Free Hunting Down Dragons (Moonlight Dragon #2) by Tricia Owens

leaped backward off his chair. He shifted into his wolf form. While normally that transformation was pretty interesting to me, this time the change only inspired dread. Once fully wolf, the black animal snarled in the direction of the kitchen, apparently seeing or sensing something that the rest of us didn't.
    "I hate when dogs do that," I muttered, feeling the hair on my arms rising to match the wolf's ruffled hackles. "Freaks me out."
    "There's something else in here." Christian snapped his fingers to gain the attention of the wolf. "Lev, can we wake Celestina? Is there any danger in that? Lev!"
    The wolf only snarled at him.
    "That's just great," I said as Lev went back to threatening the kitchen doorway. This was becoming a scene straight out of a horror movie. To Christian, I said, "Let's be safe and leave her be. We can handle—"
    The cheese plate went hurtling across the room, nearly striking Christian in the head. We all dove for the floor. The shop began to shake hard enough to make the table legs rattle against the floor. Dolls and candy bars and other offerings fell off the Lwa altar. It could have been an earthquake. We sometimes felt them from California, but I doubted the timing of it.
    Then something entered the room. I was as certain of it as if someone had loudly announced, "I'm he-re!"
    It was big. Bigger than a person, and it displaced air as though it had physical form. I could feel it moving toward us from the kitchen, some kind of wraith, invisible to the eye but registering on my other senses in a bad way. I tried to remember if wraiths could hurt you, but this just wasn't my area.
    "Something's coming," I muttered urgently to Christian.
    "I know. I feel it." He wrapped an arm protectively around Melanie who was whimpering. I was jealous, not going to lie. But I also wasn't content to sit there and wait for whatever we'd allowed into this world to come get us.
    "I've got to do it," I muttered to myself but Melanie's monkey ears were sharp.
    "Anne, you just talked to the Oddsmakers!" she reminded me with brown eyes gone as large as an owl's. "You can't use your magick again !"
    "While I agree it's not the best idea, I don't think there's much choice."
    Calling up my magick to fight really was dangerous, not only because it would ping on the radar of the Oddsmakers but because every time I gave Lucky enough energy to have solid form, I felt the pull of my ancestral blood and that pull seemed to be growing stronger. It was a frightening sensation, like slowly sliding into madness. In this case it was a madness that beckoned and cajoled, offering the allure of power and freedom.
    Just say no to drugs and dragons, Anne.
    Hesitation in a fight or flight situation was what got you into trouble. But I genuinely didn't know what to do. The wraith had reached the middle of the room. Now that it was closer I could see a slight shimmer in the air that made everything behind the wraith appear to be melting. And I could smell it, too: cold, stale and slightly meaty/metallic, like the first air belched from a freezer in the garage that used to hold steaks. Was that the smell of where this thing had come from? Is that where we'd end up if this thing attacked us?
    "Screw it," I whispered. I started to call up Lucky—
    Everything went still.
    Lev stopped snarling. The tension in the air vanished along with the wraith. After a few seconds of quiet, I peeked above the edge of the table and looked over at Celestina. She was shaking her head in little jerks, as if she were trying to clear her ears of water. She stopped doing that when she noticed me staring.
    "Sorry," she said curtly. She smacked her lips. Did she taste the ectoplasm? "That went off the rails for a bit, but everything's fine now."
    "Celestina, what was that?" I demanded as my friends and I climbed to our feet. Lev trotted over to his girlfriend and licked the hand she stretched out to him.
    "At the end? An interloper. When you open the gate between planes,