He didn’t respond either verbally or in my mind, but he shifted position so he was directly between me and the guards.

It was very odd to have people moving and fighting in utter silence. Even the tornado upstairs was soundless. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t contact Vicki. Because while she was doing a great job keeping guards out of the room, she was likewise preventing Edgar from getting in. Frustrated, he was now on the ground, helping Jones keep the guards off me.

I concentrated on Kevin. Beaten, battered, and unable to protect himself. Yes, he was an ass, and yes, I was furious at him. But that didn’t mean I’d let some demon hag cut off his limbs. Kevin. C’mon, buddy. Hear me. Wake up.

There was a smooth, blank wall of quiet inside his head. This wasn’t just from being knocked unconscious. This took drugs and lots of them. Kevin. Wake up. Amy needs you.

Thankfully a werewolf metabolism is an amazing thing. The more I called his name, the thinner the wall in his head got. I don’t know how I could feel it, but I could.

Kev—ahhh! It was the scream that finally woke him. I tend to react unfavorably to bullet wounds. My whole body spun around when the bullet entered my shoulder and I found myself on the ground staring up at a lot more people than had been there when I’d started to contact Kevin. The pain was intense and caused a reaction I should have expected. The vamp inside totally came out and I leapt on my nearest enemy before I could stop myself.

But that tiny bit of me that was still human refused to slam fangs into the man’s neck, despite the scent of blood that filled the air.… Instead, I grabbed the rifle and ripped it from his hands and used it like a club across his jaw. He went down like a rock and lay still. The glowing red eyes I’d glimpsed before he fell told me that the nurse wasn’t the only possessed person here. I slid my blackened knife from its sheath and laid the flat of the blade on the man’s chest. Even unconscious, he screamed—silently. Hopefully I had just sent the demon back to hell where it belonged.

Sound returned just then and my ears were assaulted by screams, shouts, sirens, and gunfire. Louder than all that was a howl of pure rage and pain from above. As I put the knife back in the sheath, I looked up to see Kevin at the window, his hair whipping from Vicki’s storm. The guards looked up also and aimed their weapons in his direction.

No. They would not shoot him. That I could prevent. I leapt into the nearest guard just in time. The guard’s shot went into the cinder block a foot away from Kevin.

We went down in a tangle of limbs that made my shoulder erupt into intense pain. I struggled to keep from screaming a second time. Edgar jumped on the guard directly to my left before he could pull the trigger. He perched on the man like a spider, holding down each limb, hissing, fangs bared. I turned away just as Edgar’s head thrust downward and the man screamed.

A different movement caught my eye. Kevin had decided not to stick around long enough for anyone to get off another shot. He’d jumped from the window. A human might break his legs, hitting the ground from three stories up. But Kevin just landed in a crouch, his face contorted into a snarl of fury.

A hand grabbed my wrist and pulled. It was my bad arm, so I hissed in pain and reacted, my fist sizzling toward whoever was attached to the hand. Jones is nimble; I’ll give him that. He shifted his head so that my fist sailed past his ear.

“Time to go.” He raised his other hand and his eyes blazed with power.

Air pressed against my head until I thought it would explode, and then the world dissolved to white.

5

“Y’know, vampire healing isn’t your friend in a gunfight.” The voice, male and pure Jersey, brought me back to consciousness. My eyes popped open as I recognized the speaker. Gaetano, a medic who’d patched me up before, shook his head and cut deep into my shoulder with a scalpel. Thankfully I couldn’t feel anything other than pressure, which probably meant I’d been treated with a combination of morphine and a sedative spell.

“You healed right over the bullet. If I don’t get it out, it’ll sting every time you move your arm.”

“I’ll take healing over the alternative, thanks.” My tongue felt thick and unresponsive and it was impossible to keep my head straight. Good thing Gaetano was one of the good guys—or at least less bad than those who had shot me. Of course, I had been breaking out a prisoner, so maybe I was a bad guy and so was Gaetano. “By the way, are we the good guys or the bad guys?”

He smiled then and let out a snort. “Depends on the day, Graves. Today we were the good guys.” I remembered the glowing eyes of the nurse, who’d smiled with a saw in her hands, and agreed with a shudder. Gaetano’s hands pushed my shoulder down harder on the bed. The click of metal on metal said he’d probably reached the bullet. A weird sensation in my shoulder told me I was starting to metabolize the drugs. It was going to hurt soon, maybe before he finished. Maybe it would be better to concentrate on something else.

