It hit me halfway down Shakespeare, not like some grand revelation from on high, but like one of those ugly truths that had been walking beside me for blocks and finally decided to elbow me in the ribs.
They hadn’t gone after Tony’s family only to hurt them. Or me. That was part of it, sure. There was always some asshole calculus behind these things, and pain was cheap and distracting. But that wasn’t the whole of it. They had wanted me to react. To move and become visible. They wanted me to leave whatever hole I had squeezed myself into and come running hard enough that they could pick up the trail and hunt me down.
I slowed just enough to look normal and kept going.
The block was half residential, half forgotten commercial. Brick three-flats leaned shoulder to shoulder with boarded store fronts, and the wet shine on the sidewalk made the whole street look like it had been varnished in old lamp light. Somewhere behind me a bus groaned at a stop and I could hear a train horn roll over the roof somewhere ahead, long and flat and lonely. The cold wind had teeth in it and the moisture in the air made it colder. It came skimming down the street, carrying the smell of thawing garbage, cold brick, diesel, and the metallic tang that always seemed to hang over the city after dark.
Whoever was following me would be in for a nasty surprise. I was still armed with my gun and my knives. The short white-gold blades I had no business liking as much as I did. A length of weighted chain looped under my coat. My shoulder still ached from the last round, and I could feel the tug of healing in the flesh from my shoulder and side every time I rolled it wrong. I was tired, angry, and running on the kind of focus that comes right before people do something stupid.
That last part worried me.
I let my senses drift, not pushing too hard. Pushing too hard only made everything run together these days. The city was full of signals that I hadn’t known before. Human fear leaking from a man arguing into his phone just down the block, dead rats in the next alley, a couple making up in the doorway of a taquería, rat musk from another alley. There were also scents from your normal dogs, oil spill from cars, and rainwater in cracked concrete. Threaded through all of it, too faint for a human nose and too ugly to mistake for anything else once you knew it, there was the smell of several of the Cursed.
Not one.
Several.
I kept walking.
My first instinct was to backtrack, double around, see if I could pick one out and break the tail. That was what I would have done before all this mess, before the new parts of me started changing the rules in every goddamnded way. But I didn’t want a neat little knife fight in a darkened gangway with one scout while the rest formed a ring around me. No. If they had flushed me into the open to track me, then the smart play was to give them terrain that complicated their numbers.
Industrial plots or a train yard. Somewhere with noise, steel, blind corners, hard shadows, and room to vanish.
There were enough of those west and south that Chicago might as well have been designed by paranoid people with something to hide.
I kept moving away from the denser blocks and cut west, then south, choosing streets that would take me toward the nearest strip of warehouses and the spaghetti mess of service roads and tracks that fed the yards. I didn’t run. Running tells people something. Running tells them you know.
My reflection flickered in the dark windows I passed. The damn coat I had to wear, hanging open enough for movement. Hair pulled back and already coming loose around my face. I looked like trouble. Which, come to think of it, was more or less accurate.
The first real sign of pursuit came near a shuttered auto shop. I crossed under a security light that buzzed and flickered like a dying insect, and in a side mirror on a van I passed, I saw the reflection of someone not far enough behind me to be accidental. Broad shoulders. Head down. Deliberate pace.
A werewolf, if I had to bet. It fit the movement pattern of those other wolves I had fought.
I turned at the next corner without changing speed. Thirty yards later I crossed the street as if I had remembered something. Then I used the mirrored glass of a laundromat window to look behind me without looking behind me.
There were more of them now.
Three I could guess what they were by the way they moved and by what my spidey senses were telling me. Wolves were easy. Even trying to be subtle, they moved like force applied to the world. Too much weight in the shoulders. Too much readiness in the hips. There were also jaguars. I was pretty sure they were jaguars anyway. The jaguars I could read differently. They slipped through openings instead of taking them. They watched. They let the world come to them and then decided whether to touch it. Cats always thought they were the smartest thing in the room, which was often true and always annoying.
