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“He’s a were?”
“Was. ” Lucas touched the blood and then put it up to his nose. “I can’t scent his pack, though. Which is strange. ”
Dren had said as much about the women who’d been chasing me. Lucas wiped the man’s blood on his thigh. “This would have been his first moon, if he’d lived to see it. ” Lucas rocked up to his feet and offered me a gore-covered hand. “This violence is fresh. If you’d left dinner any sooner, or not come out at all—” He didn’t have to finish his thought.
I looked around my kitchen. It was thrashed—not just the aftermath of a fight but completely tossed, high shelves emptied of their contents, a spout of flour from a torn bag still trickling white powder onto my floor. Lucas followed my gaze.
“He wasn’t just out to get you. Clearly, you weren’t hiding in your cabinets. ” He turned toward me. “What were you hiding in here?”
“Nothing,” I said. It was even the truth.
There was a plaintive meow from my bedroom, and I ran back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Minnie?”
There was another sad meow, from behind my dresser. I walked over to it and crouched down. It’d been shoved away from the wall as whoever had tossed my room had looked behind it. Minnie was back there, wedged in, hiding and unhappy.
“Oh, Minnie—” If anything had happened to her, that’d be it. I’d be through.
Lucas followed behind me and whistled from my doorway at the mess. All the drawers were out of my dresser, my underwear and bras strewn across the floor. I assumed the were had done that—and it’d been Veronica who’d taken my closet door off its hinges when she’d woken up. I scruffed Minnie and pulled her out of hiding, holding her to my chest.
Lucas pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “You should pack. I’m calling you a cleaner. ”
“A cleaner’s not going to cut this,” I said, squeezing Minnie tight.
“My pack’s cleaner. He understands. I’ll be out there, measuring your carpet. ” Lucas tilted his head toward my living room and left the door.
I should have asked some questions, like Where are we going? or For how long? But I stumbled around my bedroom in a state of shock. The mattress of my bed was pushed sideways and knifed open, stuffing poking out, looking like subcutaneous fat pushing out of skin.
The dark wood box Anna’s knife had been in was shattered into large splinters on my floor. The knife was still in my locker at work. That was the only thing I could imagine the were had been looking for. A vampire-thing. So much for Lucas’s assertions that weres and vampires were completely distinct.
I almost tripped over Asher’s silver bracelet. I picked it up, put it on, and went for my closet door—I had an overnight bag inside.
Minnie’s cat carrier was at the top of my closet. I put her into it, grabbed enough clothing off my floor for overnight and walked out into my living room. Lucas was walking around my living room in a very precise way, sending multiple texts. I stood in the hallway, watching him pace.
“Minnie can come, right?”
“I’m not sure if Marguerite will approve. ”
And this would be when I found out he had a jealous werewolf girlfriend. “Who’s that?”
“My cat. ” He glanced over at my disbelieving face. “What, you think werewolves can’t have pets? Plenty of people have dogs and cats that live together. ” His phone chirped, and he looked at it before nodding to me. “My cleaner will be here soon. Leave the door open for him. Of course you can bring her. Let’s go. ”
All the locks on the door were busted in. I had no choice but to leave it open. Me and Minnie followed Lucas out the front door, and we all got into his truck.
“Where are we going?” I asked, once I had Minnie’s carrier settled on my lap.
“My place. Just for a while. My cleaner’s fast. ” I was thinking about this, and maybe he took my silence for fear, as he continued. “You couldn’t stay there. Not with all the blood. ”
“Yeah. I’d totally lose my deposit. ”
He snorted. We took a turn, and Minnie growled.
“I feel awful putting her through this. ” God only knew how long she’d been hiding behind my dresser.
“Doesn’t it occur to you to be mad? Your vampire friend just got you into a lot of trouble. ”
“Yeah, only somehow all the things attacking me are weres. ”
“True. ” His hands wrung the steering wheel. It occurred to me that a vampire couldn’t get into my place without permission, but a were could. Lucas went on. “He didn’t smell like Viktor. Which doesn’t mean Viktor’s off the hook. ”
“No, it just means I don’t really know who’s attacking me,” I said. He was silent after that.
The buildings outside passed by like fence posts in the dark. After an uncomfortable silence, I spoke. “Won’t you miss your fights tonight?”
