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This book is for Michael, who says I’m a rock star.

Shhh, no one tell him the truth.

Also for Adam Wilson, editor extraordinaire. Thanks for all your hard work, funny tweets, and faith in me. All are much appreciated.

1

The basement of the Holy Heart Church on East 125th Street in New York City smelled like a strange combination of dust, hundreds of years of age, and the leftovers of charity dinners cooked in the kitchen hovering just above it. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, but it spoke of the age of the building and the fact that thousands of people had passed through there, many with their eyes down and faces averted.

And that made it the perfect place for the meetings now hosted there. AA and Narcotics Anonymous and Compulsive Gamblers Group and Trumping Testicular Cancer—and a host of other vice and disease meetings that required support or a kick in the ass on a day-to-day basis.

All of them met in the little room in the basement. It was tiny, cold in the winter, broiling in the summer, and with an odor like a concentrated version of old pot roast and lasagna mixed with the sweet scent of stale holy water.

Natalie Gray was late to her meeting in said locale. That was typical, actually. Even she would admit it, though she had an excuse. Working nights at the morgue made her world all . . . discombobulated, and sometimes it was hard to remember what time it was. She couldn’t quit, though. She had rent to pay and food to buy, just like everyone else. Not to mention the job helped her cover up . . . other things. Things she had to deal with at the meeting, actually.

And so as she hustled her way down the back stairs toward the tiny, smelly room, she cursed in her head (not out loud; it was a church after all and she had standards, low as they may be). She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes late. There was going to be hell to pay.

The door to the meeting room was closed, but a little window near the top allowed her to see inside.

It was weird; the church allowed the various “anonymous” groups to meet in their basement, but then they forced them into a room with a window on the door. Sometimes Natalie felt like they wanted you to deal with your shame, but never forget it was shame and that everyone, including God, knew it. If there was a group for obsessive voyeurs, Natalie guessed they’d love it all the more.

The worn-out sign hung on a plastic holder outside the door said MONSTOFELLDOSIS (MFD) ANONYMOUS. Someone had stuck a creepy butterfly sticker on it that was beginning to fray around the edges.

“Stupid name for a stupid made-up ‘disease,’ ” she muttered as she looked through the glass.

Yup, everyone was there in their little sharing circle . . . well, almost everyone. Bob didn’t seem to be present. Odd, since, as the group’s facilitator, he was almost always first to welcome them and get them all seated, hopefully not near someone they hated. That in itself was no easy task. Over the years, most everyone in the group had developed some kind of aversion to everyone else, either through hurt feelings or worse. Natalie certainly didn’t envy Bob his role.

She opened the door and stepped inside. The room fell silent and everyone’s head pivoted to look at her. What they spoke of in this room was definitely not for outsiders to hear, so the group was always careful about the door opening. Once they saw it was Natalie, the faces were relieved, and then annoyed.

“The meeting for the chronically late is down the hall,” Kai, one of the other women in the group, said as she dug for a cigarette from the purse beneath her chair. The purse’s logo said Michael Kors, and Natalie couldn’t believe Kai had set it on the dirty floor. But then again, money never seemed to be an issue for her.

Kai was tall and slender, with an exotic olive complexion that made it hard to place her ethnicity, as did her long blond hair with dark streaks dyed through it. She had an I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, and Natalie had learned over the years that it wasn’t a put-on.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Natalie said as she took one of the few empty places in the circle. “I’m not the only one who’s late. Where’s Blob?”

Next to her, the older man dressed in a bizarre cape over wrinkled jeans and a black shirt glared in her direction with surprisingly intense eyes. Natalie felt a weird pull and broke the eye contact. It was so annoying when he did that.

“Careful, little one,” he hissed.

She glared. Just because he looked so much older than them, he always thought it was okay to be condescending.

“What? It’s just us,” she snapped.

“Bob,” said another of the group members, this one named Alec, a good-looking man with long shaggy dark hair, bright amber eyes, and a scraggly beard that was borderline homeless chic, “didn’t show.”

“That’s weird,” Natalie muttered. “He’s never late.”

“Yeah, we went over this while you were staggering off the subway fifteen minutes ago,” Kai said with another perfectly arched eyebrow. She was a gorgeous woman, no one could deny that, but she always looked like she was on the edge of smacking someone.

Currently that someone was Natalie. Scary.

“So what are we going to do?” Linda, the only other woman in the circle, whined as she scratched at her hands absently. She was plain except for her stunning green eyes. Or at least they would have been stunning if they weren’t always puffy from crying. “We’ve never done group without Bob.”

“It’s not like we can’t. We’re all grown-ups . . . mostly.” Kai shrugged. “Let’s start with the usual. Everyone introduce yourself and give us the ‘therapeutic’ spiel about your . . . um . . .”—she looked back over her shoulder, double-checking that the door was shut—“issue. Natalie starts.”

Natalie shut her eyes. Everyone knew she hated this part of the group meetings. It was so awkward and clichéd. Even after all these years she wasn’t sure exactly what to say. Obviously having to kick things off was her punishment for being late.

“Bitch,” she muttered under her breath.

Kai didn’t react except for a tight, expectant smile. There was clearly no getting out of this, so Natalie hauled herself to her feet. She shuffled those same feet in complete discomfort and started to speak.

“Hello, my name is Natalie and I’m a”—like Kai, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure the door was shut—“Frankenstein’s Monster. It’s been . . . um . . . sixty years or so since anyone last discovered my true identity.”

“Hi, Natalie,” the group droned in sync like a bunch of zombies. God, she had always hated that term . . . zombie, it hit way too close to home.

She sat down with another glare for Kai, which was ignored, of course, and watched as the older man in the cape next to her stood up.

“Hello, my name is Dracula, though I’m forced to go by Drake in this city.” He folded his arms. “I hate that name. Why I cannot simply be called by my real moniker—”

“We’ve gone over this before,” Alec interrupted with a roll of his eyes. “Dracula attracts a lot of attention. And ridicule. You’d be a joke. A bigger one than you already are with that cape.”

“Alec,” Kai interrupted, her tone sharp and frustrated. “Your circle etiquette. Let him finish.” She glared at Drake. “But hurry it up, we don’t have a century for you to drone on with one of your monologues. It’s not the 1500s anymore. People have places to go and things to do.”

Drake scowled. “I am a vampire and it’s been twenty years since anyone last discovered my true identity.” He hesitated, then added, “But those sparkling whippersnappers running around out in the open aren’t helping. They whine and go out in the sun. Are they trying to get themselves killed? Don’t they know they’re attracting the wrong kind of attention by mooning all over the place, over some silly little girl who—”

Kai squeezed her eyes shut. “Drake, we’ve gone over this in several meetings. Those ‘sparkling vampires’ aren’t real. They’re from a movie. You must know what a movie is, you’ve been around for like, a thousand years.”

Drake opened his mouth to argue, but before he could, the shaggy guy leapt up and started talking. “Hi, I’m Alec. I’m a werewolf. It’s been seventy years since someone last discovered my true identity.”

As the rest of the group said hi, Natalie watched Alec. Sheesh, he was good. With all that scruff and literally puppy-dog eyes that he could make so forlorn, he pretty much got laid all the time. He even winked at her as he sat down.

“I’m Linda,” said the nervous woman who had been picking at her hand. “I’m a Swamp Dweller.”

Before she could continue, the bonding adhesive that had been used to hold the fake skin on her hands loosened and a chunk of skin dropped away, revealing dark green scales beneath.

“Oh shit,” she said as she dropped down to grab for it. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“It’s okay,” Kai said, but her tone was less than soothing and she barely spared Linda more than an eye roll. Not that Natalie could blame her. Linda was a bit . . . needy; the constant attention and comfort she required did get a bit old.

Still, it was hard not to feel sorry for her. Like all of them, Linda had to constantly battle to keep the monstrous parts of her appearance from becoming too obvious. Being part amphibian, part human meant extensive makeup, constantly watery eyes (which Linda exacerbated with her emotional outbursts), and gills that only Blob had ever seen.

Natalie could sympathize. For her it was the scars all over her body, the fact that she was super-tall, and the slightly different skin tone of one leg versus the other. There was a reason she never wore skirts. But at least she didn’t have green skin or bolts sticking out of her neck. Stupid movies.

Linda knelt on the floor and tried to force her skin back on with the now-dingy adhesive. “It’s really not okay.”

Kai sighed. “Oh my God, Fishlady, chill out.”

Linda shot Kai a look. “Don’t call me Fishlady. And Bob wouldn’t have said ‘chill out.’ ”

“Well, I’m not Bob, thank God . . .” Kai sighed again. “Next.”

The next man stood up and said, “I’m Dr. Henry Jekyll—”

As if about to hiccup, he shut his mouth and paused. After a moment, he opened his mouth to continue—but before he could speak, he tensed, his body twitching like he was having a seizure. Of course, no one moved to assist. It wasn’t like they hadn’t seen this before. Kai did rush over to the door and stood in front of it to block what was about to happen from unexpected passersby.

With a lot of groaning and grunting, Jekyll staggered forward. There was a sound of rending flesh and he groaned in pain. His body tensed and he arched backward with another half roar, half whine.

Slowly, his body separated in half, the back of him staying put as the front pulled free. And suddenly a second man stood in the middle of their group. One who was almost a mirror image of Jekyll except for the wicked gleam in his eye and the disheveled quality of his appearance.

As Jekyll bent over at the waist, panting with the exertion of what he’d just done, the twin version of him said, “And I am Edward Hyde. It’s been four weeks since someone last discovered our true identities.” He smiled, thin and unpleasant. “Although they won’t be speaking about it.”

Natalie shivered. Of all the members of their meeting group, Hyde was the only one she thought of as a “monster.” He actually liked being what he was, liked being some kind of weird twin who had never been fully separated from his brother.

The two men shared a face, but Hyde had gotten all the wicked impulses, the frightening desires, and Jekyll all the ability to control those things. When they were formed as one person, it was fine. Jekyll had the control and could rein his brother in. But when they weren’t . . .

It was creepy. Partly because the more evil he was allowed to be, the more twisted and ugly, the more monstrous in form Hyde became.

Jekyll reached forward to grab for Hyde and re-form as one . . . entity, but Kai slammed a fist against the wall and shook her head. “Oh, no, no, no! If you two are going to rejoin, do it in the bathroom. No one here wants to see it.”

The rest of the group nodded with various expressions of boredom and disgust. Seeing the two men go through what they called the “Bonding Ritual” was pretty troubling. There was lots of coughing and growling and sometimes even screaming and blood . . . Not good.

Jekyll frowned, though he did as he’d been asked and stepped away from Hyde. “You know we can only stay like this for a short time.”

“An hour,” Kai snapped. “Enough time to get yourselves into trouble on a regular basis, so don’t give me the you’re-threatening-my-existence speech.”

“Excellent.” Hyde laughed as he took the seat the two had once occupied as one person. “I’ve wanted some fresh air for days.”

He folded one leg over the other and smiled at the group. Jekyll turned and realized his . . . brother, for lack of a better term, had taken his spot. The doctor let out a heavy, put-upon sigh as he stomped across the room to grab another folding chair from the corner and added it to the circle beside Hyde. The two exchanged a glance before Jekyll folded his arms and turned his face away.

“Okay,” Kai said. “That leaves me—”

Linda had collected her skin and climbed back in her chair with a glare for Kai. “Unless Ellis is here.”

Kai shut her eyes with a groan. “Oh, right, that asshole.” She looked around. “Ellis, are you here?”

There was no answer, but that didn’t mean anything. As the Invisible Man, Ellis often liked to play tricks. He hid right out in the open (often giggling like an idiot), followed people home to play tricks on them, and God knew what else. Natalie had heard he’d once watched Kai get undressed, but she’d caught him and beaten the snot out of him for it.

“Ellis . . . ?”

But despite . . . or perhaps because of his invisibility, he also loved attention. He was obsessed with being on the stage, with being seen. No discouragement from the group kept him from regularly going out for casting calls on Broadway and commercials. He never got any parts, but he kept trying, certain he’d win a Tony if “they” would just recognize his talent.

“I’ve never known him to be quiet for more than five minutes,” Natalie pointed out. “Maybe he had an audition.”

Drake nodded. “He was rambling on about that the other night when he called my new smartphone. What do they call it? An Ephone? Aphone? Some vowel-phone combination . . .”

Natalie turned on the man beside her with a blank stare. “You have a cell, a six-hundred-dollar cell, but you think sparkling vampires are real?”

Kai bit back a laugh. “Okay, we’ll just assume he isn’t here, because if he is, ignoring him will drive him crazy.”

Alec let out a burst of laughter. “I like that idea.”

Kai tilted her head. “And I guess we are back to me for introductions. So, I’m Kai. I am a mummy, reincarnated by some idiot archaeologists in 1922.”

“That makes you the oldest and the youngest of our group,” Alec pointed out, just as he did at every meeting.

And just like at every meeting, Kai pursed her lips in annoyance and continued, “It’s been . . . I guess 1940 since I was last revealed to anyone, though there were some close calls in the nineties. Stupid mummy movies . . .”

She shook her head and adjusted her suit jacket. Natalie blushed as she caught a glimpse of the white gauze Kai always wore beneath her clothes. She’d once admitted it was a way to keep moisturizer trapped against the dry skin, but Natalie always felt like she was seeing her underwear whenever she caught a glimpse of it.

“Hello, Kai,” half the group droned, while the other half was distracted by other things.

Kai sighed. “Great, so that’s done. Now, does anyone have anything they want to talk about?”

“Ellis might be at an audition, which explains his absence,” Linda whimpered. “But what about Bob?”

Natalie stared at Kai. Yeah, what about Bob? Blob. The Blob. She was kind of wondering that herself.

Hyde snickered. “Perhaps he got stuck on a subway car. Literally. Fat ass.”

Natalie folded her arms. Hyde was a nasty bastard and she refused to encourage him. “Look, the guy might be big, but he’s never missed a meeting in all the years we’ve been doing this. Plus, he runs Overeaters Anonymous in the room after us. I can’t picture him skipping out on two meetings without some kind of notification for someone. It’s just not in his nature. You know he takes this shit super-seriously.”

“Unlike some of us,” Kai said with a pointed glare for Natalie. “All this talk and speculation won’t do us any good until we actually know what’s going on. Has anyone called him?”

Linda nodded her head quickly. “Oh, yes. Every day. He didn’t answer this morning.”

Natalie blinked. “You call Blob every day?”

Linda’s green eyes narrowed at Natalie’s tone. “Lay off the attitude, Zombie Girl. I like to check in.”

“Shit.” Alec chuckled. “That might explain it right there. Maybe he just needed a vacation from Linda.”

Kai ignored them all. “Whatever the reason for his absence, can someone do a welfare check on Blob tonight?”

Silence hung heavy over the group. They might meet a couple times a week, brainstorm on how to stay hidden, and keep each other informed about things that might be of interest to the modern monster . . . but none of them had ever been all that big on actually helping each other.

Kai shook her head in disbelief. “Seriously, no one is willing to do this? Drake, you live near him, don’t you?”

“He’s just a few blocks from me.” Drake nodded. When Kai gave him an expectant stare, he sighed heavily. “Fine, I’ll stop by.”

“Great, thank you. Are there any other issues?” Kai asked, though by her terse tone and tapping foot, it was clear she was done with all of this.

Alec ignored her signals and waved his hand low at his side. From his grin, Natalie couldn’t help but think he was doing it on purpose just to piss Kai off.

“Yeah,” he said when Kai pointed at him with annoyance. “One. So I actually just got another warning from my nighttime delivery job.”

Drake shook his head. “Young man, you are only drawing attention to yourself.”

Kai nodded in agreement. “For once, Drake isn’t wrong. Were you caught stealing razors from shipments again?”

Alec shrugged sheepishly. “Look, you have no idea. I have to shave three times a day to keep from being wolfed out all the damn time. And when it’s this close to a full moon? Forget about it. It’s more like six times a day. And each shave is, like, three or four heavy-duty razors.”

Jekyll tilted his head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why don’t you just buy them?”

Alec glared at him and the teasing in his tone and on his face faded to something a bit darker. Not Hyde dark, but a little monstrous nonetheless. “Not all of us have family money, Doctor. We don’t all live on Park Avenue and wear thousand-dollar suits.”

“Three thousand,” Hyde said with a thin smile as he smoothed the fine line of the suit he currently wore.

“Hyde,” Jekyll said softly, without looking at Hyde. “You know that isn’t true.”

Hyde shrugged. “Only because you’re cheap. Honestly, a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit is hardly fit for peasants, brother.”

“You think too much about money. Among other things.” Jekyll rolled his eyes, then shook his head apologetically, as if to imply they all knew Hyde. And they did.

“Whatever.” Alec shrugged. “I make, like, fifteen an hour at my job—”

“Fifteen hundred?” Jekyll interrupted with wide eyes as Hyde snorted in amusement at his brother’s inexperience when it came to normal people.

Alec stared for a moment, then slowly shook his head. “No, numbnuts, fifteen dollars. U.S. currency, a ten and a five. Shit, you are clueless. What that means is that I don’t have the cash to pay for that kind of expenditure.”

Natalie shook her head. “But Alec, if you lose your job because you’re caught stealing too many times, you won’t have any money at all. Plus, I’m sure the amount of razors you take has to seem super-weird. Don’t you worry they might get nosy if they start the paperwork to let you go—ask too many questions about why you need that many razors? It draws attention to you in a way that could be dangerous.”

He grinned at her, crooked and utterly charming. “I’m not sure I’m going to lose anything, sweetheart. This is my third warning and there’s been no consequence so far.”

Drake tilted his head. “How do you manage that if they keep catching you in the act?”

Alec laughed. “Female supervisor.”

Kai rolled her eyes. “So did you bring this up to brainstorm ideas on how you can manage to get razors and keep your job, or did you bring it up to brag about all the tail you get?”

“Both?” Alec said with a shrug.

“Eh,” Kai groaned. “You’re on your own, jackass. Anyone else have something to say?”

Linda raised her hand and the group as a whole sighed. There weren’t many movies about Swamp Dwellers. The closest one had been Creature from the Black Lagoon, and in that feature the monster didn’t talk and he/she (that part wasn’t really clear . . . ) was always portrayed as a bit of a badass. A thing that could get things done, even when they were totally evil things.

Linda . . . not so much. In fact, she was living proof of what everyone in the room already knew: authors of books and directors of movies got their lives so consistently wrong. Those hacks took a fraction of truth and then exploited and twisted it beyond recognition.

So Linda, unlike her movie counterpart, was timid, needy, and . . . well, flaky. Kind of like cooked fish. A joke Linda did not find funny in the slightest, so Natalie kept it to herself.

“Seriously, Linda?” Kai asked. “Really?”

Linda’s hand came down slowly and she slouched in her chair. “I like Blob better.”

To be honest, so did Natalie. He was the calming influence on a grouchy bunch of freaks. They didn’t argue as much when he led the proceedings. Hell, sometimes they even had a breakthrough, not that any of them would admit that if asked. Poor Blob had been trying to get someone to acknowledge a breakthrough for years.

Kai shrugged. “Well, maybe he’ll be back where he belongs on Wednesday, okay? And then you can tell us all about your cats and your neighbors you don’t like and whatever other tedium constitutes your day. Until then, why don’t we break this up for the night?”

Although Linda still looked pissed, the rest of the group appeared as relieved as Natalie felt. After all, they shared a common bond of what they were, but other than that, she felt very little connection to these people . . . er, things. And she had to go to work anyway. The medical examiner’s office waited for no man, or beast. Not in New York.

Everyone gathered their things and Jekyll and Hyde ducked into the bathroom to perform their creepy ritual. No one waited for them. Instead they trailed out onto the street in a disorganized and silent group. No chitchat. No offers to share a cab or walk to the subway station.

The church was on an iffier end of the street where there were no doormen at the apartment buildings. To Natalie’s mind, that made it the perfect place to be mugged, so as she half-assed waved to the others and trudged toward the station, she kept a wary eye out for people. She was made of various parts from dead people, convicts mostly, which she tried not to think about (thanks a lot, “Dad”). Whoever had “donated” her ears to the project had had exceptionally good hearing in life. Natalie used that to her advantage in the city, where danger did occasionally lurk, though admittedly not as much in the last fifteen years when the city had been “cleaned up.” (Translation: freaks were not welcome.)

In the distance she heard a woman arguing with a man, probably over a purse. Part of Natalie thought about heading in that direction, of using her super-Frankenstein’s-Monster strength to be a hero.

But she’d learned the hard way that a hero’s path didn’t really get a person anywhere. Hell, she’d been chased out of a German village a century ago by people brandishing pitchforks and torches because she’d tried to help a child. And afterward? The brat had turned on her and started screaming and running.

She shivered. Not again. Nope, not in this life.

So instead of putting on her superhero cape (which she just knew would be far more stylish than Drake’s Dracula cape), Natalie walked down the steps into the train station and off to work with the dead. None of them talked, none of them caused her any problems whatsoever.

2

“You’re late.”

Natalie sighed as she pulled her lab coat from her locker and replaced it with her purse before she turned to face Medical Examiner Gretchen Grimes.

“But then again, it is you,” Grimes said with a smile that softened her severe face slightly, and Natalie’s former sigh turned into a breath of relief. No being reamed out today, apparently.

Grimes wasn’t a bad egg, really, but she was totally unpredictable. Sometimes she was Natalie’s best-friend boss, asking about Natalie’s apartment or her roommate . . . hell, she’d even asked her to join a book club.

And then there were the other times when she could be the bitchy supervisor right out of a stereotypical television show. Natalie felt like she was rolling the dice each time she came to work, and she hated gambling.

“Sorry, the subway was running late,” Natalie said.

Grimes nodded as if she totally understood, even though Natalie knew the woman always took cabs and thought the subway was scary. Sheesh, if only she knew there was a monster in her office.

On second thought, not such a great idea, since Grimes knew how to dissect bodies. She’d probably have a field day with Natalie’s hodgepodge of parts. Kind of like dear old Dad had.

“So what’s on the agenda tonight?” Natalie asked to clear her mind.

“We’ve got an interesting body downstairs waiting for autopsy,” Grimes said as they walked toward the elevator together.

“Oh God, interesting?” Natalie repeated, and her stomach dropped in anticipation.

Interesting was never a good word, not if one was an autopsy assistant. That meant murder or melting or spontaneous combustion or something equally gruesome and high-profile. She preferred the run-of-the-mill heart attack or stroke. In those cases, they cracked open the body, did a quick verification, and that was that. There was no heavy paperwork, no cops with questions, no testifying before a jury of anyone’s peers or getting interviewed by reporters. Natalie hated that shit.

Grimes, on the other hand, lived for it.

She was always looking for something that was going to get her in front of a jury, giving “expert” testimony about something wacked out or murderous. On court days, she would practically quiver with excitement and hold sessions in the break room afterward to share all the details with other scientists and office workers who wanted to kiss her ass in the hopes of a promotion. That had never been Natalie’s MO.

“This guy was beaten to death by a mob,” Grimes said as they entered the big metal service elevator.

The lift smelled faintly of death, though the scent didn’t bother Natalie. After all, it was the same smell she tried to cover up on herself almost every day. That was the main reason she’d taken this job in the first place. If anyone ever made the faux pas of pointing out her faint odor, she could say, “Autopsy assistant in the ME office, City of New York.”

That normally shut people up or got them asking questions about autopsies or the latest high-profile murder case, and not noticing the scars she worked so hard to cover up. She wore turtlenecks in the summer. Enough said.

Of course, there were times when she wondered at the irony of the situation. After all, her “dad” had been a bit obsessed with death himself. He would have loved her job. Like Grimes, he would have drooled over the weird deaths and spent hours analyzing broken limbs and exploded livers (that had actually happened . . . once).

Then again, he probably would have lost the job in ten minutes for stealing body parts or, worse, reincarnating someone with the shredded wires of a coffeemaker and the help of a thunderstorm.

“Natalie?” Grimes asked, and her tone was a bit terse.

Natalie snapped back to the present and nodded.

“A mob?” she asked with a look for her boss. She had a bit of a history with mobs herself, back in history. She wanted to keep it that way. “Wow, that hardly ever happens anymore.”

“Yup, those clean-up-the-city movements really changed our jobs.” Grimes sighed almost wistfully. “Not that you’re old enough to really remember that.”

Natalie swallowed back a snort. Grimes looked older than Natalie by at least ten years, though in reality Natalie had a good two centuries-plus on her; she just had the monster aging factor on her side. Her boss had a thin face and long, straight black hair that was actually a bit reminiscent of Cher . . . or the Addams Family (yet another show that got it wrong about monsters, but at least it had given them a smidgen of humanity).

She remembered the Civil War (though she hadn’t been stateside for it). The crackdown on crime in New York hardly registered on her radar. In another hundred years, she wouldn’t remember it at all. Assuming she didn’t encounter her own mob in the interim.

“Yeah, but everyone knows what it used to be like. I’ve read some of the old reports. It was pretty ugly here not that long ago,” Natalie said. “Normally these kinds of things only happen now when it’s New Year’s or the Nets win a championship.”

Grimes nodded. “Aw, yeah, that case two New Years ago. I’d forgotten that. That was a good one.”

Natalie tried not to shudder. Morbid.

“Where did this happen?” she asked.

Grimes shook her head and there was an actual delighted gleam in her eyes. Shit, she really had to believe this case was going to make her more famous than she already was.

Natalie had a theory that Grimes was hoping some writer would fashion a plucky heroine after her and suddenly there would be a television show or movie starring Angelina Jolie or Olivia Wilde or something. Grimes! Or Death Grime. Or Grimey, M.E.

“It didn’t happen where you might guess,” Grimes teased as she passed her key card through the reader at the door to the morgue. It swung open automatically and the two of them walked into the cold, sterile room. “The beating happened on the Upper East Side.”

Natalie didn’t mask her disbelief. “You’re kidding me! The worst that happens up there are white-collar crimes, maybe the occasional mugging.”

Grimes nodded. “And the occasional murder-for-hire. Remember that case in ’08.”

Natalie paused as nostalgia flooded her. Maybe she was a little morbid, too. “Oh yeah, the Swansons and their War of the Roses. But a mob beating couldn’t be a murder-for-hire. That just doesn’t make sense. Maybe . . . drugs?”

“Nope. The cops say they don’t suspect drug involvement, although of course we’ll run the usual tests,” Grimes said with a shrug. “It’s all part of the big, fat mystery.”

Natalie blinked in confusion. “That is weird. Do they have any theories about what made a mob attack this poor person?”

“That’s what makes the case so interesting,” Grimes said.

She walked over to one of the refrigerated drawers that held the bodies and opened it. As she slid the sheet-covered body out, she said, “The cops have several eyewitness statements that say our victim was invisible before the mob attacked him. That he only became visible after he was killed.”

Natalie’s ears began to ring and her vision blurred for just the slightest second. She fought to keep her face calm and nonreactive.

“Invisible?” she repeated. Her voice seemed pretty calm to her own ears, though a little shrill. “Wh-what does that mean exactly?”

Grimes shrugged. “According to the report, the guy was just clothes draped over nothingness. He had no hands, no face, just . . . nothing.”

Natalie clenched her hands into and out of fists at her sides. “That’s crazy talk. The cops have to be wrong about the lack of drug involvement. Sounds like the witnesses were on something.”

“Nope,” Grimes said. “None of the witnesses appeared to have any kind of impairment, beyond being freaked out about the whole mob-beats-guy-to-death thing. Oh, and the invisible-guy thing.”

Natalie nodded because it was expected, but inside her head, her mind was screaming about Ellis. He had been missing at the meeting. Her brain spun around on invisible dead men and mobs and news coverage and about twenty other thoughts that crowded and echoed in her head, none of them good.

“So, do you want to see what the Invisible Man looks like?” Grimes asked with glee.

Natalie hesitated. She sort of knew what Ellis looked like. Sure, he was invisible, but like in his old movies and book, he could cover up that fact through all kinds of creative means. He always said a modern world made being invisible less . . . see-through.

In the early spring, fall, and winter, he used scarves, hats, and sunglasses to disguise his monstrous qualities. When sunglasses drew too much attention, like at night, he had a large collection of full-coverage eye contacts to choose from.

But in the summer, when it was boiling hot and sweaty, he couldn’t get away with wearing his usual disguises. Not only would he have been uncomfortable, but a man in a calf-length trench coat, hat, and sunglasses, swathed in a scarf, would have probably alerted Homeland Security.

Instead, he used his training as an actor and covered his invisible skin with makeup to create whatever appearance he wanted. Once he’d even been black, despite being told how truly inappropriate that little stunt was . . .

But there was one “face” he wore often enough that Natalie had always thought it might just be his own.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Then do the honors,” Grimes said. “And get the gurney while I scrub up.”

Her boss turned away to prepare herself for the actual autopsy, which was just as well. If the guy under this sheet really was Ellis, Natalie was going to have a hard time covering her reaction.

There was a container of gloves attached to the wall and she grabbed a pair and tugged them on before she slowly grabbed the edge of the sheet. Taking a deep breath, she yanked it back.

The white fabric pulled away, revealing a face swollen by the beating. Even under the massive bruising, though, she could see it was a face she both knew and didn’t know.

“Oh no,” she whispered. Tears stung her eyes and forced her to blink to keep them at bay. “Oh, Ellis.”

She stared down at him, finally fully revealed in death in a way he could never manage in life. One of his eyes had been swollen shut, but the other was open and blank, staring at nothingness.

“His eyes were green,” she said with another sad sigh. “I always wondered what color they really were.”

“Did you say something?” Grimes asked, suddenly at her elbow like she was a medical-examining ninja or something.

Natalie started. She could not let her boss know she knew their “patient.” That would only lead to questions. And it would mean getting taken off the case because of personal involvement, and that meant she wouldn’t know what the hell was going on.

For self-preservation, she had to know.

“Sorry, I was just commenting on the bruising around the eyes,” she croaked. “Looks like more than just fists caused this.”

She turned away, gathering her composure with a few deep breaths as she walked across to the gurney and came back to transport Ellis’s broken body to the examination table.

“Good catch,” Grimes said with a wide grin she hid as she slid her mask up. “There were several baseball bats involved.”

Natalie flinched, but continued to shift Ellis’s body (monster strength came in handy at these times). Once he was fully on the gurney, she rolled him a few feet over to her boss, who waited at the exam table. A few more quick motions, and Ellis was laid out for autopsy. Once again, Natalie blinked to keep her eyes clear before she started breaking the seals on the sterilized equipment they would use to perform their gruesome task.

“All right, let’s get to it,” Grimes said as she clapped her hands together with glee that was way beyond what the situation required. “I want to see what made the Invisible Man tick, don’t you?”

Natalie closed her eyes briefly. No, she did not. But she had no other choice.

Natalie stood at the big metal sink, letting hot water scald her hands as she stared straight ahead of her at nothingness.

When she’d first taken the job at the ME’s office, autopsies had been hard on her. Cutting up bodies had been a bit too reminiscent of her own slice-and-dice past.

Over time she had managed to move past discomfort and become numb to the grossness (most of the time) and weirdness of being a human butcher. After all, her job had a purpose, unlike her father’s experiments. What she did helped families get closure and brought criminals to justice.

Of course, she’d never autopsied someone she knew before. Now all of her initial reactions to the process returned in force. Her stomach hurt and she just wanted to go home and shower for about a week.

“So have you ever read the book The Invisible Man?” Grimes asked as she tugged bloody gloves off her hands, tossed them in the medical waste container, and moved in beside Natalie at the big sink to scrub up.

Natalie blinked. As she’d allowed her shock at dissecting someone she actually knew to sink in, she’d sort of forgotten Grimes was still in the room.

“Um, no,” she said with a shake of her head. “Sorry. I’m not big on monster stories.”

She did not add that her aversion to the genre had more to do with their frustrating lack of accuracy and the simplicity of the “monster’s” motives than with anything else.

“Oh.” Grimes tilted her head almost like she pitied Natalie. “It’s a classic, you know. We read it in our book club last year. You really should join. Expand your horizons a little.”

Natalie blinked. Was this really happening? Were they really talking about her horizons at this moment?

She pursed her lips. “I’m sure it is a classic. But what does it have to do with our friend on the autopsy table? Aside from somebody’s foolish notion that he might have had perimortem, um, invisibility.”

Grimes sighed. “It’s a weird thing; in the end of the book, the way the Invisible Man dies is by being beaten to death by a mob, too.”

Natalie turned to look at Grimes. The other woman was cheerily washing her hands and forearms with antiseptic soap.

“Huh,” Natalie said with as much disinterest in her tone as she could muster. “Did he? That is sort of weird.”

“Of course, like you, I don’t really think this guy was invisible,” Grimes added. “There’s got to be some reasonable explanation of why no one saw his hands or his face after his sunglasses got knocked off, until after he was dead.”

“Yes,” Natalie hastened to agree. “Of course. I mean, an invisible man is just crazy talk.”

“Crazy—but a great story!” Grimes said. “The press is going to be all over our office once they’re done with the cops. I heard they’re already calling it ‘The Invisible Man-slaughter.’ ”

Natalie shook her head. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath.

“Hey, are you okay?” Grimes asked as she grabbed for paper towels.

“Huh?” Natalie asked. “Sure, why?”

“Well, you weren’t exactly chatty while we were doing our autopsy and now you’ve been washing your hands for, like, five minutes.” As Natalie dragged her pruny hands out from under the hot water, Grimes stepped closer. “You know, I’m not just your supervisor. I’m your friend. You can tell me if something is going on.”

Natalie stifled a humorless laugh. Yeah, that would go well. Grimes would totally freak if Natalie actually told her the truth about anything in her life. That was one thing about the support group. At least they got it. Not that they were going to react well to Ellis’s demise at the hands of a mob.

“Ah, no, I’m okay,” Natalie said with a false smile. “Just distracted, I guess.”

Grimes tilted her head and Natalie could see she was aping some television show she’d seen where the supervisor was all warm and helpful. CSI, likely. But Grimes was no Grissom, that was for sure.

“Well, if you need an ear, I’ve got two,” Grimes said with a pat of Natalie’s arm.

“Um, thanks,” Natalie muttered.

Yeah, she had two ears herself. One she sometimes had to reattach, along with the occasional rogue finger or thumb . . . and once she’d had to do a complete overhaul on a nonfunctioning arm—but there were two of them.

“Anytime, honey,” Grimes said, oblivious to Natalie’s musings on graveyard visits and worn-out body parts. “Now, why don’t you finish up? I’ll go file these papers. The cops are waiting for our official cause of death, then we can move on to the suicide in bin twenty, okay? Pills, so not a lot of blood. Just stomach content.”

“Great. That’s much better.”

Natalie couldn’t help her sarcasm, but Grimes didn’t seem to notice, since she nodded before she strolled out of the lab. The second she was gone, Natalie pulled her cell phone from her pants pocket and scrolled through the very few names saved in her contact list.

When she found Kai’s, she pressed text and typed:

Emergency re Ellis. I get off at 5 AM. Can we meet?

She flinched as she hit the SEND button. Normally she wouldn’t reach out to Kai, but the Mummy Girl was the most reasonable of their crew. She got stuff done and didn’t cry or moan about it. Of course, Natalie couldn’t picture Kai getting up at five in the morning for anyone, especially her, but if she was lucky she might convince the mummy to give her a minute before Kai went to work. Because the potential situation with Ellis could get out of control way fast.

And once it did, all of them might be in danger.

3

Alec’s phone buzzed insistently and he lifted his head from his pillow to stare at his clock through bleary eyes. Seven-fifteen. God, how he hated mornings. Werewolves, even ones who didn’t work the night shift delivering groceries and toiletries to stores, even ones who hadn’t just fallen asleep fifteen minutes ago, all shared that trait.

Not that he’d met another Were in, like . . . fifty or sixty years, it had to be. Way before cell phones.

