More figures appeared at the end of the alley. Backup. Dozens of people would swarm the scene now, getting to work like busy ants, trying to figure out what had happened and how to stop it from happening again.
And I would be taken to the station.
Then to jail.
Banks’s eyes gleamed with excitement. He’d finally won, and he knew it.
As the handcuffs snapped onto my wrists, my head spun.
Holy crap, this was really happening.
Corrigan couldn’t meet my eyes, but Banks had no trouble. He leaned
in. “I’ve got you this time.”
“You have no idea what you’re doing, you idiot.”
His jaw clenched, and he looked like he wanted to hit me. He probably did.
My eyes moved around the rest of the scene. I recognized more than half the people—had even gone to training with some of them.
Suspicion flickered in their gazes as they looked at me, and my heart sank. Memories of all the cases I’d helped them solve flashed through my mind. So many.
And now I was in handcuffs.
2
The Devil
I tucked myself into the shadows, disappearing into the darkness as I watched the police shackle the woman who’d drawn me into her visions.
Something pulled inside me, hard and fierce.
Protect her.
I rubbed a hand over my chest, confused.
What the hell was this feeling?
I hadn’t felt anything like this—much of anything, really—since I’d been turned into a vampire nearly five hundred years ago.
And yet, this human made me want to protect her?
Why?
She was beautiful, yes. Pale eyes and skin, though the colors were so muted that it was impossible to determine shade. All colors were muted for turned vampires. Taste and smell, too. It all came with the curse of immortality, which felt more like being half dead.
But this woman made me feel alive.
She thought I’d committed this murder. I hadn’t, of course. I’d killed too many people in my dark past. I wasn’t above violence now—far from it. But I didn’t crush the skulls of random men in alleys. It was beneath me.
I’d been tracking a stolen dagger—one that I thought had been used on this man. Then she had arrived, then the cops. It was too many people for me. Too many humans.
An insane vision popped into my head—me, storming the scene and taking the woman from them.
It was ridiculous.
For one, it was too dangerous. Not for me, of course. I could have them on the ground in seconds without having to resort to a weapon. But that show of speed and strength would reveal what I was, and the human world must never know what walked among them.