"You made fences?"

I groaned.

After practice I sat in my car and stared out at the dark, empty parking lot. The hunger was back and as bad as ever. I couldn't ignore it. I had hoped the less the craving, the easier it might be to avoid losing control. It apparently didn't work that way. I had no choice but to feed.

I went to a restaurant—no more strip clubs for me—and found a cute girl headed for the bathroom. Between the men and women's restrooms was a family bathroom with a lock on the door.

"Hi," I said, letting the hunger control the vaporous sex-seeking tendrils.

The girl gave me a look that said to bug off. I latched on to her halo. She stopped dead in her tracks as lust filled her eyes.

She was mine.

* * * * *

The next day at practice I saw Nyte, Ash, and a handful of students sitting in the bleachers. I waved at my friends then trudged toward Coach Burgundy. I'd hidden an MP3 recorder in my pants, intent on recording something incriminating. I noticed he was talking to the sheriff and a couple of deputies. How convenient. He waved me over.

"Here's that boy I was talking about," he said.

"He don't look like much," said the sheriff. "You sure he's up to it?"

"Don't let his size fool ya, Roscoe. This boy's the real deal." He slapped the sheriff on the shoulder.

Roscoe looked me over like he was appraising a new coonhound before nodding. "We got a lot riding on this, boy, so don't let us down."

My brilliant idea of recording the coach fizzled like a cigarette in a urinal. If he and the sheriff were in cahoots, who else was in his pocket? As if to answer that question, the local city police chief strolled over with a grin on his face. He was tall, broad, and seemed to be in shape compared to the shorter plumper sheriff. He slapped Roscoe on the back and shook hands with Coach Burgundy. I turned and scooted away, my tail between my legs.

In addition to the coach, I would apparently have to collect evidence on the entire good old boys club in this one-horse town. Technically we were in the metro Atlanta area, but the only authorities I could go to at this point might be the GBI or the FBI. I wouldn't have been a bit surprised to suddenly see representatives from those agencies show up and give Coach Burgundy a grin and a slap on his fat butt.

After the usual warm-ups, I endured practice handoffs without a defensive line to counter me for half an hour.

"Why do we keep running the same drill over and over and over?" I asked Bryan.

"Repetition helps muscle memory. Your body will know exactly how to respond to a play under pressure."

I wished it helped my brain memory too. I felt like such an idiot for getting myself in deeper and deeper with every move I made.

Soon the defensive line joined the offense for practice. Nathan and his buddies overloaded the left side which, as they knew, would be the side I was going through.

"Give it a rest, Nathan," Bryan said when he walked to stand behind the center.

Nathan sneered. "Shut it, Jones. I'll do what I want."

Bryan sighed and barked the call. I took the ball, noticing that my body did indeed know how to take it better after all that repetition. I decided at the last second that plowing through three huge guys would look way too suspicious, so I squirted around them and to the outside. The safety dove for me as I ran into the end zone. Coach Wise whistled the play to stop.

I turned in time to see Nathan hurtling toward me, murder in his eyes. At the last second, I stepped aside and tripped him. He rumbled, stumbled, and face-planted in a mud puddle with a loud splat. The handful of students in the bleachers cheered. I turned to them and flourished a deep bow. Coach Wise whistled until I thought he was going to pop an aneurysm and spray-paint the field red with arterial spray.

"Spelman, you cut that out right now, boy. Practice like you know you should."

Nathan pushed himself up, mud dripping down his face and practice jersey. He looked like he wanted to kill us both, but he stopped short of murder and instead shot me a glare that might have caused a bowel evacuation in the prior version of me. Instead, my bowels ignored him. I tossed the ball to Coach Wise and was about to turn away from the small crowd when I noticed two figures seated at the top corner of the bleachers, well away from everyone else.

They wore black hoodies which covered their faces, jeans, and gloves. Large sunglasses covered their eyes but I could see their ivory pale skin and red lips. They looked to be in their twenties at least. Definitely not high school students. Definitely nobody I knew. I caught myself staring and turned away quickly.

Were those the people Elyssa had warned me about? Sick dread formed ice in my chest. I had to be careful. Very careful.

I watched them from the corner of my eye. By the time practice ended, they had vanished. But that didn't mean they weren't watching me. My teeth chattered although I was plenty warm from physical exertion.

They showed up the next day as well. The crowd of onlookers also doubled in size. Nerds, cheerleaders, and people I had never seen before showed up to watch the Nathan versus Justin show. At least that's what Nyte and Ash called it. They'd taken down the videos after I begged them, but it didn't mean others weren't posting their own. I hoped I had toned down my performance enough so people wouldn't wonder. But I couldn't tone it down too much or Burgundy would complain and threaten me again.

