Kelley Armstrong
No Humans Involved
Women of the Otherworld, Book 7
To my grandmother, Florence Taylor-MacGowan, who taught me that you don't need to be tough to be strong.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to the usual suspects: my agent, Helen Heller, and my editors, Anne Groell of Bantam Spectra, Anne Collins of Random House Canada, and Antonia Hodgson of Warner Orbit. Your help is, as always, much appreciated.
Thanks, too, to my readers this time around: Danielle and Alison.
And a special thanks to my copyeditor, Faren Bachelis, who has been with me for a few books and never properly thanked. Someday, thanks to her gentle corrections, I may overcome my fondness for gender-indeterminate antecedents and learn the rules of collective noun-verb agreement. Until then, a big thank-you to her for fixing my mistakes!
PART I
Brendan struggled to stay awake. A tough battle-far tougher than it should have been under the circumstances.
They'd approached him behind a bank, its parking lot empty as evening turned to night. He'd been cutting through to the shelter, hoping it would still have meals. Hot meals would be too much to hope for at that hour, but he'd settle for free.
The bank had erected a fence between itself and the shelter to stem the flow of kids taking the shortcut from the bus stop. Brendan had been halfway up when the woman had hailed him. Fearing trouble, he'd only climbed faster, until she'd laid a hand on his calf and he'd turned to see not cops, but a middle-aged couple-well-dressed professional types.
They'd told him some story about losing their son to the streets and devoting their lives to helping other kids. Bullshit, of course. In real life, everyone wanted something. Despite their sincere smiles and concerned eyes, he'd decided that what they wanted was sex. And, as long as they were willing to pay for it, that was okay with him.