Yuki Shiro: 0 Absolutes: The Night Parade Page 18

  My jeans were relatively clean, so after brushing them off with a wet rag, I reluctantly pulled them on. Yep, commando-style. Ugh. I needed to get back to the hotel to get a change of clothes, and soon.

  Pulling my hair back into a tail, I wrapped it in a loose knot to let it dry and headed downstairs, following the tantalizing aromas of fresh bacon and coffee; I found utter and complete chaos.

  My poor dragon had his back to it all, trying to focus on cooking, while my four best friends in the world, my girls, my squad, were leering at his naked ass while sprawled out in his living room, doing their usual things.

  Miki was hiding behind her laptop, pretending to work; and I say pretending, because she spent more time peeking over it to snap photos of Vilhelm’s ass on her cell phone. Half-master hacker, half-evil genius, she had inherited both her father’s geekiness and her mother’s eye.

  Tsubasa was chatting away on her mobile, no doubt wheeling-and-dealing to keep her JPop group under control and in the limelight; and staring at Vilhelm’s ass the entire time.

  Kaori was trying to pull off her best uptight business woman act, which she normally pulled off extremely well, despite being one of the infamous cat-thieves in the world and not at all an uptight business executive—she just wore it as her usual traveling disguise, but with Vilhelm’s back to her, she was fanning her flushed face as she muttered to herself.

  Then there was poor, dear, sweet, innocent, and bad ass shrine priestess, Shinkō, who was trying to ignore that perfect example of masculine perfection by staring out the window, but her gaze kept veering back to it whenever he moved.

  Of course, all of them were as Yōkai as I was, and we were all roughly the same age and members of the Shiro Clan, so it was natural we gravitated together. We also tended to balance one another out. Or egg each other on to bigger and worse things. It could go either way.

  As I came down the stairs, Vilhelm turned toward me, those eyes of his locking on me intently. He managed a grin for me, but I could see the whites of his eyes and I believed I caught the faint whiff of desperation swirling around him.

  Ignoring the girls for the moment because I didn’t even have to wonder how they had found me, given Miki had almost certainly bugged my phone with a tracker, I walked over to Vilhelm and stood in front of him.

  Giving him a small, knowing smile, I said, “How about I finish up making breakfast for the unruly invaders while you go shower and change?”

  He responded by putting down the spatula, lifting me up to give me a big, deep, thorough smack on the lips, then disappeared upstairs utilizing that preternatural speed of his.

  Ignoring the hisses and boos coming from the peanut gallery, I eyed Masa, “Right, talk. Tell us about the tagging, then the girls can bring me up to speed on what they’ve found out, and we can start figuring out just what the fuck is going on.”

  “Yeah, just what is going on?” Tsubasa asked, finally ending her call and coming into the kitchen to help; thank Susanō’s hairy ass she knew I was helpless in the kitchen. I’d owe her later, though. Maybe she’d take some of Vilhelm’s wine?

  Masa came to attention in the center of the living room, looking at me seriously with ghostly white eyes, ‘You were tagged by the Enoch, apparently under the demands of one of the Arch-Angels, since none of the Choruses do anything this overt without their express permission. I do not know which Chorus, however, I don’t know the Enochian well-enough for that. I did manage to muddy up the trail, so you’re safe for now.’

  “The Enoch?” Kaori asked, pushing her useless glasses up the bridge of her nose, still wringing as much time out of the disguise as she possibly could. “Who are they?”

  Miki raised her head, but before she could speak, Shinkō said clearly, “They’re the bastards that call themselves ‘angels.’ They’re fucking parasites, they move into a territory, drive out the native spirits and supernaturals so they can live off of humanity unopposed. They wiped out much of the supernatural population throughout Europe, Africa, South America, and have an iron fist wrapped around America’s balls.”

  Shit, Shinkō was Evil-Shinkō; that only happened when she was angry. Her hair was beginning to whip angrily up around her shoulders, her eyes starting to glow a sullen crimson as she spoke.

