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save our lives if I can’t do it fast enough or if I start foaming at the mouth and become worse than what we’re running from? How do we know if the meditation works if we don’t test it?” I fingered the mala bracelet around my wrist as I asked. I’d gotten it from Nik—one of four that belonged to the Buddha-loving badass himself.
    The bracelet was made of steel beads, each one a meditation mantra. It was supposed to keep me centered and in control of my nonhuman side, because in the past when I traveled, it wanted to come out and play. Meditation helped me push it back down. Control. It was all about control, because, believe it or not, they don’t make a pill or a patch for wanting to tear people apart thanks to over a million years of genetic tendencies.
    His gaze didn’t shift a millimeter. “And that’s what you were thinking when you traveled from the park to here? Practicing?”
    Yeah, in a sling big- time. “Sit down. You’ll need a good hour to ream me.” I sighed. “Beer or tea?”
    He didn’t sit and he didn’t speak. I went and brought back both. Brewing the tea took a few minutes, an opportunity for Niko to become a little less furious. I brought the tea that I kept for him under the bar, some mix that cost a ridiculous twenty dollars an ounce, but desperate times called for criminally overpriced tea. Kind of like throwing a virgin on some old god’s altar in hopes he would cure that pesky leprosy. Probably wouldn’t work, but didn’t hurt to try.
    I put down the tea. He looked at it, the beer, then me. “I can’t decide which would be the more effective lesson: a bottle smashed over your head or hot tea thrown in your face.”
    Maybe it did hurt to try. I took the beer for myself. “I just . . . needed to. I feel like a hawk stuffed in a cage. I needed, I don’t know, out.”
    “A hawk,” he snorted. “A parakeet on your best day.” But he sat down and wrapped his hands around the mug of tea. “You need to?”
    “It’s like a rubber band in me, stretched tight enough to snap. If I travel, I feel normal again.”
    Better than normal.
    “And I haven’t foamed at the mouth or tried to eat anyone even once, swear. I think with the Auphe all dead and losing the mental connection with them, I’m okay. Either that or the meditation is kicking in, but either way, I’m good. I am. And I’ve only done it twice in the past six months.”
    “Counting tonight?” he prodded.
    “Three times,” I corrected, and glumly drank more of the beer.
    “I should’ve had the phone reprogrammed sooner. Meditation works, but not that quickly and not for one of your skill level . . . virtually nonexistent,” he said darkly. “But we’ll discuss this later. We’re meeting a client here in a few minutes.”
    “Who?” It’d been three weeks since our last job. I’d been getting bored. Niko and I, and sometimes Promise and Robin, made up what Niko called Preternatural Investigations. I was convinced he called it that because I could barely pronounce preternatural. My nice, simple Ass-kickers, Inc. had been voted down. “Someone Promise recommended?” I asked. Promise, Niko’s vampire girlfriend, sent the majority of our clients our way, although since they’d only recently reconciled, I didn’t expect it to have come from her. They were taking things slowly from what I could tell, feeling their way carefully. With her daughter, Cherish, having almost killed or made mental slaves of all of us, it was for the best. And with Niko having bypassed the “almost” in killing when it came to Cherish, you’d want to make sure the foundation of the relationship was solid first.
    “Actually, someone called my cell and asked for the meet.” He decided drinking the tea instead of scalding me with it was the better plan and took a swallow. “He wouldn’t say anything more.”
    That was weird. It wasn’t as if we wrote our number on bathroom walls or paid for subway ads. Monster Maimers, Inc.