She’d worked for the Lakefront PD for eight years and had always been considered a good cop with a good reputation and a lot of friends on the force. Then she’d started dating Jeremy—a well-liked cop from a family of cops who had made a name for themselves in the community. He had friends in high places, so he was on the short list for sergeant, then lieutenant. Everyone thought they made the perfect couple—until she decided to break it off with him.
Everything had gone downhill fast from there. Jeremy had handled her rejection like the arrogant, conceited asshole he was—which meant poorly. When he couldn’t convince her to take him back, he stalked her and harassed her at work, telling outrageous lies about her to other cops, and screwing with her reports. Almost no one in the department believed anything she said about him, and those who did wouldn’t do anything about it. Jeremy was the big man on campus as far as everyone in Lakefront was concerned. No one in the city would look at him sideways.
She’d found out later that was why her backup had been late that night three months ago. She’d been blackballed. Thanks to Jeremy, her fellow cops were never going to lift a finger to help her ever again.
“Was that the night that everything changed for you?”
Dixon’s question pulled her out of her reverie. “What?”
“Is that when you gained your new abilities?”
Khaki’s heart began to beat like crazy. She darted a look at the two cops on the other side of the diner to see if they’d heard what Dixon said, but neither man looked her way. “What new abilities?”
Dixon’s mouth edged up. “Relax, Khaki. No one can hear us. There’s just you and me talking about what’s been happening to you over the past three months. Assuming that’s when it started.”
Khaki’s first instinct was to immediately deny everything. Her second instinct was to get up and run out of the diner. But Dixon looked so calm and relaxed sitting across from her that it was hard not to trust him. The internal sensor she’d come to trust so much recently was telling her the SWAT commander wasn’t a threat. In fact, he might be the only person she could confide in.
“How did you know?” she asked softly.
“That the change was happening to you, or that it started three months ago?”
“Both, I guess.”
He smiled. “It’s not so hard to recognize the signs indicating a person has changed since I went through it myself.”
Khaki stared at him. “You’re like me? You can…do things you shouldn’t be able to do?”
“You mean, can I run way too fast? Can I hear and smell things I shouldn’t be able to? Am I stronger than I should be? The answer to all those questions is yes. And yes, I can heal from things a lot faster than I should, too, which is probably the first thing you learned after you were shot that night.”
Khaki’s hand tightened around her coffee mug. She’d finally found someone who’d dealt with the same things she was dealing with now. Or, more accurately, he’d found her.
When she’d been hit in the shoulder with a cluster of shotgun pellets and a 9 mm, not to mention another round in the thigh that night at Grace Park, the doctors had patched her up and put her on two weeks of bed rest, saying she was dealing with the wounds incredibly well. Only they didn’t know how well. In the middle of the night two days later, she’d gotten up to hobble to the bathroom and discovered she wasn’t hobbling anymore. Panicking, she’d torn the bandage from her leg to see that the wound was completely healed. The shoulder wound, which had been much worse, was nearly healed as well.
She’d never gone back to the hospital for her final checkup, worried the doctors would realize she was some kind of freak. When they’d called to check on her, she told them she’d already been cleared by another doctor on staff. They’d assumed the paperwork had been lost and let it go.
Since that night, she’d been wounded twice more, once with a knife and once with a small automatic. The wounds had healed so quickly she hadn’t even bothered to tell anyone about them.
“Do you know why this happened to me…to us?” she asked.
“Yeah, I do.” His mouth twitched. “But it might be a little hard for you to believe it.”
Khaki let out a short laugh. “Hard to believe? Sergeant Dixon, last week, a drugged-out factory worker stopped beating his kid just long enough to shove a seven-inch-long hunting knife through my stomach. I pulled it out and threw him through a wall, then carried the little boy down three flights of stairs so we could wait for child services out on the curb. There’s nothing that I wouldn’t believe at this point.”
He nodded. “That’s good to hear because that makes it a lot easier to say this next part.”
She leaned forward, eager to hear what he had to say.
He sipped his coffee, then set down the mug. “You’re a werewolf, Officer Blake, just like I am. I run an entire SWAT team full of people just like us down in Dallas. And I want you on the team too.”
Okay, maybe there were some things she wasn’t quite ready to believe yet.
“We’rewhat?”
Khaki didn’t realize she’d said it so loud until the two other cops in the diner looked her way. She lowered her voice.
“Want to run that by me again? Because I could have sworn you said we’re werewolves.”
“That is what I said.” Dixon sighed. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but from what I’ve been able to figure out, there’s a gene in some of us that gets tripped when we experience a traumatic, life-threatening situation—like what happened to you at that apartment complex.”
