Wolf Rising

by Paige Tyler

  Oliver bounced off the front of the SUV, his weapon coming up again but pointed at Selena this time.

  Shit.

  Heart pounding, Brooks lunged, grabbing Oliver and snapping his neck before he could pull the trigger. Gage almost certainly would have preferred letting the man live long enough to tell them about the hunters, but that simply hadn’t been an option.

  Brooks pulled Selena into his arms, making soft shushing sounds as he attempted to calm her down. She held on to him tightly, her face pressed against his chest.

  “It’s okay, baby,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

  He glanced at Zane, who shook his head.

  “She wiggled loose,” Zane said. “She’s a lot stronger than a werewolf her size should be, and she was freaked out worrying about you.”

  “It’s okay,” Brooks murmured again, using the same calming tones on Zane as he had on Selena. “It’s all going to be okay now. No harm, no foul.”

  Zane nodded, even though he still looked embarrassed as hell.

  Brooks sighed, listening to Selena’s heartbeat slow to normal as the tension drained from her body. He couldn’t see her eyes, so he wasn’t completely sure, but something told him they were no longer blue. That was good. She’d gotten herself under control quickly.

  He looked around, realizing the shooting had stopped. He could make out a few members of the Pack moving about, checking on wedding guests. The hunters had come at them again, with a coordinated, targeted assassination attempt, and Curtis had been a part of it.

  But while the assholes had done a lot of violence and made one hell of a mess, the Pack had come out on top. Some of the hunters had gotten away. In fact, Rachel was still where she’d been watching the other vehicle’s taillights disappear into the distance. Oliver was dead, though, and there were a lot less hunters in the world than there used to be.

  The battle looked like it was over for tonight.

  Then Brooks heard the sound of approaching sirens, and he realized this evening was just getting started.

  Chapter 19

  “The rear loading dock is all clear,” Brooks whispered into the radio, as he, Connor, and Diego slipped between the three tractor trailers parked behind the Sovereign Row industrial building and headed for the big roll-up doors that lined the side of the place. Two of those doors were wide open, but it didn’t help much. Between the awful rattle and clank of conveyor belts and the harsh, burning stench of chemicals, Brooks couldn’t say if there was one person in the warehouse or twenty.

  “Front lobby is clear, too,” Trey said into his earpiece. “Ready to move when you give the word.”

  Trey, Remy, and several members of the small task force entry team had headed for the main entrance a few minutes ago. They all assumed there’d be at least one gang member there standing guard, but apparently, the new gang boss was getting cocky.

  “Side door is locked,” Ray said over the radio. “Give us a second.”

  Brooks motioned his teammates behind the trucks, glancing at his watch as they waited for Ray to give the word. As they crouched down beside a trailer up close to the loading dock, where it was unlikely anyone would see them, he glanced at his guys, noticing how tired they looked. The attack on the SWAT compound last night had taken a lot out of everyone.

  Trey and Alex had spent hours digging bullets out of every member of the Pack and each other. The synthetic wolfsbane wasn’t deadly to them any longer, thanks to the vaccine, but that didn’t mean it was fun getting shot with it. Their bodies still had to detox the crap out of their systems, reminding Brooks a lot of what it used to feel like to be hungover. He decided it wasn’t anything he missed.

  Beside him, Connor leaned against the trailer and closed his eyes. Brooks moved a little closer in case he had to catch his pack mate before he face-planted on the concrete. Connor was functioning on little more than adrenaline fumes at the moment and probably shouldn’t have even been on the raid, but there was no one to take his place. The truth of the matter was that everyone on the team was just as exhausted right now.

  Last night had been filled with a steady stream of questions from Internal Affairs, the city manager, half the city council, and the U.S. Marshals. As if that wasn’t enough, then the frigging FBI had shown up. Because apparently the whole thing had looked like a terrorist attack to them.

