Karhi Emelyn

What the hell had Michael been? Silver blood? And Karhi should have realized something was wrong when he was leaning against the van, and it was groaning from his strength. Michael hadn’t even complained that Karhi was grabbing him too hard. A normal human would have complained with how strong Karhi’s grip was.

Night had fallen while they had worked to get the bodies squared away. Lunette had made calls to deal with Hashem’s body and the bodies that were supposed to be transported to the mortician.

Karhi stood against his car, arms crossed over his chest. One lone light attached to the building shone across him, casting long shadows.

He looked up when Lunette exited the building. She had pulled her hair up into a ponytail to get it out of the way.

“Hey, didn’t you try to fuck that Summer faerie when we were trying to figure out who was killing Hazel’s advisors like a century ago?”

Karhi growled. “Lunette, shut up.” His face was burning. How had he not even sensed that Michael wasn’t human?

“Quit trying to have sex when we’re working on shit, and then I’ll stop bring it up,” she snapped back.

She was right, but he didn’t want to say it out loud. He couldn’t even claim that Lunette wouldn’t understand because she wasn’t even interested in sex. He knew that was a weak excuse. He was a weak excuse.

“This is a role reversal,” Lunette said as she typed something on her phone.

Karhi glanced at her. “It is.”

Karhi was the one who usually made bodies disappear when his siblings messed up and killed someone. Or when their fledglings did. Ilona had made it his responsibility for the first few decades of his life to dispose of bodies when she was done with them. It was a specialty of his.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He shrugged. He felt stupid and childish, but he didn’t want to talk about it with Lunette. He was mortified that he had gotten carried away with Michael.

“How did he die?” Karhi asked.

It took Lunette a split second to understand the subject change, but she picked it up quickly. “I couldn’t tell from the outside. Maybe something internal like a brain haemorrhage or something. There wasn’t any external damage.”

Karhi nodded. He wanted to focus on something that wasn’t his stupid mistakes. The body in the morgue that didn’t belong there was a good distraction.

“Have you ever seen silver blood?”

He shook his head. “Zeren might know.” He uncrossed his arms. “What did he mean about Sloane?”

Lunette shook her head, tapping on her phone. “If you don’t know, how would I?”

Karhi gave her the finger and she responded in kind, but she did the British V-sign.

She held her phone out. The speaker was on.

It rang twice before Zeren answered. “Hey Luna, what’s up?”

“Zere, I’ve got Karhi with me. We just came across a creature we’ve never encountered,” Lunette said.

“Oh?” Zeren sounded like he had a grin on his face. He lived for obscure monster shit. “Do tell.”

“He killed someone and took on their form.”

“Anthroshifter?”

“Definitely not.”

“Did he eat any part of them to gain their form?”

Lunette and Karhi exchanged unnerved glances. “No, I don’t think so.” Lunette answered. “I took a look at the body before calling someone to remove it.”

“Though he did seem familiar with how to pack a body into a mortician’s van,” Karhi added. “And seemed familiar with how to handle himself around a morgue. We were meeting a mortician’s assistant.”

“So, either he had knowledge of those items or took it from the assistant somehow. Okay. How did you reveal him?”

“I found the assistant’s body. I threw him away from Karhi after using cruciopathy on him, but he shrugged off my cruciopathy. I got the jump on him and made him hurt, but it didn’t last at all. He completely shut it out.”

Karhi nodded in agreement even though Zeren couldn’t see it. Lunette’s power, cruciopathy, was the ability to cause pain with a thought. Lunette claimed it was more complicated than that, but it was what it boiled down to. It wasn’t common for her to encounter someone who could block it out.

“Interesting,” Zeren murmured. They could hear him scribbling down notes.

“Yeah, and I must have cut him because he bled silver.”

“Silver?” Zeren was having a hard time containing his enthusiasm.

“And his eyes were glowing. And he had these . . . burns? On his face?” Lunette glanced at Karhi.

Karhi shrugged. “It was like hard, black rock or something on his face. It almost looked like wounds, but I’ve never seen it before.”

They heard more of Zeren scribbling on paper. “Fascinating . . .”

“He also teleported.”

“Teleported?” Zeren asked incredulously. “He didn’t just Jump?”

Jumping referred to moving from one dimension to another. Like cutting open a portal from this world into the Fey world or a bestia world. “I have no idea what the difference is,” Karhi admitted.

“Did he seem to cut a portal really fast, like Carrick does, or did he just disappear?”

