Until, that is, the fire door disappeared behind me. And before I could dodge, a hard male arm settled vise-like across my chest.

  THE SCENT OF ALPHA werewolf burned like ammonia against the exposed membranes of my nostrils, and yet I found myself relaxing rather than further tensing up. Because while this wasn’t the best opponent to grab me in a near chokehold, he wasn’t the worst either. “Jackal,” I greeted the male behind my back.

  I expected the werewolf to release me, having fulfilled whatever charade he was playing out for the sake of his men. But, instead, he pulled me in closer, the subtle slide of fingers across my fabric-covered breasts suggested I wasn’t quite out of the woods just yet.

  And while I was willing to go quite a distance for the sake of public appearances, groping was where I drew the line. So I pulled at my star ball’s magic ever so subtly, sharpening one of the buttons on my jacket until the metal boasted a razor edge. The next time my assailant’s finger slid in that general direction....

  Jackal stumbled backwards, a much larger cut than I’d intended splitting open the pad of his thumb. “What the—?” he started. Then, recalling our rapt audience, he straightened from his attempt to peer at my fastener, running out his tongue instead to take one long lick along his own bleeding wound.

  Within seconds, crimson stained a grinning mouthful of wolf-sharp fangs while fur sprang out in a circle around both of his eyes. The male was seconds away from shifting. And, predictably, his show of bestial dominance knocked the other werewolves off the trail of any potential weakness, sending them stumbling over each other as they retreated from us both.

  I, on the other hand, had been busy figuring out how to wrangle a decent conversation without our audience turning Jackal into even more of a dick than he usually was. “If you’ll excuse us for a moment....” I told the room at large, batting my eyelashes as flirtatiously as I could manage. Then I grabbed Jackal’s lapels and drew him into the laundry room, kicking the door closed behind our backs. A quarter in the dryer, and soon I was confident that we could speak without being overheard.

  “What do you want now?” I demanded, dropping all pretense at toadying up to the male I usually thought of as one of my few allies within my home turf. “I’m tired. Tell me whatever you have to tell me, then let me get some sleep.”

  I expected a request or a warning, not the ammonia-scented rage that came rolling off Jackal in waves. “You’re playing with fire, pup,” he told me. And even though there were no underlings present, he pushed in closer, glaring down at me with teeth that were still as sharp as any wolf’s. “Being seen entering the Atwood mansion after dark then leaving with that filth. What were you thinking? No wolf waltzes in here and takes over my town and my girl.”

  The emphatic words rolled around in my head like so many pinballs, knocking down my defenses and abruptly pushing any soothing response out of my reach. “But it’s their territory, not yours,” I countered. “Just because they’ve been staying close to home for the last decade doesn’t mean they don’t have dibs on this land.”

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll change that fact,” Jackal answered back just as fast. His fingers were similarly speedy when he yanked a cell phone out of his pocket, tilting the screen so I could look over the crook of his elbow and catch photo after photo of my sister’s smiling face.

  Kira out behind the school with no one to protect her except clawless humans. Kira walking to the corner store, a time stamp proving her expedition had occurred this evening after I’d explicitly warned her to stay at home.

  The pictures were a visceral reminder that my kid sister could either be helped or harmed by this werewolf who depended upon my supposed romantic interest to solidify his precarious grasp on power. The trouble was, I couldn’t just lock Kira away in her room to keep her safe.

  “You’ve enjoyed years of protection,” Jackal told me as I rearranged my understanding of the situation, realizing too late that this male I’d thought my staunch ally was both more fickle and more dangerous than he’d initially appeared. “Now it’s time for you to pony up. Get rid of those trespassers by the end of the week or I’ll be forced to transfer my affections to a more malleable female. Your sister, I think, might just do the trick.”

  Chapter 18

  Anger and fear carried me back up the same flights of stairs I’d traversed twice already in the last half hour. Rage turned my key in the apartment’s lock and powered me through the darkened room on fox-soft feet. But once I tiptoed up to Kira’s bed and found the girl snoring on her pillow, the events of the night all caught up with me at once.

  An intriguing—and far too astute—alpha. A well-named Jackal nipping at the heels of those stronger than himself. A serial killer on the loose who appeared to possess my mother’s missing possessions. And Kira, caught in the middle, with only me to defend her from the horrors of the outside world.

  At least I still had my sword...and whatever information I could glean by tapping into my neighbor’s unprotected wireless connection.

  To that end, I booted up the laptop so ancient it had been discarded as useless by Kira’s school a semester earlier. The power cord was frayed and only worked if bent at just the right angle—I folded the appropriate loop into place and tacked it down against the kitchen table with the weight of the computer itself. Similarly, the right-hand hinge was broken from being manhandled by one too many students, so I had to use two hands when opening the screen so as not to damage the machine beyond repair.

  Finally, though, I had a browser in front of me, the colors blinding against the darkness of the otherwise unlit room. Tapping F9 with a fox’s instinct for stealth, I continued dimming the screen until I was able to see again using my peripheral vision. Only then did I begin to type.

