Where Demons Dare. Kim Harrison

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       Five

      The soft click of teeth on the knob of my bedroom door stirred me, but it wasn’t until a wet nose snuffled in my ear that I truly woke up, with a pulse of adrenaline that was better than chugging three cups of coffee.

      “David!” I exclaimed, jerking upright and scooting back to the headboard, my covers pulled to my neck. “How did you get in here?” Pulse hammering, my panic subsided, turning to irritation when I saw his pricked ears and his doggy smile. My gaze slid to my clock. Eleven? Damn it, I had a good hour left before the alarm was going to ring. Irritated, I flicked the alarm off. No way would I get back to sleep now. Not after a Were’s version of a wet willy.

      “What’s the matter? Your car not starting?” I asked the large, gangly wolf, but he only sat on his haunches and let his tongue loll as he stared at me with his luscious brown eyes. “Get out of my room. I have to get up. I’m meeting someone for coffee,” I said, making shooing motions with one hand.

      At that, David snuffed a negation, and I hesitated.

      “I’m not meeting someone for coffee?” I said, ready to believe him. “Is Ivy okay? Is it Jenks?” Worried, I swung my feet to the floor.

      David put his front paws, each as big as a saucer, to either side of me to keep me sitting. His breath was warm, and he gave me a comforting lick. He wouldn’t get this close in his people skin, but wearing fur seemed to bring out the softer side of most Weres.

      I eased back, deciding everything was okay. He didn’t look worried. “Talking to you is like talking to a fish,” I complained, and David huffed, his claws clicking on the hardwood floor as he got off my bed. “You want some clothes?” I asked, seeing as he probably hadn’t woken me up for the hell of it. If it wasn’t car problems, maybe he had forgotten to bring something to change into. “You might fit in Jenks’s old stuff.”

      David bobbed his head, and after a brief thought of my almost-nakedness, I got out of bed and snagged my robe from the back of a chair. “I kept a pair of his sweats,” I said as I shrugged into the blue terry cloth and tied it closed with an abrupt, embarrassed haste, but David had turned to the hallway, the perfect gentleman. Feeling awkward, I dragged a box down from my closet shelf and dropped it on my bed. Not that we had a lot of naked men in our church, but I wasn’t going to throw out Jenks’s old clothes from when he had been people-size.

      The scent of Queen Anne’s lace came to me when I wrestled the box open. Fingers searching through the cool fabric, my slight headache eased and the smell of growing things and sunshine rose high. Jenks smelled good, and it hadn’t washed out.

      “Here you go,” I said when I found the sweats and extended them to him.

      His brown eyes sheepish, David carefully took them in his mouth before padding to the dim hallway, the oak floorboards glowing with morning sun reflecting in from the living room and kitchen. Shuffling to the bathroom, I decided he had probably locked himself out of his car and change of clothes—which left me curious as to where the ladies were. David didn’t seem to be distressed, and I knew he would be if either one of them had a problem.

      Wondering how David knew I didn’t have a coffee date when I hadn’t even told him I had one to begin with, I shuffled into the bathroom and quietly shut the door to keep everyone who was sleeping, sleeping. It was nearing the golden hour of noon when the church went silent—Ivy and me asleep and the pixies just settling down for their four-hour nap.

      Hanging on the back of the door, my costume thumped, and I quieted it, listening for the hum of pixy wings. I fingered the supple leather in the silence, hoping I would get a chance to wear it. I was pretty much churchbound after dark until I nailed whoever was sending Al after me. And Halloween wasn’t a holiday to be missed.

      Since the Turn—the nightmarish three years following the supernatural species coming out of the closet—the holiday had been gaining strength until now it was celebrated for an entire week, becoming the unofficial celebration for the Turn itself.

      The Turn actually began in the late summer of sixty-six when humanity began dying of a virus carried by a bioengineered tomato that was supposed to feed the growing populations of the third-world countries, but it was on Halloween that we celebrated it. That was the day Inderland had decided to come out of the closet before humanity found us by way of the “why aren’t these people dying?” question. It had been thought that Halloween might ease the panic, and it had. Most of the surviving human population thought it was a joke, easing the chaos for a day or two until they realized that we hadn’t eaten them yesterday, so why would we today?

      They СКАЧАТЬ