His hand lashed out and surrounded her wrist, clamping down with awful strength as he turned without hesitation and dragged her into the shadowed yard of a darkened home. But she made not a single sound, a fact that lightly brushed his reasoning centers and evoked a tiny, tiny note of curiosity.

The overwhelming flood of desire and need crushed all reason as he found just enough shadow, if only barely, to cloak their presence. With both hands, he pulled her to him and looked down into her upturned face. Rather than fear, he saw hunger in her eyes, and her own free hand reached down to latch onto his rampant need. Then she smiled and, despite the thunder of his own heartbeat, he noted that her teeth looked... sharp. Not the fangs of those bloodsuckers that had burst into society, or the mammalian dentition of the shapeshifters that had followed into the light, but rather these were the saw-toothed triangles that filled the jaws of sharks—big sharks.

Before he could more than register this wrongness, he felt needle-sharp pain in his privates, as if pierced by talons. His ears heard a tearing sound that was simultaneously the shredding of cloth and the wet rip of flesh.

Pain on a scale he was previously unaware of hit his groin, even as she raised a hand grown huge and scaled, drenched in red, clutching bits of blue material and pale skin, and he felt a hot gushing between his legs.

Now it was his turn to scream, but when he opened his mouth and raised his chin, she blurred forward and he felt razors clamp down on his throat, cutting off all sound before he could make it.

The cold, wet ground came up to slam into his back as heat poured from two places in his body, the dim light silhouetting her bald head and heavy shoulders before fading away to complete blackness and the cold of oblivion.

His feet thrummed the ground reflexively as she fed, a flood of hot liquid pooling out into the leaves and dirt around them. The fast, staccato pulse of sound slowed and ceased, replaced with a sodden slurping and the periodic crunch of hard bone.

Chapter 16

Declan found Chris sitting in Arcane’s dining room the next morning, working his way through a triple-sized omelet and his own pot of coffee. He looked tired.

“Rough night without the mom?” Declan asked.

“Different schedules. Their normal bedtime is about an hour ago. They actually passed out a few hours earlier. Too much excitement, getting to visit their babysitter in her own home, meeting a small army of witches and weres, the drive up yesterday. They’re off-kilter a bit, but not horribly so. Luckily they went down before I got called out,” Chris said.

“Called out?”