by Paige Tyler
Max didn’t have a clue, and he wasn’t keen on digging too deeply into some of those areas to figure it out. “I don’t know. It could be all of the above—or none of them. All I can say for sure is that I almost frigging bit Lana last night. I can’t keep doing that.”
Brooks regarded him thoughtfully. “Have you ever considered talking to a professional about this, maybe the psychologist the DPD sent Cooper to—Hadley Delacroix?”
Max gaped. “Are you serious? What am I going to tell her, that I grow fangs and claws every time I start to make out with my girlfriend? Somehow I don’t see that working out.”
Brooks shrugged. “She seems to have helped Cooper a lot. He’s not nearly as psycho as he used to be.”
Max didn’t know about that. Cooper still seemed pretty psychotic to him most of the time.
“Brooks might be onto something,” Cooper said. “I still stop in to see her now and then when I need to talk. I could probably get her to see you, too, just to let you try it out. Hell, if we can get enough of the Pack to go with us, she might give us a bulk discount.”
Fortunately, Max didn’t have to reply because Gage came out of the admin building.
“We got a call, Sarge?” Max asked, hopping up from the bench.
“Sort of.” Gage grimaced. “Brooks, take Max and head out to that industrial loft in Deep Ellum we set up for our visiting werewolves. I think we might have a problem brewing out there.”
Brooks grunted and got to his feet. “This has the potential to be interesting.”
Interesting. That probably wasn’t the term Max would have used.
* * *
Lana rang the doorbell, hoping Brandy and Miriam were home. She sagged with relief when it opened. A pajama-clad Brandy stood in the doorway regarding her sleepily, a pair of pink fuzzy slippers on her feet.
“I feel like crap, but you look like crap,” Brandy said, motioning her in. “Bad night?”
“Actually, the best night ever,” Lana said, keeping her voice down in case Miriam was still sleeping.
Brandy must have caught on because she shook her head. “Miriam went in early. One of the other nurses got sick and she’s covering for her in the ER.”
Lana headed straight for Brandy’s coffeemaker, thrilled to find the pot full and steaming away merrily. She grabbed two mugs out of the cabinet and fixed them both a strong cup of liquid sunshine.
“I stayed at Max’s place last night,” she said casually as she added just enough milk to keep the coffee from melting the inside of the mug. She never used to drink a lot of coffee. The caffeine didn’t do a damn thing for her, but the act of holding a steaming cup of coffee always relaxed her. Plus, she simply liked the flavor, so she’d gotten into the habit.
She turned to see Brandy sitting at the kitchen table, a big smile on her face. “Were you two getting to know each other in the friendly manner or the biblical one?”
Lana handed Brandy one of the mugs, then sat across from her friend. She was having a hard time keeping the smile off her face as she remembered everything she’d done with Max last night. “Oh, definitely the biblical one.”
“And?” Brandy asked, leaning forward eagerly. “How was it on a scale of one to oh-my-God-stop-melting-my-panties?”
“Well, I’m not sure where it places on your scale, but I’ll probably just stop wearing panties altogether when I’m in Max’s presence. They’ll just end up in tatters anyway.”
“That good, huh?”
“Better,” Lana said. “It was simply incredible, and I don’t just mean the sex. This is going to sound positively insane, but I’m falling for this guy so fast it’s scary. It’s thrilling, too. It’s the most alive I’ve ever felt.”
“Well all righty then. Sounds like you hit the romantic lottery with this guy.” Brandy sipped her coffee. “In which case, why are you sitting in my kitchen looking somewhat less than thrilled?”
“Because my dad was waiting for me when I went back to my parents’ house early this morning. To say he was pissed is an understatement.”
Brandy blinked. “You’re kidding, right? Your gun-toting daddy does realize his daughter isn’t a teenager anymore, right?”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
As she sipped her coffee, Lana explained how her father had ambushed her the moment she’d walked in the door. Their argument had gotten heated enough to have them yelling at each other.
“He’s never yelled at me in my life,” Lana added. “And it’s all because he thinks Max is wrong for me.”
Brandy lifted a brow. “What did you say to that?”
Lana shrugged. “I told him that who I see is none of his business. As you can imagine, the argument went downhill from there.”
The situation probably wouldn’t have been quite so bad this morning if she hadn’t been so tense to begin with. But for some stupid reason, the moment she’d walked into her parent’s house, her teeth and fingertips had started tingling again. She couldn’t explain what was causing the sensations, but they’d gotten so bad the hair on the back of her neck had actually stood on end, which really put her in a weird mood. When her father had confronted her, she’d naturally counterattacked. Not that her dad didn’t deserve it. He was being a butthead. Still, Lana was sorry things had gotten out of hand.
“When I said I wasn’t going to stop seeing Max simply because he said so, he told me to get out,” Lana said.
Brandy looked about as shocked as Lana had felt hearing those words. “What? You’re not serious are you?”
Lana could only nod, remembering how stunned she’d been. She’d never seen her dad so angry. You’d think she was dating a drug dealer, not one of her dad’s best SWAT officers.
