Sin's Dark Caress Read Free Page A

from everywhere and nowhere at once. The unsettled sensation she felt last night returned and unnerved her even more than before. She crawled to her feet and looked down at the stubborn cat.
    â€œGo on, then. Keep it while I get ready for work.” She walked over and switched off the fire and the thermostat.
    He’ll have lost interest by the time I finish dressing.
    Bianca went into her room and opened the closet door. At one end hung the gothic clothes her mother bought her before her bonding. Since she never bonded with a familiar, the cultural badge of her race stayed in her closet unworn, but for some reason she’d never been able to throw them away.
    She reached for a pair of navy pants and dressed quickly. She twisted her hair up and secured it with some pins before picking up her shoes. Vincent still lay where she’d left him, curled up and purring again. He still had the pendant.
    â€œCome on now,” she said, bending down. “Give it up.”
    This time the cat didn’t sheath his claws when he swiped. Three parallel crimson streaks stung the back of her hand. He’d never struck her before. Not in anger.
    Her phone rang.
    â€œAre you coming in tonight?” Oberon asked.
    â€œSorry, I slept through my alarm.” She didn’t want to tell him she’d fallen asleep on the sofa. He’d worry.
    â€œI need you to go over that data from the crime scene. We’re getting some heat from above.”
    She glanced at the cat and sighed. The pendant wasn’t going anywhere for now. Though feeling a little naked without it, she pulled on her coat and gathered up her keys.
    â€œBe good,” she said to Vincent on her way out the door.
    B ianca had spent most to the night and half the day going over the thaumaturgic data she’d gathered from the crime scene. The photos were the worst, though. While she’d become more accustomed to the sight of dead bodies over the years, she knew it wasn’t something she would ever get used to. And if she did, well, that would be the time to change jobs.
    Now she just wanted to collapse in a heap.
    A blast of hot air greeted her as she opened the apartment door. The heating was cranked up to the max, and the fake fire blazed away again. It was a miracle the whole place hadn’t gone up in flames. A dirty paw print dusted the wall next to the thermostat.
    Vincent? Since when had he known how turn up the heat? And why?
    It wasn’t exactly the weather for it, given the typical late spring day with a balmy seventy-one degrees outside. She turned down the temperature and switched off the fire, but Vincent was nowhere to be seen.
    Her pendant lay where she’d left it that morning, only now it was in two pieces. How had the cat managed to break a solid piece of stone in two?
    When she picked up the pieces, she found them to be hollow, like . . .
    An egg?
    She walked over to the kitchen counter, and Vincent suddenly appeared on the windowsill with a dead mouse dangling by its neck in his mouth.
    â€œYou that hungry, baby?” she said, moving toward him.
    He ducked her hands, jumped and raced off into the living area before she could catch him. The cat dumped the mouse on floor, which wasn’t as dead as it first appeared. He placed a paw on its tail and started to mew strangely, almost as a mother cat would call her kittens.
    The mouse tried to crawl away, but the cat held it fast.
    â€œLet’s put this poor thing out its misery,” Bianca said, getting closer.
    But the cat crouched low over its prey, ears flat and a low growl rumbling in his throat. Bianca backed away and he began mewing again, then something flashed past her foot, hardly bigger than the captured mouse.
    She sat down heavily on the lounge, her brain trying to comprehend what she was actually seeing.
    A dragon. A tiny, perfectly formed, baby dragon.
    Cobalt blue to aqua scales shimmered along its body and a pair of metallic maroon