CHAPTER 1

Karina Tucker took a deep breath. “Jacob, do not hit Emily again. Emily, let go of his hair. Don’t make me stop this car!”

Her daughter’s face swung into the rearview mirror, outraged as only a six-year-old could be. “Mom, he started it!”

“I don’t care who started it. If you don’t be quiet right now, things will happen!”

“What things?” Melissa whined. Megan, her twin, stuck her tongue out.

Karina furrowed her eyebrows, trying to look mean in the rearview mirror. “Horrible things.”

The four children quieted in the back of the van, trying to figure out what “horrible things” meant. The quiet wouldn’t last. Karina drove on. The next time Jill called to ask her if she would chaperone a gaggle of first graders for a school field trip, she would claim to have the bubonic plague instead.

The trip itself wasn’t that awful. The sun shone bright, and the drive down to the old-timey village, forty-five minutes from Chikasha, was downright pleasant. Nothing but clear sky and flat Oklahoma fields with an occasional thin line of forest between them to break the wind. But now, after a day of hayrides and watching butter being churned and iron nails being hammered, the kids were tired and cranky. They’d been on the road for twenty minutes and the lot of them had already engaged in a World War III–scale conflict three times. She imagined the other parents hadn’t fared any better. As the six cars made their way up the rural road, Karina could almost hear the whining emanating from the vehicles ahead of her.

They should have just gotten a school bus. But Jill had panicked half of the parents over the bus not having seat belts. In retrospect, the whole thing seemed silly. Thousands of children rode school buses every day with no problems, seat belts or not. Unfortunately, creating panic was one of her best friend’s talents. Jill meant well, but her life was a string of self-created emergencies, which she then cheerfully overcame. Usually Karina pulled her off the edge of the cliff, but with Emily involved, it was hard to maintain perspective.

This pointless worry really had to stop. Emily wasn’t made of glass. Eventually Karina would have to let her go on a trip or to a sleepover without her mommy. The thought made Karina squirm. After Jonathan died, she’d taken Emily to a grief counselor, who offered to work with her as well. Karina had turned it down. She’d already been through it, when her parents passed away, and it hadn’t made things any easier.

Her cell beeped. Karina pushed the button on her hands-free set. “Yes?”

“How are you holding up?” Jill’s voice chirped.

“Fantastic.” Would be even better if she didn’t have to talk on the phone while driving. “You?”

“I need to go potty!” Jacob announced from the back.

“Robert called Savannah a B word. Other than that we’re good,” Jill reported.

“I really need to go. Or I’ll poop in my pants. And then there’ll be a big stain . . .”

“Listen, Jacob needs to go potty.” She caught sight of a dark blue sign rising above the trees. “I’m going to pull over at the motel ahead of you.”

“What motel?”

“The one on the right. With the big blue sign, says Motel Sunrise?”

“Where?” Jill’s voice came through tinted with static. “I don’t see it.”

“I don’t see a motel,” Megan reported.

“Look at the blue sign.” Emily pointed at the window.

“Well, I don’t see it,” Jacob declared.

“That’s because you’re a doofus,” Emily said.

“You suck!”

“Quiet!” Karina barked.

The exit rolled up on her right. Karina angled the car into it. “I’m taking this exit,” she said to the cell phone. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

“What exit? Karina, where are you? You were right there and now you’re gone. I don’t see you in my rearview mirror . . .”

“That’s because I took the exit.”

“What exit?”

Oh, for the love of God. “I’ll talk to you later.”

The paved road brought them to a two-story building covered with dark gray stucco. Only one car, an old Jeep, sat in the parking lot.

Karina pulled up before the entrance and hesitated. The building, a crude box with small narrow windows, looked like some sort of institutional structure, an office, or even a prison. It certainly didn’t look inviting.

“Now I see it,” Megan said.

Karina shook her head. You’d think if you owned a motel, you’d want to make it seem hospitable. Plant some flowers, maybe choose a nice color for the walls, something other than battleship gray. It only made good business sense. As it was, the place radiated a grim, almost menacing air. She had a strong urge to just keep on driving.

“I have to go!” Jacob announced and farted.

Karina jumped out of the van and slid the door open. “Out.”

Fifteen seconds later, she herded them inside a small lobby. The lone woman standing behind the counter turned her head at their approach. She was skeletally thin, with long red hair dripping down past her shoulders. Karina glanced at her face and almost marched back out. The woman had eyes like a rattlesnake, no compassion, no kindness, no anger. Nothing at all.

“I’m sorry,” Karina said. “Could we please use your facilities? The little boy needs to go to the bathroom.”

