But while the assholes had done a lot of violence and made one hell of a mess, the Pack had come out on top. Some of the hunters had gotten away. In fact, Rachel was still where she’d been watching the other vehicle’s taillights disappear into the distance. Oliver was dead, though, and there were a lot less hunters in the world than there used to be.
The battle looked like it was over for tonight.
Then Brooks heard the sound of approaching sirens, and he realized this evening was just getting started.
Chapter 19
“The rear loading dock is all clear,” Brooks whispered into the radio, as he, Connor, and Diego slipped between the three tractor trailer trucks parked behind the Sovereign Row industrial building and headed for the big roll-up doors that lined the side of the place. Two of those doors were wide open, but it didn’t help much. Between the awful rattle and clank of conveyor belts and the harsh, burning stench of chemicals, Brooks couldn’t say if there was one person in the warehouse or twenty.
“Front lobby is clear, too,” Trey said into his earpiece. “Ready to move when you give the word.”
Trey, Remy, and several members of the small task force entry team had headed for the main entrance a few minutes ago. They all assumed there’d be at least one gang member there standing guard, but apparently, the new gang boss was getting cocky.
“Side door is locked,” Ray said over the radio. “Give us a second.”
Brooks motioned his teammates behind the trucks, glancing at his watch as they waited for Ray to give the word. As they crouched down beside a trailer up close to the loading dock, where it was unlikely anyone would see them, he glanced at his guys, noticing how tired they looked. The attack on the SWAT compound last night had taken a lot out of everyone.
Trey and Alex had spent hours digging bullets out of every member of the Pack and each other. The synthetic wolfsbane wasn’t deadly to them any longer, thanks to the vaccine, but that didn’t mean it was fun getting shot with it. Their bodies still had to detox the crap out of their systems, reminding Brooks a lot of what it used to feel like to be hungover. He decided it wasn’t anything he missed.
Beside him, Connor leaned against the trailer and closed his eyes. Brooks moved a little closer in case he had to catch his packmate before he face-planted on the concrete. Connor was functioning on little more than adrenaline fumes at the moment and probably shouldn’t have even been on the raid, but there was no one to take his place. The truth of the matter was that everyone on the team was just as exhausted right now.
Last night had been filled with a steady stream of questions from Internal Affairs, the city manager, half the city council, and the U.S. Marshals. As if that wasn’t enough, then the frigging FBI had shown up. Because apparently the whole thing had looked like a terrorist attack to them.
Not that Brooks was surprised to see so many high-ranking people on the scene. It wasn’t every day the chief of police of a major U.S. city attempted to assassinate members of his own SWAT team. Then there was Curtis’s alleged involvement in the prison break. That didn’t go over well with the city officials either.
And everyone from each of the aforementioned agencies had wanted to know what the hell had happened at the compound. Why would the chief of police want to kill them? What did SWAT know about the prison break? Who the hell were all the dead people with automatic weapons? How did Oliver end up with a broken neck? Why was there so much blood everywhere but so few wounded cops?
Brooks and his teammates had dealt with situations like this before—maybe not on this scale—so they had experience covering for the strange things that happened to them. They kept their stories simple and to the point and never elaborated on anything. That had earned them a lot of dubious looks, but it wasn’t like anyone was going to suspect they were werewolves.
The marathon interrogation session hadn’t ended until around nine o’clock that morning. Even then, there’d been no rest for any of them. Half the team had been sent out to provide SWAT support to the cops responding to all the hotline tips coming in claiming to know where Curtis, Frasheri, Engler, and the four hunters who escaped might be. The other half of the team had started digging out the armory building, recovering as many weapons and pieces of equipment as they could. It had been miserable, dirty, smelly work, but it had to be done. Without the weapons in that armory, they were nearly worthless to the department. By the time they were done, Brooks had reeked. Even after showering twice, he still smelled like smoke and ashes.
The sun had been going down on a really long day, and he was looking forward to getting home—and Selena, who’d finally agreed to go to his place and get some rest after spending the night along with Lana and his other packmates’ significant others in the small dorm room of sorts in the admin building where the team could catch some shut-eye if they needed to—when his cell had rung. It had been Ruben, giving him this address on Sovereign Row, saying it was where the gang was making the spiked energy drink. According to the kid, the man who’d taken over and consolidated most of the local gangs would be there overseeing the movement of several truckloads of the stuff. Apparently, they were shipping it out of state.
Gage had offered Brooks half the team, but instead, he’d stuck with the four guys who’d been with him on this from the start. And Zane.
“Side door is open,” Zane’s calm voice murmured over the line. “We’re ready to go.”
Brooks had told Gage he needed Zane along to handle task force coordination. He’d said Zane wouldn’t be going in with the entry team, but that had been a lie. One Gage had almost certainly seen right through.
Zane had risked his life for Selena, and there was no way in hell Brooks was ever going to forget it. If that meant taking a risk on this raid and letting Zane take part, he’d do it in a second. That said, he’d put Zane with Ray’s team, figuring his friend wouldn’t be able to get himself into any trouble if he was stuck with the slower moving team of human cops.
Brooks nudged Connor. His eyes snapped open immediately, a light gold ring around the edges of his pupils.
“We go in five seconds,” Ray called out.
Brooks gave his packmates a nod, then led them around the trailer and onto the loading dock.
“Three…two…one…go!” Ray shouted.
The moment they were through the door, Brooks and his team spread out slightly as they moved toward the center of the building. The chemical smell was even worse inside the warehouse, making his eyes water. The scent of fentanyl was predominant, and Brooks wondered briefly if he and the others could get high from breathing in the fumes.
The mechanical noise coming from the endless miles of moving conveyor belts was unreal, too, and as they slipped deeper into the building, weaving around the belts, heavy equipment, and half-stacked pallets of Buzz energy drink, Brooks realized their greatest werewolf advantages—namely their senses of smell and hearing—were completely neutralized in there. They’d be forced to do this the old-fashioned way, depending on their training and instincts like every other cop in here.
He was surprised how uncomfortable he was at that thought. He hadn’t been forced to deal with a situation like this without access to his enhanced senses in a long time. Not since Gulfport in fact. And he didn’t like to think about how that had ended.
They were nearly to the middle of the warehouse before they saw a guy pushing a pallet of shrink-wrapped cans toward the locking dock. The gangbanger took one look at them and reached for the handgun shoved in the waistband of his pants. The moment he yanked it out, everything went crazy, as shooting and shouting immediately filled the cavernous space.
Connor took a round in the shoulder, but they got the gangbanger down and zip-tied without killing him. Then they were moving, Brooks calling out updates over the radio as he came to grips with the sheer scale of this drug operation. There were dozens of pallets loaded with the spiked energy drink, not counting what had already been loaded into the trucks outside. If they distributed the drink like they intended, the number of overdoses would be mind-boggling.