The little annoying device buzzed again and he flipped it over. The caller ID read Bitchy Kai, and he chuckled. If it hadn’t been on vibrate, it would have been playing a nineties song called “I’m a Bitch,” too, just because.

He pressed the button and grunted, “What?”

Kai’s voice was just as annoyed and tired as his own. “It’s Kai.”

“Hi. Nice of you to call,” Alec said, faking friendliness he knew the mummy would see right through. Smart cookie, that one. And hot. Though not exactly his type. Still, if she decided to come knocking on his door looking for fun, he wouldn’t kick her out.

“Shut up and listen,” she snapped, her tone no-nonsense, as usual. “You need to meet me at Bernie’s Bagels on Fourth at eight-thirty, okay?”

Alec blinked. Kai had never called him. She had only very reluctantly given him her number at all when there had been a storm and they thought they might have to cancel the meeting. Blob had insisted on a phone tree. Stupid.

He flopped back on his pillows. One of them still smelled like a cheap perfume the girl from a couple of evenings ago had worn. He was going to have to do laundry. What had once been alluring was getting increasingly gross as his sense of smell got better. Full moons did that.

“Why do I need to do that? I just got off work and it’s bedtime for me.” He groaned.

Kai’s sigh was audible over the line. “Just do it, okay? Natalie texted me about Ellis and she seems all wigged out. Since you two both work nights, I figured she might need someone else to freak out on for the rest of the day, and I have to leave for work.”

Alec blinked at the ceiling. “Natalie? I don’t think she’d be the kind to freak out so bad that she’d need a babysitter. Anyway, she doesn’t like me.”

That fact always kind of made him chuckle. Especially since it was so easy to make her all squirmy. It was a challenge now to find new ways to do it.

“I don’t really care which one of you guys likes or doesn’t like the other.” Kai sighed. “Until we find Blob, somehow I’m in charge of the Merry Men, so just do it.”

“Okay, Robin Hood. Oh, wait, you work for one of the biggest corporations in the world, so maybe you’re not actually sharing your earnings with the poor, after all—”

She hung up on him and Alec laughed as he set the alarm on his phone for half an hour later and rolled back over. Time for a catnap. Dog nap. Whatever. He had to dream up some new ways to piss off Kai and make Natalie blush.

At eight-thirty, Natalie was sitting in a booth near the door of the coffee shop on the corner of Kai’s street, tapping her short fingernails on the ceramic mug that was filled with steaming coffee.

She’d been there for almost an hour, much to the annoyance of the skinny, curly-haired waitress who kept pressing her about ordering. Natalie had told her exactly fifteen times that she was waiting for someone, but the girl still made little grunting noises as the prework rush shuffled in and out the door.

She glanced at her watch even though the Mummy Girl wasn’t exactly late. “Come on, Kai. Where the hell are you?”

As if on cue, the door to the coffee shop opened with a jingle of the bell and Kai stepped through. She was wearing a gorgeous red pantsuit and her blond hair was swept away from her face into a sleek ponytail. She was like an Egyptian supermodel and Natalie felt super-dowdy in comparison.

As Kai caught sight of Natalie, she frowned.

“Did you come straight from work?” she asked as she dropped into the seat across from Natalie.

“Yeah, why?” she asked.

The waitress handed Kai a menu. “Coffee, please,” Kai said. Once the woman had gone, she whispered, “Well, there’s a fleck of blood on your shirt. I figured you’d have enough time to go home and change and stuff before we met. That’s why I said eight-thirty.”

Natalie clutched her coffee cup with both hands. “I probably could have, but—”

Before she could finish, the bell at the door of the coffee shop rang again. Natalie looked up out of habit and her eyes went wide.

“Alec?” she said as she blinked at the shaggy guy dressed in a black hoodie and fitted gray T-shirt. He smiled toward their booth and crossed the small shop.

“Ladies,” he said, then stared at Natalie expectantly.

She stared back.

“What are you doing here?” she snapped, perhaps a bit more peevishly than she had intended to sound.

He arched an eyebrow, and for a moment he looked positively wolfish. She scowled.

“I invited him,” Kai said with a sigh as she settled back against the shiny red leather booth seat.

Alec was still staring at Natalie. She shrugged. “What?”

“Can I sit down?” He chuckled.

She folded her arms and slid against the wall to give him space. He took it and sprawled back, filling in every inch of free booth. Great.

The waitress returned with Kai’s coffee. She set it down in front of her and turned her gaze on Alec. Suddenly she wasn’t annoyed but sweet as pie as she drawled, “And what can I get you?”

He grinned at her and a stupid, totally attractive dimple popped in his left cheek. “Diet Coke, honey, thanks.”

Natalie rolled her eyes as the waitress flitted off, her hips twitching a bit more than they had before.

“Why did you invite the wolf?” she asked as she watched Kai pour cream into her coffee.

Kai sighed. “Because by text number twenty-three it was quite clear that you were freaking out, Natalie, and I have to go to work.”

“And?” Natalie said, still completely lost as to why Alec had to be involved.

Kai rolled her eyes. “I don’t have time to take care of you. Alec works nights just like you, so he’s free during the day. I figured he could listen while you prattle on about whatever your issue is.”

Natalie gasped. She wasn’t exactly close to Kai, but that actually hurt her feelings. “You think I need a babysitter?”

Kai shrugged. “Yeah, and the only other one of us available during the day is Drake. But since he explodes or something if he gets touched by sunlight, Alec was the better choice.”

“I don’t think you need a babysitter,” Alec interjected, with another smile meant to charm the pants off women.

“Oh, who asked you?” Natalie snapped.

“So what’s your freak-out over?” Kai asked. “You said something about Ellis? Do I need to kick that pervert’s ass again?”

Before Natalie could answer, the waitress slipped back to set a glass of soda in front of Alec. “Can I take your order?”

“Just the coffee is fine,” Kai said. “And a big ice water.”

“French toast,” Alec said without even looking at the menu. “And eight strips of bacon. Lightly cooked.”

Natalie glared at Alec, then glanced at the menu. “I’ll have the fried egg platter with wheat toast, sausage as the meat. I know it comes with hash browns and that’s fine, but I’d also like to add a side of fruit.”

The waitress walked away and Kai shot her a look. “Really? You’re going to eat that much food?”

“When I get nervous I eat,” Natalie admitted with a shrug. “My metabolism is so messed up that I never gain any weight.”

Kai’s eyes narrowed. “Your monster powers suck.”

As Alec barked out a burst of laughter, Natalie stared. “What do you mean?”

“You get that weird Frankenstein strength and you can eat whatever you want?” Kai shook her head. “I get all dried out if I don’t moisturize, like, ten times a day. Oh, and I can speak a dead language. Go, me!”

“Is that why you work for the pharmaceutical company?” Alec asked. “Free moisturizer?”

Kai shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt. Plus I’m in charge of the beauty division, so I get to test out new products. If I could just find one that didn’t require the bandages to keep it active all day . . .” She trailed off. “Anyway, I think we’re off topic. I doubt Natalie called me here to talk to me about moisturizer.”

“Maybe not, but sometime I’d like to talk to you about razors. Or hair-removal products,” Alec said, and Natalie was shocked that he seemed totally serious. The whole hair thing was an obsession for the guy.

“No, no razors.” Natalie shook her head. “We’re not here to talk about any of this shit. I have to tell you guys what happened at work last night.”

“All right, all right,” Kai said, waving her hand. “Go, tell us.”

“I found out what happened to Ellis. Why he wasn’t at the meeting.”

Kai snorted a laugh before she sipped her coffee. “You mean he wasn’t there the whole time lurking and thinking he was hilarious?”

“No.” Natalie didn’t really know how to break the news, so she just blurted out, “He was—is—dead.”

Alec choked on his gulp of soda and Kai looked at Natalie over the edge of her cup and then slowly put it down on the saucer. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, what the fuck?” Alec asked as he wiped his chin with the closest napkin, which happened to be Natalie’s.

“He’s dead,” Natalie repeated with a quick look around. “He was beaten to death by a mob on the Upper East Side early yesterday evening. You two didn’t see it in the paper this morning?”

“I don’t look at the paper until I get to work,” Kai said as she leaned back in the booth.

“Please, I don’t get the paper,” Alec snorted. Then he shook his head. “Holy shit.”

Natalie sighed in relief that she’d gotten her news off her chest. And that both of them were taking it seriously. In some ways the two monsters in the booth with her were the ones who reacted the least to anything. Kai because she didn’t give a shit, Alec because he made a joke out of everything. But both of them looked concerned now.

Of course, at that moment the waitress returned with water and the two breakfast plates. But now that Natalie had said out loud what had happened to Ellis, she wasn’t really hungry anymore.

The same didn’t seem to be true for Alec, who grabbed a slice of nearly raw bacon and slurped it down with a satisfied grumble in the back of his throat.

Kai leaned forward. “Poor Ellis. I mean, I never liked the asshole, but that sucks.”

“It gets worse,” Natalie said as she pushed her plate away. “Want to know how the character of the Invisible Man died in H. G. Wells’s stupid story about him?”

Kai looked at her, almost confused by the question. “Um, okay.”

“Mob killed him,” Alec said around the food in his mouth. When the two women stared at him with twin expressions of surprise, he shrugged. “I read.”

“He’s right.” Natalie raised her hands to accentuate the words. “A mob killed him, Kai. And my boss, the fucking medical examiner, pointed that out. I verified it on Wikipedia. Plus, I did see the paper this morning. The press is calling the case ‘The Invisible Man-slaughter.’ ”

Kai’s eyes went wide. “Okay, that last part is worth freaking out about.”

“Oh, just that last part? You mean, you don’t think that Ellis dying in the same way he did in The Story is worth freaking out about?” Natalie said with a huff of breath. She was starting to sound shrieky.

“I get it,” Kai said as she reached over to snag a piece of Natalie’s forgotten toast. “Someone mentioned The Story. None of us like it when they mention The Story. And it is sort of weirdly ironic that Ellis died the same way his character did in The Story. But, and this is a big but, the guy was also a dick.”

Natalie waited for Kai to add more to that statement, and when she didn’t, she hissed, “And?”

“And you know he used his invisibility to be a total asshole. He stole things, he grabbed women’s asses on the subway, he tripped old ladies. If anyone could inspire mob violence, it would be that guy. Hell, I nearly beat him to death myself when he showed up at my house trying to get a peep at me in the bath.”

“Holy shit, that was true?” Alec asked with a long laugh that had several female heads pivoting toward them in appreciation. “I always wondered.”

Kai shrugged. “Yeah, it’s true. He didn’t do it twice, though.”

“Everything you say is correct, but what does his being a prick have to do with this?” Natalie asked, barely keeping a rein on her monster emotions. They wouldn’t like her when she was angry.

Kai rolled her eyes. “It means I don’t necessarily think that his mode of death is anything more than a coincidence.”

Natalie drew a deep breath. Kai might not be her favorite person, with her hard personality and a seeming lack of compassion for the others in their group, but she was definitely the most logical of the monsters in their therapy circle.

Kai was right: sad but true, people got beaten to death all the time. That had nothing to do with H. G. Wells or The Story.

“But if the press picks up the story and runs with the Invisible Man angle, whether or not someone actually knows about us and killed Ellis to match a story about him isn’t really the problem, though, is it?” Alec had finished his plate in record time and shoved it aside while he wiped his mouth, again with Natalie’s napkin. “Are you going to eat that other piece of toast?”

Natalie glared at him as she dragged her plate closer and started eating. “I can’t believe they took that angle. Every time a monster story goes into the press, people start thinking about all of us again. Hell, our movie rankings even go up on IMDb.”

Kai blinked. “You watch our movie rankings on IMDb?”

“Um, yeah,” Natalie said with a shrug. “I like knowing where we all sit in the mass culture. I would hate to be caught in the middle of a torch-bearing mob without being prepared.”

“Wow, you really do need therapy.” Alec laughed. “When was the last time that happened to you?”

Natalie sighed as she thought back to all the times she’d been chased by torch-wielding mobs. “Um, maybe 1940. Right before I moved to the United States, I guess.”

“So, like, seven decades ago,” Alec said with a shake of his head. “Seriously, you’ve got to live in the now.”

“I’m trying to make sure the then and the now don’t suddenly overlap in really horrible ways,” Natalie snapped, defensive.

“Okay, okay,” Kai said with a raise of her hands that signaled surrender. “We get it.”

“Doesn’t seem like either one of you gets it,” Natalie muttered.

“Well, I do,” Kai insisted. “It’s not like I want to collapse into a heap of bones, or get stabbed and sent back to the Land of the Dead, or any of the twenty other ways I’ve died in people’s stupid movies and books and television shows.”

“Getting shot by silver bullets isn’t really fun, either, I would imagine,” Alec conceded with a little shiver. “I’ve seen it happen to other Weres over the centuries and it seems like it’s really, really painful.”

Kai sighed. “And you’re right, any time the press starts spouting off these stories, or a new monster movie comes out, or, God forbid, Halloween comes, everyone gets all up in the business of monsters, even if they don’t know we exist in real life, which of course we do not want.”

“No, we do not,” Natalie agreed.

Kai looked at her evenly. “So, anything you can do from your position to reduce that possibility?”

Natalie shrugged. “Grimes already filed the autopsy report, I’m really just an assistant. I can try to intercept the blood work and make it look drug-related. That might confuse the issue and maybe even bore the press, but I can’t make any promises.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Kai said. “Do your best.”

“That leaves us with one more issue,” Alec said with a frown. “What about the others?”

Kai covered her eyes with her hand for a moment. “Oh God, them, don’t even make me think about it. You know what will happen. Linda will freak out, Drake will decide it’s the new Dark Age and start thinking he can stop raiding blood banks for his fix . . .”

“Yeah, mass hysteria,” Alec agreed.

“But we should tell them, if only because they’re going to notice when Ellis doesn’t come back to group.” Natalie sighed.

Kai shrugged. “True. We’ll just have to hope that Blob manages to make his way back to us tomorrow night so that he can deal with their fallout.”

“Yeah, Blob,” Natalie mused. “I wonder if he’s okay.”

Alec nodded and Natalie was surprised to see that he actually seemed to be concerned.

“Don’t get yourselves all worked up,” Kai said with another eye roll. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

“But both of them missing at the same time—” Natalie began.

“Is probably just some wacky coincidence,” Kai said with a dismissive shrug that made Natalie wonder why she wanted to make this go away so much. “Who knows why Blob bailed on us, but he’ll come back. Once he’s there, we’ll review the how-not-to-get-discovered tips and things will go back to normal again.”

“Ha,” Natalie snorted. “Normal.”

“Well, as normal as they ever get for us.” Kai pushed out of the booth. “Gotta run, can’t be late. See you two tomorrow night, okay?”

“Sure,” Natalie said to Kai’s retreating back before she turned her attention to Alec. He hadn’t moved from his place right beside her, even though Kai’s spot in the booth across from her was now wide open.

“Um, you can go,” she said before she took a bite of eggs. “Kai’s wrong, I don’t need a babysitter.”

“I don’t think you do,” he said with a shrug. “I already said that, remember?”

She shifted, uncomfortable that he still hadn’t moved from the seat right up against her.

“So Kai is blowing this off,” Alec said as he sipped his soda down to the ice until it made that awful sucking-air noise through the straw.

Immediately their waitress swept by and took the glass for a refill. She also winked at him over her shoulder, and Natalie scowled. He got free refills, too? Asshole!

“Yeah, well, Kai is probably right,” Natalie muttered. “It’s a coincidence.”

He leaned back a little and caught her eye. “But you don’t really think so, do you, Natalie?”

She hesitated for a moment. She hardly knew Alec, didn’t really want to know him and his wolfishness. But she couldn’t exactly ignore a direct question, especially since she was trapped in the booth.

“No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” she admitted after a long pause. “But I’m a pessimist.”

He smiled. “I’m an optimist. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence, either.”

“No?” Natalie said, once again surprised that she and Alec would see eye-to-eye on anything. Or that he was capable of taking an issue seriously one way or another.

He shook his head. “But until we go to the meeting tomorrow, until we know what the deal is with Blob and the others . . . there’s no use worrying, right?”

She bit her lip. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

He grinned. “So what do you want to do today? Statue of Liberty? Wax Museum?”

Natalie stared at him. “Um, no. I’m just going to finish up and go home. Take a shower. Go to bed. I have to work tonight.”

He nodded, but his smile faltered a little. “Gotcha. Well, thanks for breakfast. See you tomorrow. But if you change your mind . . .”

He tossed a card on the table as he stood, and then he was gone with just one more grin before exiting the door.

Natalie picked up the card. His name, his cell phone. How many girls had he given this to over the years? Still, she shoved it in her bag and ate the rest of her eggs.

4

As Natalie hurried down the stairs toward the meeting room underneath Holy Heart Church the next night, she was certain of only one thing: she wasn’t late. Perhaps for the first time in her life.

She would have been proud of that fact if not for the reason she had managed to haul herself out of bed on time and get down to the church.

The Invisible Man-slaughter.

She had dreamed of Ellis and his death during her restless hours of sleep both the previous day and that afternoon. When she woke, the nightmare continued. The story had been top news on every local channel while she was getting ready. Sure, the newscasters told the story with a wry tilt of their heads and the occasional wisecrack transition, but they were still telling it. Over and over.

Her stomach turned at the thought.

She reached the door of the meeting room and stopped. Through the glass, she saw everyone already seated in the circle.

Jekyll and Hyde were separated, literally sitting halfway across the room from each other, which normally meant they were arguing over something. Anything. Over the years Natalie had heard fights on everything from who had taken the remote the night before to why Hyde insisted on rough sex with college coeds.

Linda was seated next to Jekyll with her head in her hands. She’d been scratching, and little lines of green had already made themselves known through the makeup she wore.

Even Alec looked scruffier than ever, and he had shadows under his golden eyes that told Natalie he hadn’t been sleeping any better than she had.

Drake was still wearing that ridiculous cape, despite the fact that he’d been told a dozen times that it foolishly drew attention to him. Normally that didn’t bug Natalie, but tonight she wanted to slap him for it.

Kai was the only one not seated. She stood against the wall across the room, somber in another of her high-end suits. She was shaking her head over and over, like she was upset or dealing with everyone else’s upset.

Were they doing this without her?

“No!” Natalie cried as she burst through the door. “I’m early! You started without me even when I’m early?”

The heads of everyone in the circle swiveled to look at her and she stopped again, this time inside the room. From the terrified and upset faces, she could see they weren’t discussing their usual bullshit monster woes. Slowly, she reached back and closed the door.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Why?” Linda sobbed. When she lifted her head, Natalie could see closer up that the makeup smeared her face and made her scales visible around her eyes. “Why is this happening?”

Natalie swallowed hard and stared first at Alec and then at Kai. Now that she was inside the room, she could see the Mummy Girl was pale and drawn.

“You told them about Ellis?” she said softly.

It wasn’t like she was looking forward to telling the group about Ellis, but she couldn’t believe Kai and Alec had done something so important without her. Especially since she was the one who had found out about his death. She was the one who had told them. And she was the one who would be falsifying reports and risking her job (and perhaps some jail time; she wasn’t totally clear on that even after several Internet searches).

Linda lifted her face from her hands and stared at Natalie in confusion. “Ellis?”

“I didn’t say anything to them about that,” Kai whispered, and she actually looked a little hurt, which made Natalie feel like shit.

“Then what—?” Natalie began to ask, and turned toward Alec.

He got up and ran a hand through his scruffy hair. As he moved toward her, there was a gentleness to him that scared her. Like he wanted to break really bad news carefully.

“Natalie, Blob . . .” He caught himself and sighed. “Bob is still missing. Drake couldn’t find him when he did the welfare check.”

“He didn’t answer his door,” Drake explained. “Or call me back when I tried his landline or his cell.”

Natalie blinked. She’d been so focused on The Invisible Man-slaughter situation, she hadn’t really thought that Blob wouldn’t be found. She’d sort of depended on the very opposite.

“Wh-what?” she whispered.

“What about Ellis?” Linda asked as she got to her feet.

Natalie ignored her question, now entirely focused on Blob. “Where could he be? He wouldn’t just blow us off.”

“What happened to Ellis?” Linda screeched again, and this time she actually took a rather menacing step toward Natalie.

Natalie took an instinctual step back. If she wasn’t so confused and worried, she might have been impressed. Little Linda could be monstrous when she wanted to be, after all.

“You should tell them what happened,” Kai said with a shake of her head. “With Blob . . . Bob still missing, they need to know everything.”

Natalie sighed. Here she had been pissed not to be involved in telling the group about Ellis, but now that it was her responsibility, she didn’t really want it. She shifted from foot to foot and only when she caught Alec’s eye did she stop. He smiled at her and the expression was actually encouraging. Like he believed in her or something.

“I—I’m surprised none of you saw it in the paper or on the news the last couple days,” she began with a nervous laugh, though she found the situation anything but funny. “But I guess we’re more the Jerry Springer crowd than the CNN crew.”

No one else laughed at the joke; in fact, both Kai and Jekyll looked offended by it. Natalie took a deep breath. No more stalling. She had to just do this.

Slowly, she told the group about Ellis’s death, including the part about how it matched the way he died in The Story. When she was finished, she was surprised that it wasn’t Linda who started sobbing again, but Dr. Jekyll. He all but crumpled in his seat, covering his face with a hand-stitched handkerchief and wailing into its silky folds like his grandmother had died or something.

“I—I had no idea you and Ellis were so close,” Natalie said softly as she stared at the man in his expensive suit all but rocking back and forth in his chair like a child.

“They weren’t, my dear,” Hyde said with a sniff of disgust for his brother or alter ego or whatever. Still, he crossed the room to him and placed a hand on Jekyll’s trembling shoulder. “But—”

Natalie stared. Hyde was never nervous; Hyde was never anything but bold. Now . . . he looked scared.

“But?” Alec encouraged.

“Jekyll has an aversion to poison, you see . . . and that’s how he . . . we die in our dreadful little book by that hack Robert Louis Stevenson.” Hyde sniffed again.

“Well, shit,” Alec said as he pushed to his feet and started pacing, more wolfish than ever. Normally it was all a joke to him, but this time his tone was sharp. “None of us die in particularly pleasant ways in our stories. Kind of comes with the monster territory. Shot in a field like a dog, stabbed in the heart with a stake, burned alive . . . It’s pretty fucked up all the way around, so stop crying, rich boy, and let’s figure out what we need to do.”

Natalie stared at the Wolf Man in surprise. She didn’t know Alec had that kind of forceful leadership in him. He was normally such a flirt, never serious. He looked pretty damn serious now.

“What do you suggest, Wolfie?” Drake asked with displeasure. “I went to his apartment, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, that was some welfare check.” Alec snorted. “You knocked on the door and then called? Please. I could do better in my sleep. I say that some of us go over there right now and check it out a little . . . closer.”

“What do you mean, ‘closer’?” Natalie asked.

He shrugged, but there was a glint in his eye that somehow said breaking and entering. Natalie bit her lip. She was already right on the borderline of big trouble in her own job if anyone found out about what she’d done to Ellis’s test results.

“I mean closer, sweetheart. And while Natalie, Linda, and I do that, the rest of you split up and check out some of Blob’s usual haunts around the city,” he continued. “Ask questions, see if anyone has seen him.”

“In New York, you expect people to know who he is?” Drake asked. Sarcasm dripped from his every word.

Alec arched a brow. “He’s four hundred pounds and goes to the same places every week. Yeah. I think they know him.”

“Wait, why are Natalie and I coming with you?” Linda gasped, her fake made-up skin actually paling at the thought. “I don’t want to go to Blob’s apartment!”

“Well, want to or not, you’re coming,” Alec said as he turned on her with a rather monstrous glint in his eye. “I need Natalie just in case Blob is hurt. She works with bodies and probably knows something about medicine.”

“I don’t, actually,” Natalie interjected, but Alec didn’t seem to care. He just continued talking like she hadn’t said a word.

“And I need you, Linda, for two reasons. First, you’ll be our lookout. You’re so nervous, you’ll make a great one. Plus, you probably know Blob the best since you constantly harass him. We might need your insight once we get there.”

Linda blinked like she wasn’t sure whether to argue with that or thank him, but he didn’t let her answer because he continued.

“The rest of you . . . pizza joints, buffets, every place Blob likes to go. Now let’s do this. Text to keep in touch, and whoever finds him wins.”

Kai blinked. “Wins what?”

“I don’t know, something fantastic,” Alec grumbled. “Now let’s go, okay?”

The monsters all stared, but to Natalie’s surprise, they actually started moving toward the church doors, phones out to exchange numbers and find directions to the restaurants Blob liked best. There were a lot. He often waxed poetic about food before, during, and after meetings. If you needed to know a restaurant in the city . . . ask Blob.

“Wow,” Natalie said as she moved to stand by Alec. “Where did that come from?”

He stared at her in confusion. “What?”

“Who knew you were a take-charge kind of guy?”

“Alpha wolf, leader of the pack, all that shit. Eh, I can be lots of things when I want to be.” Alec waved off the comment. “But why bother? It’s a lot of work and wrangling. So, are we ready to go, ladies?”

Linda glared at the two of them, her green eyes sparkling with lizardy anger. But she followed them when they started for the door and the three subway transfers that would eventually take them to Blob’s shitty apartment across town.

The hallway would have been a strong contender for Dingiest Throughway in New York. The mess didn’t really bother Alec, although his sensitive nose wrinkled at the smell. At his side, Natalie had her eyes focused straight ahead and she wasn’t blinking. Every once in a while she would make a little noise in her throat when she saw a roach carcass or nearly touched the smudges of dirt and God knew what else on the walls.

Still, her measured reaction was way better than Linda’s, who whimpered and gagged as she walked behind Alec and Natalie toward Blob’s door.

“Why are you freaking out?” Alec asked. “You’ve been here before, right?”

Linda shook her head. “No. Bob always met me other places.” She hesitated. “I just want to wait outside,” she whined for the third time since they’d entered the apartment building.

Natalie made a new sound in her throat, a growl that would have impressed the worst of the horror writers. Without warning, she spun around to pin Linda with a very monstrous look.

“Hey, Fish Sticks, we’re here and we owe it to Blo—Bob to at least check it out. You claim to be a friend of his and you bug the guy enough that you owe him more than most of us. So shut the hell up and get with the damn program.”

Linda folded her arms and stared in stunned silence for a moment. Then she shook her head viciously. “Fish Sticks? Fish Sticks? No way, I won’t go. Not with you.”

Natalie took a menacing step forward and Alec caught her arm. The last thing he needed was a girl fight in the hallway. A girl monster fight, anyway. That would certainly attract the attention of the neighbors.

“Here, let me handle this,” he said to Natalie, and stepped in front of her.

“Linda, you don’t want to help your good friend Bob, then don’t. Be a little bitch and step back outside onto the street and wait for us.”

Linda’s eyes lit up with relief and Alec raised his hand so that she would let him finish before bolting.

“But . . . just know that there’s a fishmonger who lives right down the street. And I would guess he’s always got an eye out for a fresh fillet.”

“Alec . . .” Natalie shut her eyes and shook her head in exasperation, but she was covering a smile.

Linda’s eyes narrowed. “Oh yeah, make fun of the Swamp Dweller, totally cool.”

Alec shrugged. “No less cool than bailing on a friend who’s done nothing but help you, but whatever.”

He turned his back on her, put his hand on Natalie’s arm, and the two of them moved toward the end of the hall again. After a couple of steps, Linda rushed to join them.

“You guys are assholes,” she snapped, but she didn’t threaten to leave again.

Alec grinned and Natalie briefly allowed a smile of her own as they took the final few steps.

“Here it is,” Alec said as he checked the piece of paper in his hand. “Number 419. So close to 420, yet so far away.”

“Really?” Natalie growled under her breath. “Pot jokes, Alec?”

Alec didn’t respond, though he shot her a wink. Then the joviality in the group faded as they got a good look at the door. The four was broken and hung haphazardly from one tiny nail. The doorknob was smeared with something . . . and it didn’t smell good. If the girls asked, Alec was going to say chocolate. The alternative was . . . only going to cause more problems.

“Knock?” Natalie suggested, but Alec shook his head.

“Naw, Drake already tried that. Let’s just skip to the end part.” He dug into his pocket and withdrew a tool and went to work on the lock. “You keeping an eye out, Linda?”

She started and half turned to do just that. “Um, yeah. There’s no one out in the hall.”

“Good . . . and . . .” The door made a click and Alec grinned. He’d learned that little skill a couple of generations ago when being short on money had inspired him to become a cat . . . dog burglar.

He turned the knob and Natalie peered around him into the apartment. It took a moment for Alec’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, but once they did, he sucked in his breath.

There were only three words for what they all were seeing, and Natalie said them.

“Oh. My. God.”

5

The apartment was a hoarder’s delight, or at least what they could see of it was. What was visible was shocking. Even with ever-increasing werewolf strength, Alec had only been able to open the door about halfway due to the stuff crammed behind it (which Natalie couldn’t help but hope was not Blob’s body).

Boxes, clothing, books, toys, all stacked from floor-almost-to-ceiling in piles that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Pizza boxes from different restaurants all over the city made up another pile. Ones on the bottom were so yellowed and brittle that Natalie couldn’t help but imagine they’d been there for years.

“Jesus,” Alec breathed as he squeezed through the opening and looked around. “What a mess.”

Natalie nodded, mostly because she couldn’t come up with words to express her feelings of disgust and pity.

Blob, who had led their meetings with grace and gentle encouragement, Blob, who had kept them all in line . . . he lived like this. Like a sad, lonely man . . . not a monster who was fully capable of absorbing an entire horse into his body through a very gross form of osmosis.

He could have wiped out half the city any time he wanted, but he never had. He’d just piled up pizza boxes and run support groups in the basement of a church.

He’d just tried to help monsters and humans alike.

Natalie cleared her throat past the sudden lump that had formed there. “How did it . . . get like this?”

To her surprise, it was Linda who answered. “It must have been the osmosis.”

Alec arched a brow. “The osmosis? I thought he could control it.”

“He could control the big things, but sometimes he didn’t even notice the little ones until he got home and shook himself out. He always felt bad, since technically he was shoplifting pretty much whenever he left the house. He must have just . . . piled whatever he took here.”

Natalie wiped a hand over her face. “That would explain the women’s items. The children’s toys. And maybe that’s why he got so much delivery.”

Linda shrugged. “He said he didn’t really like going out much, he got so tired of taking things with him.”

“How did he even move around in here?” Natalie breathed.

Linda shrugged. “I think he just shook out whenever he was about to leave.”

“That would explain the piles,” Alec murmured just under his breath as he kept looking around from garbage tower to garbage tower.

“Why didn’t he ever talk about it in group?” Natalie whispered. “It was a real problem!”

“Could he have ever gotten a word in edgewise?” Alec asked as he jerked his head toward Linda.

Natalie pondered that. No, probably not. All of them were so caught up in themselves, they might not have even heard Blob’s very real plea for understanding.

“So now what?” she croaked. “What do we do with . . . this?”

“We can hardly see a damn thing in all this mess. He could very well be here. I say we go farther in and see if we can find him,” Alec said with a shrug. “Come on, Linda, lookout duties are over, time to be a friend. Step inside and shut the door behind you.”

As Natalie squeezed inside, Linda hovered at the open door, her nose wrinkled up enough that the makeup on it cracked and revealed even more thin rivulets of green from her scales beneath.

“I’m not going in there,” Linda whimpered. “I can’t stand that smell.”

Natalie sniffed. She was practically nose-deaf, thanks to her cobbled-together parts and a few years of working at the morgue. But there, vaguely, she did smell . . . rot.

“Is that food or—or something worse?” she whispered.

Alec breathed in a whiff and grunted. “Yeah, that’s rotting food. At least so far. And you are coming in, Linda, so suck it up and follow us.”

Linda huffed and puffed her upset, but she wedged through the door, found a tiny square of carpet to stand on, and slammed the door behind her.

“Now I’m in!” she snapped. “Happy?”

Alec didn’t answer. He just put a hand on one of the more sturdy piles and found a new place to put his foot so he could start moving through the apartment.

Natalie followed him as he picked his way through a precarious path in the boxes and piles.

“How do you know?” she asked.

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Know what?”

“Rotting food. How do you know that’s what the smell is?” she repeated as she stepped over a pile of crusty socks that made her shiver with pure disgust. She would need a loooong shower after this one.

“Oh, dog nose,” he explained with a shrug, and tapped the tip of it. “Very sensitive.”

Natalie nodded, but as soon as he had turned his back, she took a quick whiff of her own pits.

She had always been super-sensitive to her scent. Sometimes, if she wasn’t diligent, she could smell a little rotten, too. Stupid stolen body parts.

“You smell fine, Nat,” he said without looking at her. “Come on, this way seems to be the bedroom.”

Natalie blushed as she glared at his back. “What, do you have doggie vision, too?”

“Dogs are mostly color-blind,” he said as he reached a door at the end of the hallway. “I’m not color-blind. By the way, I like that green shirt. Looks really good with your hair.”

Natalie glanced down at herself with a frown and another deep blush (though this one was way more pleasurable than the first). Okay, not color-blind. Good to note.

“God, this apartment is pretty big, isn’t it?” Alec continued, as if he weren’t just making Natalie feel all . . . weird.

“I think it was a converted loft. They were trying to revitalize the neighborhood at some point when Blob rented,” Linda explained.

“That didn’t work,” Natalie said with a wrinkle of her nose as she heard the scuffle of some kind of small animal in the piles. She could only pray it was a rat and not something worse.

“No doubt,” Alec chuckled. “If this is revitalization . . .”

“Hey, I know you two are enjoying this, for some reason,” Linda said from behind them in her whiniest of whiny voices. “But I think we should just get out of here.”

“Why?” Alec asked on a heavy sigh.

Linda arched a brow. “Really? Um, what if someone saw us?”

Alec glanced back at her. “You told me no one was in the hallway. You were the lookout.”

She pursed her lips in annoyance, but it kind of resembled a fish face and Natalie swallowed a laugh.

“Well, no one was in the hallway, but that doesn’t meant they weren’t leaning on their door staring at us through the peephole. What if someone saw us break in and is calling the cops right this very moment?”

“Trust me, this isn’t exactly a neighborhood where people look out for each other,” Alec said, climbing over another pile with a grunt.

Linda groaned. “Okay, but obviously Bob isn’t here. So let’s just go and see if any of the others found him.”

“You are as useless as Drake when it comes to searching for people.” Alec rolled his eyes. “Nope, we’re checking the doors and rooms and nooks and crannies until we can rule this place out for certain. If you want to speed things along, then go to the kitchen while Natalie and I work on the bedroom.”

“Alone?” Linda rubbed her arms and shook her head. “No way.”

“For a monster, you are such a scaredy cat,” Natalie said, beginning to feel as frustrated as Alec sounded. Shit, no wonder Kai always looked like she wanted to punch the fish.

“Am not.” Linda pouted. “I’m just not willing to pretend that my monster powers are going to protect me from a mark on my permanent record.”

Natalie refused to respond as she turned to Alec.

He put all his weight into the bedroom door and shoved. It eased back with what seemed like great effort and finally there was enough space for one person to pass through. One skinny person. Skinnier than Alec.

“Ladies, both of you look great. Clearly you’ve been working out. So . . . which one of you wants to do the honors?” he asked as he motioned to the door with the aplomb of a butler motioning to a fancy dining hall.

“Um,” Natalie began. She tossed a glance at Linda, but the other woman had turned her back and was staring intently at a pile of books behind them. “Fuck. Fine. I’ll go.”

She moved forward and stared at the space. It was pretty damn tight, but she edged herself into the opening anyway and could only pray she wouldn’t be embarrassed by getting fully caught. For a minute her ass got stuck, but she managed to wedge herself through and in.

It was even worse than the “living space” they’d encountered outside. There wasn’t even enough of an area to walk through into the room, let alone any evidence of a bed or couch or . . . floor. She was standing on piles, touching piles; they were everywhere, made of clothes that still had tags, food containers that reeked of old meals, shoes of all shapes and sizes, a book bag that read MICHELLE, toys . . . If it had a name, it was here.

