Chapter Five

She could hear someone making his way down the alleyway.  Well, the hell with it.  She might as well confront whatever or whoever was after her, rather than cringing in the shadows.

She stomped out from behind the dumpster, trying to look intimidating - which was ridiculous given that she lived in a city where vampires stalked in the daytime and men turned into meat-eating animals.

And then she grimaced in disgust.  The man who’d been following her was Jordan.

He served as the neighborhood liaison for the Blood Oath Pack – since none of the pack members would condescend to live in a downscale neighborhood like this.  Jordan made a very nice living working for them.  He dressed his short, rotund form in silvery shark skin suit that were so shiny they looked like tinfoil, and liked to flash his Rolex.

For some reason that made Zoey think of Dominic.  Like the other high-ranking members of the pack, he always wore a suit.  His suits were exquisitely tailored to his muscular body, but they didn’t shout for attention the way that Jordan’s did.  They didn’t need to.  Dominic commanded attention just by strolling into a room, with his animal grace and his piercing blue eyes.

Now, why was she even thinking of him? He’d changed his mind and she didn’t have to worry about him any more – right?

“Zoey!” Jordan leered, sliding in front of her.  “Trying to avoid me?”

“Why would I ever?” she said drily.  She quickly sidestepped him so he was no longer between her and the end of the alley.

“You haven’t paid your share this week.” That’s what they called the extortion money.  Her ‘share’.

She dug into her purse and reluctantly handed over almost all the tips she’d earned the night before.  She’d left forty dollars tucked in her sock; he needed to see her empty her wallet before he’d be satisfied, the greedy bastard.  He seemed to get a sick thrill out of separating people from the last of their money.

“Seriously,” Zoey said irritably, gesturing at the trash, “What are we paying for? We can’t go on like this.”

“You got a problem with the way I run things?  Maybe you’d like to move to another neighborhood,” he snapped.  She glowered at him.  He knew she wouldn’t.  She’d taken on responsibilities here, and she prided herself on being someone who followed through with her promises.

“Thought so,” he gloated.  “Now show me your tits, and I’ll knock a hundred off next week’s share.” He flashed his big chiclet teeth in a loathsome smile.

Zoey instinctively recoiled.  She could actually feel her lady-bits shriveling up and trying to hide. “Say that again, I’ll knock your veneers down your throat.”

His face scrunched up like an angry baby’s.  “Just for that, a hundred dollar fine for the noise complaint.”

“Noise complaint?” Like anybody could hear anything from her apartment with the nightclub pounding away downstairs.  “From who?”

“Me.  From the noise you make when you flap your gums.”  His mouth twisted in an ugly snarl.

“Worth it,” she taunted him, “And I have 30 days to appeal the complaint,” and then she walked away as quickly as she could with her butt-cheek still aching.  She could feel Jordan’s gaze burning into her backside, and it made her want to take another shower.

As she made her way down the sidewalk, her spell phone rang, with the ring tone indicating it was her mother.  She sighed.  She’d need to stop at the spellectricity store to recharge soon.

She sent a text in reply, saying that she was at work and she’d call her mother back later and no, she had not been crisped by a dragon or eaten by a troll.

She was still kind of worried about the Blood Oath pack problem, and she wasn’t great at lying to her mother over the phone.  Her mother would definitely have heard the stress in her voice.  Her parents were already completely freaked that their oldest daughter now lived in a portal city.  

Of course, they could have moved to Encantado with her.  About sixty percent of portal city residents were human anyway. 

Zoey wouldn’t do that to them, though.  She had four brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom was twelve.  Life in a portal city was too volatile, with magic changing things day by day, and nobody knowing what the portal was going to burp out next.  A horde of flesh-eating ghouls? That was the most common threat.  They seemed to proliferate in the chaos realm.  Or trolls, or dragons. Or on rarer occasions, something cute like stone gargoyles.

Aside from the danger, Zoey’s brother and sisters were in middle and high school, they had friends, they were on sports teams, and her parents had excellent jobs and lived in a good neighborhood.  Her father was an accountant and her mother was a real estate lawyer. They might not even have been able to find jobs in Encantado, and realistically, if they did, they’d almost certainly have to work for one of the larger criminal organizations that ran the city these days.   The Blood Oath pack, the Bianchi pack, the Nightwalkers vampire clan…every section of the city was ruled by someone.

Not only that, but living in a city near a portal, where magic energy from the chaos realm leaked through, tended to change humans over time.  A short visit didn’t affect people, so tourists could visit safely, but if they lived here, the odds were that their children would be born magical. Which meant they’d be stuck living in one of the dozen portal cities that were scattered across the country.

