Washington, D.C.

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Damon Jones yawned, showing his teeth to the smuggling ringleader, who promptly fell to the floor in a dead faint.

This wasn’t all that surprising.

Damon had very large teeth.

“All right, Jones,” his partner, Zane, said. “Enough with the lion form. Time to switch back into a human, because I’ll be damned if I’m doing all the paperwork this time.” Zane cuffed their captive--who currently stank up the number three spot on the FBI Paranormal Operations Division’s Most Wanted List—just as the scumbag twitched his way back to consciousness.

Damon looked at both of them and then casually extended the claws of one dinner-plate-sized paw.

Number Three, who’d just come around, made a moaning sound and passed out again.

“And quit playing with the prisoner! You damn cats. Always playing with your food.” Zane was six feet of attitude wrapped up in bad ass, and one of the few people—in or out of the FBI—who dared to mouth off to Damon.

Damon was currently in his alternate form: six hundred pounds of pure Barbary lion. He’d measure nine feet long from head to tip of tail, if anybody had ever dared to approach him with a tape measure, and his head was at the level of Zane’s shoulder. He stretched and then shifted back to human form in a shimmering kaleidoscope of magic.

“Your analogy sucks. I’d never consider that moron to be food,” he said, grinning. “Nice call on barricading the warehouse exits, by the way. Sam caught two of this idiot’s flunkies trying to sneak out of the second story window.”

Zane stared at him. “How could you possibly…oh. You smelled them? Also, did I mention how glad I am that you don’t shift into a naked human? I really, really don’t want to see your dangly bits.”

“I heard Sam report in on your radio. Cat hearing, remember? And, sadly, nobody has seen my dangly bits in far too long.” Which was for the best, probably. The last thing he had time for was emotional entanglement, with a job that kept him working and traveling 24/7.

Their backup rushed in and put the cuffs on Number Three, who moaned and whimpered as he was dragged away.

“Not very impressive for a so-called drug lord. Especially one who must have a death wish to play with the Winter Fae lords and Ice,” Zane said, shaking his head, as they followed Number Three out of the dingy Chicago warehouse that had been home to a fairly substantial Ice-processing operation until just about five minutes earlier.

Ice was the massively hallucinogenic drug that some enterprising criminals were manufacturing, using water from the cold, clear mountain springs in Winter Fae territory. The drug was a mild party enhancement to anyone with Fae blood. For humans and shape shifters, it was the most powerful drug ever invented—made meth look like baby aspirin—and the trafficking in it was worth billions. When the Fae caught intruders in their territory, though, death and dismemberment—and not in that order--followed shortly thereafter.

Ice was a ticket to torture in a tiny plastic baggie. It had the nasty habit of killing at least a quarter of its addicts in particularly horrible ways: seizures that went on for hours, bleeding out, loss of all neurological function and control. For some reason, that didn’t stop any of the fools from using.

“I don’t get anything about any of this. Why they’d defy the Winter lords--who are seriously bad ass dudes—to steal the stuff, why anybody would use it when they could die miserably…why jelly donuts exist.” Damon scowled. “Who the hell wants jelly in a donut?”

Zane laughed. “Dancing Donuts get your order wrong again? I wondered why you were in such a foul mood this morning. Usually a take-down puts a smile even on your grouchy mug.”

They headed out of the warehouse and into the parking lot, which had been transformed since the op went down from an empty, weed-infested patch of gravel to a space filled with cop cars, evidence pick-up vans, FBI sedans, and an SUV that probably chauffeured the mayor and/or the chief of police around. The reporters were showing up, too. The TV station vans were shuffling for access at the edge of the lot already.

Made sense. All the politicians were going to want to get in on this one. Bagging the local head distributor and an estimated twenty-five million dollars’ worth of Ice was going to be major news, and everybody would want a piece.

All Damon wanted was to get out of there before somebody shoved a camera in his face.

“You’re gone,” Zane said, sighing. “Leaving me to deal with this--"

A crack ripped through the air—the kind of sound that caused even lion shifters to want to dive for cover. Nothing else sounded like a high-powered rifle.

Instead, Damon leapt into the air, shifting mid-leap into his lion form, desperate to put himself between the bullet and his partner. When the freight train slammed into his shoulder, he knew he’d succeeded. The velocity of the hit knocked him to the ground just long enough for him to bounce back up, snarl at Zane to get his ass to cover, and head for the outside stairs to the roof.

Whoever was up there shooting had better be prepared to die.

Ignoring the shouting coming from the cops on the ground and the pain in his shoulder with equal determination, Damon raced up the rickety stairs that barely clung to the side of the old building, not landing on any step long enough for it to decide it couldn’t carry the load of a quarter ton of seriously pissed-off lion. The creaking sounds were ominous enough, though, to give him the passing thought that the staircase might not hold on his way down.

He sure as hell didn’t want to die when his last bite of food on the planet had been a damn jelly donut.

Screw it. They could chopper him out.

He hit the roof in a flat-out run, but the sniper must have seen him coming, because he was crouched in the corner of the roof, braced against two walls, and aiming the rifle at Damon’s face.

Before the man could get off a shot, Damon leapt into the air with the preternatural speed and power that was a gift of shapeshifter magic. No mere lion could have moved so fast that he was a blur in the shooter’s eye.

No lion could have leapt fifty feet across the rooftop in the span of a single heartbeat.