The woman nodded to the archway on Karina’s right. Charming. That’s okay. They just needed to get in and get out. “Thank you! Come on, kids.”

The archway opened into a long hallway. On the left, several doors punctuated the wall, one marked “Bathroom” and another, at the very end, marked “Stairs.” On the right an older man stood in the middle of the hallway. Heavily muscled, with a face like a bulldog, he’d planted himself as if he were about to be overrun by rioters. His eyes watched her with open malice. The kids sensed it, too, and clustered around her. Karina didn’t blame them.

“Hi!”

The man said nothing.

Okay. She marched to the bathroom and swung the door open. A single-person bathroom, relatively clean. No scary strangers hiding anywhere. “In you go.” She ushered Jacob inside and stood guard by the door.

Minutes ticked off, long and viscous. The man hadn’t moved. The children kept quiet under his scrutiny, like tiny rabbits sensing a predator.

Karina knocked on the door gently. “Come on, Jacob. Let the other kids have a turn.”

“Almost done.”

Karina waited. The man kept staring at her. Gradually his face took on a new expression. Instead of staring her down, he was now studying her as if she were some bizarre alien life-form. That was even more disturbing. Karina fought a shiver.

“Jacob, we need to go.”

She heard the toilet flush. Finally.

Jacob emerged from the bathroom. “I washed my hands with soap,” he informed her. “Do you want to smell them?”

“No. Does anybody else need to go?”

They shook their heads. Emily hugged her leg. “I want to go home, Mom.”

“Excellent idea.” Karina led them down the hallway.

The man moved to block their way. “Thank you for letting us use the bathroom,” Karina said. “We’ll be on our way now.”

The man leaned forward. His nostrils fluttered. He sucked in the air through his nose and his face split in a grin. He didn’t smile; he showed her his teeth: abnormally large and sharp, triangular like shark teeth, and definitely not human.

Ice skittered down Karina’s spine.

The man took a step forward. “You ssshmell like a donor.” His teeth took up so much space in his mouth, he slurred the words.

Karina backed away, holding her hands out to shield the kids behind her. She wished she had a can of mace or a gun—some weapon in her purse other than Kleenex, her pocketbook, and a cell phone with a dead battery.

“Let us out!”

The man advanced. “Rishe! The woman ishh a donor.”

“We’ll be leaving now!” Karina put some steel into her voice. Sometimes if you looked like you were ready to fight, people backed down and looked for an easier target.

The man bared his teeth again and she glimpsed what looked like a second row of fangs behind the first in his mouth. “No, you won’t,” he said.

Time for emergency measures. “Help!” Karina screamed at the top of her lungs. “Help!”

“No help,” he assured her.

The kids began to cry.

Maybe this is a nightmare, flashed in her head. Maybe she was dreaming.

“Mom?” Emily clutched at her jeans.

Dream or not, Karina couldn’t let him get a hold of her or the kids. She kept backing away to the door behind her, the one labeled “Stairs.”

“Let us go!”

He kept coming. “Rishe! Where are you?”

The wall on their right exploded.

Splintered pieces of wood peppered the hallway, knocking the shark-toothed man back and missing Karina by mere inches. Stunned, she glanced into the gap in the wall. The redheaded woman—Rishe?—jumped over the counter and ran directly at Karina and the children, her face twisted into a grotesque mask. The skin on Rishe’s neck bulged, rolling up, as if a tennis ball slid up her throat into her mouth.

This is just crazy . . .

The woman spat.

Something dark flickered through the air. Pain stung Karina’s left side. A long thin needle, like the quill of a porcupine, sprouted from her stomach, just under the ribs. She yanked it out on pure instinct. She should’ve been terrified, but there was no time . . .

Something hit the red-haired woman from behind, arresting her in midstep. Rishe’s mouth gaped in a terrified silent scream. Huge claws grasped her face, jerked, and her head twisted completely around.

Oh, my God.

Rishe’s body fell, and beyond it Karina glimpsed a thing. Huge, dark, inhuman, it stared back at her with malevolent eyes. Its very existence was so at odds with everything Karina knew, that her mind simply refused to believe it was real.

An odd odor saturated the air, dry and slightly metallic, like copper warmed by the sun. The thing stepped over the woman, its gaze fixed on her.

“Run!” Karina turned on her heel and dashed down the hallway, herding the children before her.

The man with shark teeth rose slowly, pulled a wooden splinter out of his eye, tossed it aside, and, with a deep bellow, charged into the lobby through the hole in the wall.

