by Paige Tyler
The hunters didn’t pose an immediate threat to Lana, not here in the home of the deputy chief of police. The hunters were vicious, but they weren’t reckless. They’d never come at anyone like a cop, not in the middle of a fully populated residential neighborhood. Lana would be safe for the moment—until he could come up with a better plan.
With that in mind, Max jogged back out to his Camaro and cranked the engine. Pulling a U-turn, he headed back the way he’d come.
Gage and Mac’s home was a frequent hangout for a lot of the werewolves in Dallas—Pack and otherwise—so when he pulled up in front of the two-story house thirty minutes later, Max wasn’t surprised to see Xander’s pickup truck alongside Mike’s Sierra in the driveway. There were two other vehicles Max didn’t recognize.
Gage’s wife, Mackenzie, answered the door. Tall with long, dark hair and blue eyes, she was a journalist at the Dallas Daily Star. She didn’t have to be a reporter to pick up on the fact that something was up with him.
“Is everything okay?” she asked the moment he stepped inside.
Since she’d married the SWAT team commander, Mac had turned into the Pack matriarch—even if she refused to consider herself old enough to play that part. Regardless, she’d jumped into the role of helping the rapidly growing Pack deal with day-to-day issues.
Max gave her a rueful look. “Not really. I sort of pulled a stupid, and need to tell Sarge about it.”
“Gage mentioned you’d found your One,” she said, her lips curving. “I wondered how long it would be before you showed up here—or ended up in jail.”
Max smiled wryly. “Good to see you have so much faith in me.”
“It’s not that we don’t have faith in you,” she said as she led him toward the back of the house and the kitchen. “It’s just that we know how finding The One can make a werewolf behave. Gage will be thrilled you decided to come and tell him up front instead of calling him after the crap hit the fan.”
Max grunted. He wasn’t so sure the boss would be as thrilled when he found out the deputy chief had been ready to pull a weapon on him.
Gage, Xander, and Mike were sitting at the kitchen table along with Khaki, while Florian and Armand Danu, the oldest members of the family Cooper had married into, were leaning back against the granite counter of the island. The two men had become ingrained in the Pack’s effort to form a safe haven for werewolves here in Dallas. With their knowledge of werewolf hunters, their presence at gatherings was as important as anyone’s.
“No handcuffs,” Xander observed dryly. “I’m going to say that’s a good thing even before I hear the details.”
Gage didn’t seem as amused. “What happened?”
Max took the empty seat next to Mike and told them everything that had happened that night, starting with the call he’d gotten from Peterson and finishing with his decision to reveal to Lana that he was a werewolf. He might have downplayed the part where he’d beat up on the two Good Samaritans in the alley. For all the good it did him. One look at Gage, Xander, and Mike convinced him they knew he was keeping something from them.
“Well, that’s one way to let Lana know she’s a werewolf,” Mike said. A big guy with light-brown skin, dark eyes, and close-cropped, black hair, he had been an undercover narcotics cop before he became a werewolf and joined SWAT. “Probably not the way I would have done it, but I give you an A for intentions. How did she handle it?”
“Not well,” Max admitted. “She flipped out and almost shifted. I don’t think she realized what was happening to her, though. Before I knew it, she took off running and didn’t stop until she reached her parents’ house.”
Gage grimaced. “And you decided to go over and try to talk to her, right?”
Max shrugged. “I had to try to make sure she was okay. She still doesn’t believe what she is or how much danger she’s in.”
“Try?” Xander prompted. “You didn’t talk to her?”
Mac shook his head. “No. The deputy chief was waiting for me at the door with a gun. He wasn’t going to let me within ten feet of Lana. I could hear her crying upstairs, though. I really scared her.”
On the other side of him, Khaki put a comforting hand on his arm. “When she realizes what the two of you have, she’ll come back to you.”
Max snorted. “You sure of that? You didn’t see her face. She was terrified when she saw me fang out.”
“If she’s The One for you, it will happen,” Armand said, his French accent slight but still discernible. “Everly was horrified when Cooper showed her he was a werewolf.”
“You mean after you stabbed him and forced him to partially shift, don’t you?” Xander pointed out.
Armand shrugged. “Maybe. But the important thing is that even though my sister ran away, she was unable to resist the tug pulling her back to her soul mate. She was bound to him so strongly that being away from him made her physically ill.” He looked at Max. “If you’re meant to be together, it will be the same with you and Lana. You can’t force her to accept something she’s not ready for. Just give her a little space.”
Max hoped that was true. If Lana felt like he did right now, he didn’t understand how she could stay away from him. It felt like he had a hole in his chest where his heart should be. “What about the hunters? What if they come looking for her while I’m not around to protect her?”
The mere thought made his gut clench.
“There’s not a lot we can do about that right now,” Gage said. “I think she’ll be safe with her father watching out for her.”
Max opened his mouth to complain, but Gage cut him off. “Even so, I’ll work up a duty roster and have the Pack do drive-by patrols every couple hours. We’ll keep an eye on her.”
