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I manage to kick free of the blankets then scramble to my feet and adjust my grip on my knife. The blond stalks toward the television, his fingers curled tightly around his own dagger. His weapon puts my dinky switchblade to shame. It’s more like a fucking miniature machete than a pocketknife.
I’m not used to having the smallest knife in the room.
We wait in absolute silence broken only by the distant passing of cars. It’s wild to think that life outside is just trucking along while I’m battling a literal shadow in my motel room with my second mate after rumbling with my first mate in the woods.
I rode my motorcycle right into the fucking twilight zone tonight.
I’m staring at the television stand where the thing vanished, but the blond’s scanning the room, which makes me think he knows the beast better than I do. So I tear my gaze away from the pressboard stand just in time to see the shadow reappear from under the bed.
The little bitch heads straight for my ankles.
I kick out at it, but my foot passes right through it. I growl in frustration and dance away from the undulating mass. It’s like I’m fighting smoke, trying to punch something that doesn’t even have form.
When the blond steps in and snags the shadow with a mean roundhouse, the thing flies across the room, tumbling into the shadows in the corner.
“What the fuck, man?” I snarl, pointing my switchblade at him. “Why can you affect it when I can’t?”
His blue gaze cuts to me, and his expression is enigmatic enough to make me want to put my fist through his face. But we’re interrupted when the shadow returns.
The blond and the shadow start an incredibly fast, powerful dance around the motel room. It’s as if the shadow’s pissed, now, like it’s an honest-to-God living thing and we’ve gotten on its last nerve. It slides seamlessly through the shadows, darting into one corner and out of another, slithering beneath the bed and the table, fluttering beneath the curtains. Before it leaps from the shadows and becomes bulbous. A living creature. A living threat.
I try in vain several more times to land a blow on the damn thing, but nothing I do works. I lunge away from the shadow’s repeated attempts to reach me while the blond fights with his knife and fists. He slams into the table, knocks over the chairs, and takes out everything unattached to the nightstand during the fight.
When the shadow slams into the giant flatscreen television, and Blondie lifts his knife like he’s about to skewer a five-hundred-dollar machine, I grab his knife wrist.
Ignoring the way desire and need flood my body from our skin to skin contact, I snap, “Not the television! Do you think I’m made of money?”
Blondie purses his lips and looks at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. And maybe I have, but he won’t have to pay for damages.
I drop his wrist, my fingertips still tingling and warm.
Before I can lift my knife and look around for the shadow, the blob suddenly appears between us. A long tendril whips out at me, latching onto my wrist. It burns like fucking hell, like I’ve dunked my arm in boiling water. I let out a cry and stumble backward into the table. My hip catches on the edge, and I slam down onto my back on the tabletop, still in the thing’s burning clutches.
Blondie growls and grabs the shadow in his hand. His palm sizzles, and he lets out a yell—mostly to release the pain, I think, because he wastes no time throwing the shadow against the wall and slamming his knife into it. He slashes his knife down, twists it, then slashes up again—
—and the shadow explodes.
Little wisps shoot outward and dissipate into smoke. Within seconds, nothing’s left.
I’m lying on the tabletop, my legs splayed and my t-shirt riding up on my stomach as I breathe heavily through the pain. My fingers are still curled around my knife, but it’s more out of a need to squeeze something so I can ignore that the skin on my wrist is scalded with third-degree burns.
The blond man glances at me. He’s not even winded. His expression is hard to read, though his piercing blue eyes glitter darkly as his gaze sweeps down my way-too-exposed body.
Then he lunges past me, throwing the curtains aside as he leaps through the window.
Startled, I leap to my feet and stumble over my own legs to follow. I throw back the curtains to find the window open, a cool, desert breeze blowing inside. That’s how the fucker got in my room. I didn’t even think to check that it was locked before I went to sleep.
His hair shines in the moonlight as he sprints through the motel lot.
No time for hesitation. I throw a leg over the edge of the windowsill and drop to the sidewalk, then shift into wolf form to take off after him.
I’m either running on fury or determination, and the emotions are so similar I can’t tell the difference. But I’m not letting this guy get away. I don’t know what the fuck is going on—why that shadow attacked me or why Blondie boy ended up in my bedroom—but I’m getting answers.
No matter how far I have to run.
Blondie vanishes under the overhang of a dark gas station—apparently closed for the night—and when he re-emerges in the moonlight, he’s no longer human, but a giant blond wolf. He barrels into the street and heads for the shopping center, toward the outskirts of town where the wilderness will give him places to hide.
I spare a glance both ways before crossing the street, since I’m not really interested in getting flattened by a late night car, then go full throttle. My burned wrist aches, and I feel every pounding of my foot on the ground through the raw, sensitive nerve endings. I push through the pain anyway, my sight trained on the wolf ahead of me.
