steps that led to street-level. Jaw clenched, he looked around, getting his bearings before pulling Analie with him. He moved south toward Battery Park; they’d get there in thirty minutes if they paced themselves. A little late, but not enough to cause comment.
After getting a glimpse of his expression, Analie decided not to push Christoph. He was too hyped up to risk upsetting him further. No matter how tolerant New Yorkers were supposed to be, it didn’t seem like a good idea to push their limits by having a fully shifted Were throwing a very public tantrum on the city streets. She wasn’t interested in finding out what the inside of a jail cell looked like.
Oddly, it seemed he was more scared than angry, which she didn’t understand. The only time she’d heard of him tangling with a vampire had been recent, back when he’d first scoped out the city and made contact with the packs here. Luckily, the guy who vouched for him and got him out of jail was the leader of the Moonwalker pack, Rohrik Donovan. The same Were who had unveiled the existence of werewolves, vampires, magi, and a host of other mythic creatures that turned out not to be so mythic after all, to the general human populous. Rohrik was far more tolerant than any Goliath Were considering Christoph was still alive, Analie thought.
After some harsh words to the erring Goliath, Rohrik had used his not inconsiderable political clout to get the police to release Christoph to the custody of the Moonwalker pack to be handled as an “Other-to-Other” matter. Aside from having him sign a statement promising to reimburse the store for the damages, the police were all too happy to let him go. Most stations hadn’t yet been equipped to hold a Were during the full moon, and Christoph would have shifted in one of their cells in a matter of days.
Analie had never bothered to find out anything about the vampire he had fought. Like the rest of her pack, she’d assumed based on the way Christoph told the tale that he’d killed the vamp in the process of trashing the store. Now that she thought on it, he’d never outright stated that he’d killed it, only gave knowing looks or grinned slyly when somebody asked. It had made the others in the pack respect him more. Even the alpha’s deputy paid him more deference for thinking he was a vampire slayer—a title only the most high ranking and hardened warriors in their pack had achieved.
Anger abruptly surfaced as she realized what that encounter must have meant.
“You are unbelievable! That was the same vampire from the store, wasn’t it?”
Doing his best to ignore her, when she grabbed at the lapel of his brown canvas trench coat, he finally paused, snarling and ripping it out of her fingers. At the sound of tearing fabric, he closed his eyes and counted to ten silently to himself before answering her.
“Yes, it was the same one. Keep moving.”
“You are just… God!” she spat, throwing her hands up in the air and marching after him as he sped up into an easy jog. Soon she was forced to run to keep up with his ground-eating strides. Hefting her backpack, she continued cursing him softly under her breath, realizing at this pace she’d have to start shouting for him to hear her over the foot traffic and passing cars, and thus draw attention to herself. He’d done it to shut her up. Again.
When forced to wait for traffic lights, she took every opportunity to call him every nasty name she could think of, unable to believe he would break the Goliath Code by showing such cowardice. Nobody would have thought less of him for losing a fight to a vampire if he’d been honest about what happened. Those monsters were nasty; even the most recently turned were capable of doing unbelievable amounts of damage in a fight. To pretend like he’d come away the victor was beyond detestable.
Some curious guy smoking outside the convenience store on the corner stared when she uttered something particularly creative about Christoph’s hide, fleas, and camel corpses.
“Will you shut up already?” Christoph hissed.
“Fear is no fault, but cowardice is,” she growled. He couldn’t meet her challenging stare when she recited that line of the Code. He knew he was going to have to pay for his deception eventually—he’d just hoped it wouldn’t come so soon.
“Look, the park’s right over there,” he said, pointing.