Sheryl pulled into her driveway at seven forty-three with a stack of mail in her hand and her hospital badge still clipped to her scrub top. She had her key out when the black Mercedes-Benz sedan parked at the curb registered, its engine off and its tinted windows running dark.

  She stopped on the front walk. The air carried a sweetness that had no source in the yard or the surrounding street, cold and faint and wrong.

  The rear passenger door opened by itself.

  Lycara stepped out in the black leather bodysuit with its gold chevron studs and hammered chain, her straight black hair loose at her shoulders, her green eyes throwing their light across the lawn in front of her.

  Sheryl’s fingers tensed at her sides, the nails curving slightly. The mail hit the grass.

  “I’m not here to kill you,” Lycara said. “I’m here to make an offer.”

  Sheryl exhaled through her nose. “What kind of offer?”

  “I want you and your son to join me,” Lycara said, walking forward through the grass. “A new kingdom is coming to Earth, Sheryl. One where our kind no longer hides.”

  “What did you do to get here?” Sheryl asked. “And why did it have to be Karen?”

  “The thunderstorm you felt that night was more than lightning. It was a bridge, and its power gave me what I needed to awaken. As for your cousin, she was beautiful, strong, alone, and a former Lycan. She was too tempting to ignore.” Lycara raised one hand, and a green shimmer opened in the air beside her, a spectral screen of condensed energy playing footage of Karen convulsing on a floor as black smoke pressed through her skin.

  Sheryl covered her mouth. Karen’s screams were audible through the energy display.

  “It was painful,” Lycara said, “but necessary. Don’t worry. She’s in a better place now.”

  The screen shifted to Derek’s werelion form, his frame expanded to full height, the DNA helices in the display glowing against the dark background. “He’s not pure Lycan like us,” Lycara said, “but he’s extraordinary. Part wolf, part African lion. Do you understand what he could become if he stopped holding himself back?”

  “We’re not joining your pack,” Sheryl said, her voice cracking at the edges. “Too many people have died because of this. My son and I would never use what we are to hurt innocent people. If I could get rid of it, I would.”

  Lycara tilted her head. “Monica would be ashamed of you.”

  Sheryl went still.

  “Our sister built her pack from nothing,” Lycara said, her voice dropping to a measured, deliberate register. “She understood what she was. She did not apologize for it or ask humans for permission to exist in the world she was born to inherit. And you stood against her. You chose them over your own bloodline, and now you stand in your driveway defending the same people who would cage you the moment they understood what you are.”

  “Monica was a murderer,” Sheryl said. “She killed people who had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Monica was a builder,” Lycara said. “You destroyed her work and then went back to your hospital and your badge and your dinner dates with human men who don’t know what you are. That is not survival. That is hiding. Cowardly.”

  Olivia stepped out from the second Mercedes that had pulled silently to the curb. She wore black leather fitted close to her frame, her eyes running full green, her posture open and unhurried as she crossed the lawn and stopped beside Lycara.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Sheryl,” Olivia said, and the voice was Olivia’s, but the cadence behind it was not, every syllable forward and deliberate. “I know what you think happened to me. I know you’re looking at me right now, running the math on what you've lost. But hear me out.”

  Sheryl looked at her. “Olivia—”

  “I spent two years with a badge on my chest and a set of rules that told me exactly how far I was allowed to go,” Olivia said. “Every time I got close to something real, I had to stop. Procedure. Chain of command. Internal review. I was good at the job, and the job still put a ceiling on me every single day.” She paused. “There is no ceiling here. I woke up, Sheryl. I’m not asking you to stop caring about people. I’m asking you to stop pretending that those people would extend you the same protection you keep extending them. You know they wouldn’t.”

  “You killed two officers,” Sheryl said. “Those were your colleagues.”

  “They were in my path,” Olivia said flatly. “I made a decision. That’s all it was.”

  Sheryl shook her head. “That’s not you.”

  “It is now,” Olivia said, and she said it with no grief in it.

  Lycara raised one hand toward the Mercedes at the curb, and the front passenger door swung open. Phil stepped out and looked at Sheryl across the yard, his eyes burning green against the dark.

  “Hi, Sheryl,” Phil said, and grinned. “So this is what you’ve been hiding from me all along? Those episodes. Those times you said I couldn’t see you.”

  “Phil, no,” Sheryl whispered. “You don’t understand what this is.”

  “I understand perfectly,” he said, his voice dropping into a low, resonant growl beneath the words. “It’s deliverance. It feels incredible. You should join us. We could be a family.”

  Sheryl’s knees hit the grass.

  Lycara’s shadow crossed her as she stepped close. “My offer is still on the table,” she said. “By the next full moon, my kingdom will rise.”

  The rest of the pack assembled behind her, Michelle from the driver’s door, Carl from the rear, and then the second Mercedes, releasing Gwendolyn and Paul. They stood in the driveway behind Lycara watching Sheryl on her knees in the wet grass, and several of them laughed low and quiet before Lycara turned and walked back to the car, and the others followed. The Mercedes pulled away from the curb, and the street went dark and quiet.

  Sheryl went straight to the liquor cabinet, poured Crown Royal into a glass, and drank it standing at the counter. She poured a second and drank that too. Then she picked up the bottle and hurled it at the kitchen floor, and the glass went across the tile in a wide scatter, and she stood among the pieces with her eyes burning yellow and a sound building in her chest that she let out in a full roar that ran through every room in the house.

  She stripped off her scrubs, pulled on her flip-flops, wrapped herself in the white robe from the hook by the door, and got in the car.

  She drove south on the parish road with her hands tight on the wheel and her jaw already shifting forward, the teeth pushing through while she was still in the driver’s seat, the fur coming up across her forearms as the robe fell loose. By the time she reached the open acreage on the south edge of Bayou Mounds city limits, she was pulling off the road onto gravel, and the shift ended as she hit the fence line.

  Death Claw moved through the pasture at a dead run, and the cattle in the field scattered in every direction. She took the first one down in three strides and tore through the fence line at the property’s south edge without slowing, crossing into the adjacent field where an abandoned eighteen-wheeler sat rusting on flat tires beside a hay structure. She hit the cab door with her right hand, and the door came off its hinges and spun into the field. She drove both claws through the engine block, closed her hands around the motor housing, and pulled the entire assembly free from the chassis in one sustained pull, the mounts tearing, the fluid lines severing, oil and coolant raining down her arms and across the grass as she turned and hurled the engine block end-over-end into the cornfield at the property’s edge. It landed two hundred feet out with a concussive impact that flattened the nearest rows in a twenty-foot radius.

  She stood in the torn-up field with oil running off her claws and her chest heaving and the yellow burning at full intensity in both eyes, and she looked at the sky and opened her throat and let the roar run out across the dark acreage and into the tree line until it dissolved into the night.

  When the rage had finished moving through her, she was down on all fours in the wet grass, breathing in long, slow intervals, the fur slicked back with oil, blood, and field mud. The moon sat above the tree line, white and full and indifferent.

  She had not joined Lycara’s kingdom.

  But Phil was gone. Karen was gone. Olivia was gone. Monica’s name was in her chest again after two years of not hearing it, and Lycara had put it there deliberately, and it had landed exactly as intended.

  The beast inside her was not going back to sleep anytime soon.