“I don’t think he’s in here,” she called back out into the hallway. “This has been bad for a long time, Alec. Even if he didn’t talk about it, how could we not know?”

There was a long pause and then Alec said, “I guess we didn’t ask.”

Natalie shut her eyes. No, they hadn’t. Natalie tried not to ask questions about any of the members of their little club. Once more, she regretted that. If she had, maybe they could have helped Blob. Bob.

She sighed. “I doubt he’s even been in this room for months, maybe even years. There’s no way he could fit through the door.”

“Okay, we’re going to check the kitchen. Can you get out on your own?” Alec asked from the hall.

Natalie took a glance at the door. She didn’t really want to squeeze herself free in front of Alec, especially if her butt was going to get stuck again, so she responded, “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll join you in a sec.”

She heard Alec’s steps disappear down the hall and Linda’s droning voice trailed off behind him. With a sigh, she looked at the piles again. It wouldn’t hurt to look a little closer. Just in case.

“Bob?” she called out softly. “Bob, are you in here . . . somewhere?”

There was no response and Natalie reached out to toe one of the piles gently. In response it began to rock.

“Shit!” she barked as she made for the door. She squeezed her way through the space and staggered into the hallway just as the pile toppled and slammed the door behind her with its full weight.

She covered her chest, her borrowed heart rattling against her ribs. Getting crushed in the door by a pile of trash was not a very romantic way to die. It was by far more embarrassing than any of her various movie and book deaths.

“Oh my God!”

Her heart, which had begun to calm, leapt back to pounding when she heard Linda’s scream from the kitchen. She pivoted and headed toward the sound, dodging piles as she went. She burst through the open door to the kitchen and came to a sharp stop.

The kitchen was as bad as the rest of the apartment. The counters were all covered with cans, bags, piles of trash. They shivered on the floor almost to the ceiling. They had taken over.

Alec and Linda stood in front of a big walk-in freezer that was squeezed into a space next to the fridge that had probably been meant for a little eat-in kitchen area originally. They had opened the double doors, and inside, propped up between rows of ice cream and frozen dinners, was Bob. Blob.

Dearly departed Blob.

Natalie squeezed her eyes shut. As someone who had studied pathology both for professional and personal reasons, she knew what kind of terrible death his had been. Alone in the cold dark, the oxygen slowly leaving the tight, sealed space, he would have gasped for breath. His fingers and toes would have tingled painfully, then lost all feeling. Eventually he would have fallen asleep and never woken up, but the time while he was awake must have been utterly terrifying and painful.

“Oh, Bob, poor Bob,” she whispered.

“Why did he have a walk-in freezer?” Linda murmured. “In a shitty apartment with hardly any space?”

Alec rubbed his scruffy beard. “He had to eat a lot to maintain his physical form, to keep from turning into a totally gelatinous object. I would guess this made it easier. He could store half a cow in here.”

Natalie sniffed and tried to keep tears from flooding her eyes. “I don’t care why he had a freezer. How did this happen? Walk-ins usually have a safety release inside.”

Alec turned toward her. He was pale beneath the shaggy scruff of beard and his wolfish golden eyes glinted with a combination of anger and sadness.

“Because of this,” he said, and lifted a small lock that he held in his hand. “Blob didn’t do this accidentally. It was murder.”

Over the years since Alec had moved to New York, found out about the monster therapy group from Drake of all people (werewolves and vampires had always been well aware of each other), and met Natalie and the others, he’d come to expect certain reactions from the monsters no matter what new circumstance they faced.

Drake would always monologue, usually way off topic. Linda would cry. Kai would get bored with it all or set herself into a complete denial phase that went against all her intelligence and strength. Hyde saw every situation as a new opportunity to go wild, and Jekyll would have to constantly fight to keep him in line.

But Natalie . . . Natalie was a different egg, and that interested him. She never reacted the same way twice. She kept her emotions close to her vest. She was really good at not going monster . . . in fact, he’d never seen her do it even once. If it wasn’t for the scars and the superhuman strength, he might not believe she was a monster at all.

Today, faced with Blob’s hoarding, and now his murder, was no different. Natalie’s face was still, and though her eyes were unbearably sad, she didn’t show any other emotion. She just stared at the lock in his hand.

“Someone did this to him,” she repeated.

It wasn’t a question, just a statement. Blank and flat.

He nodded slowly. “The lock is small, but it’s really strong and it was holding the doors shut. When I smelled a very faint scent of death, I broke it off, and there he was.”

Linda had been staring at the dead body, but now she let out a low sob and sank into a faint on top of another pile of pizza boxes. Both Alec and Natalie looked at her for a moment, exchanged a bland look of little concern, then turned their attention back to Blob.

“You know how he died in his movie, right?” Alec asked.

“I’m afraid I do.” Natalie shivered, and not from the temperature caused by the open freezer. “I looked up everyone’s cause of death after Ellis. I didn’t want to be caught unaware a second time. He was frozen to death, right?”

Alec nodded slowly and they both stared at Blob a little while longer.

“What do we do now?” Natalie whispered. “Besides call the cops, of course.”

Alec recoiled. “Uh, no. No cops.”

“Why?”

“You know how you don’t like fire?” he said. When she nodded slowly, he continued. “Well, cops are like fire to me. Fire bad. Cops bad.”

Natalie glared at him and he couldn’t blame her. He had used the Frankenstein’s Monster Voice, after all. That was a bit out of line.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Alec. There’s a dead body of a guy who was locked in a freezer by someone. He was our friend and he was murdered. We need to call the cops and at least report the death.”

Alec shifted. Now she was making him feel like a total shit. “Okay. Maybe we do have to call the cops. But . . . can you wait until I go?”

Natalie stared at him even harder, and there . . . there was that little glimpse of a monster as her irritation turned to anger.

“Seriously?” she managed through gritted teeth. “You’re going to bail?”

“Um, I might be . . .” Alec felt blood rush to his cheeks and cursed it silently. “I might be er, holding, at present.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Natalie huffed through an angry exhale. “You’re carrying pot?”

He shrugged. “Helps keep me calm before the full moon.”

Which was true. It didn’t help a lot, but sometimes it cut the edge of the wildness that was already coursing through him and would only get worse with each passing day until finally he had no control over it anymore and it was Moon Fever time. Natalie arched a brow. Pure disbelief almost swept off her in waves.

Alec rolled his eyes with frustration. Of course Miss I’m-Always-in-Control wouldn’t get it. She never even growled, let alone locked herself into steel handcuffs once a month to keep from marauding through the city and killing people.

“Believe me or not, Natalie, but it’s medicinal. Only it’s not legal and I don’t really want the cops asking questions.” Alec backed toward the door. “So I’m going to just go. And you call the police.”

She shook her head and Alec looked at the scene in the kitchen once more. Poor Natalie was going to have to deal with a dead Blob, cops, and an unconscious Linda. He felt bad, but he had other problems to deal with. Ones more straightforward than this. This was better, necessary.

When Natalie got home, she’d understand.

So he turned on his heel and bolted, with Natalie’s call of “You SUCK!” echoing in his ears as he opened the front door.

“So you know the deceased how?” the bored, cold cop asked as he scribbled in his notebook.

He seemed so unmoved by her friend’s death that Natalie couldn’t help but wonder if he was taking notes on something other than the circumstances of the case. Maybe about what movie he planned to catch that weekend or the stats for the two New York football teams (the Giants had Eli Manning, but Rex Ryan was a good coach something, something, something, human guy talk).

“Well, er,” she stammered, trying to think of the best way to put her relationship with Blob. “We’re in a s-support group together.”

The cop glanced up and stared at her, but said nothing. Natalie’s cheeks flamed hot with a blush. One that deepened when he said, “A support group. For what? Was the deceased into drugs or—”

“No!” Natalie burst out, louder than she had intended, probably because when he said drugs she thought of stupid Alec and his stupid pot that had caused her to be the one to deal with this shit.

“Then what?”

“I-it’s a chronic condition,” she explained slowly. “We all share.”

“One that might have made him suicidal?” The cop looked at the corpse. “Or just fat?”

Natalie bit back a curse. The guy didn’t have to be an asshole. Or maybe he did.

“It’s not something that would make anyone suicidal. Bob was definitely not suicidal.”

“But you came looking for him,” the cop said after yet another long pause. “How come?”

Natalie shook her head. “He didn’t show up for a couple meetings in a row, which wasn’t like him. So we came.”

“You and the lady who is sobbing on the pizza boxes?” the cop said with a quick jerk of his head toward Linda.

She was sitting on the boxes she’d fainted on earlier, hugging herself and softly crying. At least she was conscious.

“Yeah.” Natalie sighed. “That’s the one.”

“She’s very upset by this,” the cop observed, and then frowned. “She’s not going to puke, is she? She almost looks green.”

Natalie bit her lip. Yeah, Linda did look green. Because she was green and all that crying did a number on her cover-up.

“I—I’m not going to throw up,” Linda interjected through tears. “I—I just f-feel so bad for Bob. To die like your movie is just awful.”

The cop wrinkled his brow and stared at Natalie. “Movie?”

Natalie tensed. “Sorry, she’s just distraught. I think she should go home. Is there anything else you need from us?”

The cop scanned over his notes again, likely relieved that Natalie had given him an out on further inquiry with Linda. “No, I don’t think so. At least not right now. And we know where to find you if we do.”

Natalie had been looking at Linda, who was still muttering about movies and monsters, but now she turned to face the cop with a gulp.

“You . . . know where to find me?” she repeated on the barest of squeaks.

He nodded. “Yeah. The medical examiner’s office, right? Detective Blass said he’s seen you there.”

Relief poured through Natalie like ice water, cooling her suddenly heated mind and body. “Yes, of course. I should have recognized the detective. Good-bye.”

The cop gave her a dismissive nod and wandered off toward the fridge, where two other detectives were debating how to get a frozen four-hundred-plus-pound corpse out of a four-story walk-up. Natalie grabbed Linda’s arm and pulled her to her feet.

“Come on, let’s go before they decide they have more questions,” she snapped under her breath.

Linda followed her, but she was dragging her feet so much and crying so hard that Natalie practically had to carry her down the hallway, where neighbors were peeking out through the spaces in their chain-locked doors.

Once they were outside and had walked a couple of blocks, Natalie hauled Linda over into the shadow of a building and shook her.

“Get it together, girl!” she ordered in a no-nonsense tone she thought even Kai would have liked.

Linda shook her head and kept crying. “I don’t want to get shot ten times and found in the Hudson.”

“Is that how you die in The Story?” Natalie asked with a sigh. She had looked up Linda’s movie and book history, of course, but she was too distracted to remember any of it.

Linda nodded. “Not in the Hudson, but that would be the obvious choice when someone kills me here.”

“Well, there’s always the East River,” Natalie said as she rubbed her eyes. Part of her understood Linda’s freak-out. But the other part . . .

“What is the first rule of hiding our identities?” she asked in a low hiss to keep passing strangers from hearing them.

Linda sniffled. “D-don’t draw attention to yourself.”

“Then stop crying,” Natalie ordered, though she found herself rubbing Linda’s arm in a comforting fashion. “Seriously, you’re going all green, even the cop noticed.”

Linda gulped back tears and drew a few deep breaths before she withdrew a lighted compact and examined herself.

“Oh shit, you’re right. Hang on.” With a few expert sweeps of a brush, Linda redid her makeup and suddenly looked like a real-life girl again.

“Better?” she asked with only a sniffle.

“Actually, yeah.” Natalie shook her head with begrudging respect. “You’re really good at that.”

Linda sighed. “Well, I’ve had practice.”

Natalie couldn’t help but smile. She understood that. She might not have green, scaly skin like Linda, but she had to cover her scars on a regular basis. The summer was a nightmare.

Linda checked herself again and snapped the compact shut. “My crying is water-related, you know.”

Natalie stared. “Not all of it.”

Linda pondered that statement for a moment. “No. I’m emotional. But I kind of like it. It makes me . . . human. Kind of like your sarcasm or Kai’s being a raving bitch.”

Natalie pursed her lips. She hadn’t thought of it that way before. “Yeah, I guess we all like our human bits, don’t we?” She shook her head. Heaven help her if she was going to start to “get” Linda. “Anyway, I’m going to walk you to your train and I’ll see you later.”

“What?” Linda’s eyes went wide. “You aren’t coming with me?”

Natalie shook her head. “No, I’m going home. I’m going to text the others and let them know that Bob has been found . . . sort of. Then I’m taking a hot bath and going to bed. I just want to forget this day.”

But as they headed down the stairs into the dark, dank subway station, Natalie knew that forgetting wasn’t possible.

6

The apartment door flew open before Natalie could even start looking for her keys, revealing the pudgy, mousy figure of her roommate, Whitney. She was still wearing the uniform for her job as a waitress in a ridiculous fifties-themed restaurant in the heart of Times Square: a poodle skirt and puffy sweater. Her brownish hair was tied back in a tight ponytail and her brightly painted red lips were pulled down in an angry scowl.

Not that the expression was different from any other night; she’d seemed pissed pretty much since the moment she moved in.

They had met via Craigslist a year and a half before when Natalie was looking for a roommate. In the end, she’d chosen Whitney not because they’d connected on any kind of natural level, but because she needed a paying body in the house who didn’t seem like she’d be too nosy. They had nothing in common, from their personalities to their hobbies, but they had always tolerated each other. Barely.

Today Natalie just wasn’t in the mood. Her head had started to throb about twenty minutes before and all she wanted to do was lie down in a dark room and try to pretend she hadn’t seen Blob dead in a freezer. Clearly, that wasn’t going to happen. She forced a tight, unnatural smile on her face.

“Hey, Whit—”

Whitney cut her off. “What the fuck, Natalie?”

Natalie blinked. She’d seen Whitney annoyed over dishes, music, the state of the bathroom . . . but never really mad. Now her full cheeks were splotched with red and her normally boring brown eyes were bright with what could only be described as rage.

“What? What the fuck what, Whitney?” Natalie asked as she counted to ten in her head.

She just wanted to go inside. Why couldn’t they talk about this shit inside? Why did they have to do it in the hallway, with its bright lights and buzzing exit sign that sounded like a shotgun in her head right now?

“You gave some random guy your key?” Whitney barked.

Natalie shook her head. What was Whitney talking about? She pushed past her roommate into the apartment and looked around. There was no random guy. Had her roommate let all the hamburger grease go to her head?

“What are you prattling on about?” she asked, her own voice elevating. “I never gave anyone my key.”

She was feeling a little . . . monstrous, actually. It wasn’t something she allowed very often, mostly because she feared she might not be able to control it once it started. It was not to be fucked with.

“Yeah. You did.” Whitney slammed the door and folded her arms. “He could have raped me, Natalie!”

Natalie shook her head as she dug into her pockets for her keys. Once she found them, Whitney would have to admit she was full of shit. Maybe even apologize . . . though she had never done so in the whole time they lived together. It was actually Natalie who normally said sorry for everything.

And she couldn’t think of why at the moment.

She gritted her teeth and kept patting her pockets. But there were no keys.

“Um,” she began.

Whitney threw her hands up and rolled her eyes. “See? You can’t even fake that you have your keys. You gave them to that guy, you gave him our address, and you let him come in here, without even consulting me first. I mean, shit, at least have some common courtesy.”

“Whitney—” she managed past gritted teeth.

“No, just don’t say another word. It’s too late now. This is the last straw. Your pick-up is in your bedroom waiting for you and I hope he can pay the rent, because I’m out of here.”

She turned on her heel and grabbed a purple duffel bag that read Dance! in swirly letters. Not that Whitney and her fat ass had ever danced.

“What are you talking about?” Natalie cried, stepping forward as panic gripped her.

The medical examiner’s office paid fine, but not well enough to cover one hundred percent of the rent even on her modest place. It was in Manhattan, for Christ’s sake! Not the greatest part, but still . . . Manhattan!

“Look, I’ve put up with your hours, the fact that you come home with blood all over you at least once a week, your nineteenth-century music choices, and your general . . .” Her roommate waved her hands at Natalie. “Your general weirdness. But this is it. A friend at the diner has a spot opening up in her place and I’m moving out. I’ll be back for my stuff tomorrow.”

“No—” Natalie said with a shake of her head. “Wait.”

But Whitney pushed past her into the hallway without another word and slammed the door behind her. Natalie flinched as the reverberation of the door made her sensitive ears tingle, and then she turned back into the apartment.

Every light was on, but somehow she still felt . . . scared. Scared like kids had been scared of her for generations. Except she was afraid of the light, not the dark. Of what it might reveal when she went into her bedroom and saw whoever had somehow gotten her keys and was waiting for her.

It wasn’t a common feeling, that fear. Normal people couldn’t best her. They underestimated her strength.

But what if it wasn’t just a normal person waiting for her? What if it was the same person who had incited a crowd to kill Ellis? Or frozen Blob alive? Human or not, they had managed to get past the monster defenses of both her friends. Who was to say they wouldn’t get past hers?

Would she end up on a funeral pyre tonight, a dead monster no one even missed?

No way. That was not going to happen. She reached out and grabbed an antique silver candlestick on the console table by the door. Dear old Dad’s castle had been a good source of décor, for sure. Décor that doubled as protection.

She moved down the hallway, candlestick poised above her head. As she reached her closed bedroom door and touched the knob, her hand started to shake.

“Come on, you’re a monster,” she muttered, and then threw the door open with a horrifying guttural cry she hadn’t executed in over a hundred years.

What she found inside, though, wasn’t some human ready to kill her. No, instead Alec was sprawled across her bed, reading a three-month-old issue of Cosmo. He glanced up as she entered and grinned.

“Nice candlestick,” Alec quipped. “And that monster yell was killer. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Natalie continued to stare at him, candlestick raised above her head and confusion on her face. Not that he could blame her. She hadn’t exactly invited him here. Which was kind of the point.

He closed the magazine. “Hope you don’t mind, I took the sex quiz since you hadn’t. Turns out I’m kind of a whore, but good to my friends. Accurate.”

Natalie blinked and then slowly lowered the candlestick to set it on the dresser by her door. “Alec?”

He almost had to laugh at her blank, perplexed expression.

“Yes, we’ve met before.” He pushed to his feet and extended a hand. “Alec. And you’re . . . Natalie, right?”

She didn’t smile, but reached up to rub her eyes.

“What the hell are you doing here? How did you get here?”

Alec knew what she meant, but he was in no hurry to get into it. “Same way you did, I assume,” he said with a shrug. “Subway.”

She glared at him. “How did you get into my apartment, dickhead?”

He laughed. Hardly anyone used dickhead as a curse anymore. Natalie was a throwback in so many ways.

“Oh, that!”

He reached into the pocket of his jeans and held out her keys, complete with the little pink cartridge of pepper spray attached to the key ring.

“Here you go,” he said. “Though I don’t know why you have pepper spray. You’ve got monster strength and good ears. Or is it for show, since so many women in the city carry it for protection? You constantly think of all the details when it comes to fitting in. I always sort of admired you for that.”

She blinked as if she didn’t really understand the words coming out of his mouth.

“You stole my keys,” she said, more to herself than to him. “When?”

“Blob’s apartment,” he said with a shrug. “Figured we could meet here and decompress.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but it was as good a start as any.

“Asshole.” She advanced on him with a scowl befitting any monster. “You realize you pissed my roommate off—and now she’s moving out!”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah, I heard her through the door. But I never would have raped her.”

Natalie shook her head. “Am I in The Twilight Zone? Is this really happening?”

“I don’t know about The Twilight Zone, but that’s not the point. The point is . . . sorry about your roommate.”

For a moment, Natalie just stared at him, but then she pressed her hands into his chest and shoved as hard as she could. To Alec’s surprise, he staggered back a step. Just a few hours before, he’d been musing on how Natalie never went monster . . . but here she was, brown eyes flashing, dark hair flying around her face, and all her impressive strength on display.

She was a monster. And for the first time Alec truly saw her. She was . . . hot, actually. He’d never noticed just how pretty her face was or the way her eyes sparkled.

“You aren’t sorry!” Natalie growled, a fitting interruption to his very weird thoughts. “I can see in your eyes that this is just a big joke to you, just like everything else is. Well, some of us have to live. And work. And pay our damn rent, which is why I had Whitney living here with me in the first place. It wasn’t for her awesome company, by any means.”

Alec knew all that. But he wrinkled his brow anyway, like he didn’t have a plan. Nope, not at all.

“Come on. She’ll get over it in the morning.”

“No.” Natalie sank down on the bed Alec had vacated and rubbed her temples. “This time, I think she might not. She was going on and on about all the things she doesn’t like about living with me.”

“Do you really listen to nineteenth-century music?” he asked.

She glared up at him. “Seriously?”

“Sorry.” He shrugged. Now was the time to announce his plan to Natalie. “I’ll tell you what . . . I find myself currently, um, between residences, as well. How about I move in and I’ll help you cover the rent, huh?”

Natalie’s mouth dropped open. “Wait, you got kicked out of your apartment?”

Alec nodded. It had happened a day before. The notice had said something about excessive noise infractions (like it was his fault that he thrashed and howled when the full moon was close).

He had intended to mention it at the meeting, but then Blob hadn’t shown and looking for him was the priority. When he was hanging out with Natalie, he’d kind of remembered some roommate problems she mentioned now and then, and . . . poof. Somehow he’d ended up with her keys and a potential solution to his impending homelessness.

Natalie was still talking. “Are you trying to tell me you just happened to create enough problems to make my roommate move out?”

He didn’t answer, but raised both eyebrows.

“You . . . you . . . mutt!”

“Hey! Hurtful!”

With a groan, she flopped down on her back on the bed and threw an arm over her eyes. “You did this on purpose.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute, just stared at her. Well, first at her boobs, then at her. She was pretty pissed. Like, legitimately pissed, not Linda-getting-attention pissed.

When she moved her arm to stare at him, he actually felt sheepish.

Mmm. Sheep.

“You did, didn’t you?” Natalie asked as she pulled herself into a seated position, almost as if she hoped he would deny it.

He shrugged. “I heard you mention a couple times what a bitch she was . . . and you were right, by the way. I tried to be nice to her when she got here. I explained I wasn’t a random guy but a friend, and she still started yelling like a banshee on crack. Drama queen.”

Natalie sighed. “Yeah, a little. But—”

He interrupted her. He could see he was working past Rage Natalie and he couldn’t stop now. “That girl totally did not deserve a nice pad like this or a roommate like you. And I admit . . . when it gets close to the full moon, I . . . well, sometimes I trash a place, so it’s hard to keep an apartment on my own.”

Natalie shook her head. “You think the fact that you trash your apartments is going to be a selling point for me letting you live here?”

“You have monster strength,” Alec pointed out. “When you shoved me, I staggered, and that’s pretty rare, having a bit of monster strength myself. You could help me control myself. Lock me up in a room during full moons and stuff.”

Natalie just stared at him, but her expression had softened a little. Alec could see he was close to getting what he wanted.

“C’mon, Nat!” he pleaded. “Wouldn’t it be nice to live with someone you didn’t have to hide your true identity from? Someone who doesn’t mind weird music, or at least remembers when it was cool, and keeps your same hours?”

“Monsters sharing an apartment . . .” Natalie mused.

He tilted his head. “I’ll be such a good dog. Bring you your slippers?”

She smiled before she could help herself and then rolled her eyes. “Fine. Fine, you can stay here. But you better cover your half of the rent or I swear I will put you out on your fine ass before you can howl or whine.”

He grinned. “So my ass is fine, is it?”

“Shut up!” Natalie grabbed a pillow and tossed it at him.

He caught it, but then set it aside and stared at her evenly. She shifted beneath his close inspection, but didn’t break the stare.

“So,” he said. “Want to talk about our real problem?”

“That you’re a narcissistic sociopath?” she teased.

He didn’t smile, though he normally would have. “No. Blob. Ellis.”

Natalie squeezed her eyes shut. “No, I don’t want to talk about that. But I guess we have to, don’t we?”

Alec sighed and then took a seat next to her on the bed. When she opened her eyes, she jolted in surprise and then lunged to her feet. She paced away from him to the tiny window that looked out over a dirty alley below. With his good wolf ears, he could hear her trying to settle her breath, though if that was because of him or the circumstances, he had no idea.

“So you and I agree that, whatever Kai wants to say to explain this away as ‘coincidence,’ this is a big deal, right?” Natalie asked without looking back at him. “I mean, two of us, dying like we did in The Story? That’s too much to be dismissed as a fluke.”

“Yeah.” Alec nodded as he thought of poor Blob all blue in the freezer. He’d always liked the guy. He certainly didn’t deserve to go like that. “We agree. We’re all in danger. And we’re going to need to address that tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Natalie repeated with a shake of her head as she finally looked at him again. “But that’s not our regular meeting day.”

“Didn’t you get Drake’s text?”

Natalie’s eyes went wide. “I still can’t believe Mr. Fifth Century texts now.”

Alec laughed. “Yeah, well, apparently he somehow arranged for us to use the church basement off our usual schedule.”

She wrinkled her brow. “How? Didn’t some other group have the space reserved?”

Alec shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he used vampire mind tricks. Those are real, right?”

“Yes. I’ve felt them a couple of times.” Natalie let out a heavy sigh. “Shit, I hope he didn’t do something like that. It’s way too obvious, even to dimwits. That’s exactly the kind of behavior that could only make this situation worse.”

Alec blinked. “Worse? Is that possible?”

She turned back to the alley below and shivered. “I hope not.”

7

Alec had been living with Natalie for all of five seconds and he’d already told her a lie. When he said “I’m going to work” as he’d left that night, he’d actually meant, I’m telling you what you want to hear so that you won’t ask questions. He had something else to do, someplace else to be . . . and he doubted Natalie would approve. Actually, he knew she wouldn’t, and for some weird reason that actually mattered to him.

He’d spent years going with the flow, making sure everything and everyone around him was superficial. Oh sure, the guys at work liked him enough to sometimes have a beer with him or ask him to play poker. And girls flocked to him at clubs and joined him in bed without having to be asked twice.

But that didn’t mean anything he shared with those people was genuine. Alec didn’t really make friends or have girlfriends or do more than hang out a few times. It was too dangerous. The last time he’d let someone get close was over a hundred years ago, and that poor girl had ended up dead in a ditch with her throat ripped out.

Not by him, of course. By a bastard who was trying to convince his village of a “Wolf Man” on the loose. But still. Those were the dangers of Alec’s lifestyle. No, not lifestyle. Lifestyle implied a choice in how one lived.

This wasn’t a choice. As some little pop star kept singing on the radio . . . he was born this way. And monsters weren’t easy to love.

But with Natalie, there was something . . . different. He didn’t have to be scared for her life or her future; Natalie could take care of herself in dangerous situations. And she was as hard to kill as he was, even if things got . . . bad. Plus, he didn’t have to worry what she would say when she found out what happened to him during the full moon. Natalie got it.

She might not get him. But she got it. And sometimes, even against her better judgment, she might even like him. Now, was that going to lead to anything? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact that there was a possibility it might made him much more worried about what she’d think of his current “extracurricular activities.”

So he was just going to keep tonight’s agenda to himself. If anything came of it, then he’d think about telling Natalie what was really up.

He stepped up to the same building he’d been at just a few hours before. Blob’s building. Somehow he expected to see crime scene tape and cops swarming everywhere, but the place was quiet, like nothing had happened there.

Natalie thought he was a big joke, and that was his own fault. Over the years, decades, centuries, he’d learned that playing the fool was the best way to keep people out of his business. No one ever thought he had any . . . Or any brains to go with it.

But he had a bit of both.

He stepped inside and was assaulted by the same filth they’d encountered earlier. He went up a floor and down the hall to one of the apartments: 215. One he’d been to plenty of times, though he hadn’t mentioned that to Linda or Natalie when they came here looking for Blob. It only would have caused too many questions.

He knocked and the door opened only as far as the chain would allow. A bright, wild eye appeared in the space and then softened with recognition.

“Alec, my brother,” a male voice with a decidedly fake Rastafarian accent said.

The door shut, the lock slid free, and the door opened to reveal a very skinny, very white man with long, stringy dreadlocks and a dirty beard. The apartment smelled like patchouli leaves, stale socks, and some other gross aromas.

Sometimes Alec cursed that sensitive doggie nose of his.

“West,” he said as he shook the other man’s hand and was dragged in for a chest bump. Shit, the kid was an idiot. He’d been pretending to be Jamaican as long as Alec had known him and the act got pretty old.

“So, my best customer,” West said, motioning to the couch as he relocked the door. “Back for more already? You were just here a couple of days ago, man.”

Alec shook his head. This was why he hadn’t told Natalie about being in the building before. She clearly didn’t approve of the pot use, even though it was truly for medicinal purposes. And he wasn’t about to tell her that his dealer lived here.

“Naw, man, I just heard you had some trouble here with the cops. Thought I’d come see for myself if you were still breathing and operating.”

West frowned and for a second the accent slipped. “Yeah, dude.” Then he was all smiles and no-worries attitude again. “Some fatty upstairs offed himself, I guess.”

Alec flinched. Man, people were mean. Monsters were mean, too, but at least they had an excuse.

“That the word?” he asked, tone not revealing anything.

West nodded. “Yeah. So it ain’t no thing. Won’t cause any problems to business, if that’s your worry, man.”

Alec nodded. “Good. Good thing. But I—uh, actually knew the guy from . . . work.”

West had no concept of what anyone did for a living beyond selling drugs, so he nodded.

“Whoa. Trippy, man. Well, sorry about the fat dude. Want to smoke a blunt for him?”

Alec shook his head. In truth, the pot made his nose itchy. He really only did it for the calming effect around full moon days.

“Actually, I was wondering if you saw anyone weird here before my dude died.”

That was the thing about West. He was a pothead and a dealer, but he protected his business. Alec knew he watched his building pretty fucking close. If anyone would know about weird monster-killing commandos or ninjas or something, it would be him.

West sat down on his old couch and leaned back. He stared at the ceiling like he was thinking. Then he shrugged.

“Naw, I don’t think so. But lots of people come in and out of this building, right, man? To see me, to see other people. It’s kind of dance central here, even on the weeknights.”

“But no one out of the ordinary who you noticed,” Alec pressed.

West shrugged. “Nope. At least, I don’t remember someone weird. Why? The guy killed himself, right . . . or did someone steal something from him?”

Alec thought of Bob’s swollen face, his blue skin, the look of terror on his face, and the lock that had kept him from escaping his fate.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“That sucks, man,” West said.

Alec rubbed his itchy nose and moved to the door. “Thanks, man. I appreciate the assistance.”

West got up, confused. “Uh, yeah. You’re going to come back and do business, though, right?”

Alec hesitated at the door. “Oh yeah. I’m good for now, but I’ll be back.”

West smiled weakly and Alec shut the door behind him. So much for that, and it was the closest thing to a “lead” he had. The only upside was he wasn’t going to have to tell Natalie about this little excursion. Which was of little comfort when he thought of poor Blob and his sad little lonely death just two floors up.

Natalie slipped into the side door of the Holy Heart Church and moved toward the stairs to the basement. The church was empty except for two older ladies who were wiping down the pews with wood cleaner. When they caught sight of her, both of them flinched and started whispering to each other in Italian. Natalie hadn’t spoken Italian in nearly a century but she remembered enough to know what they were saying wasn’t complimentary. Their voices were filled with accusatory fear she heard loud and clear, even if she didn’t fully understand their words.

She clutched her bag tighter as she moved into the basement stairwell. Their reaction caused a visceral one of her own: fear prickled her neck, nerves. She could almost smell torch fire and feel pitchforks poking her in the back before she shook her head and shrugged away the bad memories.

This was New York City, not nineteenth-century France . . . or England . . . or Italy . . . or Romania. No one was going to chase her.

She made her way to the meeting room and walked inside. She wasn’t surprised that almost everyone had already gathered for their meeting. She’d pretty much given up on ever being the first one in the room.

They were a stony, silent group, sprawled in chairs, hardly looking at each other.

Linda cried softly. Drake paced along the back wall of the room, jerking his cape around his legs every time he pivoted. Jekyll and Hyde were merged, but even as a single, united man they were creepy. He/they gripped their hands together, comforting themselves by sliding one finger against the other and speaking out loud to each other in two different voices, like they were straight out of a Stephen King novel.

“You’re not late,” Kai said with genuine surprise.

Natalie frowned as she scanned the room. “I’m also not last. Alec isn’t here yet.”

In fact, she hadn’t seen Alec since he left for work the night before. She’d had the night off and had indulged in a long bath, caught up on her DVR (monsters chilled to reality TV, too), and finally slept off her migraine.

But despite the fact he had declared he was moving in, Alec hadn’t shown up in the morning or all day.

Maybe he’d changed his mind.

Or maybe something else had happened to him.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Natalie asked as fear gripped her.

She could almost picture Alec lying in a gutter somewhere, a silver bullet piercing his heart. She didn’t like the guy . . . much . . . but she didn’t want him to end that way.

“Oh God,” Linda started to wail. She pressed the heels of her fists into her eyes until it looked painful. “They got Alec—they got Alec!”

“Good riddance,” Drake muttered, but despite his nasty comment he, too, looked concerned. His eyebrows knitted down and his gaze grew distant and fearful.

“Okay, everyone calm down,” Kai said with a no-nonsense brittleness to her tone. “We don’t know if anyone has gotten Alec yet.”

“Who got me?” Alec asked as he strode through the door and shut it firmly behind him.

Natalie wasn’t expecting the relief that rushed through her at the sight of the goofy mutt, but it flooded her nonetheless. She smiled at him and he returned it briefly before looking around the room.

“Jesus, you are all a bunch of downers, aren’t you?” He chuckled.

Kai scowled at him, but she seemed relieved as she said, “See, Alec is fine. To be truthful, we don’t know if anyone has gotten anyone yet.”

“Bullshit,” Alec said as he flopped into a seat. He motioned toward Natalie with one hand. “Natalie and I talked about it for a long time last night. One of us dying the same way we did in The Story is one thing. But two? That just can’t be a coincidence.”

Kai flashed a quick, arched brow at Natalie as if to say, Last night? Natalie tensed. Shit, she hadn’t really thought of how she was going to explain their new living arrangements. There were going to be questions and insinuations and—

Kai turned away and glared at Alec without engaging in the inquisition Natalie feared was coming at some point.

“Natalie’s texts were pretty vague.” Kai sighed. “As usual.”

“I have a cheap phone and a limited number of characters, what do you want?” Natalie said with a glare for Kai.

“You mean there are limits on characters to text?” Drake interrupted, pulling that silly smartphone from his pocket.

Natalie took a long breath before she spoke. “I swear to God, I will send you a link to everything you ever wanted to know about that thing, okay? Can we focus? For once. Please?”

Kai nodded in agreement. “Look, back to the topic, okay? Why don’t you tell all of us exactly what happened to Blob? Bob.”

Alec motioned toward Natalie and she shook her head. She didn’t want to tell them what had happened . . . to think about what had happened to Blob. But Alec lifted his eyebrows in encouragement and she hauled herself to her feet with a sigh before she started in on the whole story.

The rest of the monsters, who usually were forever interrupting and interjecting during explanations, remained strangely quiet during her tale and for several long moments afterward.

Finally, Kai shook her head and her normally olive complexion was pale and blotchy.

“Okay, I’ll admit that does sound bad. Especially the part where he got . . .”—she swallowed hard—“locked into the freezer.”

The moment she said it, all hell broke loose. Linda returned to the loud, screeching sobs that echoed in the room and made Natalie flinch like someone was jabbing her eardrums. Jekyll and Hyde began to argue back and forth quickly, though since they were joined as one person, it was rather comical. Meanwhile, Alec and Kai were just yelling at each other.

Natalie sat back, watching them all. What good was this going to do? If someone was aware of them, stalking them, killing them, then fighting in the basement of the church wasn’t going to stop that.

