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of the god-awful straight-backed chairs in front of his boss’s desk and clasped his hands over his stomach. “What’s up?”
    “You just come from the grocery store?”
    Dante nodded. “Not much to report. Vic wasn’t turned, and while it looks like it was the werewolf who attacked him and not the vamp, we won’t know until the hospital files its final report with the pret council.”
    Captain Scott leaned back, the resulting squeaking an ominous indication of the rickety chair’s ability to hold up his weight. He appeared to be considering something, working it over in his mind. Dante had seen him do this countless times before, and it usually meant whatever his captain was debating on telling him was nothing good. Finally Scott asked, “You hear about the pret attacks up in District Four?”
    “No.” Dante frowned. “What about ’em?”
    “I just got word this morning. We’ve got some freak changing humans into werewolves.” Scott shook his head and drilled the tip of one stubby finger onto his desk. “Like it’s not bad enough that in another four months the Moore-Creasy-Devon comet is going to open a rift between dimensions and we’re going to be hit with another influx of these damned EDs.” His eyes held poorly disguised fear that Dante had seen in the general populace. No one was immune from being taken over by a preternatural when they came through the rift in December. Human scientists had yet to find a way to keep the rift from happening to begin with. They had no clue how to stop alien beings from squatting in their fellow men and women.
    It was a bit unsettling to think you could be going about your business and then— wham! —you’re no longer in control of your own body, rather, you had to share it with someone else, someone whose personality gets melded with yours.
    All the prets he knew insisted that the soul or spirit, whatever you wanted to call it, of the human remained intact. The fact that the squatter had its host’s memories seemed to support that, but Dante wasn’t so sure. How could there possibly be room for more than one consciousness without the brain going into overload? And since there didn’t seem to be a prevalent number of schizophrenic prets running around…
    And what happened if he and Tori got involved and then he got taken over by a pret who hated her kind? What then? Would he have loved her only to lose her, as he feared?
    He shook himself free from the anxiety that tickled his gut. Instead of worrying about something that might never happen, he should focus on his job. “What do you want me to do?” Dante asked.
    Scott leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “Keep your eyes and ears open. Nobody on the council seems to know anything about this, but I’d wager a month’s salary they have an idea who’s behind it. They either don’t care or…”
    “Or?”
    Scott’s eyebrows climbed, furrowing his brow. “They support it.”
    Dante straightened out of his slouch. “I…No, I don’t like to think they’d do that, sir.”
    “Well, who knows about them, right? They have their own agenda.” Scott shook his head. “I’d like to think they wouldn’t try to cover something up, but…”
    “How many attacks have there been?” Dante asked. He’d have to remember to ask Tori what she knew about these attacks. Surely she’d been talking with the werewolf liaison of that quadrant. She might have more information than the council was releasing to its human counterparts.
    “There was one each on Sunday and Monday, then again one on Thursday and one on Friday.” Scott lifted a hand and scratched his head. “Four goddamned victims with just enough forensic evidence to get us nowhere. So far we’ve managed to keep a lid on it, but it’s only a matter of time before it gets out.”
    “Shouldn’t we warn people?”
    “And tell them what? ‘Be on the lookout for a rogue werewolf’?” He shook his head. “It won’t do us any good to have