I sat up. Next to the bed, Beast raised her tiny head from her dog bed.
I listened. Crickets chirped. A cool breeze drifted through the screen of the open window, stirring the beige curtains. The wooden floor felt cool under my bare feet. I really should get a rug in here.
Another gentle chime. It felt as if someone had tossed a rock into calm water and the ripples splashed against my skin. Definitely an intruder.
I stood up. Beast made a mad lunge and licked my ankle. I took the broom from its spot against the wall and left the bedroom. A long hallway stretched before me, dappled with cool darkness and moonlight coming through the large bay windows. I walked along the hallway, zeroing in on the disturbance. The Shih Tzu trotted next to me like a vigilant seven-pound black-and-white mop.
The inn and I were bound so tightly it was almost an extension of me. I could target any intrusion with pinpoint accuracy. This particular intruder wasn't moving. He was milling about in one spot.
The house was dark and quiet around me. I crossed the hallway, turned, and stopped at a door to the western balcony. Something moved below, in the orchard. Let's see what the night dragged in. Soundlessly, the door swung open in front of me, and I stepped out onto the balcony.
In the orchard, twenty yards from the house, Sean Evans was urinating on my apple tree.
You've got to be kidding me.
"Stop that," I hissed in a theatrical whisper.
He ignored me. His back was to me and he was still wearing the same jeans and gray T-shirt I'd seen him in that morning.
"Sean Evans! I see you. Stop marking your territory on my apple tree."
"Don't worry," he said without turning. "It won't hurt the apples."
The nerve. "How would you know? You've probably never grown an apple tree in your entire life."
"You wanted me to handle it," he said. "I'm handling it."
He was handling it, all right. "What makes you think that marking things will have any effect? The dog killer ignored your marks before."
"This is how it's done," he said. "There is a certain etiquette to these things. He challenged me, and now I'll challenge him back."
"Not in my orchard, you won't. Get out."
Beast barked once to add her support.
"What is that?" he asked.
"It's a dog."
Sean zipped himself up, turned around, and took a running start at an oak tree. It was an incredible thing to watch: six feet away from the oak he leapt up and forward, bounced off the bark upward to the spot where two large branches split from the trunk, pushed off them like he was weightless, landed on the branch stretching toward the balcony, ran along it until it thinned, and crouched. The whole thing took less than two seconds.
His eyes shone once with bright golden amber. His face had gained a dangerous sharpness, predatory and slightly feral. A shiver ran down my spine. No, not repressed. Not even a little bit.
A werewolf was bad news. Always. If I had met him on the street like this, I'd have started making soothing noises and thinking of exit strategies. But we were on my turf.
"That's not a dog," Sean said.
Beast let out a tiny snarl, astonished at the insult.
"She weighs what, about six, seven pounds? Now, I'm willing to concede that somewhere in the distant past one of her ancestors might have been a dog. But now she's an oversized chinchilla."
"First you insult my house, now you insult my dog." I leaned on my broom.
"She has little ponytails," Sean said, nodding at the two tiny ponytails above the Shih Tzu's eyes.
"Her fur gets in her eyes. She's due for a grooming."
"Aha." Sean tilted his head to the side. He seemed completely feral now. "You're asking me to take a dog with two ponytails seriously."
"I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm telling you: get off my property."
He bared his teeth at me in a slightly deranged smile. He looked hungry. "Or what? You'll hit me with your broom?"
Something like that. "Yes."
"I'm so scared right now I'm practically shaking."
He was within the inn's boundary. I was clearly an innkeeper—the broom was a dead giveaway. Yet he showed no respect. I'd met some arrogant werewolves—when you were a highly effective killing machine, you tended to think the world was your oyster—but this one took the cake. "Go away, siri." There. That would fix him.
"Name's Sean." He tilted his head again.
No reaction to the insult. Either he had a bulletproof ego or he had no idea I'd just called him a sniveling coward in his own language.
