The kitchen I’d worked all morning to clean was totally fucked up. That was the first coherent thought I had once I reached it.
It was an absolute mess, and not the kind of mess that occurred after children passed through it, hunting for snacks. This wasn’t the usual Lawrence-family wrong of abandoned socks beneath stools, half-finished homework near the fruit bowl, or Billie’s tiny plastic creatures arranged in a legal protest.
This was violently fucked up.
Drawers had been yanked open. Silverware spilled across the floor. A cabinet hung crooked from one hinge. One of Conrad’s neatly labeled meal containers had fallen from the refrigerator and cracked open, sauce bleeding slowly across the tile.
Two men stood in the middle of it all. I could tell immediately that they were not supernatural beings, which should’ve been comforting after the nightmare I’d had.
They were only human men with masks covering the upper halves of their faces, wearing dark clothes and gloves, carrying greed and poor planning into a house where three children resided. One of them was broad through the shoulders, thick-necked, breathing hard in a way that made my stomach churn. The other was leaner, quicker, holding a crowbar in one hand as he rifled through a drawer with the other.
My skin was still smoking. The daylight had burned me far worse than I wanted to admit, exposed patches of skin aching where the sun had reached me during the run from the car. I could feel the weakness in my limbs and the hunger beneath it, deep and instinctive, demanding blood I had no intention of taking.
Not yet.
First, I needed to get these intruders away from the children.
The thinner man turned first. He saw me in the doorway, his face going blank with confusion.
I understood why. I must have looked unhinged. Hair loose and wild around my face. Dress wrinkled. Skin reddened and faintly steaming. Eyes probably too bright, because stress always dragged the monster closer to the surface no matter how many centuries of manners one layered over it.
“The hell?” he muttered.
The larger man swung around too, gripping a stolen laptop against his chest. “Who are you?”
I took one step into the kitchen. Their confusion sharpened into alarm.
Good.
“I’m the nanny,” I said.
The thin one laughed once, too nervous for it to land properly. “Holy shit, man… rich people are weird.”
The larger one glanced toward the hallway behind me. “Is there anybody else here?”
That question opened something cold inside me. He was thinking about witnesses. Or maybe not. I didn’t care. I crossed the kitchen faster than either of them expected. Not my fastest. Not even close. Daylight had made me clumsy by my own standards, every motion dragged down by the heavy, unnatural wrongness of being awake too early, too abruptly.
But to humans, even weakened, I was quick as a flash.
The larger man barely had time to drop the laptop before I caught him by the front of his jacket and drove him into the wall beside the pantry. The plaster cracked from the impact. His breath left him in a harsh burst, eyes going wide through the holes in the mask.
The thin one shouted and swung his crowbar. I twisted, but not fast enough. The metal clipped my shoulder hard enough to make white-hot pain flash down my arm. I hissed in irritation alone.
The sound made both men freeze.
The thin one stared at me, and I realized my fangs were showing. I usually had excellent control over them, but when I was this emotionally heightened, sometimes they slid out without permission.
His face changed completely. “What the?—”
I ripped the crowbar from his hand and threw it across the kitchen. It struck the far cabinets with a brutal metallic clang that would absolutely wake the children if they weren’t awake already. Or were they at school? The adrenaline mixed with the confusing haze of being awoken so suddenly made the timeline of the day fuzzy.
That only made me angrier.
“You broke into the wrong house,” I said.
The larger man recovered enough to shove at me, which was admirable in the same way jumping into a frozen lake for no reason was admirable. Cold plunge my ass. Briefly impressive. Deeply stupid.
He hit me in the ribs. I looked down at his fist, then slowly met his wide eyes.