  Reluctantly, I opened the fridge and pulled out one of the last, precious lava cakes and waved it at her. “Shinkō, chocolate…”

  Evil-Shinkō disappeared in the blink of an eye and with a squeal of delight as she ran into the kitchen and snatched the small, ceramic dish from my hand. Pointing her towards the silverware drawer, I fought the urge to pout. I hated sharing my chocolate, but like me, Shinkō was something of a chocolate addict, and we found it best to feed her beast before she started literally burning the world down around her.

  “Ahem,” Miki said, giving Shinkō a look. “As Shin-chan was saying, they’re basically angels, but they’re not the happy fluffy type. They’re the militant crusader type that believe all non-Enoch supernaturals are monsters that need to be slaughtered or converted.”

  “Converted?” Tsubasa asked as she expertly prepared omelets. Glancing over her shoulder…okay, it was more like I peeked around her…I muttered, “You’re going to need a lot more eggs to feed my dragon.”

  She gave me a look. I raised my hands in surrender and turned back toward where Miki was glaring at us with impatience.

  “Yes, converted. They can turn supernaturals into Enoch, bring you into their collective, assimilate you like the Borg or the Cybermen.”

  We—that was, everyone besides Miki—all shared a look and a sigh.

  Yes, I did voice acting for anime and dub movies, and I’d even admit I could be a bit of an ōtaku at times, but Miki’s obsessions were all Western, and a lot of her comments went over our collective heads.

  “She means,” Vilhelm responded, coming down the stairs, freshly showered and wearing jeans and a t-shirt, only the t-shirt looked much better stretched across his incredible torso than it did hanging on my petite frame. “They turn you into one of them, and by the end of it, you’re happy they did so. We don’t know how they do it, but we do know that they’ve managed to even convert some of the gods to their ranks.”

  “So basically, join us or die,” I said grimly.

  “Yes,” Vilhelm replied simply and shrugged. He pointed at the stove, “The rice should be ready. I believe it is a standard breakfast accompaniment in Japan?”

  The girls gawked at him. I grinned. Oh yeah, he was going to fit in just fine.

  Then I remember, he hadn’t had to deal with my actual blood relations yet.

  My grin faded.

  “Miki, where is my family?” If anyone knew, it’d be her.

  Giving me an apologetic look, Miki sighed, “According to their flight plans, they’re actually not due to arrive for a few days. It looks like they’re making a few stops along the way.”

  Groaning, I closed my eyes, “Do I want to know?”

  Shaking her head, Miki gave me a serious, flat look. “No, you don’t. But they did tell me to tell you that they’re going to make sure you have a very happy birthday this year.”

  My left eye began to twitch. “Oh?”

  Vilhelm tilted his head, much like Masa did, as he regarded me expectantly, “Just when is your birthday?”

  Pinching the bridge of my nose, I shook my head slowly. “December twenty-fifth.”

  “Why are you so upset about your birthday, my Yuki? You will be twenty-five this year, no? I sense you are on the cusp of your transformation,” he asked in complete bewilderment.

  The bitches laughed. All of them, even the real, actual female canine, and my poor dragon just looked even more confused.

  “Because,” Tsubasa finally managed to say through her laughter, “It’s on Christmas Day. She’s always hated celebrating her birthday because it’s usually forgotten because people are celebrating Christmas.”

  “Oh yeah,” Miki piped up, the little traitor. “If you rea
lly want to get her going, sing her Christmas carols. They drive her insane!”

  “Can we not talk about this, please?” I growled in a rather impressive impression of my dragon, if I did say so myself, “We have other things to discuss, such as just how my family is planning to help me ‘have a very happy birthday’.”

  I was met by blank stares, a few shrugs, and a crushing sense of doom pressing down on my shoulders.

  “I need coffee for this; and chocolate, I need more chocolate.”

  It was definitely time for some coffee and lots more chocolate.

  ❆❅❆

  Vilhelm | Vilhelm & Yuki’s Temporary Lair, Shadow Lake, CO | December 7, 2017

  Watching my little mate interact with her friends, I was intrigued. I had much to learn about her. As was typical for us dragons, if we found our mate, we tended to pounce, then spend the next few millennia learning about our mate. Sadly, even before most of my kind were driven off or slaughtered, true matings were rare—maybe one in a hundred.