The third kind I could not place. There was a flicker to them. A lightness. A trick of attention. I would look one way and my mind wanted to slide off and look somewhere else. Whatever they were, they were good at making a person notice the wrong thing.
That pissed me off on principle.
I crossed under the dark bulk of the elevated line and the city changed around me. Less foot traffic. Fewer lit windows. More chain-link, corrugated metal, truck bays, locked gates. The sidewalks grew patchy and buckled. Weeds pushed up through cracks and through old concrete seams. A forklift sat abandoned beside a loading dock, yellow paint gone chalky with weather. There were other sounds here. Somewhere nearby a generator or industrial fan thrummed with a low continuous vibration that I felt in my sternum more than I heard. An unlocked door were rhythmically slamming in the wind with dull thuds.
I changed course to get the wind behind my followers a bit better. I tried to count the scents on the wind and came up with too many. Close to twenty, give or take. Maybe a little under. Maybe a little over. Enough that whoever set this up had not been joking.
“Jesus,” I muttered to myself. “What did Dominic do, send out coupons?”
The thought of him made my teeth itch. Dominic of the Outsiders, Dominic with his aggressive personality, his annoying stare, and his very special talent for making every room worse the moment he entered it. A weretiger from the Outsiders with the kind of influence that came from someone who would do anything to get what he wanted. He wouldn’t rallied the packs unless he needed to. He’d pressure, threaten, and blackmail to get what he wanted. He’d lean on every weak point in a pack until someone gave way.
The Breeds were after me because Dominic had egged them on, fanned the flames of their fear and hatred. I knew why, but he was still a fucking bigot. Trauma and pain can make you do horrible things.
Didn’t mean I had to be charitable about it.
I cut through a breach in a chain-link fence and into a lot full of stacked pallets and rusting metal drums. Rainwater had collected black and slick in ruts left by truck tires. Every step sent up the smell of mud, old oil, and rotting wood. I moved faster now, but not flat out. I wanted them stretched. I wanted the eager ones ahead of the careful ones, the wolves crowding the jaguars, everyone just a little too sure of the kill to realize it would be too late.
At the far end of the lot a retaining wall dropped to a service road and beyond that, through another fence, I could see tracks glinting dull silver under yard lamps.
Good.
I vaulted the wall, hit the service road in a crouch, and sprinted.
The cold air tore at my throat as I ran. The world narrowed to distances, angles, footing. Broken glass glittered by the curb. Pothole. Storm drain. Slab of ice in shadow. My boots hammered concrete and gravel as I cleared the last fence and entered the rail yard proper.
It was one of those in-between places that only made sense if you worked there. Parallel lines of track splitting and rejoining in the yellow haze of sodium lamps. Freight cars standing in long dark ranks. Sheds, signal posts, electrical boxes, stacked ties, mounds of gravel, puddles reflecting the lights. The whole place smelled of creosote, wet iron, diesel soot, and cold concrete.
I ran between two strings of freight cars and cut hard left. My breathing had settled into a controlled rhythm by then, and I could feel the changes in me wanting to come up and take over the mechanics of motion completely.
This part I loved about the change. The speed. The precision. The edge between hunt and escape. But I couldn’t give my instincts and powers free range, that would make too easy to find. I shoved them down as best I could. If I let too much of it out, then scent suppression became harder, and I needed that more than I needed another twenty percent on my sprint.
Behind me the yard woke up with pursuit. They became bolder now as I became more isolated. They thought they were the only ones with the advantage here.
Metal clanged. Gravel scattered under heavy feet. Somebody vaulted something and landed wrong in a stack of barrels. There was a hissed curse after the noise of the falling barrels quieted down. A moment later came the softer sound of something that had not landed wrong at all.
I ran up the ladder of a boxcar, crossed the roof in three quick strides, dropped to the next one, then the next. The steel was slick with condensed mist and old grime, but my balance held. At the end of the row I jumped to a maintenance platform bolted to a signal support and slid down the far side into darkness between stacked rail ties.
The first wolf overshot me by ten feet.
