Everything goes black.
I jerk my head away from the wet swipe against my cheek.
My eyelids flutter open.
What happened? Did I pass out again?
I’m flat on my back, the smell of blood is heavier than it was before, and a thin, gray wolf with silvery-gray eyes stands over me.
I don’t know his juniper sage scent—don’t recognizehim—but as he peers down at me, something in his gaze makes me think Idoknow him.
“Who are you?” I choke out the words as I feel around for a weapon.
My head feels heavy and my body light, and it is taking everything I have to keep my eyelids open.
Why am I so weak?
My fingers brush against something sharp and hard. I grip it as I glance down at it, and suddenly, all my pain makes sense. A crossbow bolt. The end is wet, which explains my pain, and the pool of blood I’m lying in.
Someone shot me with a crossbow bolt, and whoever it was yanked it out of me.
The wolf steps back before I can use my newfound weapon on him, and I watch as the wolf slowly gives way to a man with the long, wiry muscles of a runner.
He’s naked, like all shifters are after a shift.
And his face…
I shake my head.
This doesn’t make sense.
“You’re dead,” I whisper.
Cristofer, the library technician with terrible allergies, who I had always considered a friend, smiles at me. “The old me died. The person I’ve spent the last seven years pretending to be. I decided it was time to embrace who I truly am.”
The Gregson College Killer preyed on my exes, stalking the campus for nearly a week. Cops thought an escaped animal from the zoo had been tearing into the students, chewing on their guts, and ripping their throats out.
The cops had been wrong. I knew it was someone like me, even though I’d never caught their scent.
A shifter.
“You’re like me,” I whisper.
“I knew it was only a matter of time before you figured out it was me,” he says, crouching close beside me.
He’s right.
Iwasconnecting the dots. Just far too fucking slow.
All my exes were dead, then Aren kidnapped me, brought me to Burning Wood, believing I was the killer on campus. I nearly died proving to him that I was a shifter like him and not a feral.
When I left Aren to return to the city, Cristopher asked me out, but I refused. I’d only ever viewed him as a friend, and I couldn’t tolerate being around him for long because of the herbal medicines he used for his ‘allergies.’
He tore his apartment to pieces, making it look like a wild animal had broken in. The cops never found a body like they had with all my exes he’d killed, because there wasn’t a body. It was a fake crime scene.
His eyes slide to my belly. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Because youshotme,” I accuse.
