by Paige Tyler
Also by Paige Tyler
SWAT: Special Wolf Alpha Team
Hungry Like the Wolf
Wolf Trouble
In the Company of Wolves
To Love a Wolf
Wolf Unleashed
Wolf Hunt
Wolf Hunger
Wolf Rising
Wolf Instinct
Wolf Rebel
X-Ops
Her Perfect Mate
Her Lone Wolf
Her Secret Agent (novella)
Her Wild Hero
Her Fierce Warrior
Her Rogue Alpha
Her True Match
Her Dark Half
X-Ops Exposed
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2019 by Paige Tyler
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks
Cover art by Kris Keller
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
With special thanks to my extremely patient and understanding husband. Without your help and support, I couldn’t have pursued my dream job of becoming a writer. You’re my sounding board, my idea man, my critique partner, and the absolute best research assistant a girl could ask for. Love you!
Prologue
Chattanooga, Tennessee, October 2017
“Suspicious activity reported near the south end of Forest Lake Memorial.”
Officer Rachel Bennett knew the police dispatcher was going to ask her to check it out before the guy called out the number of her patrol car. Why? Because she was just lucky that way. Cursing under her breath, she flipped on her lights, spun her vehicle around, crossed over the median, and headed north on Highway 27.
Rachel forced herself to ignore the chatter on the radio, gritting her teeth as the shift sergeant instructed her fellow Chattanooga PD officers to set up a perimeter north of Lookout Mountain, miles away from where she was. There’d been a high-speed chase, a crash into a ditch, and lots of gunfire. It was literally the triple crown of fun for a cop on a slow Tuesday night in Tennessee. The chase had drawn half the law enforcement officers in the area, both city and county. And when the vehicle’s two armed occupants had escaped into the woods near the highway, that had drawn every other cop in this corner of the state. Hell, there were probably off-duty officers already rolling out of bed right that minute and yanking on their uniforms on the off chance they could get involved in the excitement.
And where was she heading while the rest of the police force ran through the woods looking for two armed felons? To a damn cemetery, most likely to chase off a prostitute and his or her trick looking to get freaky in a graveyard. Rachel had caught the suspicious activity call because it was her beat, but being forced to deal with sex-crazed perverts the night before Halloween while the other members of her department went after real criminals was frustrating as hell.
As Rachel crossed over the Tennessee River, the more built-up parts of Chattanooga quickly got left behind, replaced with stretches of dense woods, interspersed with quiet residential areas. A mile later, the woods disappeared almost entirely.
There was a thriving red-light district just before the bridge, but while that area had plenty of sidewalks for the guys and girls to display their wares, there weren’t many good locations to conduct their business. The nearby parking lots were generally well lit, which scared the johns to death. And the dark alleys behind the buildings were a refuge for the homeless and druggies, neither of which was good for a prostitute’s business. Nervous customers took longer to finish in that environment—if they could finish at all.
So, the working men and women of Chattanooga now had their clients drive them over the bridge to the suburbs, and for reasons that made sense to no one but them, the Forest Lake Cemetery had become their preferred location to get busy. Apparently, the privacy and soft grass made the time it took to get out there worthwhile. Rachel had no idea how the graveyard ambiance affected their bottom line though. She’d definitely never want to do it in a place like that.
Rachel turned into the cemetery, wishing for the hundredth time the place would install a gate that locked. The city had talked to the facility’s management about it, but they were resistant to the idea. They claimed it was because they didn’t want to keep people from being able to come in and out to visit their loved ones whenever they wanted. More likely it was because they didn’t want to spend money protecting a place when there wasn’t anything to steal.
She stopped the car a few yards inside the entrance, the beams of her headlights reflecting off the fog drifting silently across the graveyard. She flipped on her search light and swiveled it this way and that, but beyond confirming there was no one parked anywhere near the main building to her left, she didn’t see much of anything. Thanks to the fog, she couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. Just the silhouettes of headstones, large and small, along with a few family-sized crypts.
Nope, not creepy at all. Especially this close to Halloween.
She’d been in this damn graveyard a dozen times in the past month, so she was familiar with the mazelike network of narrow, curvy footpaths that weaved through the different parts of the tree-shrouded cemetery. The place had been fashioned that way on purpose, to give mourners a sense of privacy while they were there, but it also meant, if there was someone in the cemetery looking for action, it could take a while to find them.
