“Dani, no! I need the amulet!”

I hang upside down, watching pavement whiz by.

“Dani, stop!”

But she doesn’t. I hear snarling receding rapidly behind us.

The Hunter roars.

Bloodcurdling howls shatter the night.

I jerk. I know those sounds. I’ve heard them before.

“Take me back, take me back!” I scream, but for an entirely different reason now. Who are they—these beasts that sound like Barrons? I need to know!

“Dani, you have to take me back!”

But she doesn’t. She keeps running. Doesn’t listen to a word I say. She runs me straight to the one place I never want to see again.

Barrons Books and Baubles.

14

My first suspicion that it wasn’t Dani carrying me reared its head when we blasted through the front door of the bookstore.

Or, rather, that suspicion turned its head and licked blood from the back of my thigh.

Unless Dani had some serious issues I didn’t know about, this wasn’t her shoulder I was over.

It licked me again, dragging its tongue across my leg, just beneath the curve of my ass. My dress was hitched up, trapped between my stomach and its shoulder. It bit me. Hard.

“Ow!”

With fangs. Not deep enough to draw blood but enough to sting. I wiped my sleeve across my face, scrubbing blood from my eyes with the fur cuff.

I was dazed by Darroc’s abrupt murder and my shock over K’Vruck being the Book. If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d have known from the first that I was much too high from the ground for it to have been Dani. Several feet too high.

The shoulder I was over was massive, as was the rest of it, but it was too dark to see clearly. Rooftop spotlights no longer illuminated the exterior of the bookstore, nor did the customary amber glow bathe the interior. There was only the light of a three-quarter moon, spilling in through tall windows.

What had me? An Unseelie? Why had it brought me here? I never wanted to see this place again! I hated BB&B. It was dark and empty and ghosts were everywhere. They perched with sad eyes on my cash register, drooped along my book aisles, and draped, paper-thin and defeated, on my sofas, shivering before fireplaces that would never be lit again.

I wasn’t prepared to be flung from its shoulder. I went flying backward through the air, slammed into the chesterfield in the rear seating cozy, bounced off it, crashed into a chair, got tangled in one of Barrons’ expensive rugs, and skidded across the polished floor. My head smacked into the enameled fireplace.

For a moment, all I could do was lie there. Every bone in my body was bruised. Blood was crusted on my face and in the corners of my eyes.

With a moan of pain, I rolled over and propped myself up on an elbow to assess the damage. At least my arm wasn’t broken, as I’d thought it was.

I pushed my hair from my face.

And froze. Standing in the dim light of the bookstore was a shape that was devastatingly familiar. “Come out of the shadows,” I said.

A low growl was the only reply.

“Please, can you understand me? Come out.”

It hulked near a bookcase, panting. It was enormous, at least nine feet tall. Silhouetted against the moonlight filtering through a window behind it, it had three sets of sharp, curved horns spaced at even intervals along two bony ridges that spanned the sides of its head.

I’d seen horns like that before. My pouch of stones had been tied to similar ones. Horns I’d watched melt away when the beast wearing them resumed its human form.

In the Silvers, Barrons had been slate gray with yellow eyes during the day and black-skinned with crimson eyes at night. This one was in full night mode, velvety black in the darkness but for the glint of feral eyes. I’d heard more of these beasts back in the street, before this one had carried me off. Where had they come from?

My hands began to tremble. I pushed gingerly into a sitting position, acutely aware of every stretched tendon and strained muscle. I leaned back against the fireplace, drew my knees up and hugged them. I didn’t trust myself to stand. This creature was the same kind of beast Barrons had been and was a connection to the man I’d lost.

What was it doing here? Was he still somehow protecting me, even in death? Had he assigned others of his kind to guard me if the worst happened and he was killed?

The thing in the shadows suddenly turned and smashed a taloned fist into the bookcase. Tall shelves rocked on floor bolts. With a metallic screeeech, the ornate case ripped from the floor and began to fall. It crashed into the one next to it, and the one next to that, taking them down like dominoes, making a complete wreck of my bookstore.