by Lori Drake
A shrill whistle caught Joey’s attention while they were loading up, and she looked over to see Abby pointing down the driveway. A gold sedan that Joey didn’t recognize was on its way up the drive. A spike of fear went down Joey’s spine, but reason kicked in a second later. Whoever it was had gotten past the front gate, which meant they at least had the code, if not a keycard. She shut the tailgate and faced the car as it rolled to a stop. The angle was all wrong for her to see the driver, but as soon as the car stopped the back door swung open, and Chris stepped out.
Relief flooded her, and she ran over and flung her arms around him. “Jesus, babe, you gave me a freaking heart attack! Why didn’t you call?”
“Sorry, I was a little distracted.” He kissed her temple. “We have a problem.”
Joey had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t talking about the hunter. She pulled away from him to look across the roof of the car at the driver, whom she’d noticed getting out in the corner of her eye. Her eyes widened. She recognized him instantly.
“Good afternoon, Miss Grant,” Harding said.
Drawing on her extensive performance training, Joey put on a welcoming smile. “Detective Harding! What a surprise.” She made sure she spoke loud enough for all the wolves to hear.
The detective smiled in return. “Found a stray on the side of the road. Figured I’d bring him home.” He glanced toward the truck, where the search party was still clustered, wolves in the back, humans bristling with weaponry standing and watching curiously. “Hope I’m not interrupting.”
Shit, shit, shit.
Joey froze. She had no idea what to say about what Harding had walked in on. Even she knew it was too late in the day to go hunting, and no one was dressed in camouflage.
“They were on their way to look for me,” Chris said, coming to her rescue. “I didn’t think to call after you picked me up.”
“We did have a lot to talk about,” Harding said, closing his door. Not planning to get back in the car and drive away anytime soon, it seemed.
Joey reluctantly pulled away from Chris. “Thank you so much for bringing him home.” She met Abby’s eyes from afar and motioned to the truck. Abby nodded, walked over to open the tailgate, and began herding everyone back toward the house. Lucas lingered, among the last to leave.
Harding walked around the car to join Joey and Chris. Now that some of her surprise and adrenaline had faded, Joey quickly checked Chris over for injuries.
“I’m fine,” Chris said, but she wasn’t satisfied until she’d seen with her own eyes. His arms and hands were a bit bloodied, but there were no bullet holes and no trace of the wounds that’d caused the bleeding. Was it even his blood? She had so many questions, but this wasn’t the time for them.
“Hate to break up the moment, but is there somewhere around here we could talk privately?” Harding said, hands casually thrust in the pockets of his tan raincoat.
Joey nodded and motioned for him to join them as she headed for the front door with Chris’s hand firmly clasped in hers. If she had her way, she wouldn’t let him out of her sight for the rest of the day. But even she had to acknowledge to herself that was a bit clingy.
“Have you heard anything about Colt?” Chris asked her quietly as they walked.
“Ben says he’ll be fine once he gets the bullet out.” She kept her voice low, but glanced behind her for good measure. The detective seemed to be paying them no attention, taking in his surroundings as they entered the house. But she had no doubt he would eavesdrop if given the chance.
“Silver?” Chris whispered.
“No.” She felt him relax beside her, and she reached across her body to rub his arm.
In her office, she stood leaning against her desk with Chris beside her and the detective settled in the chair Lucas had been sitting in not long ago.
“I’m in no rush, if you want to take a minute to wash up,” Harding said, nodding to Chris. “Wouldn’t want those scrapes to get infected.”
“It can wait,” Chris said, keeping the bloodied side of his arms turned away from the detective. “Can I offer you a drink?”
“No, thank you.”
Joey kept her attention on the cop, studying him before deciding which tack to take. “I think this’ll go easier for all of us if we speak frankly. There’s no way you just happened to be driving by and found Chris on the side of the road. What were you doing there?”
