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soon.”
    “He’ll probably be high and pass out on the
couch.”
    “Please let me down, MeeShee.”
    I put her down and was forced to calm my
beast’s complaints.
    Relax , I told him. We’ll hold her
again .
    My mom’s face flashed through my mind. The
last time I’d seen her, she’d told me to take care of La La and
stick together because the habitat life was rough and would swallow
us up whole.
    I’d snorted and left her standing there in
the rain without a reply.
    But now I understood what she’d been trying
to say. It all clicked in my head. If we stuck together, we’d be
stronger to deal with life’s heartaches. We wouldn’t have our
parents’ fates. We could charter our own destinies.
    I will take care of her, Mom.
    I will.

THE HEART RIPPER’S
SONG
    Zulu

    “Zulu, we do this quick and easy,” Ray said.
“No ripping his chest apart, taking out his heart, and painting his
blood across the pavement.”
    “Come on. I did that once, and you still
won’t leave it alone.” I shrugged my shoulders and leaned back in
the van’s backseat.
    Ray wiped sweat off his wing forehead brand
that identified him as a Fairy. He’d been sweating, burping, and
farting our whole stakeout. The brown carpet lining that covered
the van’s walls and floors reeked of Ray’s watermelon candy
scent.
    “You’ve ripped several hearts out,” he
argued.
    “I have not,” I insisted and pushed open the
van’s tinted window to air the space out.
    “No, mon,” Nona said, on my right, in her
thick Rebel dialect. “Me think it was six times.”
    I didn’t respond.
    If Nona said it was six, then it was
probably true. The Were-dog was many things; the Rebel Shifter’s
fierce leader, a mom to three rowdy Were-pup boys, and, most of
all, a painfully honest observer.
    “Me think you go too far, mon.” She took off
her hunter-green sunglasses that matched her emerald-green Mohawk.
Those black eyes peered at me as her tan fingers stuffed the
glasses in her suit pocket. “You roar and bang your white hands
upon your chest like a crazy mon and—”
    “I got it, Nona,” I muttered.
    She and the Fairy exchanged worried
glances.
    “What now?” I held out my hands.
    “The little mon and me,” Nona said, pointing
to Ray as he peeked around the driver’s seat and faced us. “We
think you need to change your look.”
    This from a six-foot female with a green
Mohawk and flashy dress suit.
    “I’m not a little man,” Ray corrected Nona.
“This is just my fairy glamour. I’m bigger than five feet.”
    I chuckled.
    Nona hadn’t seen Ray’s real form yet, the
one he hid under Fairy magic. It would give her nightmares, which
was saying a lot considering I’ve watched her eat a man while he
was still alive.
    “What do you both mean I need to change my
look?” I crossed my arms across my bare chest.
    “When we do these missions, everybody knows
it’s you afterward. We might as well hold up signs over your head,”
Ray said. “There aren’t that many white Mixbreeds running around
the habitat with blond dreadlocks.”
    “I won’t cut them.” My lips curled down at
the edges. My fangs pierced my gums.
    “No. We want you to put them in a ponytail
or something,” Ray explained and launched a bag of rubber bands at
me.
    They landed on my lap with a thud.
    “You can’t be a thug anymore. Now that you
started Mixbreeds for Equality, you have to act more like an
upstanding individual,” Ray said.
    I gathered all of my blond dreadlocks into
one hand and attempted to stuff them into a rubber band. The end
result was a huge haphazard dreadlock ball the size of a melon that
stuck to the back of my head.
    I groaned. “Anything else?”
    Ray pointed to all of the multicolored cords
sewn individually into the muscles on my arms. They covered the
majority of the space from my shoulder to my wrists.
    “You know I can’t get rid of these,” I
said.
    They were permanent. I’d had them since I
was a kid. My existence without the