I shivered into the snake. And stole the body of tlvdatsi. Not just the snake under her skin, to share her form. I took her. Stealing her body. Stealing her soul.

Light and cold and blood exploded through me. Tlvdatsi screamed in rage. Fighting me. Inside with me. Nononononononononono.

I took tlvdatsi. Made her mine. I shoved my memory into her skin. With her.

I/we rolled across snow. Heaving breaths. The world shifted, shuddered, quaked. I fought her for control. And I/we rose up, hunger demanding. I/we ate from her kill. My kill. Tlvdatsi screamed and raged. Eat, eat. Belly aching with need. Then, Kits. Kits. Kits.

I stopped eating when I was full. Satisfied. And big. The Beast was crouched inside tlvdatsi with me. Watching. Kits, she demanded. Showed me the path, back to her/our den. Scents, landmarks, places marked to make it ours/hers, hers/ours. Followed near the trail, in the spoor of a wolf, hiding my tracks with his. Would have to kill the wolf soon. Danger to kits.

Kits made hunger cries, chirping whistles. Squealed low-pitched. I/we followed my beast scent to den, low cave in rock, opening wide enough to crawl through, into the dark of earth, into cave. Leaves had blown in. Good den. I/we touched, licked, smelled cubs. Very young. Breath full of milk, open mouths in dark. I/we settled with them, grooming paws. Cubs pulled at us, milk teeth uncomfortable yet soothing as they nursed. Language and history and memory fell away. Buried. Beast was born.

I woke with a shudder. I was drenched in sweat, my heart an uneven trip-hammer. “Crap. What was that?” But I knew. I knew. It was a memory of my own past. It was the memory of how Beast and I ended up inside me together. I had stolen her body. And ended up with her soul, inside, with me.

Deep within, I heard Beast’s panting breaths. I tasted her anger, old and worn like a bone with nothing left inside or out, no marrow, no substance except memory.

“Dear God,” I whispered. “What did I do?”

Neither God nor Beast answered me.

This was outside the life of a skinwalker. I knew that without knowing how I knew. I had done foulest evil. I had stolen the body of a living creature. Beast had called me liver-eater.

I rose from the tangled damp sheets and stripped the bed, made it up with fresh sheets, tossing the damp ones into the corner. Stinking with flop sweat, I took a shower, standing a long time under the water as if it could really clean me. Exhausted, I climbed back in bed and pulled the sheets and coverlet over me.

Black magic. I had done black magic.

CHAPTER 15

I was still buck naked

I woke at the sound of a scream. Scream on scream. Women. In terror. Katie’s.

I was up and running before I came fully awake. Grabbing weapons and crosses from the closet. Slinging the shotgun free of its harness. I raced through the house and outside, into the half-light of predawn. Dropping crosses over my head, sticking stakes into my hair. I went over the wall without breaking stride, brick scraping my legs.“Crap,” I grunted. I was still buck naked. Time to worry about that later. If I lived.

Katie’s back door was hanging open at an angle. Ripped from its hinges. I paused and took in the door; claw marks had scored the wood. The rogue’s compound scent was smeared on the door, the rotten reek uppermost, rank in the air. If what I had figured out in the previous long night was true, it needed to feed. Mad one. Liver-eater. Beast bristled and I growled.

I had just checked the loads, but my hands flew through the motions anyway. Satisfied, I set the stock at my shoulder and moved into the house, placing each bare foot carefully before transferring my weight forward, my hair brushing my back with each step. My breath hurt in my lungs as I tried to breathe silently after the run, unable to draw in enough air; my heart tried to slow from sprinting speed, pounding an erratic rhythm.

The sconce lights were on, but muted, dimmed for the night. I smelled blood, heard crying. Someone else gurgled with each breath, as if breathing underwater, or through a restricted airway. The blood and gurgling came from my right, the dining room, maybe.

An aborted scream tugged me the opposite direction. I took a hard breath, settling myself. Weapon muzzle leading, the butt tight to my shoulder, I moved left down the hallway. Silent, I stepped into Katie’s office. For an instant that lasted forever, I took it in.

Blood was sprayed over the walls and ceiling in huge, glistening gouts. Troll was against the wall. A lamp burned, casting the room into jagged shadows, cutting his face into planes of light and dark, his bald pate shining with sweat. He was watching across the room, cheeks red, fisted hands at his sides. Muscles straining. He grunted with effort. Immobile . Pinned, Beast thought. Not breathing; trying to get free. His skin was both flushed and gray. Tears coursed down his face.

At the desk, across the destroyed room, the rogue vamp was bent, hunched. He held Katie to his mouth, his fangs buried in her stomach. Sucking. Chewing. His hair streamed forward, hiding his face. Black hair. Dark skin showing through, coppery. Like mine. His hands were clawed—not recurved, retractile claws for catching and bringing down prey, but bird claws, for grabbing prey on the fly.

