Copper? Oh hell—shape-shifter!

The giant creature watched us carefully.

Misha led me farther back. “Do not fear; my guards shall protect us.”

Screaming, guzzling, and crunching sounds made me glance toward my right. Three of Misha’s decapitated bodyguards flopped around like fish out of water while a giant saber-toothed tiger slurped a fourth like spaghetti. If I had wanted to meet a similar fate, I’d have taken a moment to bang my head against a tree.

“Master, run!” some vamp’s head yelled from the woods.

Ten miles remained to Misha’s estate—close enough that his entire family would sense their master in danger, but too far for them to reach us quickly. I knew shape-shifters could assume the form of any creature, alive or dead, but this was beyond eff’d up and so totally unfair.

I took in the prehistoric mob bosses and moved forward. “I’ll take the cat,” I muttered right before changing.

“Cat” was a loose term. This thing was more bearlike and about two hundred pounds heavier than my tigress. Six-inch fangs hung from her blood-soaked mouth. One bite from those jaws would kill me, so I thought better of challenging her. My tigress equally thought we could kick her ass. I pounced on the saber-tooth’s face, clawed at her eyes, and then bolted like a thoroughbred on crack.

She was faster, but not used to this form. I was in my second skin. I dodged and whipped around trees. She barreled through them, sending strips of bark to pelt my back and sleeping birds jetting out of the branches in a frightened scurry. All I was doing was buying some time. I wasn’t stupid. No way I could beat her on my own. Shifting her was also out of the question. I needed to be able to hold her for a few seconds, and she didn’t strike me as the type to stand still.

I cut through the woods and doubled back to return to Misha when the thundering of massive paws stopped. That would have been a good thing had it not suddenly been replaced by the beating of powerful wings. The shifter had transformed into a pterodactyl. Unlike in her other form, this one allowed her to move with ease, grace, and unholy speed.

The trees around me blurred as I dodged and leapt, and still I wasn’t fast enough. I dove the last thirty feet to the road and shifted through the pavement. The earth above me rattled with the force of a massive quake. I surfaced a hundred feet away, still feeling the ground rumble beneath me. The pterodactyl had crashed into the road, temporarily stunned from the impact. I leapt onto her back and shifted her far below before I lost my breath. My body resurfaced through the pavement and barely avoided the stampeding feet of a giant woolly mammoth.

The shifter that had attacked the limo had taken on a new form—one that could attack on the ground. Misha and a horde of his vampires rode the beast, stripping chunks of flesh from his back. The deafening trumpet sounds signaled his agony, but the damn pachyderm wouldn’t die! He snatched two vampires with his trunk and stomped them into bloody ash. I jumped on his nose and hacked into the muscle until he swatted me away like a pesky fly. I landed hard on my paws, moments before he charged.

“Celia Wird. Celia Wird. Celia Wird,” he shrieked in a demonic voice.

I was already freaked out that a nine-ton, supposedly extinct creature was barreling at me, but throw in the psycho voice and I just about passed another seed.

My claws raked against the tendons of his legs while I tried to avoid his sweeping, bloody trunk. I’d managed to sever one of his hind legs when deep, riled hisses cut through the cold night. The rest of Misha’s keep had arrived.

We skewered and dug our fangs through the leathery skin, beating the shifter into submission with more brute will than grace. We brought him down just as the earth erupted beneath me.

Pebbles and chunks of asphalt smacked our faces. The road cracked and the shifter I’d buried reemerged. And damnit to hell wasn’t prehistoric predators the flavor of the evening. The former saber-toothed tiger turned pterodactyl morphed into a tyrannosaurus. This couldn’t be happening. To transform with such ease and hold so much power took scary-ass evil to a whole new dimension. I jerked out of the way of her snapping jaws when a silver Yukon slammed into her side and rode over the top of her.

Anyone else driving would have hit the gas and kept going, but then again Shayna was behind the wheel. The wheels squealed in protest as she thrust the SUV in reverse and parked it over the T. rex’s throat.

Shayna leapt out with a prima ballerina’s poise, converting her sword into an axe as she twirled it in her wrist. Taran stumbled out behind her, tripping in her high heels. “Son of a bitch!”

I trained my efforts on blinding the dinosaur to help protect my sisters. If she couldn’t see us, she couldn’t eat us, right?

The creature’s furious eardrum-shattering shrieks mixed with wails of agony. Above it, all I heard was Shayna chopping away, and I smelled the burning flesh as Taran set it ablaze. A few vampires abandoned the mammoth to help us, puncturing where the T. rex’s jugular pulsed.

“Celia, look out!” Emme’s face deepened to purple as she suspended a jagged boulder in the air. I moved—fast. She crushed the gargantuan skull, and still she couldn’t kill it. The T. rex writhed, taking out a couple of vamps with her tail like a cluster of bowling pins.

I pounced on her head and pulverized her cracked skull, anchoring my body with my hind claws while my front burrowed into her head. Slime and blood soaked through my fur. I just about retched when I reached the brain and mashed it with my paws.

The T. rex collapsed. Shayna jumped up and down and cheered…until the last hunk of brain fell in a wet splatter between her and Emme. They hurled. Not wanting to feel left out, I leapt off the shifter and joined them.

Cries of horror erupted behind us. The vamps had failed to finish the other shape-shifter. He morphed again into another giant pterodactyl, staking anyone within reach with his long beak. The vamps scattered like marbles to avoid him. They screamed, unable to escape the jabs of his pointed beak. The shifter screeched with triumph and spread his wings, lifting into the air before diving at Misha and spearing him with its talons.

Pandemonium erupted through Misha’s tortured hollering. I leapt onto the pterodactyl’s narrow torso while the remaining vampires worked to bring the shifter down. Except his wings were too strong and they couldn’t hang on. Emme launched an array of sharp stones like bullets. They bounced off his leathery skin. I tore an opening in his chest, trying to break through the rib cage to reach for the heart. I never made it. He snapped my front right leg with his beak and yanked me back, holding tight so I couldn’t wrench free. The pain was blinding. I changed back to human, unable to maintain my tigress.