MacCallan looked at me long and hard, and I matched his stare without breaking his gaze. Even as a body-wracking chill ran clattered through me, I didn’t turn away.
“You know, if you stare an animal in the eyes like that, it’s considered a test for dominance,” he said in a low voice.
“I am not testing your dominance.”
“Are you sure, Miss Lanard?” he voice was low, gravely. It tickled the spot just behind my ear.
“I am sure, Professor MacCallan.”
Vicki the waitress came back and snapped us out of our staring contest. I was momentarily lost in his accent as he ordered the biggest burger they made, cooked the rarest that it could be cooked and still stay together as a patty. Thinking about eating it made me sick, reminded me of the animal hidden beneath his unassuming exterior. I pulled my bag, hiding the stun gun, a little closer.
“And the usual for you?” Vicki asked.
“Hold the onions.” I handed her the unused menu.
After Vicki walked away, we stared at each other for a few more moments before I needed to get the conversation started again. “Feel free to ask me questions too. I need to know everything about Ethan’s world, but that doesn’t mean the information only needs to flow one way.”
This was a game I’d played with a few other informants. Let them loosen up, made them feel like they had an even hand in all this. But perhaps with MacCallan, it would provide that needed disclosure, maybe build some trust if we were really going to solve Ethan’s murder together. Ethan and I had taken six months to find our stride. MacCallan and I didn’t have that kind of time.
“You’ve made the front page enough for me to get the general gist.”
I snorted. “Of what? Ace Reporter?”
“Danger addict and chaos magnet more like.”
“Chaos is the law of nature- order is the dream of man,” I quipped.
There was a glint of approval in the literature professor’s eyes.
“If you didn’t have questions, you wouldn’t have agreed to burgers.”
I cleared my mind and focused on MacCallan. There was a familiar banter here that reminded me this was a walking, talking part of Ethan right in front of me. He knew the side of Ethan that I didn’t, but considering the amount of time Ethan had spent on the job, there was likely a good part of Ethan that maybe MacCallan had never gotten to see.
“Why aren’t you scared? I just told you monsters were real.”
So he wasn’t going to start with the basics: what’s your favorite color, where did you grow up, what was your first pet. Maybe he sensed the urgency in assessing our potential to work together as well. This was his test and he was just about to find out how good a student I really was.
“I am scared, but it won’t stop me. I’ll do anything to figure out who killed Ethan.”
“Including climbing a tree in the middle of the night.”
“I was fairly convinced the Howard family was just growing pot or trafficking drugs, but I needed proof. Werewolves were the farthest thing from my mind.”
MacCallan laughed. “Levi could use some, but he’s too uptight to try it.”
Vicki delivered our food and he devoured half the burger before I could even realize what was happening or that I was staring at the way he devoured the burger and the dainty flick of his tongue to get a bit of ketchup from his lips.
I managed a few bites of the salad. It was my turn now.
“How exactly are you and Ethan related?”
He finished chewing. “Mum and Da were high school sweethearts. Had me in the seventies when marriage was passé. Da came to America, fell in love, and had Ethan. Ethan kept his mother’s name.”
At least now I had an explanation as to why my searches for him hadn’t panned out.
He put down his burger and took a sip of water. “I’d imagine you spent a lot of time together, investigating crimes, etcetera.”
I nodded. “We saw each other nearly every day for two years, and when we didn’t see each other, he called me to make sure I wasn’t in trouble.”
“Even on full moons?
“Even on full moons.”
His insecurity floated on the surface of those ocean-blue eyes. “And he never said a word about any of us, of this?”
“I only knew Emily. Knew some stories about Daisy, his mother.”
“Doesn’t that make you a bad reporter?”
“No,” I scoffed. “It makes me a self-centered ass hat.” I shook my head. “How does a person miss all that? Never ask?”
MacCallan sighed. “From personal experience, you’d be amazed at what you can hide if you have to, make two completely different sides of yourself.”
“Nature gives you one face and you make yourselves another?”
MacCallan’s dark brow arched beautifully over his teal eyes. “Tenacious and a Shakespeare fan?”
“Which side am I seeing now? The rakish professor or the dutiful brother?”
MacCallan shook his head. “Neither, actually. I follow the Polonius way of thinking. To thine own self be true.”
I studied him carefully. “So you’re telling me what I see is what I get?”
“Something I’m sure you don’t encounter on a regular basis, Miss Lanard.” A wide smile spread across his face.
He was attempting to disarm me with it, and with his next question revealed why.
“What really happened the night Ethan died?”
I pressed my lips together as if that could hold in the truth. I didn’t want to tell him. Every time I thought about it, it took longer and longer for the nightmare to fade from my mind’s eye. But I couldn’t lie to him. It was more than my complete aversion to lying. This was his brother, and as much as I told myself that Ethan and I were close, we were not blood.
“Girls started going missing on the Trade Streets. Whispers started floating around about a new gang in town. We were waiting for a regular snitch of ours who said he had information when we were attacked. I didn’t see anything. Guys came at both of us. And they vanished as fast as they came.”
