He’d walked past her in the union, then had stopped and come back around. With that cheeky grin, he’d plopped himself down at her table and asked what she was studying for. When she’d told him, he’d nodded sagely and asked who her prof was. They agreed that McKittrich was a hard-ass, and he mentioned he’d aced the course last semester. The offer to help her study had been unexpected and she’d nodded dumbly at him, surprised that her fantasies were manifesting themselves in real life. He hadn’t even minded when she mentioned the study group. He seemed nice enough, but she knew better than to invite a stranger over without anyone else there. But if things went well…she certainly wouldn’t say no to some private time together. The longer she had to wait to see him again, the more certain Cassidy became that they would hook up.
“What’s your address?” Cal had asked. He’d repeated the question when she stared blankly at him.
“My place is really small,” she’d finally said.
“It’s better than my place,” he’d laughed. “Way too many roommates.”
When she’d written down her address on a scrap of notebook paper and passed it to him, he’d winked, and then left.
The intercom by the front door buzzed sharply and she jumped. She’d been thinking of Cal’s hair and chiseled cheekbones a little too long. Her cheeks colored and she was glad no one else was there. Having no roommates definitely had its advantages.
She pressed the button and leaned in until her mouth almost touched the microphone. “Who’s there?” Hopefully whoever was at the other end would understand the question through the crappy speaker.
“It’s Cal. Ready to get your study on?” At least that’s what she thought he said. It was difficult to make out.
“Sure.” Cassidy pressed the door release button, holding it down for a couple seconds. He was early, by almost two hours. Still, that gave them time to hang out just the two of them until the other members of their study group made an appearance. A thrill tingled its way down her spine. Who knew what could happen in a couple of hours?
She opened the door to the hall then looked down. If she’d known he would be this early, she would have worn something that showed a little more cleavage. It wasn’t like there was that much of it, and what little there was, really needed to be displayed to its best advantage.
A couple of minutes later, Cal walked through the door, ginger hair standing straight up as usual.
“Hi,” Cassidy said brightly, grinning at him across the living room.
He smiled back, lips tight. Four more people filed in behind him. She had no idea who they were; she recognized none of them from school. A woman and two men stood on either side of him while a second woman with white-blond hair shut the door behind them.
“Who are they?” Cassidy asked. Her excitement was gone, snuffed out as if it had never been. The air vibrated with tension. Something wasn’t right. The blond woman threw the deadbolt and Cassidy jumped at the sound. “I think you should leave. I’ll study on my own.”
“That’s not going to happen,” one of the men said. His eyes seemed to be glowing red, which was impossible. She hadn’t seen that. This wasn’t happening, whatever it was.
Cassidy darted into the short hall to the bathroom and her bedroom. She slammed the bedroom door shut behind her so hard that one of her framed posters slid off the wall and hit the ground with a thump. There was a lock on the handle, thank god. The dresser slid more easily than she thought it should have. She wedged it against the door, and then took shelter in the closet, crouching under the hanging clothes. She needed help. Her heart pounded in her throat, making each breath into a shallow, shuddering thing.
The phone! She pulled it from her back pocket. Her fingers shook so badly she had to enter her pass code twice before the lock screen disappeared. The phone app opened much too slowly. They were at the door now. The handle fell off the door, bouncing on the dresser’s top with a series of metallic clanks before falling to the floor.
Mary Alice was the last person she’d called and she mashed the redial icon madly until the phone indicated it was dialing. It went right to voice mail again, and Cassidy gave a strangled moan of frustration.
“Mary!” she whispered, trying to pull in enough breath to keep talking. “Oh god, you have to help me! They’re here and I don’t know what they want.” The door crashed open, toppling the dresser and sending it sliding across the floor. She screamed, unable to stop herself and hating the high, thin sound of terror.
Cal strode through the doorway, both men with him. He grabbed the phone from her with one hand while yanking her from the closet by her hair. Cassidy grabbed at her scalp to try to relieve the pressure. He turned and threw her onto the bed. His eyes glowed brilliant white, and they burned into hers when he leaned over her.
“This is your sister’s fault,” he said. His words were garbled and he drooled slightly around pointed teeth that were much too large for his mouth. “We’d hunt her anywhere after what she did, but you’ll do. I couldn’t believe it when you were practically dropped in my lap at the union.”
The man with the red eyes tossed a little square of fabric to him. “Make sure she’s really the one we want.”
Cal snatched the fabric out of the air without looking at it. He pressed it to his face and inhaled deeply, then bent toward her. He leaned in, sniffing the air next to her head in a curiously delicate fashion. The sniffing went on for a while, and he parted his lips, drawing her scent into his mouth.
“She’s it. And even if she wasn’t, you think MacTavish would care that much if we give him one more?”
Cassidy tried to crawl away from him, and he did nothing to stop her. She bumped into one of the other men who stood at the side of the bed. He grinned at her and his face blurred, stretching crazily. Fur sprouted around his eyes and Cassidy screamed again. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. She chanted the thought like a mantra, but nothing changed.