Sean tilted his head. "So how does a girl like you know about werewolves?"
"A girl like me?"
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-four."
"Most twenty-four-year-old women I know sleep in something more revealing. Something more adult."
I raised my eyebrows. "There is nothing wrong with my Hello Kitty T-shirt." It was thin and comfortable, and it reached to my mid-thigh, which meant that if I had to get up in the middle of the night to dispatch any intruders, I'd do it with my butt covered and modesty intact.
Sean frowned. "Sure, if you're five. Got a touch of arrested development happening there?"
Argh. "What I have happening is none of your business."
"It fits," he said.
"What?"
"The T-shirt. It fits your whole lifestyle. I bet you grew up around here too."
Where was he going with this? "Maybe."
"Probably never left the town, right? Never been anywhere strange, never done anything crazy, and now you run this bed-and-breakfast and drink tea with old ladies on a balcony. A nice quiet life."
Ha! "There is nothing wrong with a nice quiet life."
"Sure." Sean shrugged. "When I was twenty-four, I wanted to see the world. I wanted to go places and meet people."
I couldn't resist. "And kill them."
He bared his teeth at me. "Sometimes. The point is, if you've stayed around here all your life, how do you know about werewolves? There isn't one for miles, and if there is, they're dormant. I combed this territory before I took it. The closest werewolf is in a suburb of Houston, and when I spoke to him, he confirmed that there hasn't been an active werewolf in this area for years. So how do you know about werewolves?"
"Don't like your own kind much, do you?"
"Do you always duck the questions or am I just special?"
"You're special," I told him, sinking as much sarcasm into it as I could. "Now shoo. Go on."
He dipped his head and stared at me, with unblinking, focused intensity like a wolf in the middle of winter sighting his prey. His eyes shone, catching the moonlight. Every hair on the back of my neck rose.
"I'll find out. I don't like being out of the loop."
And now he was threatening me. That does it. One more word and he'd regret ever opening his mouth. "Leave. Now."
The werewolf grinned at me, his eyes full of wild. "Fine, fine. Sleep tight."
He dropped off the branch, fell two stories to the ground, landed in a soft half crouch, and took off running. His long legs carried him out of my orchard, and a second later the magic chimed in my head, announcing that he had left the inn grounds.
I turned and walked back to my bedroom, the balcony door closing softly behind me. Obnoxious smart-ass. Never been anywhere, never done anything, huh. Arrested development, huh. Considering that it was coming from a man who spent his nights peeing on his neighbors' fences, that was rich. Shoot, I should've told him that. Oh well, too late now.
I climbed back into bed. They didn't call his kind lunatics for nothing. At least he decided to do something about the dog killer.
Half an hour later I decided it was time to stop thinking up witty and inventive insults involving werewolves. The house was quiet. Beast snored softly. I yawned, flipped over my warm pillow, and scooted deeper under the covers. Time to go to sleep...
The magic rippled, splashing against me like a tide.
Someone was running along the edge of the inn's grounds, skimming it. It was moving fast, too fast for a human. It could be Sean, but somehow I doubted it.
Chapter Two
I knelt by the spot where the intruder had veered off from the inn's boundary. Four triangular indentations marked the hard soil—claw marks. The trespasser had sunk its claws into the ground as it turned on its foot and dashed off. I had just missed it.
In front of me the street lay silent, the trees mere charcoal shadows rustling softly in the wind like sheets of paper sliding against each other. The subdivision was hardly rambunctious, and even on Friday nights, the activity died down by midnight. It was close to one o'clock.
I breathed in quietly, listening, watching. No hint of movement anywhere. No stray noises. I'd taken three precious seconds to throw on some shorts and a thicker T-shirt and snap a rubber band around my hair, and now the thing with claws was gone.
I raised my hand, focused my power on the tips of my fingers, and then touched the indentation. A pale yellow trail ignited on the ground. It faded almost instantly, but not before I registered its direction. It was heading down the street, deeper into the subdivision.
