It was the scent of something strange, something otherworldly, that led her to the first splashes of crimson. In the stormy darkness of the sunless predawn, even her enhanced vision saw it only as wet splotches against the ice that sheeted the road and covered the grass beside it. But Stevie Rae knew it was blood. A lot of blood.

But there was no animal or human lying there bleeding.

Instead there was a trail of liquid darkness thickening in the sheeting ice, moving away from the street and into the densest part of the grove behind the abbey.

Her predator’s instincts kicked in instantly. Stevie Rae moved stealthily, hardly breathing, hardly making a sound, as she tracked the blood path.

It was beneath one of the largest trees that she found it, hunkered down under a huge, newly broken branch as if it had dragged itself there to hide and die.

Stevie Rae felt a shudder of fear pass through her. It was a Raven Mocker.

The creature was huge. Bigger than she’d thought they’d looked from a distance. It lay on its side, head tucked down against the ground, so she couldn’t see its face very well. The giant wing she could see looked wrong, obviously broken, and the human arm that lay beneath it was weirdly angled and covered with blood. Its legs were human, too, and curled up like it had died in a fetal position. She remembered hearing Darius firing a gun as he and Z and the gang had ridden like bats outta hell down Twenty-first to the abbey. So, he’d shot it from the sky.

“Dang,” she said under her breath. “That must’ve been one heck of a fall.”