Jacked Cat Jive Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  More from Rhys Ford

  Readers love The Kai Gracen Series by Rhys Ford

  About the Author

  By Rhys Ford

  Visit DSP Publications

  Copyright

  Jacked Cat Jive

  By Rhys Ford

  The Kai Gracen Series: Book Three

  Stalker Kai Gracen knew his human upbringing would eventually clash with his elfin heritage, but he didn’t think it would happen so soon. Between Ryder, a pain-in-his-neck Sidhe lord who’s been coaxing him to join San Diego’s Southern Rise Court, and picking up bounties for SoCalGov, he has more than enough to deal with. With his loyalties divided between the humans who raised him and the Sidhe lord he’s befriended and sworn to protect, Kai finds himself standing at a crossroads.

  When a friend begs Kai to rescue a small group of elfin refugees fleeing the Dusk Court, he’s pulled into a dangerous mission with Ryder through San Diego’s understreets and the wilderness beyond. Things go from bad to downright treacherous when Ryder’s cousin Kerrick, staking a claim on Southern Rise and on Kai, insists on joining them.

  Burdened by his painful past, Kai must stand with Ryder against Kerrick while facing down the very court he fears and loathes. As a Stalker, Kai has always expected to die while on a run, but now he wonders if embracing his elfin blood will also mean losing his heart, soul, and humanity along the way.

  This one is going out to Michelle Mary Taylor, who really just wants to steal Kai away. And also to Harley, who came into our house, covered it with gray fur, and promptly steals my seat when I get up. If only she could type.

  Acknowledgments

  TO MY beautiful Five—Penn, Tamm, Lea, and Jenn. Through thick and thin and through dangers untold, you are my true constant stars—kind of like a constellation… but with more bickering about tea and someone losing their knickers.

  And much love to my other sisters—Ren, Ree, Mary, and Lisa.

  Thanks will always go to Dreamspinner—Elizabeth, Lynn, Liz and her team, Naomi (who I drive insane), and everyone else who takes what I turn in and makes it marvelous.

  Glossary

  THE WORDS contained in Jacked Cat Jive have a base in current language and serve as representative words in Singlish, a polyglot common tongue spoken in the book. While many have retained their original meaning, some have experienced a lingual drift and have developed alternative definitions.

  a'a—rough, crumbly lava

  ainle—multiuse word, can be hero, champion, angel or if used in certain context, wild cat (Gaelic)

  ainmhi dubh—black dog (Gaelic)

  ampulla—orig: vial, blister; slang: piece of shit, waste of a person (Spanish)

  arracht—monster (Gaelic)

  bao—an Asian-centric bread, usually a soft white yeasty bread (Chinese origin word)

  bebé—baby (Gaelic)

  beathach sgeunach—skittish beast (Gaelic)

  bonito—handsome, masculine pretty (Spanish)

  chi wo de shi—slang: eat my shit, damn it (Mandarin)

  chikusho—slang: damn it, fuck (Japanese)

  deartháir—brother (Gaelic)

  diu nei ah seng—fuck your family (Singapore slang)

  fifl—idiot, fool (Old Norse)

  gusano—worm (sometimes found in tequila) (Spanish)

  hanai—adopted, calabash relative. Someone you would share a bowl of food with while eating with your fingers (Hawaiian)

  hibiki—resonance, echo (Japanese)

  hondashi—dried bonito (fish) flakes, mainly used for soup stock (Japanese)

  Iesu—Jesus (Hawaiian)

  Indios—indigenous Austronesian peoples living in Southern California / Mexico regions

  jan-ken-po—rock, paper, and scissors (Hawaiian slang of Japanese phrase)

  kimchee—pickled, spicy cabbage pickles, national dish of Korea. Also spelled kim chi or kim chee. (Korean)

  kuso—crap (Japanese)

  luranach—lover, intended (Gaelic)

  malasadas—deep-fried yeast donuts rolled in granulated sugar (Portuguese)

  meata—gone bad, turned rotten (Gaelic)

  miso—soybean paste, commonly used in soup (Japanese)

  muirnín—beloved, sweetheart, darling (Gaelic)

  musang—wild cat, civet, feral cat (Filipino-Tagalog)

  nori—seaweed, usually pressed into sheets (Japanese)

  paho‘eho‘e—smooth, ropy lava (Hawaiian)

  peata—pet (Gaelic)

