With a cry of rage, he launched himself at his assailant. She tumbled backward and he crushed her to the floor. Though he had a good forty pounds on her, she almost wriggled free. She clawed at his face with razor sharp nails, and he leaned back. It was all the space she needed to flip him onto his back and aim a stake at his heart. He froze.

“Nolen Galbraith,” she wheezed in a strange accent, “by order of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, you are sentenced to death for the murder of Marianne Galbraith and Christine Allen. How do you plead?”

“Turn on the light,” he said between deep breaths. You dumb bitch, he added silently.

She squinted in the darkness. “Nolen Galbraith?”

“No. Nice try, though.” Max shoved her off him and stood, brushing at his clothes as though they had been soiled.

In the faint illumination from the mercury light outside, he recognized her. “You met with the general last night. Or should I say, ‘your boyfriend, the general’?”

“You turn on the light,” she demanded, an exotic lilt adding haughty authority to her words. “I do not have the same quality night vision as you do.”

“Could that be because, oh, I don’t know, you’re not a vampire?” But he turned on the light anyway, because she still had a stake and he was curiously allergic to wooden splinters through the heart. “I always thought dogs could see in the dark. Or is that cats?”

“General Breton sent me. Apparently he was worried about an assassin who is not capable of finishing the assignment.” Her last words morphed into a growl.

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re in my friend’s house. Especially when he’s running berserk on the streets. What the hell were you thinking, coming here?” The knife was on the floor at his feet. He just had to figure out a way to grab it without getting skewered.

Thankfully, she didn’t appear to have noticed his frantic glance downward. “I could ask the same of you. You are walking around, drinking their blood supply, using their appliances. It seems like you might be playing both sides.”

“There’s only one side, sweetheart. I hate to disappoint you, but Nolen—” Max sketched quotation marks with his fingers “—is on it.”

“He has killed.”

“Under very extenuating circumstances!”

Bella shook her head. “There are no extenuating circumstances. He has killed, he will be killed.”

“Unless I kill you first.” Max expected to see some reaction in her eyes, but there was none. Just the cold, calculating stare of a predator who lived only for the hunt.

Moving faster than any mortal creature he’d ever seen, the werewolf threw the stake at him. He ducked it and scooped up the knife. The wooden missile embedded itself in the wall, near where his heart would have been.