It made me feel like a shitty friend and a bad ally. Whatever Shane had experienced to make him a stealthier fighter, I hadn’t been around to witness it. And what if things had gone the other way? What if instead of adapting, he’d failed?

We might not be besties, but he’d been around for a lot of crappy stuff that had gone on in my life, and he’d toughed it all out. I’d go as far as to say we were friends. Friends with a weird working relationship.

Anything less than friendship and I probably wouldn’t have followed him into the dark unknown. But he was part of my life, and was willing to keep me in his house at his own peril. Plus he’d promised we’d get to kill something.

I checked the safety of my gun and made sure it was off before crouching low to the ground and ducking under the fence.

Shane was halfway up a rusted fire escape, and my gaze traveled past him over the brick wall of the building. A shattered window ten floors up was his most likely destination. Siobhan clambered after him, and I brought up the rear. Shane paused outside the broken window and waited for us to join him, holding a finger to his lips to signal for us to be quiet.

I wanted to point out that three grown adults standing on the fire escape of a condemned building was just an accident waiting to happen, but my complaints would have to remain silent.

From inside came a sound I was all too familiar with: a young girl crying. The pitch of her voice was all I had to go on since she wasn’t saying anything, but from that alone I knew she had to be very young. Possibly a child.

What did it say about my life that listening to a child crying in fear was the norm? A messed-up one, is what.

Since I’d been living in relative hiding, I also didn’t know what warrant Shane had been working on that would have resulted in this situation. I was allowed into the council headquarters under strict supervision, and only when absolutely necessary.

One of the threats on my life was from Alexandre Peyton, a rogue vampire who’d been locked up by the council for over two years, chained in silver and starved to the point of emaciation. He hadn’t been a fan of me to begin with—our history of trying to kill each other went waaaay back—but now he would stop at nothing to see me dead.

And the last place he’d been seen was in the council headquarters. So he knew his way around the lower passages, and he knew the Tribunal chambers. If he was somehow still hiding there, or knew a way to get back in, I wasn’t protected in the place that should have been the safest for me. Which was the only reason I wasn’t being locked in there permanently.

Sig, the two-thousand-year-old Tribunal leader and my boss of sorts, had a few ideas about where I should be, but ultimately had yielded to the babysitter notion.

Babysitters and a perpetual shadow.

Somewhere in the alley, Holden Chancery would be watching. Sig could have selected from a hundred different vampires to watch over me, but we didn’t know who we could trust these days. Peyton was beguiling and had enlisted aid from other vampires in the past, so it wasn’t out of the question he might have help on the inside.

Holden was trustworthy.

He was the only vampire aside from Sig himself who I knew without a doubt wanted to keep me alive. Sig found me…amusing. He was interested in me as a sort of pet project, but I knew he cared about me in a weird, twisted way. My death would upset him. It would inconvenience him. And Sig didn’t like to be inconvenienced.

Holden was different. He’d once been my key into the vampire council, and now I was his superior. But that wasn’t what made him loyal. Holden loved me. He’d told me as much, in front of my boyfriend no less.

It might not have been ideal, but it meant he could be trusted because no matter what happened, he wouldn’t let the woman he loved die. Holden would sacrifice himself to protect me, so Sig had chosen him as my guard.

I scanned the alley, looking for any out-of-place shadow, but he was too good to be easily spotted. I couldn’t see him, but I felt his presence, and it comforted me.

The crying from inside the building, however, wasn’t comforting at all.

“Who are you chasing?” I asked.

“Grendel,” Shane said matter-of-factly, then ducked through the broken glass.

The name meant nothing to Siobhan, apparently. She shrugged and went through behind him. Ignorance was bliss in her case, because I knew all too well who Grendel was.

The Grendel. The namesake of the monstrous beast in Beowulf was not a demonic creature, at least not in the traditional sense. Grendel was a medieval warlord in his living years, a ferocious killing machine with no sense of honor or morality. Then he became a vampire.

Something most people don’t understand about vampires is that they aren’t made evil by the vampire infection. When they shuffle off the mortal coil, they don’t become smarter or more beautiful, and the change doesn’t make them wicked.

Vampires were just immortal versions of the shitty bastards they were in their human life. Or the lovely wonderful people, if that were the case. But in my association with vamps, I tended to think most of them started life as pricks and ended it the same way. Thomas Hardy once had a character say, “I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability.” Tommy had unwittingly summed up vampires in a nutshell.

