Lana searched her memory for the name. “The guy you met at that party at the SWAT compound? The one you said you weren’t interested in?”
Brandy rolled her eyes and sighed. “That’s the one. I was all prepared to forget about him, but then he called and left a message. I was dumb enough to listen it and now I can’t get his voice out of my head.”
Lana waited for her friend to elaborate, but Brandy didn’t say anything else. Instead, her friend sat there staring morosely into her coffee mug.
“Wow,” Lana said. “That must have been one heck of a message. What did he say?”
Brandy ran her finger around and around the rim of her mug. “That he had a good time and hopes we can get together again sometime soon.”
Once again, Lana waited for the rest of the story, only to realize there wasn’t any more forthcoming. “And that’s why you couldn’t sleep?”
Her friend shook her head. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never gotten this crazy for a guy. I have no plans to call him back, but I’m so gaga over his voice I can’t even get myself to erase the message. I must have listened to it twenty times before bed, then tossed and turned the whole night thinking about him.” She gave Lana a stricken look. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
Lana laughed. “Maybe you just like him. You should call him back and go out with him. Who knows? It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
Brandy crossed her index fingers in the universal symbol of protection. “Get back beast! I don’t do relationships, and you know it.”
Lana ignored her friend’s theatrics. “Maybe you should start.”
“Like that’s going to happen.” Brandy scoffed. “I’m going take a nap. When I wake up, I’ll delete his message and forget I ever heard it.”
“Sure you will,” Lana said. “But before you take that nap, how about helping me drag some stuff in from my car?”
Brandy thought about it a moment. “Can I wear my slippers and pajamas?”
“Sure. No one will notice.”
* * *
“What the hell just happened in there?” Max asked Brooks as they walked down the steps of the industrial-warehouse-style loft Gage had set up for some of the recently arrived werewolves.
Brooks didn’t answer right away—mostly because he was too busy trying to piece together parts of his shredded tactical vest. Luckily, his skin hadn’t been shredded along with it.
“If I had to guess,” the big alpha said, shaking his head and giving up on his vest, “I’d say we just witnessed the start of some new werewolf adaptation, an evolution of how the different werewolf breeds behave in response to the hunter threat.”
Max thought about that and realized it made sense. An hour ago, he and Brooks had gotten there expecting to find the omegas causing trouble for the small pack of betas who lived there, and instead found two omegas aligning with the betas as part of their pack and squaring off against two other omegas who felt they would do a better job leading the pack and protecting the kids who lived there from any hunters who might show up. Although it had turned into a big ass brawl, the omegas were still behaving a lot more rationally than Max was used to.
Even more bizarre, the betas living in the building were acting much more aggressively than Max had ever seen them. One of them had jumped into the fight between the omegas. That wasn’t the way beta werewolves normally reacted.
Betas acting like omegas, and omegas acting alphas? If Max hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he’d call BS on the idea.
“You think it’s a good idea to leave them all together up there?” he asked.
Brooks snorted as they reached their response vehicle parked on the street. “What choice do we have? They agreed to work together to protect their pack. We can’t ask much more than that. Besides, I think that beta up there, Allen, has the situation pretty well in hand. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s undergoing a beta-to-alpha transformation.”
Max climbed in the passenger seat. He had noticed Allen’s fangs and claws seemed longer than they were before. It looked like the guy had put on a couple pounds of muscle, too.
Brooks was just pulling away from the Deep Ellum apartment building when Max’s phone rang. His heart did this seriously unmanly backflip thing when he thought it might be Lana calling. He’d left her lying naked and beautiful in his bed this morning, and if he was lucky, that was where he’d find her tonight after work.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t Lana. It was Detective Peterson from Austin homicide, and while Max’s stomach was doing that backflip thing instead, it was for a completely different reason.
“Lowry,” he said when he put the phone to his ear.
“Max, it’s Detective Peterson, Austin PD. I’m not sure what this means, but I thought you should know. We found another murder victim with an MO similar to Denise Sullivan’s. Signs of torture and the guy had a large-caliber bullet through the forehead.”
“Who is he?” Max asked, a sickening feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. Two people shot through the forehead? It couldn’t be a coincidence, not when hunters preferred putting down werewolves exactly that way.
“We’re still trying to ID him, but getting prints is tough because the guy’s fingertips are a mess,” Peterson said. “This guy was a big bruiser type, with a nose that had been broken a couple times, lots of scars like the ones you’d get fighting, and a collection of prison ink. Bottom line, he’s the kind of man more likely to do the torturing than to get tortured. The ME is saying he was probably killed at least two days before Denise, maybe three. We’re trying to ID him from his prison ink, but that’s probably going to take a while.”
