Page 3 of The Vampire in the Potting Shed

That was the line he used to feed me when I limped home from school after the other kids, who had wolves, beat the taste out of my mouth. I wasn’t sure if I preferred those early days, when he had been so sure it would happen. That a she-wolf would burst from my skin under the right conditions to protect me. Say, when kids tripped me in the lunch line in the cafeteria. Or shoved me down while we waited on the bus. Or knocked me off the swings at recess.

Violence was a classic shifting trigger, but I only fired blanks.

Now that Dad had lost hope of a wolf emerging from me, he coddled me the same as he had Mom, who had chosen divorce over his suffocating love when I was a toddler.

“Then why do I have bodyguards, unlike everyone else?”

Damn it.

I hadn’t meant to let my temper slip its leash, but Bowie had that effect on me. He had since I was in the fifth grade, and his younger sister knocked out my front tooth. Then, instead of being helpful, he had the balls to lecture me on picking fights I couldn’t win.

“You’re the pack princess,Peanut.” Bowie trailed a finger down my spine. “You get special treatment.”

“Daddy.” Embracing the stereotype, I stuck out my bottom lip. “This creep is bothering me.”

The death stare Dad leveled at him over my shoulder broke a genuine smile across my face.

I wasn’t the only one who remembered the reason I came home with my tooth in a glass of milk.

“I’ll check in with Zoe,” Bowie grumbled at my back. “She’s expecting a call about the Walsh situation.”

And if he pinched my hip on his way out, I didn’t give him the satisfaction of flinching. “What’s the Walsh situation?”

“There are no signs of forced entry or magic use.” Mercer swooped in, saving the day and giving Dad the perfect excusenot to answer. He offered Dad his mini tablet then winked at me before presenting me with a lollipop, like that made excluding me any better. “Whoever broke in picked the lock with a good set of tools and a steady hand. This wasn’t their first rodeo.” He unwrapped a sucker for himself. “I would think they didn’t want Anie knowing they had been here, but a dog that ugly is hard to miss.”

“Hey.” I anchored my hands on my hips. “We don’t dog shame at GSG.”

“Apologies.” Mercer wiped the smile off his face, but it lingered in his eyes. “I meant no disrespect.”

“No magic means the intruder left behind a scent.” Dad watched the screen for long moments before he tilted it toward me. “Have you ever seen this man?”

The short clip let me watch a powerfully built man in sweatpants and a hoodie let himself in through the back with a mesh dog carrier slung over one shoulder. “I don’t think so, but it’s hard to tell.”

For the whole minute he spent coaxing the lock to open, the man had kept his head down, denying me a glimpse of his shadowed face. He kept his wide shoulders bowed too, making it difficult to peg his height except to say that he was tall. Maybe around Bowie’s height, give or take an inch or two.

“The thing is,” Mercer said, circling back to Dad’s earlier comment, “GSG is a public building, and Anie has all kinds of clients. Human, witch, shifter, vampire.” I was damned proud of the diversity I had cultivated too, even more so when I reminded myself how few of the pet owners had Sartori ties these days. Bailey might have been my first, but she was far from the last client I earned through the reputation I built for myself, not the one attached to me at birth. “We have no means of parsing customers’ scents from the intruder’s scent without a baseline.”

The men shared a look that transferred onto me, but I wasn’t having any of it.

“We can circle back to how you mounted surveillance cameras across the street without telling me.” The energy it would take to act surprised, when I was more shocked they hadn’t wired the inside too, wasn’t worth the effort of scrounging up enough outrage to carry me through an argument that I wouldn’t win. “That poor dog has had enough excitement for one day without randos smelling like wolf backing it into a corner in a strange place and sniffing it for clues.” I blasted out an exhale. “I’ll do it.”

A wolf spirit might have snubbed me in the womb, but I was born possessing the exact same heightened senses and increased strength and stamina as the rest of the pack. Not that anyone gave me credit for it.

One whole step later, Dad cleared his throat. “Are you sure you?—?”

“I’ve got this.” I ditched them in the lobby and entered the kennels. “Sloane?”

“Here, boss.” She trotted over from where she had been talking to one of the sentinels. “What’s up?”

“Clear the room, please.” I palmed a ring of keys in my pocket. “I’m going to visit our guest.”

“On it.” She allowed her wolf to climb into her voice.“Everybody out.”

The four male wargs in the room hustled to obey the command in her tone, reminding me she might not be the world’s greatest kennel tech, not yet anyway, but she was fierce when it came to doing her actual job. All her anxiety melted as her dominance streak emerged from where she kept it hidden for my sake.

Because I had the heart of a dominant and no wolf to back it up if I triggered her instinct to fight me.

As soon as the room was empty, I let myself into the suite and shut the door. I sat on the concrete floor, crossed my legs, and let the dog decide when to come to me. I smelled like a predator, which helped me when it came to wrangling difficult clients into the tub for their bath or holding them steady underneath the force dryer, but it hindered me when pets had human owners.

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