“This food tastes like crap,” Max complained as he shoved another tiny spinach quiche into his mouth and chewed. If it wasn’t for the fact that werewolves could eat anything they wanted without it messing with their weight, he’d have been worried about the wasted calories.
“Stop complaining,” fellow werewolf and SWAT officer Jayden Brooks said. A senior corporal on the team, Brooks was a former college star running back, and while he was the biggest werewolf in the Pack, he was also the most soft-spoken. “Besides, it’s free. That makes it taste better.”
With a grin, Brooks popped some kind of fancy hors d’oeuvre in his mouth. His plate was piled so high with them Max was surprised they didn’t fall on the floor of the large banquet area that had been set up outside the main auditorium in the Dallas Police Department Headquarters. Max wasn’t a fan of coming here, regardless of the event. In his opinion, the place was made for lawyers and politicians, not cops. Having to wear his dress blue uniform made it even worse. If it wasn’t for the fact that some of his fellow SWAT teammates were being recognized, he wouldn’t have come at all.
“Free doesn’t always mean good,” werewolf-slash-SWAT-officer Diego Martinez pointed out as he and another of Max’s teammates, Zane Kendrick, joined them.
The late afternoon award ceremony was packed with people, so it had taken a while for them to work their way through the buffet line and come over to the cocktail table in the corner they’d staked out. Clearly, Diego and Zane shared Max’s opinion of the food. They’d barely put anything on their plates.
“We should try and convince Chief Curtis to hold these events at the SWAT compound,” Max said. “Then we could grill some real food.”
Brooks chuckled at the suggestion. “I don’t see that happening. Chief Curtis isn’t a fan of ours these days. We’re never going to get him out to the compound unless it’s so he can arrest one of us.”
He was probably right about that, Max thought. Chief Curtis had suspended Max, Brooks, and their teammate Alex Trevino after they’d been caught breaking into a private research facility while looking for some girls who’d gone missing from Regional Texas College a few months ago. It wasn’t that he and the other guys had gone into the place without a warrant that had pissed Curtis off. It was the fact that the facility had been owned by Councilman McDonald, one of the chief’s biggest political supporters. It hadn’t helped when they’d later disobeyed the chief’s orders to stay away from the case and continued their investigation into the girls’ disappearance, ultimately proving McDonald had been the one who’d kidnapped them. To save face, Chief Curtis had to pretend the suspension was a smokescreen, so Max and the others could expose the corrupt politician.
“It must have really chafed the chief’s ass to stand up in front of nearly half the DPD and give Alex a commendation for rescuing those college girls,” Diego said with a grin, his teeth a flash of white next to his tan skin.
Max glanced at Diego. At six foot even, he was the shortest werewolf in the SWAT Pack, but what the guy lacked in height, he more than made up for in brawn. He was flat-out built like a fireplug. “You think he’s that petty?”
Diego snorted.
“No doubt about it,” Zane agreed in that British accent of his everyone in the Pack loved teasing him about, including Max. “I thought the chief was going to toss the award at Alex and tell him to pin the damn thing on himself.”
Max chuckled. He’d thought the same thing.
“It probably didn’t help he had to pin medals on Khaki and Xander, too,” Brooks added. “Three commendations for SWAT in one night—that’s gotta burn.”
“Speaking of Khaki and Xander, where are they?” Max asked, looking around for his two pack mates Khaki Blake and Xander Riggs. “I thought they were going to join us as soon as they grabbed some food.”
Brooks picked up a crab puff that looked way too tiny for his gigantic hand from his plate. “Khaki was too burned out from spending most of the day at the courthouse for Jeremy’s sentencing hearing. She and Xander went home so she could chill out.”
Diego shook his head, mouth tight. “I still can’t believe that asshole wiggled out of the death penalty. He murdered one man and almost killed Khaki and Xander. Hell, he even shot a frigging dog. If that isn’t enough to get a guy a needle in the arm, I don’t know what is.”
It was a subject that had been rehashed a thousand times over the past year, both at the SWAT compound and in the local newspapers. It was hard to believe the trial had taken a year. It felt like only a few months since Jeremy Engler, a cop from Khaki’s past, had shown up in Dallas looking to settle a score with her and, by extension, her new boyfriend, Xander. To say things had gotten nasty was an understatement.
Khaki and Xander, as well as the dog—SWAT mascot, Tuffie—had thankfully made it through okay, but the case had dragged on endlessly in the courts. Jeremy’s lawyer had first gone with an insanity defense, which actually might have worked since Jeremy swore up and down that the entire Dallas SWAT team was filled with bloodthirsty monsters who had claws and fangs and would murder them all.
When the doctors and the judge had rejected that defense, his lawyer went with plan B—make Jeremy as sympathetic as possible. While Jeremy had been found guilty on all charges, the jury had bought the claims that his “episode” had been brought on by the stress of being a police officer out in Washington State and “losing the woman he loved to another man.” Today, he’d been sentenced to life without parole instead of the death penalty.
“I heard they’re sending him down to the Coffield Unit just south of here,” Zane said, picking at the food on his plate with disinterest. “That means he’ll be in the same prison as Frasheri and his crew of omegas.”
Max shook his head. Armend Frasheri was an Albanian mobster they’d put in prison a while back who’d used omega werewolves as muscle. Omegas were similar to alphas like Max and the other werewolves on the SWAT team in size and aggression, but unlike alphas, they had almost no control over their inner wolves.
“Serves the asshole right,” Brooks muttered. “If we’re lucky, maybe they’ll put Jeremy in a cell with an omega.”
Max was picturing Jeremy screaming his damn head off in the middle of the night as he realized he was bunking with a “monster” when his nose picked up an intriguing scent he’d never smelled before. Max didn’t have the best nose in the Pack, not by a long shot, but he was usually good at identifying scents. He turned his head this way and that, sniffing the air as he tried to figure out which part of the large room it was coming from. But it was no good. It seemed to be everywhere at once, surrounding him.
“Do you guys smell that?” he asked his teammates, interrupting a conversation they were having about making a run to the store for steaks and taking them back to the SWAT compound to grill.
“Smell what?” Diego asked, lifting his nose slightly and testing the air.
“I’m not sure how to describe it.” Max sniffed again, surprised none of the other guys had picked up on the delectable scent. “It’s sweet and spicy at the same time, like…I don’t know…maybe cinnamon and flowers?”
Diego and Zane stared blankly at him while Brooks shook his head.
“I don’t smell anything,” the big man said. “There are a lot of people in here. Maybe you’re picking up a combination of their scents.”
“Maybe,” Max said softly, though he didn’t think so. This was one very specific scent, not a blend of several. It was hard to explain how he knew that, but he did. All he could say for sure was that the scent had come out of nowhere. Like someone who hadn’t been there before had just walked into the room.
