by Juniper Hart
On the other hand, at least I don’t have to sit on the sets anymore.
No, there was certainly no need for that, not when Audrey had literally found her wings within weeks of being turned.
“She was made to be a dragon,” Lane had said one day when she had popped in to check on Audrey. “She never would have made a good Lycan. I have no idea what Gabriel was thinking when he turned her.”
“I don’t think he had a method to his madness,” Hudson said. “I think he grabbed who he could when he could.”
“I hope we get to ask him one day,” Lane said through clenched teeth.
“Me too.”
Yes, Gabriel had wreaked havoc on so many lives, but in this case, he had done Audrey a service, even if he had never intended to do so.
“I hate to tell you this,” Audrey murmured in his ear. “But we’ve got to deal with the paparazzi on the way out.”
“We already dealt with them on the way in!” Hudson protested. “And they’ll probably be lurking outside whatever party we’re going to.” He was only half-protesting. He had learned that being at Audrey Crane’s side meant an endless barrage of photographers and many awkward pictures.
“I have to enjoy this while I’m still in my actress persona,” Audrey replied evenly. There was not a hint of the misery that such a notion would have once given her.
She’s accepted her immortality, Hudson thought. She’s learning to adjust.
“You love it,” she jested, tugging on his hand, and he snorted but followed. It was a two-way street. They both had their own lives, their own claims to fame, and they endured the difficult aspects—because they loved one another.
They stepped onto the red carpet outside the theater, and a flash of lightbulbs blinded Hudson. To his surprise, the first question was for him.
“Mr. Fowler, there have been rumors that Audrey is going to be the new face of Fowler Telecom. Is that true?”
Hudson blinked and looked at Audrey, who wore a sly smile on her face.
“I’m afraid you’ve caught my fiancé off guard,” she purred, hugging the arm of his suit jacket. “It was going to be a surprise.”
“What does your agent have to say about this?” another brazen reporter asked. Audrey scowled in response.
“If there is one thing I’ve learned in my life, Jamie,” she said to the hipster holding a mic, “it’s that asking for permission is optional.”
“Better to ask for forgiveness than ask permission?” Jamie snickered, thinking that she had screwed up the quote.
“Did I say that?” Audrey replied sharply. “No. I think I said, don’t ask for permission. I don’t think I mentioned forgiveness at all. Come on, darling.” She pulled Hudson toward the waiting limo, and they slid inside.
“Really?” Hudson asked when the door closed. “You’re going to do commercials for my company?”
“Commercials?” she echoed. “Of course not. I’m an A-list actor.”
Ah. There’s my smug lover. “Then what was that about?”
“I’m going to join your company.”
He gaped at her. “What?”
“What?”
“You’re going to give up acting?”
“I’m going to learn to fade into the background,” Audrey said quietly, shrugging. “I can’t be an actress forever.”
“You still have years before you make any decisions like that,” Hudson told her. “You love your job.”
“Actually,” she corrected him, “I love you. I like my job, but what I really like is working. I’m starting to think that working with you might combine my two favorite things.”
Hudson didn’t know what to say. “Are you sure about this, Audrey?”
“Unless you think we’ll kill each other,” she replied.
“No,” Hudson chuckled. “I’m fairly sure you’d win in that fight.” Her eyes widened with the challenge.
“We have never put that to the test, have we?” she murmured, pulling her face toward him. He pounced on her, pinning her to the leather seats of the limo.
“I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
“Pity,” she sighed as he dropped his mouth to hers. “I was hoping they weren’t mutually exclusive.”
Mate’s Mission
Alpha Protectors
1
Hazel blinked once. Twice. When she batted her lids a third time, her vision finally cleared, and she looked around her bedroom in uneasy amazement. Her cerulean blue eyes widened to take in every detail of the familiar room, as if she was expecting something else.
How did I get here? She was most certainly home, there was no doubt about it, but how?
Slowly, she sat up and looked down, her heart racing slightly. With relief, she noted that she was wearing pajamas, although it was still unsettling, since she had no recollection of putting them on.
What the hell happened last night?
If only it was a question of excessive drinking or a regrettable one-night stand. No, there was something far more sinister at play here, and it filled Hazel with a churning of the stomach that she couldn’t settle.
Swinging her legs over the side of her queen-sized mattress, Hazel placed her manicured toes on the faux fur rug underneath the bed and heard the squeal of her cat, Julip.
“Sorry,” she muttered aloud, and the Siamese glared at her with crossed eyes, glowing blue in the moon-dappled bedroom. Hazel knew she was lucky to have avoided being swatted with his razor-sharp claws. Instead, Julip hissed at her and curled back onto his spot, ears twitching defiantly. “I don’t suppose you can explain what happened?” Hazel asked conversationally, but the feline did what he did best: ignored her.
Once upon a time, Hazel had considered the surly beast a friend, a companion in an otherwise dismal existence. Now it seemed that Julip had had enough of her, just like everyone else.
