Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland Page B

nothing?
    According to Jimmy, the Nephilim weren’t human.
    Except they were. At least half.
    I rubbed my forehead. This was a moral dilemma I wasn’t up to dealing with.
    I lowered my hand, lifted my chin and met his gaze. “We’re a little short on villagers. What next?”
    His wary stance relaxed at the proof I wasn’t going to push for difficult answers. At the moment.
    “We keep searching,” he said. “Eventually someone, or something, has to turn up.”
    We did the best we could, hurrying from shop to shop, then house to house, ringing bells, tapping on doors. We found no one, and I began to get twitchy. There had ob-viously been people here once; now they were gone as if they’d disappeared into thin air. As far as I knew, that wasn’t possible. Unless…
    “Could this have been a town of werewolves?” I asked.
    Jimmy snorted. “Yeah, right.”
    We’d reached the outskirts of Hardeyville. A short distance away loomed what appeared to be the school— brick like everything else, but squat, with a flat roof and a whole lot of concrete parking lot rimmed with playground equipment. Jimmy stood where the sidewalk ended and the dirt began, scowling at a brand-new field house.
    “Why not?” I asked. “Maybe a few came for a visit, then turned everyone in the place.”
    “Turned?” As if he were having a hard time tearing his gaze from the gymnasium, Jimmy faced me. “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “A few werewolves decided they wanted a place for themselves; they wanted a pack.” The more I thought about it the better I liked the idea. “So they scouted out a nice town in the middle of nowhere, and they bit everyone in it.”
    He was shaking his head before I finished. “We aren’t living in a B movie. Werewolves can’t make other werewolves by biting them.”
    “Then how do they make more werewolves?”
    “They don’t really need to. There are enough to keep us busy for a very long time.”
    “Where are the pets?” I asked. We hadn’t found one dog, cat, or parakeet, though we had seen evidence of all three.
    “There’s something about shifters that makes domestic animals go bananas. Either they took off and they aren’t coming back, or they were—”
    Appetizers . My mind helpfully filled in the blank.
    “If dogs go nuts at the sight”—or maybe it was the scent—”of shifters, why don’t we have a few on the payroll?”
    “Not a bad idea, and some DKs do, but since most of us travel a lot and have our cover jobs, dragging a dog along with us is more of a pain than it’s worth. We aren’t all Paris Hilton.”
    My lips twitched at the image of Jimmy carrying a Chihuahua everywhere he went.
    As we approached the school, a strange hum filled the air. I glanced at the sky, but the sound was too soft to be a plane or a helicopter, too loud to be nothing. Jimmy either didn’t hear it, or he didn’t care. Maybe he already knew what we’d find.
    Thousands of flies swarmed at the entrance, butting their heads into the glass in an attempt to enter, bouncing back, swarming together and buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.
    “Fuck,” Jimmy said, his tone conversational. Then, ignoring the flies, he yanked open the door.
    The smell hit me right away. Not as bad as 1 expected, really, but not good either. They hadn’t been here very long.
    The brand-new basketball court was ruined. I didn’t think blood came out of wood very well, especially not that much of it.
    Jimmy stood in the doorway and surveyed what appeared to be a mass murder. I got a pretty good idea what Jonestown had looked like. Except there were no remnants of poison Flavor-Aid, just blood on blood and then, hey, more blood.
    “They lured the whole town in here.” Jimmy’s voice was quiet, even though no one in the building was alive to hear. “Then they shut the doors and had some fun.”
    “Why?” I whispered, voice hoarse, eyes burning.
    “Because they could.”
    “You said the Nephilim want humans for food,