Chapter 1
“Officer down! Requesting immediate backup and paramedics,” a desperate voice shouted through the radio. “Repeat. Officer down. We have five shooters armed with automatic weapons. Three have already moved inside the nightclub—”
The rest of whatever the officer was going to say got cut off as rapid gunfire echoed over the radio. From where he sat in the rear passenger seat of the SUV listening to the bullets fly, SWAT Officer Hale Delaney cursed. Other voices drifted across the radio as more cops reached the scene only to quickly realize they were outgunned. Hearing them shout for backup and paramedics made Hale’s inner werewolf want to break out in the worst way.
“How far are we?” Hale asked, gripping the handle mounted above the seat and holding on for dear life as fellow werewolf Senior Corporal Carter Nelson steered the SWAT vehicle around the next corner, driving way too fast.
“Three miles and closing fast,” senior corporal and werewolf Trey Duncan responded calmly from the front passenger seat, his gaze locked on the vehicle’s GPS. “We’ll be there in a little over two minutes.”
Imagining how much damage a handful of people armed with automatic weapons could do in that amount of time, Hale didn’t think two minutes was going to be fast enough.
Pushing that thought aside, he did his best to ignore the sounds coming over the radio, focusing instead on counting the number of blocks between them and the nightclub. His efforts were wasted. There was no way to shut out the shouting, gunfire, and screams of terror.
In the front seats, both of his pack mates’ eyes glowed yellow-gold, a clear sign that their inner werewolves were trying to slip out as their anxiety built. Hale’s own inner wolf felt the same. He only prayed they arrived at the scene in time to do more than help with the wounded and cover up the dead.
“You think we’re dealing with the same people who’ve been terrorizing Dallas the past couple of weeks?” Carter asked, taking another turn so fast the tires of the SUV squawked as they slid across the pavement.
Hale snorted. “Five shooters hitting a nightclub full of people, all heavily armed with assault rifles and multiple-edged weapons. What do you think?”
Carter only grunted in agreement.
This would be their boldest move yet, though. First, there’d been the attack at a large outdoor party near Terrace Grove that ended with a dozen people dead, all of them with ties to the HillsideRiders, a local gang. Everyone assumed it was the beginning of a new turf war because the MO had fit the narrative. Five shooters, all of them big, muscular, and wearing tactical gear that obscured their faces and protected them from return fire. The way they’d gone straight after the most heavily armed members of the Riders, it made sense they were members of a rival gang.
The second incident had been against a small convenience store. Headquarters hadn’t made the connection to the first attack until the description of the same five heavily armed shooters had come through. Then they’d figured out that the store was a front for a gambling establishment run by the Russian Mafia and that all of the dead and injured were inked with known Russian crime tattoos. It was enough to toss the entire gang-war theory out the window and replace it with the thought that this was an even bigger war and that someone was making a move against all the different criminal elements in the city.
If that was true, then the attack on the club tonight made sense. It was a well-known gang hangout and served as neutral ground, where members of twenty or thirty different gangs would frequently gather. If someone wanted to make a dent in the criminal population of the city, that club was the place to do it. But the number of innocent people who would lose their lives as well was more than Hale wanted to think about.
Hale heard gunfire and screaming coming from inside the club even as Carter slid the SUV to a stop half a block short of the front entrance. The second SWAT vehicle carrying their pack mates Senior Corporal Mike Taylor and Officer Connor Malone passed them and came to a stop at an angle in front of the club’s doors, serving as a protective barricade.
As Hale shoved open his door and jumped out of the back seat, he realized a barricade wasn’t going to be necessary. While the area in front of the club was complete bedlam with people shouting and running everywhere, the shooters had already moved inside.
Hale scanned the area as he started forward, trying to see into every dark corner and alley while also keeping his gaze on all the people fleeing the club. Many of them were bleeding and even more were freaking out. He was pretty sure he saw a handgun or two among the crowd. But this was Texas, so people carrying weapons wasn’t exactly uncommon.
