“I didn’t bring this up to get your pity,” Mike said. “I’m telling you so that you’ll get your head out of your ass and realize that you only get one soul mate. Don’t screw up and waste the time you’re given, figuring you can make up for it later. There may not be a later.”
Carter didn’t say anything, mostly because he wasn’t sure what to say. Thankfully, the server came by to refill their coffee, giving him a chance to think.
“So, how do I do this without screwing everything up?” he asked after the woman had left.
“Step one—stop overthinking everything,” Mike said, turning his attention back to his food. “Step two—tell Hadley how you feel and trust that she’s going to be there for you.”
Carter already trusted Hadley and telling her how he felt about her shouldn’t be that difficult now that they’d gotten past the soul mate conversation. The difficult part was to stop thinking so damn much.
While they finished breakfast, they talked about the supernaturals with Strickland and how to handle them, as well as Kat’s chances of finding someone willing to take on Kamden’s skinwalker essence.
“It makes me wonder if anyone has ever attempted to turn a werewolf back into a human,” Carter mused, pushing the last of his pancakes around the plate to soak up all of the syrup. “And before you ask, no, I wouldn’t consider doing it, but I imagine Hadley’s brother would have jumped at the chance.”
“I can understand that,” Mike admitted, sitting back in the booth and sipping his coffee. “Though to be honest, I’ve always been more worried about someone coming up with a way to turn someone into a werewolf than the reverse.”
Carter grimaced, wondering why someone would be willing to put themselves through the trauma it’d take to activate the werewolf gene. “Hopefully, that never happens.”
After another cup of coffee—and an argument over who’d pay the check because they both wanted to do it—they left the diner, Mike to head back to the SWAT compound, while Carter swung by Kat’s shop to pick up Hadley.
Carter was halfway to his SUV when a familiar scent reached him. His omega usually discarded almost everything he smelled unless it was something interesting—or dangerous. Right now, he wasn’t sure which this scent was, and he stopped mid-stride as he tried to figure it out.
Mike halted, too, clearly smelling the same thing Carter had.
On the far side of the street, the same two men Carter had seen a few weeks ago stood near the mouth of the alley. Both of them were tall and fit, one blond and the other dark-haired. That’s when Carter realized they smelled like werewolves, though something wasn’t quite right about the scent.
Before Carter or Mike could even consider taking a step in their direction, the men turned as one and disappeared down the alley. Mike moved to follow, but Carter reached out a hand to stop him.
“Don’t bother,” Carter said. “We’ll never catch them, especially not if they shift into their wolf forms.”
Mike swung around to look at Carter, his expression calculating. “Those are the werewolves you and Hale saw before?”
Carter nodded. He and Hale had been coming out of the diner when they’d picked up the strange werewolf-like scent. When the men had run, he and Hale had given chase. He and Hale had almost caught up to them when the men shifted into their wolf forms in the span of one stride to the next. Pack werewolves couldn’t do that. Gage was the fastest at a full shift and it still took him fifteen seconds.
“Do you think they were watching the diner—or us?” Carter asked. “I mean, they were in the exact same place the last time I saw them.”
“It could be the diner, though I don’t think we’ll get that lucky since it seems like there’s always someone after us,” Mike said. “Regardless, I’ll talk to Gage about it. In the meantime, watch your back, huh? Until we know who those werewolves are and what they want, we all need to be on high alert.”
Carter cursed as he headed to his Hummer. Couldn’t anything ever be easy?
* * * * *
“You never did tell me if anything interesting happened at Kat’s shop,” Carter said to Hadley as they walked into his apartment that night.
After picking her up at Kat’s, they’d stopped by her office for a little while so she could see some patients, then to the SWAT compound, where they ended up getting takeout along with some of Carter’s pack mates.
She considered the question for a moment before letting out a sigh. “I don’t think interesting is the word I’d use. Difficult, verging on impossible, is what I’d probably go with instead.”
“That sounds like a long story,” Carter said, walking to the kitchen and coming out with two glasses, a carton of milk, and a package of Oreo cookies. “Which calls for the appropriate snack.”
Hadley laughed, no longer shocked at Carter’s need to eat. It was clearly a werewolf thing. She had to admit, it’d be nice to eat the kind of stuff he and his pack mates did and not have to worry about the consequences.
“So, what happened?” Carter said after they were both sitting on the couch with ridiculously large glasses of milk in front of them.
“Well, I should probably get the bad news over with first,” Hadley said as she reached for a cookie. “Remember when Kat told us that she’d need some kind of living vessel to absorb Kamden’s skinwalker side? Well, it turns out it’ll probably need to be another skinwalker.”
Carter winced as he finished the Oreo in his hand. “So we’re looking for a skinwalker willing to…I don’t know…take on a double dose of it? I can’t imagine the odds are good of that.”
“Probably even worse than you think,” Hadley agreed. “According to Lydia, the entire supernatural community has picked up on the rumors about some guy hunting a skinwalker in Dallas. Because of that, we’ll have a hard time finding another one within three hundred miles. No skinwalker wants to risk accidentally becoming a target for this hunter guy.” She sipped her milk. “Kat isn’t giving up, though. Kamden, on the other hand, is in panic mode, while Lydia’s about ready to say screw the whole thing.”