I guess it was good while it lasted. With a massive sigh, the blonde made her way out of her bedroom and into the living room, her mind whirling. The last thing she remembered was leaving the office the previous evening. Was I even coming here?
It seemed unlikely. She rarely went straight home. There was always a lead to follow—especially now that she was commissioned with bringing down the elusive and cunning serial killer who had been terrorizing Washington State for a year.
As a rule, Hazel spent as little time as possible alone in her apartment. If it had been a two-bedroom, she would have considered taking on a roommate, simply to get her rent’s worth. The sparsely decorated unit was devoid of any warmth, and the space served as little more than a hotel room to the FBI agent who used it to shower and occasionally sleep. More often than not, Hazel’s nights were spent in her car or inside a seedy motel room in a strange city as she hunted down the country’s most despicable.
Not that many cities were strange to her anymore. In five years, she’d gone out of her way to know the west coast better than anyone in the Washington offices. That was what had made her such a coveted agent. She put full effort into everything she did.
To the detriment of everything else, she thought. Like my sanity.
There was not a single light on in her apartment, indicating that she’d made some conscious effort to go to bed. Or that whoever had brought her back hadn’t turned on the lights.
Hazel willed herself not to lose sight of reason. There was a legitimate explanation for how she’d managed to get home, she was sure. She just needed to think.
To clear her mind, she turned on every light in her path, the flood of illumination showing off the tastefully done room without incident. There was not a lot inside the apartment, but it was still there, and it inspired some kind of joy in Hazel—or at least her version of joy.
She walked toward the front door and found it locked from the inside.
What the hell…? Slowly, she moved into the kitchen and glanced at the time on the stove. It was 3:34 a.m. Again, the witching hour.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time Hazel
had found herself in this predicament. In the last year, she’d woken in her own bed after a period of memory loss, the preceding events lost forever. This was the fourth or fifth time it had happened, and even though Hazel was not one to admit weakness, she knew it was time to see a doctor. She assumed it must be some kind of highway hypnosis; she was going through the motions without remembering anything.
Each time, Hazel had woken intact, unhurt, and without a reminder of where she’d been. There were never follow-up texts from people to discuss her whereabouts. It was as if she had simply gone through her life without any acknowledgment of what had occurred.
Except for that first time, she recalled. But that was eight years ago.
With a grunt, Hazel did what she always did in these situations: she started the kettle to make herself a cup of chamomile tea and returned to her bedroom to find her phone, which was invariably plugged in by the bed. There were no missed calls, no new texts. There was no form of communication from the last thing she remembered to her present situation.
There’s a perfectly good explanation for this, Hazel assured herself in her typical reasonable way. I’m probably overworked and sleepwalking or something.
But in her heart, Hazel knew it was all wrong, and putting off the trip to the doctor was not going to make things better. Sleepwalking indicated that she had gone to sleep at some moment. The problem with making that appointment, however, was a confession that she wasn’t in control of something for once in her life.
There’s no sense in worrying until you know if there’s a problem, Hazel reminded herself, tossing the cell off to the side of the kitchen table and reaching for the boiling kettle.
Suddenly, the phone vibrated, causing Hazel to spin around, the kettle still in hand. She looked at the screen in disbelief, although it wasn’t all that peculiar. She was a federal agent, after all. There was no rest for someone in her position. Not when the Werewolf was running amok.
The phone continued to ring as she stared at it, her mind taking a moment to register who it was at that hour of the morning.
“Carrington,” she answered when she’d finally composed herself.
“Sorry to wake you,” her partner sighed. “But we’ve got another one. And a problem.” Hazel stifled a sigh, running her hand through her blonde hair.
“Isn’t that redundant?” she asked, her heart sinking. “Isn’t another body a problem in itself?”
“Yes,” Ortiz grunted. “But this body is in California.”
Hazel perked up with interest.
“California?” she echoed. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“The same signature,” Ortiz replied. “Teeth marks. Ritual killing.”
“Who is it? Anyone notable?” Hazel wanted to know, jumping into work mode.
“I’m just around the corner from your place,” her partner told her. “I’ll pick you up.”
“Give me ten minutes. I’ll meet you outside.”
“Fine.”
Hazel disconnected the call and exhaled in a whoosh. Another body. Same signature.
The Werewolf was moving along the coast now. He was getting braver—or stupider, assuming Ortiz was right and that the latest body did belong to the Werewolf they were after.
Hazel poured her tea into a thermal cup and hurried to change out of her pajamas, shoving aside the questions about how she’d gotten home. There would be enough time for her to worry about herself after this case was solved.
If it ever gets solved, she thought. We’ve been at this for a year. How many more bodies is the Werewolf going to claim?
There were seven so far: men and women ranging from ages twenty to forty-five, each with puncture marks at the jugular, causing them to bleed out. No defensive wounds, but also no signs of drugs or alcohol in any of the victims, as if they had given themselves willingly to the monster who had claimed their lives.