  Pele—Goddess of lava, volcanoes, passion and general bad-assery. Not someone to be fucked with. (Hawaiian)

  saimin—local Hawaiian word for noodle soup dish based on Japanese ramen, Filipino pancit, and other Asian noodles. Possibly based on Japanese word ramen/sōmen or Chinese words xì and miàn.

  shoyu—soy sauce (Japanese)

  siao liao—crazy, out of your mind, insane. (Singapore slang)

  Sidhe—fairy folk, also Seelie. Considered the “Dawn” court of the Underhill faerie / elves. Pronounced she. (Gaelic)

  sláinte—health, salute (Gaelic)

  sona ba bi tsi—son of a bitch (Chamorro)

  sucio—filth, dirty things (Spanish)

  tik-tik—bulbous triangular taxi cab, single driver car with wide back to accommodate passengers, suspended above roadways by upper rails and trolley lines, resembles a rounder version of a 1976 Ford Pinto (Indian origin word)

  Unsidhe—fairy folk, also Unseelie. Considered the “Dusk” court of the Underhill faerie / elves. Pronounced un-she. (Gaelic)

  One

  “WHATEVER YOU do, boy, don’t get eaten!” Jonas yelled at me from across the devastated schoolyard. “If you’re going to die, you don’t want to go as a giant squid’s snack! Think about what that’ll do to your reputation as a Stalker!”

  Right. Because what people think of me and how I died should be my last thought as I drew my final breath. My reputation as a Stalker was already a sketchy one, mostly because I wasn’t human and I’d been raised and trained by Dempsey, the most foulmouthed, hot-tempered, itchy-trigger-fingered Stalker ever to be given a license.

  And those were his best qualities.

  It’s a well-known fact being a Stalker for the SoCalGov meant long hours, lean pay, and an extremely short lifespan. It was a brutal existence with little thanks, and if you were like me, a chimera of Sidhe and Unsidhe blood, it meant a lifetime of being viewed with skepticism and met with a loaded gun if you trespassed on a rancher’s land in pursuit of a particularly nasty monster.

  That’s what Stalkers did—not the trespassing part so much, but the monsters. We were paid to take down, relocate, and sometimes eradicate anything that preyed on human settlements. I couldn’t imagine there was much need for my job before the Merge, but when the elfin world folded into Earth, it brought more than the Sidhe and Unsidhe courts.

  There were wars following the Merge. The introduction of two separate races already at odds with each other to a human world used to being on top of the food chain naturally led to conflict. On the human side,
thousands died. On the elfin, at least a couple of hundred. Where Earth had technology, the Sidhe and the Unsidhe had magic and an unimaginable resistance to death. But they also couldn’t reproduce like humans, so even the few casualties they suffered were catastrophic.

  A peace was eventually struck, and the three races were reluctantly learning to live with one another over the subsequent decades—mostly because none of us had any choice. Everyone was struggling to survive in a world turned upside down by an event that nobody predicted or could control. The elfin courts had fought among themselves and against each other for centuries, and adding humans to the mix only made things worse. All sides were partners in an uneasy alliance, sharing resources and knowledge in little bits and pieces and opening up opportunities that no one ever imagined could exist.

  Being a Stalker was an opportunity because the Merge didn’t just bring elfin to Earth. It also brought their monsters—which was why I was deep in the bowels of San Diego’s understreets, in the middle of an abandoned schoolyard, fighting a blue-spotted megacuttlefish the size of an elephant.

  And by fighting, I meant letting myself get entangled in its tentacles to gain a clear shot at its underbelly when it drew me close enough to its snapping four-foot-wide beak. That hadn’t been the original plan, but as I was about to go on a one-way ticket down a not-ready-for-dinnertime calamari appetizer, it was all I had.

