Dark Awakening by Kendra Leigh Castle

paused. “Very ugly, knowing Damien. Someone’s gone and paid for the best if he’s involved.”
    She stared up at him, full of impotent rage. Even now,with her house in shambles and her deepest-buried secret completely exposed, she couldn’t ignore her simmering attraction to him. Having him this close, braced above her, completely focused, Lily saw that he felt it, too; she could see it in the way his breathing changed ever so slightly, the way his eyes, already intense, went to hot silver. So much of her wanted to stretch beneath him, to arch and invite him to put his hands on her, to melt under a touch she knew instinctively would be even hotter than his gaze.
    Lily had to look away again. This was insane, and she needed to get a handle on it.
Now
.
    “I’m going to sit up now,” she said firmly. She might be a quiet girl, but she’d been taking care of herself for a long time. Growing a spine hadn’t been an option, and she was glad to find hers intact in spite of everything. “You’re going to need to back off.”
    Thankfully, he didn’t ask why or argue with her about it. She tried to be glad of it as Tynan shifted and moved back from her with the liquid grace of a cat.
    A cat… he had been a cat….
    Lily struggled up to a sitting position, still feeling like little more than a hollow vessel from which all the contents had just been emptied. She glanced at Tynan, now crouching only a few feet away and watching her with guarded interest.
    “I thought vampires were supposed to turn into bats, not big black cats,” she muttered resentfully, lifting her hands to examine them for any cuts from the flying glass. Satisfied that there were none, she got her feet beneath her and began the arduous process of standing up without letting Tynan know how much it was costing her to manage it.
    “Not all of us can turn into something else. It depends on the bloodline,” he said, frowning as he watched her. And damned if he didn’t get to his own feet and start to move toward her again, as though he wanted to help her up. Lily shot him a withering glare, and it must have conveyed what she wanted it to, because Ty quickly shifted back and stuck his hands in the pockets of his long black coat.
    “Cats. Smoke. Bit of this and that. There are even a few who can turn into lions and jungle cats and things, though they’ve about gone extinct. And yes, bats. But turning into animals is usually sort of… frowned upon.”
    “Because?”
    “Too much like werewolves. And vampires hate werewolves.”
    “I… oh.” Lily tried to digest that, then just decided to pretend she hadn’t heard it. The existence of vampires was enough for tonight.
    “And that man who was here to kill me? Damien, I think you called him?” Lily asked, wrapping her arms protectively around herself as she made sure she was steady, then surveyed the damage she’d done. “Can he turn into anything else that I should be looking for?”
    Tynan shook his head. “Another cat, I’m sorry to say, though you’ll have to believe me that he’s gone, at least for the moment. It’s a shame that he’s a Cait Sith,” he said, pronouncing it
cat-SHEE
, a word that sounded Gaelic and mysterious as it rolled off his tongue. “He’s a slippery enough bastard in his human form. All the Shades are, but he’s special, even for them. The services of the House of Shadows are astronomically expensive for a reason. Theft, espionage, extortion—assassination. The Shadesoffer it all. And they’re very, very good.” He paused. “But Damien is in a class by himself. Easy to admire, when he’s not being paid to kill you.”
    The sheer awfulness of what he’d just described to her was too much to take in, so Lily turned away from it, ignored the whole, and concentrated on the superficial.
    “He mentioned you. I don’t think the feeling is mutual.”
    “No, it wouldn’t be.”
    Tynan didn’t elaborate, so Lily looked at her bare walls, one of which had a