Ian barely heard Risa Sinclair shout his name. The pain in his shoulder seemed to take over all of his senses. There was a piercing roar in his ears, spots dancing in front of his eyes, the coppery taste of blood in his mouth and the scent of it was overpowering.
The wolf chomped down again and tugged, trying to bite off Ian’s entire arm. That didn’t seem quite right. Shapeshifters usually went right for the heart—the organ they needed to consume in order to live. But the one on top of him didn’t seem to know what it wanted.
It looked down at Ian as it tore at him and he thought he saw something like desperation in its glimmering, golden eyes. The animal was frustrated to the point of tears in an utterly childlike way. And he felt sorry for it, even as its teeth shredded his flesh.
Gunfire penetrated the shroud of agony surrounding Ian. The silver bullet pierced through the air above him and buried itself in the plaster of the wall, startling the wolf. Its jaw slackened in shock and Ian seized his chance to escape from it.
He pushed off the wall with his feet, giving him the momentum to roll over on top of the shifter. To his surprise, the wolf didn’t even seem to care that Ian had gotten the jump on it. It just bit down on the arm that he was using to press it into the floor.
“Damn it,” he cried, trying to push the animal’s head back. Its teeth were like daggers in his forearm.
“Move your head,” Carden shouted. He was aiming the gun down at them. “I’ll have a decent shot if you move back a little.”
“No, not yet. I need it alive for information,” Ian barked. He slammed the wolf’s head against the floor. “Change, damn it. Change back into a human.”
The wolf only yelped pathetically and scraped more skin off Ian’s arm.
Risa came to his aid and pried the wolf’s jaw open while Carden forced its head back. It writhed in their grip, but it wasn’t strong enough to fend off all three of them.
Ian stared down at it. “Change,” he said to it again. “Just answer our questions and we’ll let you go.”
“The hell we will,” Carden snapped. “Not after what this thing did to Risa yesterday. I’m putting it down like the sick dog that it is. But maybe if it answers your questions, I could be persuaded to do it a little less painfully.”
Risa shook her head slowly. “This isn’t the wolf that attacked me,” she murmured. “That one was more…calculating? No, that’s not really the right word. It was more aware, I guess. This one is just lashing out.”
Ian nodded. “I’m glad someone else noticed it,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if it was just me.”
He looked into the wolf’s crazed eyes. There was definitely something wrong with it. Maybe it was sick or starving. But whatever it was, it was keeping the animal from thinking clearly. Ian found himself wondering what those eyes would look like once the shifter changed back into a human. Would they still be this brilliant, golden color? Or did they only look like this because it was an animal?
“Well either way, it did a number on you, McCafferty,” Carden spoke up. “Your shoulder looks like ground beef.”
“True, but I’m still alive. It never went for the kill.”
“That’s only because she doesn’t know how yet,” said a voice behind them.
Ian’s head snapped up to see a boy leaning casually against the door frame between the hall and the dining room. He didn’t look older than fifteen, but Ian thought that he must have been living on the streets for a long time. His brown hair was greasy and slicked back, as if he hadn’t had a shower in weeks, and his filthy clothes were ragged. Anyone would have taken him for just another homeless kid, but Ian could see the unnatural, malicious glint in his eyes.
“You know, it takes a little practice before a wolf learns how to feed and how to kill,” the kid explained. “Sometimes they have a knack for it and sometimes they don’t. I can’t wait to see how she turns out.”
“Who the hell are you?” Risa asked. She let go the wolf on the floor, leaving Ian and Carden to hold it down by themselves. She stood up and faced the boy with her hands on her hips.
The boy gave her a strange, dazzling smile that sent a chill down Ian’s spine. Someone that young shouldn’t look so…rabid. “Hey, you’re back,” the boy said excitedly. “I was hoping you’d come back.”
Risa paled slightly. Although she didn’t move, her posture suddenly looked tense, rather than confident. “You’re the one?” she asked in disbelief. “You’re the shapeshifter who killed those girls?”
The boy pretended not to hear her. “You owe me some money for what you did to my floors,” he said nonchalantly. “Oh yeah, how’s your arm doing?”
Carden whipped around to glare at the boy and Ian could feel the rage radiating from the vampire. “You hurt her?” he asked hostilely. “I’m going to rip your spine out.”