  “Stop getting in the way of its eyes,” Jonas shouted at me from his very safe position a few yards away. “I’m trying to shoot its head, and you keep moving in front of it.”

  My hanai uncle was difficult to see in the perpetual gloom of the understreets. That seemed odd—how did anyone miss a brawny, nearly seven-foot-tall black man wielding two sawed-off shotguns?—but the black ink the cuttlefish sprayed on me might have clouded my vision, and the monster’s hold on my foot as it swung me around like I was a piece of toilet paper it was trying to get off its shoe might have had something to do with my concentration difficulties.

  “I can’t even see its fucking eye!” I tried shouting back, but there was little hope Jonas heard me. The cuttlefish flailed me about and slammed me into a part of its body that felt like its head, but I couldn’t be certain. Since I had a death grip on my knife, I stabbed at whatever I could reach, but the angle was all wrong and its skin was too slick, so all I did was irritate it. “Swear to Pele, I’m going to turn you into tacos.”

  It was a terrible pun, a play on the word tako, but since no one but me heard it, I wouldn’t catch shit for it. The cuttlefish didn’t have an opinion or a sense of humor. But then, we were trying to kill it, and since I’ve often bitten on the other side of that knife, I can attest that laughter is not normally my first go-to when I’m trying not to die.

  Or maybe it is, because I just made a pun about cuttlefish and tacos.

  Another circuit of the air above its body and the monster lost its hold and sent me careening into a decrepit chain-link fence. The slam of my body against the woven metal was like the cymbal finale of a symphony—a rattle of chimes and clashes loud enough to send a piercing shock wave through my eardrums. I rolled off of the fence and into the dirt and scraped my face on the scrabble of dead weeds clustered about a post.

  I quickly considered staying put. Sure, the thing would probably graduate to munching on children in the next week or so, but they weren’t my kids. I couldn’t even have kids. I was a genetic cocktail of warring elfin DNA, incubated in a magical stew and hatched out of a crucible. The closest thing I would ever have to a child was my cat, who I found when it was eating one of my kills.

  No, I couldn’t think of one good reason to get back up on my feet and do battle with the rotten-tuna-smelling monster that was slithering free of the wading pool it now called home, but the bounty it would bring Jonas would be enough to feed his family for the next couple of months.

  “Get off your ass, Kai,” I scolded myself as I shook my nerves back into place. I’d lost my Glock as soon as the thing grabbed me, but I was still in possession of all of my knives, if not half of my wits. But damn, I ached. “It’s a fucking appetizer. A couple of passes with your knife and you’ll have ika for days.”

  This was supposed to be a simple bounty. A brief contract put out by the Post to eliminate a displaced foreign entity in the southern quadrant of San Diego’s understreets. The job seemed pretty cut-and-dried.

  The report sent over with the bounty stated that a small cephalopod of sea origins had somehow made its way through the sewage system and ended up at a brackish pond near New Barrio Logan. The SoCalGov inspector reported the mollusk was simply too large to go back through the grate it had come in through and was now trapped in the city proper. There had been some unverified instances of it preying on rodents, which we soon discovered from the locals was a big fat lie. The thing had been picking off dogs and cats for the past three weeks and had since moved on to slashing at any human who came too close.

  I had just gotten too close.

  Because twenty feet was too damned close when standing next to a wading pool with an angry, overgrown cuttlefish.

  The understreets of San Diego were where the poor and disenfranchised gathered up what little they could scrape together and lived their lives in the belly of a vast metropolis. Efforts had been made to bring light and fresh water to the bowels of the sprawling city, but there was little return on investment for most politicians to do more than the bare minimum. Massive tracks of lights meant to replicate natural sunlight were affixed to the cement canopy separating lower San Diego from its upper regions, but they never seemed to be replaced when they broke. We were in a part of the understreets where copper piping was stripped from buildings for a few bucks and people sold wood scavenged from grocery store pallets a few blocks away.

