Free Blade Song by J.C. Daniels Page B

condos.
    Now it was a hell-hole for some of the wolves and cats and witches who didn’t want to fall in line with the local packs, and who wouldn’t pay the tithe to join the witch houses. The witch houses weren’t a bad thing, per se. They offered protection and the strength of numbers, but you had to live by their rules. Some of us didn’t do rules very well.
    Those people often ended up in places like this.
    I wouldn’t call it the slums , exactly, because plenty of people here had money.
    They just usually came about it in less than ideal ways.
    The little sign that used to read Winter Haven now read Wolf Haven , thanks to some ingenious soul and his clever hand with a can of spray paint. It looked like they’d tried to cover it over with Cat and witch several times. But the wolves were the first ones who had come here, more than fifty years ago when the human world had first found out about us.
    This place had been called Wolf Haven for a very long time.
    It wasn’t going to get changed to Cat Haven just because somebody tried to spray it on a sign.
    I parked the car but didn’t climb out. This was the very last place I wanted to be. I had good memories of this place…and bad. I’d still been broken when I finally stopped running. This was where I’d stopped. Sometimes, I wished I’d never left.
    I could understand why some people thought Doyle might have come to Wolf Haven. A place where almost anybody could lose themselves. Lose themselves…hide. I’d hidden here for a few years myself.
    Had hidden here very well, but I’d done it by being inconspicuous, something I couldn’t do with the demonic Damon next to me. Tapping my nails on the steering wheel, I stared at the square, squalid building in front of me. TJ still worked there. I liked TJ. She was…well, TJ was TJ. And if anybody had seen Doyle in the area, TJ would know.
    It might cost me some money, but that was fine.
    “I don’t suppose I can convince you to let me go inside there by myself, can I?” I asked.
    He shot me a disbelieving look.
    “I didn’t think so.”
    I reached over the back seat and closed my hand around my blade. She warmed under my palm. In the back of my head, I could feel her pleasure and it made me smile. “I’m taking my sword. I don’t care how many damned shifters we run into, I don’t care how many problems you think it will solve for me to be unarmed. I’m not walking through Wolf Haven unarmed.”
    He stared at me.
    I stared back at him.
    Minutes ticked away until I finally broke visual contact and climbed out of the car.
    Since he wasn’t snarling at me or demanding to pat me down for weapons, I had to assume he saw the sense in letting me keep the sword.
    He was really going to be happy with me in a minute.
    TJ didn’t let anybody in her place with a weapon.
    I locked the car and hoped it would be in the same condition when I got back. I wasn’t terribly attached to the damn thing, but it was the only car I had and I didn’t have the money to get it fixed if they did a lot of damage. My insurance also wouldn’t pay for anything that was done to it if I was in Wolf Haven—I hadn’t picked up the vandalism rider for it because I just didn’t have the damn money.
    As we crossed the street, somebody ducked out from TJ’s and a grin split my face.
    Hey, maybe luck was smiling on me.
    “I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch.”
    “You always were,” I said cheerfully to the mountain standing there.
    His name was Goliath, and like his namesake, he was big. I’m talking big-as-a-mountain big. He had hands the size of dinner plates, a massive, deep chest and when he spoke, his voice rumbled out of him like it was coming from deep within the earth. When he shifted to the half-beast some of them used, he was so damned big, the ground shuddered under his feet when he walked.
    Goliath had come to Wolf Haven after the alpha of his pack had tried to kill him. He’d failed—Goliath had beaten the shit out of him. With