But Damon could—and did—do both.

He smashed the sniper’s body down to the concrete and then broke the rifle in half with one bite of his powerful jaws. It took every ounce of control in his body to keep from doing the same to the shooter.

Instead, he stalked around the man’s prone and trembling body and roared out his fury.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Zane rushing across the roof toward him.

“Time to back off the puny human, Damon. I know you’re ready to rip his head off at the neck, but we need to interrogate him first.”

The shooter made a moaning sound at the word “first,” as Zane had no doubt intended. It was enough to help Damon calm down, which his wily partner had also probably intended.

When the shooter dared a glance at him, Damon snarled, showing all of his teeth, and the man turned pale.

“I won’t talk!”

Zane looked at the shooter, and then at Damon, and then he laughed. “Yes, you will. They always do. Ten minutes alone with a lion…you’ll be begging us to listen to you talk.”

Damon snarled again, but this time from pain. The shoulder was burning, which meant the bullet was still in there. The very fine Ulfberht .338 Lapua Magnum--that he’d reduced to expensive kindling. He needed a few minutes alone to focus, so he could force it out of his muscle.

He’d worry about that later, because –

Oh, hell.

He had to deal with it now.

He had a plane to catch.

While agents took the sniper down off the roof, Damon closed his eyes and pushed; every muscle straining to rid his body of the foreign object. After about thirty long, painful seconds, the bullet popped out of his shoulder and hit the floor.

“Bonus! Evidence,” Zane said, using tiny tongs and an evidence bag to secure the bullet. “Good kitty.”

Damon bared his teeth at his smartass partner before transforming back to human. “One of these days, you’re going to seriously piss me off.”

Zane just laughed, and headed for the stairs. “Yeah, whatever. I already figured out that my black ass is safer with you than without you. Nice try on the intimidation, though. Definite six out of ten.”

“Like you need me to feel safe. You make half the suspects piss their pants just from catching a glimpse of you,” Damon told his Oxford-educated partner, who had the brains of a rocket scientist and the muscles of a body builder. “One of these days you’ll give me a ten on something, and I’ll pass out from the shock.”

“One of these days, maybe. But right now you need to catch that plane to go play big, bad lion in the middle of the scary conclave of pretty, pretty garden witches,” Zane said, doing a fake shudder, his eyes widening as he mocked his partner.

Damon stopped, one foot already on the top step. “How did you know about the garden witches—oh. Right. Psychic. Well, yeah, I have intel that Bannon may be setting up shop in Ohio of all freaking places. I need to go check it out. If there’s anything to it, I’ll call you in.”

Zane grinned. “Don’t do me any favors. The last bloody witch I dated stole my dog and almost turned me into a toad when I showed up to get him back. Mr. Darcy was so upset I had to hire a doggie psychologist for him. Do you know what dog psychologists charge? We are in the wrong damn business.”

Damon rolled his eyes. “You are a lunatic. Also, I still can’t believe you named an English bulldog Mr. Darcy. Did you have to turn in your man card?”

“My baby sister named him. Are you dissing my baby sister?”

“Never. Give Zenia kisses from me, okay?” Zane’s younger sister was possibly the sweetest person on the planet. She taught kindergarten, rescued and fostered dogs for a shelter, and lived with Zane. The two of them had worked hard to create the family life they’d never had. Their junkie mom had dragged them to the U.S. and dumped them in the foster care system when they were kids. They’d been split up into different group homes, along with an older sister Zane never talked about, until Zane had managed to get custody of Zenia just about the minute he turned eighteen.

It helped, when you were working your way through the bureaucracy of the foster care system, to have psychic powers. Zane had always known exactly how to answer every question put to him, and he’d succeeded in record time at gaining custody of his sister, like he succeeded in everything he touched. He was the best person Damon had ever known, and it pissed him off all over again that some asshole flunky had come close to shooting Zane.

Zane was a badass, but only shifters and vampires were badass enough to survive some weapons—and high-powered rifles were at or near the top of that list.

When they were back on the ground, Damon nodded at him. “Keep me informed on this situation. I’ll let you know what’s going on in Ohio. It’s gotta be a false rumor. What the hell would a major international drug trafficker be doing in the Buckeye state?”

“Maybe he’s a football fan.”

They took a moment of silence in appreciation for The Ohio State University--the best team in college football--and then Zane laughed.

“Dude. Be careful with the scary, scary witches.” Zane cleared his throat and glanced away, then back at Damon. “And thanks. You saved my life.”

Damon rolled his eyes. “Please. I owed you one, after that problem with the puppeteers in Alaska. Anyway, the Cardinals are witches. How scary can they be?”

Then, with that probably stupid and definitely arrogant question hanging in the air, Damon headed off to his miserably gray and sterile apartment to pack his bag for a quick trip to Ohio. Not that he was in all that much of a hurry to get back to the practically empty place; it still had cardboard boxes scattered around after five years. He traveled too much to care about decorating or even unpacking. And it wasn’t like there was anybody in D.C. to miss him.

There wasn’t anybody anywhere to miss him.

Disgusted with his uncharacteristic self-pity party, Damon headed out. He had some witches to meet. He had to remember to be gentle with them; they were probably delicate, fragile creatures.

He sighed. Delicate and fragile were at the top of his own personal top ten list: Things Damon Sucked At Dealing With.

This job was going to blow.