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steeled myself for the first blow.
    Instead, Dempsey began to laugh.
    He was a big man, taller and broader than me by a long shot, and over the years, the lean tautness of his belly eased out, giving him a paunch he religiously kept up by regular applications of alcohol and fatty foods. I couldn’t remember a time when silver didn’t fleck the scruff on his face and neck, and he’d always smelled of tobacco with the faint hint of sour sweat. Dempsey raised me as he’d been raised—hard, swift, and with a slap or two to keep me in line.
    Most people would say he was a sorry excuse for a father figure. They didn’t know what they were talking about.
    I had—have—a father. He’d torn me apart from the inside out, shoving iron bars under my skin knowing the metal was toxic to our kind, and gleefully used his magic to peel the flesh from my bones to feed his Wild Hunt. I’d been passed around as a party favor for his friends and served as a chopping block for his enemies. I’d been bled to white, broken to the marrow, and starved before I could even speak.
    Dempsey was a Pele-blessed angel compared to Tanic cuid Anbhas, and I thanked Life every day for the hand he’d been dealt to win me. I knew how to survive. Hell, I knew how to live . A Stalker’s existence was short and brutal, and Dempsey’d been one of the best. He’d made me one of the best.
    His son humbled me. His laughter made me smile.
    “You came to tell me you’re… dying, old man?” I asked when he stopped to take a breath.
    “No, kid.” He stared me straight in the eye, sucking at his front teeth. “I came to ask you for money. You see, those damned doctors? They have a plan. But it’s an expensive one, and the way I figure it, you owe me.”

Three
     
     
    “WHAT THE hell do you mean you can’t take it?” I couldn’t believe my ears—my goddamned pointed ears—so I took a step forward in case I’d somehow missed what the squirrel-faced museum director squeaked out of his thin lips. Stabbing his chest with my finger, I pushed him back a step. “You’re taking the gods-be-damned egg.”
    It was early in the morning. Way too early for any nonsense from a scrawny human dressed in a rumpled suit. The exhibit director was slender, frail in a way reminiscent of praying mantis males when they danced in front of a hungry female, and his pale gray eyes slid around behind his oversized round glasses.
    Mostly, he squirmed and refused to look me in the face while he told me I’d risked life and limb to fulfill his damned contract and he no longer wanted the fricking egg.
    I really regretted leaving my shotgun outside in the truck. Hell, I regretted not leaving me in the truck. I had a Glock on me, strapped into a shoulder holster mostly so I felt comfortable, but they didn’t make as nice of a boom as a shotgun did when blowing someone’s head clean off their neck. And I badly wanted to blow this guy’s head so far off his body it would leave a smear on the museum’s shiny marble floors.
    I still stunk of egg, despite the many showers I’d given myself at home, and the whiff of sulfur followed me through the parking structure near the museum’s back entrance. The guard who’d let me into the building did jack to help me wrest the egg inside, even grumbling about sidhe bitches when I toddled by. Since the job came with a tight deadline, I wanted to slide in with the best damned egg I could get my hands on before some other asshole waltzed through the door first.
    Little did I know the asshole would turn out to be the guy who’d contracted the job to begin with.
    “Explain to me, dickhead. How do you cancel a contract you’ve registered with the Post? One I agreed to.” My finger made another stab, and he shuffled back a step. “You owe me. And big.”
    Morrìgan, I sounded just like the man who’d raised me.
    The asshole under my finger didn’t care that I’d nearly bought it in a dragon battle just a few hours ago or that