by Anna Abner
Within the crowd, anger and righteous vindication broke down into undiluted fear. Half the people in the trailer park backed away from the shifter while the other half moved closer, firearms drawn. They may never have seen a shifter before. Neither had Roz. But, like her, they’d figured it out. And a supernatural creature was far more frightening and dangerous to their daily lives than a man-eating bear.
“Ladies, weapons up,” Connor barked. “Roz, calm them the fuck down. Ali, shoot the first son of a bitch that makes a move. We’re getting bear boy out of here before they tear his legs off.”
Connor rushed forward, his .44 in the air. Firing once and sending the crowd low over the ground, he shouted, “Back off!” The masses smartly did what he said, perhaps sensing they should not fuck with Connor Beckett. A vampire with unlimited strength, speed, and healing abilities, he was nearly unbeatable by human foes.
“Calm, calm, calm.” Roz’s hands and knees shook, but not from the force of her power. She was scared. What would these people do to protect themselves? “Sleep, sleep, sleep,” she intoned.
Her spells worked. Kind of. Connor already had the shifter out of his chains and slung over his shoulder as if the full-grown man was a sleepy five-year-old. The pissed off fire enthusiasts stayed away, but no one appeared very calm.
Maybe her magic was all used up. She’d made the shifter pass out, but he’d been in a lot of pain. He was probably thirty seconds from collapsing, anyway. All she’d done was nudge him over the edge. She wasn’t even a real witch. She was an amateur. A rogue spellspeaker.
A wannabe.
Ali waved her handgun around, though they all knew she wouldn’t actually use it, while Connor jogged to the truck with the wounded shifter, the speed of said jogging equivalent to an average person’s full-speed sprint. Landing hard in the bed of the truck, the shifter didn’t move. Connor pulled Ali through the cab door, and then he motioned for Roz to slide behind the wheel.
Maybe Roz’s magic wasn’t all shit because the trailer park crowd remained by the fire. No one followed them. No one fired a single round.
What if she really had put the entire group to sleep?
The shifter whimpered, snapping her back to the problem at hand.
“I need to keep him calm,” Roz told Connor, bypassing the drivers’ side door and climbing over the wheel well into the truck bed. “You drive.”
Connor didn’t hesitate, but drove like he did everything else, in extreme high gear. He laid scratch out of the lot, racing over bumpy and dusty dirt roads north toward the glow of Las Vegas.
The shifter was so big, even flat on his back, he didn’t fit in the bed of the truck without bending his knees. To accommodate his wide chest, Roz scooted to the far side and hugged the rail while propping the unconscious shifter’s head in her lap.
“We’re gonna need the doc,” she shouted through the rear cab window.
“On our way,” Connor responded.
The shifter tossed his head, and fresh blood bubbled over the side of his mouth. Also, an oozing crater in the top right quadrant of his chest looked an awful lot like a bullet wound, his throat was rubbed raw from the chains, and rivulets of blood circled his collarbone. On top of the mangled leg, there was a freely bleeding X-shaped injury under his left arm.
“It’s okay,” she soothed, sweeping a hunk of golden hair stiff with blood from his forehead. “You’re safe.” The shifter settled at the sound of her voice, and she continued speaking healing and sleep spells.
She hoped shifters healed when they shifted. Something to do with rearranging body systems and tissues. Or maybe that fact was urban legend. The media didn’t possess a lot of scientific data on shapeshifters. None had ever been caught and studied. Most people believed they were a myth. At least infecteds had been captured on film and studied in military hospitals. There was no longer any doubt that vampires existed. Shifters, though, remained in the same category as Bigfoot.
Except she’d seen this guy shift from bear to human in less than three seconds flat.
Roz pulled out her cellphone, disregarded a list of emails and news alerts, and called the doctor. “Julia?” she shouted into the wind. “We found a shapeshifter, but he’s injured. Can you meet us at the clinic?”
“A shifter?” Dr. Julia Burke repeated in her German-accented English. “I gotta see this. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”
Dr. Burke worked in a tiny, poorly equipped strip mall in Henderson, Nevada and was one of those souls who really just wanted to help people. She patched up Connor when he went up against the vampire horde. She would help them now.
