It takes almost a whole other week for Rumpel Stiltz’ kin to get back to me.

I’m sitting at The Dragonfly, wondering if this new job is really all it’s cracked up to be because fuck, am I bored. A single dhampir gal like myself can only go to so many movies alone, wander the aisles at the bookstore until they close, and eat takeout from places that they don’t live above.

I miss being a vampire hunter.

Is that fucked up?

It’s the dead of night and The Dragonfly is packed far beyond legal human capacity—not that Harry or his business partner gives a shit about that. But holy hell, it’s crowded in here and the smell is interesting. Sweaty bodies are packed shoulder to shoulder, a whole host of different species pressing up against my back, waving cash and credit cards in an effort to get a drink.

Me, I’m just fine with my four different colored mixed drinks. And this time, only three of the four tastes like gin and tequila! The fourth just tastes like tequila.

There are so many people, so many different species, that my senses are overwhelmed. Normally, I’m fully aware of each person in the bar, their species, the rate of their pulse. But tonight, there’re too many for me to keep track of, so I relax into the anonymity of the crowd and sip my drinks until I’m buzzed and smiling.

Even with the supernatural horde filling The Dragonfly, Harry keeps the drinks comin’ for me, and I stay put, laying claim to my stool and my little section of the bar. I don’t usually come in here on such busy nights because I’m out working, but I’ll be damned if I give up my space tonight.

Besides, the people-watching—er, the ogre-vampire-faerie-dragon-whatever-watching—is prime. I’ve already seen three fights, two hookups, and an argument about fae politics. Fantastic.

The last thing I expect to see that night are the Stiltz brothers.

But as soon as the door opens that day, I can feel them like a lightning bolt to the chest, even through the thick, dense crowd. Fuck, they’d be impossible to miss. I notice the rest of the vampires—and a single other dhampir—that’re sharing the bar with me all turn to look. The crowd even parts to let them through.

“Look at that,” I purr, just drunk enough to be brazen, just sober enough not to slur my words. “The red-carpet treatment. Bravo.” I clap my hands together in a slow, melodramatic sort of way as Sorrow cocks an eyebrow and Vyce slides onto the stool next to mine, very recently vacated by a pretty young fae girl in a thick glamour. Who the hell knows what she looks like underneath?

“Are you drunk?” Vyce asks with a small, little smirk. “Because we’d like to talk business, and I don’t do business with drunk girls.”

“Hardly,” I say, whipping a knife out from my belt and pointing it at Vyce’s midsection. He doesn’t stop me. I can’t decide if that’s because I got the jump on him or because he’s just being nice. “I call this one Lucy.” With a grin, I spin the knife with the rowan handle in a full circle and tuck it away again.

“Lucy, Ricky, and Ethel, huh?” Sorrow asks, tucking his hands into this fabulous red wool military coat. “I like the theme there, babe.”

“Ooo, the name babe doesn’t sit well with me,” I tell the blue-eyed vampire with a tight smile spreading across my lips. “Stick with Cam.” Wrapping my fingers around the hideous orange drink that Harry’s named A Sunset in Cabo, I knock it back and then rise to my feet.

An ogre girl immediately slips into my place and steals my spot; my mouth drops open in shock. Harry gives me a don’t you dare look before he moves over to the girl and leans on the counter, flirting heavily with yet another chick who wouldn’t appreciate the size of his dick.

To each their own, I guess.

“Shall we get out of here?” Vyce asks, his voice so sultry and smooth that it manages to cut through the din of the bar. The way he looks at me, I can almost imagine he’s asking for an encore to our last performance.

But eh. The thing about a one-night stand is that it’s a one-night stand. Not two. No fucking way. Besides, these men are hot and powerful and dangerous as hell, the perfect addiction. If I let myself, I could get caught up in them.

“Let’s,” I say, nodding at Harry as he gives me a very stern look. I toss him a salute and he flips me off in return, watching me leave with hard, gray eyes as I head out the door with all three vampires.

Wolfe is silent and stoic, mouth pinched in a tight line, but I can’t deny that he’s a beautiful man with strong, commanding features and luscious lips. Too bad he doesn’t seem to know how to use them to smile, or even smirk like his fellow Stiltz brothers.