He was already in half-form, shoulders too broad for his jacket, muzzle halfway there, hands ending in claws that clicked on ballast stone as he turned. He had expected me to keep going straight and his surprise lasted just long enough.
I stepped in and drove the weighted chain into the side of his knee.
Bone doesn’t sound the way movies think it sounds. It’s not always a crack. Sometimes it’s a thick, sickening knock, like somebody smashing green wood. He went down snarling, twisting to grab at me, and I hit him again across the temple before he could rise. The blow staggered him, but I could feel in the recoil how hard the bastard’s skull was.
“Stay down,” I told him, which was generous of me considering the circumstances.
He did not stay down.
Of course he didn’t.
He lunged low. I stepped aside, let him slide past on the wet gravel, and brought the white-gold knife down into the meat of his upper shoulder. Not deep. Not killing depth. Just enough to turn his snarl into a bark of pain and make his arm fail for a second. I ripped the blade free and backed off.
More were coming.
A jaguar dropped from the side ladder of a tanker car and landed so lightly that for a ridiculous instant I thought of ballet. Then it came for me and all the elegance turned practical.
Cats don’t fight like wolves. Wolves commit. Cats test. The jaguar feinted high, cut low, then changed line halfway through the motion because my hips had already answered the first lie. She wasn’t trying to bowl me over. She was trying to make me make a mistake.
“Yeah, no,” I muttered, ducking a slash that would have opened my cheek to the bone.
I gave ground through the ties and support beams, turning the space mean and awkward. That helped against the wolves and hindered the cat, which felt fair. Another wolf came around the coupler at the same time and I used the jaguar’s attack to put him in her way. He crashed into her with a curse and a snarl, and the both of them nearly went down in the ballast.
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Then something bigger and stronger arrived.
I didn’t see him first. I felt him.
A hot and cold pressure in the air. An ugly mix of arrogance, fear, and determination that didn’t quite hid the panic underneath. He hit the top of a low service platform in half-form, huge and broad through the chest, fur breaking through skin in bands and patches, a short wolfish snout of a face twisted into something hungry.
“There you are,” he said, voice roughened by the shape he wore.
It was one of the wolves from the alley where Gina the werewolf had killed Marc. I didn’t know his name.
I laughed once, breathless and mean. “You brought a whole parade, man. What, couldn’t find your balls, so you borrowed theirs?”
His eyes flashed. “You should have gone to ground, Maria. If you’d been smart, you’d have left Chicago. You’re weak and stupid.”
“Funny, I was thinking the same about you.”
He dropped from the platform and came at me fast for something his size. The first swing would have taken my head off if I had stood there like an idiot. I stepped inside it, felt the wind of his arm on my scalp, and drove my elbow into the side of his throat. It would have crushed a man’s larynx. The man just grunted and answered with a backhand that clipped my shoulder and spun me halfway around.
Pain flashed white down my arm.
Another wolf came in on my blind side and I heard him before I saw him. I bent, grabbed a handful of gravel, and threw it in his face. Cheap? Yes. Effective? Also yes. He recoiled long enough for me to kick his shin sideways and slam his muzzle into the ladder of the boxcar.
Then the jaguar came again. I caught its paws, twisted, and used its momentum to throw her over my hip into a puddle black with oil sheen. She rolled smoothly and was back up at once, which I respected against my will.
I was not going to win by standing in one place.
My mind kept working and analyzing everything around me while my body kept moving. There were too many of them, too many angles, too much open ground between cover. I could take some down. Maybe many, if I stopped caring who walked away. But I did care, annoyingly enough. Killing people because Dominic had terrorized them into a bad decision would feel satisfying for maybe six seconds and then sit in my stomach forever. I would if I had to, but if I could avoid it I would.
So I shifted my goal.
I went under a stationary flatcar instead of around it, slid in water and grease and gravel, came up on the far side, and ran for the darker edge of the yard where a drainage cut disappeared under a maintenance road.
Someone shouted. Someone else howled. The big werewolf roared my name like it was a curse.