I was in a bed. The softness and the sheets gave it away. But whose bed, and when did I get there? Without moving my head, I looked around. I seemed to be in the basement of a house. A hot-water heater stood in a corner and I could see the back of a staircase beyond Gaetano’s muscular arm. “Where are we?” The direct approach is often the best.

“Safe house.” His voice held concentration. “Quit talking. It makes the drugs wear off. You’re starting to flinch.”

Yeah. “Should you give me more?”

His brown eyes flicked my way. Pretty. There was frustration mingled with amazement in his expression. “I’ve already given you enough to kill a full human, Graves. If you just relax and don’t think, they’ll work fine.”

“Celia.”

He stopped again. “What?”

“Celia, not Graves. I’m not a soldier.”

Another snort and a shake of his head. “Then you’re hanging out with the wrong people.” He put bloodstained gloved fingers on my eyebrows. “Now relax and let me finish, okay?” He closed my eyes.

* * *

There was a warm, vibrating weight on my chest that moved when I did. My eyes opened slowly, enjoying the sensation of heat and movement. Orange and white fur was all I could see. Why was our office cat, Minnie the Mouser, in the safe house?

Then I realized she wasn’t. I was in my office, lying on the couch. What the hell? I put a hand on the cat and gave her a stroke or two. She responded with extra purring. Then I gently lifted her up and put her on the floor. The purring stopped and she gave me an annoyed look with wide green eyes before walking into the nearest sunbeam on the carpet to begin bathing her face with one paw. I sat up and immediately regretted it. I’d been through a battle, and from the way my shoulder moved I was betting there was a bandage underneath my shirt, which was actually a button-down shirt and not a black turtleneck with a hole in the shoulder. Oh, crap. That meant my shirt had been off while Gaetano had been operating on me. Logical, and it shouldn’t bother me. Except it did.

My vest, clothing, and wrist sheaths, with knives, were neatly stacked on my desk. My first thought was to check the safe. The lock was still red, but I wouldn’t know if they’d used my palm to deactivate the magical part of the locking system until I looked inside. I was hoping not, but I wouldn’t put much past Jones.

I spun on the couch and sat up. The sound of crinkling paper had me looking around and then groping in the pockets of my bloodstained jeans. I hoped they’d been dry when I’d been laid on the couch. A folded slip of paper came out after a second of tugging.

I don’t date soldiers or coworkers, but you’re not either. Call me.

Gaetano

A phone number followed, and not surprisingly, it was local. How else would he have been around to swoop in, medical kit in tow, twice in a month?

Feast or famine. That’s nearly always how it worked with me. For five years, I couldn’t get a date on a bet. Now I’d attracted a growing flock of men, milling like the birds that were undoubtedly outside my office.

The problem was that everything I’d heard and experienced told me it was all frosting, no cake. Having a date who is magically compelled to worship the ground you walk on isn’t quite the same to me as earning his respect and him liking me as a person. It didn’t matter whether I could help it or not. I didn’t want to wind up like some of the starlets who abound in Hollywood and complain nobody respects their minds while on their way to the plastic surgeon to add a cup size. Maybe I needed to get a whole bunch of those anti-siren charms made up and hand them out to everyone I met.

I stood up and went to the desk, automatically checking each and every pocket of my vest. The place where the bullet had pierced the vest was obvious—the fabric covering the strips of Kevlar was frayed and slightly charred. Jeez! Were they using tracer rounds or something? I could fit my ring finger into the hole. It felt like a .30-06 to me, except that a hunting round would probably have gone right through me. Maybe I would call Gaetano sometime, just to ask what he’d pulled out of my shoulder.

Nothing was missing from the pockets except what I knew I’d used in the fight. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. Damn my paranoia anyway. I could think of a thousand hideous spells that could be contained in seemingly innocuous ceramic disks. I might think I was throwing a mudder and wind up choking to death from a lack of oxygen around my head.

I sighed. Better safe than sorry. Part of my weapons safe has a containment unit where I store unknown stuff until I can take it to experts who can tell me what it is. All my disks would have to go there.

I put my palm on the sensor of the lock mechanism, then entered the code. There was a long pause. I’ve gotten used to the pause. It used to open right up, but that was before the vampire bite. The tech people got it to work for me after my DNA altered by telling it I was pregnant. Nobody knows what’s going to happen at the nine-month mark. I needed to add a note to my computer calendar to remind me of my “birthday” so I could clean the safe out the day before. I’d hate to not be able to get to my stuff just because I forgot. Finally it let out a confirming beep and the reassuring clunk of the lock that I’d been told could be heard everywhere in the building. I opened the door. Everything looked just as I’d left it, which made me feel better.