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The werewolf met my eyes—unless he was a total idiot, he must have realized what I was—and he growled deep within his chest before charging down the alleyway.

Oh, this won’t do.

I kept my pace at a casual walk, biding my time until he was an arm’s length away.

He flashed his teeth and jumped at me.

I grabbed his wife beater tank shirt—which was stained a disgusting pitted yellow—and yanked him from the air, throwing him to the ground.

The werewolf wheezed on impact, his frame rattling when he hit the fancy pattern the brick was arranged in.

Without breaking my stride, I kicked him—rolling him over on his back, then walked over him, grinding my left heel into his chest so the wheezing noise expanded into gasps.

When I stepped off him, I paused and looked back at him. “Learn some manners, mutt.” I delivered one kick to the wolf’s head and he collapsed, either unconscious or so rattled he couldn’t so much as move.

Disappointing.I shook my head and continued down the alleyway.The task force slayer would have countered that. And probably shot me.

I sighed as I reached the end of the alleyway and stepped out into the last few anemic rays of the sun.Maybe I’ll search her out. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good fight.

CHAPTERTWELVE

Jade

One day and two nights after the market, I wasn’t feeling quite so jolly as I sat at my desk staring at the stack of paperwork I needed to finish filling out.

“You know,” Sunshine leaned back in her chair as she flipped a page in a blank report file I was supposed to use as a template. “I don’t know much about human law enforcement, however, I’m pretty sure their paperwork doesn’t include questions likeHow did you vibe with the perp?”

“It’s the Commissioner,” I said. “Since supernaturals don’t have tons of laws about prosecution, he’s making it up as he goes.”

Sunshine turned another page in the report. “Which apparently means patching things together from as much human pop culture as possible.” She set the report down, then picked up the sudoku book she’d abandoned on my desk. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of records to file. That means I’ll be busy in the evidence room tomorrow, storing things away.”

She processed evidence and stored reports, which meant she’d been one of the poor souls who got headaches from the green lights before someone had talked the Commissioner into normal LED lights for evidence processing, and she took boxes of open cases and stored them in the evidence rooms. (For all his TV watching, the Commissioner must not have seen evidence storage because we had big rooms filled with boxes that anyone from our department could pass in and out of. They just had to check in with the “librarian” on duty, who would find the case for them.)

I looked down at the waiting reports: the stray dog—whose owner we had successfully found, and I’d gotten to witness their tearful reunion—the fae fight downtown, the released mantasps, and so on. “Most of these will probably just get scanned into digital storage,” I said. “I don’t think the chief will bother to keep hardcopies about the call we got from the human police that some inebriated person mistook a lost dog for a werewolf.”

“You said most. Which ones do you think will float my way?” Sunshine asked.

I picked up the report I’d started about the mantasps earlier in the week. “The mantasp case. Public property was damaged, and the case is still open. It’s assumed the monsters were released as a part of the fae royal succession wars, but we’re looking for evidence that would point to what Court did it. Beyond the mantasps…”

I trailed off and glanced over at the report I’d started and stopped writing nearly every day I’d been on duty for the past two weeks.

Sunshine peered at the first few lines I’d penned. “Ahhh, the case of the micromanaging vampire menace. Yeah, that one is a little concerning now that he’s appeared twice.” She flipped her sudoku book open and plucked a pen from her hair which she used to start filling numbers into empty squares. “You’ve told Sarge about him?”

I nodded. “He had me tell Captain Reese. So far, we don’t have any evidence that he’s doing anything. It’s just that a bunch of supernaturals end up mysteriously beaten unconscious whenever he’s hanging around and when they wake up, they just babble that it was an accident.”

“He hasn’t killed anyone, right?” Sunshine asked as she raced through her number puzzle.

“Not yet.” I tapped my fingers on my desk and glanced at the framed photo I kept of my family—my paternal family, so Nan, Paddy, my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins were all crowded in the picture wearing our slayer gear. “I’m starting to think he’s establishing a territory. All the beatings are downtown—directly downtown. He doesn’t venture even out to Tutu’s.”

Sunshine finished her number puzzle in record time and flipped to a new one. “And that bothers you because? So far all he’s done is settle down unruly supernaturals with more force than necessary.”

“That’s all wethinkhe’s done,” I said. “A vampire territory typically is their hunting grounds. He could be taking sips off humans, and we’d never know if he only takes a mouthful here and there.”

Vampires don’t usually publicly feed—generations of slayers had never been able to pinpointwhy, but we suspected it had something to do with the feeding process. However! Vampires could still bite a human and siphon off a mouthful or two of blood—essentially a snack for them—without notice if they used their pheromones on the human to lull them into complacency.

I picked up my mask—I didn’t wear it when I was in the department offices. “I wouldn’t be bothered if he wasn’t so strong. He has to be an elder but he just wanders around by himself, without any offspring bowing and scraping to him.”

“Maybe he had a Family and they all died,” Sunshine suggested.