  Not that Brooks was surprised to see so many high-ranking people on the scene. It wasn’t every day the chief of police of a major U.S. city attempted to assassinate members of his own SWAT team. Then there was Curtis’s alleged involvement in the prison break. That didn’t go over well with the city officials either.

  And everyone from each of the aforementioned agencies had wanted to know what the hell had happened at the compound. Why would the chief of police want to kill them? What did SWAT know about the prison break? Who the hell were all the dead people with automatic weapons? How did Oliver end up with a broken neck? Why was there so much blood everywhere but so few wounded cops?

  Brooks and his teammates had dealt with situations like this before—maybe not on this scale—so they had experience covering for the strange things that happened to them. They kept their stories simple and to the point and never elaborated on anything. That had earned them a lot of dubious looks, but it wasn’t like anyone was going to suspect they were werewolves.

  The marathon interrogation session hadn’t ended until around nine o’clock that morning. Even then, there’d been no rest for any of them. Half the team had been sent out to provide SWAT support to the cops responding to all the hotline tips coming in claiming to know where Curtis, Frasheri, Engler, and the four hunters who escaped might be. The other half of the team had started digging out the armory building, recovering as many weapons and pieces of equipment as they could. It had been miserable, dirty, smelly work, but it had to be done. Without the weapons in that armory, they were nearly worthless to the department. By the time they were done, Brooks had reeked. Even after showering twice, he still smelled like smoke and ashes.

  The sun had been going down on a really long day, and he was looking forward to getting home—and Selena, who’d finally agreed to go to his place and get some rest after spending the night along with Lana and his other pack mates’ significant others in the small dorm room of sorts in the admin building where the team could catch some shut-eye if they needed to—when his cell had rung. It had been Ruben, giving him this address on Sovereign Row, saying it was where the gang was making the spiked energy drink. According to the kid, the man who’d taken over and consolidated most of the local gangs would be there overseeing the movement of several truckloads of the stuff. Apparently, they were shipping it out of state.

  Gage had offered Brooks half the team, but instead, he’d stuck with the four guys who’d been with him on this from the start. And Zane.

  “Side door is open,” Zane’s calm voice murmured over the line. “We’re ready to go.”

  Brooks had told Gage he needed Zane along to handle task force coordination. He’d said Zane wouldn’t be going in with the entry team, but that had been a lie. One Gage had almost certainly seen right through.

  Zane had risked his life for Selena, and there was no way in hell Brooks was ever going to forget it. If that meant taking a risk on this raid and letting Zane take part, he’d do it in a second. That said, he’d put Zane with Ray’s team, figuring his friend wouldn’t be able to get himself into any trouble if he was stuck with the slower moving team of human cops.

  Brooks nudged Connor. His eyes snapped open immediately, a light gold ring around the edges of his pupils.

  “We go in five seconds,” Ray called out.

  Brooks gave his pack mates a nod, then led them around the trailer and onto the loading dock.

  “Three…two…one…go!” Ray shouted.

  The moment they were through the door, Brooks and his team spread ou
t slightly as they moved toward the center of the building. The chemical smell was even worse inside the warehouse, making his eyes water. The scent of fentanyl was predominant, and Brooks wondered briefly if he and the others could get high from breathing in the fumes.

  The mechanical noise coming from the endless miles of moving conveyor belts was unreal, too, and as they slipped deeper into the building, weaving around the belts, heavy equipment, and half-stacked pallets of Buzz energy drink, Brooks realized their greatest werewolf advantages—namely their senses of smell and hearing—were completely neutralized in there. They’d be forced to do this the old-fashioned way, depending on their training and instincts like every other cop in here.

  He was surprised how uncomfortable he was at that thought. He hadn’t been forced to deal with a situation like this without access to his enhanced senses in a long time. Not since Gulfport in fact. And he didn’t like to think about how that had ended.

