The Smith and Wesson .45 lay on the small wooden dining table next to Nik’s new best friend, a bottle of Crown Royal. Well, Crown was an old friend he’d left behind, but they’d recently renewed their acquaintance in a major way.

Nik had been staring at the pistol for almost an hour. Twice, he had reached for it. Twice, his hand had veered toward the whiskey instead.

He was still stone-cold sober. Apparently, it took a lot of even the finest whiskey to make blowing your brains out seem like an okay idea, even if there was a family precedent. His father had chosen the same exit route, leaving his body for sixteen-year-old Nik to find.

A car horn sounded outside, jerking Nik away from the image of his father, a horror-show of blood and bone and brain matter spread across the office of the fine old house Stavros Dimitrou had bought in New Orleans’ Broadmoor neighborhood with the first big profits from his shipping company.

Stavros had passed his psychic gift, or curse, to his son before he decided he’d rather be dead than deal with it anymore. Nik had been left to find his own way of coping with the assault of images whenever he touched things or, worse, people. A sheaf of papers on the chair next to Nik held the fruits of that gift—drawings he’d made from the images he’d gotten off the guy in Atlanta.

Deciding the car horn had nothing to do with him, Nik settled back into his chair and took another sip of Crown. Nik didn’t have a son to find his body, but there would be repercussions. Robin, the eagle shifter who’d become his best friend, would never forgive him if he committed suicide. God knows she’d talked him off the proverbial ledge often enough with her unique brand of tough love, and it had been Robin who’d brought him to Penton. She’d thought he wouldn’t be able to read the past off the touch of a vampire, and she had been right.

But that was before things had changed. Before Nik had begun to change. Robin might even help him die now. She’d told him often enough: true shape-shifters were born, not made. Three bites from a shifter created a hybrid monster that usually ended up being put down like a mad dog.

Not long after arriving in Penton three months ago, Nik had taken three bites from a hybrid coyote shifter in the clusterfuck that had ended with Fen Patrick’s escape, Krys’s coma, and Aidan’s injuries. He had gone so long before developing symptoms that Robin believed he’d gotten away with it. That maybe his psychometric abilities had protected him from being infected.

She had been wrong. The psychometry hadn’t protected him; it had just slowed down the process. Plus, the damned shifter had bitten off half of his right earlobe.

A couple of weeks ago, Nik’s blood began to feel as if it were laced with battery acid, burning as it ran through his veins. It happened only a few minutes every couple of days at first, but since had become more frequent. Last night, after returning from Atlanta, the symptoms had lasted more than forty-five minutes. Long enough that Nik finally had to pull his head out of the Crown Royal-laced sand and admit the obvious.

His body was trying to shift. It wouldn’t simply keep happening; it would get worse until he partially shifted and stayed that way, a miserable freak. Unless he put a stop to it first.

Nik poured another highball glass of whiskey from the half-empty bottle. He took a sip and looked around him at this place he’d come to love. He’d harbored dreams that Penton would be the perfect place for him to live out his days, peaceful among vampires whose touch told him nothing about the horrors they’d committed or endured during their long lives. A quiet life in the rural environs of eastern nowhere, Alabama. More quickly than he would’ve believed, Penton had become home.

He shared this communal house in Penton with Robin, her vampire mate, Cage Reynolds, and Hannah, the young Muscogee Creek girl who’d been turned vampire and frozen in time at age 11. Nik truly hated to leave Hannah, who’d come to look at him as an older brother or surrogate father, bound together by gifts they couldn’t control. Where Nik read the past, Hannah got random visions of the future. She’d lost the couple who had been her familiars—both feeders and parents—in the first attack on Penton. The bond with Nik had begun to revive her. She would survive without him, though. She wouldn’t want him to endure the future he faced as a hybrid shifter freak, always in pain, never in control.

Another noise from outside jerked Nik back to attention. A car door. Hannah had taken her dog Barnabas for a walk and a trip to visit Krys. It was too soon for them to be back. Robin had taken flight in her eagle shifter form, communing with nature and working off nervous energy. Cage was on patrol duty. Aidan kept a full perimeter guard around Penton now, twenty-four/seven.

Yet Nik heard heavy footfalls climb the front steps and cross the porch, followed by a knock and the last voice Nik wanted to hear: Mirren Kincaid.

“Dimitrou, open the door. You have thirty seconds.”

Or what? These doors were solid and had a steel core, double dead bolts, and the jambs were lined with silver, which burned the skin of vampires and reduced their physical power.