A drop of blood fell from the ceiling. Slowly. Catching the dim light. Landing on my shoulder with a soft, cold plop. I took in a breath, so heavily scented with vamp blood and rogue it was choking.

Faster than thought, pictures of possibility overlay one another in my mind. Me firing. Katie taking some of the poisonous rounds. Me racing in to place the shotgun into his side. Him stopping me with his mind. Me slapping silver crosses all over him, to watch him bubble and burn. Him stopping me with his mind. Me racing in to stake him. Him stopping me with his mind. No good alternatives. I pulled a stake from my hair. Sprinted in. Time went sluggish.

The rogue looked up. Vampy eyes, black pupils the size of dimes in crimson, bloody orbs. He lifted his mouth from Katie. Blood spouted over his face. His tongue was black.

His mind reached out, black tingles of power stinging along my skin. His mind gripped mine. Vampiric and frozen. Stop, he commanded.

Momentum fought his compulsion. I couldn’t stop. Stumbled. Beast reared up. I/we screamed. Caught my balance two steps away. Still moving. The black electric power tightened on me, gripping. Time slowed, taking on texture, thickening to a heavy, oily consistency. Feeling as if I moved underwater, my muscles stretched. I turned the stake for an underarm thrust. A killing strike as I ran. One step.

Gore coated his mouth and chin and spilled down his clothes. Fancy clothes. A tuxedo. A second step. He laughed. The laughter splashed over me like warm honey. Congealing over me. Stop. . . . Blackness took me. Momentum still had me in its grip. His mind . . . closed over me.

But Beast had my soul. With a scream that tore through my brain and out my throat, Beast ripped me free of his control. I crashed into the rogue. The Benelli and my body slid between his and Katie’s. She started to fall. The stake rose up on its arc from near my thigh. Lifting to slash up between us. Aimed into his belly and up, under his ribs. I caught a glimpse of his face. A man. Hawkish nose and chin. Lips pulled back from fangs on both upper and lower jaw. Not something I had ever seen before.

The air shivered. Cold. Icy. And the vamp was gone.

I fell forward, stumbling, catching myself with Beast’s reflexes. Bent-kneed, body in a half crouch, I caught Katie across my thigh. I eased her to the floor. Whirled. Whipped my head, following the rogue’s scent. His complex, compound scent changing. Beast sucked it in, over her/my tongue. Changing . . . liver-eater rot. Something else . . . rogue/not-rogue.

Troll’s breath like a bellows, ragged and hoarse as he knelt beside me. “Katie,” he said, his voice rising on the last syllable. He stopped, his hands hovering just above her, uncertain. Her dress had been ripped away, exposing small breasts with tiny pink nipples. A scar, brown and uniform, marked her upper arm. A fleur-de-lis. A brand, I realized. What the heck?

A hideous wound in her belly started at her rib cage and ended at the juts of her hip bones. Fangs had scored across her skin. A large portion of her torso on the right side was gone. Over the liver. It oozed. Katie had been eaten. “Katie,” Troll whispered. Shock and horror froze him immobile, as he had been when the rogue held him at bay. Beast’s hearing detected a faint thump.

“Her heart’s still beating,” I said, blood pumping once in her throat, up her carotid artery to her brain. “She’s still . . . with us.” Not quite alive. But not gone.

He gathered Katie in his arms, cradling her, pressing a hand over the gruesome hole in her stomach. Her blood covered him to the wrist. I handed him a pillow to press over her instead. He looked up from her, tears drying on his face. Visibly, he pulled himself together, the poise and self-control of an old soldier. “He busted all the phones. Disabled the security system. Get Leo.” Then he looked at me. “You’re naked.”

“I noticed. Did you see him? Did you get a look at his face?”

“No. All I could see was a blur. Vamp mind games.”

Get Leo, he had said. Not yet. I ran from the room, chasing the evolving scents of the rogue. Trying to understand. I had assumed the rogue’s compound scent was like a human’s, changing due to emotional stress, exercise, spices—or in this case, blood—eaten. But this was different. Its scent signature was actually changing, new scents evolving, wiping out others.

Nothing can change its basic, individual, singular, one-in-six-billion scent. We can wash until it’s faint, cover it with chemicals so it’s hard to distinguish, alter it with fear, illness, or age. But the basic, underlying scent, in its most elemental state, is unique, the distinct chemical reactions in the cells of one person, no matter how layered, masked, or compounded. But this guy’s scent wasn’t just compounding. It was altering. I followed it down the hall.

The crying, gurgling, and odor of fresh blood I had noted when I entered the house came strongly from the dining room. I put my back against the hall wall and checked behind me, swinging the weapon back and forth, up the hall and down. A sconce was broken. I stepped over shattered glass. My heart had stabilized with activity into a fast, hard rate, my breath deep and steady. The smell of my sweat was free from fear, marked by concentration and adrenaline.