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“Sorry,” Tanner mumbled, cutting two down with the blade he retrieved from the grimy floor.

“You’ve been spending too much time on screens,” Darien accused, shouting over the crack of bullets. It was true; he often worried about taking Tanner on jobs that required anything other than a phone or a computer. The guy was just as capable at killing as he was hacking, but that didn’t mean a person couldn’t get rusty from lack of practice.

Jack grinned. “And not enough time on the battlefield.” He wiped the blood off his forehead with the back of his glove, wavy hair clinging to his skin.

They slaughtered the rest of the Grimnachts in a matter of minutes, making even more of a mess of the kitchen that had seen better days.

And then they dumped the bodies out back with the piles of oozing trash bags.

Lace tugged off her gloves and stuffed them in the back pocket of her white jeans. White—bad choice of clothing, but sometimes her love of fashion won over her practicality. “I need a shower.” She shook the blood off her sleeve. “Those things are nasty.”

“Darien?” called a gravelly voice.

Darien turned, peering down the alley to see Valen and Sylvan walking by on the street. After confirming it was him, they started walking this way, garbage crunching under their boots.

“I thought that was you,” Sylvan said, words bouncing against the walls, the bricks colorful with graffiti.

Jack joked, “As if he’s not impossible to miss.”

“What are you guys doing here?” Darien asked.

Valen gestured to the club. “They have some of the best strippers in the city.”

“You got a thing for werewolves?” Lace teased.

“We’ve got a thing for beautiful women,” Sylvan replied with a wink, eyes raking down her body.

Lace snickered.

“What are you doing here?” Valen countered.

Darien gestured to the Grimnacht corpses piled on top of the trash bags. “Got a call about these buggers nesting in the kitchen.”

Jack’s perpetual grin grew. “Hope you guys don’t indulge in anything off the menu.”

“Only lap dances and the occasional beer,” Valen said.

Tanner grimaced. “I wouldn’t even drink the beer if I were you.” As if he’d just remembered the glasses sitting on the top of his head, he put them back on. A second later he removed them and used the inside of his shirt to clean the specks of blood off the lenses.

Lace was grimacing too. “He’s not exaggerating.”

She’d barely got the last word out when glass smashed in the kitchen, followed by shouting and pounding feet.

Darien was at the door and pushing through it before anyone else had even moved.

He froze at the sight of the vampire—young, maybe twenty years at most, her copper hair cut short—dodging the werewolves pursuing her with kitchen knives.

Shouts cut through the room, voices mingling together.

“Get the fuck back here!”

“Stupid leech!”

Fear made the vampire’s red eyes bulge out of her bone-white face, and although she was trying to escape, she was showing no sign of attacking, or even shifting into her hunting form.

It was the blatant fear written clear as day on her face that pushed Darien to react, his Devils following behind him as he crossed the kitchen, Valen and Sylvan there too. Hands drifted toward weapons as they waited for instruction.

Darien stepped in front of her before the head chef—Big was his nickname—could cut her head off with a meat cleaver.