  Luckily for me, Kira had saved passwords on the same device I was currently accessing. So it was the work of only a few minutes to discover that Mama’s possessions had been sold off in three batches to three separate buyers. The closest purchaser was in Michigan, the furthest in California, and the amulet had been included in the latter lot.

  It seemed hard to believe that someone had traveled halfway across the country to return items I’d considered junk to their original location then had used the self-same amulet to commit murder in a manner seemingly designed to implicate werewolves after the fact. Still, the listing was one of the few leads I’d come up with to date, so I noted down each address and Ebay handle to be analyzed once my brain was less desperately in need of sleep.

  By that point, my eyelids were starting to slide closed and I knew I’d hate myself in the morning for failing to go to bed in a timely manner. Still, there were so many questions circling through my mind that I doubted my ability to sleep even if I succumbed to my current state of exhaustion.

  Specifically, I wanted to know more about fox shifters, to answer the questions Kira had recently been asking. Mama had sworn me to secrecy as soon as I was old enough to say my own name, and I’d somehow carried that promise through to adulthood. But what could it hurt to google the concept and find out what the wider world knew about my kind? What would it hurt to educate myself about my abilities as well as the risks that threatened my sister and me?

  So I pulled the screen closer toward me, placed my hands on the keyboard...then swore under my breath as the formerly lit surface went abruptly blank.

  “I know better than that,” I berated myself while fiddling with a funky hinge full of rather important cables. Had I pulled out an internal wire while trying to make the words on the screen a little easier to read? Or did the cranky laptop just need a little TLC to bring it back to life?

  Only after several minutes of frustration did I realize that it wasn’t the hinge that had caused the problem in the first place. Instead, my touch to the upper corner of the laptop had caused the power cord to unravel...and of course the battery no longer held a charge.

  4:44 read the glowing numbers in the upper right-hand corner of the rejuvenated screen when the operating system finally booted back up. I waited for my mother to toss out a proverb about bad luck. After all, I remembered her warning me repeatedly as a child about the ill-fated nature of the number four.

  But her ghost voice remained silent. So I pushed the memory aside, typing in my query with two fingers and a thumb.

  “What are fox shifters?” I whispered aloud as words slowly materialized on the screen before me. And Google answered immediately, a single word popping up in a box above all other search results.

  “Kitsune.” The foreign word sent a jolt through the star-ball-turned-sword still scabbarded at my back. But when I nudged at my mother’s ghost, she remained resolutely silent.

  Well, if Mama wasn’t going to explain my genealogy, then I’d have to do research on my own. Because familial secrets had already killed two innocent humans. For all I knew, Kira and I were next.

  So I clicked through to the first website and slowly I began to read.

  SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN, I collapsed onto the softest bed in our apartment...the one that already contained my comatose sister. “Ge’ offme,” Kira complained, words running together muzzily. Then she growled sleepily as my cold fingers snuck up against her warm scalp to thaw.

  “So shift,” I answered only a little less groggily. There had been so many stories on the internet, myth and supposed fact and tales labeled modern fiction. Kitsune were Japanese fox shifters—that part I could vouch for myself. But were we tricksters who only appeared human in moonlight? Or beautiful and loyal women whose reflections showcased the fox within? So many stories, and none of them seemed to reference an amulet able to suck a human’s life force out of his body then leave said two-legger with a miniature star ball frozen into his chest.

  So I took the easy way out and decided to deal with my heritage tomorrow. Instead of mulling over the issue further, I snuggled closer to my sister, waiting for her to pull upon her fur form and make a little extra space for me on the bed. After all, the bar in the sofa bed was brutal. I ended up here more often than not, and Kira was always willing to shift and snuggle.

  Only, apparently, she was feeling argumentative tonight. “You shift,” my sister countered, sounding more awake than previously as she elbowed me in the kidneys. Her bones were sharp and her tone was surprisingly adamant, so this time I shrugged and obeyed.

  One moment I was a women frozen and exhausted, mind running in endless circles that all centered around the child hugged within my arms. The next, I was a fox, moist nose the only part of me exposed to the chilly air in our barely-heated apartment. Tucking my snout beneath my tail solved that problem, and soon I was as toasty as if Kira had let me under the covers in the first place. This was the life....

  With that thought, I drifted off and slept the sleep of an innocent animal. The bed was soft, my sister was close, and vague threats could be dealt with at a later date.

  Too bad “later” came far too prematurely when the kitchen door crashed open and werewolves poured into our previously solitary den.

  Chapter 19

  Laptop, fox, sister. Three potential weaknesses, none of which I could currently guard against displaying to the outside world. Not when my own body represented the second danger, my red fur glimmering in the full-noon sunlight that bathed our small but well-lit room.

  Kira, on the other hand, was currently human and quite capable of diving directly into muddy waters without measuring the distance to rock bottom first. “What are you doing here?” she demanded while stalking toward our uninvited guests in half-dressed tween splendor. “Have you ever heard of knocking? Didn’t you realize a locked door means Keep out?”

  I itched to protect rather than hide and continue being protected, but rationality pushed me flat against the bed instead. Because if these werewolves became aware of my identity, they’d know what Kira was as well....

