I shook my head to clear it and forced the experience from my mind. It doesn’t matter, Celia. He’s not yours to take.
The thought alone made me slow down. But what had I expected? Someone that striking would never know a lonely night.
I slipped off Taran’s deadly interpretation of footwear and called a cab. The cold sidewalk alleviated the aching of my swollen feet, but it was no match for the sense of longing the wolf had caused. I paused and lifted my hair, willing myself to calm, and hoping the brisk night air would whisk away the evening’s frustrations.
It didn’t work. As much as I dreamed of seeing him again, I never imagined it would be on the arm of another female. Disappointment beat shock into submission.
When the cab arrived almost forty minutes later, I crept into it, disturbed by the unusual ache gnawing at my chest.
“Where to, lady?” the cabbie asked.
“Dollar Point.”
The portly cabbie adjusted his baseball cap, but didn’t bother to turn around. Most of the hair he had left hung from his ears. “Sixty bucks,” Prince Charming muttered. He jumped when he caught my scowl in the rearview mirror. “I have to charge more when I cross the state line!”
“It’s less than twelve miles away.”
“I don’t make the rules, lady. I’m just trying to put bread on the table.”
I slumped in my seat. “Fine.”
Sixty bucks for a sixteen-minute ride in a car that reeked of stale cigarettes and armpit. I rolled down the window for some fresh air and debated whether to return to The Hole—not for my sisters, they were fine—but to get another glimpse of those steamy baby browns. I abandoned the idea. His girlfriend wouldn’t be happy. Not that I blamed her. If he were mine, and some girl tried to—
The metallic scent of blood burned through my nose.
“Stop the car!”
“What?”
I shoved my feet back into Taran’s death traps. “Stop the car now!”
The cabbie pulled to the side. I bolted out before he finished parking. “Hey, wait. You have to pay!”
I raced toward the scent of death and spilled blood saturating an alleyway between a hair salon and a bookstore. Taran’s shoes dug into my tender feet like white-hot needles, but I didn’t stop, propelled by the need to investigate the dread plaguing the starlit night.
But when I stumbled into the alley, my pace slowed to a crawl.
There wasn’t a body there.
There were two.
Both women. Both young. Both with clothes splattered with their own blood. Their broken bodies lay near a Dumpster, amid a scattered field of discarded newspaper and tabloid magazines.
I wished fang marks had pierced their necks. Fang marks would have been welcome. Instead chunks of serrated flesh hollowed through to the vertebra, like a hungry dog had chewed down to the bone.
Except it hadn’t been a dog.
Their bodies were nothing more than sunken shells of gray shriveled skin over bone and withered muscle, drained of the blood that once nourished their organs and allowed them to breathe, laugh…live.