I jumped the drainage cut, skidded on the muddy bank, nearly lost my footing, caught a rusted handrail, and swung down onto a concrete ledge slick with runoff. The ditch below carried a shallow ribbon of black water toward an arched culvert choked with weeds and windblown trash.
Perfect.
I splashed into the stinky water and ran bent over, hearing them behind me on the banks and above me on the road. The stink would cover much of my scent, and my powers would do the rest as soon as could slow down and concentrate. The culvert mouth loomed low and round, concrete ribbed with old water marks and tagged with layers of graffiti. I plunged in without ceremony.
Inside the tunnel, the sound changed again. The open rail yard noise died in one breath and was replaced by the enclosed rush of water, the slap of my boots, and the magnified echoes of pursuit. The tunnel smelled like runoff, mineral wetness, mold, rat nests, and the old metallic odor of subterranean places that had never seen sunlight even when they were new. My own breath came back at me from the curved walls. So did theirs.
I started running on the sides of the large pipe just above the waterline. Jumping from one side to the other, I kept momentum up while avoiding slushing through the water and slowing me down. I started running as fast as I could.
I didn’t know exactly where the drainage fed, but Chicago is laced with enough forgotten infrastructure to make anyone halfway competent disappear. Sewer connectors. Utility corridors. Old maintenance cuts. Access crawls. Old Speak Easy:s. Storm tunnels. Half the city looked respectable only because everything ugly and useful had been shoved below ground.
After ten minutes I had gotten quite the head start.
The main culvert forked at a concrete junction where one branch narrowed and the other widened into a deeper channel. I chose the narrow one and swore a bit when the roof dipped low enough that I had to hunch. That was good for numbers, though. Bad for the wolves, who seemed to be a bit on the large side, but Excellent for me - if I could keep from getting cornered.
A wolf came into the tunnel behind me before the others. I could tell by the sheer racket of him. His claws scraped sparks off concrete when he tried to brake for the bend. I turned and fired once.
The suppressed shot snapped painfully in the enclosed space. He yelped and stumbled. I had hit him somewhere in the leg. White gold would make shifting a misery. Not fatal, unless I made it so.
“Go home,” I called over the rush of water.
He answered with a growl that was all pain and stubbornness.
“Suit yourself.”
I ran again.
The side passage dipped, then opened into a maintenance chamber with a ladder bolted to the wall and two waist-high pipes crossing overhead. Water dripped from every seam. The concrete underfoot was furred with algae and grime, and the whole place had the clammy chill of an old basement magnified ten times. My left side burned. I looked down long enough to see a slice in my coat and blood darkening the cloth beneath. One of the pursuers had tagged me at some point. It hurt, but not enough to matter yet. The problem was leaving a scent trail.
I ripped a long leather strip from the coat as I ran. Awkardly I wrapped it around me, covering the slash in my side, and tied it off. Hopefully it would keep it from dripping blood that they could follow.
I ducked under the pipes, climbed the three rungs on a ladder, and leaped for a side lip that led into an older brick-lined conduit. My hands slipped. I caught the edge anyway and hauled myself up.
That old conduit was narrower, drier, and older by a good hundred years if the brickwork and crumbling mortar were anything to go by. The smell changed too. Less runoff, more old dust and ancient damp, as if the tunnel itself had memories. I moved through it crouched, hand sliding along the wall for balance, and came out at another junction where steel doors once must have sealed sections off. One door was missing entirely. The other hung open on one hinge, furred orange with rust.
Behind me the hunters spread through the tunnels like spilled oil.
I could hear wolves arguing. A jaguar hissed something low and furious. A third voice answered in a cadence I didn’t recognize, quick and light. Not wolf. Not cat. It had to be the third type I had scented above. I still couldn’t place them properly in my head. Their smell kept skidding sideways from my attention. It was like a lesser type of the suppression I could do. Clever little bastards.
