Doubletake Read Free Page A

three bullets between its blazing silver eyes. They shone brighter than any streetlights in this part of town…until their life seeped away and left only the dull gray of death. I felt bad for them—almost—but they had turned a block that had once hosted scavenging homeless, thriving drug dealers, and sullen hookers into a desolate wasteland. In my opinion, I didn’t have a preference for one over the other, kishi or human. The mayor wanted the city cleaned up. The kishi clan was doing the job one block at a time…even if it meant eating quite a few people.
    Were those people good people? If I knew anything, I knew that these days, starting four months ago, I wasn’t in the position to make the call on whether certain people were worth saving or leaving to the predators. That I left up to Nik. I simply stepped over their bodies and went on with the job.
    Regardless of whether they were good or evil, those people belonged, whether they knew it or not, to the Kin. The Kin, the werewolf Mafia of NYC, weren’t pleased to be sharing their money or their snacks with Johnny-come-lately supernatural hyenas from the depths of…um…I should’ve paid attention to where those depths were during the premission rundown—maybe Africa, but Niko knew. That was enough. I didn’t think it mattered much. They were encroaching on Kin territory, and the Wolves didn’t like that.
    Unfortunately for the Kin, the kishi, as a race, howled at a decibel level that would have any Kin Wolf’s ears bleeding ten blocks away. Curled up in homicidal furryballs, moaning for their mommies, they hadn’t had much success in taking down the kishi. Luckily for Niko, me, and our bank account, human ears couldn’t hear notes that high.
    And although I wasn’t entirely human, my hearing was. That made us the go-to guys for this job. It had seemed easy from the hiring and the half our fee slapped into my palm—if it hadn’t been for Niko’s research, finding out the kishi were highly intelligent preternatural hyenas, if extremely malevolent. That meant the adults were fair game, but the younger kishi we had to pat on the head and find a goddamn supernatural foster and rescue organization for murderous fur babies to raise them right, socialize their asses, put rhinestone collars on them, and take them off our hands.
    How many of those do you think were in the phone book? Nada? Good fucking call.
    But the bottom line was, it was all about family, which had to be where that thought had originated. The adult kishi taking down prey for their young, which luckily was only one at this point, feeding him or her, setting up a nest, claiming this place for their own. They were doing what evolution had bred in them to do. Evolution worked the same for nonhumans as for humans. Kishi were predators to their bones. They would slaughter anything they thought they had a chance of bringing down, but to give them credit, they looked after their family.
    That’s where family became a bitch in yet another way. You eat people for your family, you piss off the Kin for your family, you die for your family.
    As a random bully had once said to me when I was a kid in the fourth grade as he demanded my sneakers and backpack, life isn’t fair. I agreed with him by punching his annoying teeth down his equally annoying throat. Ifthat’s the way the world wanted to be, I’d go along. I didn’t make the rules. I only played by them.
    Since when?
    Since never.
    This wasn’t a schizophrenic voice; at least, I hoped not. This was just my subconscious, my new subconscious. Since I’d let a small piece of me wither and die months ago to save
my
family, the swamp in my mind that made up the subliminal me was considerably more shadowed. It was more prone to the bad thoughts people think, normal people too, that they shouldn’t, don’t like to admit to, and don’t act on. But as I wasn’t normal and wasn’t exactly the Webster’s dictionary definition of a person, my bad