Eighteen Months Later …

The decision to take hellhounds off the endangered species list was a long time coming—whole lot of good that did me. Hunting them was still illegal; the only difference was now there were more to hunt.

“Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.”

I really shouldn’t have been doing this. If I got bloodstains on my graduation gown, Bethany was going to kill me, and Elliot was going to laugh. Adjusting the cap on my head, I spun my knife lazily in one hand.

Closer. You’re getting closer.

If someone had seen me from a distance, all they would have seen was a normal girl, just graduated from high school.

A girl who lived bit by bit and day by day.

I closed my eyes, tasting sulfur on the wind and waiting. Here, puppy, puppy, puppy.

Catching a hint of something in the air, I jerked to a stop. This was the place, but there was something … off.

And that was when I realized that the hellhound was already dead.

“Hello, Kali.”

I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with eyes I would have recognized anywhere: silver eyes, fringed in black.

Eighteen months. It had been eighteen months of radio silence in my head. Eighteen months without a word, and now, he was here.

“Hey, Zev,” I said. I nodded to the hellhound on the ground, noting the distance between its body and its head. “Just for the record, the next one’s mine.”

Zev smiled. “I think that can be arranged.” He raked his gaze over my body, and then his eyes drifted slowly to the side. I turned and followed his gaze to two men standing at the edge of the park.

They were wearing suits.

I stopped twirling my knife and took a single step forward before I realized that one of the men looked very familiar.

“Reid?”

Skylar’s brother nodded. He and the other man started walking toward us, and belatedly, I realized that the two of them—and Zev—moved like a team.

“Congratulations,” Reid said, gesturing toward my cap and gown. “Got any plans for after graduation?”

I’d been entertaining the idea of taking a few classes at the University That Shall Not Be Named, but as I glanced from Zev to Reid, something clicked inside of me, and I started spinning the knife in my hands again.

Zev was a vampire. Reid was FBI. And according to something I’d once overheard the mother I hadn’t seen in eighteen months saying, Chimera wasn’t exactly one of a kind.

PS: When they ask you what they’re going to ask you, say yes.

I brought my eyes to rest on Zev’s. “What exactly did you guys have in mind?”