His need to protect her still at odds with his duty, Jay took off around the side of the house. The sounds of fighting grew louder as he approached the woods behind the barn, and he stopped and stripped off his clothes as quickly as possible.
As soon as he knelt and coaxed the slow burn of magic inside him into the conflagration that would bring his change, Jay caught sight of a man dragging a woman out of the trees. Her pink hair stood out in the moonlight, a bright spot of color against the dark forest.
Her attacker jerked to a halt, his head whipping toward Jay. His mouth curved into a feral smile, undoubtedly at catching Jay in the vulnerable moments just before a shift. But as the stranger took a step forward, the girl twisted, raking her nails across his cheek in a desperate attempt to escape.
He slapped her hard enough to drive her to her knees, and Jay took advantage of the man’s distraction to finish his transformation. Wild, instinctive satisfaction filled him. If the stranger thought him weak, that it would take him long minutes to struggle through the change from man to wolf, he’d be fatally disappointed.
Jay sprang forward with a growl.
The man spun, wrenching his body out of the path of Jay’s charge with an angry roar. The girl scrambled to her feet with the speed of a werewolf and bolted.
“Mae!” The shouted name rode an angry command, sizzling dominant power that ghosted past Jay and slammed into the girl’s back like a physical blow. She hit the ground on her knees, shaking. “Don’t run, darling. You and I are going to have a talk about all this disobedience.” The man whipped a knife out of his boot as he turned on Jay. “Just as soon as I teach this packless mutt a lesson.”
The knife looked normal, but it felt like magic. Jay circled, his teeth bared in a snarl as the man watched him, no hint of fear in his cruel eyes. When he moved, it was blindingly fast, the blade slashing toward Jay’s side.
The wicked edge found its mark, slicing a burning but shallow line across Jay’s ribs. Definitely magic, because a heaviness accompanied the pain, a stagnant weight instead of the delicate tickle of near-instantaneous healing. Jay twisted and snapped at the man’s arm, grazing skin with teeth just as sharp as the knife.
His opponent jerked back with a laugh. “Yeah, you feel it, don’t you? You can bite me and I’ll heal. You’ll just keep bleed—” Twigs snapped to their left, and the man lunged fast enough to get a handful of the girl’s pink hair and jerk her off her feet as she tried to run. “You treacherous bitch!”
The lunge stretched out the line of his body, leaving him low and open to attack. Jay dug his back legs into the soft earth and launched himself at the man’s throat. He closed his teeth on the vulnerable spot and felt flesh give and blood run hot as his momentum carried them both to the ground.
Another wolf snarled at the edge of the trees. Beneath Jay, his enemy struggled weakly. The girl kicked the knife away from his outstretched hand and grabbed it as she rolled to her feet. She held the blade awkwardly, as if she didn’t know how to use it, and backed away, brandishing the weapon at the new wolf.
The wolf ignored her and charged at Jay. The girl shouted one word, her voice high and panicked. “Zack!”
Jay took the full weight of the charging wolf in the shoulder and rolled. He snapped viciously at the wolf’s back legs and pushed up on his paws just in time to see three more wolves break out of the woods, a tall, bloodied man at their heels.
One of the new wolves dove toward Jay. A second lunged at the disheveled man, who caught the animal by the scruff of its neck and threw it toward the tree line with a roar of fury.
The creature hit a tree with a crack and fell to the ground, limp and twitching, but the man didn’t stop or even slow down. He reached for another, and the fight turned quick and ugly as the remaining wolves attacked low, over and over, desperate to gain an advantage.
Teeth tore at flesh. Claws raked through clothes and skin alike. The man seemed as oblivious to the pain as he was to the pink-haired girl’s broken noises of protest. He snapped necks and tore wolves apart, and when no more surged to take the place of the fallen, he whirled on Jay.
“Zack, no—” The girl stumbled forward. “He saved me. He killed Scott.”
The change was hard, sometimes impossible, when a fight had Jay riding high on adrenaline. He called it anyway, and the effort hit him like a sprint, left him clutching a stitch in one side and the fiery cut on the other. “Zack?” he panted in disbelief. “Zack Green?”
The man’s chest heaved. He wiped blood from his mouth before spitting on the ground. “Did you take care of the rest of them?”
Jay grabbed his pants and glanced around at the bodies scattered on the grass. “There are more?” As soon as his brain processed the thought, a cold chill gripped him. “Fuck.”
Eden.
Eden watched the spot by the house where Jay had disappeared and cursed her cowardice.
