Sure the man was going to rip out his throat, Brooks threw his arm up to block the blow. But then everything stilled as the guy stopped moving. With the little strength he had left, Brooks shoved the man off him. There were three bullet holes in the man’s chest.
Too tired to even care anymore, Brooks fell back on the concrete, pain radiating through every inch of him as he fought for breath. He was dimly aware of Cassie crying somewhere nearby, then bright lights were in his face as officers and paramedics moved in. He knew most of them, had worked with some of them for years. But it was the face of his shift supervisor, Sergeant Jack Walker, that he focused on.
Even though Jack had been doing this job for a long time, his face still betrayed how bad it was. That was okay. Brooks had already known.
He tried to smile as his old friend grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze, but wasn’t sure he managed. The older cop wasn’t merely a coworker and friend. He was like a second father to him. Jack had been there when Brooks’s real dad had been killed in a gang shooting more than a decade ago and had been in his life ever since.
“We got you, kid,” Jack said, eyes misty with tears.
Or at least that’s what Brooks thought he said. His ears didn’t seem to be working very well. It didn’t seem like his eyes were working right, either. Everything was dull and muted around him.
Brooks smiled anyway. Jack was the only person in the department who ever called him kid. Hell, there weren’t many who’d even use his first name. They’d always been too intimidated by his size to be that casual with him. That had never been a problem for Jack, though.
Jack leaned in close, encouraging Brooks to keep fighting. Brooks had no intention of giving up, but it probably wouldn’t matter. He had a gash in his side big enough to park a bus in. No amount of fight was going to change that.
While the paramedics worked to save his life, he turned his head to look at the man he’d killed. As he watched, the bizarre blue glow that had been in the guy’s eyes throughout the fight slowly faded away. Stranger, the fangs—for lack of a better word—were also fading, retracting until they looked like normal teeth. Brooks frowned, shocked that no one else seemed to notice the monster in their midst. But everyone was focused on trying to save his life.
As everything around Brooks began to get fuzzy and the pain disappeared, he knew their efforts weren’t going to matter. He hoped that none of them blamed themselves. He’d died doing his job and protecting people. A man couldn’t ask for more than that.
Chapter 1
Dallas, Texas, Present Day
“We’re moving into position now.”
Brooks motioned the four members of his SWAT team toward the back of the back of the warehouse on the east side. At his signal, fellow werewolves Diego Martinez, Connor Malone, Trey Duncan, and Remy Boudreaux quickly ran across the sunlit street and soundlessly disappeared into the shadows of the building on the other side.
“Roger that,” Sergeant Ray Porter said over the radio in Brooks’s ear. “Just watch yourselves back there. I haven’t heard anything from my CIs, and it’s starting to worry me.”
“Understood,” Brooks said as he followed his teammates.
Ray Porter was one of the most experienced officers in the Dallas PD Gang Unit and was damn good at his job. Which was why he was running the joint gang, narcotics, and SWAT task force the brass had put together to deal with the recent increase in gang-related heroin showing up in the city. But while Ray was a good cop, he was an even better person, and those confidential informants in there were kids he’d worked with for years. It was obvious he was worried as hell about them. That was something Brooks understood and respected.
Even though his nose and ears told him there wasn’t anyone behind the warehouse to see them, Brooks wasn’t thrilled with the idea of hitting the place in broad daylight. There were too many things that could go wrong. But if the intel they’d gotten from narcotics was right, there could be as much as two hundred pounds of high-grade heroin in that building, along with some high-level gangbangers from several of the biggest gangs in the city, all coming together to figure out how to move the drugs. Multi-gang operations like this were unheard of in Dallas, but Ray’s CIs had said a new boss with money and muscle had moved in and was actively consolidating most of the east side gangs. Nobody knew who this guy was or if he could pull something like this off, but if he did, it meant crime in the city was about to get a lot worse than it already was.
So while the operation was risky, it would be worth it if they could keep the heroin off the streets. Taking down the gangs and their new boss would just be gravy on the biscuits.
Normally, their squad leader, Mike Taylor, would have taken lead for an operation like this, but he was helping the newest member of their SWAT team with in-processing. A werewolf SWAT cop from Chattanooga, Rachel Bennett, had shown up on their doorstep a week ago saying she’d heard about people hunting werewolves in Dallas and that she wanted to help. To say they’d all been thrown for a loop was an understatement. Usually, their commander, Gage Dixon, went out and brought new werewolves into the Pack after carefully vetting them to make sure they’d be a good fit. This was the first time a werewolf had joined the Pack on their own. It was kind of weird.
Brooks didn’t mind running the operation in Mike’s absence, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t concerned about this raid being risky, especially considering they had no idea how many gangbangers were in there or how well armed they were. That was the kind of info he’d hoped Ray’s CIs could give them, since both of them were active members in the gangs involved, but the older cop hadn’t heard from either kid in two days. Which was why Ray was worried. If someone figured out those kids were working with the cops, they were dead.
“Civilians along the front of the warehouse,” Ray said in Brooks’s ear. “Entry on hold. All personnel, maintain your positions until my order.”
Brooks bit back a growl as he joined the rest of his team behind a Dumpster surrounded by piles of wood pallets and cardboard boxes. Another sniff told him the back side of the warehouse was still clear, but they were pressing their luck hanging around like this.
The original plan had been for Ray’s gang unit, along with officers from narcotics and K9, to converge on the front of the warehouse while Brooks and his SWAT team went in through the back. The idea was to execute the raid before anyone saw them coming. The longer they waited, the greater the chance of something screwing that up.
Beside Brooks, Connor’s eyes flashed gold, a sure sign his inner wolf was trying to get free. On the other side of him, Diego, Trey, and Remy started to get a little fired up, too. Even though Brooks had complete control of his animal side, at times like this, he had to admit he felt the urge to let the wolf out.
He blamed it on the hunters. It had been more than three weeks since the run-in with those assholes when they’d almost lost one of their pack, Zane Kendrick. Since then, the Pack had been on full alert waiting for the next attack, and they were all feeling the strain.
Brooks resisted the urge to extend his claws and fangs and focused on getting his team back under control.
“Take it down a notch, guys,” he growled at his packmates. “Between hunters trying to kill us, somebody in the DPD trying to sell us out, and a city full of werewolves depending on us for protection, we’re already dealing with enough shit. The last thing we need is some gangbanger’s video clip of one of us in midshift going viral on the internet.”
His teammates immediately got it together at the mention of that. Even Connor, the least experienced werewolf among the five of them, reined himself in. Brooks hated reminding them about all the negative crap going on lately, but one little mistake on any of their parts, and a lot of people were going to pay the price. They’d handled the hunters this last time, but now that there was someone inside the Dallas PD working with the assholes, this fight was only going to get worse before it got better.
“We’re cool,” Remy murmured in his N’Awlins accent.
