Despite her exhaustion, she was restless as hell. Overtired. Stressed out. Jessie picked up the remote and switched on the TV. The satellite service offered a plethora of possibilities. Watching TV and reading were two of her favorite ways to relax.
“...the storage facility was located in the Inkster—”
Jessie’s finger twitched on the channel key and scrolled away from the news. She found a reality show and tossed the remote on the bed. As background noise, it would work.
Shower. She craved it like a starving man craved food.
The kind policewoman had rustled up an old set of scrubs for her to wear. Jessie stripped them off and tossed them into the waste bin beneath the sink. The fewer reminders, the better.
The hot water cascaded down her skin, untying the knotted muscles. Her fingers traced the bite wounds. The doctor had washed the area but hadn’t disturbed the scabs as the wounds appeared to be healing well. His eventual conclusion, passed on to her by the male police officer, was that the men had used some kind of device to make the wounds. That they weren’t the result of a bite.
Jessie wished with all her heart for that to be true.
She’d had no opportunity to speak with the other two women they’d taken. She’d been loaded alone into one ambulance, them in the second one. They’d never had a moment together at the hospital, and they’d left before Jessie. But the police hadn’t suggested that anything other than humans had locked them into those rooms.
Had the others not seen the beast? Was she the only one? Or were they, like her, afraid to speak up?
Jessie scrubbed harder. Trying to wash away the memories, so they would run down the drain along with the sweat and dirt and things better not examined. The departing grime revealed the bruises around her throat and all along her back. Including a fading one along her cheek where Troy had slapped her. They ignited her anger. How dare they? No matter what the hell they were, they had no right to do what they’d done.
And be damned if she was going to let them ruin her life.
Wrapping herself in a towel, she walked to the tiny bathroom window and flung it open. The steam billowed from the room, and she let some of the fear fly away with it.
It wasn’t that simple, she knew. But it was a start.
* * *
Kade rubbed his face as he surveyed the written report on the three women. The office was quiet in the morning before opening. During the day, Moonlight Detective Agency was a thriving business that focused mostly on public insurance investigation contracts and the occasional straying spouse. It was a real, functioning business, but it was also a cover for his other work—serving the Cryptid council.
His contact on the council had done a good job by getting the report to him. Nothing in it indicated the kidnapping to be anything other than the work of a sick human mind. Or, rather, several sick minds. The forensics team had likely found DNA from all five males Kade had scented. They were running the samples, but it would take time for the profiles to come back.
Kade paused over the list of collected evidence. Human DNA. And hairs.
At this early stage, the forensics declared them to be dog hairs. They had also been sent for analysis, although at a much lower priority than the human material collected. Those results would come back inconclusive. The beast always defied analysis.
The so-called human samples would come back human, with anomalies. Contamination, the results would say. But human. They couldn’t be more wrong. Hiding among an oblivious human population, the Dire Weres had always been more numerous than the Sabres. More numerous, more temperamental, and all too often, trouble.
Kade pulled a series of photos from the pile. The first ones were shots of the wounds. He tapped a strong finger on the photos. The explanation for the wounds made him snort. Better they be blamed on some obscure torture device, than the truth be blasted to the heavens.
The photos offered Kade the final bit of conclusive proof that Cara was right. Dire Weres had kidnapped these women and bitten them. The human police couldn’t be faulted for not making those connections. They had no idea such beasts existed.
It was Kade’s job to keep it that way. A task that had taken on a degree of impossibility over the last ten years. Because there were far fewer Sabres to enforce the rules.
His kind were disappearing. Something in their world was out of balance. The female to male proportions had never been even in their society. Sabres had adapted by most often mating in triads, with two males mating a single female. It effectively broadened the gene pool, as both males fathered children.
But over the last fifty years, increasing numbers of females had died in childbirth. Killed when their offspring panicked during the birthing process and transformed to beasts out of sync with their mothers. No one was sure what was going so wrong. But female Sabres were now rare.
The blackness came at Kade without warning. Stabbing through his psyche, twisting in his brain as the memories pounced. Images flashed through him. Eyes of shaded violet tilted upward at the corners, wide with terror and pain. It had reverberated through their mental link, as he and Cas had tried to hold her. To holdon toher.
Isa. Kade couldn’t help her, no matter how hard he’d tried. He’d given everything he had. But she’d slipped away from him. He’d been in her mind at the very moment when she’d let go and taken his future with her.
His gums itched as the big sabre fangs threatened to break through. He resisted. They hadn’t helped him then, and they wouldn’t now. He’d been down that particular black hole. Run from the pain and let the beast take him. He wasn’t going there again.
Over his years of experience as a Sabre enforcer for the council, few things in his life hadn’t been resolved with muscle and teeth. But not that. And not his bond brother’s death, either. Cas had nearly lost his mind when Isa died. For weeks, he’d been inconsolable. Ended up at the same place Kade had gone, only much sooner.
The telepathic link between him and Kade had fractured with Isa’s death. So when it seemed that his bond brother had turned a corner and decided to live, Kade had believed him. But then Cas had gone scouting for a rogue pack of Dires in northern Manitoba. And found them.
Cas should’ve called for Kade’s help. Kade believed that his friend and bond brother had walked into that pack with a death wish. He’d died as a warrior, but not before taking four of the bastards with him.