Chasing it would mean leaving the inn's grounds, where I was at my strongest. I should stay out of it. I should turn around and go back to bed. It was none of my business.
If it killed a child, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. I'd made my decision, for better or worse. Now wasn't the time to have doubts.
I needed a weapon. Something with reach. I concentrated. The broom flowed in my hand, the "plastic" of its handle melting into dark metal shot through with hairline fractures of glowing, brilliant blue. A razor-sharp blade formed on one end while the shaft of the broom elongated to seven feet. An old line from an Italian martial-arts manual popped into my head: the longer the spear, the less deceiving it is. Seven feet would do.
The last of the blue cracks melted. The spear, now the dark gray of Teflon, felt comforting in my hand. I took off down the road, keeping to the shadows. The glowing trail faded. I would've loved to rekindle it, but I'd left the inn's grounds and my bag of fun tricks had shrunk.
Avalon Subdivision had been built by a drunkard who couldn't draw a straight line if his life had depended on it. The streets didn't just turn, they curved and looped back on themselves as if they were the whorls of a giant's thumbprint. Camelot Road was the subdivision's main street, and even it bent like a snake slithering through the forest of houses. I passed by the side streets, briefly glancing down each one. Gawain Street, Igraine Road, Merlin Circle... The streets lay empty. Here and there lights were still on, but most of the residents had gone to bed.
Galahad Road.
A floodlight shone bright in the distance. Probably motion triggered. Someone or something was moving outside.
Keep going or check it out? If it was nothing, it would cost me time. But if it was something, I could stop looking.
I crossed the street to the opposite side and ran, hiding in the shadows of mature oaks. It would only take a minute.
A house sat in the shadow of a poplar tree. Gray Texas limestone, two stories, bay window, two-car garage—pretty standard fare for the subdivision. A car sat in the driveway, a Honda Odyssey, both passenger doors and the hatch open, showing white plastic bags in the cargo area, probably from a twenty-four-hour grocery store. The familiar shape of a child's car seat curved in the back. The door of the house stood ajar.
A couple coming home from a trip, maybe? They must've stopped at the store on the way so they wouldn't have to go out tomorrow, come home, parked, and taken their child inside. It was probably nothing, but I wouldn't know until I took a closer look.
The house directly across the street from the limestone offered no cover, but the property right before it had a nice thick hedge. I snuck over to the hedge and crouched to the side of it, resting my spear in the grass.
A car started somewhere deeper in the subdivision and drove away, the sound of its engine fading. Silence claimed the night. The moon shone bright, a glowing silver coin spilling gauzy veils of light onto thin shreds of clouds. Here and there stars pierced the darkness. To the left, a plane left a pale trail across the sky. The air smelled fresh, the night breeze pleasantly cool on my skin.
Quiet.
A shadow dashed across the lit-up driveway, swiped a grocery bag from the back of the Odyssey, and sprinted across the yard to the side of the house before sinking into the night shadows.
Got you, you creepy bastard. If I had blinked, I would've missed it. As it was, I got a vague impression of something simian and large, covered with patchy fur.
The thing on the side of the house ripped the bag apart, tossing the pieces out onto the moonlit lawn. Only its forepaws were visible—ratlike, larger than human hands, with bony hairless fingers armed with sharp black claws. Chunks of a yellow Styrofoam tray followed the bag, and the creature tore into its contents. A crunching noise announced bird bones being crushed. Lovely.
"Baby, did you bring in the groceries?" A woman asked from inside the house.
A muffled male voice answered.
Stay in the house. Stay in the nice safe house.
A woman appeared in the doorway. She was in her early thirties and looked tired, her shoulder-length brown hair messy, her T-shirt rumpled.
The creature dropped its stolen meat.
Stay in the house.
The woman crossed the threshold and headed for the car. The creature melted into the shadows. Either it hid because it was scared or because it was about to strike.
