As they stood there eating cookies and drinking the almond milk Jenna poured for them—which he was amazed to realize tasted surprisingly good—they talked some more about what had happened earlier, both of them wondering if there was more than one of those creatures living beneath the city, what it had been planning to do with the unhoused woman it had captured, and whether it lived directly below Skid Row or merely hunted there. The questions Jenna continued to pose made it obvious she’d spent a lot of time thinking about this thing.
Once the bag of Oreos was properly demolished, he pulled out his cell phone, quickly found Hale’s number in his contacts, then hit the Call button.
“Dammit, Trevor,” his friend grumbled after a few rings. “You’d better have a good reason for calling me at two o’clock in the frigging morning.”
“You know I wouldn’t be calling if I didn’t,” Trevor said. “I’ve got a situation out here and I need some help.”
Hale cursed. “Don’t tell me that you’ve screwed up this thing with Jenna already. You’ve only been out there a day. Even you couldn’t have messed up that quickly.”
“No,” Trevor said. “And if I weren’t so focused on what’s going on here, I’d be offended by that.”
“So what is going on?” Hale asked, fully awake and serious now. “And what can I do to help?”
Trevor breathed a sigh of relief. Unconditional and no-questions-asked support. That was what it meant to be part of a pack. He composed his thoughts, trying to figure out the best way to explain all this, without Jenna hearing something she shouldn’t—specifically that the SWAT team was made up of werewolves.
“I’ve run into a supernatural creature out here in LA—possibly more than one of them—and it’s more than I can deal with on my own. Can you talk to Gage and see if he can send some help out?”
Gage Dixon was the commander of the Dallas SWAT team. He was also the alpha of their pack, which made him the alpha of a bunch of other alphas. How he put up with all their crap was anyone’s guess, but he did, and that was all that mattered.
“Damn, dude,” Hale groaned. “Only you could go out to LA for vacation and stumble across a supernatural creature. At least tell me that Jenna isn’t involved. Connor will lose his mind if he finds out.”
Trevor hesitated but knew he couldn’t hide that particular detail. “Actually, Jenna’s right in the middle of it all.” He glanced at Jenna to see her eyeing him curiously. “The creature I tangled with is the same kind of thing that grabbed her and Connor’s sister a decade ago, and it’s almostcertainly taken other people since then. We barely stopped it from kidnapping someone tonight.”
Rather than play a game of literal telephone, Trevor thumbed the speaker button so Jenna could tell Hale about how the creature had grabbed Hannah in the alley ten years ago. Trevor then told him about chasing the thing underground earlier that evening, going into detail about the creature’s impervious skin and the way it could apparently dig through reinforced concrete.
“Jenna did some sculptures of the creature. I’ll send you pics after we get done talking so you can show them to Gage. I’m also going to head over to Davina’s club tomorrow and see if she knows what we’re up against and how to fight it, because going toe-to-toe with the thing definitely didn’t work.”
“How many of us do you think you’ll need as backup?” Hale asked.
“Three should be good. We might need weapons, too,” Trevor said, then added, “And it goes without saying that Connor can’t know anything about this.”
“I figured that,” Hale said. “Unfortunately, the more people who know about this, the harder it’s going to be to keep your secret from the Pack. But I’ll do my best.”
“I appreciate it.”
Trevor reminded Hale that he’d send him the photos, then hung up.
“Okay, what the heck just happened?” Jenna demanded. “You tell Hale—who seems to be a rational person—that you got into a fight with a supernatural baboon with monstrous fangs and claws, and he didn’t even bat an eye. While we’re at it, who’s Davina, how can she help, and why did Hale refer to your SWAT team as a pack?”
Trevor thought he’d been ready for all Jenna’s questions until she asked the one about the Pack. He barely remembered Hale even using the word and was at a complete loss when it came to explaining it. He couldn’t very well tell her that he was a werewolf. Not right now anyway. She already had more than enough to process at the moment. He’d tell her soon.
Before the poor excuse was even half finished in his head, Trevor was already berating himself for being a coward. Jenna deserved to know the truth, and it wasn’t like he’d ever have a better time than now to bring it up. A little voice in the back of Trevor’s head insisted he was withholding the information to protect her, but that was crap and he knew it. After the life she’d been forced to live, the truth was that Jenna was more than strong enough to deal with his little furry secret. Bottom line, he was being a chicken about this, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why.
Okay, that was probably another lie.
If he was being honest with himself, Trevorwould say that his hesitation to come clean with Jenna about this was rooted in fear. Fear that she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him once she knew what he was. He had no idea where this fear of rejection came from, but it was there all the same. It would have been nice if he had time to stand here and explore what his major malfunction on this topic might be, but Jenna was looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer, so he decided to go with the first—and most simple—explanation that came to mind.
And keep lying to her…and himself.
He pulled up his T-shirt to expose the left side of his chest. He almost laughed when Jenna’s eyes widened, preferring to think it was his muscles she was enamored with and not the tattoo there.
“Everyone gets a tat of a wolf’s head when we join the SWAT team,” he said, glancing down at the image of the wolf on his chest, eyes blazing and fangs exposed. “It shows that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves. Something even more than a team—a pack.”
Jenna reached out and lightly ran a finger along the dark lines of the tat. He had to admit he liked the contact and would have gladly let her do what she was doing for the rest of the night. “I guess that makes sense. The artwork of this tattoo is exquisite.”
As if just realizing she was caressing his chest,she quickly took her hand away to reach up and tuck her hair behind her ear.
“What about the other stuff?” she asked. “Why do I get the feeling that describing that monster to Hale wasn’t a big deal for him? Now that I think about it, you didn’t freak out the way I expected you would, either.”