“The second,” Lunette answered.

“Wow . . .”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Not a fucking clue.”

Lunette glared at the phone. “Zeren.”

“Come on, Lunette. If you and Karhi haven’t encountered it—you have 100-plus years on me. Silver blood rings some bells, but I think I’ve only heard about it in the context of Enforcers, and I don’t know anything about them.”

“Enforcers . . .” Karhi trailed off. “I’ve heard that before.” Something in passing, maybe from Hazel.

“They don’t pop up in our world often. I don’t think any creature less than a millennium old would have ever encountered them. They have more to do with the Fey and the bestia and stuff. But there isn’t a lot in literature about them.”

“Why would they be interested in Sl—”

Karhi cut Lunette off before she could continue. “Zeren, could you do some digging?”

“Oh, for sure. But I don’t really have my library easily available. I’ll do what I can, but honestly, I don’t think I can look into it until after Samhain. I’m sorry, guys. Is it urgent? I could try to have someone grab some books for me and overnight them.”

Lunette sent a questioning glance at Karhi.

“He didn’t really seem interested in us . . .” Karhi said after a moment of deliberating.

“No, just Slo—”

“That’s fine, Zeren,” Karhi interrupted. “Thank you.” He tapped Lunette’s phone to end the call.

Lunette gave him a murderous look. “Why did you keep cutting me off?”

“I don’t want Zeren to know that he was interested in Sloane.”

“Why? He wouldn’t care.”

“No, but when Ilona finds out that there was some powerful creature looking for Sloane, do you think she’ll be kind to those that knew?”

Lunette didn’t have an answer for that. They both knew the answer. If they kept it quiet from Zeren, he wouldn’t be a direct recipient of Ilona’s wrath.

“Exactly,” Karhi said. “Did you find anything else of interest in there, outside of Michael?”

Lunette’s eyes went wide. She had remembered something. “Fuck, right. I forgot about it when I smelled something decomposing.”

Even if a body was only a few hours dead, they could smell decomposition. A body started to breakdown the minute it died. “What was it?”

“The cause of death for Rhegium Phillips. It appeared to be blood loss, but there was a bit of blood left in the body and they tested it for toxicology and found a neurotoxin.”

Karhi blinked. There was only one that Lunette would be interested in. “Hemlock?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, it was on there. Karhi, if he’s involved—”

Karhi barely had time to react before the scent of wet dog hit his nose. He turned to look but paws the size of his own hands knocked him to the ground.

His head cracked against concrete, fireworks exploding inside of his skull. He snarled in pain, his teeth growing into fangs. His senses sharpened. The smell of gas and wet dog weighed heavily in his nose and the pain in his head flared angrily.

A brown werewolf pinned him to the ground. Teeth snapped at his face, but he rammed the heel of his palm into its jaw. The blow stunned the wolf, and Karhi reached down, sliding his hand between the wolf’s back leg and his own body. He jerked his knee up and grabbed the wolf’s haunch, heaving the leg up and throwing the wolf off.

Karhi rolled to his feet and came face-to-face with Lunette.

Lunette glared at the wolf, and it howled out in pain where it lay stunned on the ground. Almost immediately, bright green fire erupted from the wolf. Karhi and Lunette jumped back, and the wolf stopped crying.

The wolf got to its feet and stood up. Its brown eyes crackled with bright green light, and it snarled at them.

“What the fuck?” Lunette whispered.

There was no heat coming off of the wolf and Karhi just barely had time to shove Lunette out of the way as it lunged at her.

The wolf yelped in pain as Lunette threw her cruciopathy at it, but it continued on. This time her powers didn’t knock it down. It was expecting them.

Most creatures were flammable to an extent. But human vampires were like dry brush compared to most other creatures. A good fire would tear them apart and, if they survived, leave them scarred for centuries, if not the rest of their lives. It was one of the few things they couldn’t heal from easily.

But this fire wasn’t even regular fire. It didn’t burn, and it didn’t light anything near it.

Karhi had only ever heard of one fire like that.

“Lunette, it’s soulsilver,” Karhi shouted.

“Oh fuck,” she cursed, dodging the wolf’s attack.

Their best plan of attack was to run. They couldn’t overcome soulsilver.

That was, until Lunette pulled out a gun and fired off a shot at the wolf. The sound rang through Karhi’s head. It wasn’t just a regular gun. She had moon silver rounds.

The wolf screamed in pain, and Karhi smelled blood. Shifter blood smelled like human blood, except much stronger. It was nauseating.

