Roadkill Read Online Free

second—the entire country in the same—to another dimension that was the next best thing to Hell if you wanted.
    Actually, radioactive Hell now, thanks to Niko, me, and a de rigueur secret society that had access to suitcase nukes instead of secret handshakes. And the Masons thought they were hot shit.
    The gray light rippled before me in the night—gray, dirty, and wrong, but a tool, and a tool I could control and use. The sight of it even quieted the howling Wolf. “Hearing great things about prosthetics. Check it out,” I told him, then stepped through.
    Right behind my boss, Ishiah, in the bar’s storage room. I don’t know if he heard me, saw the light from the corner of his eye, or just sensed it. But his wings sprang out of invisibility into a banner of gold-barred white feathers as he turned and was already swinging a fire axe. We had one mounted in every room—less for fire; more for beheading.
    “Whoa, boss. I’m not that late,” I said with a grunt as I hit the floor hard to avoid a haircut that would’ve started about chest level.
    “Do not do that in this establishment,” he snarled. “Do you understand me?”
    Ishiah was my boss and he was a good boss, which meant he paid me and hadn’t killed me. But he had a temper like Moses seeing the Golden Calf and breaking the Ten Commandments. No, that was more like a temper tantrum. Okay, Ishiah had a temper like God taking out Sodom and Gomorrah for being the Vegas of biblical times and turning Lot’s wife into a saltshaker just for wanting a look. Biblical references . . . Niko homeschooled me, and I knew a lot of obscure information when I bothered, which, according to everyone I knew, was rarely. But in this case it wasn’t applicable. Ishiah wasn’t an angel. There were no angels or demons, no Heaven or Hell. Fairy tales built on myths built on more myths, all built on the first caveman who refused to believe his kid, his brother, his mother, were gone for good. Who knew what the truth really was? Who wanted to know? Not me.
    But here’s what it wasn’t. No angels. Ishiah was a peri, probably where the angel myth began . . . there and with all the Greek gods with wings. After all, the Auphe were where the elf myth had started and if you took away the hundreds of needle-fine metal teeth, the scarlet eyes, the black talons, shredding jaws, nearly transparent skin, and a raging desire to destroy humanity, then I guess you were close enough. The pointed ears were the same, right?
    Thank God I hadn’t gotten the pointed ears. Who wants to pass as a Star Trek or Lord of the Rings fan boy for the rest of their natural-born lives?
    A slight increase in the weight of the axe on the back of my neck redirected my attention to where it belonged. Peris, per the mythology book that Niko had swatted my head with on regular occasion, were supposedly half angels /half demons or something midway between the two. In other words, I had no idea what Ishiah was. It didn’t matter. Mythology was always wrong . . . like the whisper game. You started with one thing and by the time it was passed around the circle, it was something completely different. If you had even a seed of truth in mythology, you were doing damn good. Werewolves and vampires were born, not made, and were not all uncontrollable sex addicts, no matter what the local bookstore’s fantasy section might tell you. Puck, Pan, Robin Goodfellow were all one trickster race; all looked exactly alike; were all male; and they were all uncontrollable sex addicts. Revenants and ghouls had never been human. I could’ve gone on, ticking them off in my mind, but the axe blade was getting uncomfortable.
    “Got it. No traveling in the bar. I’ll make a note.” I didn’t think he’d really chop my head off, but with Ishiah, you could never be sure. Can’t say I blamed him, because you couldn’t always be sure about me either . . . especially when I opened gates.
    Why did I travel at all then? To avoid being