The shifter moaned low in his throat, coughing up another spray of blood. “Hush,” she said, quitting her spells for a moment. “It’s not far.”
He opened Caribbean blue eyes, and they locked on her face. Roz froze, her fingers brushing his bristly chin. For a moment, he stared, and she expected him to say something. At the very least, she assumed he’d sit up. Worst-case scenario, the creature would attack. A wounded animal and all that.
His eyes fluttered, and his head rolled into her belly. Holding him, Roz re-started the healing and calming spells with more enthusiasm this time.
Twenty minutes later, Connor parked his truck in front of the medical clinic where the taller than average doc waited on the sidewalk, holding open the front door, waving them in. Connor jerked the shifter off Roz’s lap and deposited him on a gurney in the first exam room.
“Did you actually see him shift?” Julia asked, checking the man’s pulse in both his battered throat and limp wrist.
“Yes,” Roz said at the same time Connor said, “No.”
At the sound of their voices, the shifter turned his head, and his eyes blinked open. A pair of pain-clouded blue eyes focused on Roz. His left arm moved as if on strings, swiping clumsily at the cart beside his gurney, tossing it against the floor, which pulled a blood pressure machine over. He kicked out his broken leg and shattered the glass in a tall cabinet.
They held stares for a moment, and chills skittered up and down Roz’s arms. What things did a shifter think? What did he hope for? What did he fear?
“Scheisse,” the doc exclaimed, fumbling a vial of sedative before injecting him directly in the side of his bare hip.
Once the shifter’s blue eyes closed, the doc waved them out of the room and got to business recording his vitals and starting an IV.
With nothing left to do, Roz meandered into the waiting room and checked her phone while Ali sat in a plastic chair and Connor paced. She skimmed some emails and texts, but nothing screamed life-threatening. An alert popped up for the Oracle Ilvane. Apparently, the greatest seer in the world had published a new prophecy.
Though Ilvane was protected by the Coven, she wasn’t a bitch like the rest of the witches, and Roz kind of liked her. The Oracle had helped her and Connor in the past.
Because the supernatural creatures congregating around Las Vegas took her prophecies seriously, Roz did too. Besides, Ilvane was never wrong.
Roz clicked on the message and found her way to the online version of the Las Vegas Herald. The prophecy filling her screen stopped her blood cold in her veins.
“Oh, fuck,” she swore, standing stiffly in the middle of Julia’s waiting room. “Oh, fuck.”
“Bad news?” Connor mused.
Yeah, nothing except having a prophecy about her being posted for the whole world to see and scrutinize.
“Ilvane,” Roz stuttered. God, she couldn’t even speak. This kind of emotion rarely affected her, and she loathed it. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Ilvane posted a prophecy tonight.”
“So?” he returned.
“It’s about me.”
“What?”
Suddenly, she had both Ali and Connor’s undivided attention.
“Listen to this,” Roz said, reading off her phone. “A witch from Miami will bring about a new age of magic in the Coven.”
Connor stopped pacing. “Oh, fu
ck.”
Ali asked, “You’re from Miami?”
Ignoring Ali, Roz read the prophecy again to make absolutely certain she understood it. Then she ran a separate search for Ilvane to be sure the first site had written the prophecy accurately.
It was the same. A witch from Miami will bring about a new age of magic in the Coven.
Prophecies sucked. And prophets were even worse. They spewed cryptic garbage that ruined people’s lives.
“Jesus,” Connor hissed. “What are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Roz admitted. “I need to think about this.”
“We could port to the Oracle.”
Absently, Roz waved him off. “Yeah, maybe. I need a minute.” She slipped through the clinic’s back door and into the warm evening air.
This couldn’t be about her. She was nobody. A rogue spellspeaker. Her application to the Coven had been denied. Rejected witches did not remake the most powerful religious organization in the world.
There must be dozens of witches from Miami. Hundreds. Thousands, even. To ease her concern, she searched for the number of registered witches in Miami, Florida.