A snarl answered him, a promise of pain and death. It whipped Karina into a frenzy. She swiped Jacob off the floor—he was the smallest—and ran faster to the heavy door barring the stairs. She jerked it open. “Up the stairs, go, go!”

They ran up, whimpering and sobbing. The same fear that drove her propelled them up the stairs better than anything she could’ve screamed.

Karina slammed the door closed, balancing Jacob on one arm, and looked for something to bar it, but the stairway was empty. Her stomach burned, the pain from the needle puncture spreading up and down her body as if her skin had caught on fire. She ran after the kids. The boy in her arms was stone heavy. They reached the top of the staircase and crowded on the landing.

Below something clanged. There it was again, the scent of hot metal burning her lungs.

Karina set Jacob down and wrenched the door open. They burst into the upstairs hallway. She scanned the rows of doors and tried to shove the nearest one open, but it was locked.

Another—locked, too.

Third—locked.

This is a nightmare. It has to be a nightmare.

A vicious snarl chased them. Emily screamed, a high-pitched shriek that could’ve broken glass. Karina grabbed her daughter by the hand and dragged her down the hall, to the single window. “Follow me!”

Beyond the window a fire escape waited.

Karina grasped the window latch and jerked it up. Stuck.

Her head swam. The air around her had grown scalding hot. Every breath burned her lungs from the inside out. She stumbled, caught herself on the windowsill, and pulled the sash upward with all her strength. The wood groaned and suddenly the frame slid up.

A door thumped. Kids screamed. The terrible dark beast had made it into the hallway.

She grabbed the nearest child and hurled her onto the fire escape, then the next, and the next. Little feet thudded, running down the metal stairs. Emily was last. Karina clutched her daughter to her and climbed out on the fire escape.

A black van waited below. Several men stood by the van. They had the children. They stood there silently, watching her, so calm while the kids screamed, and suddenly she realized that they and the beast inside were allies. They were trapped.

A growl washed over her.

The world gained crystal clarity, everything becoming painfully vivid and sharp. Slowly Karina turned. Her daughter hugged her, her breath a tiny warm cloud on her neck. The metal rail of the fire escape dug into Karina’s back. The thudding of her heart sounded so loud, each beat shook her rib cage like a blow from a sledgehammer. Every breath was a gift.

She saw the thing emerge from the darkness. Slowly, it solidified out of the gloom, one gargantuan paw on the windowsill, then another. Enormous claws scratched the wood. It climbed onto the windowsill and perched there, a mere foot from her. Karina stared into its eyes, inhaled its scent, and knew with absolute certainty that she was going to die.

The thing opened its maw, revealing huge fangs. Its deep voice issued forth in a single mangled word. “Donor.”

“Are you sure?” asked a male voice from below.

The beast snarled. Karina jerked back, shielding Emily with her hands. Her legs gave out and she fell to her knees.

“My lady?” said the voice from below, closer now.

She barely turned her head, not daring to take her gaze from the monster in the window. A dark-haired man climbed the fire escape toward her. His face was preternaturally beautiful, his eyes a dark, intense blue. “I have a proposition for you, my lady . . .”

His voice faded, replaced by darkness and the feel of cotton against her body.

I agree.

Karina sat up . . . She was in her bed. The room lay dark about her. A nightmare. That was all.

Her heart thudded in her chest. She rubbed her face and her hands came away slick with cold moisture.

I agree. “I agree” to what? What did she agree to in her dream?

It didn’t matter. It was a nightmare. In the morning, she’d call the grief counselor.

Karina frowned and pushed free of the blankets. She felt a strange sense of wrongness, as if there was something very important she was missing. Something vital. A small lamp waited on the table next to the bed. She flicked it on and a cone of soft electric light illuminated the room.

The bedroom wasn’t hers.

*   *   *

For a moment Karina froze, and then fear caught her in its fist and squeezed. “Emily?” she whispered. “Emily?”

No answer.

She was alone in a strange bedroom.

There could be a rational explanation for this. There had to be. She just didn’t know what it was.

I agree. An echo of her voice from the dream. She had a terrible suspicion the unfamiliar bedroom and those two words were connected.

Her clothes were gone. She wore only underwear and a giant T-shirt, three sizes too big.

A pair of carefully folded jeans lay on a chair next to the bed. Her jeans, the ones she had worn on the field trip. Karina pulled them on. She had to find Emily.

The door swung open with ease and she found herself in a hallway. To the left, the hallway ended in a stairway leading up. To her right, a pool of electric light brightened the wooden floor and the rust-colored rug. Quiet voices carried on a soft discussion.

