Lacey blinked. Everly had to be joking. But when the other woman didn’t even crack a smile, Lacey realized she was being serious.
“Werewolves aren’t real, Everly. They’re stuff made up in books and movies.”
Lacey looked at Wendy, expecting some backup, but her friend was sitting there with a thoughtful expression on her face.
“Have you ever wondered where all the werewolf stories came from for those books and movies?” Everly asked softly.
Lacey thought about that for a moment. Taking into account the claws and fangs, she supposed she could understand how a person could see what she’d seen and make the leap to werewolf.
Crap. Was she seriously buying into this idea that Alex was a werewolf?
“How did Alex get this way? Was he bitten, like in the stories?” Then she remembered how many times Alex had nipped her neck—and other places—with his sharp teeth. “Will I turn into a werewolf if he bit me?”
Both Everly and Wendy raised their brows, but thankfully, neither asked for details. Lacey had no desire to get into what she and Alex had done in the heat of passion.
Everly shook her head. “That’s the part the stories and legends all get wrong. Werewolves don’t get turned with a bite. People who become werewolves are born with a gene that lies dormant for most of their lives. They won’t change unless they go through some kind of horrible, life-threatening event.”
“So…him biting me?” she prompted.
“Won’t do anything to you,” Everly promised with a smile.
Lacey was relieved she wouldn’t get fangs and claws anytime soon, but she had so many questions whirling through her head that she couldn’t focus on that quite yet.
“You said something horrible had to happen to turn a person into a werewolf,” Lacey said. “What happened to Cooper?”
Everly looked down at the floor for a moment. When she lifted her head, Lacey saw tears shimmering in her eyes. “He was caught in an IED blast over in Iraq. He almost died—he would have died—if he hadn’t changed.”
Suddenly, all Lacey could think about was what kind of traumatic event Alex had gone through to turn. She remembered running her hands over his muscular body and feeling several barely there scars along his left side. Had whatever happened to give them to him been the event that had changed him? She wasn’t sure why she wanted to know, but she did.
“Do you know what made Alex change?”
Everly slowly shook her head. “I have a general idea, but that’s one of those secrets I have no right to share. If you really want to know what happened to him, you’ll need to ask him yourself.”
Lacey nodded, though she could never imagine asking Alex, not after everything had changed between them. Some roads just couldn’t be traveled again, not after you burned all the bridges along the way.
Everly answered as many of Lacey’s other questions as she could, being honest about those she couldn’t. For a while at least, Lacey could almost forget that her sister was missing—or worse. But when the questions ran dry, the concern for her sister came flooding back. Kelsey had been missing for more than twelve hours. Was she even still alive? Unbidden, images of the dead girl who she and Alex had found Saturday night popped into her head. Is that the way they would find Kelsey? Oh God, she hoped not.
“Alex is going to find your sister,” Everly said. “You just have to trust him.”
Lacey gave her a wry smile. “I’m not very good at trusting people—especially men.”
“But Alex isn’t like any other man you’ve ever met. You have no idea what he’s capable of or how far he’d go for you.”
After the way she’d bolted away from Alex, Lacey wasn’t so sure of that, but part of her prayed Everly was right.
* * *
“Where’s your pack?” Alex asked as Jayna led him into the living room of the five-bedroom loft apartment over near Baylor’s Dallas campus that everyone had started calling the Beta House. The place was usually packed to the gills with Becker and Jayna, Zak and Megan, Moe, Chris, Joseph, and lately, Mia. Six werewolves and two humans were a lot of people to fit into a single apartment, even if there were five bedrooms. But that was just the way Jayna’s beta pack preferred it.
“Zak took them over to Dave and Buster’s,” Jayna said over her shoulder. “He knew Eric needed to get some work done.”
Becker, Max, and Remy were in the living room, studying the big screen TV as grainy video footage slowly scrolled by.
“What do you have so far?” Alex asked as he grabbed a seat on the end of the couch and tried to figure out what he was looking at. It seemed to be some kind of stationary footage, maybe from a commercial security camera, but it was so dark, it was nearly impossible to make out anything.
Becker paused the video and sat back on the couch. Remy and Max took the opportunity to sit back and rub their eyes, clearly tired from looking at tape.
“Right now, not much,” Becker admitted. “I have a facial recognition program running on all the video I got from the bar, but we’re doing it manually too, just to make sure we don’t miss anything. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—there were sixteen different cameras in there. You add those to the street cameras around the bar, and we’re looking at maybe thirty or forty hours’ worth of grainy crap to look through. Even if we limit it to the time period we think Kelsey went missing, it’s going to take a while. I don’t expect to have it done until tomorrow morning sometime.”
