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do,” Kraven answered calmly.
    â€œThen let’s fly away,” she said, “to somewhere we can’t hurt anymore.”
    Kraven let the question soak into his mind next to a puddle of suspicion that he and this girl had only fought the first battle in a war of evil. He knew that the shapeshifter was alive and so was the witch who’d made him.
    Alexandra laid her head against Kraven’s chest, the warm tingle of his fiery skin soothing her aching skull.
    â€œWe have to return my uncle’s journal to my Granny June,” Alexandra said. Kraven stroked her long hair. He nodded his chin up and down as the slam of a door in the hallway roused Jack from Alexandra’s lap. Growling, the dog scratched at the bottom of the door, his paws trampling the yearbook page that had fallen to the floor.
    Retrieving the picture, Alexandra ran her fingers over the red letters. “Who would’ve left this here? Do you think it’s some kind of sick joke?” She became thoughtful and said, “I wish I could have shown this picture to my dad. He always used to tell me he wished he could have been a pirate, but that he was born a few hundred years too late.” Her green eyes bored into the hard mask of the creature towering over her.
    He kept his face hard, unable to be read.
    He is so beautiful , she thought. So strong outside. So fragile inside.
    Kraven smirked. You’re beautiful, Alexandra . His lips never moved, but she heard his voice clearly in her head.
    â€œStop doing that,” she said.
    â€œWhat?” The immortal creature laughed shyly at the seventeen-year-old girl.
    â€œYou know,” she sighed. “Stop getting inside my head.”
    At her feet, Jack whined and turned in circles.
    â€œOh, my goodness,” Alexandra cried and ran to her bedroom. “My poor little man,” she said, returning to the living room quickly with a red dog leash in her hand. “I can’t remember the last time you went outside. Let’s go take care of business.” She hooked the leash to the dog’s collar and patted him on his spotted haunches.
    â€œYou, too,” she said, pulling on Kraven’s white t-shirt. “You’ve got some more explaining to do.”
    In the hallway, Jack sprinted to the waiting elevator as Kraven kicked his black boots at the muddy footprints on the carpet. He wrinkled his nose at the perceptible stench of death in the dirt and he gripped Alexandra’s hand tightly in his own.

    In the dark, steaming-hot attic of Sean Callahan’s rented Victorian mansion on a quiet, oak tree-lined avenue a block south of the Collinsworth Academy campus, there was a tired old man whose cracked rib ached in his wheezing chest. Cyrus, a shapeshifter, lay limp and helpless, listening to the raspy sighs of his shallow breath. Within Cyrus’s brown body was an angry wolf who waited restlessly to escape the dormant shell of the old man’s skin.
    Cyrus pondered. Me reckon dat witch gonna kill me now for not getting dat girl.
    Except for the thin, daisy-patterned bed sheet strewn over his fractured hip, the old man lay naked on the wooden floor of the stifling attic, the rough wooden planks rubbing his black and blue skin raw. The wild, ravenous beast within his soul whimpered as Cyrus writhed in pain on the hard floor, his arms and legs bound together by thick, braided rope.
    Lying on his back, he stared up at a grimy, wood-framed window, the only source of light in the room, as the sun’s rays bored through a century of dust and grime. The light swallowed his aching head whole; with his eyes blinking against the bright sunshine, the old man sucked a deep breath into his bruised chest. A howl of pain pierced the silent room.
    Confused by the commotion, a bitty brown mouse scurried across the room toward a hole in the floorboard, with a crumb of moldy bread twice the size of its mouth stuffed into its cheeks. A fierce grumbling escaped