Wolf Untamed (SWAT - Special Wolf Alpha Team #11) - Paige Tyler Page 0,120

the hell they’d come across.

But if they had, why hadn’t they called out all clear over the radio?

“Jaime? Neal? Do you copy?”

No answer.

Double crap!

Jes smelled the blood before she saw the two bodies lying motionless on the ground near one of the dumpsters. She ran toward them, her heart in her throat. If she could pick up the odor of blood, there had to be a bucketload of it.

There was.

Dark red pools of it that looked black even in the glow of her flashlight.

Damn, she hated being right.

Knowing her teammates were almost assuredly dead but needing to check all the same, she crouched beside Jaime when movement near one of the storage containers caught her attention. She jerked her head up to see something big and hulking in the darkness less than fifteen feet away. That same low growl she’d heard before rumbled from its chest as it gazed at her with glowing yellow eyes, and a chill ran along her spine.

Jes brought up her weapon, resting it on the hand that held the flashlight, and pulled the trigger in quick succession, knowing there was no way she could miss at this distance. But the creature disappeared before the bullets could find their mark. One moment, it was there, and the next, it was gone. Before she’d even gotten a good look at it.

As fast as the thing moved, it could easily come at her from a dozen different directions, but she couldn’t worry about that. One or both of her teammates might be alive. All that mattered was helping them.

But when she turned her flashlight on Jaime and Neal, she realized it was too late. Whatever had killed them had savagely torn out their throats. They had been dead before they’d hit the ground.

She swallowed hard and pulled out her phone, thumbing the speed-dial button for the STAT emergency operation center in Washington, DC as she scanned the area around her for the creature that had killed her teammates.

“This is Agent Ridley,” she said. “Two agents are down and I need a cleanup team out here ASAP. Tell McKay we have confirmed supernatural involvement. I’m going to need backup.”

* * *

Washington, DC

Jake Huang cursed silently as he strode down yet another hallway on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover building. How the hell was he going to find the conference room where he was supposed to meet with his new boss in this damn maze? He supposed he could ask one of the other FBI agents who zipped past him in their perfect professional clothes with their perfectly styled hair and perfectly shined shoes, but ultimately, he couldn’t bring himself to admit he didn’t know his way around the place yet. He was a federal agent now. Shouldn’t he know this kind of stuff?

Then again, maybe he should cut himself a break. He’d only been in DC for less than a week and had spent most of that time trying to find a place for him and the twins to live. His boss, Nathan McKay, had given him a quick whirlwind tour of the huge FBI headquarters, then told him to focus on getting settled before worrying about the job. Of course, that was before McKay had called this morning telling him he had thirty minutes to be at the office.

So much for getting settled in.

If it were just him, Jake would have grabbed the first apartment he could find close to work and called it a day, but he had other people in his life now, namely Zoe and Chloe Haynes, the eighteen-year-old beta werewolves he’d rescued from a vampire coven and recently become responsible for. Bringing teenage werewolves who’d gone through their first change barely two months ago to a city as big as Washington, DC was crazy to say the least, but that’s what it meant when an alpha stumbled across betas who needed him. They became a pack and a huge part of each other’s lives.

When McKay had offered him a position on the joint FBI/CIA Special Threat Assessment Team—aka STAT—the first thing he’d done was ask Zoe and Chloe what they thought. If they’d been against the idea, he would have walked away from the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Even though it meant uprooting the life they’d just started in Dallas, the twins had urged him to take the job. The girls were thrilled at the idea of living in the nation’s capital, while he was excited to have a job that would let