Tru, I knew, would be just as safe today with Jack standing in my place. That’s what it meant to be woelfin instead of werewolf. We shifted using a physical pelt that remained outside our bodies in human form and we had a twin who could be trusted beyond reason.

  The combination of traits was strength…and weakness as well.

  Because anyone could steal our pelts and prevent us from shifting. Knowing we were twins would be enough to put Jack at risk, to label him as a potential woelfin. So I protected him by denying his existence, something that felt like a lie as Tru and I grew closer day by day.

  Never mind that Jack and I had made a pact years ago not to reveal our identities to anyone but a mate. If I asked him now, he would say I was arguing semantics. He’d urge me to reveal my full self to the object of my admiration.

  But I didn’t ask for that permission. Why?

  “I wouldn’t have kissed her,” my brother informed me, misreading my silence. I needed to get out of my own head and track down India, but my twin wasn’t ready for me to go yet. Instead, he kept harping on his previous point in that mellow voice that was the only obvious external difference between us. “Didn’t think that had to be said,” he continued. “But, you need to hear it, I need to say it.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, making the words true with an effort. “You’re the only one I’d trust with her.”

  Jack nodded, dropping the issue far more readily than I would have in his shoes. Sun shone out from behind eyes just as cloud-gray as mine but infinitely warmer.

  Jack was fiery, but in a good way. Just as our relationship was now, once again, good.

  So I shucked off my clothes and spun my pelt across my shoulders, shifting in a way I didn’t around anyone other than my twin. He’d been undressing at the same time, preparing to pull on my suit and become me but taking time first to shove his own clothes into a backpack, clasping the bag around my lupine chest and rumpling my ears as if I was a family pet.

  “Take care of yourself,” he demanded.

  I didn’t. I loped across snow and ice that dwindled the further I traveled from the Strays’ enclave. Later, running across unfrozen pavement until my paw pads bled, I was grateful for the pain since it beat back the fiery darkness twining through my brain.

  Because the fire told me I was an idiot to leave Jack alone with the object of my affections. The fire told me India was proof of why I couldn’t trust him around a beautiful woman.

  Because, no matter how much I would have preferred to send Jack on this foray in my place, India was the only Stray who’d met both myself and my brother. Well, met wasn’t quite the proper word. She’d met Jack in various bedrooms, had thrown a skillet at his head when he admitted he only kept coming around because she was a good lay. She’d likely do worse if he showed up on her doorstep tonight.

  No, I was the only one who could complete this errand. I was also the only one who knew where India would go to ground.

  The apartment building where I’d originally found her was perpetually half empty thanks to the scent of dog shit carrying over the fence from the next-door kennel. The stench drove away most renters in short order, which proved doubly handy for a werewolf trying to fly under the radar.

  India would have been able to snag a room here with no notice. And any werewolf walking by would fail to pick up on her scent.

  I arrived just as dawn began pulling fecal stench into the air. Shifting behind a sad excuse for shrubbery, dead twigs poked into my bare skin as I wrapped my pelt around one leg before yanking Jack’s pants over top. My own trousers’ impeccable tailoring would have hidden the bulky addition seamlessly, but Jack’s apparel was less forgiving. Too late, I remembered that my brother liked to wrap his pelt around his torso instead.

  He wrapped his pelt around his torso and had once managed to seduce a dozen women in a dozen days without revealing our familial secret. For the one-night stands he’d indulged in years ago, that skill had been essential.

  Fire tried to lick into my mind again. Darkness tried to tell me a playboy wouldn’t protect the woman I loved in quite the way I’d intended.

  Ignoring the insidious tendrils of doubt, I hit buzzer button after buzzer button at the front door, not apologizing to anyone despite waking neighbors far too early. When India answered—“Yeah?”—I demanded, “Buzz me up.”

  The lock clicked and I headed up the stairs, hunting the number the buzzer had promised belonged to her. It didn’t require much hunting. India was waiting for me outside her apartment, hair a different unnatural shade than it had been yesterday. I intended to remark upon it, but other words emerged from my mouth instead. Someone else’s words.