  Even the blue tik-tiks didn’t make it in as far as we were, their overhead cables cut and tied off as though they were nothing more than a gigantic macramé plant hanger waiting for the world’s most enormous fern.

  Still, the neighborhood had its pride and its own fury. Someone had made enough noise for SoCalGov to send someone down to investigate their ravenous intruder, and when it was all done, I was definitely going to get some elote and carnitas fries from the kiosk on the corner to take home for dinner.

  The fantastic smell coming from that grill had been driving me insane ever since we pulled up to the place, and oddly enough, even with the rotten-kelp-and-spoiled-seafoam odor caught in my nostrils, the kiosk’s aromatic smoke stayed with me.

  “You okay, boy?” Jonas shouted as I wiped the ink out of my eyes, hoping to shake off the ringing in my head and get back into the action. He let loose a volley of shot into the monster, but all it seemed to do was anger it. The flat head on one of its long tentacles lashed out, narrowly missing Jonas’s face, and I was up on my feet before he could finish swearing.

  By all rights the cuttlefish shouldn’t have been there. The explanation of its arrival through a sewer pipe connected to the ocean was plausible only if we weren’t nearly twenty-five miles inland. When we first got there, the wading pool appeared to be empty, half filled with algae-covered, garbage-choked water. But when we got closer, the monster erupted out in a flurry of tentacles and a snapping black beak.

  The size of it made me lose speech. It was larger than a rhino, with pale angry eyes dominating its frilled triangular head, and its pale flesh rippled pink and purple beneath its startlingly bright cobalt spots. The bloated remains of a dog floated in the pool next to it, and the rank smell of the water made Jonas gag. I’d smelled worse. Hell, I’d literally smelled worse than that pool myself more than a few times in my life. It was the malevolence in its gaze that brought me up short.

  Then it began to crawl out of the pool and the game changed drastically.

  Most sea creatures needed water to breathe. As far as I knew, that was a truth that extended even to cuttlefish, no matter how big they were. But this one didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that it had lifted mostly
out of the foul pool as it lurched its way toward Jonas and me.

  I didn’t move back fast enough, or maybe I just didn’t believe the thing was as quick as it turned out to be. One moment I had my gun aimed at its bulbous head and then the next I was being used as a cat toy to draw out its next snack.

  “I’m fine.” It took me a bit to get up on my feet, but I forced my body to respond. “Let’s kill this thing and go home.”

  “Planning on doing just that,” Jonas replied with a shit-eating grin. The streetlamps were bright enough to catch the silver in his closely cropped hair—more silver than had been there a few months before—but his growl was still fierce, even though there was a hitch to his step when he moved out of the monster’s reach. “If we do this right, we can have cuttlefish steaks for dinner. Meat’s good once you get it skinned.”

  I didn’t like how slowly Jonas was moving. Hell, I didn’t like the fact that he was there at all, but he’d taken the bounty and asked me for help to bring the thing in. It took a lot for a man like Jonas to ask for help, but he was still recovering from a brutal attack months before, and he’d done right by me more times than I had hair on my head, so saying no wasn’t on the table.

  Honestly, I just really didn’t like how slow he was responding or his wincing when he turned to take another shot at the monster.

  “Bullets aren’t working on it,” I yelled at Jonas as I searched for at least one of my guns. I found my Glock on the pavement a few feet away and stumbled toward it. My hand closed down on the hilt, and my fingers felt like they were on fire from the mollusk’s spew. The creature had left a viscous film on my body, and a sharp tingle began to spread over my skin. I wasn’t up to date on my mollusk toxins, but something told me the cuttlefish had more surprises in it than just moving tentacles and a foul temper. “Jonas! Pele take you, don’t let that thing grab you. It’s—”

  He got too near to the creature, and I saw his life flash before my eyes. I broke into a run—a hard, fast sprint toward an impossible target—as it aimed the flat sucker-filled end of its tentacle straight for Jonas’s head. My elfin blood and body gave me a distinct advantage among humans, but where our monsters were concerned, it was pretty neck and neck.