On the other side of the table, Brandy yawned behind her hand.
Lana grimaced. “Sorry for waking you up so early. Did they have you working late at the hospital again?”
Brandy shook her head. “Not really. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
Lana hadn’t slept much last night either, but she’d never needed as much sleep as her friends. Besides, missing sleep due to sex was completely different from lying in bed tossing and turning.
“What kept you up?” Lana asked. “Something you’re dealing with at work?”
“No, nothing that simple. I couldn’t sleep because every time I closed my eyes, I kept thinking about Chris.”
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 to 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 to 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 finding 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 into 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.