  “Get inside.”

  India obeyed because she had to but her eyes suggested she intended to filet me once the alpha command wore off. I didn’t blame her. This wasn’t the way to treat a Stray running scared.

  But the darkness had hold of me now. The darkness that, I now realized, had nothing to do with an unrequited mate bond. Nothing to do with the fire I always managed so carefully.

  No, the darkness was something else entirely. It was the spirit who had possessed Erik and Cedric. The spirit who, inside my own head, I could feel was male instead of female.

  Kami wasn’t the culprit. And I was now the tool for the true villain’s murderous impulses.

  Whoever had hold of me shoved my will out of his way, forcing my fingers to close and lock the door behind us. “Sit,” he told India even though her kitchen was devoid of furniture and the floor was both grungy and sticky. Once she’d sunk down as mandated, he added, “Stay.”

  Then, as if noticing I was still awake inside the body he now commanded, the spirit growled something harsh and my view of the world blinked out.

  Chapter 20

  Tru

  I hadn’t expected the ruby to do much, at least not yet. After all, when I’d peered out the window after returning from the past, the moon had been no more than a fingernail in the star-studded sky.

  But when I cupped the jewel and thought of Kami, the gem moved a fraction of an inch across my fingers. “Did you see that?” Lynette demanded.

  “Saw and felt it,” I agreed.

  “So let’s go!”

  To her extreme annoyance, we didn’t go immediately. Instead, I forced us all to cool our heels until Seth returned from patrolling. I’d learned from watching horror movies cuddled up beside a squealing Lynette to never go off to hunt the scary thing alone. Especially not when in charge of an impetuous ward who needed at least one set of eyes on her at all times to keep her out of harm’s way.

  I was glad of that decision when we rolled into Lexington mid-afternoon, me behind the wheel because Drake, oddly, hadn’t seemed concerned about my inexperienced hands guiding the battered car down multiple interstates. He’d maintained an eerie silence the entire way, sandwiched between Seth and Erik in the back seat with Neko curled up on his knees. My offer of a juice box to soothe his throat resulted in only a wry shake of his head.

  I expected support now however. Because, as soon as it became evident that the city most of us had called home for the last month was our eventual destination, I’d been trying and failing to talk Lynette around to being left out of the hunt. With Rosa’s house just around the corner, it was time to pull out the conversational big guns.

  “No way.” Lynette folded her arms beside me in the front passenger seat. “Kami hurt Erik. She killed Cedric. And that’s just this week. I’m coming with you to take her down.”

  “We’re not taking anyone down,” I countered. I was hoping this afternoon would only be reconnaissance, a fact-finding mission to figure out where Kami was hiding and, if we were lucky, what she was up to. “We’re just checking things out,” I told Lynette for the tenth time. “Which means we need to keep our numbers low to keep from being noticed. You stay here with Neko, Seth, and Rosa. When we get back, Drake, Erik, and I will give you the complete blow by blow.”

  Lynette huffed out an immediate denial. “You’re only bringing Erik because you don’t trust him around me!” She waved a hand toward the boy of her dreams who, yes, I had situated in the back seat as far away from her as he could be while still coming along for the ride.

  Rather than following the sight line suggested by the gesture, I glanced in the rear-view mirror. The Drake I’d come to know over the last month would have been ready to meet my gaze, to answer the silent question—would Seth be able to protect both Lynette and Rosa from Erik if the teenager went wonky again?

  But all I saw was the dark crown of Drake’s head as he poked at his cell phone. Seth was the one who met my gaze then jerked his chin up and down in a nod.

  Odd, but not the issue at the moment. Trusting Seth’s confirmation, I accepted the inevitable and pulled out the trick I knew would win Lynette over.

  “You’re right. I should leave Erik home with you. You two deserve some alone time. Then, after our scouting, Drake and I can go on our first real date. Yeah?”