She followed the voices and stepped into a kitchen, blinking against the light. Three men sat at the round table in the center. They turned to look at her. The one sitting farthest from her wore the unearthly face of the man from her dream. His name surfaced from the depths of her memory. Arthur.

I agree.

Arthur nodded to her. “Ah. You’re up. Why don’t you sit down with us? Henry, please get a chair for Lady Karina.” His soft, intimate voice caressed her almost like a touch. It should’ve been soothing. Instead her insides clenched into a tight knot.

A tall man with a shy smile rose and held a chair out for her. So oddly domestic, all three drinking tea. Nobody was startled by her appearance. Clearly she was expected.

Karina sat. “Thank you.” The automatic response rolled from her lips before she even realized it.

“You’re welcome,” Arthur said. He leaned back with a quiet elegance, artfully posed without putting any effort into it. His hair was soft, black, and brushed back from his perfectly sculpted face. His eyebrows were equally black and so were his eyelashes, long and soft like velvet. They framed big eyes, crystalline blue, distant, and cold. Angelic, she thought. He looked like an angel, not a plump cherub, but an angel who roamed freely in the sky, possessed of heart-wrenching beauty and terrible power, an angel who had stared into the bottomless blue for so long that his eyes had absorbed its color.

“Would you like some tea?” Arthur asked.

“Children . . . ?”

“Safe,” he said and she believed the sincerity of his words even though she had no reason to do so.

Arthur rose, took a small blue mug from the shelf behind him, and poured steaming tea into it from a large kettle on the stove. He set the cup in front of her. “Please drink. It will steady your nerves.”

Karina looked at the cup.

He drank from his own cup and smiled in encouragement.

She picked up the cup and took a sip. Green tea. Odd taste, slightly sour.

Maybe she was still dreaming. The whole scene had that slightly absurd wrongness found only in dreams.

Karina looked about the table. The man who had offered her the chair, Henry, sat to her right. He was tall and whipcord lean. His face, serious with somber intelligence, lacked Arthur’s magnetism, but its sharp angles drew her all the same. His tawny hair was cut close to the scalp, but still showed a trace of a curl. His green eyes regarded her and she read pity in their depths.

The man on her left was model pretty. Strong masculine jaw, deep, dark blue eyes, high cheekbones, a mane of golden wavy hair dripping down to below his waist, hiding half of his face . . . His eyes flashed with wild humor. He gave her a wink, grinned, exposing even white teeth, and tossed his hair back. An ugly scar ripped his left cheek, almost as if something had taken a bite out of him and his flesh hadn’t healed right. She fought an urge to look away. He reached for her hand . . .

“Daniel.” Arthur’s voice gained a slight edge. “That’s extremely unwise.”

Daniel sat back.

“Just because she didn’t scream when she saw your face doesn’t mean you get to touch.” Henry refilled his cup.

“Please forgive Daniel. He doesn’t mean to be rude. He’s just forbidden to speak for the time being. Your tea is getting cold,” Arthur said.

“He tends to cause problems when he speaks,” Henry said.

Daniel gave her a smoldering smile.

She faced Arthur. “What did I agree to?”

Arthur sighed. “I see.”

Henry leaned forward. “Perhaps we should mend this.”

“Yes. The sooner, the better. Lucas might return and that would make things considerably more complicated.”

Daniel laughed softly. If wolves could laugh, they would sound just like him.

Henry held out his hand. “It’s easier if you hold on to me.”

Karina hesitated.

“You do want to remember, don’t you?” Arthur asked.

She put her hand into Henry’s. His long warm fingers closed about hers. The world tore in two and she was back on the landing of the fire escape at the not-motel, cradling Emily. Her whole body burned with a terrible ache.

Arthur leaned his head to the side, looked at them for a moment, and plucked Emily from her arms.

“No!” Karina struggled to hold on, but her hands had lost all strength.

Emily didn’t kick. Didn’t scream. Her face was completely blank, as if she had turned into a doll. Arthur turned and handed her to someone behind him on the stairs.

“Emily!” Karina tried to crawl after her but her body refused to obey.

Arthur touched the hem of her black top and edged it upward. His fingers touched her stomach. Pain pierced her and she cried out.

“Ah. Now see, this isn’t good.” Arthur shook his head mournfully. “All of this must seem terribly confusing to you and our time is short, so I will keep the explanations simple. This is the house where monsters live. We are the killers of monsters. I suppose that also makes us monsters simply by necessity. I don’t know why you’re here. It’s probably a pure coincidence. An unlucky roll of the dice. You and your children were caught in the cross fire. One of the monsters poisoned you with her throat dart. The wound is fatal. You’re dying.”

