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slide into gray scale I realized there was one problem. Leo wasn’t in front of me.
    I got out one breath before he raised the dart gun and fired until the clip was empty. Five darts, a payload that would drop a three-­hundred-­pound lycanthrope.
    A blue velvet sky full of stars spun across my vision, and then the stars blurred into white lines on the center of an endless highway before everything went black.

 
    CHAPTER 6
    I was seventeen when I left Bear Hollow, Tennessee, for the last time. I had one dress, one pair of shoes, and two dollars that I’d saved working since I was barely fourteen mending and taking in washing with my mother.
    I had never seen electric light or indoor plumbing, but I was no dummy. I worked my way to New Orleans, mending clothes for rich women and cleaning houses when I had to, watching children, anything that paid the bills and didn’t involve putting my legs in the air for strange men. Prohibition was going strong, and my grandmother had made the best moonshine in Bear Hollow, so it wasn’t hard to set up a little shack in the bayous of St. Bernard Parish and watch the money roll in.
    She was the one who told me about haints, about the black dogs that prowled the swamps where she grew up, deep in Cajun country. About the rougarou, the beast with red eyes who’d consume you, body and soul.
    I guessed it was only fitting I’d ended up back there. And I made a good life for myself until I died.
    After I became a hound, I’d catch glimpses sometimes of that mirror-­still bayou water, silvered by the moon. Of the things moving in the cypress swamps, ruffling the hanging moss with their passage. No matter where I went, from Anchorage to Juarez and most every back road in between, part of me was always back in that bayou. It wasn’t strange to me. After all, it was where I’d left my soul.
    Cold water smacked me in the face, and I choked, sucking in sour-­tasting fabric.
    Leo yanked a black cloth sack off my head. I hissed as harsh light abused my dark-­adapted eyes, and bared my teeth at him.
    â€œCalm down,” he said. “You’ve been napping for a while, and I need to talk to you.”
    My head was still muzzy from the tranquilizers, but everything snapped into focus pretty quickly. I was in a chair, two-­legged again, chained down hand and foot. Smells of oil and hot metal and the lack of any furniture besides my chair and a rusty metal table told me I was probably in one of the hundreds of abandoned gas stations that littered the Mojave.
    â€œYou keep saying that, and then you keep knocking me out,” I told Leo. He disappeared from the pool of light and wheeled a ratty old rolling chair to face me. He sat, taking a flat silver flask from his pocket and sipping before tucking it away.
    â€œIt’s hard to talk when all you want to do is shift and rip me apart.”
    He was right. I wanted to shift more than anything, the craving like claws in my brain. I was frightened and hurt, and the hound in me knew the right response. Shifting in these chains was going to be a bitch—­I could easily snap all the bones in my arm, and then I’d be a three-­legged dog. That wasn’t much more use than a chained-­up woman.
    Leo got up and disappeared again. This time he brought back a mechanic’s cart covered with a rag. “You’re the third hellhound I’ve caught,” he said. He tossed the rag on the ground, and metal instruments gleamed.
    I felt my teeth start to grow, and my muscles rippled under my shirt. Leo flinched a little. Good. At least I knew there was something that could get to him. “This is a hobby for you?” I snarled. I could still be hurt, especially like this. Get hurt bad enough, and I wouldn’t be able to shift anymore. I’d be fucked, even if I did somehow convince Leo to take the chains off.
    â€œNo,” he said. “This is my job.”
    He switched