Not thousands. Not hundreds.
Six.
No, it wasn’t about her. Seeing it had scared her for a sec, but it couldn’t be about her. Later, she’d create a portal to the Oracle when things quieted down and ask, but it would probably be a waste of time. Ilvane would most likely laugh at her.
Able to breathe normally again, Roz swiped through her messages and then stepped back into the clinic.
“Everything okay?” Connor asked.
“Yeah,” Roz said, slumping into a chair near Ali. “It’s not about me.”
“Oh, good.” Connor chuckled with relief. “I was worried for a sec. The last thing we need is to go against those bitches.”
“We’ll have to deal with them sooner or later, but I’m no destroyer of worlds.” She, too, chuckled. The Coven was up to no good, obviously, but Roz’s small team—her, Connor, and Ali—had no business trying to take down a well-connected and monumentally wealthy organization like the Coven. Those witches would wipe the floor with Roz. She preferred to focus on things in the realm of possibility, like capturing vampires and occasionally protecting tourists on the Strip.
“Too bad we didn’t find any vampires tonight,” Ali spoke up.
“I think finding a shifter was pretty exciting.” Roz glanced at Ali, gauging her stress level. Since her skin was flesh-colored and not glowing neon pink, Roz concluded the other woman was handling her first shifter sighting with ease.
“We’ll hunt again tomorrow,” Connor promised Ali. Though by the twinkle in his eye, it was obvious he had other ideas about how to spend their time together.
Ignoring him, Ali leaned across her chair’s armrest and asked Roz, “Do you think Connor’s vampire immunity shot is going to work?”
Roz propped her elbows on her knees. “Why do you care what I think? You think it’s going to work.”
“I have my doubts. I expected more progress by now.”
“Why don’t you ask Dr. Burke about it?”
“She scares me.”
“I’ll ask her, then. She doesn’t scare me.” Roz leaned back in the chair. “Besides, secretly feeding humans your antibodies in the hopes they’ll be immune to vampirism?” she teased. “What could go wrong there?” Sarcasm was her blanket, attitude was her shield.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Ali admitted. “I just know I have to do something. I couldn’t have been born this way for no reason. Right?” She stared up at her with big, doll eyes. Cartoon animal eyes. “I feel like it’s my job—no, my sacred duty—to cure the disease that destroyed my mother, killed my family, and has ruined so many people’s lives. I can’t quit now.”
Alina Rusenko was a rare, one-of-a-kind freak. The vampire Maksim Volk had infected Ali’s mother while nine months pregnant with her, infecting Ali, and yet making her something different. Something more. Ali wasn’t a vampire, but she might be the destruction of the vampire infection. She had definitely been the end of Oleksander the Destroyer. That psycho was dust on the side of a Nevada highway because of her.
Connor thought Ali was heaven on two legs, but Roz was still trying to find common ground with their newest team member. Curing vampirism was one thing they could both get behind.
“Okay,” Julia announced, entering the room and tearing off a pair of lavender surgical gloves. “The fracture is set, and I cleaned and stitched the gunshot wound. He’s concussed, but resting comfortably. His injuries will heal on their own. Who is he?”
“No clue,” Connor admitted. “He was about to have his head stuffed and mounted when we stumbled in by accident. But now that he’s here,” he stretched his arms over his head, “we’ll be on our way.”
The doc laughed. “Good one, but you’re not leaving a shifter at my clinic. Get him the hell out of here.”
Connor dropped his arms. “Where am I supposed to take him?”
“I don’t know,” Julia answered, seeming uninterested. “But I’m going back to bed, and I’m not worrying about some crazy shapeshifter tearing the place to pieces. My job is to heal you weirdos, not run a boarding house for the supernatural.”
Connor grumbled. Translation—he was losing the argument. “Fine. But as soon as he’s on his feet, maybe even before then, he’s on his own.”
“I don’t care what you do with him, so long as you do it far from here.”
