Roadkill Read Online Free Page A

late? Honestly? If it could bring out the worst in me and it wasn’t to escape imminent, messy, ugly death, then why did I do it?
    Good question.
    And no good answer. No answer at all, only the excuse that it hadn’t brought out the worst in me lately . . . not like before. So why not use it? I had control now, so it wasn’t that big of a chance. Not anymore, although getting anyone else to believe it, especially Nik, wasn’t something I looked forward to. But my brother wasn’t the problem at the moment; it was my boss.
    “Can I get up and sling some beer or are you going to cut my head off?” I asked Ish. “Either way, I really need to take a piss. It’s been a long day.”
    He thought about it, then grunted and lifted the axe. “I’m docking you two hours.”
    It was better than having my head docked. I got to my feet and peeled off my jacket. It was summer in New York, which made it too hot for the leather jacket, but when you wore two guns in shoulder holsters, a cheerful smile wasn’t quite camouflage enough—if I could even pull off cheerful, which was doubtful. I didn’t need camouflage in the bar. Humans tended to avoid it like the plague—some instinct passed down from caveman ancestors who knew there were monsters in the world and a woolly mammoth wasn’t the only thing that could squash you flat. The few random humans who did walk through the front doors were predators themselves—arrogant ones who ignored their instinct because they thought they were the shit and no one was more of a badass than them. Those humans usually didn’t leave the bar . . . except in pieces. The bar didn’t serve food, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be found there once in a while.
    I made my way to the bathroom, then out to the bar to toss the jacket under it and grab an apron. “Good crowd tonight,” Sammy commented. Samyel was another peri, dark to Ishiah’s light blond, with wings barred with gray. “Quiet.”
    Quiet was good. We didn’t get it that often. I leaned on the bar and took in the small crowd. Vampires, lamias (kind of a combo between a vampire and a leech), three incubi, two vyodanoi (predatory, rubbery, man-shaped water creatures), but no Wolves. Not a one. While quiet was good, that was not . . . especially on top of what had happened in the park. There were always wolves in the bar.
    I fished my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and called Delilah. Modern-day werewolves had modern-day accessories. I got her voice mail. I usually did. She had a busy life, between being a bouncer at a strip club and her Kin work, which could be anything from stealing to fighting rival Kin packs to things I might not want to know about. I had asked if she killed humans. She’d said no—she preferred real prey, real challenge, not bleating sheep. I thought she was telling the truth; she was all about the challenge. But I’d asked her that before I’d killed a few humans myself, so I wasn’t sure I was in the position to judge. Mine had been bad men, but wasn’t “bad” a matter of who was holding the gun and who was getting shot by it?
    I left her a message that someone who smelled an awful lot like her had tried to kill me in the park and I hoped he wasn’t a regular hookup, because he had nothing left to hook up with now. I also asked what was up with all the missing Wolves.
    Ishiah, wings now gone, came out of the back room with a beer keg and scowled at my making personal calls on my first five minutes of company time. “Two and a half hours,” he said.
    Normally he would’ve made it three. I wasn’t the only one getting sex. A fire axe to the neck and docking my pay were actually mellow for him. That was the good part. The bad part was he was getting it from a friend, the only one I trusted besides my brother, and this friend and frequent fellow monster killer liked nothing better than to threaten me with the details . . . and that was worse than any axe.
    When Robin Goodfellow, a puck,