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He offered me what I assumed was to be his appeasing smile but it only served to stir up a hot seed of anger in my belly.

“You could have let us decide whether or not we worried about you,” I spat. “I thought that the Chief killed you. That’s what Alex said—”

I stopped, the words going heavy and bitter in my mouth. I felt my eyes narrow, and knew that I was holding my mouth in a hard snarl. “Did Alex know? Did he know this whole time?”

Sampson pushed himself off the couch, avoiding my gaze. “Sophie, Alex—”

I launched myself up then, too, hands on hips. “Alex knew this whole time, didn’t he?”

“Not the whole time, Sophie. I had to hide. I had to make it look like I was dead or they would keep coming after me and no one at the Agency would be safe. I wasn’t going to do that to the Underworld, Sophie. I needed to know when it would be safe to come back again.

And the only way I could do that—the only way I could do that and still even have the slightest hope of coming back was to have eyes out here.”

“Alex’s.”

“He helped me, Sophie.”

I thought of Alex, of his ice blue eyes and that cocky half smile, of the two-inch scars above each shoulder blade that had grown silvery with age after years of wandering the earth without his wings.

Alex was a fallen angel, earthbound but determined to do good, to one day be restored back to grace. He had been my protector, my lover, my friend; and he had lied to me.

“Does he know you’re back now?” I wanted to know.

Sampson made a show of looking around my apartment, his silence a clear answer. I made a mental note to Google “ways to kick a fallen angel’s ass” on the Internet.

“So, where were you?” I asked.

Sampson cocked his head. “Everywhere. Nowhere. After that night—”

An involuntary shudder wracked my body. The memory of being chained with Sampson in an underground basement while a madman sharpened the sword he was going to use to pierce my flesh was still as cold and as fresh in my mind as it was two years ago. Sampson slid a comforting arm across my shoulders and I slumped against him, my body relying on muscle memory because my brain was still calculating, figuring, tying to make sense of Pete Sampson, alive, in my living room.

“I was rescued—or so I thought—from that damn little kennel.”

Sampson clapped a hand over his chin and rubbed where the salt and pepper stubble littered the firm set of his clenched jaw. He looked at me and I could see the smallest flitter of embarrassment cross his face; his shoulders seemed to sag under the weight, under the memory of being chained, being beaten—being treated like an animal by a man whom he had once considered a friend.

“There were people; they said they knew about the Underworld. I didn’t have a choice. I got in the car and immediately passed out. I must have been drugged. Then I was crated, moved. I woke up in a shipping yard, somewhere. I knew it was woodsy, or forested, but that’s all I knew. Nothing was familiar.”

“They dropped you in the woods? In the middle of nowhere? That’s awful!”

Sampson wagged his head, the hand that was stroking his chin now raking across his ragged curls and over eyes that were tired, heavy. “I was starving, naked, in the middle of nowhere and by the time I came fully to, so did they.”

I gulped, the sour state of my own saliva catching in my throat. “Who were they?”

“The werewolf hunters.” He licked his lips. “Trackers. It’s an ancient calling ...”

I nodded. “I know what trackers are, Sampson.”

I knew all too well. It had only been a couple of weeks since Will—Will, the man charged with keeping me and all my Vessel of Souls-filled self safe—had had a run in with Xian and Feng Du, Werewolf Hunters. And although werewolf hunters sound incredibly elegant and Van Helsing-esque, you should know that werewolf hunters these days have come out of the silver-bullet forging days of ancient, dusty castles and now took up residence in more urban environments—like in the back of a retro delicatessen in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

You should also know that werewolves are not the drooling, shirtless mongrels that modern cinema would like us to believe, changing each time the moon becomes full. First of all, it’s not just the moon that brings on the hairy changes in werewolves. If it was, I might have never gotten my first job at the Underworld Detection Agency under Pete Sampson. What edged out the other applicants—a fairly well-put together zombie woman with melon-shaped boobs and a vampire so newly formed that his fangs were still short—was my ability to chain up a grown man in thirty-four seconds flat.

I licked my lips, choosing my words carefully. “So why now? Why did you come back now?”

Sampson swallowed slowly, his eyes flicking quickly over mine, then working hard to avoid my questioning stare.

“Hey, who’s this?” He patted ChaCha who popped up on her popsicle-stick back legs and danced around like the ferocious ball of three-pound fur that she was. I snatched her from under his hand and held her to me.

“Why now?” I asked again.

“I couldn’t run anymore.” Sampson’s lips were set in a hard, thin line. “I would have to spend my whole life running. The trackers weren’t going to back down.”