The boy only laughed. It was an unsettling sound—cold and hollow and metallic. He wasn’t afraid of anything, Ian realized. “Hey, dude, she was trespassing. She got what she deserved.”
“And what about the two girls upstairs?” Risa snarled. “What did they do to deserve what you did to them?”
“Them?” The boy’s smile broadened. “That was just for fun. Just a way to kill time.”
“And Hollis?” Ian snapped. He was still straddling the wolf on the floor, trying to hold it down by himself while Risa and Carden confronted the boy. “The blond girl who was here earlier. What did you do to her?”
The kid stared at him for a long moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “Man, you Daybreakers are so fucking stupid. Who the fuck do you think you’re sitting on, dumbass?”
Ian froze. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t true. “You’re lying.”
But then he looked down into the wolf’s eyes and realized why he found them so remarkable. Those were Hollis’s golden eyes, wild from the change. “No,” he whispered to himself.
More laughter. “Hey, she wanted it,” the boy told him with a smirk. “There was a wild animal in her, just waiting to bust out. As soon as she feeds, I’m going to give her a little test drive.”
If he didn’t have to hold down the wolf underneath him, Ian would have strangled the kid with his bare hands.
“All right,” Carden growled. “I’ve had about enough of this.” He lunged at the boy, but before the vampire could even lay a finger on him, the boy was on the other side of the room.
“Too slow,” the kid laughed, flipping his greasy hair out of his face. “I outrun thugs like you every day.”
“Look, kid. Do you even know who you’re dealing with?” Carden asked. “Ian and I are two of Circle Daybreak’s best assassins.”
“Daybreak assassins? Ooh, I’m shaking. What are you going to do? Love me to death?” the boy asked sarcastically.
“Well, you’ve got the ‘to death’ part right, anyway.”
The kid threw an amused glance down at Ian and the wolf. “Well, it looks like your boy is a little busy with that slut, so how about you, me, and your girl go at it? We’ll have a hot, sweaty threesome.”
“You got it.”
Carden drew his gun and aimed it at the boy. He fired off three shots rapidly, but the kid was a blur as he dodged them. He was the fastest moving target that Ian had ever seen.
The vampire fired again, but the boy jumped and transformed into a wolf in midair. He landed heavily with a deep, satisfied roar. A beast let out of its cage.
“Oh, I’m shaking,” Carden said, sounding bored as he mocked the kid’s words.
Maybe sensing another wolf nearby, the wolf that Ian was holding down started to thrash violently. Could it really be Hollis, snarling and twisting frantically in his grip? He didn’t want to believe it, but he still found himself in an agony of reluctance to hurt the wolf.
“Hollis!” he shouted, staring intently into her eyes as he willed her to recognize him.
Her eyes remained vacant. Alien. There was no rational intelligence there, just an animal.
But Ian realized that he’d been right—this wolf was starving. She probably hadn’t fed since she’d been changed and the new hunger was driving her out of her mind.
“Hollis, please,” he tried again. “You know me.”
The wolf still fought him and without Risa and Carden to help restrain her, she threw Ian off in a powerful jerk that sent him sliding across the floor. The hardwood scraped against his mutilated shoulder, pricking it with sharp splinters until he came to a stop at the edge of the hole in the living room floor.
Like a puppy after its bone, the wolf came bounding after him. Ian heard the deteriorated floorboards snapping under the animal’s weight and he shouted, “No, no, no!”
But the wolf didn’t care or understand. With a loud, jarring crack, the floor underneath both of them broke, sending them plummeting into the basement.
The fact that he was only a boy still shook Risa to her core. It just didn’t seem possible that the animal that had sliced open the two young girls and feasted on their innards was barely older than his victims had been. The sick person that had left their remains to decay in this filthy, dilapidated house was probably younger than Cori was right now.
Risa had thought that she’d seen evil. She had stalked and hunted it, night after night for most of her life. But she’d never seen anything like this kid. The people she normally killed were usually driven by greed or hate, but this teenage boy had no reasons for the things that he did. He simply enjoyed pain. He left his thoughts completely unguarded and the perverse things that went through his mind—things that he’d done, things that he wanted to do to her—made her nauseous.
