Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “He’s left the Fist,” he informed her. “I can feel it. I know it. There’s no doubt in my mind he’s gone. But he won’t stay gone. I need to hunt him. Find him. And finish him before he ever returns.”

  “I don’t object,” she said without looking at him, but he could see the sorrow in her eyes. She was still Dante’s mother, and a mother was never happy to welcome her son’s death. “But, my love, you’ll never find him out there.”

  Troy furrowed his brow, discouraged, and asked, “Why do you say that?”

  “Why?” she questioned right back. “Why do you deny what you already know?”

  “I know that I won’t be able to find him wherever he’s run off to? I don’t know that. I could find him in Montana or Utah, he could be anywhere and so long as he’s breathing I can track him down.”

  “You know it isn’t going to unfold like that.”

  “Why do you keep saying, I know, when all I know is that I don’t know anything.”

  “Your visions,” she said intuitively, “they’re anchored to the Fist, aren’t they?”

  He tapped into his foresight, but only for a second—that was all he could bear—and he felt the truth of her question.

  “When will he return?” he asked her. “I can’t tell. The visions are all jumbled up. Violent. There are no details. Nothing I can act on. Can you tell me when? Can you see when?”

  “It’s not when, Troy,” she told him as her aged eyes finally met his. “It’s how.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What does your foresight tell you?” she countered, and a punch of frustration slammed into his chest.

  He didn’t have time for riddles.

  “Maybe he won’t ever come back,” he said, optimistically, as he released her cold hands and rose to his feet. He paced away, thinking, and as he neared her again, he questioned, “Will he be back?”

  Again, she challenged him by saying, “What does your foresight tell you?”

  And this time a crystal-clear wave of insight crashed through his mind.

  His jaw dropped open and his eyes widened as he spoke the overwhelming realization out loud:

  “Yes. He will be back. In many unrecognizable forms.”

  Sasha nodded knowingly then returned her gaze to the fire.

  Many unrecognizable forms.

  How many mortals had Dante turned during his short stint in the Fist?

  Troy ran his hand down his face and covered his mouth, overwhelmed.

  The tables had certainly turned.

  The werewolves of his pack had been hiding in plain sight for centuries, peppered throughout the mortal residents in Devil’s Fist.

  And now Dante was using the same strategy, those that he had turned to form his army of the damned now hiding in plain sight as well.

  The war had started, and Troy didn’t even know who he was fighting.

  ***

  That night, when he returned to his cabin that had become the home he shared with his precious wife, he held her as they sat on the couch, his arm wrapped around her shoulder as they finished reading out loud the final few sentences of her novel.

  She turned the final page and righted the manuscript in her lap.

  “Reece, it’s incredible.”

  “Really?”

  “I once told you truth is stranger than fiction, but you somehow managed to weave it into your book flawlessly.”

  “I was hoping to get it published,” she told him as she rose to her feet and neared the crackling fire.

  “I think any publisher would be proud to put it on bookstores.”

  “I think if they did,” she said, smiling sweetly at him, “it would put our people at risk.”

  With that, she set the thick manuscript in the fireplace and watched the flames devour it.

  “I don’t need my story out there in the world,” she told him. “I’m living it, right here with you, and that’s all I’ve ever needed.”

  “I love you, Reece,” he said, joining her and wrapping his arms around her from where they stood in front of the fireplace. “You’re all I’ve ever needed, as well.”

  KALEB

  Chapter One

  KALEB

  The bright, golden rays of the rising, Wyoming sun cut through the open bedroom window, warming Kaleb’s face and blazing through his eyelids, nearly blinding him. He would’ve thrown his arm over his eyes, but in his groggy wakefulness, he sensed something was off.

