Chapter 1: Enter the wrath-eaters

Ah, yes. A moment of nostalgia.

There was a time when I would flick my wrists and a Catholic schoolgirl's panties would vanish like magic in the next town over. I'd toss my hair, and there would be a sexual disturbance in the Force. You heard me. A thousand voices crying out in orgasm and then silence. I could walk into nightclubs and part straight men like the Red Sea, lest a single one of them look too interested. I'm not bragging here. This stuff is cold, hard metaphysical fact, and if I walked into your bedroom right now, things would probably happen. Things you would like, believe me. That's what makes me such a delicious monster—it's instant Stockholm Syndrome with a smile and a sway of the hips. And so long as I don't give a flying rat's ass about you, things are normally sort of okay. A sip here, a sip there, you get it back eventually, and I stay alive. But there's so much more.

My world is a road of five-star restaurants with me riding a boatload of cash, and I'm straggling along surviving on stale peanuts. I get a brother out of it, who's a good man. And I can live with myself.

But under this mortal exterior I'm a supernatural being—I can leap fifteen feet and punch a hole in concrete with the right amount of energy, and coax your daughter out of her virginity from the next state. So believe me when I say the mighty have fallen.

I can't even hold down a job making coffee.

"Hi there, welcome to Starbucks! My name is Thomas. How are you doing today?"

As if I cared.

This particular adventure begins at the nexus of pain and suffering in the universe—opening shift at a Starbucks drive-thru in a major city. At the time I'd kept the job longer than the others, finding the whole café environment kind of conducive to my nature. My first few weeks were all closing shifts—you get kids in the shop proper, sitting in comfy chairs studying, with Aretha Franklin playing and not too many people in the drive-thru. They never start you on the headsets, and I worked with a couple guys every night. There weren't many "partners" (Starbucks doesn't call you an employee, but a partner… at 7.25 an hour, I really doubted I had stock options) who liked the closing shift. You have to do a boatload of prep and dishes, mop while making drinks, keep the place clean in between blending and training and being cheerful. But overall, it was relaxed. I ran the till and did dishes, even got to listen to my MP3 player in back while I scrubbed. The more relaxed I am—and the customers are—the better able I'm able to keep myself under raps.

I learned a lot about making coffee, and it occurred to me that I could do this café deal. It was chill and intimate, people talking about the University of Chicago and politics and who's dating whom. Girls were too wound up in their midterms to notice me, and I was pounding away to music in the back, making money and shriveling my hands a little. Prune fingers in exchange for some self-respect? Not bad.

Then the manager lost a morning person. I was one of the few non-students, and my availability was way open. When I got my schedule, I found six days in a row of 4:00 AM shifts. Holy. Crap.

There are some things I have in common with Harry. I am not a morning person. And things just get worse when we have to carpool, because then he's in a bad mood too. Then you have the general atmosphere of a Starbucks at five in the morning. People running around for five hours straight, angry women in Hummers and kids screaming in backseats, everyone wearing drive-thru headsets, drinks on the fly, crazy complicated orders (and none of these people think it's fair to have to put their own sweeteners in their coffee once we gave it to them). All in all, I've never despised the human race more than I did that week. People are at their worst before coffee, and they display it going the whole hog when you're a face inside a crackling menu. And still the manager stalked around among us, reminding us with this maddening, forced smile.

"Don't forget to ask—how are you doing today? How are you doing today? How are you doing today? Thomas, smile some more. Did you ask them how they're doing today?"

How are you doing today?

How are you doing today?

I still have nightmares.

But I couldn't lose this job. Harry hadn't gotten a paycheck from SI for a couple weeks, the investigations business was slow, and he had nothing going except a hunt for some handed-down watch with a nominal fee. I had to make it until schedules came out, now that I'd turned in new availability, citing my roommate and travel options as a deterrent to opening shift. My control was skidding down a ninety degree slope coated in pudding. And to make matters worse (Margaret LeFay bequeathed to her sons dark hair, fair height, great chins, silver pentacles, and horrible luck), the manager was a woman.

When she came by again, I gritted my teeth for another barrage, capping a couple of dry non-fat cappuccinos with two equals on the bottom, fully expecting her to go into it again about cheerfulness. Instead she reminded me that paychecks were on the counter on the other side of the pastry case. Man. I thought I was going to wet myself with relief—which I avoided, noting sternly to myself that it wouldn't be the most suave option for an ultra-hot sex vampire, no matter how low I'd sunk. When my break rolled around (Starbucks is great about breaks and never letting you work too long without one, which is apparently two hours), I had the thing open. I'd worked an inhuman number of hours over the two weeks leading up to it, taking shifts from sick folks and at other stores, trying to close whenever I could, or take the mid-afternoon swing shifts when the place is relaxed and steady. I'd racked up nearly five-hundred dollars before taxes.