And Grendel had been born the worst of the worst.

If history held true, he had a penchant for flaying his victims alive. Removing their skin and picking them apart piece by piece until their insides fell out.

He was also a vigorous fan of the rape in rape and pillage.

My heart sank as I thought of him in there with some poor, innocent girl. Why was it the worst kind of monsters focused on the sweet, sunny little kids?

“I’m sorry, they sent you after Grendel?” I climbed through the damaged frame, avoiding shards of broken glass as I stepped onto the patchy floor within. Boards of plywood crisscrossed over gaping holes where I could see through to the lower levels of the apartment building.

A scream echoed through the walls, rattling upwards into the ceiling and falling again, quieter. She was still screaming in fear and not pain, which was a small comfort. Anguish had its own unique sound, and it was one I was becoming increasingly familiar with.

Shane was edging across a rotting two-by-four, and Siobhan was nowhere in sight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No offense, Shane, but hunting Grendel isn’t a job for a human.” As foolhardy as I could sometimes be, I wouldn’t have gone after the warlord vamp on my own, let alone send a single human hunter after him. “Did you piss off Juan Carlos?”

The third Tribunal Leader, a Spanish conquistador, tended to hold grudges, especially against me. When I’d been the bounty hunter in Shane’s place, I was often assigned some impossible hunts, usually because a certain someone wanted to do away with me. Was he punishing Shane now, since he couldn’t take it out on me?

“It’s because of you,” he said in a ragged whisper. “They’re spread too thin looking for Peyton. I was the only one around. Now shhhhhh.”

As if us trampling around on creaky wooden planks and stepping on broken glass hadn’t alerted Grendel to our presence. But we’d play it his way and sneak up like unstealthy ninjas if that was what Shane wanted.

I tested a piece of plywood with my foot, and it bounced back. If I stuck to the edges, I might be able to rely on some extra resistance from the original floor. Except the floor must be in pretty shitty condition if the plywood was necessary. Seemed like my chances of safe passage were about even with the likelihood of me falling into the room below.

Fighting a thirteen-hundred-year-old vampire would be bad enough. I didn’t need to try doing it with a broken leg.

“Is any of that blood his?” I asked hopefully.

Shane had reached the empty elevator shaft and shot me a glare for breaching his cone of silence. Admittedly, it looked a lot more menacing with the coating of red all over him. Adding a splash of gore made a man much…manlier.

Something was very wrong with me.

“You don’t want to know where this blood is from,” he answered.

“I’m not in the habit of asking questions I don’t want the answer to.”

Shane checked his gun—a stupidly large revolver straight out of Dirty Harry—and glanced up the shaft of the elevator rather than down. “He ripped a dude’s head off. This was the result.”

Provided with such a lovely visual, I sort of regretted asking. “Did you—?”

“There were no witnesses. Wardens were called to clean it up, but God only knows when they’ll show.”

Bless my twisted little soul. He was learning. I might make a real bounty hunter out of the boy after all.

I tucked my gun into its holster and jumped across the hole, bypassing the questionable plywood altogether. Below us the screaming had faded to whimpers, meaning we were running out of time. Soon the screaming would start again, and when it did, it wouldn’t be from fear anymore.

Inside the belly of the elevator shaft the rust-coated cables started to wobble and sway. I stopped next to Shane and followed his gaze upwards.

Siobhan slid down the cable and jumped between us, shaking her hands and swearing. Her palms were bloody, and the front of her dress had been worn threadbare in places from the friction of the cable. “Remind me never to do that again without the proper equipment.”

“Is your mountaineering gear in your other purse?” I asked.

“Har-har.” Siobhan wiped the blood on her dress. “The upper floors are clear, no additional guards. If he has anyone protecting him, they’re downstairs.”

This girl was nuts. I liked not being the craziest woman in the room for once. “Don’t suppose either of you have any special skills that might help us figure out how many we’re up against?”

“At least two,” Shane said, still the only one whispering. “I used my special skill of seeing.”

I arched a brow at him. If Siobhan was responsible for him growing a pair, I had to give her props. I’d always assumed Shane had no backbone, but maybe I scared him. I was a fan of him coming out of his shell, but perhaps the sass could wait until after we’d killed some vampires.

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