Blood Challenge Read Online Free PDF Page A

learning to cook. Slowly. “I’m not hungry. I ate before I ran.”
    “A yogurt smoothie is not a meal.”
    “Not for you, maybe. I had a banana, too.”
    He took out the hamburger meat. “I’ll cook it. You don’t have to eat it. How many threats have you received?”
    “None I consider serious.”
    “That’s not an answer.” He began shaping a patty.
    Lily bent to pull out the big grill pan and gave in. “Seven altogether. Six were addressed to the local FBI office. One was sent to Quantico. Two of those nuts signed their names,” she added dryly. “They’ve been checked out and given a stern warning. The rest contain either explicit or implicit threats.”
    “You’ll tell me exactly what it is they do threaten.”
    She shrugged. “One was very traditional: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ They got a couple good partials and a full thumbprint from that one, but no match so far. The rest … Rule, they’re ugly, but there’s no reason to think the writers will go from words to actions. The vast majority of the time, the letter-writer is satisfied with venting and doesn’t escalate.”
    “Someone did. He vandalized your car.”
    “Which means we ought to have his picture, right?” She set the pan on the burner. “Medium heat?”
    “A little higher. I want to see those letters.”
    “There’s no point in it. You’d just—”
    “Lily.” He slapped patties onto the griddle—one, two, three, four, five. At least two were for him, maybe three. She didn’t think Toby could eat two of the thick patties. “I am not going to panic. Do you really think I haven’t received my share of threatening letters?”
    She felt foolish. Of course he had. “You think you have a handle on when it’s a real threat, when it’s a caution light, and when you can set it aside.”
    “They’re all at least a caution light.”
    “Okay. And how many letters have you received since Friar started appearing on all those talk shows?”
    He stilled. Then his mouth twitched. “Ah … I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”
    She kept her mouth firm. “How many, Rule?”
    “Four. But they’re—”
    “Not anything I need to worry about? Nothing to be taken too seriously?”
    He ran a hand through his hair. “Dammit, Lily, no matter how many people enjoy mouthing off, the number who will actually take on a big, bad werewolf is vanishingly small. You’re—”
    “A big, bad federal agent,” she finished, before he could say “small” or “a woman” or anything else that would get him in trouble. “Believe it or not, very few people want to take us on, either. We’re not as scary as you, but we’ve got that whole power-of-the-law thing going.”
    For a long moment he just looked at her. She could see thoughts moving behind his dark eyes, but had no sense of where he was headed with them. So it should have been no surprise that he surprised her. “Then it wasn’t the threats you’ve received that gave you nightmares last night?”
    She considered several replies, but settled on “No.”
    He crossed to her and brushed her hair back, his face softening. He settled his hands on her shoulders. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you woke smelling of fear?”
    “Sometimes your ability to smell what’s going on with me is a comfort. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass.”
    That made him smile, but briefly. “You had a session with Sam yesterday.”
    She didn’t say anything. They’d already talked about this. Okay, not much—she wasn’t a talk-it-out person—but they’d talked.
    Last month, Lily had learned her Gift came with bonus abilities. The first one made her uneasy. It would be too easy to abuse, even with the best motives. No one should be able to suck out another person’s magic … except in extraordinarily rare situations. Like when the other person was a millennia-old out-realm being who was trying to kill you so she could drive millions of people into madness and feed