desire to rampage through the city, destroying everything in my path until I found my targets.
‘You are so impatient,’ a voice whispered in the back of my skull, tinged with an edge of laughter. ‘Just wait. He has to come home sometime.’
I growled, the sound reverberating deep in my chest.
‘Touchy.’
“Shut up,” I snapped, running my fingers through my hair to shove the errant curls out of my eyes. “If he doesn’t come soon, I won’t have enough time to do anything. The sun will be up in less than an hour.” I’d been counting on Dillon being home so I could destroy the bastard before he hurt someone else. Or at least beat him into new and interesting shapes to make him think twice before infecting another uncontracted human.
‘Maybe he spent the night with someone. Or left for work before we arrived.’
I didn’t say anything, a pang of doubt giving me pause. The belt wrapped around my waist was the source of the voice in my head; a voice that would be banished once the sun rose. Aside from providing moral support and snarky commentary, the first rays of morning light creeping over the horizon would take with it all of my enhanced skills and senses, leaving me frail and human again. Though most of the time I hated what the belt did to me, I couldn’t afford to be without its help while facing down an angry werewolf.
‘Then wait until tomorrow night to face him. Use the day wisely; get some rest and food to build up your strength, and use those P.I. skills of yours to track him down.’
I nodded, turning away from the street and huddling into my trench coat against the cold. Now that I’d had a few hours for my ire to cool, I found that I was suffering from a wintry, calculating hatred instead of the heated, unthinking rage which had driven me here to begin with. Despite that the wait was really weighing on my nerves, it had given me plenty of time to think about what I was going to do once Dillon showed his face, and what I would do about the other Sunstrikers who had driven me to hunt them like the cowardly dogs they were.
In the space of a few days, my entire life had turned upside down. Not that it had been particularly normal to begin with, but my now very ex-boyfriend Chaz had been cheating on me. He’d also been running some kind of werewolf mafia ring right under my nose. Though I had no solid proof, I was sure his pack had something to do with the murder of Jim Pradiz. Not that I’d liked the sleazy reporter, but it was terrifying to know that the werewolves were willing to stoop so low to silence him.
To top things off, one of the Sunstrikers had scratched and quite possibly infected me with the lycanthropy virus. It would be weeks before I’d know for sure if I was going to join the ranks of the terminally furry come the next full moon. Clearly, thanks to the murder of Jim Pradiz—which the Sunstrikers were somehow connected to, I just knew it—I would never be one of that pack whether or not they accepted me. It was entirely possible that they were out to kill me, too.
Thanks to Chaz’s pack, I was on the run from a bunch of murderous werewolves, the police, and half the media in the state. The last straw had been my father telling me point-blank that I wasn’t his little girl anymore. Being disowned from my family for my involvement with the Others had been a gut blow I wasn’t prepared for. Recalling the raspy, accusing tones of my dad as he forbade me from ever coming home to him and Mom again made my eyes burn, but I’d cried my last tear over his pronouncement hours ago. I had work to do to make sure that the people involved with bringing this load of misery down on me and my family paid for everything they’d done. My resolve only firmed as I paused at the edge of the roof above the rusting metal framework of the fire escape that would lead me back down to the filthy alleyways and web-work of New York City streets below.
Considering it was Chaz and the rest of his pack’s fault that everything—my life, my livelihood, my family, and possibly my humanity—had been taken from me, I was not