Not Very Subtle
About half past midnight, my phone beeped. My police officer friend had sent me a file on the guy who owned the car: not only his name and basic info, but a full background check.
Bless Morgan and his willingness to break the rules. I owed him a dozen boxes of donuts.
I flipped to the photo, which was a mug shot—no surprise there. Although the crime he’d been arrested for that time, assaulting a fifteen-year-old street kid, made me raise my eyebrows. I mean, Jesus, there were assholes and then there wereassholes.
The guy’s birthdate made him forty-two years old, and his out-of-date photo showed me a thin-lipped, bald, heavy-browed thug. Human, according to the appended note.
I turned my phone Jack’s way. “This is the owner of that sedan. Sam Hendler. Recognize him?”
Jack’s lip curled into a snarl, and his eyes flashed gold. I was betting on yes.
“Yeah, I do,” he confirmed. “He hangs around this bar Brent always used to go to. God dammit!”
Jack turned away, fuming under his breath, and I went back to the file. Further down, I learned that Hendler owned a cabin outside of Lancaster—only a couple of miles up the road from the bar we were parked in front of.
I turned the phone to show him again. “If you were wondering why Brent went on the run to Lancaster specifically, now you know.”
Jack went off into another spate of cursing, and I went back to the file. Not much else there except a few more truly disgusting criminal charges, but it did get me thinking about what his and Brent’s plan would have been if Jack had been following instructions. Would they have lured him up to the cabin and ambushed him there? Home turf advantage and all that.
And speaking of. Now we knew where they’d be going after they left the bar.
“We should wait for them there,” I said, cutting into Jack’s continuing stream of profanities. Actually, his kind of impressive stream of profanities. He had real talent, and I hated that I now knew something else about him that I liked. “They’ll head there after the bar, right? We’ll ambush them instead.”
“Unless Hendler has security cameras he can monitor from his phone. And then they’ll be in the wind.”
I ruminated on that for a minute. Dammit, I hated it when my age caught up with me. I’d done fairly well adjusting to each new technology as it arose, but I didn’t have the intuitive grasp of how it could be used, and used against me, as someone born to it. My default tactics for housebreaking, distracting the dog with a steak and hiding behind a tree, were a bit outdated.
“We should at least move up the road, though,” I suggested. “They might see us here. This was an okay plan when we didn’t have anything better. Now we know where they’re going. Here, look at this.” I zoomed in on the map, having noticed something while I spoke. “There’s another cabin over here. If we go up that road, park, and then hike through the woods to the east?”
That got Jack’s grudging approval, and I started the car with a sigh of relief. It took half an hour to find the right turnoff and then drive slowly partway up and find a good spot to park, but finally we were out of the fucking car and picking our way through the forest.
In the outside air, Jack’s scent didn’t overwhelm me quite as much—although it did blend into the forest like he belonged there, which distracted me in a different way. And he paced alongside me almost silently even with his big feet in those heavy boots. His unexpected grace added another little straw to the camel’s already overloaded back.
Damn it all to hell, anyway.
I scowled into the darkness and promptly caught my boot heel on a fallen branch, my arms flailing.
And jerked to a stop before I could hit the ground or try to catch myself, wrapped in Jack’s arms with my back pressed against his chest.
And my ass pressed against his groin. I tried desperately not to pay attention to what that felt like, or to what I could feel behind me.
The arm around my middle felt like a steel bar, and the hand on my waist bled heat into me, his fingers curled around my hipbone. Our hearts beat in counterpoint, mine quicker, his slower and harder.
“You can off-road, huh?” His breath tickled my ear and I could feel the vibrations through his hard chest as he spoke.
I shoved myself out of his grasp and stomped off through the woods again, my cheeks flaming and my fists clenched. How dare he laugh at me! Fucking werewolves. I wasn’t half animal and able to melt through the woods like a creature of the forest, thank you very fucking much. And I’d have liked to see him hike in high-heeled boots. Bastard.
By dint of actually paying attention this time, I managed to make it the rest of the way without further mishap, although Jack shadowed me the whole way, his closeness raising the hair on the back of my neck and making it nearly impossible for me to think about anything else.
We stopped about ten yards away from the edge of the woods, with a small clearing holding a cabin in sight through the trees.
“I can see two security cameras from here, and there are probably more,” Jack said. “We were right to do an approach from the side instead of going up the driveway. No one in the cabin that I can sense. You?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t smell or hear anyone, and if Jack couldn’t either, we were in the clear.
Which was all good news, but now we were standing in the woods, with a drizzle of rain starting to filter through the canopy and dampen down my hair unpleasantly, rather than sitting in a comfortable car.