  They were nearly to the middle of the warehouse before they saw a guy pushing a pallet of shrink-wrapped cans toward the locking dock. The gangbanger took one look at them and reached for the handgun shoved in the waistband of his pants. The moment he yanked it out, everything went crazy, as shooting and shouting immediately filled the cavernous space.

  Connor took a round in the shoulder, but they got the gangbanger down and zip-tied without killing him. Then they were moving, Brooks calling out updates over the radio as he came to grips with the sheer scale of this drug operation. There were dozens of pallets loaded with the spiked energy drink, not counting what had already been loaded into the trucks outside. If they distributed the drink like they intended, the number of overdoses would be mind-boggling.

  Random shots continued to ring out around the building. Based on those and the number of hostile contacts getting announced over the air, there had to be at least twenty or thirty gangbangers in there. That was a lot more than Brooks and the other members of the task force had expected. But there wasn’t anything they could do about that now.

  He and his teammates kept moving through the warehouse, arresting those who made that an option, doing what was necessary in the other cases. It wasn’t a choice he preferred, but getting into long, drawn-out confrontations would only put other members of the task force at risk. Fortunately, more of the gangbangers gave up instead of fighting.

  Brooks thought the raid would actually go down easier than he’d feared, but then he heard heavy weapon fire coming from the right, in the direction of Ray’s team and the side exit.

  “Need backup on the east side of the warehouse,” Ray said calmly over the radio. “We’re pinned down by four men with automatic weapons.”

  Brooks threw a quick look at Connor and Diego, who simply nodded and kept moving forward without him.

  “On the way,” he called out over the radio. “Keep your heads down.”

  Luckily, Brooks didn’t have to engage with any other gangbangers on the way. Mostly because there weren’t many left. He followed the sounds of heavy gunfire, the stench of chemicals getting worse as he ran past several large industrial kettles, each bigger than a car. This must be where they made the energy drink. The odor alone was enough to make him wonder why anyone would drink the crap. It smelled like scented battery acid. While the noise wasn’t as bad in this part of the building, he still wished someone would shut down the damn conveyor belts. The constant clank and rattle was digging right through his sensitive ears and giving him one hell of a headache.

  Brooks liked to think his werewolf instincts led him directly to Ray, but that would probably be pushing it. The truth was that one second, he was running down an alley between two long rows of cardboard boxes, and the next, he saw Ray on one knee behind a heavy steel support column, facing a guy with an automatic rifle. The gangbanger was walking right toward Ray, keeping him pinned down with a hail of bullets.

  “Dallas PD!” Brooks shouted, instinct and training forcing him to give a warning he knew would be ignored. “Drop the weapon!”

  The man spun, the cheap knockoff M4-style automatic rifle spraying the walls and ceiling with bullets as he tried to change his aim point and take Brooks out.

  Brooks didn’t give him the chance.

  He scanned the area to make sure it was clean but didn’t see anyone, even though Ray had said there had been four men with automatic weapons here earlier. He sniffed the air, hoping that would give him a clue, but the odor of fentanyl was so strong, he almost got dizzy from it. He kept going, approaching the downed suspect and kicking the rifle away as Ray moved to join him.

  “Where are the other shooters?” Brooks asked as he dropped to a knee to see if the man he’d shot was still breathing.

  A flash of movement from the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he snapped his head around to see three men step out from the walkway between the boxes. Everything seemed to freeze as he recognized the big man in the middle of the group, even as his head tried to tell him what he was seeing couldn’t be right.

  Ernesto.

  Selena’s friend, the man who’d become like a brother to her after Geraldo had been murdered. What the hell was he doing here?

  Before Brooks could even try to answer that question, Ernesto and the two men with him lifted their weapons and started shooting. Brooks whirled around as he got to his feet to return fire, knowing he was probably going to be hit at the same time but not caring.

  Suddenly, a blur passed in front of him. Brooks had only a second to shout in warning as Ray went down, hit multiple times with a spray of bullets as he attempted to protect Brooks from the incoming rounds.

