Chapter Twenty
Mark
My clawed feet scrape sparks from the asphalt with every stride. Horns blare. Pedestrians scream. My tail smacks the side mirror off a parked Prius as I tear down the street, primal fury giving way to something sharper... fear.
That fight should’ve been over in seconds. She wasn’t supposed to be that fast. Wasn’t supposed to vanish into thin air and reappear behind me. Wasn’t supposed to wield a sword made of ice that didn’t melt, didn’t break, and very nearly took off my nose.
I growl, snapping at a hotdog cart blocking my path. The vendor hurls himself sideways, shrieking. The cart flips, ketchup packets burst underfoot.
I leap over a hedge and dart down a narrow alley, trash bins exploding out of my way. I knock over a bicycle and send a stack of plastic crates tumbling. Somewhere behind me, someone shouts, “What the hell was that?!”
But I don’t stop. Not until I reach the far end of the alley and stagger to a halt behind a battered wooden fence. My breathing is ragged, my raptor form trembles. Adrenaline burns away, replaced by searing pain in my back and nose.
I look down. Nothing but a torn stump below the elbow. Bits of sinew dangle, the flesh already beginning to regenerate as faint pulses of greenish-red light coil along the wound. A bear did this. A bear in downtown Fullerton. A huge mofo, too.
“Dammit,” I mutter, the word slurring around too many sharp teeth and a tongue not made for speech.
I shift, and the transition hurts, especially now.
My body retracts, bones retreating, skin reshaping.
My shirt is long gone, pants ripped all the way up my legs.
I stand, naked from the waist up, blood smeared across my chest. My severed arm is already forming the stump of a new forearm, bone rebuilding in real time.
I grit my teeth and pull on some clothing I’d stashed behind the dumpster. I find an empty paper bag and pull it over my arm, covering the gore as best I can. My car is parked two blocks over, hidden in a private lot. I’ll walk there and vanish for a day or two. Heal. Regroup.
But that woman… Samantha Moon.
She’s not what I thought. Not even close.
I’d underestimated her. Badly. She hadn’t smelled like a bloodsucker.
Didn’t move like a shifter. But she’s something.
When I lunged, she didn’t flinch. When I snarled, she didn’t blink.
She smiled. That ice sword was straight up magic.
And her use of it... wow. A smooth, practiced motion, clearly trained.
She’d fought before. Perhaps even killed.
I thought I’d be the apex predator in this city. But I see now how wrong I am, and holy shit... that bear? That young gal straight up shifted into a bear. But she hadn’t been a shifter, per se. No, her transformation was instant. More magic, obviously.
Damn, I need to accelerate the ritual. T-Rex isn’t a side project anymore. It’s my upgrade. My armor. No more subtlety. No more interviews and smiles. No more trying to charm my way past undead detectives. I’m going to finish the spell, and when I do… I’ll be untouchable.
Let’s see her smile then.
***
Detective Sherbet stands in the middle of my destroyed office, hands on his hips, gaze sweeping the wreckage like he’d walked into a war zone.
“Multiple reports of seeing a dinosaur running through downtown.”He looks at me pointedly. “I instantly thought of you. I see I wasn’t wrong.”
I bat my eyes. “You say the nicest things, Detective.”
“Something you want to tell me, Sammy?”
There are claw marks down the walls. Tammy’s desk is destroyed; my chair is half-eaten. The windows are shattered, and my glass door is gone. I knew that thing would never make it. There is blood smeared on the floor, and one of my filing cabinets looks like it tried to transform into an Autobot.
I take a long sip of coffee. “A raptor... and a bear.”
He turns to me, blinking. “A bear, huh? That’s a new one.”
I point to my daughter. “Meet the bear.”
“You?” says Sherbet, spinning around and staring down at her with hands on hip. “I thought you were the normal one.”
“I haven’t been normal in a long time, detective.”
“Oh, wait. You went to fairy school or something, right?”
“Close enough.”
“And fairies turn into bears?”
“They mostly turn into butterflies and grasshoppers. But humans who can perform fairy magic can. Like me.”
“I have a hard time believing you can be a bear. I still remember you as a ten-year-old goth girl.”
Tammy looks at me. “Should I show him, ma?”
I shrug, staring at my destroyed office. “Just don’t break anything else.”
She giggles. “There’s nothing else to break.”
She’s right about that, though I think our computers made it, though not the monitors.
Tammy closes her eyes, and the change hits fast. Her skin ripples as fur explodes outward in a wave of russet and gold.
Her spine elongates, limbs thickening, hands curling into black-clawed paws the size of dinner plates.
In seconds, my daughter is no longer a young lady but a Kodiak nightmare, big as a small car, fur brushing the ceiling tiles as she looms over Sherbet with a rumbling growl that vibrates the remaining glass in the window frames.
Sherbet goes pale, stumbling back into what’s left of my chair, hand instinctively flying toward his sidearm that suddenly looks like a child’s toy.
“No guns, Detective,” I say gently. “That’s my daughter.”
Sherbet swallows. “Right. Okay. I get it. You Moon ladies are weird as hell. Just... maybe call her off before I have a heart attack?”
“You heard the man, Tammy. Back to being your cute self.”
