Silver Claw (Kait Silver #6)

Prologue

The day started with a dream, a ghost, and a sexy wolf alpha voice on the phone.

“Good morning, Kait,” Jared said.

I yawned and stretched, smiling as I held the phone to my ear. “I missed you last night,” I told him.

“I miss you every night you’re not with me,” he murmured.

“The invading wolves?”

“Handled.”

I yawned again. “I need to get up, but I’m strangely reluctant.”

“Why?”

I spoke the truth of what I just that moment realized. “Today feels…different. Something is coming to Jakeston.” I hesitated. “Or to Silverwood.”

He didn’t speak, and I didn’t blame him.

Then Lucy opened my bedroom door and stuck her head inside, and I knew from her pale face and wide eyes that she wasn’t bringing good news.

“Lucy had a dream,” I told Jared. “I have to go.”

Ash barreled in after her, almost too fat to jump up on the bed. He managed, however, and wiggled his butt crazily as I scratched his head. “Ash needs fewer treats.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She didn’t look at me.

She sat gingerly on the side of the bed and watched the dog, and her hesitancy made me nervous. Lucy was usually a bundle of raw, exuberant energy. When she was calm and quiet, I got nervous.

“You were right,” she said, finally raising her big blue stare to mine. “I had a dream. It was about you, Kait.” She burst into tears.

I was almost relieved. An emotional Lucy telling me I was in danger was pretty much normal.

I patted her hand, then fought my way out from under the sheets.

“Okay, Luce. Tell me everything after I get my shower. Last night I took on a few too many cases, and I’m going to have a busy day.

” But I hesitated, frowning as once again, a feeling of unease drifted through me.

Definitely something was changing. I felt the nervousness of it in the pit of my stomach. Sort of the way I felt when a big summer storm was looming.

Funnily enough, it didn’t occur to me that my feeling might have something to do with Lucy’s dream until she reached out and took my arm, keeping me from leaving the bed. “Kait,” she murmured. “I need you to listen to me, and I need you to take my words seriously. Okay?”

I stopped moving. “I’m listening.” But I really didn’t want to. As my mother would say, Lucy was about to seriously harsh my damn mellow.

She swallowed hard and swiped at her cheeks, wiping away the wetness. “I don’t know how to tell you,” she whispered, finally.

“Not knowing how to tell someone something has never been one of your weaknesses,” I said dryly. “I really have to get ready, so…”

“Something really bad is going to happen to you,” she blurted abruptly.

“You’re going to…” She shook her head, frustrated.

“I don’t know, exactly. I saw you as weak.

No, not weak. Insubstantial. Like a ghost. It felt like you’d lost yourself, somehow.

I don’t know what it means, but I know what I think it means. ”

“I lost my power,” I said.

She gaped at me. “How did you…”

“I’ve had a feeling,” I told her. “Not the way you do, with dreams and visions, but a feeling.” And only when I said the words did I realize the truth of them. “It feels a little like dying.”

She nodded soberly. “You’ve been there before. You were given too much, and I don’t think it was meant to be. It wasn’t natural.” She took a deep breath, and with the release of it, she seemed to calm. “Like when you were fighting the angel—”

“Lucas,” I said, and couldn’t help but shudder when I remembered our recent battle.

He’d kissed me, taking a part of me the way I’d taken a part of him.

I’d absorbed his scream. His roar. That scream killed brutally, and if I were being honest, I didn’t like it.

I’d already vowed not to use it. A memory of the dead birds smashing against the ground around me flashed into my mind, and I forced it away.

The scream wasn’t meant for my world. It was meant for the angels.

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…final than 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. Of course you’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 turned me, 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.

And that was my downfall.