“How about some bubble tea and a walk through the cemetery?” I ask, leading the way down the sidewalk. First rule in doing business with vamps: stay in control of the situation. I know a place where we can grab blood-spiked boba and scraps of meat to feed the cemetery ghouls.

“Bubble tea?” Sorrow asks, catching up to me, his coat billowing out behind him. “That’s sort of…random? Aren’t you curious to know the terms of the contract?”

“Will they change if I get some lavender milk tea and a bag of meaty bones for the ghouls?”

Sorrow wrinkles his face up as Vyce moves smoothly up on my other side, walking fast enough to catch up and yet somehow managing not to look hurried either.

“Sorrow’s not a big fan of ghouls,” he whispers, reaching out to tuck a golden wave of hair behind one of my ears. In the same motion, he trails his fingertip down the side of my throat, over the healed flesh where his teeth penetrated my sensitive skin. I shiver and wrap my arms over the cherry red dress I wore to the bar, just in case I saw a man—or two or three—I was interested in.

I haven’t had sex since my threesome with the men on either side of me and to be quite frank, I’m horny as fuck.

“Well, I can feed them and he can watch then,” I tell the three men as I pause at the bubble tea stand and order my drink—sanguinated is the special term to get it nice and bloody—and a bag o’ bones to go. The owner gives me a good deal and then glares at the three super powerful vamps as they stand there not ordering anything.

“Oh, fuck it,” Sorrow says, picking up a rose milk tea to go, before following me the last block into Broke Oak cemetery. Yep. Broke Oak. Apparently the name’s a throwback to the first man who was buried here, killed during a storm that broke the branches of the oak above his burial plot. But whatever. Now, it’s a haven for ghouls, these skinny, long-limbed creatures with wide mouths and too many teeth.

They avoid humans, but the second they smell vamps they come sniffing around. Because, let’s face it, ghouls eat dead flesh and vampires…well, they leave chaos and destruction in their wakes.

The first two ghouls to approach us have long, stringy gray hair and hideous gray-purple skin that looks like an old bruise.

Taking a chunk of beef bone from the bag, I toss it into the grass where it clatters against a rounded headstone. The two creatures scrabble over to it, hissing and clawing at each other, until the one with the tiny, malformed breasts manages to get the bone and swallows it whole.

And that is the reason why ghouls make such good garbage disposals; they eat every bite and don’t leave a drop of blood or a single tooth behind.

“There’s a bench just down the way,” I tell them, chucking another bone out into the grass for the male ghoul. I stick the wide pink straw into my mouth and take a big sip as we walk through the thick silver streams of moonlight. “If you’re here, then that means Rumpel Stiltz himself went for the deal?”

Vyce crosses his arms over his chest as I plop down on the bench and toss a few more bones across the walk and into the grass. Four more ghouls creep out, doing their strange squat-crawl toward the food and hissing at the three men now ringing me in a half-circle.

“You know the boss’s name?” Sorrow asks and I shrug, picking off pieces of meat and feeding the hideous, smelly little creatures while I sip my milky tea.

“Not many people know about House Stiltz, but the ones that do, know as much about Rumpel Stiltz’ kin as well as they know about Rumpel himself.” Glancing up, I bounce from one man’s gaze to the next, pausing on Wolfe’s cold, gray stare. It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking with that stone-cold façade, dressed in a brown leather jacket and black cowboy boots. A different man wearing that outfit might look ridiculous, but with those stern eyes and dark hair, the ink flashing just beneath those long-sleeves…Wolfe is hard to look away from.

“Rumpel is willing to strike a deal with you,” he says, voice gruff and businesslike. I bet he’s a kinky fuck in the bedroom. The stern, brooding ones always are. “But it’s going to cost you.”

“My firstborn child,” I insert, because that’s the standard price for any big spell. A whole person, someone for Rumpel to train and mold into a Stiltz kin, the perfect lackey, assassin, and mage all wrapped in one. “I already said yes, I know.”

Wolfe narrows his eyes on me. “You’re either full of shit or else you’re the most fucking heart—”

“Don’t you dare fucking judge me,” I snap, shaking out the rest of the meat scraps onto the ground and tossing the bag down with them. The ghouls, well, they’ll eat that, too, just like they ate the clothing off my marks and their victims. “You don’t know the shit I’ve been through or the shit I’ll have to wade through the rest of my life.”

