another, pretending the guy at the other side of the dinner table wasn’t someone we’d tried to kill a few years ago.

I just ignored the elfin. Pretended they didn’t exist. Pretended I wasn’t one of them. Acted like I hadn’t been cooked up in a crucible by an evil Wild Hunt Master with a fondness for pain and blood. I’d been doing fine with it all until Ryder decided he wanted to establish a damned Dawn Court smack dab in the middle of the city I called home.

“Damned sidhe lord.” The coffee brewed strong, and I’d added enough sugar to it to cut its bitter edge. It was late enough for the sky to have grabbed at the blues in its palette, smearing its face with a rich robins-egg blue. Lacy clouds played at the city’s back, draped over the soft rise of mountains in the east. “Thinks he owns me, he does.”

I didn’t want to think about Ryder. I hadn’t talked to the self-proclaimed San Diego sidhe lord about shit in a hell of a long time, and I hadn’t planned on starting, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he reared his golden head up. The leash he’d put on me was a long one, but SoCalGov made sure it was tied on tight. Give the Dawn Court what he asked for and I’d get to keep my Stalker license. If that didn’t make me a whore, I didn’t know what did.

“Less I see of His Lordship, the better.” I toasted the rising sun. I didn’t sound convincing. Even to myself.

We’d parted on sticky terms. There were complications between us, dips in the road we couldn’t seem to navigate. I thought he felt betrayed because I hadn’t confessed to being an abomination, even if he said he wasn’t, and I was still more than a little pissed off that he’d finagled me onto the end of a tightly held rope. Getting me permanently assigned to his court by SoCalGov’s administration was a shitty thing to do, even if it was only a way for him to keep tabs on me.

We’d survived a Pendle run and the birth of our nieces—an odd, complicated tangle neither one of us planned for. I’d made friends with his cousin, Alexa, who’d become Cari’s apprentice. She’d have been on the job with us the night before, if not for the fact a sidhe warrior was not exactly the person to be on a run to steal a dragon egg from its nest. The sidhe were particular about dragons, believing the damned things were sacred. Ryder was never going to forgive me for killing one during a Pendle run, but it was either us or the dragon. Ryder, Clan Sebac, Third in the House of Devon, High Lord of the Southern Rise Court, thought it should be the dragon.

Since, at the time, I was driving and apparently more interested in living than he was, I chose us.

There are times I regret that decision. Not so much for me but for him, because Ryder is a pain in my ass. He kept after me to join his Court, even though I’m a chimera, an unholy, arcane soup of sidhe and unsidhe. Since I was already bound to him by SoCalGov’s threat to suspend my Stalker license if I didn’t ask how high when Ryder orders me to jump, I not so politely told him to fuck off and get out of my life.

I just hadn’t expected him to actually do exactly that—get out of my life.

“I should leave you there, Ryder,” I said to the sky, as if it would somehow carry my words to His Lordship’s ears, “in that forest of yours with the pandas and the towers. Damn you for not staying where I’d put you.”

The coffee went bitter in my mouth. I was turning maudlin, probably a result of bathing in a rancid dragon egg. Off in the distance, San Diego was waking up, its lower levels kicking in for the morning rush hour. The upper level still slumbered, its streets lean of traffic, but there seemed to be movement on the sidewalks, herds of dog walkers and joggers spending their morning hours chasing their own tails. Below, tik-tiks were diving and swooping, tiny blue metal birds clipped to overhead rails while picking up fares, then sweeping off into the shadowy streets built under San Diego’s towering skyscrapers. Medical’s white towers bristled at the levels’ meeting, a dash of mercury running silver on the city’s lips where it kissed the broad shoreline.

Leaning over the short wall running around the top of the warehouse, I sipped my coffee and stared at the city. The museum wouldn’t be open for a few hours yet, and I still needed to clean the dirt and pumice off of the egg’s exterior. There would be enough time for another cup of hot brew. Then I’d be elbow deep in soapsuds and filth.

“I’ll be needing yet another bath after that job,” I muttered at San Diego’s belly. My coffee was gone, and I was debating smoking a
kretek
before I started the laborious egg cleaning ahead of me when I spotted movement in my driveway.

More importantly, there was a very familiar old Chevy truck in said driveway and a way-too-familiar old human sitting behind its steering wheel.

“Dempsey,” I whispered under my breath.

He looked up as if he’d heard me say his name, an impossibility since I was several floors above him and his window was up, but his rheumy eyes met mine, and a sardonic grimace curled his sun-leathered face.