Maybe only one thing could stop it: Running away. Again.

She sighed. It was too bad, really. There was so much she loved about her life in New York. This city was alive and filled with freaks like her or even stranger. People minded their business and made art and music and great food and architecture.

Weird boss, expensive apartment, and roommate issues aside, she hadn’t felt like someplace was so close to home in a lot of years. Maybe even ever.

Suddenly Drake surged into the circle and banged his hand against one of the empty chairs. The loud crack of his heavy fist on wood silenced the group and everyone stared at the aging vampire.

He shrugged out of his cape and stood there, dressed from head to toe in black, his graying hair slicked back against his skull. He looked . . . regal, almost. Dangerous.

“Stop,” he ordered, his voice thicker with the Eastern European accent he normally controlled.

He made a point to look at every single person in the room before he continued. When his gaze fell on her, Natalie felt the odd pull of his vampire mind tricks before she shook off the effect. She hated when he did that!

“This infighting will do us no good,” he continued, his tone softer, though still tough as nails. Or wooden stakes. “We are acting like children, but we are monsters.”

Whatever calming effect he’d had on everyone faded with that observation. The group muttered in collective dissent but it was Linda who shook her head.

“I’m not a monster. How could say that? How dare you accuse us of being what everyone fears?” She sniffled theatrically and stared at him as if she were awaiting his apology.

Drake arched a fine, aristocratic brow. “Just who fears us, Swamp Dweller? A few teenagers after a matinee movie? Even that fades. They laugh at us. They mock us. They make cute cartoons of us and even dress up like us on Halloween.”

He said the name of the holiday with disdain dripping from every syllable.

“But they don’t fear us,” he finished. “Because we do nothing to make them fear us.”

Natalie blinked. Okay, Drake had her there. She had marauded once or twice in her life, way back in her younger days. But she hadn’t done anything scary (aside from take garbage to the chute at the end of her hallway without wearing her makeup) in so long, she couldn’t remember it.

Drake shook his head. “Perhaps that fact, the fact that we are no longer frightening, is what has led to the deaths of our friends.”

Alec tilted his head. “What do you mean?”

Drake turned his attention to Alec with a scornful sniff. “Someone out there knows we’re monsters, but they also know we will never truly act like monsters. And so they feel free to take the lives of those near us.”

Kai stared at him, and for the first time since Natalie had met the girl, she actually looked impressed by someone other than herself. She put a hand on each slender hip and shrugged.

“What do you suggest we do about that, Drake?”

He paced the room with purpose, tapping his fingers together. “First, we must assess whether or not there truly is a valid threat to our group. You are right, Natalie, that one death paralleling The Story is frightening, but two is very likely not coincidence. But we need proof, not mere conjecture. And once we have it . . . we must battle.”

“B-battle?” Linda said with a shiver.

He glared at her. “If necessary. Our first weapon must be knowledge. We all need to research our current situation. We must analyze everyone we know, everyone we’ve met, even in passing, to determine if we have a common enemy who has recently become a part of our lives.”

“Okay, that seems”—Kai shook her head—“oddly reasonable, actually. I’m completely down with going out, thinking about our activities, let’s say in the last month, and trying to figure out who is new to our lives, who might know all of us.”

“We should do that work in pairs,” Drake continued. “Not only will it help us determine a common link faster, but we will be more able to protect each other. There is currently no reason to think that this person who hunts us will stop at Ellis and Bob. We’re all in danger, and we only have each other to turn to in this dark hour of need.”

Alec sat up, staring at the vampire. Then he tilted his head back and started to laugh. The room was silent except for the laughter, which was full and rich, utterly pleasant, and completely out of place for their current situation.

“And just what is so funny, Wolf?” Drake asked over the laughter.

His lips were pursed in a thin line and Natalie could actually see the faint outline of his one good fang against the taut skin. Sometimes she forgot Drake even had a fang anymore. Or that Dracula had once meant something. Shit, when she was “young,” there had still been people terrified of Drake. Women who crossed themselves when they said his name and hung garlic inside their windows to keep him and his kind away.

Alec pushed to his feet and grinned. “Nothing, I was just wondering how, after all these years of trotting around like a doddering old man, you managed to wake up on the right side of the coffin all of a sudden.”

Drake took a long, menacing (for him) step toward Alec and Natalie surged to her feet to wedge herself between them.

“Great, this is a plan,” she said as she shoved Alec away from the pissed-off vampire. He was still grinning and it was only serving to anger Drake more. It wasn’t that she thought the vampire would hurt the werewolf, she just didn’t want to have to deal with a fight. “I’ll take Alec to search on my end.”

“Why Alec, Natalie?” Kai asked as she folded her arms and looked at the two of them evenly.

Crap. The questions about what was going on between them hadn’t been tabled like Natalie hoped.

She shrugged. “I’ll take him if only so that no one else kills him.”

Plus she kind of wanted to know whether he was moving into her apartment or what.

“Right,” Kai murmured in a voice that oozed sarcasm. “We’ll leave that to the monster murderer roaming the city.”

“Right,” Natalie said, swallowing hard. “Wouldn’t want to take away their fun.”

“Shit, I’m standing right here,” Alec said, but his tone was laced with laughter, despite the dark topic.

“Fine. I’ll head out with Jekyll and Hyde,” Kai offered with a grimace at the man . . . men.

Natalie shivered. One of Jekyll-Hyde’s eyes was dark with concern, while the other was bright with sexual interest. She actually preferred them separated because having two such different personalities in one man was . . . disconcerting. When Hyde was separate, you could at least pinpoint the threat.

Drake frowned. “So that leaves me with Linda.”

Linda pushed her lip out in a pout. “I’m not a monster,” she insisted again. Poor Drake was going to be apologizing for that comment all night.

Natalie rolled her eyes and started for the door. “Let’s meet up tomorrow night during our regular time and compare notes on whatever we find. Come on, Alec.”

She exited the room without looking back at the group and headed down the hallway toward the stairs. If she could just avoid any more arguments, maybe she wouldn’t end up with another migraine before the end of the night.

“Hey, wait!” Alec called behind her.

She slowed down and looked over her shoulder. He was jogging to catch up with her, and when he did, she started walking again.

“Did you really pick me because you want to make sure none of the monsters kill me?” he asked.

Natalie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you seem to bring that out in people.”

“Except you,” he teased.

She shot him a look. “No, I want to kill you, too. I just have more self-control.”

Alec laughed as they headed out onto the street and made their way toward the subway station.

“So what are we doing?” Alec asked.

She shook her head. How it had come to this, she did not know.

“You are going to be a good boy and come with me. To work.”

He grinned even wider. “Morgue time? Woohoo! I’ve always wanted to visit the morgue. Will they let me have a bone?”

She blinked as she stared at him for a moment, then turned on her heel and walked away. “God help us both.”

8

Natalie peeled the backing from the visitor tag she’d created for Alec and glanced up at him as she attached it on his shirt. There were muscles under there. She had touched them. They were kind of . . . nice.

She cleared her throat nervously. “Remember, if anyone asks—”

“I’m your cousin who showed up in town unexpectedly,” Alec finished. “Though, in my mind, we’re only cousins by marriage, so if we wanted to hook up . . .”

“Stop!” Natalie slapped at his hand. She was in no mood for his shenanigans. “Seriously.”

“Okay, okay, no need to smack.” Alec reached out to pat her arm gently. “Nat,” he began.

She tensed. Nat? A nickname? She’d never had a nickname. No one had ever been close enough to give her one. With the exception of villagers who screamed, “Demon!” or “Monster!” or “Kill it!”

She was pretty sure that wasn’t the same thing.

“I’m not going to screw up your job,” Alec continued. His golden eyes held her with all seriousness. “I can behave when I want to, and I will.”

Natalie pulled away from his unexpected comfort and glanced at him from the corner of her eye. He seemed solemn enough, but she really wasn’t sure she could trust him. Or, more importantly, if she should.

But it wasn’t like she had any kind of choice.

“Good, I appreciate that,” she said. “Okay. Well, let’s go, then.”

She used her badge to go through the locked door into the back hallway. All she wanted to do was get to her little office, hide out, and do paperwork all night between accessing the files she needed for researching the monster deaths and any relationships between them. Anything to keep Alec out of sight of her coworkers and her boss.

The moment the thought had entered her head, her boss came around the corner and started down the hall, a pile of papers in her hand. Everything seemed to shift into slow motion as Gretchen Grimes moved closer and closer. She glanced up and smiled at Natalie, and then her gaze slipped behind her to Alec and filled with interest and question.

“Hi, Natalie,” she said with a broad Hollywood smile. “And just who is your friend?”

Natalie swallowed. She’d never been much good at lying, and in that moment every bad outcome from doing so flashed before her eyes and resulted in firing . . . fire . . . arrest . . . losing her apartment . . .

“Alec Dunham,” he said, putting out his hand.

Natalie jolted. She hadn’t actually ever heard Alec’s last name before. It fit him. Also, it was the last name of a character on a TV show she liked, so that made it even better.

“Doctor Gretchen Grimes, medical examiner,” her boss said, giving her full title, as she always did when she met a new person. Always working the crowd, that one.

Alec gave that smooth, lady-killer smile that melted the panties off women at clubs regularly. Natalie could hardly cover her irritation.

“Oh, trust me, I know who you are,” he all but purred. And here Natalie thought he was supposed to be a dog. “I’ve seen you on Court TV.”

Gretchen pretended to be embarrassed, but Natalie could tell she was eating this up. “Oh, yes. The Ambassador Case. Terrible thing, three murders. But I was just happy to do my job. The fact that the case was televised . . . well, that’s really not up to me.”

Natalie bit her tongue.

“You were fascinating to watch. I’m sorry, where are my manners? I’m Natalie’s cousin,” Alec explained. “Just showed up from out of town. The family is always going on and on about her big-time job in New York and her big-time boss.”

Natalie shot him a glare that she hoped told him, Too much, Alec, and said, “Are they?”

He nodded and wrapped an arm around her shoulders to squeeze with bone-crushing power. “Oh yes. We are so proud of our little Nata-boo.”

She shut her eyes. In his scenario she even had a ridiculous nickname? Crap, that was two in the span of fifteen minutes, though she preferred Nat to Nata-boo.

Jesus, he was good. But then, unlike her, at some point a couple of centuries ago he’d probably actually had a real family. And not an I-built-you-so-appreciate-me-and-do-my-bidding family, either.

Lucky.

“Anyway, I’m just so impressed by my cuz, I asked if I could tag along with her to work tonight.” Alec smiled down at Natalie and then he winked. His eyes were all sparkly. It was weird.

“I hope that’s okay,” Natalie managed past dry lips as she shrugged from the cousin-friendly embrace. “I know I didn’t clear it beforehand. It was kind of last minute.”

Gretchen didn’t even look at her; her eyes were still focused on Alec. Natalie had never seen her boss so interested in anyone other than herself.

“Natalie, how could you have not mentioned this charming cousin before?” her boss said with what could only be called a giggle. “Of course it’s fine. He wouldn’t be able to come in for an autopsy, but there’s no reason he couldn’t be in the back with you. And maybe later he can join me to see what I do around here.”

Alec sent that killer grin her way again. “That sounds awesome, thanks. Good old Cousin Natalie always said you were a great boss, and I can see why.”

Her boss tittered again and Natalie flinched. Shit, that was an annoying noise. Gretchen was too old for Alec, for one thing . . . or at least she should have thought she was . . . and seriously, who macked on someone’s cousin right in front of them?

“Well, I have a ton of paperwork to do,” Natalie said as she edged toward her office. “So . . . I should go do that. Come on, Alec . . . uh . . . poo.”

He took Gretchen’s hand a second time and shook it a moment too long. “Until later, eh?”

Gretchen smiled. “Later.”

Natalie rolled her eyes as her boss walked away with one final glance at Alec.

“Wow, cougar!” Alec whispered once they were out of earshot. “Not that she’s bad-looking.”

Natalie shot him a look. “Please don’t talk to me about how good-looking you think my boss is. It’s so creepy.”

Alec tilted his head. “I didn’t. And is that jealousy I hear in your voice?”

Natalie shook her head. “Nope. It’s annoyance.”

She unlocked her office and stepped inside.

Alec stopped at the door. “Wow. Tiny.”

She glanced around. Okay, so it wasn’t huge, but it was pretty good-sized for New York. She had a small desk cluttered with paperwork and her computer, a rolling chair, and a file cabinet.

“If you can fit a folding chair in your office, it’s big in this city,” she said as she reached behind the door for the folding chair she kept there for when Gretchen came in for one of her powwows and ended up stealing Natalie’s comfortable chair. Two hours of standing one night while Gretchen rambled on and on about herself had taught Natalie a lesson.

She set the chair up for Alec and then took her place at the computer to log in.

She scanned her email briefly to make sure she wasn’t missing anything important and then switched to the master program for all the medical examiner reports she had access to. She had memorized the case numbers for both Ellis’s and Bob’s reports and entered Ellis’s first.

“Damn,” she muttered as a message outlined in a red square flashed on the screen.

“What?” Alec asked from behind her. He leaned in to look over her shoulder, and even with her nose-deafness she caught a brief whiff of a very nice smell.

She shifted with discomfort. This office really was small. “Uh, well, Ellis’s coroner report has been processed through the system. Shit, that was fast; Gretchen must see stars in her future if she’s expediting like this.”

“Okay?” Alec shrugged. “And?”

Natalie retyped the case number and got the same message. She sighed. “Once a case processes out of the medical examiner’s office and into the system as a whole, lower-level employees in the ME’s office are locked out of the report.”

Alec blinked. “Why?”

“To prevent us from doing exactly what you and I want to do: alter information that could affect a case. Though they assume that it would be accidental, and we want to do it totally and illegally on purpose.”

“Is there any other way to get access?” Alec pressed.

Natalie shook her head. “Only Gretchen can give me access once it clears. If I ask her for it, she’s going to play twenty questions with me about why.”

“And you are a crappy liar,” Alec offered.

She glared up at him. “Thanks.”

“It’s true.” He shrugged. “Actually, it’s kind of refreshing.”

Natalie blinked and then refocused. “Shit. I was hoping we’d catch it before the case cleared, even if only to review the details. Hmmm . . . But Blob’s info might still be available, since it was more recent.”

She keyed in the number and waited, but after a few seconds of processing, the same message popped onto the screen.

“Wow,” she breathed. “They must have classified Blob’s death as a suicide or accident and closed the case out really fast.”

Alec opened his mouth like he was going to say something and then shut it. He shook his head and then said, “So you can’t access the reports for either?”

She let out a low sigh. “I guess not.”

He reached over her and grabbed her keyboard. “Here, let me try.”

She wrinkled her brow, but stood up to give him space and paced across to the door. She glanced around in the hallway and closed it to give them some privacy.

Natalie stared at the back of Alec’s head as he leaned over the keyboard, his fingers flying. He needed a haircut. But then, he always needed a haircut.

“Did you . . . did you sleep with Kai?” she asked before she even had time to consider what she was asking.

Alec froze and slowly looked over his shoulder at her. “What?” he asked, then returned to his work.

“Kai,” she repeated, mostly because now that she had started this line of questioning, she couldn’t think of a way out of it. “I mean, you sort of showed up with her that morning after Ellis died, and I thought maybe you . . . were there with her at her apartment when she got my text. In the middle of the night. Sleeping with her.”

He glanced at her again, but his face was unreadable. “Would that bug you, Natalie?”

She shifted. That was twice he’d asked about jealousy, and this time it was a question she didn’t exactly know the answer to. Or want to face.

The truth was, yeah, the idea of him sleeping with Kai did kind of bug her.

“What?” she asked instead of answering.

He laughed. “See, bad liar. I asked you if I’d slept with Kai, would it make you jealous?”

His fingers continued to fly over the keyboard without hesitation, even though he and Natalie were having the most awkward conversation on the planet. Especially since they were faking being cousins. And since they were going to be roommates. Maybe. If he hadn’t changed his mind.

“No,” she burst out as she sank into the folding chair he had abandoned in exchange for her more comfortable computer chair. “Of course not.”

“Not even a little?” He chuckled when she didn’t respond. “Well, either way, we didn’t sleep together. Kai called me at my apartment that morning to come meet you two. I don’t know why, since I don’t think she really believes you need a babysitter.” He leaned forward. “Hey, here you go!”

“What?”

“I got in.”

Natalie shook off lingering questions and emotions related to their conversation about . . . “us” and looked over his shoulder to see what he was talking about. She staggered back as she stared at the screen. The New York Police Department seal was at the top of the site he was in. And it wasn’t the public site anyone could access, either.

“Holy shit, you’re inside the NYPD system! I thought you were trying to access Gretchen’s files, but this is . . . this is so illegal.”

He glanced at her. “All of it is illegal, sweetheart, it’s just how many more years you get in the clink. But that’s only if we get caught. And I’m not going to get caught. I have the police reports, autopsy, and everything else for both Ellis’s and Blob’s deaths.”

He pulled Ellis’s information up first and they scanned it together.

“See, this is just like Ellis’s H. G. Wells story,” Natalie said as she pointed to a couple of lines in the report. “A man claimed to have been attacked by the victim and was fleeing when he came upon a crowd. They turned on the victim and beat him until he died. There was a shovel left at the scene, but no one knows where it came from.”

“How do you know that’s from Ellis’s story?” Alec asked, though he sounded impressed. “I thought you just looked up mode of death, but this is more than just that.”

Natalie shrugged. “Once he was killed, I started doing more research on all the stories for everyone. It took me a while to get through everybody, but I wanted to be able to recognize the details if there were more attacks.”

Alec swiveled her chair to look at her. “Nice, Natalie. Good thinking. Does that mean you researched my story, too?”

She blushed. Why did that question seem so personal? “Yeah. All of your stories. And there are a lot. Werewolves have been very popular in culture for decades, centuries, even.”

“Including Teen Wolf?” he teased.

She laughed. “The original movie, the sequel, and that new series. You don’t die in those movies, though, dude. You get the girl and everything.”

“Wow, I’m impressed.” He glanced back at the screen. “Okay, well, what about Blob?”

With a click of the mouse, he switched to the report for Blob. Although it was missing the detail about Blob being locked in the freezer, since Alec had taken the lock with him when he left, it did include something else that made Natalie’s heart sink and her stomach hurt.

“In the original movie, the Blob was pushed into a freezer by townspeople using fire extinguishers as sort of a herding mechanism,” she said. “And it looks like the responding officers noticed a few freezer burns on his arms and neck that might match the kind of intense CO_2 a fire extinguisher might contain. Still, they classified it as an accidental death.”

Alec frowned, and any teasing they had shared earlier was long gone.

“This is bad,” he finally said softly.

She nodded. “Yeah. These things . . . they can’t be coincidences. Not with so many matching details.”

“I don’t think even Kai can claim that after this,” he agreed.

She shook her head. “Look, as much as I’d like to go home right now, I have to finish my shift. You should go back to the apartment and let the others know. That is . . . if you are actually going to live with me.”

His brow wrinkled. “Um, yeah. That’s what we talked about, right? Unless you changed your mind.”

She shifted. She shouldn’t be so happy he’d said yes. She didn’t really want him there.

Not much.

“No, of course not,” she said with what she hoped was a nonchalant shrug. “I need a roomie to make rent and you need someone to keep you from running wild when you werewolf out. It’s just that you never came back to my apartment to bring any of your stuff after work last night. So I thought maybe you changed your mind.”

Now it was him who shifted, and he looked a little guilty for second. “I was beat after last night. Being so close to the full moon does that to me. I run ragged, then collapse. I crashed when I got back to the old apartment. But I will stop by my old place when I leave here and get my stuff.”

Natalie smiled, though she had no idea why this inconvenience was making her so happy. “Excellent. I mean, fine. Whatever. Then, uh, you should get to that. And I’ll be home soon.”

Alec looked at her for a long moment and she girded herself for some kind of string of arguments. Instead, he nodded.

“Okay.”

She blinked. “Okay. Good.”

He stood up and moved toward the door, but he didn’t leave. “Nat, are you okay?”

She slid back into her own chair and looked up at him with a weak smile. “Well, I haven’t been burned to death on a pyre. Yet. So I guess I have to be okay.”

He hesitated, and she felt like he wanted to say something else, but then he shook his head. “I’ll see you at home.”

“Yup,” she said as she pretended to go back to work. “See you later.”

But as he left her alone, she knew that the one thing this situation was not was okay. And no matter how much she lied, it wasn’t going to be.

The night shift dragged on and the eight hours felt like twenty by the time Natalie got off the train and trudged up to her street and finally to her apartment. Her whole body ached from holding it so stiff all night. Her cheeks hurt from faking smiles.

She reached for the doorknob, and for the second time in as many nights it opened before she could turn it. This time, however, there was no angry Whitney waiting for her. It was Alec, and from behind him she smelled eggs, bacon, and other breakfast delights that made her mouth water.

“Hey,” he said as he motioned her in. “Come sit down.”

She blinked as she saw her little round kitchen table set and ready for breakfast for two. “What is this?”

“You seemed bummed when I left you last night,” he explained. “And what can fix anything quicker than bacon?”

Natalie was going to argue, but at that moment it seemed like the best logic she’d ever heard. He handed her a plate and she took it, digging in before he even started.

“So did you talk to the others?” she asked between bites.

He handed her orange juice and nodded. “Yeah, to Kai. And she’s on board now. She gets this is serious, no more denials.”

Relief flooded Natalie. “Great! Then we just have to meet up at the church and see what everyone else found out. And come up with a plan of some kind. Not that it’s going to be easy, but—”

Alec’s lips pursed and he gave her a worried glance that cut her rambling off instantly.

Her heart sank. “What?”

He shrugged. “There’s some other news. The church, um, kicked us out.”

Natalie had been lifting a forkful of eggs to her lips, but she hesitated now. Her appetite wavered and she set the fork down.

“What do you mean, they kicked us out?”

He shifted. “Apparently Kai was the last one to leave our meeting and the priest stopped her. He told her that Blob was the only reason they were allowing us to meet there. And now he’s dead. They said we’re too . . . too . . . odd and they don’t feel comfortable with us there anymore.”

Natalie shut her eyes as she thought back to the women cleaning the pews. The way they’d looked at her was so familiar. So horrifying when she thought of the consequences of it.

“Oh my God,” she groaned.

“Natalie,” Alec said, his tone a warning. “Don’t freak out about this.”

“Don’t freak out?” she asked as she stared at him. “How can I not freak out? This is always how it starts. First you’re odd, then you’re dangerous, then you’re a monster and everyone has pitchforks and—”

She could have continued on like that for the whole day, but to her surprise, Alec reached over, cupped the back of her neck, and pulled her against him for a kiss. For a moment she could hardly even register what was happening, but then it really sank in.

Alec’s lips were full and soft against hers, with just the right amount of pressure. Although his strength was apparent in the way he cupped her neck, he didn’t use it against her.

She hadn’t been close to anyone like this very often in her life. Her scars, her past, her identity kept her from letting anyone near her. But Alec knew all that stuff, and when his mouth parted over hers, she found herself responding in kind and letting him deepen the kiss.

But then her logical mind kicked in. She was kissing Alec, werewolf playboy who always had an angle. And that meant what was happening here had an angle.

With a gasp, she pulled away and jumped to her feet. He stayed just where he was, looking up at her with a hooded expression that didn’t reveal anything about what he thought about what had just happened.

“I should—should call Kai and help her figure out where to meet tonight. Thanks for”—she cut herself off and blushed—“breakfast.”

He arched a brow as she left the room, and she heard his voice quietly behind her. “Any time, Nat. Any time.”

9

Natalie had never really figured out exactly how Jekyll and Hyde made their money. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, because she sometimes imagined it had to do with jewel heists, extortion, the mob, and probably there was some murder involved.

However they’d done it, they clearly had a ton, because as she and Alec walked up to the huge, posh building on Park Avenue, she couldn’t help but stare up and up . . . and up.

The building was older and when it had been renovated, it had retained its early New York charm through its intricate brickwork, keystones, and borders. There were even gargoyles staring down from the corners on each floor, wincing and grimacing their protection like little baby monsters.

“Holy shit,” she muttered.

“Um, yeah,” Alec agreed.

“So much nicer than any apartment I’ve ever dreamed of,” she finished.

Alec shrugged. “Your apartment is great. This place is pretentious. But then, that’s Jekyll and Hyde.”

As she laughed, a doorman opened the door for them and they entered the lobby to the building. But it wasn’t any ordinary lobby. This was more like a high-security office or even a government building. A guard sat at a high, U-shaped desk near the back of the lobby and as they entered he stood up, revealing a holstered Glock just like the ones cops carried.

In addition to the safety his presence provided, there was a glass partition in front of the bank of elevators next to him. On it a warning had been etched: THIS GLASS IS BULLETPROOF. ALL PROJECTILES WILL RICOCHET.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Natalie muttered under her breath as they took the long walk toward the guard station.

“Once,” Alec said. “In Halle Berry’s building.”

Natalie stopped walking and turned to stare at him. “You were in Halle Berry’s building?”

He shrugged. “Long story. Doesn’t matter now.”

Natalie opened her mouth to protest that statement, but the guard at the back of the room interrupted.

“May I help you?”

Natalie glared at Alec, who was looking around, all innocence, though she knew he was enjoying her confusion and curiosity (and perhaps a little jealousy) about the Halle Berry story.

“Miss?” the guard said, emphasizing the word with an arched brow.

“Yes, sorry,” she said. “Distracted, I’ve never been in an apartment building like this.”

The guard gave a thin smile. “Nothing but the best for our residents. Your name, please.”

Natalie swallowed. Right. Her name. He kept asking for it and she could see the fact that she hadn’t given it yet was starting to annoy him. And this was how people got shot.

“Sorry. I’m Natalie Gray, this is Alec Dunham. We’re here to see Dr. Je—”

She broke off the sentence. Jekyll didn’t go by his real name, did he? Too obvious, drew too much attention. But what did he go by? Shit, she should have thought about this earlier.

“We’re here to see Dr. Henry,” Alec supplied with a friendly smile. “He should be expecting us.”

The guard gave them a long, appraising stare and then leaned over to grab a list from the desk. He scanned over it and his eyes went wide with surprise. “You are on here. I’ll just need to see some ID and I’ll let you up.”

Natalie dug into her purse for her wallet. Dr. Henry, that was right. Thank goodness for Alec. It wasn’t very creative to go by his first name as his last, but it solved a lot of problems for Jekyll.

As he handed back their IDs and checked their names off his list, the guard depressed a button under the ledge of the desk. Slowly, the glass partition slid away with a whoosh of hidden hydraulics.

“Dr. Henry is located in Penthouse A. Press P on the elevator. By the time you’ve reached the top floor, Dr. Henry will have been notified of your arrival,” he said with a tight smile. “Have a good day.”

Alec saluted him and Natalie rolled her eyes and hauled him toward the elevator. On second thought, he was why people got shot.

“Did you forget Jekyll’s first name?” Alec whispered as they reached the elevator. The doors were already open and waiting for them, so they stepped inside and selected the P button.

She shrugged. “No, I just forgot which name he went by. But it makes perfect sense, especially for them. Jekyll and Hyde are too well known. People would get squigged out.”

Alec looked at her for a moment. “Is that why you go by Gray and not Frankenstein?”

She flinched. “I’m not Frankenstein, the doctor is Frankenstein. People always screw that up. I’m just his . . . monster. Well, one of them.”

Alec nodded. “Yeah, but he’s kind of like your dad. You never went by his name?”

She shook her head. “No way. He wouldn’t have wanted that; I was a creation, not a daughter. Anyway, that guy torpedoed my life. I wouldn’t want his name.”

She folded her arms and tried not to let the complicated, angry feelings she still had for Frankenstein invade her mind. She had way too much other shit to deal with to face any daddy issues that might be lingering.

“Wow, he did a number on you, didn’t he? We should talk about that more in group. You know, if we survive,” Alec said.

Natalie opened her mouth to snap at him, but before she could, the doors opened and revealed a short hallway with two doors a few feet in front of them. They looked at each other.

“Must be the penthouse.” Alec hesitated. “Why am I whispering?”

“I don’t know,” Natalie whispered back as they stepped out of the elevator and she knocked on the door marked A. After a few minutes, it opened and revealed Jekyll, annoyed and pale.

“You’re late.”

She shrugged. There was really no point in denying who she was. “I’m always late.”

Jekyll pursed his lips, but he motioned them through a marble-accented hall to a huge parlor on the left. As they entered, Natalie couldn’t help but suck in a breath.

The apartment was a mausoleum, but it sure was a snazzy one. All the floors were marble and polished to a high shine, no doubt by a servant who was never seen by guests. The furniture was of the highest quality, including Persian rugs (that were probably really from Persia . . . when it had been called Persia), leather chairs, and a sterling silver tea set on a marble-topped side bar.

The rest of the group was already gathered, perched on the fine furniture in varying states of discomfort. Only Kai looked like she belonged, with her black suit and sky-high black heels with the red on the bottom. Those things probably cost the same as a month’s rent at Natalie’s place.

“About time,” Kai muttered, though her tone was filled with a lot less annoyance than usual. The Mummy Girl even spared her a brief smile.

Natalie shrugged. Why Kai was lowering herself to Natalie’s level, she didn’t know. “Sorry. To make it up to you, I brought these.”

She dug into her purse and grabbed the copies she’d made of the police reports the night before. She had highlighted all the parts that related to The Story for both men.

Alec gave her a quick glance. “Good thinking, Nat.”

She felt the heat of a blush creep up her neck. He was complimenting her and calling her by that nickname . . . in front of everyone. Not that it meant anything. She ignored the embarrassment as she shoved copies of the reports into his hands and moved toward Linda, who was the closest to her on the nearest couch.

Linda’s hands shook as she took a set of copies and held them in her lap. Drake had no such reaction, snatching both and immediately perusing them. Kai did pretty much the same thing, though she was less snatchy.

With a frown, Natalie approached Hyde. He was standing at a bank of windows with his back to the group.

“Here,” she said, holding out the papers.

He didn’t turn. “Don’t bother.”

She wrinkled her brow, but couldn’t press him because at that moment Jekyll appeared at her elbow. He looked tired as he tapped her arm.

“Just give it to me,” he said softly. “No need to trouble Hyde.”

Natalie shook her head, but did as she’d been told. Not that she wanted to have a big heart-to-heart, but Hyde needed to be involved in this as much as anyone. Still, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.

She found a spot on a chair where Alec couldn’t join her. He chuckled like he knew exactly what she was doing, but remained standing behind the couch.

She scowled. Let him laugh, as long as he stayed away. Right now he disconcerted her. From his suddenly supportive and interested attitude to the fact he’d kissed her. He made her feel all discombobulated and human.

The monsters were silent as they read the reports, but Natalie could see when they reached the key points. Frowns turned to scowls, tears formed in eyes, sighs grew heavier and way more appropriate for overwrought horror stories.

Jekyll was the first to finish and set his papers aside. Hyde, who had moved to a high-backed chair across the room, shook his head. “This is worse than we thought.”

Alec glanced up and glared at Hyde. “But you didn’t take a copy of the papers.”

Hyde shrugged and dug into his pocket for a thin gold cigarette case. And from the way it shone in the light, Natalie guessed that was real gold. In today’s market, worth a little more than her electric bill in a six-month period.

Alec tilted his head. “So you couldn’t have read them. How do you know what’s worse and not worse?”

Hyde didn’t answer for a long moment, but lit a cigarette and took a long inhale of smoke. “Not all powers are about strength, Wolfie, dear. Some of us have more sophisticated taste and ability.”

Natalie’s eyes went wide. They talked about their powers at group, of course, and how to use them to their advantage when it was safe to do so. But she was constantly amazed when she heard about new ones.

“So you’re saying you don’t need to read what Jekyll does, but you still know what he saw?” she asked.

He nodded. “Always. What he reads, I read. I don’t have to bother to actually do it. It can be quite tedious.”

Jekyll set the pages aside and shook his head. “And horrifying,” he added.

Hyde chuckled, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “You simply need to expand your horizons, brother.”

The two men met eyes and all kinds of unspoken communication passed between them. A tug-of-war that was as obvious as if they’d met in the center of the room to grapple.

Natalie shivered. Those kinds of monster powers freaked her out. She preferred strength or the ability to change into a beast or whatever. Those things made sense, they were straightforward. But mind control, thought sharing? Weird.

“So, what did anyone else find during their searches?” she asked, hoping to change the subject and get everyone back on topic.

Jekyll dropped his eyes to the floor. “Last night, Hyde and I felt like we were being . . . followed.”

Hyde stood up and paced to the window. “I wanted to break apart and beat the guy to a bloody pulp.”

“Hyde—” Jekyll began.

Hyde turned from the window and glared. “Henry, you are too soft on these people. These humans. They aren’t worth protecting. And sometime . . . you won’t be able to protect yourself from them. I might not be there. And what will happen then?”

Dracula got to his feet. “I also felt as if I were being followed last night. I was on my way home. It made me so disconcerted that I—” He stopped.

Kai stared at him. “What did you do, Drake?”

He pursed his lips. “I turned into a bat on Fifth Avenue.”

Natalie shut her eyes and flopped back against her seat. “Shit.”

“Shit is right,” Kai burst out. Any annoyance she had spared Natalie for her tardiness was fully turned on Drake. “What were you thinking?”

Drake shifted. “There were theatergoers, but I don’t think anyone saw me.”

“Really? In New York, you think no one saw you? Someone always sees you in New York!” Kai jumped to her feet and raised her arms in frustration. “What the fuck is wrong with you? All of you?”

She looked around the room and in that moment Natalie could see her as a goddess, an ancient priestess, someone who would draw others to her and use their worship to her own ends. Of course, that hadn’t ended so well for her before . . .

“Don’t you get it?” Kai continued. “Changing shapes in public, breaking apart from one man to two and beating someone to death on the street . . . that is acting like a monster! That kind of thing will only make this situation worse. And for what?”

“If we’re being followed, I can understand why everyone might freak out,” Alec offered. “Give them a break.”

Kai turned on him with a glare. “But we don’t know that we’re being followed. We might all just be paranoid thanks to the deaths.”

Natalie jerked her face toward Kai. Back to denial, it was. Why did she always do that?

Alec pondered Kai’s statement for a minute and then he smiled. “Actually, we can know if we’re being followed. Jekyll, you do have a computer in this museum, don’t you?”

Jekyll shot Hyde a hooded look and then nodded slowly. “Yes. I use a computer for my work.”

Alec got up and stretched out his fingers. “Well, hand it over, buddy!”

Jekyll didn’t budge from his seat, just kept staring at Alec like he’d turned into a werewolf right in the living room, then piddled on the Persian rug.

Natalie shook her head. She could understand Jekyll’s hesitation. After all, Alec didn’t exactly look like a guy who knew his way around a computer.

“Look, just do it,” she said with a shrug. “Despite the shagginess, he actually knows what he’s doing. What he wants to do is probably a felony . . . but he’s good at it.”

Alec sent her a quick grin. “Aw, thanks, Nat.” He turned back to Jekyll and held out a hand. “Come on, Doc. Computer. Let’s go.”

Jekyll let out a put-upon sigh, but he got up and walked across the room to a rolltop desk beside the window. Mid-eighteenth century, if Natalie remembered her French furniture correctly. Worth a fortune.

He opened it and retrieved a laptop that he brought back to Alec. The werewolf set it on the glass table in front of him and started typing.

“I noticed the cameras both outside and in the hallways,” he explained as his fingers clattered over the keys. “And in a building with security like this, I’m guessing they keep the digital copies of the video for at least a few days, maybe even up to a week, before deleting them from the server. Just in case some lady complains about the cleaning lady stealing the Hope Diamond or something. If I can just access the system . . .”

He trailed off, leaned away from the computer screen. Slowly his gaze came up and he glared at Jekyll and Hyde.

“Shit, you guys have a lot of porn on here. And I’m just going to assume the worst ones are yours, Hyde . . .”