“Your mom isn’t going along with any of this, is she?” Brandy asked.
Lana shrugged. “Mom was already at the restaurant, but when she finds out, I imagine she’s going to be pissed at Dad. But what’s done is done. I told him that if he’s going to try to play that silly game of my house my rules, then I’m out of there.”
“What are you going to do?” Brandy asked.
“I guess that depends on you,” Lana said. “If it’s okay with you and Miriam, I’d like to crash on your couch for a while. If not, my backup plan is to get a room at an extended-stay hotel.”
Brandy’s brow furrowed. “What about staying at Max’s place? You just admitted you’re already head over heels for the guy.”
Lana had thought about it—a lot.
“I’m sure Max would say yes,” she told Brandy. “But even though there’s something serious going on between us, I don’t want to take the risk of screwing things up by moving too fast. I mean, we’ve only known each other for a few days. The things I’m feeling for him are insane, but moving in would be even crazier.”
Brandy looked at her over the rim of her mug. “You just told me you spent last night at his place. Something tells me that even if you have a space on our couch, you’ll still be over there most of the time anyway.”
Lana smiled. “Yeah, probably. But sleeping over and moving in are two completely different things.”
Her friend sighed. “You really spent too much time reading Cosmo, you know that? But it doesn’t matter. If you need a place to crash, then of course you can stay there. Miriam and I are hardly ever here anyway. We both work too much. But if we come in some night and find you and Max going at it, don’t get mad if I start taking pics.”
Lana laughed. At least she had a plan for the short-term. Now she had to figure out what to do next.
On the other side of the table, Brandy yawned behind her hand.
Lana grimaced. “Sorry for waking you up so early. Did they have you working late at the hospital again?”
Brandy shook her head. “Not really. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
Lana hadn’t slept
much last night either, but she’d never needed as much sleep as her friends. Besides, missing sleep due to sex was completely different from lying in bed tossing and turning.
“What kept you up?” Lana asked. “Something you’re dealing with at work?”
“No, nothing that simple. I couldn’t sleep because every time I closed my eyes, I kept thinking about Chris.”
Lana searched her memory for the name. “The guy you met at that party at the SWAT compound? The one you said you weren’t interested in?”
Brandy rolled her eyes and sighed. “That’s the one. I was all prepared to forget about him, but then he called and left a message. I was dumb enough to listen it and now I can’t get his voice out of my head.”
Lana waited for her friend to elaborate, but Brandy didn’t say anything else. Instead, her friend sat there staring morosely into her coffee mug.
“Wow,” Lana said. “That must have been one heck of a message. What did he say?”
Brandy ran her finger around and around the rim of her mug. “That he had a good time and hopes we can get together again sometime soon.”
Once again, Lana waited for the rest of the story, only to realize there wasn’t any more forthcoming. “And that’s why you couldn’t sleep?”
Her friend shook her head. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never gotten this crazy for a guy. I have no plans to call him back, but I’m so gaga over his voice I can’t even get myself to erase the message. I must have listened to it twenty times before bed, then tossed and turned the whole night thinking about him.” She gave Lana a stricken look. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
Lana laughed. “Maybe you just like him. You should call him back and go out with him. Who knows? It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
Brandy crossed her index fingers in the universal symbol of protection. “Get back beast! I don’t do relationships, and you know it.”
Lana ignored her friend’s theatrics. “Maybe you should start.”
“Like that’s going to happen.” Brandy scoffed. “I’m going take a nap. When I wake up, I’ll delete his message and forget I ever heard it.”
“Sure you will,” Lana said. “But before you take that nap, how about helping me drag some stuff in from my car?”
Brandy thought about it a moment. “Can I wear my slippers and pajamas?”
“Sure. No one will notice.”
* * *
“What the hell just happened in there?” Max asked Brooks as they walked down the steps of the industrial-warehouse-style loft Gage had set up for some of the recently arrived werewolves.
Brooks didn’t answer right away—mostly because he was too busy trying to piece together parts of his shredded tactical vest. Luckily, his skin hadn’t been shredded along with it.
“If I had to guess,” the big alpha said, shaking his head and giving up on his vest, “I’d say we just witnessed the start of some new werewolf adaptation, an evolution of how the different werewolf breeds behave in response to the hunter threat.”
Max thought about that and realized it made sense. An hour ago, he and Brooks had gotten there expecting to find the omegas causing trouble for the small pack of betas who lived there, and instead found two omegas aligning with the betas as part of their pack and squaring off against two other omegas who felt they would do a better job leading the pack and protecting the kids who lived there from any hunters who might show up. Although it had turned into a big ass brawl, the omegas were still behaving a lot more rationally than Max was used to.
Even more bizarre, the betas living in the building were acting much more aggressively than Max had ever seen them. One of them had jumped into the fight between the omegas. That wasn’t the way beta werewolves normally reacted.
Betas acting like omegas, and omegas acting alphas? If Max hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he’d call BS on the idea.
“You think it’s a good idea to leave them all together up there?” he asked.
