It ducked its head under the frame and stepped into the room, having to stoop so as not to bang its head on the ceiling. Ropy muscle bulged across a thick chest and long, talon-tipped arms. Sleek black fur covered the vaguely humanoid frame of the monster before me. It moved with a smooth, deliberate grace as it approached me. A beautiful and terrible hybrid of human and wolf, like a magnificent living sculpture of pure, condensed predator, coming for my blood.
A predator I recognized.
Dillon.
The rat bastard. The asshole who had infected me.
His lip lifted, revealing yellowed dagger fangs, even bigger than those of the wolf I’d just defeated. Claw-tipped fingers spread, and he arched his back, dog-like head lowering until he was nearly my height and presenting a slightly smaller target. Say, the size of a VW Bug instead of an Escalade.
My own lips pulled back in a rictus grin, the skin stretched so tight over my teeth that my cheeks ached. As Dillon growled, so did I, one hand closing on a stake. He stepped forward with a heavy thump, spreading his arms and flexing his fingers so the light could catch on those obsidian claws. A challenge, daring me to come at him first.
There was no way in hell I was going down without taking Dillon with me. Now that he was within sight, all the bitter, hateful things that had brought me to this point rattled around in my skull, shattering that icy calm to release the rage frozen deep inside.
Jim Pradiz might have been a sleazeball, and his methods of reporting might have been deplorable, but he’d been a good man at heart. He’d tried to protect me in his own, twisted way. And he was dead because of the Sunstrikers. The belt whispered that Dillon might have even been the one to kill him.
My arm sported scars from those sickle-like claws. More than likely, I’d be some monstrous beast like the one standing right in front of me once the moon waxed full. Because of Dillon.
The mess I had gotten into with the Sunstrikers, including my probable infection, had made it into the papers, and had led up to my father’s disowning me and telling me I wasn’t his little girl anymore.
All because of Dillon.
An inhuman howl split the air, shrieking, earsplitting, shaking the house to its foundations. The very air vibrated with the sound, and Dillon cringed back from it, covering his tufted ears. It drowned out the sound of the crackling flames, the shouts of the White Hats outside, the answering cries of the other werewolves in the house.
It came from me.
I’ve heard people talk about a red haze taking over their vision in moments of extreme rage. That had always sounded stupid to me. An exaggeration, used as a way to say you were too stoked by anger to really notice what was going on around you during a battle, that’s all.
Until that moment—that moment when I lived and breathed that furious beast, screamed to the heavens with all of the pain and anguish and hatred that had been stored in my mind, battling for release since the clusterfuck that my life had become began spiraling out of control less than a month ago—I’d thought the red haze of rage was nothing more than a joke.
It wasn’t. The sound that came from me should never have come from a human’s vocal cords. My eyes felt like they must be glowing like the fire licking at the curtains over the sink and eating away at the oak table a few feet away. There was no room in this body for all of the heat and rage it contained. This weak flesh was not enough to hold it in. It needed release.
It needed to punish.
Dillon retreated, lowering his head and skittering back from me like a giant, frightened dog.
I followed him, stalking forward with a slow, deliberate pace, knowing that this moment was inevitable. That it had been coming from the moment he scratched me. The moment he first tried to hunt me, back in that filthy, dark alley outside of Royce’s restaurant, back before we battled the crazy sorcerer. He could run. He could hide. But I would find him, and I would end him, just like I’d find and end Chaz.
He fell to all fours and loped out of the kitchen into the room he’d been watching from, where it was dark and presumably safe. His claws left furrows in the tile. I followed, moving with a kind of single-mindedness I’d only experienced once before, while chasing after Kimberly.
Hopefully she was here, too, so I could finish what I started with her back in the park.
Dillon was hauling ass, but I never once thought he’d escape me. When I reached the doorway, I tucked the stake away and drew my gun. In the back of my head, I knew we were moving at hyperspeed, but it felt like everything was moving in slow motion. He sailed over a couch, forepaws landing with a heavy thud that I felt through the soles of my boots. In that short span of time, I’d already locked on my target and popped off a round aimed at the back of his left leg.
He made a sound I barely heard, his hind leg collapsing under him as he landed. It wouldn’t hold his weight with the silver frying all of the nerve endings in his upper thigh.
As he twisted around, I calmly put a bullet in his other leg, shattering his right kneecap. He curled up on himself with a shriek, so I walked around the couch and pressed my boot into his thick neck. He made a gasping, choking sound, wildly rolling eyes widening as I lowered the gun until it was aimed at his temple. From this close, I couldn’t possibly miss.
“Why did you have to make it this easy?” I asked, distantly noting how cold and lifeless my voice sounded to my own ears. “Why couldn’t you have at least put up a good fight?”
The Were swung one arm, as thick around as both my thighs, his closed fist slamming into my stomach and sending me into the couch. It fell over backwards, sending me with it. The gun fell out of my hand and disappeared somewhere in the dark.
The belt loved it. My back, not so much.
Deep inside, the power of the belt uncoiled like a serpent, flooding me with power and adrenaline. Another giant wolf shot out of the darkness toward me, and while I was still on my back, I lifted the other gun and got it right between the eyes. The body, still twitching, tumbled forward and slid into me.
With a groan, I pushed it aside, coughing on the smoke drifting into the room from the kitchen. The fur was thick, warm, and my gloved hand came away sticky with blood.
I staggered to my feet and pressed my palm to my forehead. All the energy rushing through my bloodstream combined with the chemical smoke and the tumble was making for a horrible head rush.
When I focused on where Dillon had fallen, he was gone. A trail of blood and claw marks led me into the next room. Though I was swaying slightly, the vertigo faded as the object of my current obsession came back into view. He was dragging himself to stairs leading up to the next floor.
He pulled himself one slow, painful step at a time, his talons digging into the stairs one by one. I came up behind him on silent feet, so quiet and swift that he didn’t notice me until my hands were in his scruff and hauling him back to the first floor. His claws hooked into the wood, trying to stay put, but with the help of the combined rage and strength I was channeling from the belt, he took most of the step with him when I threw him against the wall. It buckled and cracked under the impact, and he lay where he fell, luminous green eyes blinking stupidly up at me as I descended upon him like an avenging angel.
His eyes drifted shut once I was close enough to stand over him, the tips of my boots stopping at the growing pool of blood. The thick crimson liquid kissed the edge of my steel toes, seeped between the treads.
I knelt down, waiting until Dillon opened his eyes again to look at me. Waited for the dilated irises to focus.
“Dillon,” I said, soft, gentle, just loud enough to be heard over his labored panting, “I want you to know that I did this for me. For my family. For Jim Pradiz. For everyone else whose lives you ruined or took, whether I knew them or not. You’re never going to hurt anyone again.”