So her parents worried from a distance, while Zoey tried to play up the positive aspects of being in Encantado.

She sent them cell phone pictures of fairies flittering in gardens, and phoenixes flying overhead, trailing fire, and made it sound as if she lived in a magical fairyland, which was sort of true.  When they visited, she only took them to the tourist area.  That was the one in the south, where the family tourists went. In the southern district there were magic shows with real magic, and centaurs pulling carriage through fairy-tale style villages, and the humans bought harmless magically charged souvenirs which faded after a few weeks once they were removed from the magic zone.

Immediately to the north of the family area, there was the neighborhood where the kinky pervy tourists went.  That area drew the people who wanted to bang shapeshifters or wrestle them in fake matches, or be bitten by vampires and half-drained.  Or they went to watch cage wrestling matches where shifters would fight until they were nearly dead and then med-mages would bring them back, to do it all over again.

As she walked, her cell phone rang again.  Her mother wouldn’t give up, so she answered it with a bright, fake “Hi! So, yeah, I’m about to deliver a package and – ouch!”

She’d gotten too close to the apartment building on the corner, and the gargoyle guardian had spat a pebble at her. The building owners fed him a regular diet of sand, and in return he discouraged intruders.

“What’s that?” her mother said suspiciously.

“It’s noth – ouch, ouch, ouch!” she cried out, dodging the furious little imp.  She made the mistake of picking up a pebble and throwing it back at him – yeah, like that would hurt a stone guardian – and he responded with a machine gun barrage of tiny pea gravel sprayed right at her head.

She ran off shrieking, dodging around a corner – and then realized her mother was still on the phone.

“Fine! I’m fine! Everything is fine!” she

“What is happening?” her mother cried out. “Oh, lord, are you being eaten by one of those phoenix things?”

“What? Phoenixes are vegetarians!” she said, hurrying towards her apartment building. “I’m fine, I just sprained my ankle! Really, mom, I have to concentrate when I’m biking! I’ll call you back tomorrow, loveyabye!” And she hung up quickly.

“Move to an enchanted city, they said,” she muttered under her breath as she stomped up the stairs.  “It’ll be magical, they said.”

She grabbed a bicycle and headed back downstairs. Twenty minutes later, she rolled to a stop in front of an old warehouse building.  It was currently the residence of half a dozen homeless teenagers.  Most of them, like her, were magical anomalies who’d been forced to relocate to a portal city.  Outside of magic zones, it seemed to happen on average about one every few million births. 

These were kids who’d been sent here when they were underage, and either ran away from their foster homes, or aged out.

The warehouse was old, and its busted windows stared out at the street like rows of dark, angry eyes.  Weeds choked the parking lot in front, where Lorenzo was hanging out with the other teens, who were spray-painting body-parts onto the warehouse wall.  Lorenzo was smoking a cigarette; she wheeled her bicycle right up next to him and gave him a look, and he quickly dropped it and squashed it under the heel of his sneaker.

“Don’t tell my mom,” he said.

“His mom,” Cin, the girl he had a crush on, scoffed.  Cin was a skinny little thing with spiky dyed blue hair.  She had some kind of magic ability, but she wouldn’t say what it was.  Also she shoplifted a lot.

“Great.” Lorenzo scowled at the ground, embarrassed.  He was still basically a good kid; Zoey was afraid that he wouldn’t be for much longer.  He’d dropped out of computer engineering tech school, even though he was really good at it, and now he spent his free time hanging out with this group of low-level criminals, and sooner or later he’d find himself in real trouble. And that would break Andrea’s heart.

“Hey, it’s a beautiful day to go dumpster diving!” she said loudly, and the kids dropped their spray paint cans and hurried over to her.  This was Zoey’s way of keeping the kids from burglarizing and vandalizing the neighborhood.  If they had food, and she kept them busy, they wouldn’t be starving and they had less time to make mischief.  And due to her map magic, she could guide them to the dumpsters behind the high end grocery stores in the better neighborhoods, and avoid security guards, random guard gargoyles, and other nuisances.

They followed behind her on their battered bicycles, zipping around all obstacles. She felt badly about letting Lorenzo come, because he was supposed to be home, but at least if he was with her she knew he wasn’t out spray-painting a building or boosting cigarettes somewhere in an effort to impress Cin.

The dumpster behind Le Gourmand yielded some major finds – bags of apples, bags of oranges, day old French bread, bags of donuts.  The owners of Le Gourmand were pretty considerate, and when they threw away expired food, they tried to make sure it was in good enough shape that it could be used by those who needed it.