“We’re not going to kill you, little girl,” said the third man on the other side of the bed.
“Not yet,” Cal said. Ginger hair was spreading down the sides of his head and under his shirt. “You’ll wish we had.”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to play with your food?” said a voice in the doorway. The blond woman stood there, her eyes glowing electric blue. “We don’t have much time, she called someone. Don’t fuck this up.”
“Yes, Britt.” Cal turned back to her and grabbed her arm, pulling her toward him. They all ringed the bed now, staring down at her with eyes that gleamed in impossible shades. Fur-covered faces and hands tipped with claws reached out for her, holding her down, keeping her immobile as they shredded the clothes she wore.
One of them clapped a hand with too-long fingers over her mouth when she drew breath to shriek out her terror. What came out around the hand was indistinct and would never summon help. If only Mary Alice had answered the phone. But what could she do against these monsters?
Searing pain shot through her arm. Cal watched her, his mouth around her right forearm, blood oozing out between the long teeth buried in her flesh. Another bite, this one in the shoulder, pushed another scream from her throat. It felt like someone was holding a hot poker against her skin and refusing to let up.
The mattress sagged on one side and Cassidy stared in horror as a huge wolf climbed up onto the bed. Its tongue lolled out of the side of its mouth as it stalked toward her. Unable to process what was happening, Cassidy felt like she was watching the scene from the end of a long tunnel. When blackness closed in around her, she didn’t fight it.
Chapter Nine
Uncle Ralph was not happy. His jowls quivered with the effort of not tearing into her in as public a place as the coffee shop.
“Look, I don’t see what your problem is,” Mary Alice said, her voice eminently reasonable. She smiled slightly. Anyone watching would have no idea she was in the middle of a heated argument. Uncle Ralph’s red face was a little more obvious. “We know where
the wolves are. We know they’ve attacked others. What more do you want to know?”
Ralph took a long pull on his coffee, and then exhaled slowly through his mustache. He massaged the back of his neck with one hand. “You managed to answer the least important question. Yes, we know the wolves are there, but you don’t know how many are there or what their intentions are.” He glared her down when she opened her mouth to speak, and she settled for taking a drink of her own coffee instead. “A bunch of furries attacking another furry doesn’t tell us shit.” He smiled stiffly, trying to look as natural as she was. “All it tells us is they have some territorial bullshit going on. They’re furries, I mean, come on. When don’t they fight over territory?”
“And since when have you heard about a female loner skulking around the edges of a pack, especially when she’s in heat?” Mary Alice shook her head. “She should have been all over having someone to satisfy her, but she wanted nothing to do with them. There’s more to it than there seems. I want to track down the female.”
“For what? She’s a tiny little goldfish in a pond full of barracudas. Don’t worry about the goldfish nibbling on your toes while the ’cudas are trying to rip off your limbs.”
Mary Alice had nothing further to say in the face of his insistence. She decided not to mention that she’d already taken the liberty of tracking the female to her general territory in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Ralph pushed himself up from the table and looked down at her. The poorly concealed attempt to establish some dominance was wasted. Mary Alice simply stared back at him.
“Find out how many of them are left and what they’re planning. Otherwise, you’d better bet I’ll bring in Stiletto from Atlanta.”
“That’s fine, Ralph.” This time, the easy smile was more of a baring of teeth than anything with even fake emotion. “You do what you need to do.”
He stared at her suspiciously, then shook his head and stalked out of the coffee shop. Mary Alice waited the requisite seven minutes before exiting and heading in the other direction.
She walked down the busy Chicago sidewalk, barely aware of how the crowds opened up before her. Fishing her phone from her pocket, she thumbed on the touch screen and connected it back to the cell network. Protocols dictated that her phone never be connected to the network when she met with Uncle Ralph. In fact, she was to disable the phone fifteen minutes before the start of any briefing.
Almost immediately, voice mail notifications popped up on her phone. Had crazy Ann figured out her new number? She bit back an angry oath before bringing up her voice mail. If it was Ann, she was going to get that little flunky at the gallery canned, no matter how apologetic he was.
“Hey, Mary.” Her sister’s voice issued from the cell-phone speaker. “I need to cancel dinner tonight. I’m having some people over to study for midterms. I’ll make it up to you, maybe we can do two dinners next week. I won’t have to study my ass off then. So, yeah. Bye!”
That was no surprise. In fact Mary Alice kicked herself for not suggesting it. Cassidy had ducked out on their dinner for every midterm and final in the five years she’d been in university. Uncle Ralph and those lycans had taken up more of her thoughts than she’d realized.
The next message was also from Cassidy. Now that was weird, and the timestamp was maybe fifteen minutes after she canceled dinner. Her forehead creased into a small frown.
“Mary!” Cassidy’s whispered terror came through loud and clear. “Oh god, you have to help me! They’re here and I don’t know what they want.” Ragged panting filled Mary Alice’s ear. A loud crash filtered through the phone’s crappy speaker, loud enough that she had to pull it away from her ear. She held it back up to hear her sister’s terrified scream be quickly muffled. The message ended.
