Page 204 of Hunters and Prey

I knew it made no sense. My light didn’t care.

Black himself probably would have shrugged it off as a “seer thing.”

When he paused long enough to press his cheek to mine, his light emitted another pulse of that dense, almost aggressive relief. Kissing my throat, he murmured against my ear.

“You should have told me,” he said.

I frowned, opening my mouth, but he went on before I could speak.

“––Forget it,” he murmured, kissing my neck. “That was fucking stupid. I know why you didn’t tell me.” Exhaling, he raised his head, looking down at me. “I’m sorry, doc.”

I shook my head, smiling at him.

I opened my mouth, about to say more, when a voice… a female voice, a shockingly familiar voice… erupted from one of those faces over us.

It didn’t occur to me until then that they’d never left, that they’d been there the whole time, watching Black kiss me.

It didn’t occur to me until she spoke that one of those faces belonged to Angel.

“Oh my God,” she said, her light, her words, her eyes openly horrified. “Look at her arm! Look at her fucking arm, Black!”

There was a silence.

In it, Black stared at my arm, frozen along with the rest of them.

“IS IT TRUE? You have no idea how you got this?”

The seer lab tech, who I was pretty sure was named Luric, glanced at Black as he said it, frowning, as if he doubted everything Black had just told him.

I nodded, quirking an eyebrow at Black, a faint smile on my lips in spite of myself.

Or maybe it was just whistling in the dark.

When I caught the lab tech staring at me, I nodded more vehemently.

“It’s true,” I said. “I really don’t remember.”

Luric’s frown deepened, but he aimed it at me that time.

“How many times has this happened?”

I looked at Black.

He frowned, too, thinking.

“Once I know of for sure before Nick,” he said, gruff. “Then Nick. Then last night, when you were with Brick. Then today.” He looked at Luric. “But they’re happening closer together. The first one was a few weeks ago. The last two, not even twenty-four hours had passed. And it nearly happened this morning, on the terrace… before it actually did happen.”

Luric frowned.

Turning back to finish examining my arm, he said,

“It’s just that this is fresh. It’s really fresh… like it happened within the last hour or two, Mrs. Black. At most. And I’ve never seen bite marks like this before.”

“They’re not vampire?” Black said.

Luric shook his head, clicking, seer-fashion.

“Not even close to vampire,” he said. “There are no canines, so they aren’t even like any other predatory animals I know of… or like any mammal or non-mammal I’ve ever seen. I would say they weren’t even from teeth at all, but the shape of the cuts is definitely suggestive of a bite. It’s almost like some kind of grazing animal’s bite… but the teeth themselves are much too thin to be any of the grazing animals I know of.”

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