  Something was off, alright, but it wasn’t that he was waking up early in his boxer-briefs to the smell of crisp, clean air breezing through the screen. That part was routine. So was the mild hangover that weighed his head to the pillow and so were the wafts of a lingering dream giving his attention the clever slip so he wouldn’t remember any details. It was the smell of the place, the scent of his surroundings. Unfamiliar, and yet…

  Kaleb ran both of his large hands down his face, rubbed his knuckles against his closed eyes, and raked his fingers through his dark brown hair, flexing the length of his lean, 6’2” physique, legs and muscular torso, to get in a good morning stretch before getting his bearings.

  The scent of the frilly, feminine bedroom wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. It definitely smelled like the woman he’d shuffled off from the bar with last night just before closing time.

  He turned his head.

  Yup.

  There she was, lying beside him on her stomach, the bedsheet barely covering her nude rear end, the length of her lovely back nude as well, sandy blonde hair ratted up in a tousled pile pooling over the pillow. She was facing the open window, away from him, and sound asleep.

  Now was his chance to slip out and make a run for it.

  He was a creature of habit after all, specifically a werewolf creature. And now that one of his needs had been met, it was time to satisfy the other—food.

  Moving slowly so that his weight wouldn’t bounce the mattress and rouse her, he sat his lean, muscular body up and slid his legs out from under the bedsheet, touching his bare feet down onto a nest of the woman’s discarded clothes. He gently nudged a red bra aside with his toe and stood, having another stretch once he’d stood.

  Unlike three of his brothers—Troy, Shane, and Conor—Kaleb hadn’t served in the military and the smooth lines of his toned body proved it. He wasn’t scarred up with healed knife slashes or bullet wounds. He didn’t have any homemade, inky tattoos, the products of too much idle downtown in barracks full of antsy soldiers. In fact, he only had a few tattoos. One of which was the Quinn clan crest on his inner right forearm—a howling wolf enclosed in a thick inky oval.

  The other was a rendering of the woman of his dreams. Literally. Her angelic face taking up the muscular cap of his right shoulder, her hair flowing down across his chest and shoulder blade, her figure spanning down the length of his muscular arm, though every part of her, including the features on her face, looked ghostlike, hazy, and washed out.

  For years now, she’d visited him in his deepest REM sleep but with erratic frequency. Always backlit by the blindingly bright rays of an otherworldly sun, he’d never been able to fully make out what she looked like, and more often than not, by the time Kaleb woke from the tangled, disjointed dream, every detail had already escaped him, like it had this morning.

  Quietly, he began pulling on his jeans and the red tee-shirt he’d paraded through Libations in last night. He stepped into his boots next and laced them up, careful not to wake…

  Christ.

  What was her name?

  If Kaleb had been genuinely curious about her, he would’ve taken the time to rummage through her purse, find her driver’s license, refresh his memory, but he had other priorities in mind and they included sizzling eggs and bacon, not a second roll in the hay should he accidentally wake this chick up.

  “Thanks for the memories,” he breathed with a playboy grin before slipping out of her ransacked bedroom—damn, it looked like they’d knocked into every piece of furniture during their ro
ugh, hungry foreplay. It was all coming back to him now. Even the framed photos on the walls were hanging at a slant.

  He spilled out onto Main Street outside, having jogged down the narrow staircase that connected the apartment to the building’s entrance. Libations bar was to his immediate right, and Acorn Fashion and Accessories, a little boutique clothing store, was to his left. He glanced up at the open window above the boutique at the apartment he’d just come from and exercised his heightened werewolf hearing. The girl was still fast asleep. There wasn’t a sound up there except for deep, peaceful breathing.

  Good.

  But just as he turned up Main Street where Angel’s Food diner was waiting for him three doors down, he came face to face with one very angry-looking shop girl named Pamela.

  Pamela was a curvy, flirty little thing who liked to dress in the latest trends her boutique had to offer. Today she was wearing a pink sundress, brown beaded necklace and matching bracelet, and a scowling frown on her face.

  She tossed her cigarette to the sidewalk, crushed it with her high-heel sandal, and balked, “You did not spend the night at my best friend, Courtney’s, place!”

  Courtney! That was her name!