Jekyll’s cheeks darkened to near-purple; he opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a sputtering sound as he held out a hand to demand the computer back. Hyde, on the other hand, looked quite proud of his video collection. He leaned back against the wall, arms folded and a grin on his face.

Alec ignored them both and went back to typing furiously. His golden eyes moved back and forth across the screen and then they crinkled with pleasure and triumph.

“And here we go. Shit, for a security system they have very little computer security. But I can access the videos for the last . . . three days.”

“Wow,” Kai said with a shrug. “That’s actually impressive.”

Natalie nodded and found she was feeling quite proud for some reason. As if a compliment toward Alec had anything to do with her.

“Told you,” she said. “How do you think I got those police reports?”

“That system was way harder to get into,” Alec admitted. “But I guess it should be. Okay, I’m accessing the footage from last night. What time did you two feel like someone was following you?”

“Three a.m.,” Hyde said as he paced back to the window to look over the city.

Alec glanced at him a second time. “Wow, late-night partiers. I shudder to think what you were doing in New York at three a.m.”

Hyde sent a rather menacing smile his way and Alec shook his head before he went back to work on the computer. Natalie stared at Hyde as Alec clicked away. He was darker than ever right now, more monstrous when he was being threatened, and that fact sent chills down her spine. Sometimes she wondered why they let him stay around anyway. They had kicked others out of their group for less.

But then she looked at his brother. Jekyll was pale and sweaty, tired and a tiny bit broken by the constant struggles against Hyde’s desires. And yet he loved Hyde; that was clear. And he was a good man. Anyway, they were all monsters. Whether they liked it or not, they had to stick together. Especially right now, when someone was intent on tearing them apart.

“Okay, here’s the time stamp, assuming they’ve corrected for daylight savings.”

Alec leaned back and motioned everyone else in around him. They gathered around the back of the couch, watching the grainy video. It was in black and white and a little blurry, not exactly coming-to-a-theater-near-you quality, but it worked.

Soon a man walked up to the building.

“There we are,” Jekyll said, pointing.

Natalie crinkled her eyes. Yup, from the cut of the expensive suit, that was him. Them. Whatever. Jekyll and Hyde.

In the video there was a moment of small talk with the uniformed doorman.

“It’s coming up in a minute,” Hyde said with a yawn, though he never looked at the screen. “I remember because I was trying to tell Jekyll that we don’t have to stop and speak to the help every time we come to the building.”

Jekyll turned on him. “Davis has been the night doorman for this building for ten years and his wife has cancer! Of course I’m going to ask after them. Hyde—”

“Shh!” Kai snapped. “Watch.”

The brothers glared at each other. Finally Jekyll refocused on the computer just as a figure moved in behind them on-screen.

“Hey,” Natalie said, pointing. “Look. Trench coat behind Jekyll-Hyde.”

Alec leaned closer. “That’s affirmative. But I can’t really see the face. Hang on, let me fiddle with the settings.”

He paused the video with the person standing on the street, staring at Jekyll-Hyde while they talked to the doorman. He clicked on various settings and the picture grew lighter, darker, more and less pixilated, but there was no clearing of the watcher’s face.

“Huh, sorry,” he said. “The video cameras aren’t that great at night, I guess.”

“And to think of what we pay for our supposed security here.” Jekyll sniffed.

Hyde laughed. “Don’t worry about cameras. I’m your security, brother. In fact, I wish they’d get rid of them. That kind of evidence could be . . . tricky.”

Alec shrugged. “Let me back it up and slow it down and maybe we can see something else of value . . .”

He messed with the computer and replayed the footage, this time much slower. In the frame-by-frame sequence the stranger clearly turned almost completely to the side to look at Jekyll-Hyde.

“What’s that around the neck?” Kai asked. “Pause it.”

Natalie looked at the grainy picture. When the person turned, something swung out from under the trench. “It looks too big to be a necklace. It’s square and it looks like there might be some kind of jewel on it. Like a . . . medallion?” she suggested, though saying it out loud was ridiculous.

Alec chuckled. “How very Bram Stoker of the stalker.”

No one else laughed, but Jekyll waved at the screen. “Play the rest.”

Alec did as he was told and let the footage play at full speed. As Jekyll-Hyde spoke to the doorman, the trench-coat wearer walked by a second time, looking at them again. Then Jekyll-Hyde went inside the building. A few seconds later, the trench-coat wearer was back, this time to stop outside the building and look up. He stood there a few moments before the doorman came out to shoo him away.

But he looked over his shoulder as he left the frame, and even though the expression on the unknown face was too blurry to read, there was no doubt that someone was after the monsters in their group.

And there was no telling who that someone’s next victim might be.

10

Alec froze the picture with their unknown adversary’s foot just leaving the frame and sat back against the leather seats of Jekyll’s white couch. He braced himself for the usual response from his monstrous cohorts. Crying. Howling. Whining. Bitching. Moaning.

Instead, there was a curious, heavy silence that hung in the room for so long that Alec locked eyes with Natalie. She seemed to recognize his silent question because she shrugged and shifted in discomfort.

It was Linda, of all people, who finally spoke.

“Obviously we’re being stalked,” she whispered in a broken, shaky tone.

She picked at her hand and didn’t even seem to notice when a block of fake flesh broke off to land on Jekyll’s expensive carpet. Jekyll noticed, though. His nose scrunched in displeasure and Alec could almost guarantee he’d have a cleaning lady here by daybreak. Maybe even before.

Kai turned on Linda with a shake of her head.

“Now, wait,” she said and her voice was sharp. “Calm down, everyone. Once again, we’re jumping to conclusions.”

Natalie burst out with a laugh that was anything but humor-filled. “Ellis died the same way as his story, Blob died the same way as his story, and someone was following Jekyll and Hyde. How is that jumping to conclusions?”

Kai paced the room like an Egyptian cat. Actually, that was a perfect way to describe how Alec had always thought of her. Sleek. Devious. Unaffected by anything or anyone.

He was a dog person.

Except now Kai’s voice was tense and cracked, almost as if the words she said were to convince herself as much as anyone else.

“I’m not saying these things aren’t bad,” Kai conceded. “I’m not even saying there isn’t some kind of danger lurking out there.”

“Then what are you saying?” Alec asked. “Because it kind of seems like you want to put your head in the sand and play dead pharaoh. Dead pharaoh is a thing for you, right?”

Kai’s eyes narrowed until Alec wasn’t sure she could even see past them. Then she took a deep breath and growled, “No, I’m just all for taking my time before I jump to conclusions. I think we’ve all learned that lesson over the hundreds of years we’ve been roaming this earth. Well, everyone except for Hyde.”

Hyde snorted out a laugh. “Looking before one leaps is highly overrated, my dear.”

Natalie folded her arms. “Except, in this case, our conclusion that someone was hunting us has turned out to be right. The proof of it is there on video. Why do you refuse to see that?”

Kai looked at the frozen screen and her lip twitched.

Great, at least something was finally getting through to her. Trust Natalie to just go the direct route—one Alec continued by saying, “Someone was following Jekyll. Even you can’t deny that, no matter how much you want to.”

Kai held up her hands. “Once again I have to bring up the fact that Ellis was an asshole who very well might have brought that attack upon himself. Whoever followed Jekyll could have been an admirer in a club, a business contact, or just a run-of-the-mill criminal looking to jump a rich person.”

“Your explanation has one big missing piece, though,” Natalie said.

She slowly got to her feet and moved to pour herself a drink. Alec was a little disappointed she chose filtered water, not booze. He would sort of like to see her buzzed. Was that even possible with her hodgepodge metabolism? He would have to find out.

Kai turned her attention to Natalie. “What’s that?”

“Blob,” Natalie said softly. “He wasn’t an asshole; in fact he was the exact opposite. Plus, I doubt he had business contacts or criminals after him, and no one could mistake him for a rich mark, not with the life he was living in that hellhole of an apartment. But someone still locked him in a freezer to die a slow and painful death. Just like in The Story.”

Alec nodded. “And if someone was just going to kill him, unrelated to the fact that he was a monster, why would they do something so . . . weird as lock him in a freezer? Why not just shoot him or stab him or something? It doesn’t add up.”

Natalie shook her head. “No. It does add up. It just adds up in one way. Someone knows we’re monsters.”

Kai swallowed hard, hesitating as the wheels in her mind very obviously turned to find something she could call a logical explanation for Natalie’s very good point. Except finally she just shrugged.

“Yes, there is that. Blob makes this more . . . complicated,” Kai whispered, and then sat down with a thud in one of the high-backed chairs outside the main sitting area.

Linda nodded swiftly. “And that person in the video is probably the same guy who killed Blob and incited the riot against Ellis. And if he is, that means he knows who we are . . . what we are.”

Alec couldn’t believe he was agreeing with Linda, but he nodded. “If Trench Coat is our killer, then I’d say it’s a safe bet he knows exactly who and what we are. As well as a great deal of other facts, like where we live, what our habits are, and how best to kill us. The one thing we don’t know is why.”

Linda covered her eyes, but her voice was strangely calm as she said, “I don’t really care about motives. I think we should go to the police. We can show them the connection and let them go after this murderer. That’s their job anyway.”

Hyde hadn’t bothered to watch the video of whoever had stalked him and his brother, only continued to stare out the window the whole time. But now he spun around and took a long, menacing step toward Linda.

“Really, idiot? That’s what you think we should do? Reach out to the cops and tell them what, exactly?” His face was darkening to red and then purple. A vein in his forehead throbbed and slowly he began to get . . . bigger. “That we have evidence some guy in a coat is following us? Because we’re monsters? Oh, and by the way, our evidence for this was stolen from their own database and our building’s surveillance system?”

Linda flinched at his ugly, threatening tone. Even Natalie pressed herself back against the couch, and Alec had never seen her fearful in all the time he’d known her.

But then again, in that moment Hyde looked truly terrifying. His eyes flashed dark and angry in an out-of-control way and his breath came in harsh, heavy pants. His nails had grown longer into sharp talons, his muscles bulged beneath his expensive suit, and Alec could have sworn he had fangs now. He looked like he could kill and not even think twice about it.

In short, like a monster.

“You should be the next one who dies, you stupid bitch,” he snarled, moving toward Linda a second time. “Let’s not even wait for the stalker. I’d love to do his job for him.”

At that, Linda curled up on the couch with a squeal of terror. Without thinking, without hesitating, Alec was on his feet. He heard the warning growl from deep in his throat—he was more than ready to fight, his fists raised and his mouth watering with the thought of taking a swing or twenty at Hyde.

Except he didn’t have to. Jekyll reached out and clasped his brother’s arm.

“Stop,” he said, low and calm.

Alec stared. At Jekyll’s touch, Hyde seemed to struggle, his face twisting as he fought to maintain his anger. Then it faded and the shocking changes that had taken over his body during the emotion disappeared with it. He glared at Jekyll. “You never let me have fun,” he accused, all seriousness. “I hate you.”

Jekyll flinched, almost as if he were absorbing the rage Hyde felt and it burned him, hurt him. With all the past proof of how deep the psychic bond went between the brothers, Alec had to assume that might not be too far from the truth.

“If I let you have fun, we all suffer,” Jekyll whispered. Their eyes met and held, unblinking, unwavering. “I am trying to protect you.”

Hyde muttered something unintelligible and Jekyll released him. He staggered slightly, and then both men sat on the couch together. After a second, Hyde reached over and took Jekyll’s hand and they sat still in that creepy horror-movie twin way.

Natalie’s shoulders relaxed as the threat of violence seemed to fade. She sighed. “As much as I hate to admit it, Hyde has a point.”

When Linda flinched, Natalie raised her hands. “About the cops! Not the other stuff. I know cops. I deal with them a lot in my job at the morgue. There are only two outcomes if we involve the police in our . . . situation.”

“Which are?” Drake asked. Through everything he had remained quiet, almost bored by the freaking out. This was the first time he’d spoken in so long, Alec had almost forgotten him.

Natalie pursed her lips as she considered her answer. “One, they won’t believe us because our story makes us sound like a bunch of nut jobs. But they would take a very strong interest in the fact that two people from our group have died recently. We make that connection for them and I promise you, we won’t like the outcome.”

“We’ll be suspects,” Drake offered.

She nodded. “In all likelihood, yeah.”

“And what’s the second possibility?” Alec asked. He was still standing, watching Hyde just in case the freak show decided to throw down against Linda or Natalie or anyone else in the room.

Natalie shrugged. “It’s worse: they just might believe us.”

Linda’s green eyes lit up. “Good! That’s what we want! How is that bad?”

Natalie shut her eyes for a moment and then said, “If they believe us, we’ll be outed as monsters. Maybe we even get arrested just to ‘protect the public.’ Or maybe a mob forms. We’ve all seen that happen before, I don’t think I need to go into too much detail about the possibilities.”

Kai nodded. “You’re right. Shit, I can’t believe I’m saying that.”

“Yeah, I bet. It’s almost not even English when I hear it.” Natalie laughed. “It must taste sour coming from your mouth.”

Kai shot her a look, but there wasn’t much darkness in it. Alec actually had the sneaking suspicion that Kai liked Natalie. Or at least respected her, which was as good as one usually got with the Mummy Girl.

Alec chuckled. “Well, I agree with Natalie, too.”

To his surprise, Natalie looked in his direction and her thankful smile was as good a reward as any for his agreement.

Linda covered her face with a long, wavering sigh. “I just don’t want to die.”

“None of us want to die,” Alec pointed out with a shrug. “But we have to figure this out on our own. Or at least have a lot more information before we start going to the humans and asking them to help us.”

Natalie nodded. “We have to be smart. Who might have a motive for wanting us dead?”

“Someone who knows we’re monsters?” Linda offered, her tone dripping with sarcasm and anger that her earlier suggestion about cops had been dismissed.

Natalie ignored the snottiness and shook her head. “No way. A regular human who found out there were real-life monsters in New York might call the cops . . . or the Enquirer. They’d try to get us on video. But they wouldn’t start murdering us in a series of movie-themed homicides. That just seems too personal, not to mention twisted. What’s happening to us now is part of a pretty deep-seated hatred that goes beyond movie-matinee fear.”

Alec nodded. “True.”

“But there isn’t a common element to the first two crimes. And it doesn’t seem like anyone the group has interacted with lately has a link. Did anyone find one?” Jekyll asked.

“Well,” Alec said with a shrug. He hadn’t wanted to bring this up, but it seemed like there was little choice now. “I’ve thought of one person who is related to all of us and might want us dead.”

Kai’s eyes went wide. “Who?”

“You’re not going to like it,” Alec replied. “But what about Rehu?”

The silence that fell over the room was heavier than ever as the rest of them pondered the name he had thrown out. One they hadn’t spoken in months. Natalie stared at Alec and the light in her eyes told him that she liked the idea. Had maybe even thought of it herself at some point.

But Kai froze and was almost paper-pale now.

Not that Alec blamed her. Rehu was Kai’s former lover. Former as in a couple millennia of history were shared between them. Their deaths and ultimate reincarnations had been the inspiration for dozens of mummy movies and books. But Rehu was way closer to the more modern retellings of the mummy tale than a Lon Chaney type. He was slick, good-looking, and bubbling with a rage under the surface that rivaled even Hyde’s mad fury.

He had been part of their group up until about a year before, when his behavior had started to draw attention to them. They’d been forced to kick him out, and he’d been enraged.

Kai backed up a long step and glared daggers at Alec. “Fuck you, Werewolf. Rehu didn’t do this. Of course you’d blame him, you always hated him.”

Alec shrugged. He wouldn’t go so far as to say hate, but werewolves and mummies didn’t mix. Still, he wouldn’t have accused him without a real suspicion that he could be the culprit.

Drake shook his head. “Whatever Alec’s motives, he has a point. Rehu does know what we are. He knows The Story for each of us. He knows where we meet and where many of us live.”

Jekyll nodded wildly. “That’s true. And he hates us, not only for kicking him out of the therapy circle, but because Drake and I kept him from selling the artifacts from his own tomb for profit.”

“I always thought we should have gone in with him on that scheme,” Hyde said with a sigh. “A pity.”

“You would,” Drake muttered. “And damn the consequences all the attention would bring on us.”

Hyde shrugged. “We could have made them go away and you know it.”

Jekyll silenced his brother with a wave of his hand. “Rehu has every motive in the world and every opportunity.”

Linda hugged herself and rocked slightly. “He was the biggest monster of us all. He liked to menace and scare.”

Kai let out a low growl that shut the Swamp Dweller up entirely. But Natalie wasn’t so easily cowed.

“Do you know where he is, Kai?” she asked softly.

Kai, normally so composed, so calm, turned bright red. “No. I haven’t seen Rehu since he accused me of siding with all of you and left me.”

Alec tilted his head. There was something about the waver in Kai’s voice, the way she bit her lip, that said she was lying. But would she really cover for an ex-lover? One with whom she had shared a volatile relationship? The guy had gotten her killed . . . albeit a couple thousand years before, but still . . . Alec had always pegged Kai for being smarter than that.

“I doubt he’s still even in the city,” Kai continued, with that same lilt of desperation to her tone. “Even if he is, he would never hurt anyone.”

Drake snorted his disagreement and Kai turned on him with the same level of anger she’d first shown Linda.

“Shut up, Vampire.”

“So eloquent,” Drake sneered.

Kai took a long step toward him and that seemed to signal all hell breaking loose once again. Linda burst into tears as Hyde taunted her, Natalie grabbed Kai’s arm and they started arguing over the merits of vampire-slaying. Alec ran a hand over his face. How could they ever hope to defend themselves if they couldn’t even manage to stay on target for ten minutes put together?

“Hey,” he began, raising his voice to go above the fray. No one listened. “Hey!”

But it was to no avail. Alec was about ready to give up when Drake swirled his cape around himself. There was a small pop and then he vanished into a bat. He flew to the center of the room and reappeared, this time standing on Jekyll’s coffee table.

“Silence!” he bellowed, and his tone, not to mention his Animal Kingdom act, shut down the fighting in an instant. “While you tussle, this enemy grows in power. And I have another suggestion of who it could be. Our oldest and most treacherous adversary.”

He paused, Alec could only assume for dramatic effect, and then hissed, “Van Helsing.”

11

The name Van Helsing sucked the oxygen from the room and left all of them with the same blank, empty, terrified expression that Natalie felt on her own face.

Van Helsing, a family of monster hunters who had stalked and killed their kind for dozens of generations.

Van Helsing, the oldest and deepest enemy any monster had.

Stoker had gotten it wrong, of course, when it came to that family. He described them as only hunting vampires, and in truth they had started out that way. But eventually they had expanded into so much more. They were at the front of every mob with pitchforks and often hired themselves out to make “monster problems” go away. Blood money had lined their pockets and made them powerful in politics both abroad and in the United States.

“How could it be the Van Helsings?” Hyde hissed. “We’ve had a truce with them for decades.”

“Five decades, to be precise,” Drake agreed. “When they realized no one was willing to pay them to chase ‘pretend’ creatures anymore and decided to start investing their blood money in technical stocks.”

Natalie pursed her lips. It was so unfair that bad people got to be rich from murder, while the monsters they’d chased lived in shitty apartments and hid their true identities for fear of renewed persecution.

“So why would they want to hunt us now?” Natalie asked.

Drake arched a thin brow. “They still live, don’t they? At least one here in New York . . . that I know of. And if they live, they hate. It is in their nature.”

Natalie rubbed her eyes as she tried to clear the bile from her throat and memories from her mind.

“But why would they break our pact after all this time?” she whispered.

That pact had been the biggest relief of her life. For years she had holed up in disgusting hovels to keep the Van Helsings away from her. When the truce was signed, she had been able to come out of hiding and live, even if she did have to wear turtlenecks.

She didn’t want to go back underground.

Alec shrugged. “There’s one way to find out.” When everyone stared at him, he said, “Ask.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Kai said. “I’m used to dealing with total assholes. I’ll go visit the local one. Who else?”

Drake pushed to his feet and glared at Kai. “No. I was their first enemy and I brokered the truce all those years ago. I should meet with him. Alone.”

Natalie shook her head. “Come on, Drake, you know I like you, but you have to admit you can be forgetful.”

He glared at her and she rushed to continue and soothe his hurt feelings. “And what if you’re right that they’re involved in these murders? Go alone, and that could be a death sentence. With more of us, at least we’d have a chance against some kind of sneak attack.”

Drake considered that for a moment, but then nodded. “Very well, Natalie. You may come, but no one else.”

Natalie shifted. She had said we, hadn’t she? Crap, there was no getting out of it. The way Kai was glaring at her, she was certain that if she bailed, the mummy would insist on being the one to stand at Drake’s side. And she’d seen Kai’s face when she talked about Rehu. The Mummy Girl was so stuck on protecting her old boyfriend from accusation that she might just do anything to keep him safe. Including sabotaging this meeting. Or lying about what happened during it.

“Okay, I guess it’s you and me, Drake,” she finally said. “You set up the meeting and let me know the particulars. I’ll make sure I can be there any time, any place.”

Anyway, Alec seemed pretty impressed by Natalie’s decision to ride shotgun for Drake. He was staring at her with a wide grin on his ridiculously handsome face, which was getting shaggier and wolfier every day. That was actually kind of nice.

In a weird way. That she didn’t like. Nope. Not at all. Because she didn’t like Alec. She just had to keep reminding herself of that.

“Great,” Hyde said as he got up and sneered at all of them. “Now can you all get out of our house?”

Jekyll stared at him. “Hyde!”

“Oh, please. I’m saying what you’re too much of a weakling to say, even though I feel you thinking it.”

Jekyll blushed to a deep, dark red, but he did look relieved when the group started moving for the door. “Report back to us if anyone hears anything new,” he said, his tone weak. “Thank you for coming.”

Natalie rolled her eyes as she stepped into the hall. Immediately Kai booked it for the elevator, but Natalie hung back until Alec came out of the apartment.

“Waiting for me?” he asked with a laugh. “How sweet.”

She ignored his baiting. “I’ve got to go to work, but Alec, I need you to do something.”

“Anything.”

She glanced at him. Fuck, he looked serious when he said that. She cleared her throat.

“Um, Kai . . . follow her. See if you can turn up anything about Rehu.”

Alec looked at her sharply. “You think she was hiding something about him, too?”

Natalie blinked. Were they really on the same page? “Yeah, I do. She was really . . . twitchy when his name was brought up.”

“And twitchy is not our little Kai,” Alec agreed. “Seems like denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”

She stared. “How long have you been waiting to use that line?”

He shrugged. “Um, forever.”

“I . . . just . . .” She shook her head. There was no response to it. “Well, now that it’s out of your system, I think the mummy is as good a lead as anything we might think about the Van Helsings. I don’t want to drop it just to make Kai happy and then be sorry if someone else gets killed in some horrible way.”

“I agree.” He met her eyes evenly. “Hey, Natalie, you were great in there. Really calm, but firm when you were talking. A leader, even. It’s nice to see you coming out of your shell and getting a bit more . . . monstrous.”

Natalie smiled. Normally she didn’t like being called monstrous, but this wasn’t an insult, it was a compliment. And Alec meant it, which sort of made her all warm inside.

“Um, yeah, so I’m going to work. Text me later, okay?” she said, then turned on her heel and hurried for the stairwell. Somehow she didn’t think riding down in an elevator with the werewolf was such a good idea.

Not since what she really wanted to do right now was kiss his scruffy face off.

Natalie stood staring up at the brownstone and shivered. If Jekyll and Hyde’s place was a modern mausoleum, this place was a traditional mansion. Bought with old money. And she couldn’t help but keep thinking about the fact that their “old money” had been earned when the mercenary Van Helsings got villagers to pay them to eliminate their “monsters”—whether said village even had a supernatural being present or not.

Which somehow never made it into books or movies.

Drake was suddenly at her elbow and Natalie jumped in surprise as she spun to face him.

“Right now is not the time to freak me out, Vampire!” she snapped.

He glared at her. “Don’t threaten me, Natalie. I’m not a child you can menace.”

Natalie flinched. “Goddamn it, I’d never menace a child, that’s just a—” She stopped as she looked around. Where had he come from anyway? Her heart sank. “Please tell me you didn’t just fly here as a bat and transform right on the street.”

He shrugged. “There’s no one around.”

She rubbed her eyes with one hand. “Drake, you know that isn’t the point. Kai keeps telling you—”

“Kai is not my leader,” Drake said in a cold, clipped tone that revealed all his Eastern European royal roots. “No one is.”

Natalie slowly counted to ten so she didn’t further offend Count Divalicious.

“Okay, so you won’t stop because someone tells you to. But will you stop if I ask you? Pretty please, Your Highness Count Dracula, will you stop taking these risks? I know you don’t think getting found out is a big deal, but some of us do.”

“You are so afraid of them,” Drake said with a tilt of his head. “Even though you’re strong.”

She thought about that for a long moment. “There are a lot more of them than me. I just want to be . . . invisible to them. That’s all.”

Drake sighed. “Very well, Natalie. I will try to be more discreet. And you will try to be less terrified.”

She rolled her eyes. “Now you sound like Blob.”

Drake tensed and they both thought of their former circle leader.

He shook his head. “I was surprised you could join me for this meeting tonight.”

Natalie pursed her lips. She didn’t like the implication behind his tone.

“Is that why you made these arrangements just a few hours after we agreed to come here? In the hopes I couldn’t get out of work?”

“Of course not.” He shook his head, but she could see she’d struck on at least part of the truth. Still, he gave her no chance to question his motives further. “The Van Helsings have never been known to take their time when it comes to us. As soon as I sent word that we wanted a meeting, this time and place were arranged.”

Natalie pursed her lips. “I’m not sure I believe you, Drake. But arguing with you has never gotten anyone anywhere.”

He smiled a fraction. “No. That is true.”

She shook her head. “Okay, I guess let’s just go in and see this guy.”

Drake led the way up the stairs and knocked. After a moment, the door swung open to reveal a butler. Natalie blinked. An actual butler, dressed up in a uniform and everything, just like they were actually in a Stoker novel. And the guy was impressive. He looked to be about eight million years old, or at least like he’d come through the last period when the Van Helsings were at war with the monsters.

He sniffed with disdain as he looked down at them. “Good evening. He is expecting you.”

Without any other words, the butler stepped back and motioned them into the foyer. He shut the door behind them, locked it with an ominous clang, and then walked down a long hallway.

Tapestries hung on every wall, and they were not pleasant. They depicted the taking of heads, the letting of blood, the killing of monsters. In fact, Natalie was sure she recognized a friend here and there on their finely woven surfaces. But despite the finery in the hangings, the rest of the home was dusty, hardly used. As they passed by rooms on their slow walk toward . . . wherever, Natalie couldn’t help but notice furniture covered by sheets.

The place was musty, like a freshly opened tomb. And Natalie knew tombs.

She leaned over to Drake. “Shit, this is just like a movie.”

“Some things they do get right, my dear,” Drake said with a shrug.

They reached a shut door and the butler opened it and stepped inside. Natalie couldn’t see around him as he said, “Sir, your . . . guests are here.”

If the person inside answered, Natalie didn’t hear him. But the butler stepped back and motioned them into the room. Natalie stopped just inside the door and looked around in wonder at the study.

The ceilings were ridiculously high and lined with bookshelves from the floor all the way up to where a skylight let in a little light during the day. It was night now, so there was just the faintest hint of city lights through the portal.

She leaned closer and flinched. The books on the very first shelf were various editions of Dracula and Frankenstein. She couldn’t help but think that was on purpose.

She turned away from the disturbing literature choices and looked toward the desk all the way in the back of the room. In front of it was a man. A very old man. A very old man in a wheelchair.

“Van Helsing,” Drake said, his voice thick with a mixture of disdain and grudging respect.

Natalie’s eyes widened. She had seen the minions of the Van Helsings over the years, even caught a glimpse of one of the family members about a century ago, but she hadn’t had the displeasure of their company for decades upon decades.

This man was not what she had expected. He was in no way a threat to a four-hundred-pound blob man. And she doubted he could incite a mob to riot. He was small and wrinkled and looked like everyone’s grandpa. Well, everyone’s but hers, since she had never had one.

“Drakule,” the man responded, his voice thick with a German accent. His gaze, as sharp and bright as a hawk, despite his age, swung over to her. “And this must be the Frankenstein.”

Natalie shook her head. She would not be cowed by a man in a wheelchair. She straightened her spine and said, “Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster. Shouldn’t you know that? I mean, no one ever gets it right, but isn’t that your deal, to know about monsters? I’m Natalie Gray.”

She held out her hand, but Van Helsing didn’t move to take it and she pulled it back to her side with a shrug.

He turned his full attention back to Drake. “I was surprised to hear from you after all these years, Vampire. I thought we’d made our arrangement very clear. No contact. No war.”

Drake didn’t respond for a moment, but slowly settled himself into a dusty velvet chair. Natalie stared at him. This was his element, it seemed. No longer did he look like a confused monster out of place in modern society. He looked like the lead of a horror novel. Calm. Cool. Collected.

“If there is no more war between us, why are my people being murdered?” Drake asked in a low and calm tone that barely carried in the huge library.

Natalie swiveled her gaze to Van Helsing. She hadn’t exactly thought Drake would be so blunt, but she wanted to see the other man’s reaction. There was none beyond a brief burst of pleasure in his eyes that was gone as soon as it appeared.

“Why would I know anything about that?” Van Helsing asked.

He folded his thin, wrinkled fingers in his lap and tilted his head like he truly didn’t think there was a reason to involve a monster killer in an investigation of the deaths of monsters. Natalie forced herself to keep her mouth shut and let Drake handle this issue. He was doing pretty well and she didn’t want to intrude.

“You’re Van Helsing. You need no other reason,” Drake said in a tone that could have made ice, it was so cold.

Van Helsing’s thin smile vanished, replaced with anger. “The ones who started these wars were your kind, not my family.”

Drake leaned forward. “You mean when you took money to break into my home and stake me in the heart while I slept peacefully, that was justified?”

“Absolutely.”

Natalie’s wide eyes went even wider. The two men kept leaning closer and closer, their tones dropping lower and into more of a warning zone. This was going to turn into an old-man fight of epic proportions. And while that might be a little bit entertaining and get a ton of hits on YouTube if she recorded it with her cell, she doubted it would get any of them anywhere. Certainly not any closer to finding out what was the motive behind the murders of Ellis and Blob. So she had to exercise a little control, since the two of them were apparently incapable of it.

“Look, Mr. Van Helsing,” she interjected, trying to get into the line of sight of both men so they’d remember she was actually there. “Two of our people have been killed in terrible ways. And someone was following others. We’re just trying to determine why.”

“And so you came here?” Van Helsing drawled with increasing disdain that made Natalie’s blood boil.

She folded her arms. “Let’s not pretend that you and your family don’t have a history with us. You’ve certainly been the cause of the death of our kind before and been proud of it, as the tapestries in your hallway prove. Drake and I came to you with the thought that you might have information that could be helpful in determining the specifics of our current situation.”

Van Helsing returned his stare to Drake for a long moment, then looked up at Natalie. “Drake. And you go by Natalie. You know, you may pretend to be human, but you are not. You never will be. You never could be. You are a nameless abomination, child, no matter how you hide your scars with makeup or play at being people.”

Natalie’s nostrils flared. Earlier in the day, Alec had said she was a little more monstrous. Now she felt a lot more monstrous. And not in a good way. She wanted to rip this man’s arms off.

Which would only prove his point.

Instead, she leaned closer to him and growled, “Do you know who might be behind these attacks, Mr. Van Helsing?”

He stared at her evenly for so long that Natalie began to think he might have died and no one had noticed. But finally, he cleared his throat.

“Describe this person who is supposedly following you,” he ordered, his tone dripping with condescension.

Natalie counted to ten in her head as she quickly described the person outside of Jekyll and Hyde’s apartment.

“How narrow a description,” Van Helsing sneered. “Yes, I’m sure we can pick this person out of a lineup.”

She bit her lip. “He was wearing a medallion, as well. Square, large, possibly with a jewel in the center.”

Van Helsing’s stare jerked to her face briefly, but then he shook his head. “I can assure you, my family has nothing to do with this. Now leave.”

“But—” Natalie began.

“No. And if you monsters use this fancy of yours to interfere with the Van Helsings, know that our war will rekindle. I’ll make certain the world knows what kind of disgusting mistakes you all are.” He straightened up in his chair and Natalie could see a glimpse of what he’d been before disease and age had wizened him. “We have more money than ever, Ms. Gray, and with modern technology, your lives could be hell on earth. I will destroy you in every way. If there is war this time, it will not end until you are ended.”

Drake got to his feet and turned. “Understood, hunter. But also know that if your family is behind this . . . the war will come from our side as well.”

Then he caught Natalie’s arm and all but dragged her from the room and away from the one human they knew for sure was aware of and hated them in every way.

12

Drake strode down the street at such a clip that Natalie had to hustle to catch up with him. She had questions and he was going to give her some answers, one way or another.

“Hey, what was that all about?” she demanded.

He skidded to a stop and turned toward her. His face was pale (even more so than usual) and Natalie leaned forward in anticipation of some real answers. But before he could give them, Kai stepped from an alleyway beside them.

“How did it go?” she asked, all chipper and like hiding in an alley was totally normal.

Natalie stared at her. Was this for real?

“Kai?” she sputtered. “Wh-what the hell? What are you doing here?”

She shrugged, but there was high tension on her face and in the way she held her body. “Just wanted to know what was happening.”

Drake stared at the Egyptian girl, too. “But how did you know where we were? I didn’t tell anyone the details of the address except for Natalie.”

He glared at Natalie and she lifted her hands. “I didn’t tell anyone anything!”

Kai waved her hand as if to dismiss that question. “So what happened?”

Natalie pursed her lips, but she couldn’t exactly hide the truth from Kai, even though her suspicions about the mummy and her boyfriend were now running rampant. Kai wanted them to believe Rehu was innocent, and heaping all the blame on the Van Helsings was the best way to make sure that happened.

“Well?” Kai encouraged.

Natalie rolled her eyes and quickly recounted their entire meeting at the brownstone.

“Then this Van Helsing is a viable suspect,” Kai said with a grin that certainly didn’t fit the gravity of their situation.

“I wouldn’t rule the family out of our troubles, that’s for sure. We all know they are more than capable of this kind of violence.” Natalie shook her head. “But that man didn’t kill anyone. I’m almost sure of it.”

Kai wrinkled her brow. “Come on! Just because he’s old doesn’t mean he couldn’t have done it.”

Natalie blinked. “Um, he’s confined to a wheelchair, Kai.”

Kai hesitated for a moment, then her eyes lit up again. “Okay, well, what if he’s faking?”

Natalie drew back. “Faking?”

“Being in the wheelchair,” Kai said with a nod. “He could be totally whole and fine and just using a ‘disability’ to lull us into a state of calm.”

Natalie stared at Kai. There was one thing the Mummy Girl usually was, and that was reasonable. Unlike the other monsters, who often went to crazy lengths to defend their behavior or steep themselves in paranoia, Kai stayed on the straight and narrow path. She didn’t believe in ghost stories. She didn’t freak out.

Except now she was flipping out to Linda proportions. And there was only one reason why she would do that. Rehu. He had always been her Achilles’ heel. Her personal form of madness. Natalie was seeing that in Kai again for the first time since he had been kicked out of their group a year before.

Kai was desperate to protect him. Desperate enough to spin wild stories that put the blame on anyone else in the world. And if she was this desperate to protect him . . .

Well, it only made Natalie more suspicious that Kai knew something she wasn’t telling the rest of the group.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Kai,” Drake interrupted with a sigh of frustration. “Of course Van Helsing is truly in the wheelchair.”

Kai shook her head. “I know the family has been your foe longer and so you have some respect for them, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t resort to lying for sympathy or tolerance or even to trick us.”

Drake folded his arms. “I know he’s in the wheelchair. I put him in it.”

Natalie blinked. So often she forgot that up until the last few decades, Drake had still been Dracula. And he had lived accordingly.