The last time he’d been at the warehouse was right after I bought the place. I’d been there for years, and never once had he darkened my doorway. To find him sitting in my driveway on a crisp, crystalline morning was shocking.

But not nearly as shocking as the drawn grayness of his skin as he studied me from his truck’s cab. I held up my coffee cup and lifted my eyebrows, silently questioning him if he wanted one. A curt nod brought me up from my lean on the wall, but the truck’s door creaking open drove me downstairs.

There was only one reason Dempsey would be at my doorstep. Something bad had happened… and whatever it was, I sure as hell wasn’t going to like it.

DEMPSEY WAS
silent while I got us some breakfast, and he slowly picked at the scrambled eggs and bacon burritos I’d tossed together. He’d always been one to eat, no matter if he’d just had a meal. Food was something to be consumed whenever it showed up in front of you, he used to say. Eat, because you never knew when food was going to be around again. I’d taken
that
lesson to heart, especially after the uncountable years where my only sustenance had been my own raw flesh being fed to me piece by piece.

Him not eating got me worried.

My worry turned to a cold gnaw of ice in my stomach when he eased himself into a folding metal chair next to me as I scrubbed the living shit out of the egg and Dempsey sighed.

“Listen close, son.”

Dempsey
never
called me son.

I was
never
his kid. Hell, I’d never been a kid. Sure, I’d been a bit smaller and shorter when he’d won me in that poker game, but I’d never ever been a child. My sick and twisted father’s magic took care of that shortly after I was born. I’d come to him a malfunctioning idiot, and he’d
made
me into a man.

But I’d
never
been his son.

“Doctors found some black spots in my guts, son.” His thick sausage fingers scrubbed over the tired in his grizzled, soulful face. “They said it’s going to kill me. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon. Real fucking soon.”

I’d taken knives to my stomach that hurt less than what Dempsey was telling me. I wasn’t sure what scared me more: him calling me son or the news of those dark blotches in his gut.

The water hose dropped from my hand, and I steadied myself on the egg, its curved bottom fitted into the ring of a bucket cabriolet I’d rigged to hold it while I washed it down. My knees gave, and I fumbled back for the other chair I’d brought out, my ass finding its hard edge with a heavy thump.

The warehouse’s single remaining bay-turned-garage echoed with my panicked, hissing breaths. Dempsey sat quiet and still while I fought to take control of my thoughts, swallowed up by the sudden reality of my whatever-the-fuck-he-was
dying
on me before I was ready for it.

It was funny how someone’s world changes in a second. Silly, stupid things turn life inside out, but everything else continues on as if nothing happened. Behind me, my Pendle-run-battered Mustang continued to sit on blocks, its partially restored body waiting for me to attach the new quarter panels I’d gotten in the day before. A bird sang out a trilling shriek from the jacaranda tree planted in the green space between my place and Dalia’s front door.

Water continued to bathe the slightly sloping driveway at my feet, curling around the tires of Dempsey’s truck, not quite reaching its battered rims, coated in a thin layer of milky brown dust he’d brought with him from Lakeside. The city continued to buzz, cars zipping along its streets, and the nearby ironworks churned and clanged its way through another bright, sunny San Diego morning.

But my own world had gone suddenly and irrevocably dark.

Dempsey seemed to grow smaller as he spoke, grumbling about Medical and the long lines of uncaring faces he’d been trotted past. It was more about complaining than actually telling me what was wrong, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the why and what I needed to shout at him. Those words remained lodged in the back of my throat, trapped in an amber drop of fear and unknown I couldn’t shake loose. I only found my tongue when he pulled out one of his ratty hand-rolled stogies, bit off its end, then pressed a lit lucifer to its rough tip while he sucked it to a deep red glow.

Staring at the first puff of smoke curling up from his lumpy cigar, an unreasonable rage crept over my brain, and I did something I never in my right mind would have done before that moment.

“Don’t fucking put that in your mouth, asshole.” I slapped the cigar out of his hand, sending it flying into the growing pool of water forming under the egg. “Don’t you gods-be-damned….”

The insanity of what I’d just done took a little bit to creep into my consciousness, but I didn’t care. I didn’t give a shit if he beat me into the ground. I was
angry
. So
damned
angry at what he’d done to himself. What he was doing to me.

He remained so still in his chair, I began to wonder if he’d somehow died in the space between my smacking the lit skunkweed out of his hand and my brain freaking out. I don’t know what I expected. Probably his fist in my face or maybe in my stomach. Either way I was going to get my face rearranged, and I steeled myself for the first blow.