His face was warm and happy thinking about his almost stepdaughter. He’d been living with and engaged to Donna for years, but never quite married, but the kids thought of him as their dad. Becca had been only six when he and her mother started dating. Edward, whom the vampires had nicknamed “Death,” had taken Becca to dance class and sat in the waiting room with the moms for years now. It made me smile just to think about it.

“It was more fun to hunt monsters before we had someone to go home to,” I said.

The smile faded and he turned cold eyes to look at where the head lay to one side of the field. “I can’t argue that. I don’t mind the bodies. It doesn’t bother me, but I hope we get home before the musical is over.”

“How many nights does it run?”

“Two weeks,” he said.

“Two weeks, starting today?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to be out here another two weeks,” I said.

“Me, either,” he said, and this time he sounded tired.

The real trouble with this case for me was that I knew exactly why these victims had been chosen. I even knew what was killing them. The trouble was I couldn’t tell anyone but Edward, because if I told the police everything I knew, the killers would come after me and every policeman that I told, and everyone that they told. The Harlequin were the vampire equivalent of police, spies, judge, jury, and executioner. They were also some of the greatest warriors to ever live, or unlive. Some of them were vampires and some of them were wereanimals, which was how they were slicing apart the bodies of the weretigers they were killing across the country. The body at our feet looked like a human man. Before he died he’d been able to shift to a big-ass tiger, but it hadn’t helped him against the Harlequin, just as it hadn’t helped any of the others. If two people were equally fast, equally strong, but one was better trained at fighting, the better trained one would win. So far, none of the weretigers had been anything but ordinary people who just happened to turn into weretigers.