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