Even as I told him the story, I saw everything in a new light. The darkness that had come over us—could that have been a spell that stole my vision? And the unnatural strength—could it have been some sort of preternatural being? Ethan was strong and in really great shape, yet those guys took him down. Could Ethan really have been killed by something paranormal? By Warlocks?
“What’s wrong?” Rafe asked.
Nothing could get out of my mouth. The questions about that night raced, the truth and the trauma were coalescing, scattering my thoughts in a million directions at once. If a mild-mannered photographer could be a werewolf, how many others were hidden in plain sight? How was I supposed to catch a bunch of Warlocks? Even if I did get the information MacCallan needed bring them to justice, could I stop them before they tore through more people in my city?
MacCallan slid out of his booth and into mine with a movement so smooth that I didn’t see him, only felt his warmth when he asked, “What’s wrong?”
I turned toward him, his heat pressing against me, ridding the entire booth of oxygen. He was there, around me, suffocating me with that warmth and that concern in his blue eyes. I pushed at his chest, trying to get him away, but he didn’t budge.
“Calm down. Take a deep breath.”
But I couldn’t, not with the questions pushing against my brain and the press of his heat against me. I was trapped in a shrinking room, paralyzed. I couldn’t think about anything but the memory of Ethan’s blood on my hands and the possibility that I might never have the chance to make them clean again.
Warm fur slid against my skin, even against the unexposed soft centers of my side and neck. My entire body relaxed as MacCallan reached out to gently turn my face toward his. I fell into his ocean-blue eyes, exhausted.
“Deep breath.” His voice was nothing more than a whisper between us.
I did as I was told, expanded my lungs, took in the a
ir, then slowly let it out.
“Again,” he prompted.
I was lost somewhere in the left quadrant of his right eye, picturing the clear bay outside the resort hotel where I’d spent a week eons ago on my last vacation. I took in another breath and let it out. “What is that? Why do I feel fur?”
“It’s my power, my energy. I can expand it outside of myself. We call it brushing, and it’s how Shifters greet one another, get a sense for another’s feelings.”
I wasn’t sure I understood everything that he was saying, but the longer he talked, the calmer I became and the less I thought I was going to puke.
“Good.”
It was only then that I grew aware of his soft hand on my face. I pulled away and turned to look at his empty booth.
He slid back a few inches but didn’t return to his side of the table. “What happened? Your heart was racing a mile a minute.”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t. This lie tasted like extra-soured sauerkraut.
“No. You’re not. I could hear it across the table.”
I took a sip of water, trying to convince myself that my hand wasn’t shaking before I looked back at him. At his pale skin, his dark hair, and those amazing blue eyes. Of course, he could hear my heart beating. He was a werewolf. It was probably one of those perks. They did stuff like that. Big ears. Big eyes. Big teeth. My heart speed up in my chest again, and again, his warmth spread over me.
A deep furrow sank between his brows. “Were you having a panic attack?”
I shook my head, but there was a very real possibility it wasn’t only a panic attack, but some strange cross-section of panic and obsessive seeking. It had happened before, this suffocating barrage of questions bottlenecking and strangling me.
God, I needed a drink. Too bad the hardest stuff in Sam’s Diner was the black coffee.
Since I couldn’t sate the need in my head, I could feed it with the story. I needed to focus. Like a figure skater focuses on one spot to keep from getting dizzy. And I really didn’t want that one spot to be why being next to MacCallan made everything go still. Why I could still feel his hot hand on my cold cheek?
“If we are going to work together, we need a plan of attack,” I said to the wall.
“Aye.”
I took a sip of my coffee. It was still warm and sweet. “I need to find Benny. He’s the one that called us out that night.”
“Who is this guy?”
“One of the best informants I’ve ever cultivated. I haven’t been able to get in touch with him since.”
“Why wasn’t that your first step?”
I scoffed. “Because someone confronted me at my partner’s funeral and my instinct told me to go investigate why his family had their tails up their asses.”
I thought he might snap at me, but he chuckled instead, then sighed. “Wolf puns were a running joke between E and me. Who could pull off the cheesiest before the other cracked?”
I smiled knowing that part of my Ethan was true. “He was like a non-stop Dad joke factory.”
I looked at my watch. It was nearly three a.m. “Do you need to go get your shift on? Why aren’t you all furry under a full moon? I’m mean, if that’s a real thing and not just in the movies?”
MacCallan’s gaze dropped to the table. He slid out of the booth to stand at the end of the table.
I kept pushing. It’s what I did. What I could never not do. “Why didn’t you shift with the pack? Why were you watching like I was?”
He struggled. I saw it in his jaw and the lines of muscles down his neck as they disappeared into his tense shoulders. “I’ve been assigned as the pack’s official watcher. Someone has to be available during the full moon in case something happens.”
“So, you don’t get to shift with everyone else?”
“No.”
“When do you get your monthly shift?”
“When the pack leader says I can,” he finally got out between clenched teeth.
My brain jumped to a sour conclusion, but I finally had some validation of what I’d suspected: something was going on with this family. They were actively separating MacCallan from the rest of the pack. It explained the fight at funeral and why I was the only person he could confide in.
“Do they blame you for Ethan somehow?”
