new hue through my wolf’s eyes. She started pacing inside me, her restlessness twisting my stomach with a sense of dread.
Instinct prickled down my arms.
Something’s wrong.
Frowning, I slowly maneuvered away from the bushes and toward the front of the building, staying low in a crouch and silent on my feet. Blood and burn marks painted the ground, most of the mortals dead or on their way there.
I paused at one who was mostly intact, patting down his thigh for potential knives. Finding none, I moved to the next corpse and located a dagger in his boot. A third body gave me a second blade. And the fourth had a pistol that fit nicely in my hand.
Ryder had taught me how to shoot with a similarly sized gun back at his house. I checked the ammunition like he’d taught me and found it fully loaded.
Excellent.
I stole the belt and holster from the body and latched it around my hips. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it had a slot for one of my knives, which allowed me to keep at least one hand free.
A bellow of agony had my wolf growling in my head. Ryder. I nearly started running, my instinct to help taking over, but the colder part of my mind—the vampire in me—held me captive.
What would Ryder do? I asked myself, moving on to another body to search for more knives.
If he was in trouble, I needed daggers I could throw.
I found a few, their weight reasonable and precise.
Then I heard the sound of a heel on marble coming from inside.
Shit! There was no time to duck behind another bush, so I squirmed partly under a dead human, allowing his blood and stench of death to hide my scent.
It was instinctual and fucked up, but I didn’t have time to evaluate the decision.
“Find the hybrid,” a female voice muttered. “Grab Damien. Get Ryder. Anything else?”
My brow furrowed. Who the hell is she talking to?
“Oh, and if you could also do the entire job without so much as a ‘thank you,’ that’d be great,” she continued. “Sure! I’d love to. Shall I eat you out as well?”
The female grunted, stepping right over me. It was the same one from earlier with the red shoes.
She sighed audibly. “Where the hell do I even start?” She pinched the bridge of her nose, stopping a foot away from me. “It reeks of death out here.”
Yeah, it does, I agreed.
“Fuck,” she muttered, then looked up and down the street. “Oh, Willow!” she called. “Ryder’s looking for you!”
My brow furrowed. You don’t really think that’s going to work, do you?
She whistled next, then took a few more steps before yelling for me again, claiming Ryder had sent her.
Uh-huh, I thought at her. She continued on, varying her behavior between hobbling several steps and shouting lies. I waited until she was about twenty feet away before I started the process of worming my way out from beneath the dead body.
She was too busy whistling and calling for me to notice my slow progress. It took a few minutes, mostly because I didn’t want to risk her seeing me, but I finally made it out and into a position where I could shoot her.
Only, I didn’t want anyone to hear gunfire.
So I palmed a knife instead.
If I couldn’t detect conversation inside, then the trouble was far enough away that I didn’t need to worry about someone overhearing this bitch grunt.
I slowly rose to the balls of my feet, creeping forward in a squat.
The female cursed and kicked off her shoes, completely unaware of me approaching from behind. Considering she thought I was dumb enough to fall for her calling act, she absolutely didn’t anticipate me sneaking up on her.
I weighed one of the daggers in my hand, contemplating the throwing velocity required, then released it when I was about five feet behind her. It hit her square between her shoulder blades, resulting in a shriek that turned into a grunt as I pounced on her from behind.
She went down with an “Oomph.”
I took another knife and drove it into her skull with a force created by my lycan side.
Aside from a gurgle, she fell silent.
I quickly looked around to see if anyone else had noticed and found a few vampires peeking out of nearby buildings, most of them probably wondering what the hell this female had been yelling about.
When no one reacted other than to gape, I rolled off her and onto the balls of my feet.
She’d