I used to not quite know the value of a buck, but after a few months of being penniless and eating ramen, the paycheck had an all-new glimmer. That was a lot of beer and steak sandwiches from Mac's. Harry was gonna force me to save a bunch of it, of course, so I could move my ass off his couch, but I could treat us to a good meal, grab groceries, help with Mouse's shots. I felt a weird, dizzy kind of glee, a feeling that I could do this, could really survive without the House of Raith, and kissed the little paycheck like it was my new lover. I tucked it into a safe pocket in my dark slacks and returned to work. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't put it in one of the lockers—after what happened next, I would have utterly forgotten it.

Ten more minutes of morning insanity ensued. I fetched muffins, put whip and caramel topping on a slew of fraps, took orders, steamed milk, made copious amounts of foam (don't look at me like that), poured shots, and generally ran a marathon while dodging other members with headsets and panicked expressions on their faces. Gotta get to the next coffee. The next coffee. The next coffee. No end in sight.

Then I saw it. A silvery, somehow tainted sheen off pale skin, and an argument had begun between a coworker of mine and a customer in his car. Amanda, a larger girl who wasn't quite flattered in the uniform Starbucks green apron, leaned out the window in the throes of a wicked altercation. The man in the car, from whom that nasty sheen had hit my peripheral vision, smiled with a curl of the lips that could only be perverse enjoyment, and Amanda only seemed to rile more. He said another word, and as he spoke, I could detect the power of a Hunger like my own, roiling off his skin and twisting like a knife into the young barista. Her rage towered, and he'd begun to feed.

I am personally an erotophage—I pull people into the haze of desire and I feed off their lust. Everyone creates and exudes massive amounts of energy during sex, and quite a bit of it is wasted. I take it up and people enjoy it as I do so—and during first times, I never take enough that they couldn't refuel after a couple weeks. Not all White Court vampires are erotophages—some feed off fear, others on hatred. I suppose one could feed off unbridled joy, off sorrow, and I'm sure I know of smaller families who partake of strange flavors indeed. We're all more or less wired and taught to feed a certain way—by default I feed off lust, but I could feed off other emotions if I tried. But just because monkey brains are technically a food source, and could technically nourish you, doesn't mean your body isn't going to get serious indigestion on the first ten times in. It doesn't mean you won't be grossed out by the whole thing and never do it again. And if you do, it doesn't mean you won't be altered forever by breaking one of your taboos. If watching a monkey stare at you, still alive, while you eat his brains becomes normal, you might have changed forever as well. I'm not saying it'll be a good or bad thing, because that depends on you.

Long story short, I found myself looking right in the face of a White Court thymophage—eaters of wrath.

Let me tell you a little something about rage. Fear is a feeling that dampens the spirit, and it's sick to enjoy it—but it preserves life. Lust, by proxy, also creates life. And if you're someone like my brother Harry, you might use righteous anger to keep yourself alive. But the kind of rage my cousin vampires feed off of isn't so simple as that. It's that shaking, paralyzing, soul-draining wrath that makes your spirit flare to life before consuming itself. Rage wears out of the mind and body, stresses the resources, and burns other emotions down to cinders. It's there with the purpose to kill—sometimes others, but in the end, oneself. A being that feeds on rage has no intention of letting their victims last long—fury, jealousy, towering rage, can make you totally and utterly insane. Victims of thymophages can go berserker, going on bloody massacres, before they disappear. This was the kind of rampage the eaters of wrath got their kicks from.

It's because of all this that I did something incredibly stupid.

Without thinking, I stepped forward before the manager could get in the middle of things. Cars were honking in the drive-thru, and the rage was rippling out into other employees, into the other waiting customers, in a red-tinged silver haze stretching from the car into the shop proper. I could nearly taste the obscene, twisted power of the thymophage just starting to get his fill. There was a moment of irrational, hateful jealousy, and the Hunger spoke within me. I could feel it altering my features, making me look like the starving hunter I'd become, lean and catlike, features harsh and shadowy.

He has already opened her. Either he drinks her rage or you do. Take it. Now.

I faltered as this flickered into my mind, firmly telling the demon to shut the hell up. It has a nasty habit of not listening.

What if they are here for your brother? You could drink the girl's rage and become stronger in case a battle is coming. We are starving. Give me what I need and in return you will have all the power you could ask. Did he not save you the last time? Are you not his elder brother? Things could be different. You could protect him.

Let me remind you that Harry Dresden is a big wall in between my demon and regular feedings. What's worse, brotherly love might not burn me like Justine, but it's not exactly comfortable either. It's precisely why I avoid physical contact with my brother; when he and the demon come near, my skin heats to high temperatures, something Mister Wizard is bound to figure out soon enough. The Hunger despises Harry, but it does know how to best manipulate me—and it isn't above using any loved one to get what it wants.

In line with that sentiment, my answer was an unceremonious Fuck you.

In the few seconds that it took for this conversation to take place, I'd pulled Amanda forcefully away from the window, turning to the thymophage with a thundering, rather idiotic Dresden-style "Hey!"

That was when I realized he'd been waiting for my reaction, and I had about half a second to hit the ground before his buddy in the back seat opened fire on me with a machine gun.