Chapter 1 — Every Beast Can Be Tamed (1)

There was blood on my apron again, and I was so, so tired of being the only person in Umbra City who knew how to use a mop.

“—and that’s the third time this month,” I said, dragging a rag across the bar while a shadow-hound the size of a pony lay on its back, legs in the air, tongue lolling out like a stuffed animal someone had dropped. “You morons have a collective emotional regulation problem. The Den is a bar, not a rage room. If you want to howl at the moon, go do it somewhere the acoustics don’t ruin my shift.”

The hound whined. Apologetically. Its tail thumped the floor, and somewhere behind me, a serpent-caste bartender with scales instead of knuckles let out a low, rattling laugh.

“Handler’s got opinions tonight,” he said.

“Handler’s got a rent bill,” I corrected him, because I was not a hero and I needed the five hundred dollars I made calming three berserk wolves, one panicking basilisk, and a vampire whose tantrum had set fire to the jukebox. “And if I lose this job because you idiots can’t keep your blood pressure down, I will personally teach every one of you the difference between a calming touch and a chokehold.”

This was the thing nobody in the normal world knew, and I’d spent twenty-two years keeping it that way: I could feel the beast in a person the way other people felt weather. The low animal hum under their skin. The rage they kept in cages. And when that cage rattled loud enough, my hand on their neck — or their shoulder, or their stupid giant paw — could make the whole storm go quiet.

Not magic, exactly. More like being the only person in the room who knows how to reset a breaker.

The downside: every reset cost me. Their rage went through me first. Tonight alone I’d swallowed three wolves’ worth of red-hot fury, and my temples were pounding like someone was using my skull for a drum solo.

“Ten minutes to close,” I told the room, because The Den never actually closed, but I liked saying it the way normal people did. It made me feel like I had a life. “Last call for chaos. Anyone who turns feral after midnight gets a bill.”

The serpent bartender — name was Orin, three hundred years old, emotionally a teenager — slid a drink across the bar. On the house. “You should go home, Handler. There’s something in the air tonight. The whole Hollow’s gone jumpy.”

I took the drink because I was not above free liquor. “There’s always something in the air, Orin. It’s a city of monsters. Literally. The air is mostly fur.”

That was the exact second the Hollow screamed.

Not a person screaming. The place. The underground market district of Umbra City — four square blocks of beast-run speakeasies, blood-banks, and a knockoff designer who made wallets out of — don’t ask — shuddered like a struck bell. Glasses jumped off shelves. The neon signs flickered. And every beast in The Den went rigid at once, ears up, pupils blown wide, that pre-storm stillness that I knew better than my own heartbeat.

Then the riot hit.

The Double Moon Casino doors blew off their hinges three blocks north. I felt it before I saw it — a wave of pure, unfiltered loss of control rolling down the tunnel, so thick I tasted copper. Something had broken. Something had cracked open a cage that should never have been touched.

“Shit,” I said, and put the drink down. “Orin. Lock the register.”

“Handler—”

“Lock the register and take the humans out the back. The tourists who wandered in from the surface, the ones who think this is a themed bar, get them out. Now.”

Orin’s scales rippled with alarm. “What about you?”

“I’m going to go be the only calming presence in this city, again, for free, again, because my landlord is a werewolf with a foreclosures hobby.” I pulled my apron off and shoved it at him. “And if I survive, someone’s comping me a week of rent.”

I walked into the riot like I was walking into the worst shift of my life, because statistically, that’s what it was.

The Hollow was carnage. Serpent caste — the scaled ones, the ones who ran the gambling floors — had gone full feral, bodies twice their human size, jaws unhinged, venom spraying. The shadow-hounds were everywhere, packs of them, foam on their fangs, eyes burning that sick amber that meant the rage wasn’t theirs. Something had made them this way. Something had poisoned the well.

And the bears. Oh, the bears. A three-hundred-pound ursa-caste accountant — I recognized him, he did my taxes, badly — was on all fours in the middle of the street, roaring at the moon that wasn’t even out, while two cat-caste enforcers tried to talk him down like he was a customer with a coupon dispute.

“Stanley,” I said, walking up to him, because apparently my life was now hand-holding the IRS. “Stanley, it’s me, Lila. From the Den. You overpaid me last April and I never said thank you.”

The bear stopped roaring.

“That was very generous of you,” I said, reaching up, slow, palm open. “You’re a good accountant. You’re a good bear. You’re just having a very bad night, and it’s not your fault, and I need you to breathe with me.”

He breathed.

I touched his neck — one hand, thumb against the pulse point — and took the whole storm out of him. It hit me like a freight train: centuries of anger, tax audits, a cheating ex-wife, the IRS again. I wobbled. I kept my feet.

“Good boy,” I said, because he was a three-hundred-pound bear and he liked it. “Now go home. I’ll do your taxes for free next year.”

The bear, gentle as a housecat, padded off into the night.

I turned to the chaos and screamed with my hands on my hips because I was out of patience and the night was only getting worse.

“Alright, you absolute disasters! Line up! I don’t care who started it, I don’t care who’s right, I’m the only one here who can make the noise stop, and I have a shift in eight hours!”

The most ridiculous part — the part that made me, even mid-riot, want to laugh — is that they did. Line up. Berserkers, ferals, shifters mid-change, hundred-pound wolves and serpent-caste and one very confused gargoyle who’d been hit by the wave mid-sunbathing — they formed a ragged, shaking line in the middle of the Hollow, and I went down it like a nurse in a field hospital, hand on each neck, each shoulder, each giant paw.

Rage in. Calm out. Rage in. Calm out.