He reached the two Dallas Police Department patrol units parked nose to nose up on the curb in front of the club, doors wide-open, lights blazing, shattered glass lying everywhere. There were three injured cops on the ground near the doors. One was groaning in pain from a leg wound, but the other two were unconscious. His keen werewolfhearing picked up heartbeats, but they were both slower than they should have been.
Hale scooped up the cop with the slowest heart rate and sprinted back to the SWAT vehicles. Trey was there already, treating three injured people from the club. As one of the SWAT team’s medics, Trey was used to dealing with gunshot wounds, though he was admittedly more experienced with treating werewolves than non-supernaturals. But he simply needed to keep everyone alive until the scene was safe enough for paramedics to move in.
The moment Hale placed the injured cop on the ground, he shouted an alert to Trey that the guy was in bad shape, then he was racing back for the next wounded officer. He passed Connor on the way, carrying the other unconscious cop. When Hale reached the cop with the leg wound, he yanked the man’s belt off without preamble and strapped it tightly around the officer’s right thigh, then picked him up and ran over to Trey.
There were even more injured people from the club scattered around Trey and his medic bag now, and any other time Hale would have stayed to help. But the shooting and screams inside the club had only gotten worse, and Carter and Mike were in there on their own. It was time to go.
Hale had to urge several terrified people out of the club before he could force his way past the rest of the crowd trying to push their way out. If the areaoutside the building was pandemonium, inside was chaos beyond his imagination.
The place was dark except for the neon signs illuminating the bar and the strobe lights above the huge dance floor. The darkness didn’t keep Hale’s keen werewolf sight from seeing as clearly as if it was day, but the spastic lighting made a nightmarish scene all that much worse as people climbed over each other to reach the door. He couldn’t blame them, as five big men in heavy tactical gear moved through the still-crowded club shooting in what seemed an indiscriminate fashion.
But then Hale realized the attackersweren’tmerely blazing away at anything that moved. If he didn’t know better, he’d think they were only going after the most heavily armed opponents. In this crowd, that left them with a lot of options.
Carter and Mike were on the far side of the club, engaging with three of the black-clad attackers, leaving the other two to roam free through the crowd. Locking his sights on the nearest one, Hale shoved his way through the throng of panicked people. The huge man was pointing an assault rifle at a group of young men crouched down behind a table they’d flipped over—a table that wouldn’t come close to stopping the rounds that weapon fired.
Hale itched to pull his Sig Sauer .40 caliber as he moved closer, but in the crowded space he knew that wasn’t an option. No matter how accurate hewas with the handgun, the risk that he might hit a bystander was too great, considering how many innocents were around the shooter. So instead, Hale put his shoulder down and bulled through the crowd, the muscles of his legs and back beginning to twist and spasm as he partially shifted.
He was less than ten feet away when the guy with the assault rifle somehow picked up on his approach, spinning suddenly and bringing his weapon up and pointing straight at him.
With a growl, Hale launched himself the last few feet, knocking the barrel of the weapon downward just as it went off, bullets ricocheting off the concrete flooring. Praying the stray rounds didn’t hit anyone, he slammed into the big man’s chest at full speed.
It felt like hitting a brick wall. Hale felt the bones in his shoulder and chest crack as pain surged up and down his spine. Cursing, Hale took the man to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. He got a grip on the barrel of the assault rifle, ripping it away before another burst of gunfire nearly took his face off. With a heave and a snarl, he slung the weapon across the club, then turned all his attention on his opponent.
The man was back on his feet, circling him with what could only be called a bloodthirsty look in his dark eyes. Hale had studied Muay Thai and Krav Maga since he was seventeen, so he wasn’tconcerned about engaging in hand-to-hand combat, especially because he was a werewolf, but all it took was one punch from the guy to realize he was dealing with someone inhumanly strong. Even the glancing blow nearly broke his jaw. And when Hale slipped the man’s strikes and moved in to slam an elbow into his jaw, the guy barely seemed to notice.