The victims had seemingly nothing in common, their ethnicities and socioeconomic classes different. So far, there had been no link between them in any way that Hazel’s team could find, though that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. There had to be something that would tie them together. It defied reason that a serial killer was simply acting out at random. The Werewolf was choosing his victims somehow, and it was Hazel’s job to find out how.
It had been her mantra since the beginning of the case, but she was starting to lose hope.
We have a Son of Sam on our hands, she sighed to herself. This guy is just going to stop one day and be done with it and I’ll never sleep again. This is going to be the one that got away. Although she refused to believe that, it certainly seemed that was the direction they were headed.
Ortiz believed they were dealing with a cult, or at least more than one person, but Hazel wasn’t so sure. A cult couldn’t keep quiet for an extended period of time. It just didn’t fit the profile. Still, in the grand scheme of things, a year wasn’t that long a time for a killing spree—depressing as that thought might be.
Hazel glanced at the clock on the stove. She needed to get a move on. Her partner would be waiting. Grabbing her credentials and firearm, she locked the apartment door and made her way to the stairs, forsaking the elevators. She needed to wake up, and she knew the exercise would help her do that.
The street was eerily calm, not even a homeless person banging through the garbage cans on garbage night, and Hazel found it strangely unsettling. If she hadn’t already spoken to Ortiz, she would have felt like the entire world had disappeared.
You couldn’t be that lucky, Hazel thought with a smirk, taking a sip of the too-hot tea. She regretted she hadn’t switched to coffee, but it was too late for that now.
Ortiz’s nondescript black sedan pulled around the corner of her street and slowed as it neared her. Special Agent Andrew Ortiz was a handsome enough man, with intelligent brown eyes and a serious manner. They had been partners for two years, and while Hazel wasn’t sure if she liked him, she certainly had respect for the man. His quiet way was unnerving to her in some instances, like he harbored a secret that she never could quite pinpoint.
“Were you already up?” he asked when Hazel slid into the passenger seat. “You don’t look half-asleep.” She wasn’t sure how to answer that, so she didn’t. Personal questions were always deflected when possible.
“What’s going on in California?” she asked instead, and Ortiz grunted, pulling away from the curb.
“Like I said, another body. There is a team on it there, but I’m flying out this morning to meet them.”
Hazel turned her head to stare at him.
“You mean we’re flying out there this morning to meet with them,” she corrected, but Ortiz shook his head and sighed.
“I told you, we have a problem. Because of this new killing, we’re broadening our scope. The Werewolf has branched out, which means we need teams here and there. We’re being separated, Carrington. You’re leading point here, and I’m going to San Francisco.”
“What?” Hazel gaped at him. “Why?” she asked before she could stop herself. The words sounded whiny, if not needy, as she heard them. She cringed at the tone she’d used. So what if Ortiz was going? She didn’t need him to run the team.
“Would you rather go?” Ortiz asked hopefully. Hazel considered it, but not going wasn’t her concern. It was being split up that bothered her.
I trust Ortiz. Who am I going to be paired with if he goes?
“I’m sure they’d send you just as well,” Ortiz continued, making Hazel shake her head. There was a reason they’d asked him to go and not her. She had a better handle on the matter at home, and the idea of starting fresh with a new team was insurmountable. At least she knew the people in Washington.
And Castillo knows my propensity for taking off on my own, she thought. He doesn’t want me pulling that where he can’t keep an eye on me.
“No,” she said. “You’re better at debriefing. You know I have no patience hand-holding newbies.”
Ortiz cast her a
sidelong look.
“There’s more,” he said, and Hazel snorted.
“Isn’t there always?”
“Castillo brought in a suit from DC.”
Hazel tensed and eyed him warily. “A suit?”
“Not sure who he is,” Ortiz admitted. “But he’s going to meet you this morning. If the Werewolf is branching out, this is becoming a national issue.”
“We don’t even know for sure that it is him!” she protested in exasperation. “For all you know, it’s a copycat! You won’t know anything until you get there.”
“I have a feeling that Castillo was sitting on this new guy for a while,” Ortiz replied. “You know how it is.”
Indeed, I do, Hazel thought, gritting her teeth. They were on a need-to-know basis. The higher-ups did whatever they wanted and expected the agents to adjust. Which is the reason I’m off doing my own thing most of the time. Two can play at that game.
“Who is it? This suit?” Hazel demanded. “I hate him already.”
Ortiz shrugged and slowed for a light. “I really don’t know much more than that, but I thought I’d do you the courtesy of a heads up, so you weren’t blindsided.”
“I appreciate it,” she sighed, feeling her anxiety mounting as they neared the field office. “What time is your flight?”
“Seven. Castillo is going to brief me on what he knows about the body in San Fran, and then I’ll head to the airport.”
“Sorry,” Hazel offered. “I know you were hoping to take some vacation time with the kids over the summer.”
“Penny’s going to leave me,” Ortiz muttered, and Hazel felt a note of sadness in his voice.