“You put him in it?” she repeated in quiet shock. “How? When?”

Drake’s gaze got distant. “It was during World War II. I fought for the Allies and, even though Van Helsing was German, he turned on his countrymen and fought for our side, too.”

Even Kai seemed caught up now. “Because of what the Germans were doing to the Jews?”

Drake rolled his eyes. “No, because the Allies paid him well. Never forget, children, this family is made of mercenaries. They always have been. They always will be. They hate us, yes. But they love money almost as much.”

“Why would the Allies pay for a German defector?” Natalie asked. “They had plenty of men ready and willing to fight for the cause.”

He sighed. “Hitler loved the occult. The stories about the Ark of the Covenant and mysticism and using magic to fight were all true. The Allies feared he would make . . . or recruit . . . monsters. So they hired the great Van Helsing family to sniff our kind out. To ensure our ‘evil’ wasn’t used to Hitler’s advantage.”

“Hey!” Natalie scowled. There was monstrous, and then there was pure evil like Hitler. “No monster I know or ever knew fought on the side of the Germans. Perhaps Hyde might have wanted to, but I’m sure Jekyll wouldn’t let him.”

“Of course that’s true. But Van Helsing was more than willing to encourage the misconception of the Allies if it meant lining his pockets and getting to kill a few monsters,” Drake continued. “He had no idea that I was fighting on the Allied side, but one day we saw each other in a camp. He moved for an attack. I protected myself. And he ended up in his current state.”

Natalie was quiet for a long moment, allowing the tale to sink in. “But didn’t anyone suspect something after you injured Van Helsing? How were you not found out?”

Drake stepped closer and met her eyes. Immediately, Natalie felt the pull, the uncomfortable spiraling, of his mind control. She turned her face.

“Stop.”

“You are able to fight my mind control thanks to your hyperawareness and sensitivity brought about by your reincarnated status. Your monster skills, as you like to call them,” Drake said softly. “But humans are susceptible in different ways.”

Kai swallowed hard. “So you tricked them into believing . . . what?”

“That it was an accident. Friendly fire, I think they call it now,” Drake said with a shrug. “Ultimately, they called it a tragedy of the war. And that was true. They just didn’t know which war.”

Natalie’s eyes went wide. “Seriously? Shit, Drake.”

He lifted his eyebrows with a dismissive shrug. “It is what our war has always been. Brutal.”

“See, brutal!” Kai said, rushing back to the current subject of the murders. “This guy is brutal and you don’t think he could be responsible? Even after everything you’ve just heard?”

Natalie shut her eyes with a quiet groan. Kai was obsessed. “I’m not saying Van Helsing is incapable of attack, but I doubt he shoved a huge Blob man into a freezer and locked him in. Just saying.”

Kai’s face fell. “Maybe he hired someone.”

Drake shook his head. “No, the Van Helsings are too protective of their work to hand it over to a hireling. Aside from inciting mob violence, they do not use outside forces.”

“Like Ellis’s attack,” Kai encouraged. “That was mob violence.”

“True,” Drake said. “But if one person is responsible for all the attacks on our group, it still doesn’t fully explain our predicament.”

“He does threaten us with renewed war.” Kai hesitated and Natalie could practically see the wheels turning in her head. “Drake, are there other Van Helsings in the city?”

The vampire shrugged. “Perhaps. I haven’t kept up with the family since the old days. Once the war was over, I tried to avoid even thinking of them. There may very well be. They’re like cockroaches. They never fully die off.”

Kai nodded. “I’m going to find out. I don’t believe for a second that those killers aren’t somehow involved in what’s happening to all of us.”

“Do what you must, Mummy,” Drake said with a shrug. “But I want to eat.”

With that, he shut his eyes and poofed into a bat right there on the street.

“Goddamn it,” Natalie muttered with a quick look around to make sure he hadn’t been seen. “He’s going to be the death of us all.”

But to her surprise, Kai, who was normally the stickler for the don’t-draw-attention rule, seemed to hardly register what had happened.

“I’m going, too,” she said. “Gotta hit the books and find out if there are other Van Helsings.”

Kai turned on her heel and raced away toward the subway.

Natalie shrugged. “That’s okay, everyone. I’m good. I’ll just go back to work.”

A couple strolled by, dressed like they’d been to the theater. They stared at Natalie and she blushed as she began walking toward the subway stop that would take her back to the medical examiner’s office. She’d rather follow Kai, but there was no doing that when work and dead bodies called.

She pulled her phone from her bag as she approached her station and found Alec’s number in her phone book. She texted quickly:

Kai followed us. Acting weird. Any update on the mummy?

Then she snapped her phone shut, got on the train, and hoped Alec would have more answers than she had found that night.

Alec heard his phone buzzing with a text, but he ignored the sound and continued to stare at the door before him.

He had followed Kai since she’d left the meeting at Jekyll and Hyde’s apartment. She grabbed coffee . . . actually, two coffees . . . picked up dry cleaning, and eventually led him here before scurrying off to some other place. But that didn’t matter. His intuition told him this was where he was supposed to be.

The Meatpacking District had gone through several incarnations over the decades. Originally the slaughterhouses had been here. Alec had first come to this country at that time and remembered sneaking in for meat when the full moon made him itchy and hungry.

It had fallen into abandoned disrepair in the mid-twentieth century until the 1980s, when someone had gotten the bright idea to open a bunch of sex clubs in the old buildings. Alec had been less interested in those.

Now it was becoming the fashionable place to play and live. But as he stared at the cleaned-up building, Alec believed the neighborhood had been more interesting in its previous incarnations, when it was raw and animal.

This apartment was closer to the past than whatever future the posh designers were creating now. It hadn’t quite caught up to the rest of the area’s gentrification.

Most importantly, though, it wasn’t Kai’s apartment, which was a stylish, uptown loft.

Alec knocked.

There was nothing for a moment and then some shuffling. A male voice behind the door moved closer.

“What did you forget, Kai?” it asked, and then the door opened and Alec found himself face-to-face with Rehu.

Alec supposed he should have been shocked, except he wasn’t. Kai had been too freaked out by the mention of Rehu’s name for Alec not to think she would lead him exactly where she had: right back to her boyfriend.

For years Rehu had struggled to acclimate to a modern world. Clothing, accent, and mannerisms had been difficult for him to adapt, and he had spent many a meeting whining about that very subject.

But now he stood in head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger, a cell phone on his hip. He looked every inch a young New Yorker, maybe a douchebag stockbroker or lawyer.

Except that he was just another monster.

The mummy stared at him for a fraction of a second. There was a slight flare to his lip, one that said, I’m going to kill you, and Alec pounced, hitting the other man with all his might and forcing them both into the apartment.

But Rehu was strong and once the element of surprise was gone he fought back, shoving Alec backward until both men hit the apartment door and slammed it shut with their combined weight.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Wolf?” Rehu growled as they struggled, holding each other’s lapels, pushing and shoving even though neither was making much headway in gaining control of the other.

Alec had always hated that their strength was almost evenly matched. Damn mummy.

“I’ve been looking for you, Bandage Boy,” Alec snarled back.

Rehu stared at him for a long moment and then shoved backward to extricate himself from Alec’s grip. Alec let him go, though he never let his guard down.

“What are you doing in the city?” Alec asked.

Rehu stepped backward until he stopped against the back of a black couch. He leaned there and folded his arms.

“What’s it to you?”

“Last I heard, you left,” Alec said. “And good riddance.”

Rehu’s jaw tightened and Alec smothered a smile. They were alpha (at least around this asshole) versus prince; oil and water. And Alec knew just how to push the other man’s buttons. It was a hobby of sorts. He’d actually missed it.

“I had matters to attend to overseas,” Rehu said with a scowl. “But you and the other freaks in that group don’t own New York City, Wolf. I will come and go as I please.”

Alec frowned. He had a sneaking suspicion that Rehu’s “matters” probably had to do with the sale of his artifacts that the other monsters had prevented in the U.S. The very motive they had guessed might make the Egyptian murder them in anger and a thirst for revenge.

“How did the sale go, Rehu?” he asked softly.

The corner of the other man’s mouth lifted in a slight smirk. “Better than it would have here, actually. Americans have too many laws to prevent the looting of tombs. Even one’s own. But there are other countries where they are more . . . lax on their enforcement of international treaties.”

Alec’s frown deepened. If Rehu had unloaded his items overseas and made even more money, the motive for him to kill was certainly lessened.

“And just when did you haul your sorry ass back to the city?” Alec pressed.

Rehu looked at him with distrust and hesitation. Alec almost couldn’t blame him. After all, he had just burst into the guy’s apartment, and not on a friendly welcome-home kind of call.

“How is that your business, Wolf?”

Alec glared. “Just tell me.”

“Two months,” Rehu admitted.

Alec shook his head. The timeline worked for Rehu to be their killer, plus his being out of the country explained why he hadn’t turned to his revenge earlier. So some of the story fit . . . but other parts didn’t.

Which left Alec in a bit of a quandary. Did he tell Rehu he was a suspect in the murders and hope the mummy would react? Or did he keep it to himself and try to figure out another way to wheedle the truth out of him?

“Why the fuck are you here, asshole?” Rehu growled.

Alec arched a brow. Accusation was more fun.

“I’m just here to see what a murderer of his own kind looks like.” He smiled, though he felt no warmth toward the jerk. “Asshole.”

Rehu tensed. “Murder . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do, buddy.” Alec moved toward him a couple of steps. “I mean, if you and Kai are secretly hooking up like old times, if she got you this apartment . . .”

He trailed off as Rehu flinched slightly. Alec snorted in disgust. The normally strong Kai always fell for this guy’s bullshit.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, you dried-up gigolo.” Alec shook his head. “You always knew how to push that girl’s buttons.”

“What’s it to you?” Rehu snorted. “She tells me you’re banging the Frankenstein.”

“She’s not a Frankenstein—” Alec began, then shook his head. He was getting as bad as Natalie, always correcting that assumption. “Whatever. The point is, Kai must have told you about the murders in our group, since she’s so desperate to take you off the suspect list.”

Rehu only shrugged and his expression was unreadable.

Alec shifted in annoyance. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. But you’re on it, Mummy. As far as I’m concerned, you’re at the top of the suspect pile.”

Rehu’s nostrils flared. “You had best shut it, Wolf. I had nothing to do with it.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you because a couple of millennia ago you were second or third in line for a throne in Egypt?”

“You will believe me because I’m telling the truth,” Rehu said through tightly clenched teeth.

Alec grinned. “You know Drake is way more royal than you are. At least he’s got a title.”

Rehu moved on him. “Get out.”

“I don’t think it was a mistake that you picked the weakest among us to attack,” Alec pressed, interested in Rehu’s response to his accusations, but also just because he enjoyed screwing with him. “I mean, you turned a crowd on Ellis, not exactly brave of you. And then Blob . . . a four-hundred-pound hoarder? Could that have possibly made you feel all tough, coward?”

Rehu rushed forward and swung, not with a fist but with an elbow. It slashed across Alec’s forehead, breaking the skin and sending him sprawling backward with stars flashing before his eyes.

The mummy took the opportunity and flung himself on top of Alec, swinging fists and throwing knees like he’d been watching UFC pay-per-views in his spare time.

Alec shook off his surprise and swung back, catching Rehu on his square-jawed mug a couple of times himself.

“Fuck you, asshole,” Alec grunted as he absorbed another set of punches. They hurt, but both of them knew they weren’t going to permanently injure him.

Still, his body was breakable and he could feel ribs popping and capillaries exploding.

This wasn’t going to be fun over the next few days. And with the full moon less than a week away, all his feelings and sensations were beginning to heighten. So it was going to suck even more, even if he healed all the faster.

“Enough,” Rehu grunted, and flung himself off. “I haven’t killed anyone in your pathetic group . . . yet. They’re not worth my time or my sweat.”

He reached down and caught Alec by the neckline of his T-shirt and dragged him to the door. He tossed him in the hallway.

“And neither are you.”

Rehu slammed the door, leaving Alec to lie on the dirty carpet, blood seeping from his head, his lip, even his arm, though he couldn’t remember if that was from throwing or receiving a punch.

He lay there for a long time, long enough for his body’s natural healing ability to start to go to work, then he dragged himself up and made his way back toward Natalie’s apartment.

When she got home, they had a lot to talk about. And he could only hope she would be nice enough to apply ice to his bruises while they did that.

13

Natalie checked her phone for what was probably the twentieth time in the last half hour. There were no messages. No texts. In the past, that would have been normal. Damn, in the past she wouldn’t even have checked.

But now things were different and the silence was starting to freak her out. She shoved the phone back in her purse and used her key to open the door to her apartment building. She glanced up the stairs with a frown.

It had been hours since she’d texted Alec the first time about Kai and Rehu. Then she texted again. And again. Then called his cell. Then the apartment.

Nothing. No response. In her heart she knew he was probably ignoring her, maybe even hooking up with some random chick he had met at a bar or something . . . but though she was annoyed, Natalie was also worried.

“Where are you, you stupid mutt?” she muttered as she trudged up to her floor and to her door. She knocked lightly and waited, but there was no sound from within the apartment to greet her. No dog-howling or breakfast-making today.

“The jerk isn’t even home,” she said with a sigh, and pulled out her keys to open the door. But when she turned the knob, the door opened without her clicking the lock open.

She froze out of pure instinct.

Yeah, she was a monster and that meant she had little to be afraid of in the scheme of things. But she was also a woman and a New Yorker. She did not leave her apartment unlocked. Ever.

Especially now, when someone was out there trying to figure out how to roast her alive in some kind of monster cleanse.

“Hello?” she called into the dim apartment. Did murderers, robbers, and rapists really answer to that kind of thing? In movies . . . except she knew movies were wrong, wrong, wrong when it came to most stuff.

“Natalie?” came a weak voice from the living room.

It wasn’t the voice of a murderer or a rapist that lilted through the hallway. It was Alec.

Natalie crossed the threshold, slammed the door behind her, locked the deadbolt, and raced into the living room. She skidded to a stop and stared.

Alec was spread out across her couch, but it wasn’t a comfortable, casual sprawl. His eye was black, his lips were swollen, and blood was caked along a big gash on his forehead and dried on his white T-shirt.

“Alec?” she whispered, almost as if talking too loud would make his injuries worse. In a few slow steps she came fully into the room. “Oh my God, are you okay?”

She dropped down to her knees on the floor next to the couch and started looking at Alec’s various injuries. Gash on the forehead, cuts and bruises everywhere, maybe even a couple of broken bones.

“I’m awesome,” he groaned. “Ow, don’t poke that.”

Natalie jerked her hand away from the cut she had been examining. “I need to call nine-one-one. We have to get you to a doctor.”

Alec lifted himself slightly from the couch as she moved for the phone on the table and the movement resulted in a yelp of pain from him. But he also said, “No! No doctors, no hospitals!”

“Is this a dogs-don’t-like-veterinarians thing, Alec? Because, seriously, grow up,” she said as she started dialing, but he swatted her phone away with a growl. She stared at him. “Alec, you got the shit kicked out of you. You could have a concussion or broken ribs or something very serious. Monster healing or not, this isn’t something to fool around with.”

He shook his head and his eyes suddenly glinted bright yellow in the dim light. “No. The full moon is, like, five days away, Natalie.”

She blinked. “So?”

He growled in frustration. “Things are starting to get . . . complicated for me. A doctor would notice. They would see I’m not . . . normal.”

Natalie stopped trying to reach her phone, which had slid across the floor just out of reach, and stared at him. To be honest, he did look a little more . . . wolfie.

“I guess I hadn’t thought about that,” she admitted. “I mean, you’re the most . . . human of all of us, at least most of the time.”

“Thanks, I think,” Alec groaned.

She edged closer. “So what exactly do you mean by ‘complicated’? I think I should know, if we’re living together.”

He flopped back against the couch and shut his eyes. “Everything is heightened, including pain unfortunately, but so is my ability to heal. All my chemistry is going crazy. A few tests and I’ll end up being a pincushion for some new disease . . . until I go all Wolf Man in the middle of the intensive-care ward. So please, please, no hospital.”

Natalie flinched. She got his aversion, for sure. She avoided hospitals, too, for fear they’d figure out the origins of all her kooky scars, or discover that she had the DNA of ten people floating around inside of her, making life interesting.

“Okay. I get it. I’ll, um, get you some ice and some bandages and some antibiotic ointment and I’ll see what I can do for you, okay?”

He let out a long sigh of relief. “Yes. Thank you.”

She looked at him for a moment more, then got up and moved toward the kitchen just a few steps away. As she opened the freezer and grabbed a couple of packets of frozen peas, she called out, “So what happened to you, anyway?”

There was a moment’s pause from the other room and then Alec replied, “I found Rehu.”

Natalie nearly dropped the frozen vegetables. “You did?”

“We were both right in our suspicions. Kai was hiding him in an apartment in the Meatpacking District.”

Natalie scowled. “That bitch.”

Except her nasty words didn’t really reflect how she felt. In that moment, she wasn’t mad . . . okay, she was mad, but she was also hurt. Since the beginning, she and Alec and Kai had been working together on this sticky problem. She had begun to like the Mummy Girl, despite her gruffness. Maybe they weren’t friends, but they were close to it.

And now Kai had betrayed that for a guy who’d gotten her killed, reincarnated, and then nearly killed, like, twenty times since then.

“After she left the place where I followed her, I knocked on the door and there he was.” Alec sighed. “Needless to say, he was a little pissed about (a) being found, (b) being found by me in particular, and (c) being accused of the murders in our little group.”

She moved into the space between the kitchen and the living room and stared at him. “So you just told him we suspected him? Way to go, Sherlock Holmes.”

He shrugged one shoulder and winced. “I wanted to see his reaction. Just for the record, it was displeasure. And he expresses displeasure with his fists.” He motioned at her. “Can I have that ice or what?”

“Oh, sorry,” she said and hurried over to him.

She knelt down and pressed one of the makeshift ice packs against the bruise on Alec’s eye. He winced and a low growl rumbled in his chest.

“Sheesh, okay, okay,” she muttered.

“Sorry about the growling, it’s out of my control,” he said with a shrug. “Stupid moon.”

He took the other ice pack and slowly lifted his shirt to reveal toned abs and a big bruise on his ribs. It was already purple and ugly and would only get worse.

“Alec,” Natalie whispered as she shut her eyes.

“It’s okay,” he reassured her. “You can hurt me, but there’s only one thing that can kill me, right? And Rehu didn’t have a silver bullet. Or at least he didn’t use it.”

“I knew Kai was lying about not knowing where he was,” she said as she got out the antiseptic goo and started dabbing it on the cuts on Alec’s face.

Alec nodded. “Yeah, me, too. Though I didn’t quite expect her to be visiting him with fucking coffee. Like Kai was in a chick-lit book that involved hot boys and Manolo Blahniks.”

Natalie blinked. “Which one? Wait—you know about chick-lit and shoes?”

Alec shifted and then winced in pain. “When the moon gets close, I have a hard time sleeping. I read a lot.”

“Okay, well, tell me more about Rehu,” Natalie encouraged, though she couldn’t help but smile at the thought of Alec flipping through girl books. She’d have to get him a few for this moon’s cycle . . . if they could work out this person-trying-to-kill-them thing.

“Once I managed to get inside, we had a . . . shall we say, heated exchange.” Alec flinched as he shifted the ice pack slightly. “He denied, strenuously, any involvement in the murders.”

Natalie shook her head. “So, let me get this straight. While he was beating you up, he told you he has no reason to hurt us.”

“Pretty much.” Alec sighed.

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m totally believing that.”

“But like I said, he didn’t shoot me with a silver bullet. Small favors.”

Before Natalie could reply, there was a pounding on the door behind them. Both of them tensed and Natalie peered over her shoulder.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Okay, you stay here. If that’s him on the other side of the door, he’s about to experience a damn monster he’ll never forget.”

She got up and started for the door as Alec called out, “Wow, my hero!”

Natalie ignored him and peeked into the peephole. To her surprise, and just a tinge of disappointment, Kai stood on the other side. Her arms were folded and her body language was angry and annoyed. But Natalie’s own anger and annoyance were a lot stronger and she almost pulled the door off its hinges as she opened it.

“What the fuck, Kai?” she snapped.

“What the fuck, me?” Kai answered as she shoved past Natalie and into the apartment. “What the fuck, you? Did your boyfriend go harass Rehu?”

Natalie tensed. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said as she followed Kai toward the living room. “And you weren’t supposed to know where your boyfriend was!”

“Well, that was a . . .” Kai trailed off as she made it into the living room and saw Alec on the couch. She stared at him with his bruised-up face and flinched. “. . . lie. Shit, what happened to you?”

Natalie folded her arms. “You get one guess. And it rhymes with Day-who.”

Kai spun on Natalie and her eyes were wide. “He didn’t kill anyone!” she said. Her tone was pleading.

Natalie had never heard that kind of desperation from Kai before. Normally the Mummy Girl was tough, certain, and no-nonsense.

Alec sat up a little. “Actually, I don’t believe he did, either.”

Natalie looked past Kai to stare at Alec in shock. “Seriously? After what he did to you? He beat you up, numbnuts!”

Alec covered a grin. “Yeah, but he didn’t kill me. And he could have, more than once. It made me wonder: If he’s trying to wipe us out, why wouldn’t he just shoot me right then and there in the apartment? Hell, he could have called it self-defense to the cops and probably not even have to clean up the body.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t kill you today.” Natalie threw her hands up in the air. “Because he intends to kill us in a certain order? Because he didn’t have a silver bullet handy? Because he likes your hair? I don’t know.”

Kai shook her head. “No, listen, he wouldn’t hurt anyone.” She stopped and looked at Alec again. With a shiver, she corrected herself. “Okay, he wouldn’t murder anyone. He’s just angry and a hothead.”

“Sounds pretty killer to me,” Natalie muttered. “Sociopath.”

“No. No, really. I know he didn’t kill anyone,” Kai insisted.

“How?” Natalie asked.

The Mummy Girl shut her eyes. “Because he probably would have started with me if he wanted to kill anyone. We have the deepest history. I mean, we sort of killed each other before, you know. And I’m the one who told everyone about the artifacts and got him kicked out of the group and everything.”

Natalie was going to retort, but cut herself off. “That . . . kind of makes sense, actually.”

Kai looked relieved. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe he knows something we don’t. He could have even been confronted by Trench Coat himself.”

Natalie folded her arms and glared at Kai, but before she could say anything snarky, Kai interrupted.

“Please. He could help us, I swear.”

Natalie shook her head and paced away without another word. If Alec wanted to forgive and forget and dismiss Rehu from his list of suspects, fine. But she wasn’t about to be so naïve.

“I’m sorry,” Kai added. “Really.”

Natalie looked at Kai. She’d certainly never heard her apologize to anyone before. Even when she made someone cry. Hard.

Of course, that someone had been Linda . . .

Alec shrugged. “I appreciate the apology, but this isn’t your fault, you know.”

Kai flinched. “Maybe not all of it, but a big portion is my fault. I—I should have told you all that Rehu was back in town. Especially when his name got brought up in all this murder business.”

“Yeah, you should have,” Natalie snapped. “Why didn’t you?”

Kai’s gaze drifted somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes and stayed there, even as her cheeks brightened to a dark red. “Come on, Natalie. You must know why.”

Natalie stared at her for a long moment and then shook her head. “How can you still love that ass? He got you killed the first time around, has almost gotten you re-killed how many times in the last ninety years or so?”

“I know, I know,” Kai groaned.

Alec nodded. “He’s just not a nice guy; you deserve better.”

“Did you get that from chick-lit, too?” Natalie asked. Alec shot her a glare.

Kai looked between the two of them in confusion before she shrugged one shoulder. “He’s a hard habit to break. I wish I could explain it, but I can’t. Either way, I’m so sorry that it led to . . .” She looked at Alec again. “That.”

Alec straightened up a little on the couch. “Come on, Kai. You might have kept the truth about Rehu quiet, and that wasn’t cool. But you didn’t beat me up. You can’t take responsibility for your jerk of a boyfriend’s actions. I don’t blame you.”

Kai breathed a sigh of relief, though Natalie could see she wasn’t totally convinced.

“I still have to make it up to you, though. Look, like I said, I’m going to go talk to him. He owes me big time, now that I see what he did.”

Her eyes narrowed, and Natalie had to imagine Rehu wasn’t going to get a very nice version of Kai knocking on his door in a little while. At least that was something.

“I’ll see what he knows about Trench Coat,” Kai continued. “And I’ll report back as soon as I hear anything.”

Alec nodded and Kai somehow saw that as a dismissal and started for the door. Natalie rolled her eyes and followed her. Everyone else seemed to think this conversation was closed, but it still felt pretty open to her.

Kai paused at the door and turned back to look at Natalie. “Are you going to be pissed at me forever?”

Natalie drew back. Since when had Kai ever given a damn about anyone else’s feelings on any matter?

“I haven’t decided yet,” Natalie said with a shrug. “You were supposed to be my friend, but you lied to me.”

Kai wrinkled her brow. “You consider me a friend?”

Natalie shook her head. “I did. Now I don’t know what you are.”

Kai nodded. “That’s fair.” She dug into her purse. “Look, these are a new over-the-counter painkiller my company is putting out in a few months. They work great, better than anything else out there. Give them to Alec once every four hours and they should help.”

“Okay,” Natalie said as she took them. Then she met Kai’s gaze evenly. “So are you really going to let us know everything about Rehu or just what you want us to hear about your dearly beloved?”

Kai turned her face slightly. “Okay, I deserved that. I can’t make up for what I did before, but I promise you: I will tell you when I know something, anything.”

Natalie didn’t say another word, but closed the door in Kai’s face and deadbolted it. Through the peephole, she saw the other woman hesitate like she was going to knock, but then she walked away.

Natalie sighed as she went back into the living room and popped a few of Kai’s experimental pills from the packaging. As she handed them over to Alec, she said, “That was nice of you to let her off the hook like that.”

Alec shoved the pills in his mouth and swallowed without water. “She might as well not beat herself up. Anyway, the worst Rehu did is scar me for life. Make me hideous.”

He laughed, but Natalie didn’t join in. Instead, she flinched and then turned away. She didn’t want to let him see what those words meant to her.

“Yeah, well, I’m going to bed.”

She started down the hall toward her bedroom, but Alec called after her. “Hey, wait!”

She ignored him and kept going.

“Natalie!” he snapped.

She turned to find him getting up off the couch. He hobbled toward her. She held out her hands.

“You’re going to hurt yourself!” she snapped.

“Super-healing, remember?” he said. “So the pain is temporary. But clearly I said something wrong here. What?”

“Nothing,” she said, but she couldn’t help tugging at her sleeve in the hopes she’d cover one of her own scars.

Of course, Alec caught the action and shut his eyes with a sigh.

“Shit. Look, I wasn’t thinking when I made that crack, okay? I know you have all those scars from when you were . . . were . . .”

“Made?” Natalie finished softly. “Yeah, well, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Now I’m tired and—”

She turned, but he caught her arm and held her steady. His golden eyes didn’t flit away from hers. Not even a little. The intensity of his stare was both mesmerizing and disconcerting.

“I get it, Nat,” he said, his tone very quiet in the dim hallway. “I get feeling awkward and weird. I get hating what you see in the mirror because it’s like a neon light flashing Monster.”

Natalie shook her head. Alec didn’t get it at all.

“Oh yeah, because you’re so hideous.” She rolled her eyes. “Please, you are built like a god and you get laid, like, four times a week.”

She expected him to crack some joke or something, but his face remained serious and focused. “Why do you think I steal razors, Natalie?”

“Because you’re vain,” she answered immediately.

He smiled slightly. “Actually, it’s because the hair is really embarrassing. The full moon makes it pop out everywhere . . . everywhere. And every time I see a new hair on my wrist or my elbow or my forehead, I feel like someone is screaming out that I’m a freak.”

She shook her head. “But the thing is, Alec, the hair isn’t with you every day; it just gets worse with the full moon approaching, hence the dozens of dull razors currently in my bathroom garbage. And when it does get worse, you can make it go away.”

She shoved her sleeve up with a deep blush and revealed one of the ugly long scars that stretched from her inner elbow to her wrist, where it slashed across and around the entire circumference. It marked where her hand had been attached almost two hundred years ago.

“These don’t go away. No matter what I do,” she said.

Alec was silent for a moment, but then he stepped forward. She backed up and found herself in her bedroom. He reached around the door and clicked on the light. She trembled as he edged even closer, caught her hand, and lifted it.

She didn’t know what his plans were. Kill her? Bite her? Kiss her?

“Let me see it in the light,” he said, his voice soft.

She normally would have argued. Showing her scars, especially up close, was not her thing. But with Alec grabbing her arm, lifting it up to see better, she found herself too mesmerized to argue.

He looked at the scar.

“Did it hurt?”

“I don’t remember,” she muttered with a dark flush of blood rushing to her cheeks. “I wasn’t alive yet, remember? I woke up like this.”

He nodded, then let go of her hand. Without warning, he tugged his shirt off his body and leaned sideways so she could see a dark red gash of a scar on his stomach.

“Oh my God, did Rehu do that?” she asked as she leaned closer.

Alec shook his head. “No. This one is from . . . gosh, sixty years ago, I guess.”

She blinked as she reached out to trace the line. “Did it hurt?”

He shrugged. “Not when I got it. I was in wolf form at the time, so I don’t really remember. But when I woke up in human form the next day, yeah, it hurt like a motherfucker. And since it had been festering for twelve hours, it put me out for almost a week before I could even get up.”

“How do you not die?” Natalie asked with a shake of her head as she noticed at least three more scars, all likely from bullet wounds.

He shrugged. “No silver bullets so far. Just lucky, I guess. I tend to steal chickens from very poorly read farmers.”

She couldn’t help but smile. For the first time in a long time, being a monster didn’t seem so . . . lonely.

Alec was super-close now. She hadn’t realized how close until she stopped looking at his scars and glanced up into his face. She had spent years thinking he was nothing but an annoying mutt. And he still was . . . but . . .

She reached up, threaded her fingers through his hair, and pulled him down for a kiss.

Alec froze for a minute, but then he responded with a kiss as hot as her own. And as they sank backward onto her bed, Natalie couldn’t help but think that, as annoying as he was, he was definitely a good kisser.

And getting better as he pushed her deeper and deeper into the bed, tangling his fingers with hers and driving his tongue hard into her mouth. Suddenly her body, which she had just been cursing, woke up from whatever dead slumber she’d been in lately and all those stolen nerves started to fire.

She shivered as sensation rushed through her, making her body tingle from her head to her toes. But just as she gave in to that feeling, accepted it, and decided to just not worry about the consequences, Alec pulled back.

“Whoa,” he muttered as he rolled away from her.

She turned on her side, surprisingly disappointed that he had stopped. “What?”

“Increased sensation,” he explained. His eyes were dilated and his breath came in pants. “Intense. But I—I’m not sure we should do this.”

Natalie pursed her lips. Good old scars struck again. Great.

“I understand.” She pushed up off the bed and turned her back. “Can you get to your room okay, or do you need help?”

Alec got up and touched her arm, making her face him. “I don’t think you do understand, Natalie. I’m not pushing you away because I don’t want to do this.”

“Aren’t you? I mean, I know you haven’t pushed away hundreds of other girls,” Natalie said, more snappy than she wanted to be. Her tone made her obvious and vulnerable.

Alec shut his eyes. “Hundreds may be exaggerating it just a touch. But that doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” Natalie said, “. . . for some stupid reason.”

He looked at her, his gaze focused and intense. “Natalie, right now I’m just on the edge of moon-crazed. Whatever I do, whatever I feel, it’s going to be all confused with what’s happening inside of me. If I did this with you, it would be awesome, but I would also have very little control over it. And my memories later would even be dim at best. And when we do this . . . I’d really like to remember every minute. And also not be covered in bruises that hurt like a motherfucker.”

He tilted his head and forced her to meet his eyes. “Do you get that?”

Natalie pursed her lips. Shit, why did he have to pick now to be all rational?

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Can I have a postponement?” he asked.

She wanted to say no, to make him feel like he’d lost his one shot, but she didn’t want to lose hers.

“We’ll just have to see what happens,” was the best she could muster.

He grinned. “I’ll take that. And this.”

Then he leaned forward and kissed her again. And Natalie knew, as all that fire in her body lit up again, that next time he tried putting her on her back on the bed, she wasn’t going to say no. And she wouldn’t let him go.

She just hoped it would happen soon.

14

Natalie wasn’t holding hands with Alec as they got off the elevator at Jekyll and Hyde’s apartment the that evening, but as they walked up the hallway, she felt him watching her. Actually, staring a hole through her skull was the more accurate description. The boy was nothing if not intense.

Thankfully, her head was way clearer than it had been when she got home.

Making out was fun and all, but she wasn’t about to go thinking there was something else to it. The guy wasn’t just a wolf, he was a dog when it came to women. She was a novelty, nothing else. There wasn’t going to be a future there. And if she wanted to keep him as a roommate, it was probably best to let it stay that way.

As they got closer to the door, Natalie slowed down. Their dwindling group of monster friends was gathered around the door. Linda, Drake, and Kai took turns knocking.

“What’s up with this?” Alec muttered as they reached the group.

Kai turned toward them with a frown. “Jekyll and Hyde refuse to let us in.”

Linda also turned, and when she saw Alec’s bruised face, she flinched. “Oh no. Were you attacked?”

Alec opened his mouth, but Linda didn’t allow him to speak. “Did they try to kill you?”

“Linda—” he began again.

She covered her face and sobbed, “Oh God, am I next?”

Alec reached out and patted her arm. “Dude, chill. It wasn’t Trench Coat.” He tossed a quick glance at Kai, who looked away. “I just bothered the wrong guy.”

Natalie pursed her lips. She had no idea why Alec was so keen on protecting Kai’s boyfriend. He had told her before that nothing had ever happened between him and Kai, but maybe he’d lied. Not that it was any of her business. She was more interested in what was going on with Jekyll and Hyde.

“Do we even know if they’re in there?” Natalie asked.

Alec turned to her. “You’ve got super-ears, why don’t you check it out?”

Natalie shrugged. She could do that, yes. She just hadn’t thought of it first. She leaned her ear against the door.

Sure enough, she heard shuffling and Hyde’s angry voice muttering, though she couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying.

“I only hear Hyde,” she said, shutting her eyes so she could concentrate on what was happening behind the door. “No Jekyll.”

“Maybe he’s in Hyde’s head,” Kai suggested in a low whisper.

Natalie glanced at the Mummy Girl. “Good point. One way or another, though, he sounds pretty drunk.”

Natalie frowned as she pulled back from the door and the sounds became more muffled. She had never seen Hyde impaired before. Sober he was bad enough.

Alec nodded. “I agree. Dog ears meet . . .”

She laughed despite herself. “Convict ears, I guess.”

“Okay, lovebirds, enough.” Kai sighed. “So what do we do?”

Alec dug around in his pocket and pulled out a long piece of wire. With a grin, he moved to the door.

“What is that?” Linda asked.

“Lock pick,” he explained to the group. “Can you give me some room?”

In stunned silence, everyone took a long step back. Alec made a noise of pain as he crouched down and started fiddling with the lock. He took a few minutes and then there was an audible click and he turned the knob and the door opened.

Natalie reached forward to help him to his feet and everyone stared into the apartment. The curtains were drawn and the lights were off, so the space was almost completely dark beyond the sliver of light now coming in from the hallway behind them.

Natalie swatted at the light switch next to the door and finally a lamp across the room clicked on to reveal the room in full.

It had been utterly wrecked. Furniture was flipped over and torn, bottles were broken against the walls, leaving waterfalls of booze dripping down the custom paint. Paintings were torn and hanging crooked on the wall.

“Holy shit,” Kai breathed as she took the first step into the room. “What the hell happened here?”

“What happened?”

From the darkest corner of the room, Hyde rose from a crouching position where no one had seen him and staggered toward them. An empty bottle dangled from his fingertips and there was a wild look in his eyes. Natalie actually took a step back.