The woman checked the trunk, picked up the lone grocery bag, looked into it and frowned. "Malcolm? Did you take the chicken in?"
No answer.
The monster was nowhere in sight.
Take your bag and go inside.
The woman leaned into the rear passenger door, talking to herself. "I could've sworn... losing my mind."
A flicker of movement on the side of the house, high, about fifteen feet off the ground. I tensed, ready to sprint.
The beast scuttled into the light, crawling along the sheer wall fifteen feet up, like some giant monstrous gecko. It was at least five feet long, maybe five and a half. Spotted black and blue fur grew in patches along its spine; the rest of it was covered with pinkish wrinkled skin. Its skull was almost horselike, if horses could be carnivores. Long jaws, too large for the head, protruded forward, making the wide, flat nose seem ridiculously small. A forest of sharp bloodred fangs sprouted from the jaws, barely hidden by white lips. But the eyes, the eyes were worst of all. Small and sunken deep into the skull, they burned with malevolent intelligence.
The creature gripped the brick wall with oversized digits and dashed across, toward the car, agile like a monkey, too fast for a spear throw. A moment later and it jumped off the wall, clearing the car in one single, powerful lunge, and landed behind the Honda.
Damn it. I hefted my spear and ran.
The woman straightened.
The beast leaned forward, muscles on its four limbs tensing. It looked enormous now. The biggest Great Dane I'd ever seen was four and a half feet long. This beast had a full foot on it.
The creature opened its mouth and growled. A deep, guttural snarl rippled through the night. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. It didn't sound like a dog. It sounded like something dangerous and vicious.
The woman froze.
Don't run, I willed, moving toward them. Whatever you do, don't run. If you run, it will chase and kill you.
The woman took one tiny step toward the door.
The creature slinked behind her and murmured something in a strange language full of whispers and moaning, as if a dozen people lamented and mumbled at once.
"Oh Jesus," the woman whimpered and took another baby step toward the door.
The beast let out a high-pitched cackle. I was almost there.
The woman dashed into the house. The beast chased her. The door slammed shut and the creature ram
med it head-on. The door shuddered with a loud thud.
Oh no, you don't. I flipped the spear and thrust. "Put your weight into it, darling!" Mom's voice said from my memories. I sank my entire momentum into the spear. The point of the spearhead sliced into the pink, wrinkled flesh, right between the creature's ribs.
The beast howled. White blood bubbled around the wound.
I leaned into the spear and turned, wrenching the impaled creature away from the door and pushing it onto the grass. The monster clawed the lawn, my spear stuck in its ribs like a harpoon. I lunged down, pinning it, and pushed, putting every ounce of strength into the spear, forcing the beast across the grass and into the darkness on the side of the house.
My heart pounded at about a million beats per minute.
The revolting thing screeched, squirming on the end of the spear. If it was human, it would be dead. I should've hit its heart, but it showed no signs of dying. I had to finish it and quickly, before the entire subdivision noticed its screaming and came outside to investigate. I had no clue what its vital organs were or where they were located.
If I couldn't aim for precision, I'd have to go for massive trauma. I freed the spear with a sharp tug. The beast flipped on its feet, impossibly fast, and struck, its long claws like sickles. I shied to the side. Sharp talons raked my left side, searing my ribs with hot pain. I bit on a scream and thrust, aiming for its gut. The beast knocked my spear aside with its shoulder. I whipped the weapon around and drove the butt of the spear into its throat, pinning it to the side of the house. The beast gurgled, scraping at the air with its claws, trying to rend me to pieces. Now, while it was struggling to breathe, or never. I flipped the spear and drove it into the shrunken chest.
Bone crunched. I freed the spear and stabbed it in, again and again, as fast as I could. Stable, powerful thrusts. Another crunch. White blood leaked from the gashes. Sweat drenched my face. The spear felt too heavy.
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