Mad Lizard Mambo Read Online Free

There was no escaping my race… my species, really. As much as I tried to, I couldn’t outrun my elfin features or the aging of the people around me while I remained firmly in what will be centuries of youth. Dempsey, the man who’d taught me to be a Stalker, was getting old, wearing out in front of my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
    “Things change, you cat-bastard,” he often growled at me. “I’m going to die before you ever get a damned hair on that pointed chin of yours. Best get used to it.”
    I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d never get hair on my chin. For all the humans liked to equate elfin with cats, we just didn’t get facial hair. Although from how Dempsey told it, I bit like a wild cat he’d found under his engine for the first few months of my freedom.
    I still bite. Sometimes that’s the best way to win a fight. I wasn’t ashamed of that either. You get into a fight to win, not earn courtesy points in an etiquette book.
    After years of roaming about, I called San Diego home, and I was thankful to get back to its multileveled mess. It was a complicated life at times, one made more difficult because I was elfin living among humans who had no reason to love anyone with pointed ears. After the Merge, the Wars came when the two species fought to establish dominance. Humans with their tech were no match for the elfin with magic and an uncanny knack for strategy. In the end, no one won, and now we were all living cheek-to-ass with one another, pretending the guy at the other side of the dinner table wasn’t someone we’d tried to kill a few years ago.
    I just ignored the elfin. Pretended they didn’t exist. Pretended I wasn’t one of them. Acted like I hadn’t been cooked up in a crucible by an evil Wild Hunt Master with a fondness for pain and blood. I’d been doing fine with it all until Ryder decided he wanted to establish a damned Dawn Court smack dab in the middle of the city I called home.
    “Damned sidhe lord.” The coffee brewed strong, and I’d added enough sugar to it to cut its bitter edge. It was late enough for the sky to have grabbed at the blues in its palette, smearing its face with a rich robins-egg blue. Lacy clouds played at the city’s back, draped over the soft rise of mountains in the east. “Thinks he owns me, he does.”
    I didn’t want to think about Ryder. I hadn’t talked to the self-proclaimed San Diego sidhe lord about shit in a hell of a long time, and I hadn’t planned on starting, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he reared his golden head up. The leash he’d put on me was a long one, but SoCalGov made sure it was tied on tight. Give the Dawn Court what he asked for and I’d get to keep my Stalker license. If that didn’t make me a whore, I didn’t know what did.
    “Less I see of His Lordship, the better.” I toasted the rising sun. I didn’t sound convincing. Even to myself.
    We’d parted on sticky terms. There were complications between us, dips in the road we couldn’t seem to navigate. I thought he felt betrayed because I hadn’t confessed to being an abomination, even if he said he wasn’t, and I was still more than a little pissed off that he’d finagled me onto the end of a tightly held rope. Getting me permanently assigned to his court by SoCalGov’s administration was a shitty thing to do, even if it was only a way for him to keep tabs on me.
    We’d survived a Pendle run and the birth of our nieces—an odd, complicated tangle neither one of us planned for. I’d made friends with his cousin, Alexa, who’d become Cari’s apprentice. She’d have been on the job with us the night before, if not for the fact a sidhe warrior was not exactly the person to be on a run to steal a dragon egg from its nest. The sidhe were particular about dragons, believing the damned things were sacred. Ryder was never going to forgive me for killing one during a Pendle run, but it was either us or the dragon. Ryder,