Page 1 of Targeted By Fate
1
BOAZ
“We have a problem.”
Alpha ended the call in his typical abrupt fashion, but he’d said all he needed to, and I had to hotfoot it to pack headquarters.
My mind whirred as I jumped in the car. Passing the bakery which my former lover owned, I spied him through the window, grinning at his new husband. I was happy for him because what we’d had… well, it’d scratched an itch. I wasn’t looking for a mate, and being a pack Beta, I was awaiting my fated.
And the baker? He was human and had been looking for a good time. It wasn’t a big deal when we stopped seeing one another, and I was glad he’d found a guy who loved him, something I wasn’t capable of.
But as I zoomed past a set of lights when they turned amber, my mind switched from a former bedmate to business. Whatever was going on, Alpha wanted me to handle it.
Unlike my brothers, I was a company man in that I was pack, through and through. They were in the private sector, even though they were still part of the pack and always would be. Unless they did something so horrendous, something that went against everything we stood for, that violated our pack code and Alpha kicked them out.
Knowing my bros, I doubted that would happen. They were argumentative, creative, sassy and forward-thinking, but they obeyed and stayed within the boundaries of what was acceptable to the pack, sort of.
Again I quashed thoughts of my family and concentrated on getting to headquarters. If humans were aware shifters existed, they’d probably imagine us meeting in a dingy alley or a cave in the woods. But our pack, Crescent Moon, owned a spanking-new building, all five floors.
Alpha was standing in the boardroom studying a laptop balanced on one hand. Unusually for him, his hair was in disarray and one button on his shirt was undone. He must have been shifting, likely outside the city, when he got a call or message, and he’d come straight here rather than going home.
“Boaz, what took you so long?” Alpha hadn’t glanced up, but he had scented me. He turned the laptop toward me, and I scanned the text and the accompanying images. There was a sharp intake of breath—from me—as I peered at the gruesome scene.
“Shifters?”
He nodded.
Not surprising. Unless shifters had been involved, Alpha would not have called me.
The photos were from Pulsepoint, a club that shifters frequented. I’d enjoyed evenings there, but I hadn’t been much since I was promoted to Beta.
The grotesque images were of men and women, their faces frozen with exaggerated expressions, reminding me of gargoyles, arms and legs at awkward angles and the skin around their throat and mouths gouged as though they had been clawing for breath. A pinkish foam circled their mouths, and they were drenched in blood
My belly churned, and I told my wolf to control it because I couldn’t throw up in front of Alpha. Later, when I was alone, I’d grieve the loss of my fellow shifters.
“This isn’t the bear shifters, is it?” The bear den, formally headed by Alpha Germaine, sold weed. Or used to. They’d ordered the hit on my now brother-in-law, Rhodes.
“No. Some new group who arrived in town recently, and they’ve been pushing sales at nightclubs.” He continued by saying other Alphas in town had reported their members being offered this new wonder drug. “But until now, it was just another recreational drug joining the buffet of what was already available.
“Someone laced it or swapped it to hurt shifters specifically.” It wasn’t a question. I’d leaped to the conclusion, and until I was shown evidence that contradicted it, I was sticking with the theory.
Shifters had lived in harmony with humans, mainly because humans weren’t aware of our existence. But if they stumbled onto our kind, would they be so threatened they’d kill us? It was a possibility.
But my theory was a drug so potent that it would fell a shifter and quickly had to have been created by other shifters. Why? To start a war? Because they wanted to destroy us? There were numerous possibilities, but people other than me could figurethatout.
Even without Alpha issuing an order, I understood my purpose: to hunt down and eliminate the culprits. Alpha hadn’t asked the other Betas because I was his chosen successor, though I wouldn’t be if I messed this up.
“Find who did this and end them.”
I had the night, any longer and Alpha might assign someone else to do the job. But I had a fire in my belly, a rage that was intensifying by the minute, and when I found the perp, I’d kill him or them slowly, making sure they were conscious for each bone-breaking, blood-spattering second.
After sending a brief text to three of my people, I drove to the nightclub, and not bothering to park, I braced myself because the scent of death strangled me so I gasped for breath, and it pushed me back against the car. My body sagged as the stench clogged my nostrils.
Taking deep breaths got more air into my lungs, but I sniffed my clammy skin. The air reeked of blood, and I imagined microscopic pieces of shifter flesh filtering through the air. Gods, I couldn’t throw up, not as my men pulled up and jumped out of the car.
There was no need for a phone call, an ID, or a punch in the jaw. One glance at us and even the lowest ranking cop, manning the line of yellow tape, let us through. I noted their trembling hands. Oh yeah, they might not know what we were but we radiated power, and no one dared stop us.
Unlike human detectives, there was no need to issue my men with a list of instructions. They knew what to do. While our eyes and ears worked overtime, it was our noses that would detect the scents, human and shifter alike, who had come in contact with the deceased. And whoever had touched the drugs my kin consumed would not escape.