Roz wandered nearer the hallway on the pretense of pouring herself a drink at the water cooler. Through the open doorway, she spotted the shifter asleep on the exam table. He looked broken, from his right arm dangling off the edge of the gurney to the dark bruises forming around both eyes and encircling his throat. His chest may be rising and falling, but he wasn’t well or whole. Not even close.
“You’re the only person capable of controlling him,” the doc continued from the other side of the room. “I don’t know much about shifters. I’ll do some research, but I need you to babysit him.”
Her mention of research reminded Roz of all the work she’d done with Anton and Natasha. If only her friends would answer her texts. “Have you heard from our New Zealand friends today?” Roz asked Julia. It would hurt to know the siblings were still speaking to Julia, that only Roz was being snubbed.
Julia sadly shook her head. “They just fell off the face of the earth.”
“Same,” Roz agreed, grateful to be able to complain with a sympathetic person. It had been radio silence between her, Anton, and Natasha for almost forty-eight hours—unheard of until now. “The emails I send go unanswered.” She frowned. “Did they say anything to explain it?” What she really meant was, did I do something wrong to make them forsake me? Is this my fault?
“Nothing,” Julia said. “One minute we’re discussing vampirism, and the next, they’re gone.”
“That’s how it happened to me too,” Roz said, though the knowledge they’d both been dropped like last season’s trends didn’t make it hurt any less. “Hey,” she said, “have you made any progress on Ali’s immunity idea?”
“Actually, yes,” Julia said, perking up. “I believe I’ve isolated the antibodies. I’ll let you know the minute I discover anything else.”
“Well,” Connor interrupted, “I hate to break up the party, but if we’re taking this guy with us, we might as well do it now while he’s asleep.”
Chapter Three
Oleksander’s three brothers, Ilya, Ivan, and Sergei, stood at the mouth of Maks’ cave, still a little dusty around the edges from literally climbing out of their own graves. They were just as tall, just as wide, and just as brutal as Olek had ever been.
The last time Maks had seen them, they’d been desiccated mummies half buried in a sandy pit in a secret military installation. The same pit his little bird rested. Someone must have dug up the brothers. But who?
Sergei stepped forward. “Where is Oleksander?” he dem
anded in a voice that affected Maks like steel on concrete.
Ivan, the equally tall, equally Slavic brother, clicked open an expensive-looking lighter, activated the flame, and then snapped it closed. Again and again. Until the clicking became a distracting background noise. Meanwhile, the stoic Ilya observed the group silently. Ilya had always been Olek’s least favorite brother—which, by default, made him Maks’ favorite—and over the years, Ilya had made blending into the figurative wallpaper a habit.
“What a pleasure,” Maks greeted, taking the lead role in these negotiations. He sensed Damian at his right shoulder, but he ignored the man.
“Volk the Traitor,” Sergei spat. “Unless you can produce my brother, cease speaking to me. I tire of your voice.”
Ironic, considering none of the Four Sons had ever really liked each other.
Sergei lurched in his direction and hit him so fast he couldn’t see it, so hard Maks crushed a rock wall and landed face first in the dirt.
Noise gonged around the inside of Maks’ head, and it took a couple seconds for him to decipher the conversation continuing above him. The incessant clicking of Ivan’s lighter seemed unusually loud before it faded away.
“Oleksander hasn’t returned in a month,” Damian said. “We can’t find him.”
“Which of you parasites,” Sergei demanded, “murdered my brother?”
Volk lay upon the cold earth wondering how his life had sunk to such a level. Volk the Traitor? Was that his new name? What had he done to make Olek’s brothers despise him on sight? He’d backed Oleksander at every turn. Bowed and scraped to him like a serf in the old days. He’d sacrificed his life, Katya’s life, and even Ali’s life by joining his master in his foolish plan to invade Prague.
How had he become a traitor?
“Listen to my voice,” Sergei boomed, “I am Sergei the Rabid, and my brothers and I require accommodations. Beds. Baths. But first blood. Bring me your slaves.”
As human donors were collected and dragged into the entrance, Maks shook the dust from his hair and re-entered the presence of what remained of the Four Sons, a little less cocky.