“He’s been following us,” Chris said. “I’m not sure for how long, but earlier, when we left the hotel, we had to shake a tail. Pretty sure, now, who it was.”
Joey arched a brow. “Why? Are we under some sort of investigation? You’re a little outside your jurisdiction up here, detective.”
“Not officially. I guess you could call it more of a personal interest,” Harding replied, crossing ankle over knee. “But I’m not with the SDPD anymore, for the record. My jurisdiction now is closer than you think.”
Joey frowned. “You moved to Seattle?”
“Like I said…” He smiled faintly. “A personal interest.”
“He got in some trouble with the department over my case,” Chris said.
“So now you’re, what… here to make trouble for us in return?” Joey asked, eyeing the detective. Somehow, she had the feeling it wasn’t that simple.
“I don’t want trouble, Miss Grant,” Harding said. “I want answers. Look, I’ve been doing this job a long time. When you’ve been putting puzzle pieces together as long as I have, you get a pretty good idea when they don’t really fit.”
The bad feeling in Joey’s stomach was only getting worse. “I don’t know what to tell you, detective.”
“The truth is a good place to start. Look, I wanted to do this differently, but whatever was going on out there today forced my hand. So why don’t we start there. Who’s trying to kill you this time?”
Joey looked to Chris, unsure quite what to say. He shrugged, seeming equally uncertain. “We don’t know.” Well, it was the truth. Technically.
“Is it the same person that killed your mother?”
The question caught her off guard. “No,” she answered, without thinking it through.
“Our mother died of a heart attack,” Chris added.
Harding’s eyes narrowed. “I thought we were being truthful with one another.”
Joey caught Chris’s eyes and bit the inside of her lip. She wasn’t sure what she hated more, being caught flatfooted or her uncertainty about how to handle it. Decisions usually came easy to her, or at least quickly. This time, she couldn’t figure out what to do, and that bothered her.
The detective shook his head and started to rise.
“Wait!” Joey said. Harding looked at her expectantly, and she swallowed before going on. “What assurance can you offer that what we tell you won’t leave this room?”
“How about the simple fact that I haven’t shared what I already know? I’ve been investigating your family for months. I’ll give your mom credit, she was pretty good about covering her tracks, but… it’s hard to erase everything, especially when you’re dealing with someone like me.”
“Obsessed?” Joey said. Chris elbowed her, but she made no apology.
Harding chuckled. “Connected. But maybe a little obsessed too. I’ll grant you that. Anyway, I have quite the collection of documents in a safe deposit box. Census records. Draft records. Obituaries. Driver’s licenses. Photographs spanning the better part of a century. And I’ll be damned if your family doesn’t age remarkably slowly. You two aside, anyway. Though, based on what I’ve seen, I suspect you’re already starting to slow.”
Joey’s pulse began to pick up the moment Harding mentioned documents and a safe deposit box. By the time he finished, her mouth was dry and anger had begun to simmer in her belly. “And let me guess… as long as nothing happens to you, the information won’t be disclosed by a third party. Right?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“How much do you want?” Chris asked.
“Please.” Harding snorted. “I don’t want your money. I just want the truth. What are you?”
Joey had spent the last two weeks wishing her mother were still around, but never quite so much as this moment. Chris’s fingers curled around hers, and she met his troubled eyes. He nodded to her.
She turned her attention back to Harding. “We’re lycanthropes.”
The detective’s brows knitted together. “What does that mean?”
“Werewolves,” Chris said.
Joey winced. “Do you have to use that word?”
“It’s the one he’s going to understand.”
“Yeah, but—”
Harding barked a laugh. “Werewolves. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.” But when Joey and Chris stood there quietly, their faces remaining serious, he seemed to reconsider his reaction and sat up straighter in his chair. “Seriously?”
Joey nodded. “Seriously.”
“Wait, those dogs that were in the back of that truck… were they…?”
“Yup,” Chris said. “We’ve got a lot of relatives in town for the funeral. Unfortunately, an unwelcome guest followed some of them into town. That’s who was shooting at us earlier.”