  My ward’s expression had remained mulish through the proposed sweetener of time with the object of her affection. But she was deeply invested in me and Drake taking our relationship to the next level. So I wasn’t at all surprised when her face turned childlike and happy as I finished my proposal.

  “Okay,” she agreed finally. “Enjoy your date!”

  After emptying everyone else out of the car, Drake slid into the driver’s seat without a word to me. He smelled more strongly of fur than usual, as if the hunt was calling to his lupine side. Perhaps that explained his seeming lack of interest in conversing.

  Well, that plus his apparently painfully sore throat.

  It made sense for him to drive, though, since I was the one who’d worked with the ruby to narrow down our destination on the way to Lexington. The solid yank drawing us over such a long distance had been easy to pick out one-handed, but the gem was now jerking around semi-erratically. In order to understand the subtleties, I held it in the palm of my right hand and called out turns as each intersection came up.

  Guiding us deeper and deeper downtown, I didn’t expect to find Kami easily. Had figured we’d narrow down her location to a general vicinity then come back tonight to cruise streets when she should be asleep.

  But I caught a glimpse of her within the first half hour. The way she moved was instantly recognizable. Almost as graceful as a shifter yet different in some subtle way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  Well, one difference I could clearly distinguish. Kami’s steps were slower and tireder than I recalled. Her long, blond hair was unbrushed and her clothes appeared filthy and mismatched. Pushing a shopping cart while shielding it with her body, she appeared homeless, cold, bereft.

  “There!” I pointed at Kami’s back as she shoved the cart over a broken piece of sidewalk, the task seeming to require more effort than I would have expected. She was on the far side of the street, our windows were rolled up, and traffic noise should have drowned out my voice, but Kami spun as if she’d heard me. Then, leaving the cart behind, she darted down a one-way street with too much oncoming traffic for us to disobey the posted signage.

  “Meet me at the nearest cross street!” I’d grabbed the door handle while spitting out half an explanation, expecting Drake to read my mind the way he always seemed able to.

  But the door had auto-locked when the car went into motion. The clunkiness of this old vehicle meant I couldn’t just override the locking mechanism by yanking on the handle. No, Drake needed to hit the unlock on his side.

  He should have remembered that. We’d joked about it when he was teaching me to drive in this same vehicle three weeks earlier. Had suggested I be sneaky as a fox during my upcoming license test to ensure the instructor didn’t notice the safety violation of a door that wouldn’t release its passenger on command.

  “Perhaps you’ll let me replace this vehicle before then,” he’d rasped. “You can pick out something safer for you and Lynette to learn in.”

  “Lynette needs strong female role models,” I’d countered. “We’d never let some guy buy her a car, so I can’t let you buy me one either.”

  As always, Drake had respected my boundary. And I’d passed the driving test too, covering up the motion of unlocking the passenger-side door with a wave to the waiting Lynette.

  Now, though, Drake didn’t hit the proper button even when I reminded him: “Drake! The lock!”

  His head cocked as if he was picking up on my agitation but had no explanation for it. With one hand he motioned at Kami’s receding back. Meanwhile, an extended honk suggested the traffic behind us was growing impatient as we paused far too long in the middle of the road.

  In the end, I had to crawl cross his body to punch the proper button on the door panel, and something about his scent felt wrong as I did so.

  Which wasn’t the problem at the moment. The problem was Kami’s rather extensive head start.

  Chapter 21

  Tru

  The shopping cart, as I sprinted past, appeared to contain a stained blanket and a crumpled fast-food wrapper among other items. I barely took that in before tracing Kami’s footsteps down that one-way street.

  She was gone. Or so I thought until I caught a flash of the same dingy brown coat high above me. No, Kami hadn’t disappeared. Instead she was running up an old-fashioned metal fire escape along the side of the building, as light on her feet as any fox.

  Was Kami capable of shifting into vulpine form? I still didn’t know even that simple fact about a spirit who had once appeared exactly like me.