I give him my fiercest face and whether I believe what I’m about to say or not, who knows. But I’ll never have kids, so it’s not a big deal. I’m infertile. The only dhampir doctor in the country diagnosed me when I started having irregular periods. I’m not upset about it; it is what it is.

“Why bring a child into this world at all, the way things are for me? What a miserable fucking life it would lead.” I stand up, bubble tea in hand, and stare up into Wolfe’s face. Good thing I’m tall, or else he’d be seriously fuckin’ intimidating. I’m guessing he’s what, six foot four? Maybe six foot five? “So yeah, to have children at all, I need this. And it doesn’t look like you’ve had such a terrible life to be honest. Fine. Take my firstborn, and one day they’ll grow up to be just like you—rich, gorgeous, powerful. Big fucking deal.” Sucking in a deep breath, I decide to continue my tirade while I still have the upper hand. “Besides, you’re an Unnatural, you’d think—”

Before I can finish that sentence, Wolfe is tackling me to the ground and spilling my tea all over the damn place. At first, I think he’s retaliating because I called him an Unnatural, a seriously racist term for a human-turned-vampire. But then something smashes into the spot where we were just standing and I realize this stern asshole just saved my life.

Wolfe rolls off of me and comes to his feet with two revolvers in his hands, revolvers that I didn’t even see him grab he moves so fast. He lifts them up and fires six alternating rounds from each into the side of a massive, sinewy, doglike creature.

“It’s a fucking hellhound,” I choke out as I scramble to my feet and try to figure out who or what would send one of these things my way. But that’s when I see its collar and the giant tag hanging from it that’s as big as my face.

House Sullivan.

Shit.

Lenora, that vamp I recently killed, she’s from House Sullivan—or was.

This is not good. The Family Sullivan won’t know it was me that killed Lenora, but the hellhound is spelled to seek out and kill her murderer. Since it flickers in and out of this reality, it’s impossible to track as it searches, thus the collar. Once the hellhound stops following the trail and gets ready to take down its prey, the Family can follow it here.

And find me.

And blow my cover.

“Why is a House Sullivan hellhound trying to kill you?” Wolfe asks, firing several more shots into its meaty hide. The thing has no visible skin. It’s just muscles and bones and sinew with a thin, translucent layer of flesh holding it all together. While the shots make it bleed, all they do is annoy it and slow it down.

Hellhounds are seriously fucking hard to kill.

“It’s complicated,” I say, diving in the opposite direction of Wolfe as the creature storms us and smashes into the gravestones where we just stood, scattering chunks of cement and making grassy divots with its claws.

As soon as he finds his feet, Wolfe spins his guns and tucks them under his jacket, presumably into a pair of holsters. And then he just stands there and glares at me. To be fair, Sorrow and Vyce are also just standing there staring at me.

“If we don’t know why it wants you,” Wolfe says as the hellhound circles me. “Then we can’t help.”

“Are you fucking serious?” I snap, dodging as the creature lunges again, just narrowly missing me with those snapping jaws. Damn thing has a mouth the size of a gator and twice the bite force. That, and a long tail covered in spines. Poisonous spines. Like, really fucking pleasant, right? “You’re just going to stand there and watch me get torn apart?!”

Yanking Ricky from the sheath on my back, I drop into a crouch and wait for the creature to stalk toward me again, slaver dripping hot and sticky from its jaws as a small horde of ghouls surrounds us, hissing and just waiting for the kill so they can hop in and tear the loser apart. Fortunately for me, they only eat dead flesh or else I’d be afraid they might attack. Unfortunately for me, I’m going to be dead flesh if these assholes don’t jump in and save me.

The hellhound rushes me again and I swing my sword up in a tight arc that should rightfully sever its head. Instead, Ricky meets bone and tears from my hand when the monster dog moves, shaking itself out and sending the falchion flying. I go for it as fast as I can, but it lands on the roof of a mausoleum with a clatter. By the time my fingers curl around the cement edge and start to haul myself up, the hellhound is there and grabbing me around the waist with its massive jaws.

It yanks me down and then tries to use its paws to pin me in place so it can rip me apart.

Well shit.

After everything, this is how it ends?