The wolf lay on the ground, unmoving. But Karhi could hear that its heart was beating strong. Lunette had grazed him, stunning him.

For the first time, Karhi realized that he recognized the wolf.

It was one of Sloane’s werewolves.

“Fuck,” Karhi swore, lunging for Lunette before she could fire off another shot. He knocked the gun out of her hands. It clattered on the asphalt.

“Karhi, what the fuck?” she shouted at him.

Karhi grabbed Lunette, dodging the wolf as it regained its faculties. “That’s one of Sloane’s friends,” he hissed.

“Friend or not, the fucker is trying to kill us,” Lunette shouted, shoving him away and darting for the gun.

“Wait!”

The shout didn’t come from Karhi, but he ignored it anyway, bolting for Lunette. If they killed one of Sloane’s friends, Karhi didn’t know if Sloane would survive it.

Lunette kicked Karhi before he could take the gun from her. “Are you really going to let this wolf kill us for your fucking girlfriend?” she shrieked at him, turning back to where the wolf was stalking towards them. The green fire licked at his coat, creating a shimmering effect as he stepped forward.

A blur of red fur and green flames knocked the wolf down. Snarls of pain and anger rang through the night and Karhi and Lunette exchanged wide-eyed glances.

Another wolf, Sloane’s other friend, was tearing into the first wolf. They were both engulfed in green flames. The scent of blood had already been pervasive, but it was all Karhi could smell now. He put his hand to his nose, trying to block out the smell.

“We should go,” Karhi murmured to her. “Let them deal with this.”

“No, I’m going to fucking kill that asshole,” Lunette growled, bringing up her gun and aiming it at the two of them.

Karhi smacked it away from her before she could shoot. “Stop that.”

Lunette punched him in the jaw, pain exploding through his face.

Karhi elbowed her in the nose in response and snarled. “You fucker.”

“Fuck you, Lunette.”

“Bell, stop.”

Karhi and Lunette’s attention snapped back to the werewolves to see they had both transformed back into their human forms. They were completely naked, wrestling on the ground.

“She’s a fucking vampire, Mickey!” Bell shouted at him. “It’s his fucking fault!”

“No, it’s our fucking fault,” he roared back.

That took all the fight out of Bell. He went limp where Mickey had him in a headlock.

Mickey continued, keeping Bell in the headlock, shouting at him. “You’re lucky they didn’t fucking kill you. Those two are fucking old. You think, because we have soulsilver now, we can just do whatever the fuck we want?”

Karhi and Lunette exchanged surprised glances.

“You’re a stupid fucking idiot. We’re the ones who disappeared. It’s not his fault that Sloane wanted to die.”

Karhi blinked. He . . . had never really thought about it that way.

The more he found out about her, the more Karhi had found himself wondering why Sloane ever went home with a vampire. She had known what he was the night he met her. She had known what he could do.

And yet she flirted with him and drank with him and . . . done other things with him that night. And it had started to make less and less sense. But now it did.

Sloane had wanted to die.

Karhi’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and checked it to see Sloane’s name.

He stepped away from the wrestling werewolves to answer it, motioning for Lunette to follow him.

“Sloane?”

“Karhi—is Lunette there?”

He tilted his head to the side. Interesting. “Yeah, hold on.” He put the phone on speaker. “Okay you’re on speaker.”

“I just remembered—a few years ago, there was a vampire nest in the warehouse district. Shifters hired Zero and Theron to get rid of them. And I just realized that one of the buildings the vampire nest took over was the same building Mikko was held in.”

That was interesting.

Lunette looked at the phone quizzically. “You think that’s related?” she asked.

“No—well, I don’t know. But I know that apparently the shifter courts owned that building? Or at least some of the surrounding buildings? And the vampire courts owned other buildings? Could that be related?”

How had she come to know that?

Lunette didn’t ask, though. She responded pensively. “Hmm . . . it could be. That would explain why I can’t track the owners. But if I start with knowing who could potentially own it, I may be able to trace it from there. Alright, that’s useful, Sloane.”

“Where are you?” Karhi asked.

“Lazarus. I needed something to drink. I’ll—”

They heard a heavy slamming sound through the phone, and then Sloane shrieked in pain.

His grip on his phone tightened. “Sloane? Sloane. What’s—” A high pitched ringing pierced his ears and he winced. The call disconnected.

Lunette looked up at Karhi, eyes wide. “What the fuck?”

Karhi was already running for Lazarus.