She should have told him. There’d been a moment when she’d wondered if he knew already, and she should have seized it. Spilled out the truth—the messy, unbelievable truth—even if it meant he’d never look at her the same way again.
All her starry-eyed daydreams of him would mean nothing if a werewolf tore out his throat.
Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The painful silence stretched out until Eden couldn’t handle it anymore. Had Jay heard something? If so, it had been too quiet for her to pick up, but what else could have driven him from the car? She’d read stories of cops having hunches, gut instincts that seemed to border on psychic ability, but almost all seemed based on subconscious recognition of clues and the voice of experience.
Maybe Jay had experience with werewolves.
Maybe he was one.
She choked on a hysterical laugh and sank lower in the seat. It should have been ridiculous to imagine the Chief of Police as a big bad wolf, but the more she thought about it, the less she wanted to laugh.
Grace. Strength. Power. Her cousin had shared all of those traits, along with Jay’s knack for knowing when trouble was near. But if Jay was a wolf, he was better at hiding his darker side than Zack had been. Everyone in town had recognized the feral edge under her cousin’s anger. They’d treated him like a dangerous animal, one that might maul them at any second.
And, to be fair, he could have.
“Jay Ancheta might be a werewolf,” she muttered out loud, forcing herself to acknowledge the absurdity of her own thoughts by giving them voice. Cringe-inducing, maybe…but with the night heavy and still around her, it didn’t feel absurd.
She eased her hand away from the gun and reached into her purse in search of her phone. Her fingers had just brushed the edge of the case when a low snarl broke the silence.
“Shit.” She dropped her purse and snatched up the gun, her pulse pounding. A man with dark hair slammed against the driver’s side window, and she couldn’t hold back her shriek of fear. Another clawed its way free of her throat as the man tugged at the door handle.
Locked. She’d remembered to lock them when Jay left, and her relief lasted all of five seconds before the man tore the door from its hinges in a screech of protesting metal.
Werewolves. It had to be. The only part of her mind not shaking in terror knew that nothing else explained the strength it would take to rip pieces from the vehicle.
It was that cool, calm part of her mind that pulled the trigger.
She’d braced herself as well as she could, but she still wasn’t prepared for the recoil. Her hands jerked, sending her second shot through the windshield, and the wolf lunged into the car and ripped the gun from her hands before she could hiss out a pained breath. By the time she realized what had happened, his hands had closed around her upper arms.
Her shoulder crashed into the steering wheel as he dragged her across the seat. Fighting his grip was futile; he pulled her into the open and hoisted her up so she was face to face with his glowing yellow eyes.
Those eyes narrowed as he buried his nose in her neck and inhaled. “You don’t smell like his bitch,” the man muttered. “You’re just a lousy f**king human.”
The words didn’t make sense. Had he expected her to smell like her cousin? Or could he smell another wolf in the SUV? Jay—
Jay should have come back by now.
She pushed the useless thought away and rammed her knee into her attacker’s balls. He howled his pain, his rage, and threw her to the ground like a broken toy. His clothes ripped as he shifted, and he hit the ground on all fours, his hands and feet already turning to paws. Eden found herself staring into an open, snarling muzzle full of razor-sharp teeth.
She scrambled back, kicking at his nose when he lunged. His teeth closed on the heel of her boot, and she twisted and tried to jerk away, wrenching her ankle in the process.
Tears sprung to her eyes, but she bit her lip and pulled again, dragging her foot free of her shoe. Hope surged as she twisted again and landed on her hands and knees. If she could get under the car or to the house—
A growl ripped through the air a second before a heavy weight crashed into her, driving her to the ground. Claws dug into her body, but the pain disappeared under a flood of agony as the wolf sank sharp teeth into her arm.
Screaming. Running. A woman, a brunette dressed in flannel, yelling as she kicked at the wolf. “No!”
The wolf reared back, and the woman swung the butt end of a shotgun so hard it sounded like a solid home run when it connected with the animal’s head. He tumbled off Eden and rolled away just far enough for the woman to ready the shotgun as he rose.
She fired once and the wolf staggered back with a howling whine. She worked the slide, fired again, and the wolf fell.
Eden struggled to her knees, her back on fire and her arm throbbing. “Where’s Jay? The man I came with—”
The woman tore off her flannel shirt and wrapped it around Eden’s wound. “We have to find Zack.”
“Zack’s here?” It was a stupid question, but it was hard to think when every heartbeat made the pain worse. “You’re with him?”