“Emmett,” he said, his voice holding nothing of laughter. “And I’m in charge of you.”

Her brow furrowed, the real Ria fighting her way through the fog of shock. “Who’re you to be in charge of me?”

“I’m big, I’m strong, and I’m pissed as hell that someone dared touch a woman on my watch.”

She blinked. “Your watch?”

“Dorian’s part of my team,” he said, nodding to the blond man who’d turned her attacker into a sack of broken bones. “Wish he hadn’t done such a good job—I would’ve liked to bloody the piece of shit myself.”

Ria wasn’t used to violence, but she knew without a doubt that this man was a changeling, that he could turn into a leopard with a single thought—and that the leopard had no problem with the most brutal kind of justice. When she looked into his eyes, she saw rage . . . and the flickers of something that wasn’t quite human. “He can’t hurt me.” Somehow, she found herself trying to comfort him.

“But he did.” An implacable statement. “And I’m going to sniff out the nest this little viper came from no matter what.”

She glanced at her assailant’s unconscious body. He was alive, barely. But he wouldn’t be talking for a while yet. “He wasn’t working alone?”

“Indications are he’s with a new gang.” Emmett tucked her blanket gently around her feet when it came loose. “Dark-River’s done a hell of a lot of work to clear the city of this kind of scum, but sometimes, they pop back up.”

Ria knew of DarkRiver. Who didn’t? The leopard pack, based in the Yosemite forest, had claimed San Francisco as part of their territory when Ria had been a child—no other predatory changelings could enter the city without their permission. But in the past few years, they’d gone further and begun to wipe out human predators, too.

“I can tell you a little about him,” she said, her voice gaining strength on a cresting wave of anger. “He came to my mother’s shop, left an account number where she was supposed to wire ‘protection’ money. We thought he was just another thug.”