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predator,
I reminded myself.
Top of the food chain.
    I let my eyes silver and my fangs descend, and I looked back at Joe with hunger in my eyes. Since dinner had been interrupted, I didn’t need to fake it.
    His eyes grew wide with fear, but only for an instant. He was a guy in his twenties with a gun at the ready, and he was better at bravado than I was. His eyes grew cold, hinting at hatred.
    “You okay over there?” Mallory asked. But being a good girl—tonight anyway—she didn’t move from her designated spot.
    Maybe, I thought, I could use her in this little game of ours. She’d started it, after all.
    “Your little friend is calling you,” Haircut said. But since he was still on the ground, his wrist bent in my hand, I didn’t pay him much mind. It was Joe and the gun that worried me.
    “You think I’m scary,” I said. “Granted, I’m pretty strong. But I have nothing on her.”
    “She don’t look that strong,” Joe said.
    I grimaced. “I guess you don’t know what she is.”
    All four of them looked back at her, obviously not intimidated by the petite chick with blue hair. If only they knew the truth . . . Of course, I couldn’t actually let them know the truth, so I fudged a little more.
    “She’s a death reaper.”
    “Bullshit,” Joe said.
    “Nah,” said the guy who’d stood up to the bully, watching me closely. “She’s—she’s right. That girl is a death . . .”
    “Reaper,” I filled in, since he was obviously following my lead. I really did like this kid. “Death reaper. Talks to the dead, reanimates them if necessary, points out the evil men and women who don’t deserve to live.”
    “And then what?” the quiet kid asked.
    I answered with a gesture, a finger drawn across my neck like a blade.
    “That is some serious bullshit,” Joe said again, but he didn’t sound nearly so convinced this time. “Girls can’t really do that.”
    “That girl can,” I said. I leaned forward and lowered my voice just a bit. “Have you ever been walking down the street at night, and you think you hear footsteps behind you? Maybe you walk a little bit longer while your heart beats like a timpani drum in your chest. You think you’re imagining it, so you keep walking. But the footsteps start up again. Step by step by step. And you stop, and you turn around, and there’s nothing there. No sign of anything in the street. Just lights and shadows. But you know, sure as you know anything, that you weren’t out there alone.”
    They were frozen, eyes on me but glazed, as if they were remembering their own experiences. I pressed on.
    “Or maybe you’re home alone, and you talk to someone in the next room, because you saw their shadow pass. When they don’t answer, you go look . . . and the room is empty. It had been empty the entire time. But in your spine, you can feel it. You know you weren’t alone. And when you try to go to sleep, when you close your eyes, you can feel them—you can feel
her
—at the foot of your bed, watching you sleep.”
    Slowly, for maximum effect, I slid my gaze to Mallory. “She is the stuff nightmares are made of. She haunts the minds of the living and the dead, and she sees evil where it lurks. And now she knows who you are.”
    Because in this fictional telling of mine, Mallory was a Grim Reaper/Santa Claus mashup. That wasn’t anywhere close to the truth, of course, but it was enough to change Joe’s mind. He dropped the shirt over his gun again.
    “You can’t do this,” Haircut said weakly, but the fight had gone out of him.
    “I can, and I did,” I reminded him. “I’m going to let you go, and I’ll give you a ten-second head start. Because we like the chase,” I added with a delectable whisper. “But remember—even if you don’t see her, you’ll feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise, and you’ll know she’s there.”
    I let go of Haircut’s wrist. He jumped up and ran down the street, away from the rioters. Joe followed