Fear shot down Karina’s spine in an icy rush. She didn’t think she could have gotten more scared, but his tone, that patient, pleasant, even tone, as if he were discussing lunch, terrified her. It’s not a dream, she realized. It’s happening. It’s happening to me right now. God, please let Emily be okay. Please. I’ll do anything.

“I can smell your fear,” Arthur said. “It rolls off your skin. A better man would feel discomfort at your pain. But I’m not a good man. I feel nothing for you. We rarely have to deal with innocent bystanders and when we do, we strive to send them back unharmed, not out of some altruistic impulse, but because we dislike attention. If you hadn’t been injured, Henry here would wipe your memory and the five of you would go merrily on your way. As it is, however, you will be dead in the next thirty minutes.”

The words refused to leave her mouth. Karina strained and forced them out. “Why are you telling me this?”

His ice-cold smile made her heart jump. “I’m talking to you because I’m about to offer you a deal. You have something we want, my lady. Your body has a genetic predisposition toward producing certain hormones one of us desperately needs. Your subspecies isn’t unique, but it’s rare enough to make you valuable. I suspect that’s also how you were able to find this place, and that’s why the yadovita, the redheaded woman, took the time to poison you instead of defending herself from us. Listen carefully, my lady, because I won’t repeat myself.”

She stared at him, committing each word to memory.

“The creature behind you requires your blood. He will feed on you. His venom will counteract the poison that’s killing your body. In return, he will consume the chemicals your body will produce. You will give yourself to the House of Daryon. You will let the beast feed on you. You will live in quarters of our choosing. You can never leave. You can have no contact with the outside world. For your agreement to this, we will spare your life and the lives of the children.”

The thing on the windowsill let out a low whine of anticipation. That . . . that beast would feed on her. Forever. Oh, dear God. I can’t do it . . . I can’t . . .

Arthur leaned forward, his face showing no emotion beyond the pleasant, calm composure. “Consider carefully before you answer. I don’t offer this deal to you because I like you or because I’m moved by some noble emotion. I do it because we need you. What I propose won’t be pleasant for you. You won’t enjoy it. In fact, many would say you’re better off dying now.”

Fog gathered on the edge of her mind, threatening to smother her. Karina clawed at reality, trying to remain conscious.

“My daughter . . .”

The beast growled on the windowsill.

“He guarantees her safety,” Arthur said.

“The children . . . will be returned to their families?”

“Yes.”

“I agree.”

A gentle hand seized her mind and pulled her back through time and space to the reality of the round table and the hot tea mug in her hand. She looked at Arthur.

“My daughter, Emily?”

He didn’t answer.

“You promised me the children would be returned to their families. Her father is dead. I’m the only family Emily has. Where is she?”

He smiled, a flat curving of lips without any emotion. “She’s at the main house for the time being.”

No, she wasn’t, Karina realized. He was lying. “I want my daughter. We made a deal. Bring me my daughter, or I am leaving.”

Daniel rocked back on his chair and laughed. A door slammed. Footsteps echoed through the house. “Cooperate with Lucas and your daughter will be brought to you,” Arthur said.

A man walked into the kitchen. Tall, corded with muscle that bulged his T-shirt, he dwarfed the doorway. He wasn’t just large, he was massive and wrapped in menace, as if he were a whirlwind of violence, barely contained in the shell of his body. Black hair fell on his hard, aggressive face in long strands. He glanced at her, his eyes green and merciless. She met his gaze and gulped. It was like looking into the eyes of a tiger. His stare promised death.

Recognition sparked in his green irises and flared into rage.

He lunged forward, inhumanly quick, and hit the table with his palm. She jerked back.

“Get your hands off of her!” His voice rippled with a snarl.

Henry raised his hands in the air. The man grasped the chair, Henry still on it, and tossed it aside. Steely fingers grabbed her elbow and pulled her up. He swiped her off the floor with ridiculous ease, locking her in the crook of his arm, and snapped like a rabid dog, “Mine!”

“We have no intention of taking her from you.” Arthur sipped his tea.

“Don’t any of you fuckers touch her!”

She flailed in his arms, trying to break free, but it was like trying to push back a semi.

“You must forgive Lucas,” Arthur told her. “He tends to be overprotective of his food.”

A familiar scent of heated metal invaded her nostrils. Panic squirmed through her. She fought harder, but her feet kicked only air. He carried her away out of the kitchen back to the bedroom where she had awakened.