  A heart that always beat faster in vulpine form now pounded so hard against my throat that I could barely breathe. Meanwhile, the rumpled covers that stood between me and discovery felt far thinner than they had in the darkness last night.

  Kira, get back here! I wanted to scream the words, wanted to drag my sister out of harm’s way. But all I actually managed was a twitch of my whiskers before an unexpectedly familiar voice soothed the worst of the terror out of my skin.

  “I apologize, ma’am.” I sighed out the reediest whine of relief as I realized this was Allen, Gunner’s geekiest assistant. Still a werewolf and perhaps suspicious of me...but at least not currently slavering after my blood.

  “We tried to call and we tried to knock,” the male continued, unaware of my near meltdown, “but there was no answer. Gunner was concerned something might have happened, so he gave us permission to force entry. If you want to put on some clothes and get your sister, we’ll wait....”

  Terror gradually gave way to curiosity, allowing me to sniff the air and assess the situation more fully. Astonishingly, embarrassment was the key emotion rolling off these home-invading werewolves. So I risked a peek around a corner of my cover barricade, noting the way Allen looked at everything other than my sister while his cheeks turned from faintly flushed to boiled-beet red.

  Aw. A baby-doll nightie on an underage female was apparently a better weapon than the one I itched to grasp into my not-yet-present hand. Kira was rather well developed for a twelve year old....

  Still, Allen wasn’t the only werewolf present. There were two bulky shifters behind him, one of whom seemed far more interested in his cell phone than in his surroundings. The other, though, was nosing around the laptop I’d been using as night faded into morning, the exact same device I couldn’t quite remember shutting down properly before I stumbled off to bed.

  Had the browser still been up when I abandoned the computer? Would the screen flicker to life full of damning evidence if Nosy’s fingers hit the proper key sequence? Now more than ever, I needed Kira to close the bedroom door so I could regain my humanity and shut this party down....

  And as if I’d called her attention to me by the force of willpower alone, my sister swiveled slightly to glance in my direction. Then her head tilted in a query I hoped was too subtle for the werewolves to make out.

  The door, I tried to communicate with widened eyes and flaring nostrils. And the motion must have caught Allen’s attention, because he took a step forward...only to disappear from view as Kira got the message and slammed the much-needed barrier between uninvited werewolves and myself.

  “Mai’s in the bathroom,” my sister prattled as I yanked hard on my magic, shifting in less than a second into shivering human form. Clothes, clothes, clothes, I reminded myself, hopping into yesterday’s wrinkled outerwear without bothering to don undergarments first. After all, forming the brilliant ball of frigid magic currently streaming out of my body into sword form was more important than panties if my goal was rushing to my sister’s aid.

  “Nobody’s in this bathroom,” Allen was saying as I pushed my way out into the kitchen-living-room combo.

  “Well, we’ve got two,” my sister lied through her teeth.

  And before the accountant could argue about the unlikelihood of a one-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, I was shoving my sister behind my back and slamming the laptop screen down inches from Nosy’s furtive fingers. I think I heard the hinge crack all the way through in the process. But as best I could tell, no secrets had as yet been revealed.

  “I’m here. My sister is none of your business,” I told them. Then, dividing my glare equally between all three werewolf faces: “Now get out of our house.”

  “THIS ISN’T A HOUSE, actually,” Allen countered. “More like an apartment. Or, if you’re British, a flat.”

  “Your lips are moving but your feet aren’t,” I observed, doing my best to usher all three werewolves toward the open door via physical intimidation alone. Unfortunately, Allen was the smallest of the three shifters and even he topped me by a good six inches at a conservative guess. No wonder none of the werewolves budged in response to my attempted loom.

  The phone-obsessed shifter, on the other hand, did deign to speak...even though his eyes remained glued to his cell screen. “Boss says to tell chica here that he’s tied up at the moment but that he’ll see her this evening. In the meantime, she’s in charge of the investigation today.”

  I was in charge of three home-breaking werewolves? Something didn’t quite add up. “What were Gunner’s exact words?” I demanded, angling closer in hopes I could see what was so engrossing about that tiny screen.

  “I don’t think...” Phone Dude hemmed. At which point Nosy snatched the device out of his pack mate’s hand and read the contents aloud.

  “Tell Mai I’m busy measuring my brother’s cock. Back tonight. Until then, she’s the boss.”

  “Told you it wasn’t appropriate for the ears of a lady,” Phone Dude grumbled.

  “What could be more appropriate for a lady than cock measuring?” Nosy countered.

  “Crow, Tank, that’s enough.”

  And while I should have been laughing right along with Kira at Allen’s attempt to squash his pack mates’ hilarity, something warm began unfurling in my stomach instead.

  “You know what they say about a guy with small feet,” I’d teased two nights prior at the Arena. No wonder Gunner had turned so grumpy yesterday evening when we stumbled across an extra-small canine track near the site of the murder. Had the alpha really taken my jab so literally? And if he believed Ransom to be responsible for the killing...why would Gunner risk his most important relationship by relaying that information to a near stranger like me?