“She might not have flesh, but she’s as real as you and me.”

The little girl frowned and stood. She was wearing a smock that was grimy and blood-splattered, and there were half-healed slashes all over her arms and legs. Anger rose within me, then swirled away. I needed to make sure we were safe before I could allow any reaction to those cuts.

Because those cuts were too sharp, too straight, to have been caused by anything other than a blade.

“How can she have no body and be real?”

There was still no fear in her voice, and no apparent realization just how close to disaster we truly were. I wondered briefly if she was human. She didn’t smell like it, but then, she didn’t exactly smell like a shifter, either.

“Because not everything that is real has human flesh.”

I clipped the rifle onto a loop on my belt and squatted beside the ranger as Cat’s energy hit again. Images slashed through my mind—dark beings running through the trees, their hunger surging across the night. We needed to go. Now.

I gripped the man under his shoulder and heaved him over mine. “Do you have a name?”

She hesitated, and then said, almost shyly, “Penny.”

“We need to go, Penny.” I thrust upward, my legs shaking under the stranger’s sudden weight. Holding him steady with one hand, I unclipped the rifle and rested my finger against the trigger. “Run with Cat. She’ll take you into a safe place. Wait for me there.”

The little girl’s lips trembled a little. “And Jonas?”

“Jonas and I will be right behind you.”

She nodded, then scrambled over the tree trunk and ran after the energy that was Cat as she retreated through the trees. I followed, Jonas’s body a deadweight that allowed no real speed or mobility.

Bear reappeared, his whisperings full of warning. I ran up the hill as the night around me began to move, to flow, with evil.

They were close.

So close.

But there was something else out there in the night. It was a power—an energy—that felt dark. Watchful. At one with the vampires and yet separate from them.

And instinct suggested I needed to fear that darkness far more than the vampires who swept toward us.

I cursed softly and pushed the thought away. One threat at a time. I needed to survive the vampires before I worried about some other, nebulous threat. “Bear, I need your help here.”