In an instant, faster than any werewolf and with no dramatic bone-crunching required, Tammy shrinks back into her human form, forest dress fluttering into place. She tilts her head at me. “You really think I’m cute?”
“The cutest.”
Sherbet finally finds his feet, wiping sweat off his forehead. “That was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen up close. And I’ve seen some shit with you two.”
“Well, as you can see, the raptor was no match for Tammy.”
Tammy nods like she’s discussing quilting and not prehistoric combat. “Bear fur is super thick. My claws matched his size, my bite could rival his, though he could open his jaw wider.”
Sherbet winces. “Yeah, I didn’t need that mental picture. Sammy, what do we do? We can’t arrest a dinosaur man. Jail won’t hold something like that.”
I inhale... not that I need to. “It’s complicated. Shifters usually stay hidden. They don’t want attention.”
Tammy adds, “Vampire hunters don’t just hunt vampires. They keep every supernatural in line, shifters included.”
Sherbet blinks, processing. “Uh-huh. Okay. That… tracks?”
“If a supernatural starts racking up bodies, hunters show up,” I explain. “They’ll kill the threat fast.”
“And we just wait for another attack and hope the hunters notice?” Sherbet asks.
“That’s one option,” I say. “But Mark isn’t going to stop. He needs to create a new shifter race to fulfill his family legacy and unlock his inheritance. He wants chaos. We can’t rely on hunters to appear. I’ve already noticed. That means it’s my problem.”
Sherbet narrows his eyes. “So what are you going to do, Sammy?”
I meet his stare. “Remove the problem as best I can.”
***
Allison must have sensed something was off with her favorite vampire pal, because she called not five minutes after Sherbet left. I filled her in on the dinosaur situation, and she immediately asked if I wanted backup.
“We’re talking a potential T-Rex here, Allie. Unless you’ve got a helicopter and a rocket launcher, backup’s going to be decorative at best.”
“I could swing a drone and a very stern text message.”
“Tempting; I’ll keep you posted.”
I hang up and turn to Tammy. “I’m going over there.”
“Now?”
“Now. I need to know how close he is to finishing the spell. If he completes the rite and triggers the shift…”
Tammy frowns. “You think he’s that far along? He left like... five minutes ago.”
“An hour,” I correct her. I fold my arms. “And according to Max, the veil is thinnest right now. Winter equinox. If Mark wasn’t motivated before, he sure is after today’s little Jurassic throwdown.”
Tammy nods, grimacing. “Yeah. He kinda got his ass handed to him. Did I really bite his arm off?”
“You did. I’ve never been prouder.”
“And if he finishes the spell,” Tammy continues, “we won’t just be dealing with a raptor. We’re talking the king dinosaur. Like… the king king.”
“Exactly. So I need to reach him first...before he shifts, before anyone else dies. And if I can, I’ll take him somewhere no one else can get hurt.”
“Where’s that?”
I give her a look. “Think of the biggest, emptiest place you can imagine.”
Tammy blinks. “The Grand Canyon?”
A slow grin. “Yep. That’ll do.”
“What will you do with him there?”
“No clue. I’ll figure it out when I’m staring into his giant ugly face.”
Tammy gestures at the wrecked office. “I’ll handle cleanup. You go.”
“I’m already gone.”
I summon the single flame... and within it I glimpse his makeshift alchemy lab. Time to step into the lion’s den.
Or the dino’s.
***
The lab assaults my senses the moment I appear.
The air is thick with a metallic tang: iron filings and copper bowls left too long under Bunsen burners. Herbs hanging in bunches overhead, filling the room with hints of sage and rosemary. Beneath it all lurking the sulfuric reek of something recently cooked. It smells like black magic.
I blink into existence beside the same cluttered desk, but the lab is no longer just messy.
It’s alive. The room pulses with a deep, hellish red, shadows jumping across walls as braziers roar with unnatural fire.
The air tastes metallic and hot, thick with incense and something older: bone dust and blood.
Mark stands at the center of it all, shirtless, shimmering with sweat, muscles trembling from the strain of channeling power he was never meant to wield. He doesn’t see me at first, too consumed by the ritual.
The case lies open beside him like a coffin lid. The massive T-Rex femur rests within, ancient and wrong in a way that prickles my undead skin. Runes carved into the surface glow like molten gold, shifting and crawling as if alive. A ceremonial blade sits beside it, slick with blood... his blood.
His chant stutters when he finally senses me.
He turns slowly, eyes black as death, breath ragged.
“Sam.” He smiles. “You’re too late. It’s done.”
His back arches. Bones snap. Clothing tears. He screams, half agony, half ecstasy, as his body erupts into violent motion, muscles swelling like overinflated balloons. I move in a blur of motion, grabbing his wrist just as his arm doubles in size, and summon the single flame.
The lab disappears. So does California. The air changes. The temperature drops as we appear together on a rocky ledge within the Grand Canyon itself. I let go of him and leap away as he roars into the clear blue sky.
He’s no longer Mark. He’s transforming before my eyes, becoming something ancient and enormous. The canyon trembles beneath the roars... and grows and grows.
I summon the flame again and see within it Talos...