“That’s possibly the worst doggerel verse I’ve heard since I was thirteen and wrote a poem for an English assignment,” I told the waiting fae as I walked around so I could look up the stairs.

The one who stood at the top of the stairs was maybe six feet or a little under, though his feet were five inches longer than I’ve ever seen on any normal human. He had curly red hair and a pleasantly cheerful face—if you didn’t look too hard at his eyes. He was wearing slacks and a red shirt with a blue tie that matched the red canvas apron that covered his clothes. Embroidered across the top of the apron was the name of a grocery store.

In his right hand he held a butcher knife.

He smelled of the iron and sweetness that was blood, with an undertone that made him the second of the Jolly Green Giants who’d trashed the place. The damned strong one who’d hefted a filled bookcase.

“Ah,” he said, “a hintruder. How droll.” He loosened his neck by pulling his head to one side, then the other. His accent was so heavy it was hard to decipher. Intruder, I thought, not hintruder.

“Droll?” I tried it, then shook my head. “Fateful, rather. At least for you.” When in doubt, sound confident—it confuses the guys who are about to wipe the floor with you. It helped that I had a secret weapon. “What have you done with Phin?”

“Phin?” He came down three steps and paused with a smile. I think he was waiting for me to run—or, like a bored cat, drawing out the pleasure of the kill. A lot of fae are predators by nature, and among the things they like to eat are people.

“Phin is the owner of this bookstore.” My voice was steady. I don’t think I was getting braver, but after all the things that had happened lately, being frightened had lost its novelty.

“Maybe oye et ’im.” He smiled. His teeth were sharper than a human’s—and there were more of them.

“Maybe you’re a fae and can’t lie,” I told him. “So you should stick to the facts instead of trying my patience with ‘maybes.’ Like where is Phin?”

He raised his left hand and gestured at me. Faint green sparkles stretched out between us and hung in the air for a moment until one touched me. It fell and took the others with it. They glittered on the floor, then winked out.

“What are you?” he asked, tilting his head like a puzzled wolf. “You ain’t witch. Oi can feels witches in moy ’ead.”

“Stop right there,” I said, pulling the SIG from its holster.

“Are you threatening me with that?” He laughed.

So I shot him. Three times over the heart. It knocked him back but not down. I remembered, from my reading of Phin’s book, that not all the fae have their organs in exactly the same places that we do. Maybe I should have aimed for his head. I raised the gun to make certain of my target and watched him sink through the wooden stairs like a ghost. He left the butcher knife and his apron behind.

Stone hands rose from the floor and grabbed my ankles, pulling my feet out from under me. I fell too fast to react.

I WOKE UP LYING IN THE DARK AND HURTING ALL OVER, but especially on the back of my head. My ankles were also sore when I tried to move them. I blinked, but I still couldn’t see anything—which is very unusual for me.

I smelled blood, and felt something ridged under my shoulder. Old sensory memory, left over from late-night studying in college, told me it was a pen. I waited for more recent memory to kick in—the last thing I remembered was the fae grabbing my ankles. When nothing more made itself known, I decided that there were no memories to come back. I must have been knocked out when my head hit the cement.

Odd as it might seem, I was still alive even though I’d been lying helpless before the fae.

I almost sat up, but there was a sound I couldn’t place, a wet sound. Not a drip, but a slop, slop, slop. Rip. Slop, slop, slop.

Something was eating. Once I worked that out, I could smell death and all the undignified things it brought to a body. I waited a long time, listening to the sounds of something with sharp teeth feeding, before I forced myself to move.

It didn’t really matter who had died. If it was Sam, I stood no chance against something that could kill a werewolf after I shot him three times in the chest—whether his heart was there or not, it still should have hurt him.

If it wasn’t Sam . . . either he would kill me, too, or we’d both walk out of the basement. But I had to wait until I’d considered every possibility before I rolled stiffly to my feet.

The sound didn’t change as I shuffled around, crunching glass under my feet until the edge of my shoe caught the edge of the rug. I used the rug to find the desk and fumbled around until I could turn on the desk light.

It wasn’t very bright, but it showed me that the lighting fixtures on the ceiling had been torn loose and were dangling by wires. The neat stacks of boxes were mostly gone, leaving tumbled books, ripped-up cardboard, and shreds of paper in their place. There was also blood. A lot of it.

Some of the fae bleed odd colors, but this was all a dark red that pooled black in the dim light a yard or so from the edge of the rug where the kill had been made. It hadn’t been too long because the edge of the pool of fluid was still wet. But the victor had dragged the body over a pile of book boxes and found a secluded place hidden behind several leaning stacks in the far corner of the basement where the weak light I held wouldn’t penetrate.

“Sam?” I asked. “Sam?”

The sound of feeding paused. Then a shadow darker than the things around it flowed over the stacks and crouched on top of the remaining piles of books, flattened to keep from bumping into the ceiling. For a moment, I thought it was the fae, because the wolf was so drenched in blood that he was almost black. Then white eyes caught my desk light, and Sam growled.

“SO,” I ASKED SAM AS WE HEADED BACK TOWARD KENNEWICK, “what do you think we can do to resurrect the love of life in your human half? Because I don’t think that this is working. You almost lost it there, my friend.”

Sam whined softly and put his head on my lap. I’d cleaned both of us in Phin’s bathroom as best I could. His white fur was more pink than white still, and he was soaking wet. Thank goodness the Rabbit had a powerful heater.

“Well, if you don’t know,” I muttered, “how am I supposed to figure it out?”

He pressed his head harder on my thigh.

He’d almost killed me tonight. I’d seen the intent in his eyes as he’d raised his hindquarters—and knocked over the boxes he was perched on, already precariously tipped during his battle with the fae.

It was the kind of mistake that Samuel would never have made, and it had thrown off his attack. He’d landed short of me, on top of the broken office chair. He’d put a foot through the space between the arm and the seat and during the struggle to free himself had remembered that we were friends.

From the lowered tail and head, I think he’d scared himself almost as much as he’d scared me.

We’d spent a long time in that bookstore, so the traffic had subsided somewhat, though it was still pretty busy.

I took my right hand off the steering wheel and ran my fingers through the fur behind Sam’s ears. His whole body relaxed as I rubbed. “We’ll manage it,” I told him. “Don’t you worry. I’m a lot more stubborn than Samuel is. Let’s go home and dry us both off. Then I think . . . it’s time to call Zee—”

MERCY!

Adam’s voice in my head screamed at such volume that I couldn’t move. A blasting yet soundless noise that grew and grew until . . . there was nothing at all. The cry left me with a headache that made the one I’d woken up with in Phin’s basement seem like a pinprick.