Let Mirren do his worse. Nik took a sip of whiskey and kept his mouth shut.

The door didn’t break against the mass of muscle that was Mirren Kincaid. Nik couldn’t say the same for the entire door facing, however. One second he was staring at paneled wood polished with an oak stain to bring out its grain; the next, he was staring at about three hundred pounds of pissed-off Scottish vampire, dressed in black from sweater to boots. His dark hair was cut short and his goatee did nothing to hide his scowl.

Maybe Mirren would kill him and save Nik the trouble of offing himself, although it promised to be a lot more painful. Nik held up his glass. “Want a drink?”

Mirren propped ham-sized hands on his hips and took in the scene, his eyes the color of thunderclouds rather than silver, which told Nik the big vampire wasn’t as angry as his posture might indicate. Mirren stared at the half-empty bottle. At the gun. At Nik.

“Never had you figured for a coward, Zorba.”

Mirren liked nicknames, except the ones others used on him. Nik looked every bit of his Greek heritage, so to Mirren he’d been Zorba from the day he set foot in Penton.

“Guess you figured wrong.” Nik took another sip of whiskey. “And don’t judge what you know nothing about.”

“I know those three coyote bites are catching up with you. I know you’re in pain.”

Nik set down his glass hard enough for amber liquid to splash over the sides. “How?” There were only two ways. Aidan could have picked up his distress through their blood bond, but Aidan wasn’t that sharp these days. Which left option two.

Nik’s stomach sank into his boots. “Hannah told you.”

She’d probably had a vision of her buddy Nik and his bottle and his gun.

“The kid’s on her way, but I was closer. Lucky me.” Mirren’s gaze landed on the papers. “These the images you got off the guy in Atlanta?”

Nik nodded. “I roughed them out on Starbucks napkins while the scenes were fresh, then redid them when I got home.”

Home. Penton.

Mirren snagged the .45 on his way past and settled on the sofa with the drawings. Nik wrapped protective hands around his glass and bottle. “Fucking oaf.”

There was still a chance that if he pissed the big guy off he could commit suicide by vampire. After all, Mirren’s nickname in the vampire world—the one no one in Penton dared use to his face—was Slayer.

The vampire ignored him. He held up a pen and ink drawing of the warehouse with the cages, and one of a blond woman with dark-rimmed glasses. “Any idea what these mean?”

“I’d swear some of the images I got looked like New Orleans.” His original home sweet home. Or at least the place Nik had grown up. The woman even looked vaguely familiar. “Keep going. You’ll recognize someone.” Mirren had been so preoccupied with Aidan when he’d picked them up last night, Nik had decided to wait about telling him the news of their favorite traitor.

He knew when Mirren had reached the sketch of two vampires feeding from the human man who called himself Terry Brach.

“Aw, fuck me. Fen Patrick? You think Patrick is in New Orleans? Did you tell Aidan?” Mirren tossed the drawings on the table and paced around the living room a couple of times before leaning against the wall next to what was left of the front door area, arms crossed. It was his favorite thinking stance.

“Aidan was in no shape to hear anything. You know that.” Nik raised his glass for a sip of whiskey, but his self-pity wallow had been spoiled. He set it back on the table. “I know Aidan wants to keep recruiting Penton citizens and familiars in Atlanta, but he’s not being smart about it. He’s making bad decisions.”

Nik paused, waiting for Mirren to interrupt him and jump to Aidan’s defense. He didn’t, which told Nik a lot. “Look, this is Aidan’s town and he’s our leader,” he told Mirren. “He’s my friend as well as yours. But he went back to a site he’d used before. He didn’t find a room with multiple exits. He didn’t pick up on the explosives.”

Mirren held up one finger and Nik shut up. “We’ll talk about this later. First, we talk about you.”

“There’s nothing you can do for me.” Other than use that ancient sword of his, Faolain, to put Nik out of his misery.

“You’re wrong.” The high, sing-song voice of a little girl preceded Hannah through the smashed door frame. Meeting Hannah had broken Nik’s heart, and it also had hardened it. She had the slender build of an eleven-year-old girl, complete with knobby knees and a penchant for pink and purple—such as the pink jacket and purple cords she wore now. Even Barnabas, who wasn’t with her, had a pink leash with rhinestones on it.

Hannah also was a reminder of the cruelty and arrogance of the breed of vampires against which Penton was fighting. The predators. The real monsters.