“I’ll take the first two rotations,” Max said eagerly.
“No, you won’t.” Gage scowled at him. “In fact, you’ll take none of the rotations. The deputy chief will suspend you if he catches sight of you anywhere near his home. If he doesn’t shoot you. Let the rest of the Pack handle this. You figure out what the hell you’re going to say to Lana if Armand is right and she comes back to you. And please try to come up with a more intelligent approach than showing off your fangs and claws, would you?”
Max was about to point out that the whole tell-her-the-truth thing had been Cooper’s idea but decided to keep that to himself. Admitting to Sarge he’d taken anything Cooper had to say seriously probably wouldn’t make him look any better in his alpha’s eyes.
He only hoped the hunters wouldn’t show up before Lana came back to him.
Chapter 10
Lana knew Brandy and Miriam were trying to cheer her up, but dragging her out to a dance club had been a horrible idea. There was a good crowd for a Sunday night, mostly college-age types who didn’t seem to need sleep or care about crashing at their desks tomorrow. But it was the same club she’d been planning to go to with Max last night, and that made going there hard to handle. Right then, all she wanted to do was go back to her friends’ place and curl up on the couch with Netflix and a cheese and spinach pizza.
Since running away from Max last night, Lana had felt like complete crap. She normally wasn’t a moody person, but as Sunday morning stretched into afternoon and then evening, the ache in her middle had gotten worse. She couldn’t help wondering if this was what people meant when they talked about being lovesick. If so, it sucked.
Lana had only stayed at her parent’s house for a couple hours the night before. Just long enough to get through the initial rush of emotions that had inundated her after what happened with Max in the alley. The instinct to run home to her parents had been understandable, but it had also been stupid. It was bad enough that her mother had badgered her, wanting to know what Max had done, but her father had been a complete pain in the butt, swearing a blue streak about firing Max first thing in the morning. Unable to take it, she’d left and headed back
to the refuge of Brandy and Miriam’s couch. Both women had been out, leaving her with the silence necessary to figure out what the hell had happened.
The truth was that Lana still no idea what she’d seen in the alley, but as the hours wore on, she was becoming increasingly sure it hadn’t been what she’d thought. Max might have acted odd, but there was no way she could have seen claws and fangs. That was just stupid. And all the crap he’d said about her being in danger had to be some kind of hero complex gone to the extreme. Max had simply been playing off her grief for Denise, wanting to be her knight in shining armor. She’d read about that kind of stuff happening. The thing was, he didn’t have to do anything to make her like him even more than she did. She’d already fallen for him like a ton of bricks. She’d been thinking about having kids with the guy, for heaven’s sake. Now, it looked like her father had been right all along. Max wasn’t the right man for her.
While that sounded logical, it did little to help her get over the ache in her chest. Clearly, her heart had already made up its mind about who it wanted her to be with.
Lana blinked back a rush of tears and forced herself to move away from the bar. As she wandered around the club, she kept an occasional eye on her friends, nursing a drink she really didn’t want and trying to make it look like she was having a good time. She wished she could find a spot in the club that wasn’t so loud. Between the music and everyone talking, it felt like her eardrums were about to burst.
She’d finally settled on a location between two giant speakers a few feet away from the dance floor when a shiver ran through her body. At first she thought she’d been hit with a blast from the air conditioner, but then her skin began to tingle so badly she felt like she needed to scratch all over. It was like she’d just walked into a spiderweb.
Following an instinct she didn’t fully understand, Lana began to move around the club again, trying to figure out what was making her feel so freaky. Her steps took her into one of the larger side rooms decorated in a Goth style with plenty of black lights and heavy drapery covering the walls and ceiling. There were fewer people in here than in the main room, and it wasn’t as noisy. Catching a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, she turned to see a man on the far side of the room, partially hidden by a thick velvet curtain. She moved a little to the left, trying to get a glimpse of his face and was surprised to realize it was the police officer from Central who’d spritzed her with perfume at the mall. The moment she set eyes on him, her gums and fingertips tingled. Crap, that was getting old.
She tried to duck out of the room before he saw her, but just then he looked her way. She cursed as he made eye contact. Maybe she could pretend she didn’t recognize him.
Suddenly, her whole body tingled all over like she was holding on to an electric fence. What the hell was making her feel this way?
She was still trying to figure that out when the cop from Central gave her a smile so creepy she thought her skin might slide off and run screaming out of the club. Kids who pulled the wings off of flies would look at this guy and head the other way.
And that’s exactly what she did, too.
Lana had almost reached the arched doorway that led into the main part of the club when two stocky men wearing leather jackets and jeans came into the room, blocking her path. She froze midstep as she realized one of them was the guy who’d been with the cop from Central at the mall the other day. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
She didn’t hesitate to follow her body’s instincts this time either, turning away from the two men and heading in yet a third direction. She had no idea where she was going, but she hurried past a group of women and ducked into the nearest curtain-covered doorway she saw, praying it would lead somewhere good.
