Chapter 2
Megan
The first thing that goes wrong when I get this confounded assignment is my partner.
Earl.
A Bald Eagle Shifter who’s more balding than bird these days, with a glorious beer gut and a fondness for suspenders printed with little stars and stripes.
He’s also got a wife named Myrtle who makes the best damn Polish pancakes I’ve ever eaten—and I’m from Jersey, so that’s saying something. We’ve got ethnic delicacies galore.
He takes one look at the transfer order, squints at the name Arrhythmia, Texas, and declares, “I ain’t going to no cowpoke hole in the wall in the Devil’s playground!”
And then he retires. On the spot. No warning. Just flaps his metaphorical wings and flies the hell out of Dodge.
That was six hours ago.
Now?
I’m here.
Alone.
Sweating through my sensible button-down blouse and wondering if I should’ve joined him.
Because Texas? Texas is as hot as Hell’s left armpit after leg day.
I mean, I’ve never personally been to the Underworld, but I’ve interrogated enough Demons to get the gist.
If Hell is fire and brimstone, then Arrhythmia is its dry-heaving cousin, complete with cactus and an air so thick with magic it crackles like static across my skin.
It’s the kind of place that buzzes the moment you cross city limits.
Like a psychic sunburn.
Like something’s watching you before your tires even hit gravel.
Honestly, I should’ve seen it coming. My job title literally has the word “paranormal” in it.
I’m Megan DiNapoli. Special Agent, Department of Paranormal Creatures & Activity. DPCA if you’re nasty. Or if you just like government acronyms.
And no, I’m not a Shifter. Not a Witch, either—not in the proper has Coven, will waltz naked around a bonfire sense.
I’m what they call sensitive, which sounds like I cry at dog food commercials.
I don’t.
Unless the dog is really cute.
What I can do is sense when the world is off.
Like when your neighbor’s aura doesn’t match his smile.
Or when a grocery clerk’s shadow moves faster than he does.
Or when you walk into a diner and get hit with the overwhelming smell of blood, even though no one’s bleeding.
Oh, and sometimes, I get visions.
They’re never fun.
Like the one when I was eight that showed Mr. Polanski next door eating his way through the local cat population—turned out he was a Vampire with a taste for tabbies.
Or the time I warned my dad that the librarian was stealing children.
No one believed me because technically all the kids were still accounted for. But I knew something was weird.
And sure enough, she was Fae. Swapping kids out like overdue library books and replacing them with Changelings.
That one got messy.
My dad—forty-year beat cop veteran of Jersey City—didn’t know what to do with a daughter who saw Monsters everywhere.
At first, he told me to knock it off.
To stop making things up.
To be normal.
But when he saw enough of my visions come true, he changed his tune.
“If Monsters are real, Meggy,” he said, the night he handed me my first pistol, “then you gotta be tough enough to go for their throats.”
So I learned.
I trained.
And now, I hunt the things the rest of the world pretends don’t exist.
The creatures who hide in shadows and small towns with names like Arrhythmia.
Sure, I learned that not all Supes are bad guys.
But I like to reserve that judgement for after I meet them, preferable before they attack me—which for some reason they all do.
Only something tells me this place might not be like the others.
I don’t know if it’s the way the wind whispers secrets or the fact that I’ve already passed two broom-riding Witches and a literal skeleton walking a poodle on Main Street.
But I can feel it in my bones.
This town doesn’t need me to protect it from Monsters.
Because it’s all Monsters.
And somehow, I think that might be the point.
Which means my assignment just got a whole lot more complicated.