I couldn’t have been filthier.

I reeked. My boots squelched when I walked. Semen ran down my thighs, sticky and wet. Blood dried on my skin, crusted inside my nostrils, and welled from cuts, scrapes, and bites I didn’t remember getting. Vampire blood and guts had mixed with the dirt upon which I’d lain, creating a smelly mud that coated the entire back of my body, lodged beneath my fingernails, and caught in my hair.

Just barely, I made it to my car without having a breakdown at the gross state of my body. “Eww, eww, eww,” I chanted under my breath, then climbed in and slammed shut the door. I was shivering from the slimy cold, and the second I started the old car, I cranked up the heater.

It blew out cold air and as I waited impatiently for it to heat, I stared out my window.

Shane climbed into his truck and drove away without saying a word.

And finally, the interior of my car was warm and cozy and dark, but there was no way to relax. I’d had sex with Shane.

It would have been fine except we really didn’t like each other. The wild sex didn’t change that. And we had to work together.

“Awkward,” I whispered.

I hadn’t been careful. I hadn’t even thought about things like pregnancy or STD’s.

I grabbed my phone, suddenly panicked, and texted Miriam as I drove. Apparently, I wasn’t careful when it came to most things.

I need the morning after pill.

She texted me back right away. Even at four a.m. most of Bay Town was awake. The supernaturals were night people.

How long before you get here?

Twenty minutes.

It’ll be in your room when you get home.

Thanks, Miriam.

She waited for two minutes before sending another text.

I’ll want all the details. Come find me when you wake up. Hashtag girltalk. Lol.

I sighed, then stuffed my phone back into the pocket of Shane’s jacket. My clothes…no way could I have crawled back into those ripped, wet jeans. Shane had cut them off me. They were ruined shreds of fabric, littering the ground along with the clothes from the vampires who’d disappeared.

Shane’s kills hadn’t disappeared—they just dried up into something resembling earthworm casings like the vampire I’d killed behind the bar.

The vampires I’d killed using Silverlight, though, they were gone.

When Shane had silently handed me his coat, I’d taken it gratefully. Then I’d scrambled around on the ground, searching for my belongings. Phone, knife, car keys, flashlights, Silverlight.

It was a pitiful shame, the way I was so careless with her.

I’d found one of my stakes, but the others were long gone. No biggie. I could always get more stakes.

When I arrived at Angus’s house, I sat in the car for a good five minutes, watching the house. The absolute last thing I wanted was to run into Angus in the state I was in. He’d smell the sex. I would never, ever live that down.

I crept up the back stairs to my room, realizing that living with Angus and his brood was no better for me than living in the city. I would start looking for a place of my own tomorrow.

Today.

I didn’t see Angus—he was probably still at the store, doing paperwork. He didn’t need the restaurant, but he’d said it made him legitimate to the humans. They liked a supernatural to have a little something—not too much of something, of course, but a little something. So he’d opened the store in the Bay Town Business Park, and used it to be something closer to what made him and his family a little more acceptable to the humans of Red Valley.

Angus wasn’t immortal, but without being outright killed, he would live a few hundred years. Nearly all the supernaturals lived outrageously long lives. It wasn’t something to envy, he’d told me once.

With long lives came lots of pain. And lots of wealth. The supernaturals had been amassing great sums of money for hundreds of years. It came in handy when they had to pay off the authorities, make people happy, and exist in a world in which they were unable to work side by side with the humans.

And in Angus’s case, it also came in handy when there were dozens of exes and offspring to take care of.

So when I crept up to my temporary room, holding my breath, I counted myself lucky that the only person I saw was Angus’s ten-year-old daughter, a strange little child named Nava.

She glanced at me, then hugged the wall as she hurried by.

I slipped into my room and closed the door. I locked it, then leaned back against it and closed my eyes, sighing.

“Trinity.”

I screamed and shot my eyes open, then gaped. Clayton stood at my bed with his empty eyes and his blank face, his hands at his side.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I’d rather have been seen by Angus than Clayton.

“Miriam sent me with a package.” He gestured at the nightstand. “I put it in the top drawer.”

“Son of a bitch.” I rubbed my temples. Of course she’d sent Clayton. She wasn’t going to deliver them herself.

“You look…” He shook his head. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I just need to get cleaned up and eat something.” I sniffed the air. “Do I smell…?”

“I picked up a pizza,” he said. “It’s on the desk.”

“Thanks,” I murmured. “That was really very nice of you.”

“I had to leave,” he said.

“I know.”

“I didn’t like leaving you there. Not with…”

I squinted, then drifted toward the bathroom. I really didn’t want to get too close to him. Not smelling the way I did. “Not with what?”

“Copas,” he replied. “Not with Copas.”

I wet my lips, my gaze sliding away from his. “It was fine. There were so many vampires. We killed them all.” I stared at the floor.

He studied me quietly, then, “Trinity.”

“Yes?” I murmured.

“I was a new hunter once. Don’t be hard on yourself.”

My breath caught in my throat. He knew.

Before I could think of a thing to say, he reached into the drawer, then tossed me a small package. “Clean up,” he said. “Eat. Sleep. You will be…”

I stared at him, clutching the package to my chest, and waited.

“Extraordinary,” he finished, finally.

When I turned away, breathless, he stopped me once again. “The vampires will gradually stop testing you. It usually takes a new hunter a couple of years to integrate—if she survives that long. The more you hunt, the quicker the process.” He ran his stare over my body. “It will happen for you much faster than it does for most.”

A tendril of hope snaked through me. “They’ll leave me alone?”

His smile was faint. “Well…no. But they’ll stop coming in droves. Right now they believe they have a chance to destroy you. Because you’re so new, you’re giving off a certain…scent. It attracts them, enrages them, and they will try to destroy you. But they’re dying. You’re proving yourself. They’ll accept you as an equal, or better, and they will stop coming for you.” He shrugged. “It’s a matter of self-preservation and it’s as instinctive as their drive to challenge you.”

“So all I have to do is stay alive and wait them out.”

“Hunt. If you stop hunting, the cycle will begin again.”

“That’s why Shane can walk around without a bunch of vampires descending with pitchforks and torches?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a relief.”

He nodded. “Soon, they’ll hide from you.”

I hesitated. “You don’t hunt. Why don’t they come for you?”

He stiffened immediately, and was quiet for so long things began to get awkward. Finally, he spoke. “I’m no longer a hunter. It didn’t come back when I did.”

And his desolation at that fact was so severe it broke my heart.

Miriam had taken away everything he’d ever been. The killer, the hunter, the man.

There wasn’t anything I could say to that. I walked toward the bathroom. “Goodnight, Clayton,” I whispered.

When I left the bathroom forty-five minutes later, he was gone. I sat on the bed and ate cold pizza, every muscle in my body aching. But it wasn’t a bad ache, somehow. I was getting physically stronger.

I called the captain. I left a message on his voicemail, telling him about the battle of the night. I explained to him that on the way out of the woods I’d still had Gray’s scent. He hadn’t been one of the vampires I’d fought—or if he had been, he’d taken off when things got rough. He was still alive. Still out there.

“I’ll find him tonight,” I promised. Big promise, but I meant well. I could find Gray if the vampires would stop attacking me every time I stepped foot in the woods. And if Clayton had told me the truth, that would happen. Eventually.

I wondered why Shane hadn’t educated me on that fact. Some teacher he was. And then I got a blistering image of him thrusting into me, his mouth buried against the side of my throat, his hands holding me in a punishing grip, and I lay back and allowed that breathtaking, overwhelming memory to take me where it would.