  Some even turned away from their mates, particularly if they were not dragon, preferring to keep their bloodlines pure; which was fucking stupid. Nature encouraged diversity, and we dragons were as much a part of Nature as everything else, living or unliving.

  With so few of us left? With only a handful or so of us awake right now? Me finding my mate was only because the Norns favored me.

  Letting Yuki catch up with her friends, I just listened, only speaking up when there was something I could actually contribute. They slipped easily between languages, speaking in an odd mish-mash of accents, slang, and terms that even my ability to understand and speak languages could not keep up with.

  I savored this not-so-quiet moment with my little mate and her equally little friends as we ate and they chattered like magpies. I could sense the Fates moving us on the chessboard of reality.

  Few realized that there was more than just one Fate, and I wasn’t talking about the three sisters known as the Norns, nor the three Moirai of Greece. They were ancient, beyond even the understanding of dragons, and all of us were just their playthings in their never-ending struggle to spin reality into the form of their choosing.

  I just hoped my little mate and I would survive this next match.

  Maybe it was time to call in a few favors.

  ❆❅❆

  Kincaid | Undersidhe, Somewhere in the Colorado Rockies | December 7, 2017

  I grinned unrepentantly into the scowling face of my direct supervisor, Lady Maili, Knight Protector of the Unseelie Queen, the Blade of Blackest Night, or more affectionately known to her underlings as Mistress Molly McIrish-McShamrock, because of all the Sidhe in existence, few were more stereotypically Irish than she.

  “What have you learned, Kincaid?” she said in her lilting brogue, pinning me with her emerald-green eyes.

  “Well, you see, Mistress Molly,” I said, lapsing into my most Irish of brogues, “It goes like this, it does. The rumbly feline has gone off on some errand, though I do no believe it’s a craic, since his mistress has him on a right short leash, but he’s got a glad eye for the snowy lass, that he does. He missed the Enoch doing a right number on the wee lass…”

  Yeah, I was laying on the accent a bit too thick, but it gave me so much amusement to watch that twitch in her jaw. Maili was old-school Sidhe, a direct descendant of one of the Morrígan—I could never remember which one—and as an inquisitor in charge of the Unseelie Queen’s secret knights—i.e., the assassins, spies, and thugs everyone knew served her, but were not ever publically acknowledged—she was not someone anyone wanted to fuck with. So, of course, I had to fuck with her.

  “Which you rescued her from, despite her not being your primary objective,” she interrupted, giving me the stink eye.

  With a sigh, I tugged down my shirt and pointed to my chest, “Look here.”

  She narrowed her eyes and studied the glowing mark on my chest, “Is that…?”

  “Oh, aye ‘tis,” I said with a smirk. “Looks like the wee lass is my anam cara, she is, which means that even the queen herself cannae deny me the right to take the piss out of anyone who fucks with her.”

  Maili leaned back in the heavy leather chair positioned behind her desk and stared at me.

  “How the fuck did you end up with an anam cara?” she asked all incredulously, like it was mind-boggling to think of me with anyone.

  Shrugging grandly, I spread my hands wide, “Lucky, I guess.”

  Waving her hand toward my chest, she asked bluntly, “Are you compromised? Do we need to take you off this investigation?”

  “Nah, Molly m’girl,” I said with a broad grin. “You know I serve the Unseelie faithfully, have ever since our beloved Queen made me into the man you see before you.”

  She was clever enough to catch the layers of meaning in that phrase, I saw that in her eyes. She was also clever enough not to say anything about it to my face.

  Just because I was one of the grotesque, I was overlooked, considered less than even a common forest brownie. I was a tool, a weapon crafted by the Unseelie Queen from a young boy she had found and ‘adopted’ as one of her own. I knew very well my place in the grand scheme of things. Of course, me finding an anam cara just tilted the world off its axis, and I was going to enjoy the show.