  “You slept with her?” Pamela accused as she advanced on him, her manicured fingernails tucked into balled fists that she’d planted on her curvy hips.

  “I don’t like to kiss and tell,” he told her good-naturedly as he offered her his famous playboy smile and skirted around her fuming figure, rushing off down the sidewalk towards the diner.

  “You scoundrel!” she called after him, but he was already swinging the glass door of the diner open and ducking inside.

  She was probably right about the scoundrel part. Kaleb had developed quite a reputation throughout the Fist over the years as a womanizer, a playboy, a Casanova, but no one seemed to mind until the sober light of day flooded them and they realized that not only had he “hit it,” but he’d most likely “quit it” right quick. His hands were clean, though, as far as he was concerned. Every single lady he’d gone to bed with had been aware of his habit from the start. They’d gone into this thing with eyes wide open, and they’d certainly enjoyed most everything he did to them throughout the long, tipsy hours of the night.

  He slowed up when he reached the hostess stand inside and took a gander at the crowded, bustling diner. It was the breakfast rush hour and he hoped for a booth table instead of having to be crammed in on one of the barstools at the counter.

  As he glanced around, he felt another pair of female eyes glaring at him.

  This time it was Leeanne, one of the waitresses and of course, another of his former conquests.

  If Pamela hadn’t held back her disapproval out on the sidewalk moments ago, Leeanne was notorious for her confrontational style, and it made Pamela seem, by comparison, like a kitten next to a jungle cat. Some months back, after it had gradually dawned on Leeanne that she wouldn’t be the girl to tame him—she’d expected a second date from him and when that phone call never came—she slapped him clear across the face, right here in the diner for all the customers to see.

  As she stomped straight over to him at the hostess stand, Kaleb took a little defensive step backwards, on guard for another smack. But she only asked, “Breakfast for one?” dryly as she glared those eyes of hers into tight slits.

  “A booth if you got it,” he said was an easy smile that she didn’t much appreciate, judging the shape of her firmly pressed lips.

  After grabbing one of the giant, laminated menus from the stand, she led him to a freshly cleared booth in the back and slapped the menu on the table as he slid onto the red, vinyl bench on the far side so he could face the entire restaurant.

  “Coffee?” he asked, but she was already tearing back through the restaurant.

  The best he could hope for at this point was that he wasn’t sitting in her section.

  He perused the menu options, skimming the breakfast section for absolutely no reason. He knew exactly what he was going to order so he set the menu down and did a little people watching to pass the time.

  Devil’s Fist was one of the smallest, most rural towns in all of Wyoming, and people watching was slim pickin’s unless you holed up in the diner or the one bar in town, Libations. Little did the town’s mortal residents know that a substantial portion of the population was actually like Kaleb and all the Quinns. Werewolf. But that secret that had remained unthreatened for all the centuries his kind had been hiding ‘round these parts had been recently threatened.

  With that in mind, Kaleb spied Angel Mercer, the owner of Angel’s Food, as she carried two piping hot plates of fluffy pancakes out to one of the tables on the far side of the diner.

  Angel was a polished woman who liked to keep her sleek, blonde hair pulled up in a stylish pompadour whenever she was working. She made the blue, button-down dress uniform look glamorous, and she never failed to fix on false eyelashes and blush her cheeks with rouge in true, former beauty-queen fashion.

  She might’ve looked human, but she wasn’t. Not anymore. She’d been turned. And that turning had gone so far outside of the werewolf code that it had set into motion a chain reaction of gossip and circulating rumors. The residents had werewolves on the brain, and if that wasn’t bad enough, so did the local sheriff.

  Jack Quagmire, the owner of the bar down the street, who was also a member of the pack, was nestled up in a red, vinyl booth in the back, as well. Kaleb’s oldest brother, Troy had tasked Jack to keep an eye on Angel in case she couldn’t control her newly acquired werewolf urges in public. For Jack, it was no chore. He’d been in love with Angel since the day he’d first set eyes on her, and sticking to her like glue was likely one of the greatest pleasures of his life.

