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  “What are you?” she asked again in a low, strangled voice.

  Jordan shook his head, shaggy dark hair falling over his eyes for a moment before he gave her a grim look. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  He’d seen the looks before. Disgust, fear. His parents had tried to shield him from most of it, but that hadn’t been much better. Isolated from friends and even family, Jordan’s high school years had been lonely and full of self-doubt. It had taken him years to learn how to keep the hungers at bay—for food, for sex, for violence. But he had, and damn it, he didn’t deserve to be treated like some kind of serial killer for something he couldn’t control.

  “I don’t know,” Monica said in answer to his question.

  He thought she meant to bolt, but for now she was staying still. Fists clenched. Every muscle tense. He could smell her anxiety, and it made his stomach hurt.

  “No?” he asked, deliberately snide. “Here I thought that was your job.”

  Her eyes had been wide, but now they narrowed. “Are you the one...?”

  “No!” Angry that she’d even think it for a second, Jordan got off the bed. It stung to see how she moved away from him, so wary. Her gaze flicked to the knife he’d laid on her dresser.

  He was on her before she got even two steps toward it. He could’ve hurt her if he’d tried, but he wasn’t trying. She didn’t struggle. She looked up at him instead.

  “You attacked me,” she said.

  “I didn’t know it was you. It was a mistake.” The excuse sounded lame, but it was the truth. “I heard the peacocks screaming, the same as you. I thought I could find what was killing the animals. I thought I could...”

  “Kill it? With your bare hands?” Beneath his fingers, Monica’s arms stiffened, and he let her go. She stepped back from him, but only a step.

  Jordan’s fingers curled, the tips pressing the faded scars on his palms. “I could’ve tried.”

  “This is crazy. It’s crazy,” she repeated and continued almost as though she were talking to herself, “People don’t become things. It doesn’t happen. Lycanthropy is a mental disorder, sure, but it’s not...real. You can’t really be...”

  “I’m real,” Jordan said flatly and pushed past her toward the door, where he paused to look back at her. “I’ve got a fucked-up genetic disorder that makes it hard for me to control my impulses. It forces physical changes, and most of the time, I can stop them, but sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I don’t want to, like last night, when I was thinking I could finally get whatever’s killing the animals. But I am real, Monica.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t... I can’t...”

  That was it. He’d had it. This woman had blown into his life like a fucking hurricane. He’d never asked for it.

  “Fuck this noise,” Jordan said. “All I ever wanted was to do my job and be left alone. You can believe in monsters, but you can’t believe in me?”

  He didn’t realize how much he’d wanted her to answer him until she didn’t, but all she gave him was her silence. His fingers curled again, pressing old wounds before he could force them to open. Then without another word, Jordan left her there alone.

  CHAPTER 12

  “It’s reptile, we’re pretty sure of that.” Ted pushed his glasses up on his nose and waved expansively. “Based on the blood samples you gave us and some of those markings, I compared it with a case Boris and I were on last year in Miami. Rangers had found a bunch of gators slaughtered, figured poachers, of course, but we hunted what turned out to be a monstrous fucking... Hell, it was a dinosaur, I’m telling you.”

  Monica couldn’t sit still. She had Ted and Vadim in her bungalow, both of them chowing down on the deli platters DiNero’s cook had sent down, but she couldn’t take even a bite. Not with Jordan mere steps away in the next bungalow.

  You can believe in monsters, but you can’t believe in me.

  “You’re sure it’s reptilian?” she asked finally. “It couldn’t possibly be something else? Something we haven’t seen before?”

  Vadim looked up from the sandwich he’d been piling high with meat and cheese. “What is this? You have something, Monica?”

  She opened her mouth to spill it all, but at the last moment, her jaw shut with a snap of her teeth so hard on her tongue that tears sparked in her eyes. Secrets tasted like blood, she thought. She poured herself a glass of DiNero’s whiskey and sipped it, relishing the burn.

  Ted shoveled a handful of chips into his mouth and kept talking. Monica liked Ted a lot, but right now with him misdirecting Vadim’s attention from her, she kind of loved him. She pretended she hadn’t heard Vadim ask her anything at all.

  “The patterns are almost identical,” Ted said. “It could be something else, I guess, but I think we should go in armed for dino.”

  “What happened to the one you went after in Miami?” Monica asked.

  Ted sighed. “It went down in the swamp, sank like a stone. Gators were on it before we could even get close enough to try to net it or anything. But it only took a couple shotgun blasts. Thing looked like a raptor of some kind. It wasn’t much bigger than a gator—I mean, I’ve seen ones that were a lot bigger. But it stood on hind legs and worked with its front ones. Definitely smart enough to work at a lock. I could’ve kicked myself for not trying to tranq it, but when something with teeth the size of your fist is coming at you...”

  “That’s the nature of our work,” Vadim put in. “If it were easy to prove what we find, we’d be out of our jobs, eh?”

  He gave Monica a long, steady look that she had to pretend she didn’t notice. Everything in her world had turned upside down. She couldn’t stop turning it over and over in her head. Jordan, his touch, the sound of his voice, the way he’d made her feel.

  There’d been more than a few men after Carl. She’d lost herself in physical sensation to keep herself from feeling anything else, and it had worked, in the short-term. But Jordan had been the only man so far who’d entirely chased away the remnants of the memories, left nothing lingering behind.

  Sex was only sex, though.

  “Monica?”

  She tore herself away from memories of Jordan’s hands on her and faced Vadim. He’d been there for her, too, in many other ways that had saved her. He and the entire Crew had believed her when nobody else did. They’d helped her find a purpose to her life. Their work, their passion, was hunting myths, and here was one practically right in front of them. She could offer up living, breathing proof of something Vadim had told her wasn’t possible. But what would he do with that knowledge?

  Would he hunt Jordan?

  CHAPTER 13

  “They’re going after it,” DiNero said, no mistaking the excitement in his voice. Like a kid on Christmas Eve. He knuckled Jordan’s arm, then punched the air and did a little shuffle. “C’mon, man, this is awesome!”

  Jordan bent back to the silver fox, who’d been cowering in the corner, frightened by DiNero’s antics. “Shh, little girl. Hey. Calm down, okay? You’re scaring her.”

  DiNero looked chastened. “You’re putting her in with the others now?”

  “Yeah.” Jordan lifted the fox, who nestled into his armpit, hiding her face. “I think she’ll be all right there.”

  DiNero couldn’t have cared less about the fox. He was all about the thing Monica’s team was here to hunt. He’d ordered Jordan to start construction on a new habitat—never mind they had no clue what the thing needed to survive, much less if they could even capture it alive. It was a bad idea, all around—that was what Jordan thought, but DiNero hadn’t asked him his opinion.

  Jordan hadn’t seen Monica in three days. Not since the night she’d figured out he was something other than what she’d thought he was. He kept waiting for the Crew to show up on his doorstep with lit torches and a silver bullet. Not that it