"It's a dog."
Sean zipped himself up, turned around, and took a running start at an oak tree. It was an incredible thing to watch: six feet away from the oak he leapt up and forward, bounced off the bark upward to the spot where two large branches split from the trunk, pushed off them like he was weightless, landed on the branch stretching toward the balcony, ran along it until it thinned, and crouched. The whole thing took less than two seconds.
His eyes shone once with bright golden amber. His face had gained a dangerous sharpness, predatory and slightly feral. A shiver ran down my spine. No, not repressed. Not even a little bit.
A werewolf was bad news. Always. If I had met him on the street like this, I'd have started making soothing noises and thinking of exit strategies. But we were on my turf.
"That's not a dog," Sean said.
Beast let out a tiny snarl, astonished at the insult.
"She weighs what, about six, seven pounds? Now, I'm willing to concede that somewhere in the distant past one of her ancestors might have been a dog. But now she's an oversized chinchilla."
"First you insult my house, now you insult my dog." I leaned on my broom.
"She has little ponytails," Sean said, nodding at the two tiny ponytails above the Shih Tzu's eyes.
"Her fur gets in her eyes. She's due for a grooming."
"Aha." Sean tilted his head to the side. He seemed completely feral now. "You're asking me to take a dog with two ponytails seriously."
"I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm telling you: get off my property."
He bared his teeth at me in a slightly deranged smile. He looked hungry. "Or what? You'll hit me with your broom?"
Something like that. "Yes."
"I'm so scared right now I'm practically shaking."
He was within the inn's boundary. I was clearly an innkeeper --the broom was a dead giveaway. Yet he showed no respect. I'd met some arrogant werewolves --when you were a highly effective killing machine, you tended to think the world was your oyster --but this one took the cake. "Go away, siri." There. That would fix him.
"Name's Sean." He tilted his head again.
No reaction to the insult. Either he had a bulletproof ego or he had no idea I'd just called him a sniveling coward in his own language.
Sean tilted his head. "So how does a girl like you know about werewolves?"
"A girl like me?"
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-four."
"Most twenty-four-year-old women I know sleep in something more revealing. Something more adult."
I raised my eyebrows. "There is nothing wrong with my Hello Kitty T-shirt." It was thin and comfortable, and it reached to my mid-thigh, which meant that if I had to get up in the middle of the night to dispatch any intruders, I'd do it with my butt covered and modesty intact.
Sean frowned. "Sure, if you're five. Got a touch of arrested development happening there?"
Argh. "What I have happening is none of your business."
"It fits," he said.
"What?"
"The T-shirt. It fits your whole lifestyle. I bet you grew up around here too."
Where was he going with this? "Maybe."
"Probably never left the town, right? Never been anywhere strange, never done anything crazy, and now you run this bed-and-breakfast and drink tea with old ladies on a balcony. A nice quiet life."
Ha! "There is nothing wrong with a nice quiet life."
"Sure." Sean shrugged. "When I was twenty-four, I wanted to see the world. I wanted to go places and meet people."
I couldn't resist. "And kill them."
He bared his teeth at me. "Sometimes. The point is, if you've stayed around here all your life, how do you know about werewolves? There isn't one for miles, and if there is, they're dormant. I combed this territory before I took it. The closest werewolf is in a suburb of Houston, and when I spoke to him, he confirmed that there hasn't been an active werewolf in this area for years. So how do you know about werewolves?"
"Don't like your own kind much, do you?"
"Do you always duck the questions or am I just special?"
"You're special," I told him, sinking as much sarcasm into it as I could. "Now shoo. Go on."
He dipped his head and stared at me, with unblinking, focused intensity like a wolf in the middle of winter sighting his prey. His eyes shone, catching the moonlight. Every hair on the back of my neck rose.
"I'll find out. I don't like being out of the loop."
And now he was threatening me. That does it. One more word and he'd regret ever opening his mouth. "Leave. Now."
The werewolf grinned at me, his eyes full of wild. "Fine, fine. Sleep tight."