gagged and jerked his head back. But he was no green street fighter. Even on the defensive, he kept his wits clear enough to rake his enormous black claws down my sides, scoring me so deeply that I suspected bone now showed between flaps of flayed skin.
I cried out, but still and all, not for myself. For my girl, whom this monster had bled and bitten, whom he had attempted to defile.
I kicked, a sharp jab to his soft underbelly that compromised Roldan’s balance even further. As he staggered off of me I kept hold with one hand and rolled with him to the wall. When I had him pinned, I shoved my fangs deep into his throat, pouring the ice of my cantrantia into his blood, knowing now that my core power would not slay, but only slow him.
His tongue drooped from his gaping mouth, stray flecks of saliva freezing in midair. I released my grip and lunged for the dagger, which had dropped onto the hearth of our empty fireplace. My body screamed, tortured by the stretch as much as if the Church had laid me on its altar. I felt dampness on my cheeks and realized two bloody tears had escaped my narrowed eyes. And in that moment I felt the separateness of my selves. One half weeping in protest for the anguish the other half must eternally push it through.
My fingers wrapped around the dagger’s hilt, a fine leather- wrapped handle that fit snug as a tailor’s tuck in my hand. I slid free of the wolf’s snapping jaws and staggered to my feet. Blood soaked what was left of my shirt and suit coat. I had knocked over Helena’s reading table, shattering a lamp, which had soaked her books with whale oil. My sitting room was in shambles—and for the first time since I had crossed its threshold I could finally relax. This was my territory. Roldan must pay the price for crossing its boundaries.
He charged me again. I looked into his fiery yellow eyes. And laughed. When he leaped, I spun, shoving the dagger deep into his side. It was not a killing blow, nor did I mean it to be. Silver takes Weres slowly, painfully. That was how I wanted Roldan to die. That was how the men who hurt my children would always go.
I hauled him up by the scruff of his neck, dragged him to the front doorway, and threw him into the street, my dagger still hilt-deep in his flank. My satisfaction at seeing him tumble into the gutter where he would die like a beggar snapped as a shot rang out from inside the house.
I spun, running so quickly to the study that the wind of my passage blew the window draperies midway up the parlor wall. Parts of the shattered door cracked beneath my feet as I swept into the room, one glance telling me all that I needed to know. A Were lay dead on the floor, his features already melting back to human. Another, still in his man’s form, had dealt Helena such a bruising blow that she lay unconscious over his shoulder. He could take her through the window, but we both knew how badly the shattered glass would cut her.
He stared at me from the center of the room, surrounded by thrown papers and the items that the gentleman who had built the home felt he needed for his comfort. A tall, hickory desk full of cubbyholes and drawers. Two ladder-back chairs to sit on either side of it.
A chaise on which Helena occasionally lounged, regaling me with stories of her tutors (less often their amazing revelations regarding history or mathematics than how she tricked them into spending entire afternoons roaming the park, listing the names of flora and fauna she had known since her toddling days). Beside it, a table holding a vase full of flowers she had picked from the garden only that morning, and two half-burned tapers held aloft by matching silver candlesticks.
“Put her down,” I ordered.
He hesitated, staring toward the door as if measuring his chances of escaping me with Helena weighing him down.
“Make me a deal first.” He spoke with a broad cockney accent, tossing the limp patch of hair blocking his sight out of his way as he spoke. I smelled the greasy sweetness of his unkempt locks from across the room, and my stomach turned that Helena should have to bear his touch.
“What?” I snapped.
“My freedom for her neck.”
I inclined my head. “Done.”
The Were deposited Helena on the chaise and moved toward the door. My next question made him hesitate with his hand on the latch. “I must ask. Why would you take the word of a vampire?”
He glanced back at me. “Aw, now, yer being modest.
Yer not just any vamp. All hoity-toity, living in this house here, surrounded by humans. Kinda like a Trust, as it were,” he said, his grin revealing an overabundance of brown teeth dominated by sharp, yellow incisors. “Which means yer Vampere. Which means you put a whole lotta store in contracts.”
“I am impressed at your knowledge of the inner workings of the Trust. And yet you have somehow managed to miss the most important rule.”
“What’s that?”
