Page 2 of Silver Claw

And in the days after that battle, after a kiss I still couldn’t wipe from my mind, I thought I’d felt myself weakening.

Not the wolf, but the magic.

“Lucas’s kiss is slowly draining my power,” I said.

But she shook her head. “No. Not the angel. Something more…finalthan the angel.”

Despite my attempts to remain cool and calm, fear rose inside me. “What does that mean?”

Lucy wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. It feels connected to the angels but at the same time…not.What I saw was abrupt and very, very savage. There was nothing gradual. You were attacked, and you were lying on the ground, almost…ethereal. I could see through you,” she whispered. “Kait, you were…”

“Oh,” I said, my stomach beginning to hurt. “You saw me dying.”

“No.” She took my hands in hers, and only when she began rubbing them briskly did I realize how cold they were. “I saw you dead.”

“Brutal, Luce,” I whispered. “That’s brutal.”

“I’m sorry.” She began crying again, streams of tears overflowing like a river of pain about to drown her. She got up onto her knees, ignoring the quietly whining Ash, and wrapped her arms around me. “You can’t leave us, Kait.”

I stiffened my spine and pushed her gently away. “I’m not dying, Lucy. I don’t feel that. It’s something else. Now get out of here so I can get dressed and go take on a day that might kick my ass but…” I grinned. “It will not kill me. I can promise you that.”

I believed every word I spoke.

So did Lucy, because she really needed to. She sniffed, nodded, and gave me a watery smile as she slid from the bed. “A spiritual death of some sort,” she said. “You might lose one of your abilities. Ofcourseyou’re not actually dying.”

As soon as she left the room, Ash trotting behind her, I grabbed my cell phone and tapped in a number.

“Saul,” I said when he picked up. “Something’s going on. What do you know?”

“Good morning, Kaitlyn,” he said. “I am not psychic. What are you talking about?”

Saul was my “handler,” assigned to me by the supernaturals’ council members. He gave me jobs, advice, and orders, and seemed to know pretty much everything. I’d never seen him, never met him in person, and knew I was never likely to.

“My resident psychic saw me dying,” I told him as I walked into the bathroom. “Am I dying, Saul?”

“Someday,” he said. “As we all do.”

“Except the vampires,” I noted.

“Except for them,” he agreed. “If you’re worried, Kaitlyn, speak to the county master. If you do not want to die, he will make sure you never do.”

He ended the call.

I was not amused. My friend Joe Patrick might be thrilled with being a vampire, but if someone turnedme,I would kill him right before I cut out my own heart.

I was a wolf.

I was a wolf and a whole lot of other shit, but I was most definitely not a vampire.

But something was coming for me, and I knew it as surely as I knew water was wet. “No,” I realized, pulling on my boots. “Not something. Someone.”

I had power. Magic. I was a shapeshifter who could shift into animals and people. I had the angel’s scream. I could absorb other nonhumans’ magic. I had my blade, and I had Lennon’s wand.

I was so powerful that no one could touch me.

That was why I was more excited at the challenge to come than worried someone might take my power or kill me.

I had too much power.