She grabbed her car’s radio and thumbed the button. “This is unit 220. Any additional information from the reporting party about Forest Lake?”
“Negative, 220,” the dispatcher replied. “The reporting party said they heard a female screaming when they drove past the cemetery. No further contact since, though there was an earlier report of someone seeing a man in a clown costume walking near that same area.”
Rachel groaned. She frigging hated clowns with a gut-twisting passion. Then again, was there anyone on the planet who actually liked them?
“10-4,” she said into the radio.
She considered asking for backup but decided against it. Since the call had come into dispatch ten minutes ago, there was little chance whoever had screamed was still there.
Rachel drove around the cemetery, but with the ever-present fog and random patches of trees, she couldn’t see a damn thing. Worse, between the hum of the vehicle’s heater and the noise from the radio, it was impossible to hear anything either, even with the window down. Knowing she’d never find anything if she kept trying to do this search from her car, she turned around and headed back to the main building, figuring that would be the best place to park while she continued the search on foot.
Letting the dispatcher know she was getting out of the vehicle to look around, she shoved open the door. She shivered, trying to keep her teeth from chattering the moment the freezing fall wind hit her. Crap. It shouldn’t be this cold in Chattanooga already. The weather forecast had mentioned a possibility of snow tonight, and from the way her breath frosted in the air, she could believe it.
She turned down the volume on the mobile radio attached to her equipment belt, putting some distance between herself and the distracting sound of the patrol car’s hot engine ticking, straining her ears to pick up anything suspicious. She kept one hand on the weapon holstered on her hip as she moved away from the car and farther into the graveyard, letting her eyes and ears slowly adjust to the darkness and the night sounds around her as she swung her flashlight back and forth.
The moon was out tonight, but with the fog, it was like she was walking around in a bubble, cut off from everything around her. She couldn’t see or hear anything. There could be someone standing only a few yards away and she’d never know it. Crap, there could be a psycho in a clown costume behind the next tombstone for all she knew.
Rachel shivered as tingles ran up her back. She cursed silently. She refused to let her unreasonable fear of clowns freak her out.
She walked slowly along the paths that separated the various sections of the graveyard from each other, stopping occasionally to shine her flashlight into the woods that lined the east side of the cemetery. After ten minutes, she gave up any hope of finding a vehicle. After twenty, she was convinced the entire call had been a hoax. There was nobody out here.
She hadn’t gone more than a half dozen steps back toward her patrol car when a cracking sound from off to the right made her turn.
Any country girl who’d spent time in the woods knew that sound. Someone had stepped on a big stick, breaking it.
She immediately headed that way, aiming her flashlight in the direction of the noise, her other hand still resting on her weapon. She couldn’t see anyone, but her instincts were telling her someone was out there beyond the edge of the glowing beam, in the brambles near the base of one of the trees.
“Whoever is out there, this is Officer Bennett from the Chattanooga Police Department!” she shouted. “Stand up and move toward the sound of my voice or I’ll release my K9 and you will get bit.”
She didn’t expect whoever it was to do as she asked. That line about having a dog with her almost never worked, so she was shocked when she heard a desperate scream in the darkness and then a series of crashing sounds as a girl ran toward her, slamming through tree branches and undergrowth like her life depended on it.
Rachel immediately had her Sig Sauer out of its holster, ready to take down whoever was chasing the girl. The teen collapsed to her knees the moment she cleared the wood line, crying, shaking, and gasping for breath in the circle of Rachel’s flashlight.
Slipping the flashlight in her belt, Rachel hurried over and dropped to a knee beside the terrified girl, wrapping one arm around her shoulders and pulling her close while keeping her .45 caliber pointed at the dark woods.
The girl wore nothing but a thin T-shirt, pink leggings, and ragged socks. No wonder she was shaking. She didn’t even have any shoes on. The socks and leggings were shredded from running through the woods, and she was bleeding from myriad cuts and scrapes. But it was the deep, bloody lacerations crisscrossing the kid’s back and one arm Rachel was more concerned about. The girl had a hand clasped over the wound on her arm, but blood was still leaking out from between her fingers.
Rachel let the girl go long enough to reach up and thumb the button on the mic attached to the webbing on her vest. “Dispatch, this is 220. I need immediate backup and EMS at my location. One female victim with severe lacerations across her back and arm as well as possible hypothermia. Unknown assailant.”
