A man shoved the door open behind us. Beefy, in his late forties. His face had a lovely red color that probably meant he was about to blow his gasket. “Hey! Hey, you! I want to talk to you!”

I kept walking. “You threw two humans through two different store windows. Enlighten me, what happens when a shapeshifter goes through a sheet of glass?”

“Nothing,” Ian volunteered.

“Stop,” the man snarled. “Stop, God damn it.”

“What happens when a human goes through a sheet of glass?”

Nobody wanted to answer.

“I’ll enlighten you, then: they get bruises, possible broken bones, and multiple lacerations. And because they don’t have the benefit of Lyc-V, their broken bones will take weeks to heal and the lacerations can kill them if the broken glass happens to slice them at the right place. You almost killed them over a bucket of chicken. What in the world were you thinking?”

We turned the corner, hidden from the building by the stone wall.

“We just wanted to intimidate them,” Ascanio said.

The man behind us took the corner at high speed. “You fucking bitch, I said stop!”

The beastkin-crazy Andrea was about to surface. I could feel it.

I looked at him. “Jeff Cooper, I presume?”

“That’s right. You degenerates think you can just come here and push people around.” He stabbed his finger into my chest.

The three boudas went from chastised to baring their teeth in a blink.

“Don’t put your hand on me again,” I said.

He poked his finger into my chest again. “Well, I have something to tell you: don’t let the sun set on you in this county, because…”

I grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward, tripping him with my foot. He went down back first and I caught him by his throat, three feet above the ground, lifted him up a bit and bent down to his face. My eyes glowed with murderous red. My voice turned rough with an animal growl. “Listen well, because I won’t be repeating myself, you racist prick. If you make any trouble for me or my people, I’ll hunt you down like the pig you are and carve a second mouth across your gut. They’ll find you hanging by your own intestines. The next time you hear something laugh and howl in the night, hug your family, because you won’t see the sunrise.”

I opened my fingers. He crashed on the ground, his face white as a sheet. He scrambled backward, rolled to his feet, and took off.

The three shapeshifters stared at me, openmouthed.

“That’s how you intimidate people. No witnesses and not a mark on him. Get your asses to the car.”

CHAPTER 12