Chapter One

Chapter One


Being thrown out of a tree wasn't my idea of fun.

Granted, countless nestlings all over the world went through this every year, but they only had to do it once, and for them it was simply fly or die trying.

I wasn't a nestling, and I wasn't built to die. Not easily, anyway. I was dhampire—the offspring of a newly turned vampire whose dying seed somehow created life in the werewolf who raped and then killed him—and my bones were extraordinarily strong.

Being pushed from a tree couldn't kill me like it did those countless nestlings. But God, it could still hurt.

I mean, werewolves weren't designed to fly, and muscles used to being either a wolf or a woman were having trouble with the mechanics of being a bird.

Not that I particularly wanted to be a bird. And particularly not the type of bird I could now become. I mean, a seagull? A rat of the sea? Why that? Why not something more dignified and fearsome—like a hawk or an eagle? Something with useful weapons like talons and a hooked beak built for tearing?

But no. Fate had thrown me a seagull. I'm sure she was up there laughing at me right now.

Of course, I probably could become something else. The drug in my system that had caused the initial change into a gull would probably allow me to take other forms, but I wasn't about to risk it. The other half-breeds who'd been injected with ARC1-23 had changed into so many different forms that they'd lost the ability to become human again, and that wasn't a problem I was willing to face. Especially not when I'd already felt that moment of confusion, right after I'd first attained gull shape, when the mag