Apparently, having an uncontrollable thirst for human blood made me the perfect pet.

I never would have guessed that in my former life, but I’d been incredibly naïve back then.

Silly me had assumed people didn’t make very good pets under any circumstances.

Pets. That’s what they called us, but I wasn’t so far from being human that I’d forgotten how things worked. Pets were treasured members of a loving family. Pets lived in the house and ate packaged food and slept in soft beds and did absolutely nothing to earn any of it. Pets were encouraged not to kill people, and if they did, there were severe consequences, and never rewards for doing it especially well.

To this point, I didn’t even have a pink leather collar with Alissa bedazzled in diamonds along the back.

Of course, I might have respected my masters more if they’d been honest about what we were to them. Vicious hunting dogs in the field; placid livestock in the compound. In the witches’ minds, we existed only to do their bloody bidding. Whatever humanity we once possessed meant nothing to them. We were merely humanoid creatures to be bought and sold and forced to do the dirty work of tracking and killing anyone our masters felt posed a threat to them.

They felt a lot of people posed threats to them.

And here we were. Again.

“Let’s make haste,” Aries growled, wiping his lips, then licking his hand clean. “I’ve no intention of getting punished for doing half a job.”

My empty stomach growled as the self-appointed leader of our coven looked up from our latest bounty.

A delicious-looking stream of blood dribbled off his cleft chin, but I hadn’t given in to the hunger yet, and I wasn’t going to start now. No matter how delicious blood, hot and fresh from the jugular, smelled.

I turned my face away from Aries and the mangled body pinned beneath his knee on the forest floor. I had killed people too, of course. It was unavoidable in our line of work. But that didn’t mean I had to revel in it the way my coven-mates did. It didn’t mean I had to drain our targets of their sweet, salty life force just to keep my own long-dead body going a decade after it should have stopped. All I had to do was follow orders and keep the witches believing I was loyal and grateful.