I moved left, then right, then down a stairwell so narrow my shoulders brushed the concrete. At the bottom I found a corridor with old electrical conduit strapped to the walls. Somewhere overhead a train rolled by, making dust sift from the ceiling and turn the servicelight-glow leaking in from a crack into golden smoke.
That was when the big werewolf caught up again.
He was apparently much more knowledgeable of the layout of these tunnels than I was. He came through a side access like a bulldozer with opinions, shoulder first, ripping loose some hanging cable as he forced his bigger frame into a passage that had not been built with big werewolves in mind. He was bleeding from the face and chest now, one eye swollen. I had gotten in a few good ones.
“You can’t run forever,” he said.
“Good thing I only need to run longer than you can follow.” I smirked. “Or kill you.”
He bared his teeth and charged.
There was no room for finesse. The corridor was too tight and the walls too close. I met him head on because giving ground there would just mean losing my footing in the puddles. His weight hit like a wrecking ball. My back slammed the wall hard enough to shift bricks and release dust into my hair. He tried to pin me there and rip at my throat, and I shoved one forearm across his neck and the other under his elbow, buying myself inches.
He smelled of blood, expensive soap, rage, and wet dog.
“You’re making this worse,” he snarled.
“You’re kidding, right?”
I slammed my head into his face.
Never a graceful move, but headbutting works. He jerked back, and I drove my knee up into his lower ribs, heard him grunt, then stamped down on his instep with enough force to crunch the smaller bones. He lashed out blindly. Claws ripped across my upper arm and shoulder, turning the world painful for a second. I pivoted with the blow instead of against it, slipped to his side, and used the wall to kick off and drive my elbow into his injured chest. I could feel the chest fold inward.
The corridor amplified the impact. He staggered three steps and fell to the ground.
I did not stay to admire the result.
I sprinted down the corridor, took a blind right into a larger storm tunnel, and nearly slid into deeper water. This channel ran above hip-level in the center and moved fast enough to make standing in it a hard for a human. High up a line of old maintenance anchors and cable runs ran along one wall, and I used those to haul myself to keep my passing as hard to follow as possible.
They followed.
Of course they did, but they were having a hard time picking up the scent.
Ahead of me, one wolf leaped into the water, probably thinking it would be easy, landed in the current wrong, and went down hard. I jumped down, grabbed his collar as he was trying to regain his balance, and slammed his body into the concrete sidewall as hard as I could. The werewolf lost control over his muscle for a brief second, and that’s when I shoved his head under just long enough to make my point before dragging him back up coughing.
“Enough,” I told him.
His answer was weak, dazed, and obscene.
Another jaguar came low from the wall ledge, trying to knock me into the main flow. I caught it around the shoulders and the two of us hit the water together. It was filthy, freezing, and stronger than it looked. We slammed into a big grate that covered a side tunnel. My knife hand pinned under us. Its claws scraped my ribs. I got my free hand under its chin and shoved hard, forcing its head back. Not enough to snap anything. Enough to make it choose breathing rather than killing me.
That gave me the second I needed to plant a boot on its hip and throw it off.
I came up choking and furious and laughing a little, because apparently I had become the kind of person who found sewer fights funny.
The laugh died when something small and fast skimmed past my left. All I saw was water spray and shadow. Pain flashed along my calf. Whatever the third kind was, one of them had tagged me. Not deep, but insulting.
It came again, but this time I stepped out into the deeper part of the channel, forcing it to move in water. It was still fast, and the “don’t look here” mojo should have kept it relatively safe - but it didn’t. I saw a blackened blade come for my throat and twisted my upper body to my side. I line of fiery pain in my unwounded shoulder told me she scored. I caught the hand with the blade and drove one of my ceramic blade into its side and snapped the blade. I wasn’t taking any chances.
The shadow retreated fast.
“Alright,” I snapped into the tunnel, “whoever the fuck you are, I hope you get gangrene from the fucking water.”
No answer. Just a soft echo that might have been a painful laughter.
I found the maintenance ledge again and took it at a run, using pipe brackets and exposed rebar like ladder rungs where the concrete had broken away. The tunnel split once more, and I went through a half-collapsed service door into a crawl of brick and packed earth so tight I had to turn sideways in places.
