Page 37 of Fire Bird

“And that’s all very admirable, but you’re telling me he’s now half-demon and if that’s true—”

“It’s true. We saw it with our own eyes,” Mack says, still not moving from his chair.

“Then, surely, you can see we’re playing with fire here?”

“Is that a pun?” Sam asks, looking pointedly at my hands, which have started to smoke as frustration builds inside me.

“No,” I tell him. “It’s not—”

“Where’s Kole?” Tanner’s voice makes me look round. He emerges from the bedroom Kole and I shared, and stares at me. “Luther? Where is he?”

“How the hell should I know? He was gone when I woke up.”

Tanner pushes the door back to expose the empty bed. “Okay, well, unless he’s bunked up with Rev and Sarah, we’ve got a problem.”

“Why a problem?” Finally, Mack gets up.

Tanner shoots him a frustrated stare. “Because since The Split opened, he’s been so hungry for F.H.B. we’ve been sedating him.”

“Sedating him?” Mack looks from Tanner to me.

I nod solemnly. “When it gets too bad and we can’t control him, yes. He asked us to.”

The kettle starts to whistle, so I pull it from the stove and deposit it in the metal sink. “We should go look for him,” I tell Tanner.

Tanner is already pulling his sneakers from beneath the couch. “Mack?” he asks, sitting down to put them on. “You coming?”

There’s a long moment of tension, in which Mack simply rubs his overgrown beard. Finally, he says, “Yes, I’m coming.”

* * *

Outside, the air is thick, humid, and metallic. “I didn’t realize it was so bad,” Mack says as we cross the street.

“You haven’t been here,” I reply, “why would you?”

He bites the inside of his cheek. “Luther, I couldn’t—”

“We’ll talk about it another time. Right now, we need to focus on Kole. If he gets his hands on some F.H.B., I’m not sure we’ll bring him back this time.”

“Not sure he’d want to come back, you mean?” Tanner asks, a grayness filling his usually bright features.

I pull my hood up over my head. No hair means no spending money on shampoo, but it also means being cold as a penguin’s ass when the temperature drops.

“Where would a mage who needs an F.H.B. kick go in a town full of demons to get his fix?” I ask, looking up and down the street.

Over the years, Mack and I successfully cleared most dealers out of town, but there are still some less salubrious areas where he could get lucky. “The houses around Mortis Street are where we busted that gang of French vamps last year,” I say to Mack.

He pushes his fingers through his hair. It’s crazy long. He looks like a homeless Santa. “Have there been many demons about during the day?”

“Not that we’ve encountered, although they’re getting hungrier. They might start venturing out.” I flex my fingers and bring fire into my palm. “We should be ready, just in case.”

“Guys, before we go all the way across town,” Tanner says, his nose wrinkling as he thinks, “there’s somewhere a little closer we should try.”

He turns and points up at the wonky Solar Cross signage. “Wouldn’t you say Pete is the kind of vamp who’d know where to get F.H.B.?”

“And be willing to supply it,” Mack adds.

I nod at them both. “You two go round back, I’ll take the front.”