  Brooks brought his weapon up, firing an entire thirty-round magazine at Ernesto and the other two gangbangers. They moved fast for humans, diving to the side and slipping away down a corridor between the conveyor belts. He knew he should chase them, but he couldn’t. Ray had been hit. There was no way Brooks was going to leave him.

  Shit, it was bad. Blood leaked through a hole in the center of Ray’s tactical vest, right where a bullet had punched through it. More poured from an abdomen wound, well below the bottom of the vest. There was another wound in Ray’s left thigh, but that was minor compared to the other two.

  “Officer down!” Brooks shouted into the radio as he kneeled by his old friend. “I need EMS support ASAP to the east side door, two hundred feet inside the building.”

  He didn’t hear anymore shooting in the building, which was a good thing. Someone had finally turned off the conveyor belt, too.

  There was a clang as someone shoved the nearby door open. Brooks knew it was Ernesto and the other gangbangers getting away, but he ignored them as he ripped Ray’s tactical vest off, exhaling a little when he saw the bullet hole to the right side of the sternum. The round had clearly missed the heart, but it had sliced through Ray’s right lung, and the bleeding was severe. He quickly rolled Ray to that side, so his left lung would stay clear of blood. At the same time, he pressed a firm hand to the wound on Ray’s abdomen.

  Ray let out a hiss of pain, his eyes starting to glaze over. “You should go after them,” he said weakly. “They’re getting away.”

  “We’ll get them later,” Brooks said.

  Ray opened his mouth like he wanted to argue, but Trey and Zane showed up. Zane stood there, a devastated look on his face, while Trey immediately went into his medic role, checking Ray’s pulse and calling to alert EMS for a severe chest wound.

  “Two fucking weeks,” Ray whispered, his voice getting weaker as one of his lungs began to fill with blood. “I haven’t even sent in my paperwork yet. Was gonna do that tomorrow. Can you believe that shit?”

  “Stop worrying about that.” Brooks swallowed hard. “You’re going to make it through this. You’re too damn tough to die. Besides, didn’t you hear Curtis is a criminal piece of shit who’s currently being hunted by half the law enforcement agencies in this country? You don’t
even need to retire now. You can keep working until you’re a hundred. You just have to hang on.”

  Tears stung Brooks’s eyes. Shit. He was saying some of the same stuff Jack had said to him all those years ago when Brooks had been the one lying on the ground dying at that high school.

  “I just wanted to always do the right thing,” Ray said, the words so soft, Brooks had to lean over to hear them. “I guess in the end I did that. I saved your life.”

  Brooks had to fight not to let out a howl, not having the heart to tell Ray that his life had never been at risk.

  Ray’s eyes started to slip closed, and Brooks felt a moment of panic. Then he heard his friend’s heart continuing to beat, and he relaxed a little. Ray was still holding on.

  By the time the paramedics came in with the gurney a few seconds later, Ray was completely unconscious. Trey nodded at Brooks as if to reassure him the old guy was going to make it. Brooks wasn’t so sure, but he nodded in return, then followed the paramedics so he could ride with them to the hospital.

  He needed to be there with Ray.

  Just in case.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe the chief of police tried to kill you,” Ruben said as he used a broom to sweep up another pile of glass. “And at a frigging wedding! How fucked up is that?”

  “Language,” Selena murmured, not looking away from the poster she was repositioning on the wall. When it was straight, she shoved a few tacks into the corners to keep it there. Once done, she looked around, sighing at all the work left to do.

  The windows had been replaced, the bullet holes in the wall patched, and the blood cleaned up, but that was it. Broken glass was still scattered everywhere, the chair/desk combos pushed against one wall, the literacy posters either lying on the floor or torn apart. What a mess. If Eva hadn’t called earlier to confirm everything was set for classes to restart tomorrow, Selena would have thought the room needed another week of work. But she guessed they expected her to do most of the cleanup. Shocking—not.