The Red Heart of Jade Read Online Free PDF Page A

them could not possibly be good for Dean and Koni.
    The apartment building’s door was unlocked and they barreled through, racing up the stairs. Dean tried to catch that familiar thread, reaching out across the space between himself and the victim’s present: a remote view. He managed a glimpse, and saw their target was no longer in the apartment. Above them came a scuffing sound, large and loud.
    Dean grabbed Koni’s shoulder. Both men stopped, breathing hard, listening. The person above hesitated on the stairs. But instead of coming down, he began to go up. Fast.
    “Shit,” Dean hissed. His legs and chest hurt. Breathing was damn hard in this heat; running worse. Koni passed him and leaped up the narrow metal stairs four and five at a time, nimble, light-limbed. Gold threaded through his rippling tattoos, black feathers shimmering down his arms. Dean gritted his teeth and pushed harder. He did not know exactly what to do once he reached the roof, but those were the breaks. He would just play it by ear. Like always. Plans were for sissies.
    Koni reached the roof access door before Dean. He waited there, crouched before the heavy metal. Sweat rolled down his skin; he tore off his tank and discarded it. His drawstring pants hung low over his hips, loose and ready to strip off in case he needed to make a quick shift.
    “He knows we’re here, doesn’t he?” he whispered. His eyes glowed.
    “We’re not on fire yet,” Dean replied, though that was small comfort. The both of them were going to be dead fast or find themselves very surprised.
    Koni opened the door, crouching low while Dean swung past with both arms out, guns aimed high. A hot breeze clipped his face, carrying a scent: ash, bitter and metallic with blood—and there, directly in front of him, framed against fluttering laundry and a sky penned in by glittering skyscrapers and rusting clouds, was a large man, one of the largest Dean had ever seen. A white gelatin belly hung over tight shorts, propped up on legs thick with muscle, and higher, broad shoulders brushed silver hair, heaving into a rolling face wide and flat and hard with fat. A mean face, a meaner body, and for a moment Dean was once again a little kid facing up to one of the glue-sniffing, crack-smoking, steel mill bullies who used to hang out on his street back in Philly. His sight shifted; the man rippled into a thread. Quivering fast, almost double, like there were two of him at extremes, wrapped up tight, coiled, with one side dark, thicker than the other. Quantum vines tangled, maybe fighting. No harmony. Just a big damn mess of hard times.
    But he had no trail. His energy was completely self-contained.
    And he carried a blood-spattered plastic sack in one hand.
    Dean opened his mouth, ready to make the obligatory statement of “Surrender, you asshole,” but Koni made a strange choking sound that kicked his gut into high alarm. His finger tightened on the trigger. Forget words. The white flag of peace could go to hell.
    “No,” Koni gasped, standing and stepping in front of him. Dean tried to move, to see around his taller body, but Koni pressed his chest against the gun and said, “No, you can’t.”
    “Fuck you doing?” Dean said in a low voice.
    “Look at him,” Koni said, all cool grace and calm gone from his face. He sounded like he was begging, which was unnatural, bizarre, because Koni was a man who asked for nothing. “Look at his eyes, Dean.”
    Dean looked. For a moment, it did not register—it was too strange, too unexpected. But then, the glow. Two pinpricks of light in shadow. Golden. Hot.
    “Oh, shit,” Dean said. The man in front of them was a shape-shifter. A fire-starting, got-a-bag-of-bloody-bones, shape-shifter. Dean wanted to pull out his hair. These were the guys the agency was supposed to find and protect—like Koni, like Hari back home. But if a shape-shifter turned murderer?
    Nothing has changed. He kills, he pays. He tries to hurt you, hurt back. Those