  “Now, Mistress Molly, lemme tell you more ‘bout what I discovered about our felonious feline,” I released my collar and changed the subject, turning it away from my dove as I began to fill her in on all the juicy little details my brother and I had managed to dig up.

  I very carefully did not mention that my dove had managed to get swept up by a bloody fucking huge dragon, marked and mated. Oh yeah, one of my little darlings was glued to my dove’s backside like a tick on a hound. There was no where she could go that I could not, or would not, find her. As for the dragon? I was still mulling that one over.

  He could be a complication.

  Or a serious fucking stroke of pure luck!

  I just had to figure out how to play the hand I’d been dealt.

  Good thing I always cheated at cards.

  It was time to call in a few debts.

  ❆❅❆

  Kurokō | Shadow Lake, CO | December 7, 2017

  “What’s that?” I asked the man struggling to escape my grip, my mouth pressed close against his ear so he could hear my softly purred words. It wasn’t difficult, since I had his throat locked in a stranglehold, he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The foolish puppy thought because he was twice my size and a shifter, he could take a ‘mere cat.’ He was wrong.

  “Playtime is over?” I sighed and reluctantly nodded, “You’re right, of course. I need to get back to work.”

  With my legs locked around his waist, I had all the leverage I needed. A simple flex of my arm, a quick jerk to the left, I snapped his neck and let his lax body fall to the floor.

  Leaning over his body, I eyed him carefully. He was suitably “generic American” in appearance, with nut-brown hair, sun-darkened skin, and even in death, his eyes were a bright hazel color. Parting his lips, I leaned over his open mouth and inhaled deeply, drawing out his last breath and tasting his essence.

  Yes, he would do.

  A member of one of the local mutt gangs, he would let me get an ear on the inside, keep track of them. I sneered and shook my head. Dogs were always so predictable.

  With a sigh, I knelt beside his prone corpse and placed my hand over where his heart once beat.

  I called forth my living flame, that vibrant jade magic that lived within me. Once it filled my hand, I slammed it into his body, into his heart, hissing in pleasure as I allowed the energy to race through our bodies, joining us together.

  It was almost as good as sex.

  Almost.

  No, I must stop thinking of Shiro Yuki that way. She was a distraction I could not deal with, not if I was to complete the tasks I was given. Besides, she was doomed. I believe even she realized that before she had left Amaya-sama’s res
idence in Ginza.

  Such a shame.

  Although, if I could figure out a way to keep her alive for awhile longer, maybe we could play some more.

  She really was quite entertaining.

  Reluctantly letting thoughts of having her nude body beneath my own slip from my mind, I brought the dead werewolf back to life.

  His eyes, darker now, lined with feline gold, blinked up at me before he slowly sat up and rubbed his head.

  “What happened?” he asked in a rough, scratchy voice.

  Tapping his forehead, I gave him a friendly grin, “Think you got caught on the wrong end of a brawl, my friend. You’ve got a bit of a shiner there, and your throat’s all bruised up. You may want to go see a doctor about that.”

  Pushing himself back up to his feet, my toy brushed the dust from his jeans and shook his head, “Nah, that’s okay. I gotta get back to work or my boss is going to kill me.”

  Rising to my feet, I tucked my hands into my pockets and rocked back on my heels, giving him what I hoped was a sincere, doubtful look, “If you say so. Just take it easy for a while, you might have a concussion or something.”

  Mumbling to himself, he stumbled away to his car, leaving me alone on the forest trail along the lake. I watched intently as he drove off, smiling a bit. My toys never realized they were dead, or my playthings, until it was too late.

  At least his last breath would keep my hunger at bay for a few days.

  Whistling to myself, I decided to head back to the hotel. Maybe I could catch Yuki trying on some of that lingerie she had been eyeing. If not, well, I could always re-watch an episode of Boys Over Flowers. K-Dramas always put me in a good mood, and were an excellent way of figuring out how to deal with humans.

  Transforming to my true form, the one not even Amaya-sama had yet to see, I loped back toward the distant lights of Denver.

  Yes, it was time for some more drama.

  Epilogue