Chapter One
SPLINTERS OF GLASSwashed out of Cade’s hair and fell onto the tiled floor between his feet. They glittered in among the suds the water swirled around the drain. Cade curled his toes and felt grit under his feet.
Most of the time, Cade was glad he didn’t remember what the wolf did. No one needed to know exactly what it was like to eat a seagull; the taste of the leftovers between his teeth when he’d woken up had been bad enough. And if Cadehadeaten Marlow last full moon, the last thing he’d have wanted was the gory details.
Cade would put money onthatbeing one of the rare times that reality really would have been worse than anything his imagination could come up with. And his imagination had worked overtime on that one.
Sometimes though—Cade flicked the pressure on the shower to high and let needles of hot water batter his head and shoulders—he had to wonder what the hell his furry self had gotten up to.
“….”
The white noise of the shower almost drowned out the sound of someone’s voice. Cade just caught the ghost of it from the other room. He slapped the water off and raked his fingers through his hair to squeeze the water out.
“Hold on,” he said, voice pitched to carry, as he stepped out of the shower. “I need to get dressed.”
“It can wait,” Lem said. There was a pause, and then he added, “You won’t be happy if it does, though.”
Clean clothes were folded neatly on the table next to the sink. It would take Cade a couple of minutes to dry off and get dressed. There wasn’t much that couldn’t wait that long… But Lem knew that, and he’d still interrupted.
Cade grabbed a towel and slung it around his hips as he padded out into the office. The morning sun bathed the stark gray and black room with stripes of honey gold light. Lem was perched on the arm of the couch, a tablet balanced on his crooked knee.
“What?” Cade asked.
“You know,” Lem said. “If you aren’t going to take the full moon off, you could get an apartment in the city. Houses, even. Nice ones.”
There were. Except the farmhouse was the dream. Everyone had one in their line of work: The girl back home. The boy you messaged every night. Parents you wanted to help in their old age or prove wrong about everything. It didn’t matter what it was; you just had to have something to make the shit parts of it all—the bag jobs, the dirty jobs—worth it.
For Cade, it had been a farmhouse in the country with room for family and a BBQ on the back porch that he lit every weekend. Now he had the farmhouse and the BBQ, but he’d never gotten around to lighting it.
No family either. Except for Lem, who considered the suburbs a trip into the wilderness.
“That feels like giving in,” Cade said. “Once I get a new COO in, someone to take up a bit of the slack, I’ll be able to get out there more.”
From the skeptical look on Lem’s face he didn’t buy that assurance, but he didn’t argue the point either. Instead, he tapped the tablet screen, turned it around, and held it out to Cade.
“…of course, it was a Blue Moon,” a rigorously handsome man with carefully unobjectionable styling told the camera. Or his phone. One of the two. “Perhaps that had something to do with the unfortunate events that rocked San Diego’s Night Shift last night.”
Despite the heat that lingered in his lightly scalded skin, still pink from the shower, Cade felt a cold sweat break out on him. He felt his throat tighten as he prepared himself for the blunt announcement of Marlow’s death. No one ever bothered to sugarcoat it when someone on the Night Shift died. It wasn’t as if anyone would be surprised.
The camera shifted to a grainy, zoomed-in shot of a big blond man perched on the back of an ambulance. He was shirtless, with stark purple and blue bruises blotched over his pale chest and smeared down over his stomach. The paramedics kept trying to slip an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, but he pushed it away impatiently as he talked to the woman next to him.
After a moment, the camera pulled back to show the Night Shift in formation around the ambulance, as wolves snarled and tested the line around them.
“Officer Cordell Franklin, a veteran Night Shift officer who served in both San Francisco and San Diego, was reportedlyshottonight during the performance of his duties,” the man said. His voice wobbled with borderline inappropriate excitement. A lot happened during the full moon, but most of it only had limited local interest. People tuned in the morning after to find out what happened to their house/wife/neighbor’s extension, but this could get some airtime. “At the moment, we don’t know exactly what happened, but we have heard that another Night Shift officer was on the scene and is now being sought by his colleagues. A source has told us that the officer in question is Kit Marlow, who was involved with the corruption scandal that saw Lieutenant Ned Piper stripped of his commission and imprisoned. Perhaps, in light of tonight’s events, there was even more to that story. This is Dalton Reeves for—”
The clip ended abruptly. Relief washed over Cade, and he felt his knees weaken with it. He’d worry about what had gone down last night later. Right now, Marlow was alive and the Night Shift was corrupt. Same as yesterday. That was better than what Cade had expected to hear.
A frame-up could be fixed; death couldn’t.
“Okay,” he said as he handed the tablet back. “When you said it couldn’t wait, I thought someone was dead.”
Lem shrugged and tapped at the screen. “Well, the word on the neighborhood forums has it that someone is,” he said. “The resident’s ex-boyfriend, Barney ‘Something,’ was brought out in a body bag after the Night Officer who got shot. The verdict is that Night Shift killed Barney and that it was about time. He’d apparently come to piss on the property every full moon since he broke up with the guy that lived there.”
“It happens,” Cade said. “Night Shift won’t kill him for pissing, but if he escalated—”
Lem held up a finger to shush him. “One problem with that,” he said. “I got the ex’s name from his rental contract and ran a quick background check on him. He made reservations at the Hilton Bayfront for three nights, the full moon getaway deal. Sunset check-in.”
So no one had been at the property when Barney got there. That would make it hard to justify the kill. Technically, Night Shift’s remit allowed them to deploy deadly force in defense of themselves or another, but self-defense was a hard sell. The Night Shift’s lives were in danger from the minute they went out on the streets, so they could kill who they wanted and claim self-defense.
