The Darkening Read Free

couldn't look him in the eyes.
    Whitley was never one to push, so he remained silent and patiently waited for her to continue. Finally, she took a breath and looked up into his face, genuine tears in her eyes. "There might be one other problem."
    CHAPTER ONE
    The blaring noise of the alarm roused Lexi Corvin from a deep slumber, and she awoke feeling drugged and irritable. She wanted to rip the offending timepiece from the wall and toss it through the window of her fifth-story apartment, but knew she couldn't afford to keep buying new clocks-or replacing windowpanes. So, instead, with great restraint, she merely slammed her hand down on the snooze button to quiet the obnoxious noise.
    Resisting the urge to go back to sleep, she cracked open her eyes and found herself squinting against the bright sunlight slipping through the curtains, giving the room a disgustingly cheery warmth that was at complete odds with her mood.
    The week before a full moon was always hard on werewolves. Their animal side grew stronger, and they had an urgent need to foster reproduction. Translated into human terms, it meant she was bitchy and horny.
    If she had still been living in upstate New York with her pack, she would have simply shifted to wolf form and spent the next week hunting prey and frolicking with the available males. That wasn't really an option anymore, now that she lived in the city. She had bills to pay, food to buy. That took money, and people who took off a week or two each month to be a"wolf" didn't hold jobs very long. She wanted to keep her job. It was the first one she'd had that particularly suited her. Bounty hunter.
    Shoving back the covers, she dragged herself out of bed. She took a couple of minutes to stretch, trying to loosen muscles that had become tight and sore after chasing down four skips the day before. Crime in the city was up by staggering numbers, which meant business was good.
    She crossed the bedroom and turned on the TV, flipping through the channels until she found the news. Lately, it was more depressing than ever. The world--or at least her little corner of the Big Apple-was going to hell in the proverbial handbasket. Just last night there'd been another gang fight in Central Park, leaving five teenagers dead and another three seriously injured. In Murray Hill, a venerable neighborhood filled with old money, a fourteen-year-old boy had gone berserk and shot his parents and younger sister before turning the gun on himself. Down in Soho, a man had stabbed his girlfriend multiple times following an argument , killing both her and their unborn child. Plus, five more people were mysteriously missing-making a total of twenty-three in the last four weeks. The police had no more clues now about how the different people were related or what had happened to them than they did after the first disappearances. The number of random street muggings was up, as were the number of rapes, and the police were advising everyone to stay inside after dark-much to the annoyance of the local nightclub owners, who were fighting back by offering nightly specials.
    Lexi flipped the station and watched a reporter standing outside the mayor's office giving an update on the rumor that the city officials were debating on calling in the National Guard to patrol the streets both day and night. But NewYork wasn't the only city suffering, and the National Guard was already stretched thin. Lexi shook her head and turned to yet another channel, this time finding a TV evangelist asking his congregation to petition their government for stricter Conversion Laws because he felt the number of vampires in town had dramatically risen in the last six months.
    She turned off the TV and walked into the bathroom. Had she really thought that by moving to the city she'd escaped the raw animal violence that came from living with the pack? It seemed she'd only traded it for a new, darker kind of violence-though she couldn't remember it being this bad five