The detective’s eyes tracked back and forth between the two of them. “Werewolves.” His tone suggested lingering disbelief.
“We prefer lycanthropes,” Joey said. “Or just wolves. We’re not the monsters popularized in literature and film, detective.”
“Jim,” he said. “I think… under the circumstances, you should probably call me Jim.”
“Okay, Jim,” Joey said. “You get why this needs to stay under wraps, right? We’ve been coexisting peacefully among humans for millennia.”
“I’m really sorry for what happened to you and the medical examiner,” Chris added. “I know you said you don’t want money, but I hope you’ll reconsider. I’d like the chance to make amends.”
Harding’s eyes locked on Chris, the wheels in his head turning so furiously that Joey half expected smoke to start pouring out his ears. “It was you, wasn’t it? We didn’t really misidentify that body. It was a cover-up.”
“Yes,” Chris said.
Harding leaned forward in his chair and put his head in his hands. “I believe I’d like that drink, now.”
Joey walked to the liquor cabinet to pour a couple fingers of bourbon in a cut crystal glass, while Chris gave Harding an extremely condensed and sanitized version of the real story surrounding his death and return from the other side. After handing off the glass to Harding, Joey retook her position at Chris’s side.
The detective didn’t touch his drink until Chris finished, at which point he tossed it back and swallowed with a grimace. Still, he said nothing, just stared at the glass in his hand.
“I get that it’s a lot to take in, but we need to know we can count on you not to let this get out,” Joey said.
Harding looked up suddenly. “Make me one of you.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Chris said. “Lycanthropy isn’t contagious. You’re either born with it or you’re not.”
Harding actually blushed at that, or maybe it was the effects of Adelaide’s top-shelf bourbon. “Right. Of course.” He stood, leaving the empty glass on the end table by the chair. “I should be going. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
Joey bit her lip, studying him in a vain effort to determine where his loyalties might lie. “Jim, will you keep our secret?”
He frowned at them and stuffed his hands in his coat pockets. “Wouldn’t be very smart of me to tell you otherwise.”
“You’re a man of your word,” Joey said. “Aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I am. But tell me one thing… you said you’re not monsters. Have you ever killed anyone?”
Joey met Harding’s eyes and answered without hesitation. “We’ve never killed an innocent.” Chris nodded along with her words, and she went on. “We killed the witch that tried to kill Chris. We killed the monster that killed our mother. But we’ve never killed an innocent.”
Harding held her gaze a respectable amount of time for a human, but dropped his eyes after a few seconds. He nodded. “Then I give you my word that I’ll keep your secret. For now. We have more to discuss. A lot more. But I’ve got a lot to think about too, so I’m going to get out of your hair and let you deal with this latest crisis.”
“Thanks, Jim,” Chris said. “We’ll walk you out.”
It had started to rain while they were inside. Joey and Chris stood on the front porch, watching as Harding walked briskly to his car and got inside. Chris slipped his arm around her waist, and she leaned against him.
“Here’s hoping that doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass,” he murmured.
“It’s not like we had much choice. Even if he hadn’t made arrangements to discourage us from making him disappear… that’s not who we are. Or, at least, not who I want us to be.”
He pressed his lips into her hair, his breath warm against her scalp as he replied. “Me either, babe. Me either. But before I consider making an exception, why do you smell like Lucas?”
13
Lucas really had some nerve, making a play for Joey like that. Chris was itching to give the jackass a piece of his mind—or maybe his fist—but that wouldn’t improve the situation any. It was almost dinnertime by the time Joey talked him down and pointed him in the direction of the shower. The hot water and steam did wonders for clearing his head, though there was so much rattling around in there it was a wonder he could function at all. At least washing and shaving were things he could accomplish on autopilot. His mother would roll over in her grave if he showed up for dinner like some sort of vagabond in yesterday’s rumpled, bloody clothes. Or she would have if she’d been in her grave yet. She’d turn over in her freezer compartment, or something. The thought wasn’t one for dwelling on.