And it had a strange affect on her. She was desperate to kill him, but she was also fearful and somewhat awed. She didn’t want to touch him. Some part of her was afraid that, if she touched him, his sickness would seep into her. She’d never felt this way while fighting someone and it left her off-balance. It was essential to keep a clear head if she wanted to survive, but she couldn’t get past her revulsion.
Carden wasn’t doing well either. He was a muscular guy, but Risa knew that he could move a lot faster than he was right now. He barely even resembled the skilled, Daybreak assassin that she knew. It was as if he was distracted by the kid, even as he was trying to fight him. The wolf dodged every kick, every stab, and even took the time to stand back and snort. It struck and slashed, tearing Carden’s skin off, one scrape at a time.
Then shifter changed back into his human form. A nasty smirk twisted his mouth. “You’re the best that Daybreak has?” he sneered. “I can’t believe the Night World hasn’t ground you all into dust by now.” He threw a punch that Carden barely evaded. “You’re all too soft-hearted. You’ve forgotten how to be what you are.”
“And what’s that?” Carden asked. He stabbed his heel into the boy’s gut with a sidekick, but when he went to follow it up with a roundhouse, the boy caught his foot and hurled him onto the floor.
“Predators,” he replied.
Risa ran to her soulmate’s side and helped him back up. As she moved, she felt the boy’s empty eyes on her.
“You understand what I’m talking about, right Risa?”
She shifted back into her fighting stance next to Carden, using the moment to catch her breath. But the question startled her. “What is that supposed to mean?”
The boy gave her another bright smile. He did that too often. “I know who you are,” he said.
“Really? How?”
“Got it from that blond slut’s mind.”
She had to keep him talking, keep him distracted until she found a way to attack. “How resourceful.”
He started to circle her and Risa followed suit. “I’ve heard the Night World talk about you.”
“Yeah? What do they say?”
“They say that you’ll be a legend one day.”
“Nice to know,” she replied dryly, keeping her footwork quick and light.
“You kill the most despicable humans and you don’t even care if the human world finds out about us. They say that you are a sign that the time has come for the Night World to stop hiding.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said, not quite hiding her irritation. Damn it, she never meant to inspire the Night World. She’d never imagined how much damage her hunting could cause. She only ever wanted justice. How had it gone so wrong?
“Well, I gotta say that I really admire your work.”
Risa sneered, unable to contain the anger flaring up inside her. “You don’t know anything about my work!” she snapped. “I kill people like you, you little shit.”
The kid laughed again. “Oh, I know. I was hoping that one day I might be able to draw you out, just so I’d have the chance to meet you. I guess all it took was cutting up two little bitches.”
Blindly, Risa charged at the boy. It seemed like she’d finally taken him by surprise. She knocked him down and they toppled onto the floor together, rolling over each other.
This was the right way to do it, she realized. No calm, controlled fight. No staying cool, using proper form, anticipating the opponent’s movements and using them against him. No clean kill. Like she’d done for her first kill—the man who had raped her friend—she disregarded years of martial arts training and let her rage take over.
She wrestled to get on top of him. Straddling his hips, Risa punched him in the jaw over and over again. Then she slammed the bottom of her fist into his face and chest. He hit her back, but Risa didn’t even feel it. She fell into a rhythm. With each blow, his blood spattered on her shirt, on her face, on the floor, but she didn’t stop.
She saw her little sister’s face and she punched. She saw the rotted bodies he’d left upstairs and she punched. She saw her father’s body in the casket and she punched. Her arms ached, but she didn’t give a damn. This was it. This was everything. There was no letting up, there was nothing stopping her. She beat and struck this sick, evil kid until his face was a bloody pulp and he was no longer fighting back. And then she hit him some more.
Some time later, strong arms came around her, lifting her off the shifter’s body, and she screamed. Flailing her legs, she jabbed the boy in the throat and in the stomach with her heels as she was torn away. She cried and fought like an animal as the arms around her tightened.
“Let me go!” she shrieked. The boy was lying on the floor right in front of her and she wanted to get back to him. She wanted to grind his body into the same disgusting mess that he’d made of the two little girls. “Let me go!”
“Shhh,” she heard behind her. “It’s all right. It’s all right, sweetheart.”
The arms held her even tighter, forcing her to be still in the solid embrace. The moment she stopped fighting, Risa’s legs gave out from exhaustion. But the arms caught her and lowered her to the floor.