She found herself in a dimly lit hallway with a red, illuminated sign at the end, declaring Emergency Exit. Alarm Will Sound. The easing of the tension in her stomach told her this was the way to go, and she immediately took off running down the corridor. She had to zig and zag around some chairs and tables stacked up against the walls, but then she was slamming through the emergency exit, tripping the fire alarm.
Lana hoped that would dissuade the men from following her, but just in case, she raced down the alley behind the club, heading for the main road out front. Once there, she’d be able to get lost in the shuffle of people hurrying out the front entrance by now.
But when she reached the street, two motorcycles slid to a stop in front of her, cutting her off. She initially thought they’d hit their brakes because of the people running out of the club, but then one of the men reached inside his jacket and came out with a pistol.
Crap.
“Boyd, this is Seth,” the man with the gun said, obviously talking to someone on a mic. “The girl just came out of the alley to the north of the club.”
Lana stared, shocked she could hear him through the full-face helmet he wore. But right then, she could hear every tiny sound around her. The noise was deafening.
“Good,” a familiar voice answered in Seth’s earpiece—the cop from the mall who probably wasn’t a cop at all. “Herd her back into the alley. We’ll take her out in here.”
Lana’s heart hammered. Safety was only a few hundred feet away on the other side of those two bikers, but she’d never get through them. Turning, she ran down the sidewalk away from the club as fast as she could, sure she was going to feel a bullet slamming into her back at any moment. She couldn’t think about that, though. All she could do was pray.
She heard the roar of the bikes behind her, but as fast as they were, she stayed ahead of them. She was moving so fast that everything around her was little more than a blur.
As if following some instinct she didn’t know she had, Lana turned into another alley, almost running right out of her strappy shoes. She dashed down the narrow space cluttered with dumpsters and trash cans, dodging some, leaping over others. She heard the bikes stop and knew they’d been forced to turn back because of all the rubble in their way.
She darted out of the alley and turned right, sprinting down the sidewalk for a few blocks before sprinting down another side street. Even though she should have easily outdistanced the men chasing her, she soon heard the sounds of pursuit. First the motorcycles, then three sets of heavy, pounding footsteps behind her. She knew it shouldn’t have been possible for her to discern three particular sets of footsteps out of all the noise around her, but she could.
She sniffed the air as she ran, not sure why, but her instincts were telling her she should be able smell the men behind her. More insanity, she knew. Those instincts had gotten her out of that club alive though, so she wasn’t ready to ignore them, even when the scents that should have been there never showed up. It was like a void where a scent should be. Even more insanity, but something inside her was terrified by this strange lack of odor.
While she was blazing, speed alone wasn’t enough to get her away from the three people chasing her and the other two on motorcycles. Every time she put some distance between her and her pursuers, the bikes seemed to get ahead of her and cut her off, constantly turning her back toward the three runners fanning out behind her. No matter what she did, the guys on the bikes kept finding her, herding her where they wanted her to go. It was like they knew how these new instincts of hers worked better than she did.
She considered digging her cell phone out of her cross-body bag and calling someone. But who would she call, and how would it help? She wasn’t even sure she could convince the police she was being chased, and even if she could, the men would almost certainly be able to catch her while she stood around playing with her phone. Even the idea of calling Max, as tempting as that might have been, didn’t come with any assurances. She might be dead long before he could get to this part of town.
She had no choice but to follow her instincts, the ones screaming at her to run in a certain direction even if that direction made no sense. The GPS
in her head led her farther and farther from the more populated parts of downtown, along dingy backstreets she never would have ventured in, over industrial dividing walls she shouldn’t have been able to climb, and through deserted construction lots so dark she shouldn’t have been able to see her hands in front of her face. But for reasons that probably would have freaked her out if she’d had time to think about them, she could see just fine.
Lana didn’t know how far she’d run, but it was a long way. Oddly enough, she wasn’t out of breath. Finally, she ran into an old building that looked slated for demolition. All the windows were broken out or boarded up, with graffiti everywhere. As she flew past the homeless people squatting in the lower rooms, she wondered if she should ask them for help, but her instincts told her she’d do better on her own. Plus, she didn’t want to get anyone else hurt. If she were lucky, Boyd and his crew would keep going down the street.
She was almost to the far side of the building when she realized that she’d made a big mistake. Her pursuers hadn’t kept going. All five of them had followed her in, and they had her cornered.
Before she could slip out one of the rear windows, the wall beside her exploded in a shower of concrete fragments, throwing chips and dust everywhere. Crap, they were shooting at her with silenced weapons. Who the hell were these people?
She stopped thinking and simply ran for her life as one bullet after another smacked into the wall, pulverizing the sheetrock and the concrete blocks underneath. The acrid odor of smokeless powder filled the air, stinging her nose. She’d gone shooting with her dad enough times for the smell to be unforgettable, only now it was way more pungent.
But when a bullet smacked into the wall only a few feet away from her face, she picked up another scent. It wasn’t nearly as familiar as the stench of gunpowder, but she recognized it all the same. It was the damn perfume Boyd had spritzed on her. It even burned her nose as she breathed it in.