A knock sounded on the bedroom door as he was unzipping the bag Jessica had packed for him. He adjusted the towel around his hips on the way to the door, making sure it was secure.
“Hey, boss,” Adam said when the door opened, meeting his eyes for the barest of seconds. “Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to catch you before the vultures descended. Got a minute?”
Chris waved him in. “As long as you don’t mind if I get dressed while you talk.”
“Sure, whatever.” It was nothing Adam hadn’t seen before, after all. There was little reason to make a fuss about nudity amongst packmates.
Chris closed the door and walked back to the bag on the bench at the foot of the bed. “I hope you have good news for me.”
“Actually, I do.” Adam sat on the bench, his laptop across his knees. “The trip to the hotel was a success. I got everything we needed off their surveillance and more.”
“And more?” Chris cast a sideways glance at his pocket geek.
Adam shrugged. “Never know when something might come in handy. Anyway. The security footage confirms that Wesley wasn’t alone at the pool that night. Someone was recorded entering the pool area about twenty minutes after Wesley. He left ten minutes later, and, of course, Wesley left in a body bag hours later.”
Chris encountered something solid in his bag as he fished around for socks and pulled it out, glancing at it absently as he listened to Adam. It was one of his birth father’s journals, the one he’d most recently been reading. Jessica must’ve grabbed it off the nightstand when she packed his bag. He made a mental note to thank her, then shifted his attention back to Adam’s report. “So, the guy walked in and walked out. That’s not particularly damning. How do we know he was involved in Wesley’s death? Was it caught on camera?”
“Yes and no. When he went into the pool room, Wesley got out of the pool and walked out of frame, toward the door. And before he left, he tossed Wesley’s body into the pool.”
“Okay, that’s pretty conclusive, and it means the cops are going to be up our ass over this.” Chris sighed and tossed the journal onto the foot of the
bed, then shed his towel and pulled on a pair of briefs.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it depends on whether or not the cops got their hands on the surveillance footage before I did.” Adam grinned.
Chris paused with undershirt in hand. “Do I want to know? Or is it one of those plausible deniability sorts of things?”
Adam snorted. “Please. I’m a professional. Let’s just say that the only remaining record of that time period is right here.” He patted his laptop.
Chris whistled low. “I need to give you a raise.”
“I’d have to be drawing a salary for that. Two percent of nothing is still nothing.” He chuckled and opened the lid on his laptop, tapping a few keys before turning it around so Chris could see the still frame from the security footage. “Here’s your killer.”
Chris studied the image of the unfamiliar man. It was difficult to get an idea of height from the video, but he was slender and fit, dressed simply in denim pants and a long-sleeved shirt. His brown hair was longish, chin length, with the ends brushing against his square, stubbly jaw. “No one I recognize.”
“Me either. But I guess that could be considered a good thing, since it means he hasn’t been right under our noses this whole time.”
“Good point. Can you print out a couple copies of that? I think Ben has a photo printer. I want to show them around after dinner, so everyone knows who we’re looking for.”
“You’ve got it. Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of right now. Thanks, Adam.”
Adam let himself out, and Chris quickly finished dressing and found a spot to stash the rest of his clothes. At some point, he’d have to ask Joey to clean out a drawer for him. Hell, he should probably just have some of his clothes stored here all the time, so their more spontaneous sleepovers didn’t result in driving home to change clothes the next day.
He longed for the day when he and Joey were back under one roof again. It was hard to believe it’d only been a few months since they’d been living on their own in their cozy San Diego apartment. Sometimes he wished they could go back to that—but with their current relationship intact. He had no desire to go back to hiding his feelings for her, feigning interest in other women while trying to pretend that seeing her with other men didn’t bother him in the slightest. No, being with Joey… it was worth all the shit they had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. It made all that shit easier to deal with, too.