“No, but I have to do it anyway.” Her heart raced with a sense of urgency. “I’ve got this really bad feeling.” As if something horrible was going to happen if she didn’t act now.
The scent vanished. “Shit! I’ve lost it.”
“Don’t try to force the magic.” Ridge dropped a hand on her armored shoulder, encouraging her to meet his eyes. “It’s like fighting. If you overthink it, you get in your own way.” That made sense, thanks to all those years of martial arts training. She forced rigid muscles to loosen, then sent her magic rolling into the locket again.
A woman shrieked. Kat jumped, eyes snapping wide. “That’s real. That’s happening now!” Somewhere, Karen’s killer was closing in on another victim.
Ridge bent to jerk his jeans off the floor. “We’ve got to get to her.” He stepped into the pants, jerked them up his legs, zipped, grabbed his sword. “Open a dimension gate.”
“How the hell . . . Oh.” She remembered the swirling iris of magic Grace had created, the rippling sensation as she’d stepped through. Gathering her magic, Kat sent it pouring into the air.
It began as a single glowing point that rapidly expanded into a swirling opening that showed a view of moonlit trees.
Another scream rang out, raw with pure panic.
“Bloody hell,” Ridge snarled, and leaped through the gate. Kat shot after him, praying the dimensional door wouldn’t dissolve with them halfway through.
Leaves crunched underfoot as they landed, and she puffed out a relieved breath. Still dressed in her conjured armor, Kat lifted the sword she held. Ridge had grabbed his own blade before he jumped, but he wore only the jeans. She bit her lip and concentrated, but his armor did not appear. “Nothing’s happening!”
“We’re on mortal Earth,” he hissed back, scanning the night with narrow eyes. “Magic doesn’t work as easily here. Try again.”
Kat sought her magic again. After a moment she found it: a thin, burning thread glowing inside her mind, instead of surrounding her as it did in the Mageverse.
No wonder magic was harder to use here.
Reaching deep, Kat concentrated ferociously on the armor she’d repaired. Called it.
And watched in satisfaction as it swirled into being around Ridge, covering him in magical steel.
He didn’t even look down to watch it appear, instead tilting his head back, inhaling deeply as if seeking a scent. “This way.” He set off, moving swiftly and silently through the woods.
Another scream rang out, and he broke into a run, bounding through the night with a vampire’s blurring speed. Kat conjured a light and raced after him in its bobbing glow.
Ridge grabbed her, dragging her to a halt just before she charged headlong into a clearing. He held a finger to his lips and pointed silently.
“Won’t do you any good to scream, bitch.” A big man stalked a slender blonde, who backed away from him in evident terror. Kat had the ugly feeling he was familiar somehow, as if she’d seen him before. A chilling thought, considering his next words. “I’m going to rip out your heart and eat it.”
“Why?” the blonde cried. “You said you loved me!”
“And you bought it!” He laughed. “Stupid little cunt. None of you bitches are anything to me but gullible meat.”
Kat’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a silent snarl of rage. Meat? Her sister? This poor girl? Meat?
A scream tore from her throat, a shriek of distilled fury. She jerked out of Ridge’s hold, swinging her sword up as she charged into the clearing. I’m gonna hack that bastard’s head off his shoulders.
“Kat!” Ridge snapped. “Wait!”
She ignored him, wanting only to kill, to make the bastard pay for years of fear, anguish, and guilt, of missed childhood Christmases and birthdays experienced as grief instead of joy. Make him pay for her mother’s suffering. Make him feel all the pain he’d caused.
The man whirled in surprise as she exploded out of the dark. “What the f**k?”
“It’s your turn to die, you son of a bitch!”
She got a glimpse of blond hair, of a big, muscular body, of cold eyes widening with a trace of astonished fear.
And then she was on him, her blade swinging in a long, flat arc. By rights, it should have hacked his head from his shoulders.
He ducked. Moving far faster than a human had any business moving, in a fluid explosion of speed.
And he laughed at her. “I always wanted to kill a Maja.”
What? How did he know about . . .?
A gleaming blur tore past her. “Why don’t you try a vampire instead, you bastard? Or don’t you like fighting somebody that can kick your ass?”
Ridge didn’t hesitate when the killer ducked his first whirling blow. He just kept hacking, swinging his sword in great arcs that twisted effortlessly into flashing thrusts. “Kat, dammit, get the girl out!” Ridge was right—the victim was the priority. Kat threw a look over her shoulder. The blonde just stood there, white-faced and wide-eyed, as if paralyzed by sheer fear. Kat bolted over to grab the girl’s hand and jerk her back toward the woods. “Come on!”
“No!” the killer bellowed. “She’s mine! My prey!” Magic burst from the center of his chest in a bright blue explosion. His glowing outline grew. And grew. And grew.
When it vanished, a huge figure towered there, looking like something out of a horror movie. Easily the height of a grizzly bear, the thing was lean, with a long wolf head and cold blue eyes. His fur was the same blond as his human hair, thickening to a mane on his head and bushing around his naked genitals.
Where the hell had his clothes gone?
“Kat, get that girl out now!” Ridge bellowed again.
Kat whirled to drag the girl away even as she realized the monster was the blond man they’d seen at the party, the one who’d been so interested in her locket. She’d felt his evil then, but she’d ignored her instincts.
Ridge had told her the man and his father were werewolves, but she hadn’t imagined anything like this towering monster. No wonder the cops had believed Karen had been attacked by some kind of animal.
She had been.
“Come on!” Kat hauled furiously on the blonde’s arm, dragging her out of the clearing by main strength.
“What . . . what are they?” The girl stumbled, staring over her shoulder as the vampire charged the towering werewolf, sword flashing in great arcs. “What are you?” Like Karen, she couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She even looked like Kat’s sister—same long blond hair and big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face.