There was one last message, also from Cassidy. Mary Alice stared at her phone’s screen before pressing it with trembling fingers.
“Keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you,” said a rough male voice. “This is your own damn fault.” The call disconnected and Mary Alice looked at the timestamp. This had been twenty minutes ago. Damn Uncle Ralph and his insistence on her phone being disabled when they met!
“Excuse me.” A middle-aged woman twitched her shopping bags around Mary Alice’s legs and she realized she was standing in the middle of the sidewalk. People flowed past her, some giving her dirty looks as they had to step around her.
Mary Alice broke into a jog, jostling through the crowded sidewalk, heading for her truck. She kept going faster, the sense of panic compelling her forward like a whip biting at her heels. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she stepped out into the street and sprinted along the parked cars. It was still half a block to her truck, but she made it there in record time. Shouts and cries rose in her wake; many of these people would never have seen anyone run so fast. Most humans couldn’t approach her speed. If Uncle Ralph heard about this, she would catch it from him for sure, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass. Not if Cassidy was in danger.
Fumbling with her keys at the door of the truck, Mary Alice cursed herself for not having remote entry. The truck was from the nineties and had never been blessed with any modern convenience. The windows even rolled down using a handle, something which had never really bothered her before, but as she tried to force the key into the lock for a second time without success, she couldn’t help but swear.
Once in the truck, she peeled out of the spot, not bothering with the seat belt. At least the car wasn’t going to pitch a fit, not like her mom’s newer-model sedan. Traffic was stop and go and she fumed as she inched closer to the light. If the sidewalk hadn’t been full of so many weekend shoppers, she would have been tempted to cut across it.
How did they find her? It had to be lycans. Or maybe a group of vamps. No, not during the day. Maybe the demon she’d taken out a couple weeks back had been working with someone? She’d worked so hard to keep her work and family lives separate to avoid exactly this scenario. She hadn’t been expecting to lose her dad, but one day he was just gone. If there was anything she could do to keep something from happening to Cass, she would do it. She would move mountains if it would keep her sister safe.
The light changed and she accelerated, leaving strips of rubber behind on the concrete. It didn’t get her very far, but she felt a little better for it. At least now that she’d cleared the light, traffic was flowing.
The twenty-minute ride to her sister’s crap apartment at the edge of campus was excruciating. Time passed very slowly for her under the best of circumstances, thanks to her improved reflexes and heightened awareness, but this ride was pure torture. Mary Alice was aware of every single minute that passed, second by unbearable second. The apartment had a loading zone out front and for once it was empty. She pulled in and jumped out of the truck, leaving it parked a couple feet away from the curb. People would bitch, but she didn’t care.
Cassidy’s apartment was on the fourth floor. She buzzed in at the intercom, but there was no response. Mary Alice pressed on the button again, really leaning on it. Still nothing. Feeling more frantic by the second, Mary Alice ran her fingers down the row of buttons. Seconds passed before a cacophony of voices issued from the speaker. Another couple of seconds ground by before she heard the buzz she’d been waiting for and the door clicked open.
Mary Alice burst through the door and headed straight for the stairs. She would usually have taken them instead of the elevator anyway, but not three at a time at a dead run. One of Cassidy’s neighbors had to flatten himself against the wall of the stairwell as she flew by. He yelled something at her departing back. From the tone it was uncomplimentary, but she paid no more attention to the words than she had to him.
She paused when she exited the stairwell. For a dozen heartbeats or more, she stood frozen in the hall, feeling the air. There was no way she would go running headlong into a potential ambush; she’d been too well trained. Nothing she could see or hear should have put
her on edge, yet she vibrated with wrongness. The air was too still. Something had happened. Something was definitely wrong.
On the balls of her feet, she stalked down the hall, past five closed doors, half of which were festooned with cheerily grim Halloween decorations. Grinning skeleton heads and yellow-eyed black cats seemed to watch her as she made her deliberate way to the hall’s far end. Cassidy’s was the last on the right. Mary Alice kept all her senses open to any signs of life. An apartment door would be the perfect place to launch an ambush. So would the wall. The supranormals she usually tangled with would have no problems coming through the cheaply constructed walls of this place. Ripping through drywall would be about as easy as tearing through a paper bag. Her training kept her focused, but what she really wanted to do was burst into her sister’s apartment and kill anyone she found in there who didn’t share her DNA.
Silence reigned behind the doors to the other apartments. That in itself was unnerving. The vast majority of humans knew nothing about the existence of supranormals. Most of them were happy in their cozy little world where they occupied the top of the evolutionary heap, but their primitive hindbrains recognized predators. Whatever was going on, the humans on this floor were terrified.
Mary Alice paused in front of Cassidy’s door. She spread her fingers on the alligatored wood. Decades of paint rippled rough under her fingers where chips had been covered with more paint, then chipped again. She felt nothing, no vibrations, nothing to tell her anything about what she might find when she walked through the door. She heard nothing, but a faint metallic tang rode the air. It filled her nostrils as she stood there. The scent was as familiar to her as her own. It was half her own.
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