Hah.

I shifted to coyote and, while he struggled to parse what had just happened, I wiggled out of his hold, leaving my clothing behind but not my weapon. A little foolishly (I was told later), I snagged the cutlass in my teeth as I ran.

I grabbed it by the hilt. No one outside of those cheesy old movies or computer games would really grab the blade itself unless they were very, very certain that the blade was a dull movie prop.

I dashed to the barn, putting a hay bale to my back. Then I regained my human form and, naked, took the cutlass in my right hand and faced the goblin. He’d regained his feet while I’d run. He snarled something uncomplimentary and bounded toward me, the battered copper blade raised high.

I raised my blade to a guard position—and then Larry jumped over my head and landed light-footed on the ground about six feet in front of me. Which put him directly in the path of the charging goblin. He had no weapon that I could see.

“Mine,” Larry said in a voice so power-laden it could have belonged to the Marrok.

Before the other goblin could do more than slow his charge, his scarred face blank with horror, Larry reached out, grabbed the goblin by shoulder and leg—a move very like what the goblin had used on me, but even more effective. And brutal. The goblin king used the other’s forward momentum to swing him high—and jerk his shoulders and legs in the opposite direction than they go.

It was a move requiring skill and strength that I wasn’t sure any of the werewolves could have duplicated. In one move, Larry broke the other goblin’s back and dislocated his hip with a twin pop that sounded like a pair of guns going off.

He dropped the goblin on the ground and let him writhe for a moment. Then, with a snake-quick movement, he stopped the screaming by breaking the downed goblin’s neck.

“Well, fuck,” said Ben from on top of the hay bale behind me. “Larry, you wanker, stealing all the fun.”

I twisted to look. Mary Jo and Ben were both standing on top of the bale that Larry had jumped from. Mary Jo had a cut on her ribs and blood on one hip, though the wound it had come from had already healed over.

A slice on Ben’s cheekbone was fading, but his shirt flapped loosely from the top of his shoulder to the bottom seam. There was a piece of muscle missing from his pectoral. The skin had settled over the top of the injury, but I knew that it would take a few days for the muscle to fill in.

I turned my attention back to the most dangerous of us here.

Larry was, as far as I could see, unharmed.

“So that’s done,” Larry told me cheerfully, as if he hadn’t just brutally killed someone, shedding that aura of power he’d gathered so easily it was disconcerting. Bran, the Marrok, could do that, too.

Larry stared down at the body a moment, frowned, then pulled a long-bladed bronze knife from somewhere on his person. He grabbed the goblin by his hair and sliced the head off the body. It seemed like overkill. Maybe, I thought, Larry needed to make sure that the other goblin was dead.

The knife must have been extra sharp because he looked like he didn’t make any more effort than someone cutting up a watermelon. He dropped the head on the ground, cleaned off his knife, then pointed it at the head.

To me he said, “Take that to your human law enforcement. Tell them that the goblin king showed up and brought justice for their lost child and the guardian who gave his life so valiantly. Tell them I regret that I could not do more than ensure that this one will do no more harm.”

“I thought you didn’t call yourself the goblin king,” I said.

He shrugged and sheathed his knife through an opening in his pant leg—it looked like a dangerous way to sheathe something that sharp. “Good publicity is good publicity. It was recently pointed out to me that I am what I am; it doesn’t matter what title someone outside our community tapes to my forehead, eh? The goblin king is something humans know about.”

“You are coming out to the public, then, mate?” Ben asked.

Larry grinned—and it looked right except for the seriousness of his eyes. “We are already out to the public, dude.” The stronger than normal emphasis on the “dude” made me think it was an answer to Ben’s “mate.” “But, yes. We are going to do some publicity work for ourselves here. Make ourselves a Power with allies—and then we are not so likely to end up food for the Gray Lords. Speaking of food . . .”

Unconcerned by the gore, he picked the body up, sans head, and slung it over his shoulder. The dislocated leg flopped, and the broken back made the body move oddly.

“I’d leave you the body, too,” he told me, “but I’d have to explain to the missus that I went hunting and didn’t bring back food for the family. The head should be enough to ID him.”

He glanced again at the disembodied head, a shadow of regret on his face. I wondered if he had known the other goblin, or if he was just regretting the necessity of killing one of his own.

He looked up and saw that I was watching, then muttered, “The eyes are the best part.”

I stared at him.

He saluted me with his serious-eyed grin, took a step back, and disappeared—gone from sight and sound.

Ben said, “Huh.” After a moment, when the scent of the goblin king faded into nothing, he said, “Well, sod off, then, and bon appétit.”

“He might have been joking,” I said without conviction. I liked Larry, but that didn’t mean I understood him.

2

Gruesome as it was, I had to admit the head was easier to pack into the Jetta than a whole body would have been, especially since there was no upholstery or carpet in the space where (hopefully) someday a backseat would reside.

I wrapped the head in the blue tarp that I’d been using to keep the interior of the Jetta dry (the seal on one of the windows and the trunk was gone). I’d throw the tarp away as soon as I got rid of the head. Tarps are cheap.

I managed to handle the gruesome object without dousing myself in blood. My clothing had actually fared pretty well under the circumstances. There was a rip in the shoulder of my shirt—and it was possible that had happened in the fight and not when I’d changed to coyote. But my underpants were undamaged, except for the dirt I’d had to shake out. I’d even found both of my socks and shoes.

With the head stowed away, I settled into the driver’s seat of the Jetta and mentally crossed my fingers. When it started on the first try, I was a bit surprised.

I muttered, “So far, so good.” I tend to talk to cars—not only when I drive them, but when I work on them. I don’t know that it helps, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Before I could put the car in gear, the passenger door opened and Mary Jo plopped into the seat beside me.

“Who do you suppose he was talking about?” Mary Jo said as she looked around for the seat belt. She tipped her head back to show she meant the dead goblin when she said “he” rather than any of the other choices.

“There isn’t a seat belt on the passenger side yet,” I told her. “And which of them was talking about who? And don’t you have your own car to drive?”

She quit fussing and settled in. “Ben’s going to arrange for someone to pick it up. Ben’s allergic to law enforcement, so I got elected to accompany you. And as far as the ‘which of them was talking about who’ . . . first, it should be ‘about whom.’ Second, didn’t you notice that the goblin was nattering on about someone, a ‘she’ who told him he should come here? That we’d give him protection from the humans?”

“Oh, those whos,” I said. Let Mary Jo try to figure out if it should be those “whoms” or “whos”—though for the record, I was pretty sure I was right this time. “I’d ask our passenger, but he’s not talking.”

I thought about the rest of what she’d said—and the way she’d settled into my car as if she had no intention of getting back out.

I said, “I don’t need company. Thank you for the thought, but, as I said, there is no seat belt for your seat yet. I would rather not drive up to the sheriff’s office with someone sitting illegally in my car that—if examined by a stickler—might not be legal to drive.”

I must not have gotten quite the right amount of unfelt gratitude in my voice because she laughed. “Look. Adam will not be happy if we let you go by yourself.”

She brought out the Alpha card, and we both knew she was right. If I made her get out—and I wasn’t sure I could do that—I could very well be getting her into trouble.