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you-know-what.”
    Ria stared. “Amber, what’s come over you?”
    Her sister-in-law picked up another piece of cake. “I’m going to blame it on the pregnancy.” A slow grin.

SEVEN
    E mmett’s blood was at fever point. Returning to the restaurant, he caught the scent of the shooter and began tracking. Dorian and Clay had both picked up the trail while he escorted Ria home, but this was his hunt.
    His fingers remembered the soft feel of Ria’s skin, the delicate roughness of the scratch that shouldn’t have been on her face. The leopard paced inside his skull, wanting out, wanting to do damage, but Emmett held on to his humanity. For now.
    Minutes later, he found both Dorian and Clay standing frustrated at a busy intersection. “Fuck,” Emmett said, sensing what they had. The shooter’s scent simply disappeared.
    “Probably someone waiting to pick him up,” Dorian muttered, looking around. “No CCTV cameras in this area. We need to fix that.”
    Emmett narrowed his eyes, making a slow circuit of all four points of the intersection. It was clogged with people. “Can’t have been a pickup. It’d be too hard to make a quick getaway,” he muttered almost to himself . . . and looked up.
    The old-fashioned fire escape ladder hung a few feet off the ground, just far enough up to confuse the scent trail with this many people around. Landing on the ladder with a single powerful jump, he began to follow the fading trail with the fluid grace of the leopard he was. No human could ever hope to match a predatory changeling moving at full speed.
    Making it to the top of the building in seconds, he pursued the scent to the other side. Another ladder, this one looking down into a small parklike area thronged with elders playing what looked like a combination of mahjong and chess. Ignoring the ladder, he jumped straight to the ground, making several people scream. His cat ensured he landed on his feet, his body perfectly balanced.
    Again, the scent was muddied by the number of people in the park. But worse, a few meters later it was overwhelmed totally by the strong disinfectant used to sanitize the nearby automated public toilets. Swearing under his breath, he did a circle of the park and came up with nothing. Frustration clawed at him. He was certain this was where the shooter had been picked up—on one of these narrow streets.
    Thrusting a hand through his hair, he was striding back the way he’d come when an old man waved him over. “Here—he left his motorcycle parked on the footpath. Very rude.” A piece of paper was put into his hand.
    Opening it, he found a license plate number. Hot damn. “Thanks.” His cell phone was in his hand an instant later. The elderly man waved away his thanks and went back to his game even as Emmett fed the tip through to the DarkRiver techs. Changelings had made it their business to be up-to-date on all technology known to man—because if the coldly powerful Psy had a weakness, it was that they relied too much on their machines.
    But that technical knowledge also came in handy when DarkRiver needed to hack into Enforcement databases. Emmett had an address to go with the license plate five minutes later. Assembling a team took only a further three minutes—Lucas, Vaughn, and Clay, with Dorian holding a surveillance position. The young soldier was turning into one hell of a sharpshooter.
    “How’re we doing this?” Lucas asked as they got out of their vehicle a short distance from the shooter’s home, his eyes cold.
    “I want the bastard alive,” Emmett said through gritted teeth. “We need to get Vincent’s location.” He glanced at Lucas. “We’re skating way past the edge of the law here.” Changelings had jurisdiction over crimes that involved their kind, but this shooter was most likely human. “It’s daylight—we’ll be seen.”
    His alpha shrugged. “Let me handle that.”
    Trusting his word, Emmett gave the signal and they fanned out, coming in at the