Hyde had always had an animal quality to him. Not like Alec, with his wolfish charm, but menacing . . . on the edge of control . . . ready to attack. But she’d never seen him so wild before. He was already red, his body bigger, his nails talons, which explained the jagged rips in the expensive wallpaper.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” he continued before he spun and threw the bottle against the wall with all his might. It shattered and Natalie turned her face away from the spray of glass and liquor. “Jekyll is dead.”

Natalie lifted her hand to her lips to cover her gasp. Jekyll . . .

She stared at Hyde, all rage and monstrous insanity, and suddenly a terrible thought dawned on her. “Hyde . . . did—did you—?”

Hyde spun on her, his dark eyes sparkling with pain and disbelief as he took in the meaning of her truncated sentence. “No! Never. I would never kill my brother . . . my best friend.”

“Then what happened?” Kai whispered.

Hyde’s face crumpled. “He was poisoned.”

Alec groaned. “Just like in his story.”

Hyde nodded. “He died a few hours ago. At a club. The police have already taken his body away.”

Natalie shut her eyes. Great. More problems for her to clean up once she got to work. Then she stared at Hyde with a wrinkled brow.

“But . . . how are you still here? You two can only be separated for an hour, right?”

Hyde nodded. “That’s true when we’re both alive. If both sides of the coin exist, we can only be separated a short time,” Hyde snarled. “But once he’s gone . . . then I get everything, apparently.”

Natalie blinked. “What—what does that mean, exactly?”

She really didn’t want to know, but there was no choice now. Everything had to be put on the table so they could protect themselves.

Hyde stared around him, looking at the carnage that had been hidden by the darkness until Natalie turned on the light.

“I—I did this,” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than to anyone else.

Natalie hesitated. His voice was so flat, she couldn’t tell if he was sad to see the damage to the apartment, or sorry that he’d lost control. “Yes,” she responded softly. “It appears so.”

He didn’t look at her. “And he couldn’t stop me,” he added. Hyde’s sorrow faded and he smiled. It was an ugly expression, menacing and so much more evil than usual.

“Jekyll’s connection to me was his mind, his memories, his life force. And his control over me. Now that it is gone, I can do anything I want.”

Natalie’s lips parted in horror and shock. Numerous times she had seen the calming effect Jekyll had had on Hyde. Their psychic connection, their monster abilities, they allowed Jekyll to keep his brother in check.

But now . . . now Hyde had no one to balance his wicked desires. To keep him from roaming the streets robbing, raping . . . and even worse. And she could imagine that Hyde would think of oh-so-much-worse if he had no one to put his desires in lockdown.

“Hyde,” Kai whispered. Her face was pale. There was no doubt she was having the same thoughts as Natalie was. “We know you’re upset, but—”

He snapped his gaze to her and tilted his head like an animal who had just noticed prey. “You are a beautiful woman, Kai. So perfect, like porcelain. So easy to break.”

Kai swallowed but, to her credit, didn’t step away from him. Natalie wasn’t sure she could have held her ground like that, monster strength or not.

“Hyde,” Alec snapped. Though he was still moving slowly because of his injuries, Natalie could see he was ready to attack, or be attacked. “You’ve got to think your actions through. Would Jekyll want you to go nuts?”

Hyde hesitated, but then he shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? Jekyll doesn’t want anything anymore.”

“Oh no,” Natalie whispered.

This was going to be bad. And added to their other problems? Even worse.

“These people . . . these humans, they have controlled us for too long,” Hyde said, his tone harsh and angry. “And now they kill us?”

“We don’t know who is killing us,” Kai insisted. “It might not be humans.”

“Oh, please. We know it’s humans,” Hyde scoffed. “It’s always been humans. They call us monsters and use that label to justify what they do. Well, they want a monster”—he shoved through the group in one bound—“they’ll get a fucking monster!”

“Wait!” Natalie cried.

She reached for him, trying to grab his coat, but he was already gone, sprinting at a fantastic speed down the hallway and disappearing into the stairwell.

The rest of the group stared after him, the silence heavy and filled with shock.

Linda was finally the one to break it. She motioned for the door wildly. “We—we should go after him. He could ruin everything for all of us if he goes off and shows his true monster face to the world. He might even do it on purpose, just out of spite or pride.”

“That’s probably true,” Kai said, her voice flat as she shook her head. “But I doubt anyone could catch him if he doesn’t want to be caught. Speed has always been part of their . . . his powers. Besides, he might be right.”

Natalie turned on her with a blink. “What could you possibly find in that insanity that is right?”

She shrugged. “Maybe monsters should be monsters and not pretend otherwise. Especially now that we’re being threatened.”

Drake smiled. “That is what I’ve been trying to tell all of you for days.”

Linda sniffled as the usual tears welled up in her green eyes. “Well, I don’t want to be a monster, so if that’s our big solution, then I’m going home.”

“What are you going to do at home?” Alec asked. “By yourself, with a killer on the loose?”

She shrugged as she pushed her cheap purse up higher on her shoulder. “I don’t know. But in that awful movie I was riddled with bullets and sank to the bottom of the swamp. So if I’m going to get shot a bunch of times and then drown in my bathtub or the East River or something, at least I’m going to be surrounded by my cats when it happens.”

There was a long pause and then Alec asked, “How many cats?”

Linda pursed her lips, then extended her middle finger toward him and pivoted on her heel out the door and toward the elevator.

Kai watched her go with a sad shake of her head.

“That girl refuses to acknowledge there are benefits to what we are,” she said softly. “What’s the point of living if you’re not going to live?”

“But she may be as correct as Hyde,” Drake said. “Not in her fear of what she is, but in her suggestion that we go home. For now, for tonight, there’s nothing we can do but hope Hyde doesn’t get himself arrested or killed by the police.”

“And what about the murderer?” Natalie asked. “Do we just forget about him?”

Kai pursed her lips. “Natalie, you asked Hyde if he had killed Jekyll himself. Do you think that might still be a possibility?”

Natalie jolted. “You mean that Hyde could have been the one behind this all along?”

Kai nodded.

Alec shrugged. “He is mad enough. And he hates us all both individually and on a group basis.”

“Those things may be true, but I don’t know,” Natalie said. “I’m the one who asked, but the fact is, up until last night, Hyde had Jekyll to control him.”

“But he’s broken loose of those chains before,” Drake said with a disdainful sniff. “We all remember the Central Park incident.”

Natalie flinched. She tried not to think of that night five years ago. Jekyll had been ill, and somehow Hyde used that fact to free himself of his brother’s control. He’d bolted into Central Park in a mad frenzy and nearly killed a homeless man. He’d called it self-defense, but no one in their group had believed him. He’d taken too much pleasure in retelling the act for it to be a mere act of preservation.

But the truth and the law were very different things. Hyde was lucky he had money, Jekyll to merge himself with, and a good attorney.

“Those were terrible times,” Natalie said with a shiver. “But it was an isolated incident. Jekyll never would have allowed him to kill one after the other of our group.”

Alec was the one to nod. “I tend to agree. Jekyll wasn’t good at lying. If he’d known the killer’s identity, he wouldn’t have been able to hide that fact from us when we talked about it in group. We would have seen it all over his honest face.”

“Plus, as much as Hyde resented Jekyll, he also loved him.” Natalie was surprised to find tears tingle in her eyes as she said, “You saw his face, he’s lost without his . . . brother.”

Alec considered that for a moment and then nodded. “I hate to say I feel sorry for the psychopath, but I kind of do. Still, if he goes on a three-state killing spree, we’re royally fucked . . . and I’d definitely feel less sorry for him.”

“But the killing spree we must worry about at present is the one targeting us,” Drake said with a shake of his head. “So we must return to topic. Our killer has never killed more than one of us in a day.”

Natalie shrugged. “That’s true. Ellis was almost a week ago and Blob was probably a day or two before that, based on autopsy results. It took whoever it is a long time to get around to going after Jekyll.”

Drake nodded and continued, “If we base our assumptions about what this person will do in the future on his past habits, then I assume he will go home. Enjoy his handiwork. So perhaps we should follow Linda’s lead and do the same. We can try to regroup tomorrow when emotions aren’t so high.”

Kai shrugged. “If that’s what everyone wants, there’s no harm to it. I have a few things to do anyway.”

Without waiting to hear anyone else’s opinion, Drake poofed into a bat and flew toward the closest window. Kai waved her hand at him like he was a nasty fly she could shoo away, then shook her head and motioned Alec and Natalie toward the door.

“What will you two do tonight? Work, Natalie?”

She shook her head. “I have a night off. So maybe I’ll do some more research on the medallion we saw around that person’s neck. If he is a monster hunter, maybe there’s a reference in one of the old books or movies.”

Alec clapped his hands together. “Yes! Movie night!”

Natalie shook her head. “I don’t enjoy watching them, Wolfie.”

“Aw, come on. All the ones about me are pretty entertaining,” he teased.

“Well, have fun, kids,” Kai said as Natalie pressed the elevator button. “I’ll take the stairs.”

After they waved good-bye to Kai, Natalie and Alec got into the elevator. Alone in the quiet space, Natalie felt awkward as she glanced at Alec from the corner of her eye. She had to talk about something. Something that wouldn’t inspire making out or anything.

“So what’s your deal with work?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you go in a while.”

Alec shifted. “Wellllll . . .”

She stared at him. He had to be kidding. Trying to control her tone, she rubbed her face. “Fired. Again?”

“They caught me gnawing on some raw meat in a freezer case,” Alec said with a sheepish nod.

“Ew,” Natalie said with a shudder.

“Moon hunger.” He sighed. “Sorry.”

“Great. How are you supposed to cover rent, then?” Natalie asked.

The doors to the elevator opened and they passed through the bulletproof glass partition and into the foyer. The guard glanced up from his desk as they walked by and then went back to his crossword.

The night air was cool as they moved through the circular doors onto the street.

“Are you going to tell me your big rent plan or what?” Natalie pressed.

Alec shrugged. “Well—” he began, but then he skidded to a stop and jerked his head to the right.

“Alec? You aren’t going to put me off by going all sentry wolf on me, okay?” Natalie said. “Seriously, I don’t, shockingly, mind having you as a roommate, but—”

Alec lifted a hand. “Shush,” he admonished, his tone sharp.

Natalie slammed her teeth together in annoyance. Shush? His answer was shush?

“I smell Trench Coat,” he whispered.

Natalie blinked and her annoyance at the rent situation faded instantly. “What?”

“Trench Coat,” he repeated in a tense, guarded tone. “I smelled faint remnants on Blob in the freezer, and on Hyde tonight. And now I smell it again.”

Natalie stared at him as he looked from one side of the street to the other. “What does that mean?”

He let out a low growl and pointed a block down. “There! Trench Coat!”

Without any further explanation, Alec bolted in the direction he’d been pointing. Natalie stared for a second, too shocked to move. And there, darting around a group of Japanese tourists, was a glimpse of, indeed, a trench coat.

“Shit!” she cried, and then started running after Alec.

He was much faster. Frankenstein had built her for size and strength, not speed, and Natalie had never been much for the gym (skimpy clothes were no way to cover up hideous surgical scars). Still, she managed to keep her eyes on Alec, if not on Trench Coat, who had disappeared into the crowd in the night.

Alec, however, was impossible to miss. Now, only a few days away from the full moon, he had stopped running like a man and was bounding, crouched like the wolf he would soon become.

People squealed as he jumped past them and called out very unattractive suggestions of what he could do with his pushing. At intersections, he didn’t pay attention to the crosswalk signals and cars swerved and honked as he bounded into their paths and out again, just barely missing being crushed by taxis and trucks delivering goods to stores.

As he leapt past another group of tourists, these speaking Russian, a few lifted their cameras and started taking pictures. As Natalie rushed past, she heard one of them say, “Dog Man!”

The pictures were what made Natalie’s heart lurch. You never knew when something might end up on a talk show or in a tabloid, and then suddenly it was all, Abandon your apartment, change your name, move to the middle of nowhere.

“Alec!” she cried out, hoping to catch his attention.

But like a bloodhound on a scent, he didn’t pause. He just continued to leap forward toward a person she couldn’t even see anymore, thanks to the crowd and the darkness.

Frustrated, she elbowed her way through a group of people waiting outside a restaurant and then skidded to a stop. Alec was gone. She lifted on her tiptoes to look for him, but she could no longer see.

“Damn it!” she muttered as she rushed forward again. “Alec? Alec!”

She was digging for her phone when she caught a glimpse of him. He bounded down a set of metal stairs into a subway station and vanished.

“Bad dog-boy!” she shouted as she ran toward the entrance.

A few people jerked their heads toward her, but she ignored them. She was too frustrated to care that she was making a spectacle of herself, just as she always scolded the others about doing.

She bolted down the rickety stairs into the subway station below. The lights there were brighter than the ones on the street and she blinked as she scanned the area for Alec. She caught sight of him just as he vaulted over a turnstile and ran onto the subway platform behind it. Thankfully there wasn’t someone from the transit authority watching.

Natalie dug in her purse for her MetroCard and swiped it, then pushed through the turnstile and onto the platform. A subway car was sitting at a standstill. Its doors had already closed and the train was about to pull away from the station.

Alec was standing beside one of the windows, banging on it with both his fists. As Natalie rushed to his side, she heard him growling, low and serious.

She peered around him and into the window. About ten people were on the car and all of them were staring at Alec as he pounded on the window. But one stood out. One in a trench coat, standing right at the window, watching them with a smug smile on . . . her face.

She had blond hair, pulled back in a ponytail, and around her neck was a dangling medallion with a flame stamped into the metal.

The train pulled away and rushed into the tunnel, leaving Alec and Natalie standing on the platform, watching it.

“Holy shit,” Natalie breathed.

Alec jolted and turned on her. By his surprised expression, he hadn’t even realized she was standing there. Thankfully he didn’t look so wild anymore, but more like a man.

“That was definitely our stalker,” Alec said with a sigh as he wiped off his sweaty brow.

She nodded. “But—but she’s a woman!”

He wrinkled his brow. “So? So are you, and you’re a badass.”

Natalie felt herself blush even though this was not the time to get all schoolgirl.

“Not really,” she muttered.

“Well, either way, we need to let Kai know about this.” Alec reached for her hand. “It lets Rehu off the hook, for sure.”

“But who is she?” Natalie asked.

Alec shrugged. “No clue. But I’m sure as shit going to find out. Because I’m going to get that bitch before she gets any more of us.”

15

The door to Kai’s apartment swung open and she stood inside, dressed in a flowing silk robe, her blond hair with its dark streaks down around her shoulders. She looked softer without her usual power suit and done-up hair and makeup, but she still didn’t really do it for Alec. Without thinking, he took a side glance at Natalie. Yeah, he liked his girls a bit tougher.

“Come in,” she said, motioning inside with one elegantly manicured hand.

Alec started to move, but Natalie reached back and blocked the way with her forearm so that he couldn’t make it past her. He stared at her.

“What?”

She ignored him and kept her gaze firmly on Kai. “Is your psycho boyfriend here?”

Kai’s face fell and there was true sadness in her gaze. “No. He . . . he took off after I confronted him about Alec. I don’t know where he is. Honestly.”

Natalie searched the Mummy Girl’s face for a minute, but then she nodded like she was satisfied with the answer. “Okay.”

She moved her arm and waved at Alec to come in.

“Wow, my big protector,” Alec muttered as he moved past her. “And you thought you weren’t a badass.”

He stifled a grin as Natalie blushed dark red. It was way too easy and way too fun to make her do that.

Kai led them into the living room and sat down on a big leather chair as she motioned them toward a matching sofa.

“So what happened?” Kai asked. “Alec’s message said you guys saw the stalker?”

Alec nodded, but didn’t speak as he looked around the room. It was a nice apartment, decorated with tasteful Egyptian influences and bright, beautiful colors. It screamed good taste and sophistication in a way Jekyll and Hyde couldn’t match.

Except for the lotion bottles.

They were on every available surface, including tables and even the seats of some chairs in the bar area in the great room. They were in all varieties, from the super-cheap drugstore brands to Chanel and Dior brands that even Alec knew cost an arm and a leg.

“God, add a bunch of tissue boxes and this is a fifteen-year-old boy’s dream,” Alec said with a laugh.

Kai stared at him. “Really, Alec?”

“Hope you own stock in that company of yours. And in Johnson & Johnson, Suave, and all these other companies,” he continued, highly amusing himself, if no one else.

Kai folded her arms. “Are you done?”

Alec stared at the ceiling and then said, “No, wait, I have another one—”

Natalie swatted at Alec’s arm and hissed, “Alec, knock it off.”

He stopped and stared. Kai’s face was darkening to a deep, angry red. Impressive; he had never bothered her that much before.

“The lotion,” Kai said, slowly and succinctly, like she was talking to an idiot (which she probably thought he was), “is to keep my skin from drying out. I was mummified, remember, stupid?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Alec said with a shake of his head. “But come on! You have to admit it’s a little weird.”

“Like all the crap you do?” Kai folded her arms. “I mean, your garbage man must think your trash filled with used razors and hair clumps is pretty weird, too. And your neighbors have got to love the howling.”

Natalie turned on him. “None of us are exactly rocking the normalcy. Glass houses, Alec.”

He pursed his lips. Girl monsters never had a sense of humor about their weirdness. It was too bad—that had been some of his best material.

Kai gave him one last evil eye, then turned her attention to Natalie. “So . . . what happened? I’m asking you because the mutt is too much of an idiot to address.”

Natalie nodded. “I agree.”

“All right, all right. Just tell the story.” Alec shook his head.

Quickly, she told Kai what had happened when they left Jekyll and Hyde’s apartment.

Kai flopped back against her chair with a low whistle. “So he . . . is a she?”

Alec laughed. “You two seem so surprised by that, but here you are, all tough and monstery. So much for women’s rights, huh?”

Natalie shrugged. “I guess it’s just we’ve all been so used to the pitchforks being wielded by hordes of angry men . . . we weren’t expecting a woman to be our serial killer.”

Kai sighed. “New century, new fears.”

“At this point, we have to figure out who she is,” Natalie continued. “The witnesses in Ellis’s beating and Jekyll’s poisoning aren’t going to be easily accessible to us, but maybe now that we have a description, we could go back to Blob’s apartment and see if anyone saw her.”

“Actually,” Alec interrupted, “I already kind of did that.”

Natalie turned toward him, forehead wrinkled in confusion. “You’ve been with me since we saw the woman; how could you go back to Blob’s?”

“Um, it wasn’t tonight. I went back the day we found his body and talked to someone in the building.” He shrugged. “Nothing.”

Natalie blinked, but he could see the beginnings of hurt in her stare. She hid that stuff pretty well, but the better he got to know her, the more he realized that she felt things pretty deeply.

“You went back . . . by yourself. And you didn’t tell me, even though . . .” She stopped and turned her face away from him.

Alec shifted. He hadn’t told anyone about his return trip to Blob’s apartment. Especially Natalie.

“Look . . . I didn’t tell you because you don’t approve of my . . .” He hesitated. “Use of recreational drugs to control myself. And since it was a drug dealer who I made contact with—”

Natalie huffed out a breath. “We’ve been working together on this since the beginning.”

Kai’s eyebrows were now both lifted high. “Should I be here for this?”

Alec shot her a glare, then turned his attention back to Natalie. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. My contact didn’t see anyone he didn’t recognize the day Blob died. I sort of figured since there was nothing to tell, it wasn’t a big deal.”

Natalie nodded, but there was very little understanding in the way she pinched her lips and refused to meet his stare.

“Sure. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, it gives us one less lead to follow. But it doesn’t help us figure out who she is. We know her face now, but it’s not like she flashed ID at us on the train.”

Kai frowned and then pushed to her feet. “I might have an idea. Hang on.”

As she left the room, Natalie got to her feet and paced away from Alec, pretending to examine the decorative items on a shelf in the living room. Alec watched her.

After a minute, he got up, too.

“Natalie, I didn’t want you to think less of me.”

She froze with a hand outstretched to pull a book off the shelf and turned to look at him. “What?”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you about going back to Blob’s.”

Alec shifted. He normally didn’t get this Dr.-Phil-about-your-feelings . . . but he really didn’t want Natalie to hate him.

“I’m not that judgmental,” Natalie said softly. “I mean, yeah, I made a couple cracks about you carrying, but I get it. The full moon must be awful; I can’t judge you for looking for ways to make it better. I just wish I’d known.”

“Why?” he asked, moving toward her a few steps.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

He gave a half-smile. “Sure it has nothing to do with all that kissing?”

She blushed and once again dropped her gaze, but this time it wasn’t because she was pissed. She moved her weight from one foot to the other and then said, “You really shouldn’t provoke Kai so much.”

He smiled. “But it’s fun. C’mon . . . admit it . . . you like it.”

Natalie tried not to smile, but her lips twitched and betrayed her. “You suck.”

“Nope, that’s vampires,” he whispered, then he caught her chin and kissed her.

Just as he had hoped, after a brief second Natalie leaned into the kiss. Her lips were soft and full and even though he was pretty sure she didn’t go making out with guys all that often, her lack of experience was made up for by her enthusiasm. Which was awesome.

“Wow.”

Natalie jerked away from Alec at the sound of Kai’s voice in the doorway. She blushed as she dared a quick glance at the Mummy Girl. She stood with a very old, very thick book in her hands, staring at the two of them with wide eyes.

Alec let out a low sigh. He didn’t really care if Kai had an opinion about them making out, but Natalie probably did. And he didn’t really like being interrupted, either.

“I was only kidding about that boyfriend thing, Natalie. I didn’t think you’d take it so seriously,” Kai said, and sat down in the chair across from them.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Natalie muttered as she moved back to the couch.

Alec kept himself from frowning and took his own place a second time. “Yeah, apparently, not her boyfriend.”

She shot him a look, but he shrugged. She kept saying that so strenuously it was starting to hurt his feelings a little. But maybe that was just his heightened sensations talking due to the upcoming full moon.

“So what do you have there?” he asked, happy to have a distraction.

Kai set the big book down on the table between them. “This is the Van Helsing family tree.”

“What?” Natalie asked, snapped from her embarrassment by Kai’s stunning assertion. She reached for the book and then snatched her hand back before she could touch it. “This looks really old.”

Kai nodded. “I assume it is. I think it’s the original.”

“Where would you get an original Van Helsing family tree?” Alec asked as he stared at the book.

Like Natalie, he didn’t have any desire to touch it. It might burn or self-destruct.

“Most humans wouldn’t even acknowledge the family really exists outside of horror movies and a little bit of seriously cool anime. It’s not like you could find it at the New York Public Library.”

“Oh, I didn’t,” Kai said with a shrug. “I took it from Van Helsing’s townhome.”

Natalie shoved to her feet to back even farther away from the book. “What are you saying?”

“Um, that I took it from Van Helsing’s townhome.” Kai blinked. “Did I stutter?”

Alec rolled his eyes. Kai could pretend that her statement wasn’t that shocking, but it was. “You know what she’s asking,” Alec said. “Come on. What do you mean? How did you do that? When did you do that?”

“Ohhhh, that.” Kai sighed. “Okay, so about two hours ago, right after Hyde told us that Jekyll was killed, I took a stroll around the city. And where did I find myself but right in front of Van Helsing’s townhouse. I figured it would be rude of me not to make a call on our old friend. But he wasn’t home. So I just let myself in.”

Natalie was still staring in utter disbelief. “And how did you ‘let yourself in,’ exactly?”

Kai tilted her head. “Um, I broke in. I figured that would be obvious. I don’t exactly have a key.”

“How? How did you break in?” Alec sputtered.

Kai laughed. “Oh, honey, you’re not the only one with some illegal skills. I’ve been alive for thousands of years. I know a lot of stuff you haven’t even thought to learn yet.”

Alec leaned back. He couldn’t help but be impressed. And sort of want to trade secrets. “Yeah, we should talk about that.”

“Not now, Alec,” Natalie said with an exasperated sigh.

She flopped back onto the couch and finally touched the book. She didn’t explode, though, so that was good.

“Did anyone see you?” Natalie muttered.

Kai shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

“Not that you know of.”

“Natalie . . . why do you keep repeating everything I say?” Kai asked. “It’s really annoying.”

Natalie covered her face. “I just keep thinking of Van Helsing in his wheelchair. Yeah, he’s so small, so wrinkled . . . but there is still power in him. An ability to get things done if he wants to or needs to. And then there was that parting threat about the truce being broken.” She shivered. “Kai, this could restart the war, don’t you get that?”

Kai stared at her evenly. “Natalie, three of us are dead. We’re already in a war, don’t you get that?”

“She has a point,” Alec said with a glance at Natalie.

Kai nodded. “We have to know who our enemy is. Now that you’ve seen her, we know she’s not Rehu or even Hyde or the old man himself.”

“Okay,” Natalie said slowly.

“But she could still be a Van Helsing,” Alec finished. “It’s true, we all got so stuck on a guy being involved, it isn’t like we asked about women or looked for them.”

Kai nodded. “And since we didn’t know much about who did this, that’s why I went to Van Helsing’s and took the book. If they are involved in this, we need all the information about them that we can get. We’ve forgotten too much over the years of the truce.”

“And what if they’re not involved?” Natalie asked, raising her hands in exasperation.

Kai shrugged. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

Alec took the book from the table and set it on his lap. “If you aren’t going to look, I am.”

He flipped through the pages and his eyes went wide. Page after page had columns running over and over through them. Names, dates of birth and death, details of both, details of children . . . it seemed like the Van Helsings had chronicled everything about themselves, down to their favorite food. It was going to take forever to get through it all without some guidance.

“God, these things are detailed,” he muttered.

“Human lives are short,” Kai said with a soft sigh. “They like to keep track of silly things like this.”

“Yeah, an Egyptian should talk. Weren’t your people building pyramids and putting stories on walls about the time you were . . . born . . . created . . . killed . . . whatever?” Alec asked.

“Yeah, like I said, humans.” Kai got up and walked around the back of the couch to look over his shoulder. “Look at the recent generations. It doesn’t really matter what the Van Helsings were doing four hundred years ago.”

“Good point,” Alec said.

Natalie stayed exactly where she was as the two of them searched through the book.

“Don’t you want to help?” Alec asked with a quick glance her way.

She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to look. I don’t want to see the proud evidence of the history of a family that has taken so much pleasure in hunting and destroying our kind.”

Alec looked at her full-on, and there was all that normally hidden emotion on her face again. Pain. Fear. He wished he could take it away.

“I wasn’t the only ‘monster’ my father created, you know,” she said softly, almost to herself. “I’m just the only one left alive. The others were successfully hunted down and killed.”

Kai stared at her. “By the Van Helsings?”

Natalie shrugged. “By them or people like them, it doesn’t matter. People who equated monster with evil and acted accordingly.”

“All the more reason to find out who this person who’s hunting us is . . . and why,” Alec said. “We’re an endangered species, Nat. And I for one don’t want to go the way of the dodo.”

Natalie seemed to ponder that for a minute, then she got up and moved across the room on slow, plodding feet. “Okay, okay. Let me see it, too.”

The three of them huddled over the book, turning the pages and reading over the descriptions in silence for a little while.

“Okay, here we are,” Alec said as he flipped a few more pages to the end of the book. “These are the most recent records of the family. It looks like there are . . .”—he hesitated as he looked over the pages and counted in his head—“seven Van Helsings alive aside from the guy you and Drake met with, Natalie.”

“Who are they?” she asked.

Kai shot her a look and motioned to the place on the page where Alec was reading. “Looks like two are kids, too young to be involved . . . yet.”

“Three live on the West Coast . . .” Alec said. “But there are two here in the city.”

“Okay,” Natalie said, and she leaned closer to look at the book herself. “God, this handwriting is so old-fashioned. The old man must keep it up himself.”

“He’s meticulous, too,” Alec complained.

“Think they meet up once a week?” Kai asked with a chuckle. “Maybe in a church basement?”

“I’ve been in this guy’s house,” Natalie said with a shake of her head. “He doesn’t even know basements exist, let alone ever been in one. Though I wouldn’t doubt they meet. Probably at holidays. With cognac. To gloat.”

“But the Van Helsings living in New York are guys,” Alec said. He couldn’t help the disappointment lacing his tone.

Natalie bit her lip as Alec got to his feet and paced around the apartment. He was annoyed by the dead end, but when he looked at her he could see she was terrified. It was the first time he’d ever seen her like that and he wished he could unsee it.

“So now what?” Kai asked, straightening up behind the couch and rubbing her eyes with a groan of frustration. “Where do we go if not here?”

Natalie continued to flip through the book as if there were something magical to be found there. But after a few minutes she flipped it shut in exasperation and a folded piece of paper slipped from between two pages. It fluttered to the floor at her feet. She picked it up and stared at it, her eyes widening.

“What?” Alec asked. “What is that look for?”

She stared at him. “Alec, this is the medallion that Trench Coat was wearing.”

She flipped the paper toward him and Kai, and, sure enough, it was an intricate drawing of the square medallion stamped with flame and ornamented with a large orange jewel. It was labeled VAN HELSING FAMILY MEDALLION.

“Holy shit,” Alec muttered as he took the paper.

“Then that means all this is Van Helsing–related,” Kai muttered.

Natalie got up and shook her head. “But Drake said they don’t use outside forces beyond the occasional mob. So why would they send some woman who isn’t in their family tree? What is she?”

“There’s one person who could tell us,” Alec said as he tossed the sketch across the table. “The old man himself. Are you guys with me?”

“Definitely,” Kai said as she straightened up.

“That bitch made me run,” Natalie said. “I never run. I want to get her for that as much as anything else. Let’s go.”

The most difficult thing about stalking a psychopath in a wheelchair was that psychopaths in wheelchairs take cars everywhere. And it turned out that cabbies didn’t really comply when you shouted, “Follow that Town Car!” as much as they did in movies. Stupid movies.

And yet Natalie still found herself sitting on a park bench with Kai and Alec, watching an apartment building across the street from where said Town Car was now parked.

“He’s waiting for someone,” Alec muttered.

Kai shrugged. “Let’s not get all excited. It might not be her at all.”

“Yeah, but—” Natalie began. She didn’t get to finish, because Alec leaned forward and his bright wolfish eyes were focused and intense.

“Shhh, she’s coming,” he interrupted her.

Kai looked around and then glared at him. “Where? I don’t see her. How do you know she’s coming?”

Natalie shrugged. “Dog nose. Trust him.”

He shot her a quick smile, but it fell as a woman came around the corner and started toward the building they had been watching. Natalie’s heart began to pound. Same blond hair as on the train; trench coat draped across her arm.

Natalie sucked in a breath. “God, she looks so . . . so normal.”

“So do we,” Alec said with a grimace.

Kai nodded. “Good point.”

Natalie continued to stare at the woman as the driver ran around the Town Car and helped Van Helsing into his wheelchair. The woman froze as she saw the old man and his servant and slowly moved toward him.

“Fuck, I wish I could hear them,” Kai snapped, leaning so far on the edge of the park bench that she nearly fell onto the sidewalk.

“Convict ears are on it,” Natalie said, and got to her feet. She took a quick look up and down the side street and then scurried across. She had to be careful. Van Helsing had seen her before. If he had any inkling that they were following him . . .

Well, it probably wouldn’t end well one way or another.

She leaned against a building and ducked into a doorway. She could only hope she was close enough at half a block up. She leaned forward, but she could only hear snippets of what was being said.

“—Georgia, you are putting—in danger—” Van Helsing’s words were truncated by street noise and the breeze.

“—loved him—dead—them,” she retorted, and Natalie could see that the woman—Georgia, she surmised her name was—was angry.

She might not be a Van Helsing, but she had the focused drive of one. The old man said something else Natalie couldn’t hear and then reached up to briefly touch the woman’s face. She turned away and moved toward the building. He watched her go and then motioned for the driver to put him back in the car.

Natalie pressed herself back against the door as the car drove away.

It only took a moment for Alec and Kai to join her as she stepped out and stared up at the building the strange woman had disappeared into.

“So, what did you hear?” Alec asked.

“Her name is Georgia,” Natalie said, her tone flat as anger rose up in her.

That bitch had stalked them. She had caused Ellis’s death, forced Blob—kind Bob—into a freezer to die slowly and probably painfully; she had poisoned Jekyll and sent Hyde off on a spree that Natalie didn’t even want to consider.

She was little more than a terrorist, attacking with no thought to consequences.

“Okay, I’m seeing a crazy monster face here,” Alec said, touching her arm and snapping her back to reality. “Let’s not go all Hyde before we have a plan. What’s her relationship to Van Helsing?”

“I don’t know,” she said through clenched teeth. “He was warning her—I’m guessing about us. But she said something about love and death.”

“Driving forces for any good monster novel,” Kai said with a shiver.

“Let’s go,” Natalie said through clenched teeth. She started up the street toward the front door to the building.

“Wait,” Alec said as he caught her arm. “Whoa, there, cowgirl. Where are we going?”

Natalie looked first at Kai, then at Alec. “I want to talk to her.”

“I don’t know, Natalie,” Kai said with a shake of her head. “It seems risky when we don’t really know who she is. What if we watch her for a few days—”

“No!” Natalie cut Kai off with a firm shake of her head. “Not good enough. If we wait, she could target someone else in our group. Even if we’re all on the lookout for her, she’d still have the upper hand.”

She stared at the nondescript apartment and thought of the nondescript woman who had caused so much pain and fear in their lives.

“I want that . . . that person to face a monster without being able to attack it in secret. If we’re going to take care of this, let’s take care of it. Once and for all.”

Kai pursed her lips and Natalie could see her friend searching her face. “Wow, you really are monstering out.”

“It’s kind of terrifying and awesome at the same time. I can hardly keep from hugging you right here on the street.” Alec shook his head wildly.

“I think I earned it,” Natalie growled low in her throat. “The monstering out, not the hug.”

Kai shrugged. “I’d say we all have. So, yeah, let’s go in and see her.”

“Okay,” Alec said. “But we’re going to have to be smart. There’s a doorman to get through, so we have to be careful and quiet.”

“I’ll take care of the doorman,” Kai said. She fluffed her hair and pulled a little bottle of lotion from her purse. After a quick application, she popped a couple buttons on the top of her blouse and headed for the door. “You two watch for your opportunity.”

Natalie blinked as she watched her friend shimmy up to the doorman and start flirting.

“That was unexpected,” she whispered to Alec.

He grinned and motioned toward Kai. “Impressive, though. Look, the guy is already drooling all over her. He’s not watching, so let’s go before she decides to back off.”

He grabbed her hand and the two of them slipped past Kai and her new friend and into the foyer hallway of the building. Stopping their progress, Alec grinned and began searching the mailboxes lining the hall. “Georgia, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah, but we don’t have her last name.”

“Don’t need it. There’s only one G. on these boxes here. G. Winslow, seems as good a place as any to start. Five-fifteen.” Alec moved to the elevator and pressed up.

“Not six-sixty-six?” Natalie asked as the elevator jolted and began carrying them upstairs.

“That would be a little obvious, wouldn’t it? Besides, that’s Drake’s apartment number, isn’t it?”

Natalie stared at him. “Are you kidding?”

“No. He specifically picked six-six-six as his apartment number,” Alec said, grinning.

The door dinged and slid open. “I never know when you’re kidding or being seri—”

Natalie didn’t get to finish. As she stepped from the elevator and into the hallway, someone hiding just outside the doors caught her arm and hauled her away from Alec.

Taken off guard, for a moment Natalie didn’t fight. She just stared at the woman who now held her arm in a death grip. Georgia Winslow.

The same Georgia Winslow who had a small, but very deadly, pistol pointed directly in Natalie’s face.

16

All of Natalie’s monster instincts screamed at her in no uncertain terms (and in several languages) to fight. Her chest burned with an itch of rage that she hadn’t felt since the last time she was chased with pitchforks. In any other moment, any other century, she would have roared to life and fought like a banshee.