Laying back, she looked up and saw Carden’s face. He reached out and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Risa hadn’t even realized that she was crying. “It’s all right,” he said again.
“Is he…?” she asked in a small voice.
Her soulmate nodded. “He’s dead. You beat the shit out of him.”
She looked over at the body lying across the floor, but all she could see was the head. The boy’s skull was split open and blood was pooling around pieces of brain matter that had oozed out. “Jesus,” Risa whispered, shivering. “Jesus…”
Before Ian could even sit up, Hollis was on top of him again, her heavy paws holding him down as her drool dripped onto his shirt.
He grimaced as he reached out and grabbed the wolf’s throat, his thumbs jabbing into pressure points. It was the only defense that he had against Hollis now and it barely held her fangs an inch away from him. Ian pushed his thumbs harder into her, but it didn’t help. He wasn’t sure if she was ignoring the pain or if she just couldn’t feel it at all.
His first instinct was to try to reason with her again, but it wouldn’t work. Hollis was too far gone in her hunger to think rationally. Ian doubted that she was even aware of what she was doing. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he knew that he had to if he wanted to stay alive.
There was a loud crash on the floor above them and the sound distracted the wolf for a scant second. It was all the time that Ian needed to lean up and smash his elbow into her face. While the wolf yelped, Ian pulled his knees up and kicked her sides, right over her kidneys. Finally he got his feet underneath her body and used them to push her off of him. She slammed into the wall and fell back onto the floor, dazed.
“Sorry, princess,” he murmured as he stood up.
More bangs from the ground floor shook the ceiling and Ian ran for the stairs, leaving Hollis in the basement. Once they’d killed the shapeshifter kid, he could get her a heart from one of the Daybreak banks in the city. Maybe after she’d fed, she would change back into her human form. Maybe she would be herself again. For now, Ian just needed her to stay out of the way.
He burst through the basement door and ran into the front hall.
And then he stopped short at the scene before him.
Risa Sinclair was sitting on top of the shapeshifter kid, pounding his body with feverish intensity. She was drenched in blood, but didn’t even seem to notice. Carden was standing aside, just watching his soulmate with a pained expression on his face. Neither one of them acknowledged his presence.
Ian was embarrassed. He felt like he’d just intruded on something deeply personal, yet he couldn’t force himself to move.
He’d never witnessed Risa kill anyone before, but her file indicated that her kills were usually quick and clean. Whatever he had missed while he’d been battling with Hollis had pushed Risa over the edge.
Had everyone gone mad?
Carden suddenly turned towards him and Ian realized that the other vampire had heard his thought. Before that, Carden hadn’t known that Ian was there. But now it was like he was coming out of a trance.
Slipping his arms around Risa, Carden heaved her off of the shifter. She screamed and sobbed as she fought her soulmate, but he didn’t let her go. He just held onto her, trying to sooth some deep-rooted pain that Ian did not understand.
He averted his eyes to give them some privacy and looked at the shifter lying on the floor. The boy was dead; he had bled out from the damage that Risa had inflicted. Ian stared at the body for a long time while Carden and Risa held each other and had a whispered conversation that he did not want to overhear.
Still, he envied them. It wasn’t their soulmate connection that he wanted. That seemed almost circumstantial. True, they’d probably met because of the link and maybe it had pulled them together faster than they might have done on their own. But they loved each other in a way that had nothing to do with silver cords or reading each other’s minds.
Ian scowled.
He didn’t know what drove him to do it. Part of him was outraged at the blasphemy of it. That was the part that belonged to Circle Daybreak. It believed in the sanctity of life and it believed in having respect for the dead, even for those that had wronged him. In death, we are all equal, so the credo went.
But he was still an assassin. And the part of him that understood why Risa had hunted down criminals, the part of him that felt horrified and outraged at what the shifter had done to Hollis, the part of him that craved vengeance drove him over to the body. He grabbed the kid’s arm, slippery with blood, and used it to drag the body across the hall and into the living room. And then Ian bent down and shoved it through the hole in the floor.
He heard a low, rumbling growl. Hollis, still a wolf, was on top of the body in a matter of seconds, tearing it to shreds. And Ian watched from the floor above her, feeling totally numb.
Part 11
Epilogue
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