We fell silent. For a long moment I simply enjoyed being next to him. If only this could last . . .

“He hasn’t attacked me on sight,” I whispered. “That means he’ll want to talk to me.”

“No,” Curran said. “Not alone.”

“Sooner or later this conversation has to happen. If he planned on killing me, why go through all this trouble? He knew where I was. He could’ve just put a sniper on the roof across the street from Cutting Edge and put a bullet through my head as I unlocked the office.”

Curran exhaled his frustration. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe.”

“I know,” I whispered. “And I’ll do the same for you.”

We shouldn’t have come here. I closed my eyes. I had to sleep. Tomorrow would be another day, another fight. Tomorrow Hugh would approach me and I had to be sharp. Once I figured out what his angle was, things would become a lot simpler.

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 9

I opened my eyes. The magic was down and Curran was gone. The clock said ten past seven. Plenty of time to get dressed and make it to Doolittle’s quarters in time for the meeting.

A plate waited for me on the table, covered with a piece of paper. The paper said in Curran’s rough scrawl, Went to talk to Mahon. Packs want to meet to “discuss issues.” Don’t forget to eat.

Under the paper, the plate contained two eggs and a lion-sized piece of ham. I ate a third of it, brushed my teeth, put on my jeans, and strapped on my sword. New day, new battle.

Our bags had been brought in from the ship. I dug through them and pulled out my beat-up copy of the Almanac of Mythological Creatures. I’d read it cover to cover so many times that I had memorized entire pages, but sometimes looking at it helped me connect the dots.

I’ve never heard of shapeshifters turning into winged cats, but since Lyc-V was present in the blood, most likely the mechanism of the transformation was the same: the virus infected some creature and then infected a human. The first step was to figure out what the creature was.

Winged cats weren’t the most common motif in mythology, but they did occur. Freja, a Norse goddess, had a chariot that was pulled across the sky by two giant cats, Brygun and Trejgun, who probably had wings. They were blue and not orange and didn’t change shape. The Sphinx was a feline with wings and a serpent’s tail, but also a female face. It had the power of speech, and again, no scales. Griffins had eagle heads, so I could rule them out. I’ve seen a manticore, and that was not one.