Downfall Read Free Page A

wasn’t bone. If you don’t like the name, don’t spread the fame. Regardless, they never seemed to see the truth in that, and this one was no exception. Hissing in a lamia’s customary homicidal outrage—which I admit they did damn well—seven on a scale of one to ten in making your eardrums ache, she oozed up to a sitting position and snatched up a large shard of mirror to fling it at my face.
    That was when I saw it.
    There it was—maybe—in the shimmering surface before it tumbled and I threw myself to one side. I ended up with a painful slice across my forehead and acomplete lack of patience. “Fine,” I spat. “You’ve been downgraded from ladies to bitches.” I lifted the axe, often used, well sharpened, and shining as bright as the edge of a brand-new guillotine. The lamia’s anger fled at the silver gleam, leaving her oddly deflated, her black eyes showing wild wariness as she peered up through the long dark hair that covered most of her face to cascade along with her floor-length black dress like a pool of poison on the dirty tile around her.
    “You know what a friend once told me the Good Book says?” I grinned with dark cheer. “Thou shall not suffer a bitch to live.”
    “That’s not quite how the quote goes,” came a deep, disapproving voice from behind me that I really didn’t want to hear right now. “Trust me, Caliban.” I didn’t. I went with ignoring him instead.
    The succubae were running. I didn’t care about them. They started this, but they’d been smart enough not to throw anything at me that might slice off my face . . . or make me feel something more painful. They got a freebie this time. The lamia? No freebies for her and her mirror and what she’d made me see.
    Making me see? Making me see
that
?
    It wasn’t that. It wasn’t. Nononono.
    Death was too easy for her, but it was all I had.
    I had started to heave the axe downward when a large hand caught the wooden handle just below the metal head and yanked me backward. “Let her go,” Ishiah ordered. “I can’t keep docking your pay whenever you maim or kill a patron. You’ve been working for free for three weeks now.”
    “Pigeons like you are cheap. What can I say?” I muttered under my breath before turning and letting Ishiah, my boss, an ex-angel or peri as the
paien
called them, take the axe. “It wasn’t my fault that she’d started a fight with apiece of glass and I was going to end it with a four-foot-long axe. That was purely poor planning on her part.” I waved a hand at my T-shirt. It was black with small red letters you’d have to be way too far into my personal space to make out. They spelled out IF YOU CAN READ THIS . . . YOU’RE AL READY DEAD. I took my personal space seriously. “I’m responsibly labeled. What more do you want?”
    I was trying to distract myself by bitching to Ish, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t forget what I might have seen in that glass. It could’ve been a trick of the light. It could be nothing. There was time enough for that later. Like maybe never. If I was lucky. Unfortunately I was never lucky. I pushed it all away and moved on to dealing with my boss.
    “What I want, but doubt I will ever get, is an employee who is less bloodthirsty than all my patrons put together.” Ishiah had let the weight of the axe carry it to hang inches above the floor. He was swinging it slowly, barely moving it, all in all, but I got the picture.
    “Yeah, yeah. Ruin my fun.” I walked over and knocked on the stall door where the puck had fled. “You in there. We already have one puck in town. Robin Goodfellow. I don’t know whether he’d throw you a party to reminisce about the orgy days of yore or kill you for poaching on his territory. Want me to call and ask?”
    Pucks didn’t care for other pucks, being identical physical clones of one another. With the enormous ego each and every one of them had, two of them in one city was one too many. They either disliked each