  One of the waitresses, Lucy Cooper, breezed right on up to Kaleb’s booth with a steaming pot of coffee in her slender hand, and as he lifted his dark eyes to meet her gaze, he was struck with a jarring flash of his recurring dream—the ethereal goddess leaning in close, backlit by blinding light, his surroundings indeterminable, she smiled and breathed, Wake up, Kaleb, it’s time.

  “Time to order, Kaleb,” Lucy repeated as the foggy haze of his remembered dream lifted from his thoughts.

  Lucy hadn’t bothered to tie up her long, flowing blonde hair, and it was spilling in pretty tendrils over her shoulders. She was a slender 5’6” and to Kaleb, though her eyes twinkled blue, there always seemed to be a distinct edge of darkness lurking behind them.

  “Do you know what you want?” she asked, her dainty eyebrows lifting, as she pressed the tip of her pen to her order pad.

  “How ‘bout a date?” he said cleverly and she rolled her eyes and let out a breathy, little huff of a laugh.

  He couldn’t help it. He’d never gotten within three feet of her outside of the four walls of the diner, and he liked himself a challenge, especially when it came to women.

  “How ‘bout eggs and bacon with a side of no thank you,” she countered.

  “I was never one for ordering sides,” he grinned, and she shook her head, jotting down his breakfast order that she seemed to know by heart.

  “You never give up, do you?”

  “You never take me seriously, do you?” he shot right back as the image of the glowing, ethereal angel he’d come to associate as the “light to his darkness” came to mind all over again.

  “Tell me, do you even have a belt anymore? Or has it completely disintegrated from all the notches you’ve put in it?”

  Undeterred, Kaleb lifted the hem of his red tee shirt, being sure to tighten his abs a little so his washboard muscles would pop, and told her, “Belt’s as smooth as the day I bought it, see?”

  “Impressive,” she said dryly.

  “You like that?” he asked, feeling a crooked grin tug at the corner of his mouth in the hopes that the part of him that impressed her most was his body.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said with a little smile as her gaze lifted to the wolf tattoo that sp
anned his inner forearm.

  Never missing an opportunity to further impress, Kaleb balled his hand into a fist, flexing his forearm as he presented the tattoo to her and asked, “Like it?”

  “Does Dean have the same tattoo?”

  He frowned, but reminded himself that the ladies ‘round these parts were far less interested in his youngest brother, Dean, than they tended to be with him, and responded, “All of us Quinns have it.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  Dean had been shot in the shoulder courtesy of one very elusive Dante, the rogue werewolf who had terrorized the residents of the Fist and disappeared entirely not a week ago. Dante had turned Angel Mercer. He might have also turned others. But Lucy didn’t know that. She also didn’t know that Dean had been shot with a silver bullet, which had nearly killed him, but hadn’t thanks to their Grandmother Sasha’s ancient expertise.

  “Fine,” he said with a bit of a grumble in his tone that she was so concerned with his brother.

  “Awe,” she cooed playfully. “You’re not gettin’ jealous, are you?”

  He straightened his spine, broadening his shoulders to beef himself up, and asserted, “I don’t get jealous.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said with a flirtatious wink that he didn’t quite trust. Lucy wasn’t exactly easy to warm over, much less plow into bed, and not just with Kaleb. She kept most of the eligible Devil’s Fist men at bay. “He’s not my type.”

  “What’s your type?”

  “Leonardo DiCaprio,” she told him without batting an eye. He felt another frown coming on. Kaleb couldn’t look less like the famous actor if he tried. “It’s all about the yacht,” she added. “Gotta love a man with a yacht.”

  As she headed off down the aisle to relay his breakfast order to the kitchen, Kaleb grumbled, “Like there are any oceans in Wyoming.” Then he called out to her, “I have a canoe!” but it only made her laugh from across the diner. “Let me take you out on it sometime!”

  ***