For several minutes I was just running through tunnels and service ways, with only getting away on my mind.
That finally started to peel them off.
Wolves hated the confined spaces. They could do it, but they hated it. The jaguars adapted better. Cats always did. One of the unplaceable ones came with them, near silent now, a pressure on the edge of my senses and then gone again.
The crawl led to an old utility vault no bigger than a walk-in closet. A ladder rose to a bolted manhole above, and three access tunnels ran out from it at different heights like veins from a heart. I listened for maybe one breath and chose the lowest one because there was fresh air moving through it and because the others smelled too much like dead rat and standing water even for me.
I went down on hands and knees.
There are parts under the Chicago streets that feel less built than burrowed. This was one. Round concrete pipe, maybe four feet across, dry except for a trickle to one side, dust layered over grit and bits of broken bottle washed in from some long-ago storm. The air moved steady and cold across my face, carrying scents of damp textile and machine oil and distant street exhaust. An access tunnel. Maintenance, probably. Maybe to some sub-basement, maybe to another line, maybe to daylight if I was lucky.
I crawled, then crouch-ran where the pipe widened enough.
Behind me the pursuit were splitting up. I could tell that much. They were getting farther back but not by much. Still it was not close enough to matter in the next minute or two.
Then, slowly, the pressure behind me shifted.
They were moving even further away. The were losing me.
Not because I was faster anymore, though I was. Not because the tunnels favored me, though they did. It was because I stopped pushing my otherness out into the world and folded it inward, the way I had mostly learned by instinct and desperation. My scent, my weirdness, whatever signature the Cursed felt when they looked too hard at me, all of it went, camouflaged within the other scents and imprints. Not gone. Just banked down like a fire under ash and melded into the background.
The scents of the city itself helped. Old concrete has a smell. Brick has memory. Water carries too many stories at once. In that little access tunnel, with dust in my nose and blood drying sticky under my coat, I let Chicago swallow me.
The sense of the fox-thing slid past the junction behind me and kept going.
The jaguar did not.
It stopped.
I could hear it breathing. Light. Controlled. Closer than I had thought. It had not fully bought the false trail, then. Smart cat.
The sound of it changed from paws to feet and I could hear the rustle of clothes.
I backed into a shallow maintenance niche where some old valve assembly had once been housed and lowered myself into stillness. The tunnel was so cramped my knees brushed my chest and my shoulder scraped the wall every time I took a breath. Up close the concrete smelled like lime, dust, old iron, and rat droppings. There was just enough room to move if I moved carefully.
The werejaguar came on slowly.
I could hear fingertips or claws brushing the wall for balance. Could hear her pausing every few feet to listen. She was good. Better than the wolves by a mile. Good enough that if I had been slower or a little more tired, she might have gotten me before I got out of the tight parts.
A woman passed the niche by one careful step.
I exploded out of the dark.
My left arm locked across her throat before she could turn. My right hand clamped over her mouth. I kicked the back of her knee and dragged her down with me into the cramped space, using the wall to pin her hips and shoulders. She thrashed once, sharp and powerful, then froze when she felt the knife at the soft place under her jaw.
“Don’t,” I whispered into her ear. “Just don’t.”
Her pulse hammered against my forearm. She smelled of wet concrete, cat musk, blood, and adrenaline.
For a long second all I heard was our breathing and the far-off rush of water deeper in the system.
Then the sounds of the others moved past, receding.
The jaguar’s eyes cut sideways, furious and bright in the dark.
“Good choice,” I murmured, though she had not actually had one.
I held her there until the tunnel outside went quiet enough that even my nerves unclenched a little. I was wounded, filthy, and still very much underground with a captive werejaguar and no good plan past the next five minutes. But they had lost me.
For the moment, that was enough.
I tightened my grip once, not cruelly, just enough to make the terms clear.
“You and I,” I told her softly, “are going to have a talk when we get topside.”