Night Shift (Kate Daniels #6.5)(62)

We turned and looked at him with our glowing eyes. Silly man. We have faced our worst fear. There was nothing he could do to us now.

“We’re cats,” Jim said, his voice a rough growl. “We can wait hours for the mouse to leave the mouse hole. And when the magic wave ends, your mouse hole will collapse.”

Steven’s face turned white as a sheet.

“Squeak, little mouse,” Jim said, his voice raising my hackles. “Squeak while we wait.”



“DO I look okay?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “You look gorgeous.”

“Is my lipstick too bright?”

“No.”

“I should’ve braided my hair.”

“I like your hair.”

I turned to him. We were sitting in a Pack Jeep in front of a large house. The air smelled of wood smoke, cooked meat, and people.

“Don’t be a chicken,” Jim said.

“What if they don’t like me?”

“They will like you, but if they don’t, I won’t care.” Jim got out of the car, walked over to the passenger door, and opened it for me. I stepped out. I was wearing a cute little dress and a sun hat. My back was a little scarred and Jim was limping and careful with his right side, but that couldn’t be helped. In a month or two, even the scars would dissolve. Steven wouldn’t be so lucky. The world was better without him in it.

Jim was ringing the doorbell.

Help. Help me.

“Don’t say anything up front,” I murmured. “We can just let them sort of come to terms with it . . .”

The door swung open. An older African-American woman stood in the doorway. She wore an apron, and she had big dark eyes, just like Jim.

“Dali, this is my mother,” Jim said. “Mom, this is Dali. She’s my mate.”





LUCKY CHARMS




LISA SHEARIN





The beep from the tracking chip was continuous and the dot had stopped blinking.

Yasha pulled over where Ian indicated.

McDonald’s?

It was four in the morning. I was in a stolen bakery delivery truck that’d been nearly totaled by three gargoyles. In the truck with me were two hungover elves, a pair of stoned leprechauns with the munchies, a naked Russian werewolf, and a hot partner, who was actually more of a bodyguard, in a race against a goblin dark mage to retrieve a leprechaun prince with a tracking chip embedded in his left ass cheek.

The trail ended at a McDonald’s in the Bronx.

This had to be weird, even by SPI standards.

It was a hell of a night for my first day on the job at Supernatural Protection and Investigations.


Six hours earlier

“How the hell did you lose five horny leprechauns in a strip club?”

I paused just outside the conference room door and mentally filed that shouted little gem under “Questions you don’t usually hear in an office setting.”

Five SPI agents—three humans and two elves—stood in front of their manager, sheepish or flat-out embarrassed expressions on their faces. They looked nervous. They had every reason to be.

Their manager looked human, but his behavior—and bulging yellow eyes—suggested he might have a smidgen of ogre blood swimming around in his veins. The popular belief that ogres were dumber than a stump wasn’t true. They were raging, type A overachievers, which might be good in the corporate world but was definitely bad for tolerating failure.

“But, sir, we—”

“Don’t ‘but, sir’ me, Agent Phelps.” His voice was getting deeper, more gravelly, and definitely ogreish with each word. “You had an assignment, and since all five of you are back here, that means there are five unguarded leprechaun royals out there.”

A skinny elf opened his mouth to speak.

“No more excuses! Bodyguard means you guard that body.” The manager looked out in the hall, saw me, scowled, and slammed the conference room door so hard it shook the wall around it. It didn’t do much good, because every agent in every cube between here and the employee breakroom could still hear him yelling.

I just stood there. “I don’t report to him, do I?”

“Oh my, no,” said a petite older lady from behind me. “As the agency seer, your assignments come directly through your manager, Mr. Moreau.”

Jenny from HSR (that’s Human and Supernatural Resources) made it sound like a good thing, but I still wasn’t entirely convinced.

My manager was a vampire, and our CEO was a dragon.

It was my first day at work. First night, actually. Full moon. Busy, all-hands-on-deck kind of busy.

My name is Makenna Fraser, a small-town Southern girl with my first job in the big city; well, at least the first one I’d be willing to write home about. I work for Supernatural Protection and Investigations, also known as SPI. They battle the supernatural bad guys of myth and legend, and those who would unleash them. Bottom line, if you were human, you called the NYPD; if you were a supernatural living in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, you called SPI.

Yep, creatures from myth and legend were real.

And for them, our world and dimension now ranked at the top of their “Best Places to Live, Work, Play, and Eat” list. Unfortunately, the “eat” part often included humans.