That small gain she’d thought was there after the apology was gone again, and she hated the way he refused to look at her. It was hard to believe that only a little while ago they’d been in each other’s arms, making love and trusting each other. How could things change so fast?
“I just wondered if it went further than that,” she said after a moment. “If some werewolves could shift all the way. You know, like in some of the movies when they turn into wolves?”
She realized how stupid that sounded the second the words were out of her mouth, but then noticed Zane wasn’t laughing.
“The simple answer to your question is yes,” he said, finally looking at her. “Some alphas can shift completely into wolf form—four legs, bushy tail, and the big, long snout.”
She tried to keep her mouth from hanging open and failed. “Seriously? You can turn into a wolf? You’re an alpha, right?”
“I’m an alpha, but I can’t shift any further than what you saw earlier,” Zane said. “And before you ask, the basic theory is that only alphas who are—I guess the best way to put it would be—comfortable in their own skin can handle a full shift. As you can probably imagine, that’s not really how anyone would describe me.”
All Alyssa had to think about was how many times Zane had called himself a monster to understand what he was getting at. It was too bad. She had a sudden image of him with a thick wolf coat and a bushy tail and realized she would have loved to see that. The tattoo she’d seen on his chest made a lot more sense now, that was for sure.
“Is there anything else you want to know about werewolves?” he asked, his mouth curving slightly, as if he could tell what she was thinking.
She thought about the injury they’d spent so much time talking about the night before. “Was the damage to your arm caused by a silver bullet?”
Zane chuckled a little at that. She considered that show of amusement another step forward. Okay, maybe half a step.
“You really do watch too much TV, don’t you?” he quipped. She was embarrassed at how even that lukewarm response made a wave of pleasure blossom inside her. “No, it wasn’t silver they shot me with. In fact, silver doesn’t hurt any worse than lead does, though neither is fun to get shot with. In the case of my arm, the hunters developed a concentrated form of synthetic poisonous wolfsbane they put in their bullets. They knew what they were doing when they made it. Just a flesh wound in the arm nearly killed me. The doctor had to put me into a medically induced coma until he could come up with an antidote.”
She tried to hide it, but Alyssa knew Zane noticed her hyperventilating a little at the thought of him lying in a hospital bed, cocooned with tubes and wires, little boxes beeping and blinking in the background.
“Now that you know all of my secrets, what about you?” he murmured.
Alyssa forced herself to slow her breathing. “I don’t think my secrets compare to yours. There’s nothing special about me. I don’t have claws or fangs. I can’t fight a vampire hand-to-hand or track a bad guy by scent.”
“I wasn’t looking for a competition. Tell me about the stuff you hid from me before. Like how you ended up hunting monsters for the FBI.”
Monsters.
She hated how often he used that word. She’d never thought of it as being a loaded term until he said it. The fact that he used it interchangeably for both the things she’d been forced to kill and when referring to himself bothered her the most.
“It started when I was assigned to the Sacramento field office.” Crap, she was violating so many rules by doing this, but she was going to do it anyway. Outside of her boss, no one knew this story, not even Christine. “I was assigned to a serial killer task force looking for a guy they called the ‘Sacramento Hunter.’ He liked to grab his victims, hold them for a couple days, then let them go so he could chase them on foot and kill them. The guy was vicious as hell, too. He tore his victims to shreds.”
“He was a supernatural creature?”
She shook her head, remembering that exciting yet terrifying case. “I don’t know. Actually, I never even saw the killer until he was dead. The supernatural creature I saw was the agent sent in from the Department of Homeland Security. The moment I saw him, I knew there was something different about him. He did things a person shouldn’t be able to do. He ran way too fast, seemed to be able to see in the dark, and could track the killer by scent. When he finally caught the killer, the guy was torn to pieces the same as the killer’s victims.”
Alyssa saw wheels spinning in Zane’s head as he thought about that. “Do you think the guy from DHS was a werewolf?”
She nodded. “I didn’t realize it at the time. I just thought he was different. But knowing what I know about you now, yeah, I think maybe he was a werewolf.”
“What happened?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“Being the dutiful and conscientious FBI agent I was at the time, I put all my thoughts and suspicions in my official report, suggesting the FBI investigate the DHS agent.”
Zane winced.
“Yeah, not the brightest thing I’ve ever done,” she agreed. “As you can imagine, I got a visit from some extremely senior agents who bluntly told me if I didn’t change my report, I’d be destroying my career. When I stood firm, they put my entire report through a shredder right in front of me, then politely escorted me to the airport and put me on a plane for DC. Several other very polite agents met me at the gate, then took me to meet my new team leader—Nathan McKay. That was the night I learned there are all kinds of things that go bump in the night and that I’d been assigned to a joint FBI and CIA team called the Special Threat Assessment Team. Though to be honest, most of the people I work with have unofficially replaced the wordSpecialwithSupernaturalbecause of all the strange things we end up dealing with.”
“You mean, like theX-Files?” Zane arched a brow. “You’re not making this up, are you?”
She shook her head. “Nope, I’m not making it up. It’s what I’ve been doing for the past year or so. Investigating cases involving things the regular cops can’t—or won’t—handle.”
“Like vampires and werewolves?”
Alyssa nodded. “I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had to deal with something quite this extreme, but yes, you get the basic idea.”