The dispatcher asked a few questions about Rachel’s exact location in the graveyard and how far she was from her patrol car, but the best she could do at the moment was provide a general direction and distance from the entrance. She also couldn’t answer the most pressing question—whether the scene was secure.
“Who did this to you?” Rachel whispered to the girl, glancing quickly at the wounds along the girl’s back before looking off into the trees again. “Do you know where he is?”
The girl only cried harder, latching her arms around Rachel’s waist and holding on for dear life. The poor thing might have been too traumatized to even speak.
“It was a clown,” she whispered brokenly, her face buried in Rachel’s shoulder.
Rachel thought for a minute she’d heard wrong. Then she started praying she’d heard wrong. But when the girl lifted her head and looked up at her with terror on her face, she knew she hadn’t heard wrong at all.
Crap.
“A clown?”
The girl nodded, seeming to draw strength from Rachel’s presence. “He wasn’t wearing a mask though. He had on face paint. Like you see in a circus. I was in the backyard near the fire pit, talking to my friend on the phone, when he grabbed me and dragged me into the woods. I tried to fight him, but he had a knife. I thought he was going to kill me.” She swallowed hard. “I still can’t believe I got away.”
“Where is he now?”
The teen shook her head. “I don’t know. I hit him in the head with a rock, but I didn’t knock him out. I heard him come after me.”
Cursing silently, Rachel called the dispatcher again with an update on the attacker, saying there was a man somewhere in the cemetery wearing clown makeup and carrying a knife. The dispatcher immediately put the information out on the radio. A moment later, officers began calling in their location and ETA—estimated time of arrival—to Forest Lake Memorial. Unfortunately, they were all on the far side of the city, which meant Rachel was on her own for at least ten minutes.
That might not seem like much, but those ten minutes were a lifetime when there was some weirdo out there with a knife.
She didn’t hear anything right then that made her think the clown was nearby, but that didn’t provide much comfort. The truth was that she hadn’t heard a peep out of the girl either, and she’d been hiding in the woods twenty feet away. Rachel sure as hell didn’t like the idea of the clown being that close to her and the kid.
Rachel couldn’t stay out there in the middle of the graveyard waiting for help to arrive, letting the girl bleed to death. She needed to get the girl back to the car and put some bandages over those wounds.
“What’s your name?” she asked gently, sliding her free arm around the girl again while still keeping one eye on the fog-shrouded night.
The girl stared at Rachel for all of a second before a slight smile graced her face. After everything that had happened, it was amazing she could still smile. “Hannah,” she
said even as her teeth chattered from the cold. “Hannah Freeman.”
“Nice to meet you, Hannah. My name is Rachel. What do you think about getting out of this place? I have a nice warm car waiting back at the entrance. How does that sound?”
Hannah’s smile widened for a moment but then disappeared. “That sounds good, but I’m not sure if I can walk that far.”
It was Rachel’s turn to smile. “No problem. I can help you.”
Hannah’s legs were complete rubber. There was no way she’d be able to walk back to the cruiser, even with help. Rachel had no idea how the girl had made it this far.
Hating to do it but having no choice, Rachel holstered her weapon then scooped Hannah up in her arms. The girl cried out softly in pain as the sleeve of Rachel’s uniform jacket scraped against the open wounds on her back.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel whispered as she turned and headed back toward her patrol car. “I know this hurts, but there’s no other way to do this.”
“I don’t care.” Hannah’s hand came up to clutch Rachel’s jacket in a death grip. “Just don’t let him hurt me again. Please.”
“Shh.” Rachel’s heart seized in her chest at the pain in the girl’s words. Damn that effing clown, whoever he was. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”
Hannah buried her face in Rachel’s tactical vest, somehow making herself even smaller than she already was. A few more sobs that sounded almost like relief slipped out and all Rachel wanted to do right then was squeeze her tight and make her feel safe again. But giving her a hug wouldn’t do that. Getting her back to the car and some medical help wouldn’t, either. Finding that damn clown and getting him off the streets was the only thing that would do that.
Rachel moved quickly, glad Hannah was so petite. Rachel was strong—you had to be with this job—but if the girl had been any heavier, there was no way she could have carried her. She considered retracing her steps back to the car but then realized it would be a long trip with Hannah in her arms. Plus, keeping to the roads and gravel pathways would force her to go past several areas heavily shrouded in trees. With that damn clown still out there somewhere, it was a risk she wasn’t willing to take, especially since her hands weren’t free.