“How do you know that?”

“They sent me a message.”

He paused and I sucked in an anxious breath.

“There was a den—about six of us, werewolves that had been driven from our previous lives. We were living off the grid in a nothing town north of Anchorage. The townspeople were good to us, didn’t ask questions, but,” he cocked his head, “they knew.”

I put ChaCha down, hugged my elbows. “What happened?”

“A few of us went out, decided to check in with one of the satellite UDA offices. When we got back,” Sampson swallowed slowly, his Adam’s apple bobbing with the effort, “the whole den had been slaughtered.”

“That’s awful.”

Sampson nodded. “They didn’t stop there. The town had been ravaged, too.”

I felt myself recoil, felt the ice water race through my veins. “They went after the townspeople? I thought the trackers were only after werewolves.”

Sampson looked at me, his warm eyes full and wide. “It used to be that way. But this new breed of trackers,” he looked away, breathing out a sigh that seemed to dwarf his shoulders, seemed to carry the weight of the years in it. “They’re relentless. They attack werewolves ...

and anyone who helps us.”

I looked over my shoulder, the hair on my arms standing on end. Sampson reached out to touch my shoulder, then seemed to think better of it, his arm falling listlessly to his side. “I don’t want to put you in any danger, Sophie. I’m only here to warn you and Alex. I couldn’t stand it if I knew that this—” Sampson turned his hands palms up, “that I—was responsible for anything bad happening to you. I’m leaving tonight. I just needed you to be aware.”

“You can’t keep running. You said so yourself. They’re just going to keep coming after you.”

Sampson shrugged. “It’s nothing I’m not used to.”

“No.” I clamped my hand around Sampson’s arm. “I want to help you.” I paused. “I’m going to help you. Me and Alex—and Will, and Nina—”

Sampson’s jaw clenched, fire blazing in his eyes. “I don’t want to get any one of you involved in this. It’s my fight.”

“You said they were coming after the Underworld. It’s our fight now, too.”

“You don’t understand, Sophie. It’s bad out there.” He gestured absently over his shoulder, toward the San Francisco Bay or the entire world, I couldn’t be sure.

I sucked in a breath and forced a smile. “I’m okay with bad. I mean, how bad is bad?

Werewolf hunters. Silver bullets, right? Heh, that’s nothing. I was almost blown up. And I was kidnapped. Held hostage in a restroom. A public restroom.” I raised my eyebrows, “beat that!”

style.

“After they attacked our den, they decapitated all the townspeople.”

My stomach lurched and bile tickled the back of my throat. “That’s nothing,” I whispered hoarsely, the smile on my face painted on. “So it’s settled. You’ll stay here.”

I looked around my apartment, feeling suddenly hopeful. “Yeah. Yeah, you could stay here. They wouldn’t come looking for you here, no one would. And Nina wouldn’t mind—you could probably even stay in her room. And Vlad—Vlad and Nina could probably track the trackers before they tracked you. You know,” I patted my nose with my index finger,

“vampires and their sense of smell.”

Sampson shook his head, a smile that held no joy on his lips. “It doesn’t work like that, Sophie. They won’t stop. If they can’t come after me directly, they’ll go after the things that are closest to me. That would be you, Nina, the whole Underworld. They’ll try and smoke me out by destroying the things that I care about.”

“Like the townspeople.” The weight of what Sampson was saying, the actual meaning set over me, crushing my heart, squeezing what little hope I had managed to summon. “You came back to warn us.” I hugged my shoulders. “Because they’re already coming here. After us.”

“They’re coming after the Underworld Detection Agency.” Sampson’s eyes were fixed on mine. “They’re going to come after you.”

I crossed my living room in two short strides and had my hand on the phone. “We’ve got to call Dixon. He’s running the UDA now. We need to put him on high alert, tell him you’re back.

He’ll know what to do. He’ll know how to protect you. That’s what we do,” I told Sampson, uselessly, as he knew exactly what the Underworld Detection Agency was about. “We protect our own.”

Sampson put his hand on my arm and I held the receiver, limp.

“No one can know I’m here, Sophie. No one can know I’m alive. Especially not anyone at the Underworld Detection Agency.”

I hung up the phone, the click of the receiver like the ominous cock of a gun. “So what do we do? How do we outrun them?”

“We don’t outrun them, Sophie. We have to fight them.”

Under Suspicion

KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.

119 West 40th Street

New York, NY 10018

Copyright © 2012 by Hannah Schwartz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat & TM Off.

ISBN: 978-0-7582-7971-2

Under Suspicion

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