Not prey. Not prey. His. His star.
It was all right then. She could see his pain-she had earned that right. And together they would stop the monster from eating the boy.
For the first few minutes after the change, he mostly thought like the wolf, but as the pain subsided he settled back into control. He shook off the last of unpleasant tingles with the same willpower he used to set aside the desire to snarl at the boy who reached out with a hand… only to jerk back, caught by the strap on his wrist.
David hopped on to the bed and snapped through the ballistic nylon that attached Devonte’s cuff to the rail and waited while the boy petted him tentatively with all the fascination of a person touching a tiger.
“That’ll be a little hard to explain,” said Stella.
He looked at her and she flinched… then jerked up her chin and met his eyes. “What if the Linnfords ask about the restraint?”
It had been the wolf’s response to seeing the boy he was supposed to protect tied up like a bad dog, not the man’s.
“They haven’t been here,” said Devonte. “Unless they spend a lot of time in hospital prison, they won’t know it was supposed to be there. I’ll cover the cuff on my wrist with the blanket.”
Stella nodded her head thoughtfully. “All right. And if things get bad, at least this way you can run. He’s right, it’s better if the restraint is off.”
David let them work it out. He launched himself off Devonte’s bed and onto the other-forgetting that Devonte was already hurt until he heard the boy’s indrawn breath. David was still half-operating on wolf instincts-which wasn’t very helpful when fighting vampires. He needed to be thinking.
Maybe it had only been the suddenness of his movement though because the boy made the same sound when David hopped through the almost-too-narrow opening in the ceiling and onto the track in the plenum space between the original fourteen-foot ceiling and false panels fitted into the flimsy hangers that kept them place. The track groaned a little under his sudden weight, but it didn’t bend.
“My father always told us that no one ever looks up for their enemy,” Stella said after a moment. “Can you replace the panel? If you can’t I-”
The panel he’d moved slid back into place with more force than necessary and cracked down the middle.
“Damn it.”
“Don’t worry, no one will notice. There are a couple of broken panels up there.”
She couldn’t see any sign that her father was hiding in the ceiling except for the bed. She grabbed it by the headboard and tugged it back to its original position, then she did the same with the chair.
She’d forgotten how impressive the wolf was… almost beautifuclass="underline" the perfect killing machine covered with four-inch-deep, redgold fur. She hadn’t remembered the black that tipped his ears and surrounded his eyes like Egyptian kohl.
“If you’ll get back, I’ll see what I can do with the wall,” said Devonte. “Sometimes I can fix things as well as move them.”
That gave her a little pause, but she found that wizards weren’t as frightening as werewolves and vampires. She considered his offer, then shook her head.
“No. They already know what you are.” She gathered her father’s clothes from the bedspread and folded them neatly. Then she stashed them-and the plastic bag with Devonte’s clothes-into the locker. “Just leave the wall. We only need to hide the werewolf from them, and you might need all the power you’ve got to help with the vampire.”
Devonte nodded.
“Right then.” She took a deep breath and picked up her catch-all purse from the floor where she’d set it.
Her brothers had made fun of her purses until she’d used one to take out a mugger. She’d been lucky-it had been laden with a pair of three-pound weights she’d been transporting from home to work-but she’d never admitted that to her brothers. Afterwards they’d given her Mace, karate lessons, and quit bugging her about the size of her purse.
Unearthing a travel-sized game board from its depths she said, “How about some checkers?”
Five hard-won games later she decided the vampire either wasn’t coming tonight, or she was waiting for Stella to go away. She jumped three of Devonte’s checkers and there was a quiet knock on the door. She turned to look as Jorge, the cop who’d gotten babysitting duty today, stuck his head in.
“Sorry to leave you stuck here.”
“No problem. Just beating a poor helpless child at checkers.”
She waited for him to respond with something funny-Jorge was quick on his feet. But his face just stayed… not blank precisely, but neutral.
“They need you down in pediatrics, now. Looks like a case of child abuse and Doc Gonzales wants you to talk to the little girl.”
She couldn’t help the instincts that brought her to her feet, but those same instincts were screaming that there was something wrong with Jorge.
Between her job and having a brother on the force, she’d gotten to know some of the cops pretty well. Nothing bothered Jorge like a child who’d been hurt. She’d seen him cry like a baby when he talked about a car wreck where the child hadn’t survived. But he’d passed this message along to her with all the passion of a hospital switchboard operator.
In the movies, vampires could make people do what they wanted them to-she couldn’t remember if the people were permanently damaged. Mostly, she was afraid, they just died.
She glanced down at her watch and shook her head. “You know my rules,” she said. “It’s after six and I’m off shift.”
Her rules were a standing joke with her brothers and their friends-a serious joke. She’d seen too many people burn out from the stress of her job. So she’d made a list of rules she had to follow, and they’d kept her sane so far. One of her rules was that from eight in the morning until six in the evening she was on the job, outside of those hours she did her best to have a real life. She was breaking it now, with Devonte.
Instead of calling her on it, Jorge just processed her reply and finally nodded. “All right. I’ll tell them.”
He didn’t close the door when he left. She went to the doorway and watched him walk mechanically down the hall and through the security door, which he’d left open. Very unlike him to leave a security door open, but he closed it behind him.
“That was the vampire’s doing wasn’t it?” she asked, looking up.
The soft growl that eased through the ceiling was somehow reassuring-though she hadn’t forgotten his reservations about how well he’d do against a vampire.
She went back to Devonte’s bed and made her move on the board. Out in the hall the security door opened again, and someone wearing high heels click-clicked briskly down the hall.
Stella took a deep breath, settled back on the end of the bed and told Devonte, “Your turn.”
He looked at the board, but she saw his hand shake as whoever it was in the hallway closed in on them.
“King me,” he said in a fair approximation of triumph.
The footsteps stopped in the doorway. Devonte looked over her shoulder and his face went slack with fear. Stella inhaled and took her first look.
She’d thought a vampire would be young, like her father. Wasn’t that the myth? But this woman had gray hair and wrinkles under her eyes and in the soft, white skin of her neck. She was dressed in a professionally-tailored wine-colored suit. She wore a diamond necklace around her aging neck, and diamond-and-pearl earrings.
“Well,” said Stella, “No one is going to think you look like a cuddly grandma.”
The woman laughed, her face lighting up with a cheer so genuine that Stella thought she might have liked her if only the laughter didn’t showcase her fangs. “The boy talked, did he? I thought for sure he’d hold his tongue, if only to keep his own secrets. Either that or broadcast it to the world, and then you and I wouldn’t be in this position.”