I can’t reach either Ethel or Lucy, screaming when the creature’s fangs puncture my flesh and squeeze down. The pressure gets so intense so quickly that it feels like my body’s about to burst like a damn balloon. Minutes away from making a bargain that would change my life, and I’m going to die for an assignment that paid frigging nil, an assignment I might add that had me taking a dangerous murderer off the street.

This is the thanks I get.

But before the giant dog can split me in half with its jaws, Vyce and Sorrow are there. Vyce wraps a garrote around the hellhound’s neck while Sorrow drops to his knees and puts a palm on both its upper and lower jaws, keeping it from biting down any further. In a split-second’s time, Vyce has yanked the garrote tight and severed the monster’s head.

The ghouls swarm in right away, yanking the carcass off of me and devouring it like piranha, not a single bone or scrap of meat goes to waste. Sadly enough, a hellhound’s severed head can still bite.

Sorrow holds its jaws open, but just barely, that’s how fucking strong those things are. A vampire as powerful as he is can lift a semi and throw it like it doesn’t mean shit. And yet, his muscles are quivering, beads of sweat dotting his forehead as he tries to save me from certain death. If I were a full-blooded vampire, I actually would survive being severed in two. Or rather, I’d die but then I’d immediately come back to life as one of the undead. Not so much the case for me.

Wolfe appears with a snarl and a curse just before Sorrow joins him and the three of them manage to finally dislodge the giant head, chucking it across the grass and letting the ghouls take care of that, too. Even the collar ends up down one of their throats. Wow. Good for me. I mean, it is unless I’ve already been tracked.

“Fuck,” I groan as I roll to one side and cough up blood. I must’ve gotten a tooth through the lung, too. My breathing feels wet and sticky and when I look down, all I see is red. Several of the smaller ghouls, too low in the pecking order to get any meat, sneak up close and start to lap the liquid from the grass as it pools.

Bad sign.

If they’re willing to drink my blood like that, then they think I’m going to die anyway.

“We need to get out of here in case she’s being hunted,” Vyce says as Sorrow lifts me into his arms as easily as if I were a child. “Back to her place then? I think I remember where it is.”

“How could I forget?” Sorrow asks as my head lolls and my vision flashes with big white spots. Leaving my life in the hands of three mega-powerful vampires from House Stiltz? Not the best idea in the world. Frankly, three vamps with a dying dhampir is like tossing a chocolate cake in front of a starving woman on her period. My blood will call to them as it drains out of me, beg them to finish me off and suck me dry. But there’s not really much I can do about it. I can’t even move. “She lives above a Chinese food place called Dog Town. I don’t think I could scrub that from my mind if I tried. Plus, there are molds growing in that apartment that don’t exist anywhere else on Earth.”

Vyce chuckles, but Wolfe tenses up, lifting his head in the direction of the thicket and the woods straight ahead. Even the ghouls back up a respectable distance as a howl cuts through the night air.

Uh-oh.

Sometimes…hellhounds travel with their mates.

A second monster explodes from the bushes, even larger than the first one.

Well, shit.

Sorrow shoves me into Vyce’s arms and then, even though my vision is going in and out and I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking at it, I’m almost positive I see him run toward the monster. As he moves, his shirt tears open in the back and there’s that weird ass motherfucking tattoo. It expands across Sorrow’s flesh, turning the pale white of his skin bright red, tufts of hair exploding out from the design. In an instant, it takes over him like a tsunami, swallows him up, and leaves the weirdest creature I’ve ever seen in my life.

The only thing I do recognize about the damn thing, is that it’s a demon. The black sigils on its forehead tell me that.

So…Sorrow has a demon inked into his back?! I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in my life, but this is a new one.

“We need to get her some blood,” Vyce growls out. “I’ll take her home; you cover Sorrow.”

Wolfe’s eyes catch mine, this deep gray-bordering-on-blue color that reminds me of a stormy sky over a wild ocean. It’s the last thing I see before I pass out, his eyes, and his hands holding a pair of revolvers while a demon and a hellhound tear into each other with razor sharp teeth.

Yeah.

One of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen some weird shit.

But this one takes the cake.

No wonder my dreams turn into nightmares about chocolate cupcakes with fangs. Who would’ve expected anything less?