Night Shift by Lilith Saintcrow

Jill Kismet is a hunter of supernatural bad guys, mainly demons and "Hellbreed" which can be half-breeds, the demon-possessed, and so on. She is still reeling from the death of her mentor, a man named Mikhail, who fell to the seductive wiles of a Sorrow, a worshipper of Chaldean Elder Gods. Just recently become a full hunter, Jill knows all the hellbreed in the town, and is still seeking ways to let everyone know that *she* is now in charge and bad enough to make everyone fear her.

The one person Jill is afraid of is Pericles or "Perry", a Hellbreed who lends her etheric power from the plane of hell when she needs to take down a menace. But his power-lending comes with a price: Perry is a masochist and demands that once a month she whip, stab or beat him while he is chained, something that should give her satisfaction, but deeply disturbs her instead, especially since he never cries out, but only tells her "more".

Now, an especially big bad has rolled on her town, and Jill must team up with a bunch of FBI Werecats and a Werecougar hunter from off the Rez who views her as barely one step up from a Hellbreed herself, as the mark that allows her to draw on power from Perry taints her entire body, and he can smell it.

But when the "trouble" turns out to be a Rogue Were somehow allied and united with a Hellbreed, the level of danger for everyone involved goes up tremendously. Weres are very powerful on their own, but a Rogue Were and a Hellbreed, or worse, a Were turned into a hellbreed, is a whole new level of nightmare fuel for everyone involved. And when the Hellbreed turns out to be the daughter of a completely insane New York Hellbreed, the ruler of the city whom even Experienced and powerful hunters fear to take on... Well, Jill might want a set of Depends, but it's up to her to deal with the situation and take care of both of them, alone, or along with the Feds and their Hunter, Saul Dustcircle.

Worse for Jill, she is starting to feel that Saul makes her safe when she is in her arms, and as the last man who did so was her mentor, she is close to freaking out all over again. Can Jill deal with the Nightbreed and the Rogue Were, and do it while keeping her sanity and her life intact, or will this case and her lack of rest cut her off from everyone who cares about her?

I'll start off by saying that I really enjoyed this book, but that Jill was very much like Dante Valentine. Or, no, the tough-assed action girl. Hates asking for help, falls for someone who is helping her while they spar verbally, and is equal parts sass and butt-kicker. If anything, though Jill is a less extreme example of the type, while Dante was... more extreme. I got the feeling that Dante believed her own press, so to speak, that she thought she was tougher than steel and relatively invulnerable, while Jill seems to know that she is faking it a lot of the time, and while she pretends to be harder than she actually is to fool people, she knows that's all she is... fooling, but she also knows that the fooling is necessary so that she seems more formidable and hellbreed don't try and walk all over her.

Of course, both characters grew up in hard situations. While Dante was schooled in a place where kids were trained not to show emotions or feelings, we don't actually get to see Jill's childhood. But she appears to have been a fairly young prostitute who was attacked by a Hellbreed, saved by Mikhail, one of her johns, and decided to become what he was in response to the attack. Not only were they mentor and student, but continued sleeping together from time to time while she trained under him. I don't know if this is verboten or not under Hunter guidelines, but it did trouble me a little. I don't know if the relationship had anything to do with him dying, but it just sounds strange to me.

Anyhow, Jill starts off the novel stressed and short of sleep, and this only gets worse over the course of the novel. But the writing stays on both sides of the fine line of "Finds a man and ends up needing to be rescued and not able to do anything" and "Finds a man but doesn't need him, and he ends up looking like the weak, needy one". So, for all that, I liked the book. It rocked in many of the right ways and all the right places, but it still is the "Kick-ass supernatural babe"-type book. No hot sex yet, but we can always hope.