Ravenous Read Free Page A

weekend.”
    “Cool. See you in the morning.” She pulled a couple of wrinkled bills out of the pocket of her jeans and left them on the table. “My turn. You pay next time.”
    Kaleigh took her time getting her stuff together. As she pulled her sweatshirt over her head, she watched the window across the street. She could still feel Liam’s presence. It was hard to miss. He wasn’t a weirdo like Katy said, but he was one of the darkest souls she knew. She respected him a great deal. She even liked him, but he scared her sometimes.
    She didn’t believe the nonsense about him eating those guys in Paris. But she had questions. And sooner or later, whether either of them liked it or not, she was going to have to walk through the door of the antiques shop and he was going to have to start talking.

Chapter 2
    I t was almost two in the morning when Liam’s cell phone rang, but he was still awake. Particularly vivid nightmares like the one the night before tended to cause insomnia in a man, or a beast.
    Still, the phone startled him. He didn’t get a lot of calls. He wasn’t even sure where his phone was. He rarely answered it, to the frustration of both his fellow Kill Team members and his mother.
    Who would call him at two in the morning while he was in the States?
    He got out of bed and walked toward the sound. By the light of the moon coming in through the bare window, he saw a pair of jeans on the floor. The jeans were ringing.
    He glanced at the lit screen on the phone. It didn’t identify the caller. He wasn’t generally a curious man; curiosity was dangerous, but he answered it anyway.
    “Yeah?”
    “Liam?” The voice was tiny and filled with emotion. It scratched the surface of his memory, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
    “This is Liam,” he said cautiously.
    “Liam . . . it’s Mai. I. . . Remember me? I came into the shop today. I’m sorry to call you in the middle of the night.” She took a breath. She had the quiet calm in her voice of someone on the verge of losing it. “I didn’t know who to call. Your number, it was on my hand. I . . . just dialed it without thinking.”
    He sat down, leaning against the wall; the floorboards were cool under his bare butt. “What’s the matter, Mai?” He was good in an emergency. The best.
    “The . . . the police are on their way. My uncle Donato. My dad’s brother who’s been living with us. He’s dead. Murdered.”
    Liam felt his jaw tighten, though the rest of his body remained relaxed. “Who killed him?”
    “I. . .I don’t know. Oh, God, there’s so much blood. You wouldn’t think an old, skinny man like him would have this much blood.” She seemed to be talking more to herself than to him now. “Who would do such a thing? Kill a harmless old man?”
    Liam thought he heard the sound of police sirens in the background.
    “Liam?” she whispered. “I’m scared. There’s no one else I can call. Could . . . could you come?”
    “Come?”
    “Here. I. . . don’t know if I can do this alone. I don’t want to get my cousins involved. Oh, God,” she muttered. “The police are coming and they’re going to ask questions and . . .” She let the sentence trail off into silence.
    Of course Liam couldn’t go to the human’s house in the middle of the night. He was sorry her uncle had been murdered, but that wasn’t his problem, was it? He was in enough trouble with the sept as it was; he couldn’t go running around in the middle of the night, running to the rescue of HFs. Not even pretty ones.
    “They’re here,” she whispered. “Could you please come?”
    It was on the tip of his tongue to say no. Surely there was someone she could call: a friend, a relative. But he could tell from her tone of voice that when they met, she had felt the same inexplicable connection he had. Had this been their fate from the moment she walked into his shop?
    He got her address.

    Liam didn’t like cops, policia, jingcha, gingchaat. Which was