“I’ve been there every night for the past two weeks. I think I can skip one. ”
* * *
Minnie’s fear had subsided to a low growl by the time we got to Lucas’s home. It was a huge, sprawling two-story—the kind of place you assumed would have a pool behind it, and it did, I realized, as we went up the driveway and around. There was a smaller home in the back, and when we got out of the truck, I realized that’s where Lucas was leading us. I picked up the carrier and my overnight bag and followed him inside.
“My uncle is—was—a contractor. The main house is his. Helen lives there now, with Fenris Jr. This one is mine. ” He tossed his keys on the counter and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I have to make some more calls. You can take the first bedroom down the hall. There’s a bathroom the next door past it, with a shower. ”
I set my stuff down in the spare room, then went into the bathroom and calculated the risks of showering in a strange house with a strange man in it versus being sticky with strange blood for the rest of the night. Disgust won over sanity, and I stripped out of everything, except for my silver bracelet, and hopped into the shower stall.
The hot water made it easier to think, but it didn’t solve any of my problems. Everything I owned was torn, broken, covered in blood, or absorbed into a creepy cyborg. I still owed a vampire a new hand. Weres were attacking me, and I had a date with a vampire on New Year’s Eve night. My thoughts spiraled like the water down the drain. I lost track of time.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. “Did you drown?”
“No. ”
The door opened up, and I prepared to be scared, tried to scrape together some adrenaline left over somewhere, deep down inside, but Lucas just set down extra towels on the counter and closed the door again. I turned off the shower and dried myself off—remembering that Gideon had worn my bathrobe out the door, one more thing I’d never see again—and carefully picked up all of my bloodstained clothes. I walked down the hall to the room where I’d relocated Minnie. The door to her cat carrier was open, but she still sat inside, like Lucas’s carpeting was lava.
“I know. Boy, do I know. ” I dried out my hair as best I could, and thoroughly dried off my body. Then I hunted through the clean things I’d brought—sweatpants and baggy shirt. Asher’s cuff didn’t go with these, and I didn’t want to be unkind. If Lucas was going to kill me, he would have done it in the shower to keep the carpet clean. I snorted at my morbid self and put the cuff inside Minnie’s cat carrier. Then I lassoed my silver belt around my waist one more time and untucked my shirt, so I could be a little protected but not openly rude. As armored as I was going to get, I went back outside.
“Hey. ”
“Hey. ” Lucas stood in his kitchen, not much bigger than my own. “I made coffee. I didn’t know what else to do. ”
“Thanks. ” I took the mug from him. Might as well drink coffee and stay up. It was at least one thing I was good at.
“How’s Minnie?”
“Unhappy. ”
“I believe that’s tonight’s theme. Cream? Sugar?”
“Both,” I said, and he handed them over one at a time. Once I’d doctored my coffee to within an inch of its life, I walked out into his living room and sat down in a chair covered in cat fur. Of course.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. He sat across from me on a couch with his own coffee mug. He was wearing a white tank top now, which made it easy to see his tattoos. The one sleeve was blurry, covered in old work, but the newer sleeve was still fresh, ornate, gorgeous. “Are you shell-shocked?”
“I’ve seen people die before. Not in my living room, but—” I shrugged, attempting to be cavalier.
“Sure you don’t want to tell me what was he looking for?” Lucas said, with his head tilted forward. His tone was casual, kind. Downright friendly.
“What does it matter, when he was a were?” I asked back.
Lucas’s eyebrows rose at this. “You make a good point. ”
“How is it that there are weres you don’t know about? My vampire friend can’t make new vampires without permission from her people. ” I didn’t tell him that Veronica had technically been illegal. “How does that work for weres?”
“Viktor’s family still has connections. He could have brought them in from out of town—Helen told me that he’d be a problem, even before I moved out. ” He gave his coffee a rueful smile. “I wished I’d listened to her. ”
“And what, killed him?”
“Maybe. If that’s what it would have taken to avoid all this. Winter would have done it. Winter would have killed him the first day. He didn’t appreciate other contenders. ” Lucas leaned back. “That’s why I worry I don’t have it in me. ”
“Viktor called me yesterday. He said you all were setting him up. ” I watched him carefully for any reaction, but Lucas was only surprised.
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