Only she couldn’t. Georgia Winslow’s gun was right in her face, there was no way even the worst shot in the world would miss her at this range. Monster strength and monster healing aside, she wasn’t sure she could survive that.

And then there was the fact of Winslow’s crazy eyes.

Natalie had seen madness hundreds of times over the centuries. There had been madness in monsters driven to their edge by living in hiding. And she’d seen madness in humans. First in her creator/father. The “good doctor” had been wild with it by the time he was killed, hurtled from a balcony by one of his own creations.

Later, she’d seen even more madness in the crowds who hunted her, a madness created by fear or hatred, built to a frenzy by mercenaries and profiteers like the Van Helsings.

Whatever the cause, it was never good.

It wasn’t good today. There was only insanity in the other woman’s stare and nothing else to balance it out. That meant Natalie wasn’t going to be able to debate with her.

“What are you looking at, freak?” Georgia hissed. “Stop staring and come with me, bitch.”

She caught Natalie’s arm and started to haul her along the hallway toward the apartment Natalie and Alec had been heading toward in the first place. Georgia was surprisingly strong, too. Not monster strong, but the chick did Pilates or lifted weights or something.

Alec had been holding back, blocking the elevator door with his shoulder, which was sending a piercing buzz through the hallway. But as Georgia dragged Natalie away, he moved forward toward them and let the elevator shut.

“Hey, now. There’s no need for this.”

His voice was quiet, but Natalie could see anger glinting in those wolfish eyes of his. He was coiled and ready to strike. She could only hope he had control over himself enough that she wouldn’t get her face shot off.

“Watch yourself, Wolf,” Georgia hissed as she bumped her door with her hip and hauled Natalie inside. “These are silver bullets.”

Alec froze and the color drained from his normally tanned cheeks. “Shit.”

“Yeah, shit.” Georgia laughed, a dry humorless sound. “You were next on my list, but I’m more than happy to take the zombie out instead.”

Natalie sighed. This wasn’t really the time, but come on!

“I’m not a zombie exactly—” she began.

“Shut up!” Georgia snapped, and shoved the gun harder against her temple. “I don’t want to hear you talking.”

If the silver-bullet reveal had slowed Alec down, the effect didn’t last long. He scowled and took a long step toward the door. Georgia responded by yanking Natalie into the apartment itself.

“Don’t. Silver bullets, Alec,” Natalie whispered, meeting his gaze.

Everything in her willed him to stay back and stay safe. If he got hurt—no, killed because of her, she didn’t think she could live with it.

“No, I’m not going to back off, Nat. You should know better by now.” He shifted his focus to Winslow. He edged forward until they were all inside and pushed the door shut behind him. “Listen, Georgia—”

Her captor yanked Natalie closer and her gun hand began to shake. “How the fuck do you know my name?”

Alec sucked in a breath. He was fighting for calm with every fiber of his being. Which Natalie appreciated, since she was going to be the one with the bullet in her skull if his full-moon rage took over.

“I could ask you how you knew Natalie and I were coming up the elevator.”

For a moment Winslow hesitated, then she shoved her gun flush to Natalie’s temple again. “You first.”

“We followed Van Helsing,” Alec said in that soothing tone that had probably gotten the panties off dozens of women.

“That idiot,” Georgia bit out. “I told him he shouldn’t have come.”

“And just how did you know to grab me?” Natalie urged. Talking to Winslow was at least slowing down the shot to the head the woman was so desperate to deliver.

Georgia shot her a side-glance. “I saw you on the street when I came up to the building.”

Natalie’s eyes went wide. They’d all been watching Georgia and she’d shown nothing to make any of them think she recognized them. Perhaps there was something else besides the madness in this woman.

At least Natalie had to try to find out. It might be her only hope.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” she whispered. “We just want to talk—”

“I don’t care why you’re here, you freak,” Georgia interrupted. Her voice was angry, thin, shrill, and broken. “That’s what you all are—freaks! Monsters! I know that, even if no one else does. You think you can hide from what you are? You can’t. I won’t let you. He was right, you know. When he told me about monsters, I didn’t believe him, but over time—”

Natalie ground her teeth. Clearly this little tirade was going to go on for a long time if she didn’t nip it in the bud. “Jesus, you sound like the worst kind of horror movie,” Natalie said through clenched teeth. “Will you stop the pointless drama monologue and just get to the point? Then you can kill me or turn us in or whatever it is you plan to do.”

Alec’s eyes widened. “Seriously, Natalie? Right now you want to antagonize?”

She shrugged. Right now she had a gun to her head, her neck was getting a crick from twisting all weird, and she was tired of being hunted.

She was just tired, honestly.

“I just want to know why I’m getting shot this time,” Natalie snapped.

Georgia was breathing heavily. The heat of it stirred Natalie’s hair. “I’m doing this for Sam.”

Alec’s eyes narrowed. “Sam?”

Georgia blinked at tears. “My husband.”

“Samuel Van Helsing,” Alec breathed. “He was in the book.”

“Well, he’s dead,” Georgia snapped.

Alec blinked. “But . . . he wasn’t listed as deceased. It said he was still living in the city.”

“The records,” Georgia said with a shake of her head. “The old man is always behind on updating those things. Sam died three months ago.”

Natalie swallowed. “How?”

“We never should have let the war end,” she whispered. “He told me that over and over again. He told me that we could make his family name one of honor again. One of fear.”

Natalie stared. Georgia’s eyes had lit up with an almost religious fervor. She wasn’t a real Van Helsing, not by blood. She was a fucking acolyte. A fangirl.

“His grandfather told us to leave it alone. He tried to break us up, said I was feeding into Sam’s worst impulses, but he wouldn’t leave me. And he wouldn’t stop. Not until you killed him.”

Natalie and Alec stared at each other, then she shook her head slowly.

“I—I haven’t killed anyone.”

Georgia shook her by the arm. “Maybe you didn’t, but your kind did, and you’re all the same.” Her breath caught and the tears that filled her eyes began to roll down her cheeks. “I brought one of you to him and he was struck down like an animal.”

Alec took half a step back, the color draining from his face as her accusation sank in. “Wait, are you saying you think someone from our group murdered your husband?”

Georgia’s face crumpled, filled with real and true pain. For a brief moment Natalie actually felt sorry for her. Except for the gun-to-her-head part.

“I don’t think it, I know it!” Georgia sobbed.

Her hand shook even harder, and that included her trigger finger. Natalie kept waiting for the gun to go off and for all this chatter to have been pointless.

“Listen,” she said, hoping to calm the woman down. “I know you don’t want to believe it, but all of us, er, monsters are just trying to fit in now. We don’t do that kind of thing.”

“What?” Georgia smirked. “Murder? Please don’t try to pretend away the past.”

Alec flinched. “Not to get all don’t-be-a-bigot and everything, but murder is why some of us were labeled as monsters in the past, not all of us. One way or another, we’re trying to move on. To fit in and have normal lives.”

“Don’t lie to me!” Georgia screamed. Control was gone now. Reason was gone. “He killed my husband!”

“Who?” Alec shouted back, just as unreasonable. “Tell us who! Was it Ellis? I can’t imagine it was Bob or even Jekyll, but was it?”

“It doesn’t matter which one of you,” Georgia said. “You’re all going to pay.” Her tears stopped and her voice became flat and almost emotionless. Terrifying. “Sam told me we had to finish what we started generations ago. I’m the only one left with the balls to do it.”

Natalie froze. Georgia wasn’t kidding. And she was unstoppable. There was about to be a bullet in Natalie’s brain and she had a feeling that would end any of her monster healing ability. She wasn’t freaking Wolverine . . . not that he was real . . .

“Hey,” she said in a last-ditch effort to save herself. “Aren’t you supposed to burn me alive? If you shoot me, doesn’t that mess up your classic novel/movie death system?”

“You’re right.” With a scowl, Georgia shoved her aside, turned the gun on Alec, and said, “This is for you.”

She fired the gun before Natalie could stop her. Everything felt like it moved in slow motion. Natalie lunged for Georgia just as Alec turned away from the gun’s explosion, but she saw that she couldn’t stop the bullet.

What she could see was that at that same moment, the door to the apartment flew open and Kai jumped inside, diving in front of Alec with a strange, guttural cry in a language Natalie had never heard before.

The bullet hit Kai in the side and her warrior declaration turned to a pained grunt as she fell to the floor. Immediately, blood began to seep from the wound in her side and she let out a strangled sound of pain.

Alec dropped down beside her. “Kai!”

Natalie took a quick glance at the two of them. Alec ripped the bottom of his shirt and smashed the fabric down on Kai’s wound as the mummy writhed in pain.

The rage Natalie had felt when she saw Georgia on the street doubled, tripled, only this time there wasn’t anything to stop her from unleashing it. For the first time in almost a century she felt like the monster she was.

And she was going to live it.

With a massive roar and a swing of her arm, she swatted away Georgia’s gun before Georgia could fire a second time and hurt another one of her friends. Georgia might have worked out from time to time, but she was still human—and Natalie felt Georgia’s arm break as the gun skittered across the floor.

Georgia howled, her cries of pain mingling with Kai’s, but, despite her injury, Georgia rushed toward Natalie, not away.

“Bitch!” Georgia screamed.

Natalie caught her arms, squeezing extra hard on the injured one, and the two women began to grapple. They slammed across the apartment and crashed into furniture, toppling bookcases and dumping their contents, flipping chairs hard enough that their wooden legs flew off.

Behind them, Kai let out a groan. Natalie turned to look at her friend and Georgia took advantage of the distraction. She yanked on Natalie’s hand to free herself and instead two of Natalie’s fingers, which were attached by delicate scar tissue, tore free and skittered across the tile floor and under one of the few upright chairs still in the living room.

Natalie roared in pain. And wrath. Her ability to think, to rationalize, seemed to have been removed along with her fingers. All she could do was react. With a grunt, she caught Georgia by the waist and lifted her over her head. There was an open window across the room and she found herself moving toward it.

A brief moment of clarity came upon her as she stood staring at the curtains fluttering in the breeze. She had to stop. She had to become more human than monster.

She began to lower Georgia to the floor, but before she could finish, the other woman yanked a switchblade from her boot and slammed it deep into Natalie’s arm.

Natalie screeched. “Goddamn it! Why did he have to put so many nerves in there?”

Georgia stabbed again and Natalie threw her away.

Unfortunately . . . perhaps unfortunately . . . she threw her in the direction of the open window. Natalie fell on her knees against the sill and watched as the other woman spiraled five floors down.

She was strangely quiet, staring up in triumph at Natalie . . . at least until she smashed into a parked car below and set off its car alarm. It beeped with an increasingly sickly sound that was soon followed by screams as people on the street realized what had happened.

Natalie spun around on her knees, clutching her fingerless hand and her bleeding arm against her chest. It was over.

But at what cost?

Alec grabbed Kai’s hand and pressed it over the bloody shred of T-shirt he had been holding against the gunshot wound to her side.

“Here,” he snapped, hoping a strong tone would keep her focused despite the pain and probably mortal injury. “Hold this, I have to check on Natalie.”

But to his surprise, the mummy waved him off. “Go!” she ordered. “I’ve got this.”

Alec put What the hell? on his list of questions to ask later and slid on his knees across the floor until he reached Natalie.

She was still slumped over, her back against the windowsill Georgia had just departed over. She was holding her bleeding hand and arm, but she was staring straight ahead. Not blinking. Her eyes glazed over.

At least she was breathing.

He reached out and then hesitated. The last thing he wanted to do was have her freak out when he touched her. It would only make a bad situation worse. He did, however, have to get her aware enough to get out of here, with a busted-up mummy in tow. The cops were certainly on their way.

“Natalie,” he said softly.

She continued to stare into nothingness.

“Natalie!” he repeated, this time much sharper.

Finally, she blinked and shook her head. The fog in her stare cleared and she looked over at him.

“Alec?” she whispered. “Is Kai okay?”

“Better than expected,” he said. “I’m worried about you now. Aside from the finger thing and your damaged arm, are you okay?”

She looked down at the stubs where her fingers had been and flinched. “I can reattach them.”

He nodded. “Okay, I’m going to find them right now. But once I do, we have to go, girl. The cops are going to be here in a minute.”

“The cops,” she repeated, her voice still way too blank for his liking. “They know me from my job. They said they knew where to find me.”

Alec caught a glimpse of the bloody fingers under a chair a few feet away and dove over to sweep them up. He counted them and the number matched how many Natalie was missing. With a sigh of relief, he held them out to her.

“That may be true, honey, but even your job can’t save you from being questioned and arrested if the police find us in this dead woman’s apartment. Especially if you’re missing fingers and bleeding all over. I think they might put two and two together.”

Natalie nodded as she took her fingers and put them in her purse, which had come off her shoulder in the fray. She stared down into the half-full bag at the torn digits and let out a hard, loud burst of laughter.

“Oh shit, my fingers look ridiculous in there,” she muttered.

Alec groaned. Yeah, she was all fucked up from what had just happened. So now it was time for some tough love. Tough like. Whatever.

“Look at me,” he snapped as he grabbed her shoulders and shook. “You have every right to lose it a little bit, and I promise you that as soon as we’re back at our apartment, I will hold your hair while you puke or cry or whatever. But right now I need your help, Natalie. So snap out of it.”

She blinked once, twice, and then she pushed to her feet and nodded. “Yes. Of course.”

She spun on Kai and looked down at her. The mummy was doing all right, considering she’d been shot. Pressing the T-shirt against herself, she watched Natalie and Alec with unmasked interest.

“Can you get up?” Natalie asked.

Kai nodded slowly and started to push to her feet. Natalie caught her arm and slung it around her good shoulder to offer her support.

“Okay, Wolf. What’s your plan to get us out of here?” she asked.

Her voice was bright, but falsely so. Still, Alec appreciated and respected her attempt to get it together.

He peeked out the door. No one was out there. Anyone home right now had probably already run downstairs to see what had happened, or was getting the full show from the comfort of their own windows.

He waved for Natalie and Kai to move into the hallway in front of him, but when Natalie started for the elevator, he shook his head.

“The lobby area will be crawling with witnesses and maybe even cops,” he said softly. “I think there’s a back stairway over here. Let’s take that.”

She followed him around a few turns in the hallway and, sure enough, they found a fire stairway. There was an alarm attached to it, but with a few flicks of his wrist, Alec disconnected it and pushed the door open, revealing a dimly lit stairwell.

Through the thin walls, Alec could hear the sirens approaching. An ambulance for Georgia, even though he doubted the woman would need it. Being dropped five stories and hitting a car? Most monsters couldn’t survive that, let alone humans.

And the cops were probably out there, too. Interviewing witnesses who might talk about three people fitting their description entering the building. Worse, someone might say that Georgia hadn’t jumped or fallen, but had been thrown. From certain angles in the buildings around them, Alec was sure someone could have seen Natalie hurtle the woman to her death.

“Alec,” Natalie whispered as she met his eyes.

She was thinking the same things he was. Only they hurt her a lot more.

“It’s okay,” he reassured her. “I won’t let anyone get to you, I promise.”

She hesitated for a minute, then nodded.

“How’s Kai?” he asked as he led them down, step by step.

“I’m okay,” Kai groaned. Her stare was still filled with pain, but she was helping Natalie by taking steps on her own and holding some of her own weight.

It took them what seemed like forever, but finally they stood in front of the exit door. Based on location, Alec figured it went to a back alley. At least, he hoped it did.

Alec disconnected its alarm and slowly opened the door. To his utter relief, there was no one outside, just a smelly trash receptacle and a few pigeons pecking around for food.

“Okay,” he whispered as he looked around for any trouble and eased into the alley with the girls behind him. “Let’s just be careful. Cool. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

Natalie shifted her weight and motioned to Kai with her still-fingerless hand. “Um, how do you suggest I do that while hauling Kai?”

Kai glared at her. “Let me try to walk on my own. Oh, and put your damn hand in your pocket; it looks crazy with those stubs.”

As Natalie flinched and did as she’d been told, Kai straightened up. She sucked through her teeth in pain, but managed to stay upright and take a few practice steps on her own.

“I’ll be okay,” she said, her voice stronger than before. “But can I have your jacket to cover up the blood? It’s a little obvious.”

Alec shrugged out of his hoodie, even though it covered up his torn shirt, and handed it over. A bit of belly showing was way better than Kai’s bloody side exposed to any and all bystanders.

She zipped it with a tiny grunt of discomfort. It looked weird over her suit, but not as weird as a big spot of blood on her ribs.

“I’m sorry,” Natalie whispered. “I’m so sorry you’re hurt.”

Kai turned on her in surprise. “It’s okay, Natalie. It’s not anyone’s fault but Georgia’s.”

Natalie flinched at their attacker’s name. She was wrecked by this, but that was something to deal with later.

Alec led the way out of the alley with Kai behind him and Natalie taking up the rear. The street was visible at the end of the alley and they moved out onto it cautiously. It wasn’t the side of the building where Georgia had fallen, though, but around the corner.

The sirens were really loud now; there had to be ten police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks on the other side of the building. Still nothing on their side, though, except a few pale bystanders getting out of the way.

Quickly, Alec hailed a cab. Once they had all climbed into the back, he told the driver to go to Natalie’s apartment.

The cabbie nodded and turned up his radio as he rounded the corner and took them right in front of the scene with the cops.

Natalie stared out the window and Alec looked with her. They had already covered Georgia’s body up with a sheet. A crowd was gathered, staring and taking pictures as the cops made measurements and collected information from the doorman.

“What happened?” Kai asked, her tone strained as she glanced at the cabbie in the rearview mirror.

He shrugged, unmoved by the scene they were passing.

“From the radio, it sounds like some lady killed herself. Splatted right on that poor guy’s Honda.”

Natalie flinched at the cabbie’s throaty laugh, then leaned back against the seat and shut her eyes. From the tension on her face, Alec could see that she was reliving that last moment with Georgia over and over again.

And Alec was afraid she wasn’t going to be able to forgive herself. Even though her actions had saved all their lives. Including her own.

And for that, Alec was eternally grateful.

17

“Wow.”

Natalie stared at Kai’s ribs. They should have been shattered, bloody, broken. But instead her skin was red, and there was no hole where the bullet had hit her not an hour before. No blood except for what had dried on her skin and clothes after the initial attack.

Kai shrugged as she looked down at the red welt on her skin.

“Yeah.” The mummy shrugged. “It’s pretty hard to kill me. There’s a book and words and spirits dragging me back to the underworld and the whole deal. That bullet hurt . . . a lot. And it will rattle around inside for a bit before it finds a way out, but I’m going to live after all.”

Alec sighed in relief. “Good. I’d hate for you to have put yourself out for me.”

“As you can see, I didn’t,” Kai said, but she was smiling at him.

He turned serious. “Really, though, thank you. I would have been dead if that silver bullet so much as grazed me.”

Natalie shivered at the thought of Alec taking the hit Kai had. The day wouldn’t have ended so well then. They probably wouldn’t have been able even to get him out of the apartment before it was too late. The rest, losing him . . . she wouldn’t even let herself think about.

Kai shrugged, but despite her nonchalant attitude, she actually seemed moved by his thanks.

“We’ll find a way to even it out someday.” She pulled her shirt down and zipped Alec’s hoodie back over her bloodstained clothes. “For now, I’m going home for a steamy bath and a very strong drink.”

She turned toward Natalie. “Are you going to be okay?”

Natalie stared at her in surprise. “What? I mean, yeah. I didn’t get shot.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Kai’s face softened. “And you know it.”

Natalie shrugged. Were her tangled emotions all that transparent? That was more than a little embarrassing.

“Yeah. Well. I’m fine,” she insisted. Lied. Whatever. “I promise. Go home and feel better.”

Kai hesitated but then patted Natalie’s good arm and made for the door. Alec escorted her out, and in the foyer Natalie heard Kai tell him to take care of her. She flinched. How could he? He couldn’t change what had happened. No matter how much they both might wish he could.

Alec came back into the room and stood staring at her. Then he reached out and took her purse from the console table and dug in it until he found her disconnected fingers.

“Want these?” he asked softly.

She nodded.

“Have thread and a needle?”

“In that weird drawer in the kitchen,” she said.

He smiled. “The one with all the warranties and pens and crap?”

“That’s the one.”

Natalie shook her head as he walked away. Had she ever been pissed at him for working it out so he could live here? She had no idea why. There was no way she could have done this alone, or with Whitney as a roommate.

He came back into the room with the needle, thread, and a Diet Coke.

“I figured you’d want the hard stuff,” he said as he put the opened can next to her good hand.

She took a long swig. “You’re a saint.”

“Never been called that before,” he muttered as he sat down next to her on the couch.

He took her hand and set it on his lap as he threaded black thread through the needle. She flinched as he made his first few stitches, but when she looked at his handiwork, she couldn’t help but be impressed.

“Those are good stitches. Small,” she said.

He smiled at her briefly, then went back to his work. “Thanks. Don’t worry, I won’t scar you.”

“Thanks, you know how vain I am about that kind of thing,” she teased.

He was quiet as he finished stitching, and Natalie stared at him as he worked. Her mind kept flashing back to that afternoon. Only this time all her memories had to do with Alec.

Georgia had pointed a gun loaded with silver bullets at him. Worse yet, she had fired it at him. Only luck and Kai had kept him from being dead.

“Alec,” she whispered.

He tied off his last stitch and set the needle aside. “Yeah?”

“I—I thought she was going to kill you.” She shook her head. “And I—I—”

Alec pushed her hair away from her forehead and nodded. “I know. I felt the same way. When she had you . . . I was terrified. But we’re okay. Just don’t forget that we’re okay.”

Natalie shut her eyes. Was she okay?

“I killed a human.” Tears she hadn’t shed for years welled in her eyes. “Doesn’t that make me a monster?”

Alec’s expression softened and he shook his head. “Georgia Winslow . . . okay, let’s just call that bitch Van Helsing . . . she held you at gunpoint. She nearly shot me and she did shoot Kai. We tried to reason with her, but she was crazy, Natalie.”

Natalie pondered that for a moment. It was all true, of course. All perfectly reasonable. But she still felt so wrong and empty and sad.

“And I killed her,” she whispered.

Alec tilted her face up to look at him. “Monsters in those stories about us . . . they never have a motive, honey. That’s what makes them so awful. They kill for the sake of killing. But what you did was self-defense. You killed to defend yourself and your friends from someone who had already proven she would end a life without thought.”

Natalie considered his words for a moment and they comforted her. She cupped his cheeks and pulled him closer for a long kiss. When they parted, she rested her forehead on his. “Thanks.”

“Thank you,” he whispered.

She pulled back. She could see what he wanted in his wolfish eyes, and she wanted it, too.

“I want to stay,” she said as he rested a hand on her knee and gently stroked. “A lot. But . . .”

He frowned. “But?”

“I should go in to work. Someone has to make sure Georgia’s death is marked as a suicide. To protect myself.”

Alec cupped her chin. “To protect all of us, Natalie.”

She nodded. “Yeah, to protect all of us.”

“Hello, my name is Natalie and I’m a Frankenstein’s Monster. It’s been a week exactly since anyone discovered my true identity,” Natalie said as she stared around the circle.

There were fewer monsters left now than there had been a few weeks ago when this all started, but for the first time she felt like the people in the room were her friends. When she smiled, it was genuine.

“What you are is a hero,” Linda said.

“Yeah,” Kai agreed. “And you got us back into the church basement. How did you do that? I thought we were too weird for the Catholics.”

Natalie smiled as she looked around the room. The meeting room in the church basement might be musty and dingy and dimly lit, but it was home.

“Actually, I didn’t have to do anything but ask nicely. Apparently there was some kind of misunderstanding with Drake. He used his mind control powers and scared the bejesus out of the poor priest.” She shook her head. “But a few kind words and explanations from me . . .”

“What kind of explanations?” Alec laughed.

She held back a grin. Alec wasn’t very wolfie at present. They had survived their first full moon together. With a lot of growling, locking up with steel chains, and some monster strength being used on both sides. And afterward, she had finally been rewarded with a lot more than just kissing.

If anybody asked, which no one had, he was her boyfriend now.

“The priest now thinks that Drake is in the advanced stages of some kind of neurological disorder,” Natalie explained, clearing her mind with a shake of her head. “So he’s not going to take him all that seriously anymore. He was very understanding. I think he might even pray for us.”

Drake folded his arms and glared at her, and this time Natalie couldn’t hold back her laughter at his sour expression.

“Being monstrous doesn’t solve everything,” she said. “Sometimes it just takes being human.”

Alec grinned. “Miss Self-Confidence appealed to their Christian nature.”

Natalie waved her hand at him. All this praise being lavished on her was a bit too much. Especially since she was still torn about the things that had happened a week before and everything she’d done since.

“Okay, okay,” she said with a blush. “Enough of this silliness. Why don’t we just start the meeting? Kai, do you want to run it?”

Kai shook her head. “Nope. I think you’re doing fine.”

Natalie leaned back in surprise, but then she shrugged. “I think our first order of business is to talk about Hyde. Has anyone heard from him?”

The blank, concerned faces around the room told the story. Natalie shook her head. At the medical examiner’s office she had kept an eye out for reports on dead people with Hyde as a suspect, or even his own body coming through the morgue after a fight or a suicide . . . but nothing had come across her desk so far. He didn’t answer his cell phone and hadn’t been home for a week.

“We’ll keep looking,” Alec said with a sigh. “Maybe he just took off to some other city.”

“No,” Natalie said. “With Hyde, I can’t believe it’s that easy. He’s hunting and hiding, I’m sure of it. And it’s not going to be easy to calm him down even if we do find him. Not without Jekyll.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Alec reassured her, just as he had been reassuring her for days.

Natalie nodded. There was really nothing else they could do about it yet. “Next order of business: Is there anything else to report since Georgia Winslow-Van Helsing’s death?”

Kai frowned. “That’s more your department. Have we discovered if her suggestion that one of us killed her husband is true?”

Natalie shook her head. “I was able to access his death certificate and he was murdered, though the police labeled it as a mugging gone wrong. No suspects. So she could be right.”

Kai’s frown deepened. “We just have to keep digging, then. Keeping investigating.”

Alec nodded. “It’s all we can do.”

“As for Georgia herself, the death was officially labeled as a suicide, right?” Kai asked. “I thought I saw that in the paper this morning.”

Natalie nodded slowly. “Yeah. They already suspected it. Since her husband’s death, she had been pretty despondent. It was put on her death certificate about three days ago and the case was closed.”

Kai sighed in relief. “Good, so that’s over.”

“Not quite,” Drake said, getting to his feet. “In fact, I fear it’s only the beginning.”

Natalie turned on him from the podium at the front of the room. “What do you mean?”

He dug into his pocket and brought out a folded sheet of expensive, very old-looking paper. “I received this from Van Helsing last night.”

Natalie hesitated, just as she always did when dealing with anything to do with the Van Helsing family, but finally she took it. Once she had unfolded it, she read it out loud:

The truce is over. Prepare for war.

Natalie handed the paper over to Kai and shook her head. This was to be expected. Between his grandson’s death and Georgia’s, there was no way Van Helsing could keep quiet.

But fearing a war was coming and seeing it confirmed in black and white were two different things.

“Shit,” she muttered under her breath.

She waited for someone to freak out, probably Linda, but instead the Swamp Dweller lifted her chin in a surprisingly tough display of heart.

“You know, if he wants a war, I guess he’ll find we’re finally ready for him.”

Alec smiled at her. “Way to go, Green-Eyes.”

Linda blushed and ducked her head.

“And you’re right,” Alec continued. “I’m officially done running and hiding. This is where I belong and I’m not going to let some moth-bitten old man tell me where to go.”

“Neither am I,” Drake said with a wry smile. “Though I’m a bit moth-bitten myself.”

“I’m here to stay,” Kai added, folding her arms.

Natalie smiled. Although the idea of a war wasn’t a pleasant one, she had already faced a nightmare and come through it. With her friends at her side, she knew they could survive the next thing.

“I’m going to live my life,” she declared. “And I’m living it here. Write him back, Drake. Tell him to bring it on.”

Things heat up between the monsters and the Van Helsings, and between Natalie and Alec, in the next Club Monstrosity novella: The Monsters in Your Neighborhood. Check out an exclusive excerpt on the next pages!

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s next:

The Monsters in Your Neighborhood

If only the Blob hadn’t died, Natalie would never have been in this position.

Which sounded like a ridiculous statement if it was said out loud. And that was why she wouldn’t. Ever.

But ridiculous or not, it was true. Because Bob the Blob (yes, the giant hunk of a man that the term conjured up images of) had died six months ago, now Natalie was in charge of the support group for monsters that met twice a week in the basement of the Holy Heart Church on East 125th Street in New York City.

She shook her head as she looked out over the small group of men and women before her. Kind of men and women. Things was more like it, though they masqueraded as human. They certainly were as annoying as any human. Case in point . . .

One of the women in the circle got to her feet and smiled nervously. “Hello, my name is Linda and I’m a Swamp Dweller. It’s been fifty-seven years since my identity was last uncovered.” Her smile fell. “Unless you count that thing six months ago with that awful Van Helsing woman. Which I don’t.”

She collapsed back into her chair and folded her arms with a shiver like she’d been the only one to go through “that thing,” like she was the only one with problems in their group.

Natalie sighed. Since their group had been attacked and several of their members killed six months ago, she had grown closer to all the monsters . . . a lot closer with some of them. Now when she looked at them, she saw their strengths, their weaknesses, the moments that bound them all together.

Except for Linda. Fish Sticks, as Natalie’s boyfriend, Alec, occasionally called the Swamp Dweller, was so whiny. It was hard to see her as anything but an irritant.

Still . . . even on nights like tonight, Natalie could admit that in the past month or so, Linda actually had gotten a bit better. The makeup that covered her green scales was of higher quality. Her clothes were cuter. She even had increased confidence.

So maybe she’d figure things out eventually and become bearable. Maybe.

“Hello, Linda,” the group droned.

Natalie nodded to the next person in their circle. “Pat, why don’t you go next?”

The newest member of their group rose to his feet. He pushed at the tentacles that blocked his mouth and spoke in a deep, low tone that would put Darth Vader to shame.

“Good evening,” he intoned with a great gravitas that seemed to bring a sense of importance to the room. “My name is Patrick. I am what Lovecraft called a Cthulhu, although my people have never adopted that silly, hard-to-pronounce name.” He sat back down.

“What do you call yourselves?” Natalie asked.

She had learned from the group notes Blob had left behind that it was best to respect what a monster liked to be called. She got that. Nothing annoyed her more than being called a Frankenstein. That was the damned doctor, not the monster.

“Actually, our species name is not something that can be pronounced by human vocal cords. It is really not worth trying to say as it may burst some eardrums.” Patrick nodded toward her and if the crinkles around his dark eyes were any indication, he was smiling.

“Well, we wouldn’t want that,” Natalie said with a light laugh. “I’m not sure we could explain the bleeding and crying to the church.”

Patrick nodded. “Indeed. That would be quite awkward. Thank you for asking, though. As to the second part of the introductions, up until a few weeks ago, I did not leave the sewers, so I have not been discovered for decades. Drake has been encouraging me to join your group for a very long time, and so I finally decided to take the chance.”

“We’re glad you did,” Natalie assured him. “I realize the trip aboveground is difficult is for you.”

She said she realized it, but understanding it was something different. Unlike the others, Patrick had to fully cover himself in heavy robes to sneak into the basement of the church. Here with his fellow monsters, he had disrobed and his dark gray wings, swirled with touches of vibrant reds and regal purples, folded against his back like a fallen angel, but they couldn’t really be hidden under normal clothing. And he had no way to mask the massive, thick tentacles that covered the lower half of his face.

He could not walk in the world of humans and not be seen. So he had to cower, only revealing himself at night for the occasional peek at the outside world.

It was sad to Natalie, really. Too bad she didn’t know anyone to set him up with. Matchmaking had kind of been on her mind lately.

“Aren’t you worshipped like a god?” came another voice from the circle.

Natalie shot a glare at Alec. The Wolf Man of their group (and her boyfriend of six months and the reason for her nascent matchmaking tendencies) tilted his head and stared at Patrick with interest.

Patrick nodded. “Yes. That part of the mythology created by my stories is true, indeed.”

“And your name is Patrick,” Alec mused with a cocky grin. “Is it ‘All Hail Patrick,’ then?”

Natalie was ready to smack him with a rolled-up newspaper and call him a very bad dog, but Patrick’s deep, rumbling laughter kept her from doing so. The Cthulhu leaned back in his chair and shook his head, sending his tentacles swaying gently around his face.

“I do not think that would be very powerful, would it? But it is easier to pronounce. I do not think you even have the syllables in English to attempt it. Perhaps, when I know you better, I shall whisper it to you for when you wish to worship.”

Alec grinned first at Patrick, then at her. “I like this one, Nat. He’s a keeper.”

“And you are an idiot,” Natalie said and sighed. “So introduce yourself and get it over with.”

“Alec, Wolf Man. And I do count that Van Helsing mess six months ago as my last ‘outing.’ ” When Natalie stared at him, he shrugged. “That’s it, babe, nothing else to say.”

She sighed again. Alec was just coming off his last full-moon cycle, and he was always more ridiculous and lighthearted when “that time of the month” was over. Seriously, it was like living with a woman with the weirdest form of PMS. Except there was the constant shaving. And he was super-hot.

“Next, then,” she said with a final withering stare for her boyfriend.

“I am Drake, Dracula,” the next in the circle, an older man in a cape, said.

“And I’m Kai, the mummy,” said the woman who stood outside the circle smoking a cigarette, even though she wasn’t supposed to be. She waved a hand. “We know the drill, Natalie, God. Let’s just get to the next part.”

Natalie closed her eyes with a barely suppressed growl. This was why she hated running the meetings. This bullshit.

“Does anyone have any issues they need to discuss?” she asked with a glance around the room. She already knew the answer, but the longer they put off the inevitable, the better. She didn’t exactly feel equipped for it at present.

Linda took a deep breath and Natalie stifled a groan. Although there was much more going on, she was pretty sure Linda was about to gift them with more cat talk.

“I have a—” Linda began.

Kai moved forward and cut her off with a curt, “Oh, no one cares. I have something to discuss.”

Natalie blinked. She should have scolded Kai for being rude, but she was too taken aback.

“You?” Kai had been coming to group for years and had never brought up an issue without having it forced from her. The girl did not show weakness. “What do you want to talk about?”

As if on cue, the door to the basement room flew open. Everyone in the circle, especially Pat, scrambled to make sure they didn’t look like what they truly were. But one glance at the figure who had intruded upon their circle told Natalie that they didn’t have to pretend. The man who stood there was all too familiar to their group.

“Kai wants to talk about me,” the man said, straightening his expensive jacket as he looked out over the group with nothing but scorn.

“Hello, Rehu,” Natalie said on the barest of breaths, in the hopes that she could control her emotions when she looked at him. “Long time, no see.”

About the Author

Jesse Petersen grew up a geek in love with Star Wars, video games (King’s Quest, anyone?), books of all kinds, and even the occasional RPG. Eventually she grew up, at least in body, but she still loves anything with whimsy, and her books reflect that. Whether it’s funny zombies or monsters in group therapy, you’ll find books that mix giggles with gore. You can find Jesse online, where she talks about Weird Al, cats, and even her books.

Visit her online at www.JessePetersen.net, follow her on Twitter @JessePet (www.Twitter.com/JessePet), or check out her Facebook fan page at http://www.Facebook.com/AuthorJessePetersen.

OTHER BOOKS BY JESSE PETERSEN

Married with Zombies

Flip This Zombie

“Shambling with the Stars” (short story)

Eat Slay Love

The Zombie Whisperer

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Pocket Star Books

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Petersen

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Designed by Nancy Singer

ISBN 978-1-4767-1618-3

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Special preview of the sequel, The Monsters in Your Neighborhood

About the Author

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Special Preview of ‘The Monsters in Your Neighborhood’

About the Author

Copyright