She ran across the room and wrapped her arms around Nik’s neck, and he hugged her back on instinct. He loved this kid, even if she was a couple of centuries older than him and could lift the corner of his SUV with one hand—make that his former SUV, now abandoned on the streets of Atlanta.

The girl pulled away and looked at him with solemn black eyes, long enough to make Nik squirm. Aidan had told Nik her father was a powerful Muscogee shaman, and the vampire who’d turned her had hoped to use her powers to his benefit. It hadn’t quite worked out that way; Aidan had found the guy and killed him for turning a child. Even in the vampire world, children were off-limits, at least before the pandemic crisis. Now, who knew?

“There’s still time.” She turned to Mirren, who’d been watching the child with a combination of respect and, yeah, maybe a little fear. Mirren Kincaid liked what he could see and understand, and distrusted what he couldn’t.

“Time for what?” Robin stepped through the doorway. “What happened to the door?”

“Forget the bloody door.” Her mate, Cage Reynolds, was behind her. “What happened to the whole front of the house?”

Nik groaned and banged his head on the table. Couldn’t a guy commit suicide in peace? Obviously not.

“Your friend Zorba has gotten wasted on a perfectly good bottle of whiskey and was thinking about blowing out his brains with a perfectly good bullet from a Smith and Wesson,” Mirren said. Nik could always count on Mirren for bluntness. “He’s starting up with that shifter shit.”

“Shut up about shifter shit.” Robin stalked toward Nik, slowing down long enough to aim a kick at Mirren’s shin. He slapped at her, but missed. “What’s going on with you that…”

She stopped next to Nik, frowned, then leaned over and sniffed at his neck. He pushed her away. “Stop sniffing, beast.”

Robin ignored him. Best friends, as she often reminded him, always have the option of ignoring you for your own good. “Damn it. I can’t believe this is happening now—it’s been three months since your third bite. Have you tried to shift yet?”

No point in dancing around it. “Once, last night after the bombing. Just the back of my hand. Couple of other times.”

“Burning sensations? Headaches?”

He nodded. “They’re getting more frequent and lasting longer. Robin, I told you before, when we thought it might happen sooner. I can’t live like this. I won’t. Just go away and let me do what I need to do.” He looked around her at Hannah and Mirren and Cage. “All of you.”

Robin didn’t take her eyes off him. “Hannah, what did you mean that there was still time?”

“Mirren can turn him,” the girl said. “Make him one of us.”

“The hell I can.” Mirren began pacing.

Fuck that. “Hell, no.” Nik’s voice overlapped with Mirren’s.

So far, Cage Reynolds—the newest of Penton’s vampire lieutenants and a London psychiatrist in his human life—hadn’t weighed in. Nik appealed to his level head and sense of logic. “Cage, tell them what a stupid idea that is. We all saw what happened this summer when Frank Greisser and his Tribunal buddies tried turning vampires into shifters, and vice-versa. It was a colossal fuckup. And there aren’t enough feeders to go around for the vampires we already have.”

To Nik’s irritation, Cage looked more thoughtful than supportive. “It’s quite different, though, isn’t it? You’re not a vampire being turned shifter, after all. You’re only a hybrid and not even that yet, not completely. The vampire traits might erase the shifter effects.”

“Or it could kill him,” Mirren pointed out casually, as if they discussed an interesting theory and not Nik’s fucking life. “Transition’s only about a fifty-fifty proposition, so half of those we try to turn don’t survive. Add in the hybrid factor, and the odds of survival might go lower.”

“Or they might be higher.” Robin turned to look at Nik again. “Niko, it’s your decision. You could feed from me if you’re turned. Cage wouldn’t mind.”

Nik aimed a weak smile at the barely disguised outrage on Cage’s face. He’d never shared Robin with anyone willingly, yet Robin would insist on being a feeder for Nik. For that reason alone, it was worth considering.

“If I’m turned and I survive, will I still be able to read people? Know the history of things?” Nik directed the question at Mirren. “I know that’s my real value to Penton.”

Mirren stared at him a moment, then almost smiled. Almost. “I don’t know, but you’d make a helluva fighter for us, either way. Don’t sell yourself short, Zorba.”

Nik looked down at his hands, his tanned skin smooth and free of coyote fur—for now. A flicker of hope ignited inside him. He could become a vampire or die trying, or he could turn into a pain-wracked hybrid, or he could kill himself. An hour ago, he’d thought freakdom and suicide his only options.

Things were improving.