  Whatever her shifter status, she was fast. Following in her footsteps wasn’t the cleverest option.

  Instead, I eyed trajectories. The windows along the fire escape were all shut and, based on the neighborhood, likely locked also. So Kami’s only recourse would be the roof.

  And, thankfully, Drake appeared on foot now at the other end of the one-way street. He’d parked and met me just as I’d asked, cutting off Kami’s escape back to the ground.

  Counting on him to guard that exit, I headed for a restaurant five doors down that advertised roof-top dining. After one quick explanation for the greeter—“I want to check and see if the roof is too windy before the rest of my party arrives”—I was pounding up the stairs, blocking off the other obvious exit point.

  Because the gap between her building and the one in the other direction had been too great to leap safely. But coming this way, anyone with shifter agility and no fear of heights could progress from rooftop to rooftop nearly as easily as they could run down the street.

  Turned out, it was windy on the roof. Cold air whipped hair around my face, but that wasn’t the source of my internal chill as I took in the scene in the direction from which I’d come.

  I’d been inside for only a few short minutes, which shouldn’t have been enough time for disaster to unfold. But Drake hadn’t taken my wordless hint and stayed on the ground at the base of the fire escape. Instead, he’d followed Kami up onto the roof.

  He’d followed her up and chased her until she leapt that first divide in the unexpected direction to get away from him. Fifteen feet of wind gusted between them and they spoke across the barrier of emptiness, too far away for me to hear their words but close enough so their body language was crystal clear.

  Kami was terrified. I could feel her thrumming need to flee within my own body, knew her legs and shoulders ached with urgency. But the next building in that direction was even further from the one she stood on, the gap more like twenty feet with a very slightly higher elevation at the landing site.

  Vulpine, I could have made that leap. Two-legged, I wouldn’t have tried.

  But Kami was inching away from Drake. I held my breath, then let it out as I saw she wasn’t heading toward the twenty-foot gap. Instead, she appeared to be angling toward the closer side of the building, the one that faced a large street paralleling the one-way where we’d all started.

  Drake edged along his side of the gap to pace her. Bad move! I would have yelled if that wouldn’t have made matters worse. Instead, I hopped to the next closer building then the next one.

  I was still three buildings away when Kami jumped.

  “She’s gone,” I breathed, peering down into empty space. The wind had died down, but the chill in my gut had only intensified. Because Drake’s scent, now that I’d caught up to him, was pure bitterness, no lemon-meringue sweetness at all in evidence as he stared down at the busy sidewalk and street.

  There were no awnings that would have halted Kami’s descent. Just straight up and down wall with the tiniest window ledges. And I’d seen Kami fall into that emptiness.

  She wasn’t splattered on the ground beneath us though. She’d survived somehow and Drake seemed either unable or unwilling to tell me what had happened. He’d just shaken his head and touched his throat when I demanded details. Never mind that I’d seen his lips move earlier when he spoke to Kami on the rooftop.

  The ruby—the other obvious method of tracking down Kami—was still in the car. Without that guide, my only option involved shifting and working my way down the face of the building along inch-wide ornamental ledges and three-inch windowsills. I might have been able to sniff out Kami’s presence if she’d swung herself inside an open window then slammed the pane shut to cover up her retreat. I might have been able to follow her scent trail through the building and discovered where she was hiding…if that didn’t mean ignoring the hulking danger currently standing by my side.

  Because Drake wasn’t himself, hadn’t been since I woke that morning. All of the small incongruities added up to one answer—this man beside me couldn’t be trusted. But he would be trusted by Lynette when he returned alone if I lost my footing while climbing down the building’s side.

  For Lynette’s sake, I couldn’t follow Kami and risk that. Not now. Instead, I pulled out the phone Kira had given me and Lynette had programmed with several relevant contacts this morning. After typing out a quick message, I shoved the device back into my pocket then aimed for the fire escape Drake had come up.