Sherrilyn Kenyon - Dark Side of the Moon Read Free Page A

the magick that’s holding him in cat form will eventually cause his head to explode. It’ll be painful as hell before he dies.”
    The assistant laughed. “And no nine lives to bring him back. Damn shame. But I like it.” He turned to look at the doctor. “What say you neuter him while he’s like this, too?”
    “You know, you have a great idea…”
    Ravyn snarled as the vet reached for the clipboard that hung outside his cage and made a note. Ravyn hissed at him before he sent out a mental note to the Apollite vet. “
You neuter me, you bastard, and I’ll dance in your entrails. ”
    That bit of spite came back on him tenfold as it caused the collar to constrict and shock him enough to seriously hurt, but not so much that it caused him to change forms.
    The vet smirked before he hung the clipboard back on the peg. “I don’t really see how you’re going to do that in your current position. Do you, furball?”
    The human assistant high-fived the vet. “I can’t wait for Stryker and Paul to get here and finish him off.” Then laughing, the two of them left Ravyn alone with the rest of the animals.
    Ravyn charged the bars of his cage, but all he succeeded in doing was hurting himself. Damn them all. How had they managed to get him trapped like this? How had they known where to find him?
    One minute he’d been hiding in the shadows of Pike’s Market, waiting for his Squire, Erika, to come get him, and the next thing he’d known that
puta
in the red skirt had grabbed him and snapped the collar around his neck before he could fight or sense her intentions. Once the collar was in place, he’d been powerless without his magick.
    Keeping a tight grip on him, the woman had wrapped him in her shawl, picked him up, and handed him off to a group of waiting humans who’d paid her fifty dollars for her services. Afterward, the humans had tossed him into the local animal shelter.
    And here he would stay until either his head exploded from the inhibitors in the collar or he figured out some way to escape this cage without having either his magick or opposable thumbs.
    Yeah. Great odds there… not. His only hope was that Erika would get concerned when he didn’t show up after nightfall—
    Wait, he was talking about Erika Thomas here. Erika. The girl who liked to pretend she didn’t have to work for him. The girl who went out of her way to avoid
him
and her duties. She wouldn’t notice for days that he wasn’t home.
    No, the little mutant would throw a party the instant she found out that while she’d ignored his absence, some mad Apollite had gelded his ass and left him impotent. Then, she’d call all her friends and laugh about it.
    I am so screwed
. …

    Susan sighed as
she toyed with the small gold medallion that she kept in her purse. Only a hair larger than a silver dollar, it didn’t look like much, but on the night she’d won it, it’d held even more value than a hundred-million-dollar lottery ticket.
    She paused to look at it as old memories assailed her. She’d won the Sterling Award for Investigative Reporting for Politics in 2000. She’d been on top of the world that night…
    Clenching the award in her hand, she cursed under her breath. “Just sell the damned thing on eBay.”
    But she couldn’t and she hated herself for that. It was hard to let go of a glorious past even when all it did was bring her pain. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so cocky back then. Maybe this was her comeuppance.
    Bullshit. She didn’t believe in that kind of divine retribution. She was where she was because she’d allowed herself to be deceived and she had been after more glory. There was no one to blame but herself. She’d been stupid and trusting, and she would pay for that one moment of fallacy for the rest of her life.
    Her phone rang.
    Grateful for the interruption to her morbid ruminations, she picked it up and answered. “Susan Michaels.”
    “Hey, Sue, it’s Angie. How you doing?” Her buddy sounded a