Brooks snorted as they reached their response vehicle parked on the street. “What choice do we have? They agreed to work together to protect their pack. We can’t ask much more than that. Besides, I think that beta up there, Allen, has the situation pretty well in hand. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s undergoing a beta-to-alpha transformation.”
Max climbed in the passenger seat. He had noticed Allen’s fangs and claws seemed longer than they were before. It looked like the guy had put on a couple pounds of muscle, too.
Brooks was just pulling away from the Deep Ellum apartment building when Max’s phone rang. His heart did this seriously unmanly backflip thing when he thought it might be Lana calling. He’d left her lying naked and beautiful in his bed this morning, and if he was lucky, that was where he’d find her tonight after work.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t Lana. It was Detective Peterson from Austin homicide, and while Max’s stomach was doing that backflip thing instead, it was for a completely different reason.
“Lowry,” he said when he put the phone to his ear.
“Max, it’s Detective Peterson, Austin PD. I’m not sure what this means, but I thought you should know. We found another murder victim with an MO similar to Denise Sullivan’s. Signs of torture and the guy had a large-caliber bullet through the forehead.”
“Who is he?” Max asked, a sickening feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. Two people shot through the forehead? It couldn’t be a coincidence, not when hunters preferred putting down werewolves exactly that way.
“We’re still trying to ID him, but getting prints is tough because the guy’s fingertips are a mess,” Peterson said. “This guy was a big bruiser type, with a nose that had been broken a couple times, lots of scars like the ones you’d get fighting, and a collection of prison ink. Bottom line, he’s the kind of man more likely to do the torturing than to get tortured. The ME is saying he was probably killed at least two days before Denise, maybe three. We’re trying to ID him from his prison ink, but that’s probably going to take a while.”
No kidding.
“Any way to connect this guy to Denise?” Max asked.
A big guy with prison tats didn’t sound like someone Denise would hang out with, but maybe Lana hadn’t known her roomie as well as she’d thought. Max knew better than most that everyone kept secrets.
“Actually, there is,” the detective said. “But probably not the way you’re thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before you and Ms. Mason came down, we’d been digging through old police reports, parking citations, and traffic cam footage for the area around the apartment complex. It’s standard practice when we don’t have any other leads. Sometimes you get lucky, you know? So we ended up finding a complaint filed by one of Denise’s neighbors almost a week before the murders. He reported seeing a man lurking around Denise’s apartment building a couple times, watching the place. He thought the guy was casing the apartments for a robbery, but when dispatch sent a patrol out, they didn’t find anything. They talked to the other neighbors and increased patrols in the area, but no one saw the guy again, so the report was left open and pending.”
“You think this guy the neighbor saw is the one who killed Denise and your unnamed male victim?” Max asked, trying to figure out where this was all going. The hunter angle wasn’t lining up.
“No,” Peterson said. “This guy the neighbor saw is the unnamed vic. We showed a photo of him to the witness who had called in the report and he confirmed our John Doe is the one who’d been watching Denise’s apartment.”
Max tried to wrap his head around this nugget of information—and failed. Was this new victim a werewolf or a hunter taken out by his own people? None of this stuff was making any sense.
“Can you send me a picture of your John Doe and anything else you have on him? I’ll see if Lana recognizes him.
”
Max wanted to get at the guy, too.
“I’m already working on it,” Peterson said. “The paperwork to release the file and photos to you is on my captain’s desk, but I don’t think he’s going to cause me any grief on this one. Let me know what Ms. Mason says.”
Max promised he would and was about to hang up when Peterson stopped him.
“One more thing. I’m not sure how to say this without freaking you out, so I’m just going to put it out there.”
That didn’t sound good. “Okay.”
“It goes without saying that I have no idea who killed Denise Sullivan and this John Doe or what their motives might be. All I can say for sure is that the person who did it is vicious, probably unhinged, and somehow connected to that apartment building your girlfriend used to live in. I probably don’t need to say it, but I’d keep a close eye on her, just in case.”
Max appreciated the warning, even if it wasn’t necessary. “I will.”
Peterson was about to hang up, but this time it was Max who stopped him. His gut was telling him it was time to trust the other cop. “This is going to sound really weird, but can you have your ME run a tox screen for animal tranquilizer in both Denise and the John Doe you just found?”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Do you know something about this case you should be telling me?”
“Just call it a crazy hunch,” Max said. “But if I’m right, your case might be tied to a string of murders that have been happening all across the country. I ran into a similar case in New Orleans a while back. The gunshot to the head is similar.”
“And you’re just mentioning it now?” Peterson demanded, sounding a little pissed.
“Because nothing else seems to fit,” Max told him. “The extensive torture prior to the head shot isn’t anything like the previous MO, so I’m just grasping at straws here.”
Max could tell the other cop wanted to ask a lot more questions, but he refrained, saying he’d get the ME on the screening. “I’ll keep it quiet for now, but if this comes back positive for animal tranquilizer, I’m going to be asking a lot more questions.”