MacCallan sighed and looked out the windows into the dark of the night. “Blame isn’t the right word for it.”
I understood the tremor in his voice, and it made me want to reach out to him. I wasn’t the only one who had lost a person that night. He had his own bag of grief to carry around, and I could not deny him the opportunity to do something with it, even if that was something stupid and not particularly well-thought-out.
I slid out of the booth. “Care to join me?”
“Where?” MacCallan asked.
“Ethan always said that a good story really only starts in one of two places: The City Morgue or Rome. And at this hour, the city morgue is closed, even to people like me.”
“What’s Rome?” he asked.
I smiled. “My naïve little professor. You have to experience Rome to understand it.”
He paused, studying the wall for a moment. “As much as I want to, I need to get back, watch over the pack, but I’ll be free at dawn.”
Four hours until sunrise. I couldn’t get into too much trouble. I grabbed my mug and gulped down the rest of the coffee. It seemed to fortify me for the night ahead, for chasing this renewed purpose—find Benny. And with that renewed purpose the world felt right again. I was doing what I needed to do: chase.
“If I run into something that looks like it bumps in the night, I’ll call.”
He grabbed a napkin and pulled a gold pen out of his pocket. He wrote his name and two phone numbers on the white paper. See, old school with the pen and paper.
I pulled out my cell phone and programmed the numbers in it before he even finished writing.
He simply nodded. “Good night, Miss Lanard.”
I watched him walk away. It wasn’t until he disappeared across the highway and into the dark of the woods that it occurred to me that I had just been sitting across from a werewolf.
CHAPTER FOUR
Just after 4 a.m., I parked under a streetlight and double-checked that my rolls of twenties were securely on my person and that my stun gun was equally accessible. All trade leads to Rome. If you wanted drugs, you went to Rome. If you wanted sex, you went to Rome. If you wanted information and were willing to pay the right price, you went to Rome.
The smell of the bar brought back memories of Ethan and me. Our first story was a dead sex worker found in the trade streets. In the beginning, it was rough. I was stubborn and Ethan was a pushover. I thought I had been saddled with the biggest Jimmy Olsen wannabe. He’d had quite a learning curve when I’d taken him down to the red-light district to interview a working girl for leads the police didn’t want to pursue. It had taken us a long time to find a good stride, for him to finally get over his incessant need to question every step of my process and learn to trust my instinct for trouble. Once that happened, we were golden. Partners who thought just alike enough to get along and just different enough to keep the angles fresh.
And I was back here two years later talking to my regulars about another dead body. Alone this time.
I ordered a whiskey, kept my eyes down, and bided my time. Atlanta had to wait until her pimp came around for his cut, but she eventually said goodbye to the girls and joined me at the end of the bar.
She adjusted her bra as she sat down. “Almost didn’t recognize you without that hot photographer following you.”
I tried not to wince, instead I threw back the two fingers of the cheap whiskey. It didn’t make the sentence any easier to say. “Ethan was killed.”
“Damn. That’s a loss. I would have climbed that boy like a tree.”
I chuckled. Ethan would have turned bright red with that comment, which was probably why the girls around here loved to say stuff like that t
o him. The wholesome All-American from the Midwest.
“What do you need, honey? Name it. Drugs? Boys? Girls?”
“Information.”
Atlanta rolled her eyes. “Always the hard stuff with you.”
I pulled out the roll of twenties. “Same deal as always?”
Atlanta flicked her gaze down at the cash then back up at me. “Last time I talked to you, some cop came sniffing around. Nero was not happy.”
I sighed. Officer Rutherford. He was always trying to find my sources. That beat cop was always at the right crime … but the wrong time and a roll of twenties short for my stories. I always punted him any information I got that could take down the real bad guys though—as long as I got the byline. “We got the guy that beat up Georgia. Beat up all those girls.”
She only raised an eyebrow. “And some of those girls went downtown for a stretch.”
I pulled out another roll of twenties. “I’ll double your fee.”
Atlanta waved her fuchsia nails in my direction, a magician’s flourish, before she took the rolls off the bar and made them disappear into a secret pocket in her bra. “What can I do you for?”
I focused on the questions I needed, the truth that I needed—where was Benny and what happened that night. The static filled my brain, that itch to chase, and I brought my gaze up Atlanta’s glittering top to look into her eyes. There was still an innocence to her, and a fierce loyalty, right there in her golden-rimmed eyes.
“Have you seen Benny around anywhere?”
Though willing to talk, she was hesitant. I could feel it between us, see it in the nervous twitch at the corner of her lips still stained red at the end of her shift. Of course, she would still be hesitant. Despite the cash, there had been a cop sniffing around, and that was never a good thing in her line of work.
“I know you are hesitant, but Ethan died while we were trying to find out more about those missing girls you told us about. The new gang in town.”
Her pupils dilated as she relaxed into the truth. “Heard Benny’s running with a new crowd.”
I knew the bait of my own truth would hook her, now I just needed to keep her on the line. “Really? I thought he was Dawgs ’til he died.” Could this be why his loyalty to me had faltered? Benny had been with the Dawgs since his first arrest. What could make him change colors like that?
The Truth About Night Page 6