"I got you on the roster for the game tomorrow," Coach Burgundy told me after practice. "Now you rest up and eat a good supper. I want you at your best for the game."

Relief settled over me. I had almost forgotten about the blood sample I'd given the nurse. Since the FBI and a dozen other federal agencies weren't converging on me right this minute, maybe they'd discovered nothing unusual in my fluids.

"Yes sir," I said. It was all I ever said to him these days. He owned me and I didn't know how to get out of this mess.

I left practice and decided where I would go to "eat". No matter how careful I was to conserve my supernatural energy, I was always hungry after practice. The more I used, the hungrier I was afterward. I knew I had to choose a different place to feed every night. I had to stay off the supernatural radar. A mall, a restaurant, a library; it didn't matter. I noticed that as long as I fed before growing ravenous I could stop the make-out sessions from becoming too intense. I hated it. On the one hand, I wanted sex so badly that my "boys" seemed ready to explode. On the other hand, every time I kissed a girl I felt like I was betraying Elyssa. I saw her face and smelled her hair when I closed my eyes. My soul was with her, not the strangers whose essence kept me sane.

Elyssa was right. I was losing my humanity and there was no stopping it.

Chapter 21

It was almost midnight when I got home that night. I'd driven all the way to the west side of town. It wasn't like I was killing people and littering my wake with corpses, but I didn't want to get emotionally involved with any of these girls. They couldn't help what I did to them, and I really didn't want to see them again anyway.

"You are becoming quite the predator, my little lamb," said Stacey as she dropped lithely from a tree in the front yard of my home.

I let out a squeak and jumped five feet back. "Can I just give you my cell number? Please?" I put a hand to my heart. "You're going to give me a heart attack." For a split second I'd actually thought she might be one of the anonymous watchers from football practice.

She laughed and stalked toward me, the light from a nearby streetlamp glinting off her reflective eyes. "I will give you free advice, my sweet. Do not spread out your attentions too widely. It will make you far more noticeable."

"Thanks, kitten. I'll be more careful." I was trying to put on a brave face, but her warning set off alarms in my head. I was walking a minefield without a metal detector. Those ivory-skinned peeps with the hoodies might be the very mines she was talking about. It was only a matter of time before I triggered one.

"You are too adorable, my love. I imagine quite soon you will see the error of your ways and come to me." She snuggled up to my chest and purred.

I sighed and wondered why the cute ones also had to be psychotic. Her head jerked up suddenly, and she sniffed the air like an animal sensing danger. She hissed and a claw dug into my back. I yelped and leapt away from her, muscles tensed and ready for danger.

"What is it?"

She didn't answer me. Her amber eyes gleamed with feral wariness. I also noticed her fingernails had extended into three-inch claws. Maybe I had triggered one of those mines she'd told me about after all. She sprinted away, her legs a blur.

I looked around the immediate vicinity for a threat but sensed nothing. Whatever it was could wait. It was time I found out more about my pesky stalker. I charged after her. Running and dodging over roots, curbs, rocks, banana peels, and all of the little things that make running at super-speed super-perilous was a lot easier now thanks to football practice. I guess I owed the establishment that much. My legs felt more attuned to the mere act of running whereas before it had been like driving a Lamborghini with bald tires on an icy road.

Stacey leapt over a six-foot wooden fence. I jumped and cleared it, only to barely miss smacking my forehead on a low-hanging tree limb. She ran through the back yard and vaulted a swimming pool, flipping in mid-air and doing a sideways barrel roll over the fence. I jumped, but my timing was off. My left foot went into the cold water when I landed, but my right foot somehow caught the edge. I shook it off. Hopped over the fence and into another backyard. A dog nipped at my heels as I pursued Stacey over a chain-link fence and into yet another yard.

We zigged through residential streets and zagged through old closed-down office parks. My wet shoe squished in a staccato rhythm until the speed dried it out a bit. She increased her pace, zooming, down a road where abandoned buildings and decrepit houses loomed. I recognized Scottdale, a derelict town to the east of Atlanta.

I sped up. My feet beat a staccato rhythm against the pavement and wind whistled past my ears. Stacey ran down a road spotted with broken and crumbling asphalt and lined with leafless hardwoods. She bolted left and sprinted several feet up the side of a red-brick warehouse then pushed off from the wall to catch the window ledge of a neighboring warehouse. Without pausing, she bounced from the ledge up to the roof of the other building and disappeared atop it. I groaned. Football hadn't taught me a thing about urban bouldering. I ran up the side of the building. It was much easier than I'd expected as the centrifugal force from the sheer speed of my run gave my feet traction on the building. I turned and leapt for the window ledge. Instead of grabbing it, however, I plowed through the boarded-over window and slammed head-first into a metal railing on the other side. It sounded like a gong.