Roadkill Read Online Free Page B

threatened you with sexual details, you didn’t need a porn channel and you didn’t need Hustler ; when he claimed to have cowritten the Kama Sutra, you believed his bragging ass. And the last thing I needed was to have my boss see me looking at him and trying damn hard not to picture wings and legs and other things in positions you’d need Silly Putty for bones to achieve. That would make him lose his mellow real fast. Goodfellow would like nothing better than to see his adventures on IMAX, but Ishiah was probably more private.
    And my twitching at the mental picture wouldn’t liven up the bar any.
    I twitched anyway and turned my attention to wiping down the bar. It was clean, but it didn’t matter—anything to keep my thoughts from going down that road. I’d done the same twitching when Nik’s vampire girlfriend had once had some fun at my expense. There are some things about your family and friends you just don’t want to know.
    There are also things that you don’t want them to know. Different things maybe, not that it mattered. Niko found out anyway. I didn’t know why I tried. He always did. I discovered that this particular time twenty minutes later when my brother walked through the door . . . the only human who came and went at the Ninth Circle and lived not to tell the tale. I looked up the instant I smelled him . . . when I smelled the annoyance on him. More than annoyed, he was completely and totally pissed off. And it took some doing to get my brother pissed off. That didn’t mean he’d hesitate in a fight to take the head off a boggle with his sword, but he wouldn’t be angry when he did it. A job was a job. No need to bring emotion into that equation.
    There was plenty of emotion now.
    He walked to the bar, flipped open the phone in his hand, and put it down in front of me. The small screen was open to the GPS tracker connected to my cell. “I thought we had an agreement. You don’t gate and I don’t beat you within an inch of your life. Wasn’t that it?” He leaned closer. “The agreement ?”
    “Shit.” I looked down at the phone blinking accusingly.
    “I had a friend of mine at the university program it to alarm every time your signal disappears and reappears approximately four seconds or less later.” Which wouldn’t pick up on the dead zone of the subway. Traveling was a helluva lot quicker than the subway. My brother was smart, probably the smartest guy I’d ever known, but just once couldn’t he have taken a little more after me?
    “Well? I’m listening. Were you in dire circumstances? Was it make a gate or die? I’ve always assumed if you escaped near death, you would give me a call afterward. Common courtesy.” He leaned farther. My calm and cool-as-ice brother had a temper too. You had to dig for it, had to push him, but it was there and it could rival Ishiah’s. Ice to fire, but when it was your butt in a sling, whether it was frozen or singed didn’t much matter.
    “There were two Wolves and a revenant.” I reached over and snapped his phone shut, tired of the betraying beep. “They attacked me in the park. . . .”
    “And?”
    I wasn’t going to lie to my brother. Don’t get me wrong; if I could’ve skipped telling him some things I would’ve, both to save him the worry and to save me the ass kicking. But lie to his face? He was my brother. No way.
    “And I handled it, was late, and traveled to the bar,” I admitted.
    His eyes narrowed. “Because lateness was life threatening?”
    I could’ve half joked and said that with Ishiah it could be, but that would have been shitty of me. And while I had no problem being shitty with anyone else, I damn sure wasn’t going to be shitty with Nik. He was the sole reason I was alive, the sole reason I was sane.
    In the face of that, how could I be shitty? How could I lie? I couldn’t, not to him. “No, but, hell, Nik, I need to stay in practice. How can I do that if I don’t open a gate once in a while? How can I