“This is great!” Cin crowed, hugging a bag of food to her chest.  Then she glanced at Lorenzo, and said in a low voice “I’m sorry I made fun of you earlier.  It must be nice to still have a mom.”  She always felt like she had to put on the tough badass act for the other kids, but some sweetness seeped through sometimes.

“No big.” Lorenzo shrugged, trying to look casual, but he couldn’t hide the smile tugging at his lips.

Zoey closed her eyes pictured the route home, and suddenly sensed obstacles.  Several of them.  Too bad her map magic wouldn’t tell her what they were.  Every route home that she considered, something popped up to block her.

She couldn’t tell, but she had the odd feeling that the obstacles were specific to her. 

“Guys,” she said.  “We need to split up.  There’s something in between us, and our neighborhood.  Can you hang out here for a little while? I’m going to try to find a way back there, and I’ll call you with the all clear.”

She chose a route that added half an hour to her ride home.  It was night time when she glided to a stop in front of her building.  A delivery van was idling there, and a man stood by her door with a huge crystal vase full of peonies. 

Dominic.  It could only have been Dominic. But how did he know they were her favorite?

“Zoey Monroe?”  The man said, as she eyed him warily.

“She skipped out on her rent and left town.  You’re lucky you missed her, she was a major twatmuffin.” She quickly sidestepped him, wheeling her bike.

He moved in between her and her front door.  “He said you’d say that.”

“He said that I’d say Zoey skipped out on her rent and she was a twatmuffin?” she said skeptically. “That’s awfully specific.”

 “He said you’d give me some smartass answer and say you weren’t her. You look like the picture he showed me.”

Dominic had a picture of her?  Yikes.

The delivery man shoved the vase of flowers into her arms and stood back, waiting.

“What else?” Zoey said impatiently.

“You got a tip for me?”

“Yeah, avoid Main Street, the traffic is murder right now.”  

He gave her a look that most people reserve for times when they’ve stepped in something smelly.  She ignored him and maneuvered her way awkwardly to her front door, wheeling her bike with the vase tucked under her arm.

The protection wards over the doorway recognized her, and the front door lock clicked open.  Reluctantly, she set the vase down in the lobby.  They were beautiful, but she wasn’t taking a gift from the Blood Oath pack.

She carried her bike upstairs to her apartment, and called Lorenzo on his cell phone to tell him that it was safe to go home, and also he damned well better apologize to his mother for going out without telling her.

Then she plopped down on the couch to try to figure out what to do next.  OK, so Dominic was sending her flowers.  At her apartment.  And he had a picture of her. 

All those times she’d yearned for a man who actually made her feel desirable and sexy and worth pursuing? She hadn’t imagined a scenario like this.  She didn’t even know what was going on right now.  She didn’t know where Dominic lived, what he specifically did for a living, what he was like as a person.  What would it mean to be the mate of a Blood Oath Capo? Most of the parties that she’d catered had been attended by single men – she knew because married pack members wore a chunky gold wedding ring with two wolves side by side.  The wolves had little ruby eyes. 

She had catered one family event for them, in the tourist area.  Strictly PG.  It had been a birthday party for the six year old twin cubs of a high ranking pack member.  The wives were beautiful, perfectly made up, exquisitely dressed. 

The women all had seemed to be happy, as far as she could tell.  Were they putting on a show? Did the women feel like they’d sold their souls, marrying into a crime family like that? If so, they didn’t make it obvious – but then, of course they wouldn’t.

She’d been surprised at how tender the big, fierce daddy wolves had been with their children.  She felt a sudden stab of longing as she remembered a big, scarred wolf picking his little boy up after he’d scraped his knees.  I want that. I want that for my children, a man who will adore them and protect them and comfort them. I want that for me.

And she’d dated so many duds, so many losers who made her feel like she should be grateful for any scrap of attention, that on some very deep level, she’d started to doubt it could ever happen for her.

But did she want it with Dominic? 

Or, more importantly, did she want it with a Blood Oath pack wolf? Because it was a package deal.  She couldn’t have one without the other.

And she couldn’t make such an enormous life changing decision based on the fact that Dominic’s wolf apparently thought she had a tasty butt.

She needed to go hide out for a bit while she figured out what to do next, or she might wake up in the back of a Blood Oath pack van being carted off to God knows where.  She had no idea why Dominic hadn’t just grabbed her and kidnapped her yet, since he seemed to think he owned her, but she wasn’t sticking around to find out.

She quickly packed up some clothes and climbed back on her bike.  Her legs were starting to ache, and it was late evening now, but she headed downtown, to the business district. The owner of the bike messenger service had a few tiny studio apartments in the building next to the dispatch center, where the employees could crash if they wanted to pick up some early jobs the next day.