Part One

Another Wednesday. Another Pack Leader Meeting. Pack Leader Meeting #651 if the record keeper for the meeting was correct.

Why the hell had I thought these meetings were a good idea? Oh yeah, I enjoyed the slow and agonizing torture of listening to eight alphas and their mates argue the same point into the ground. Today's agenda seemed to mirror the agenda from last week. Three shapeshifters murdered in cold blood. No new leads. Same brilliant conjectures. I quickly cut my eyes over to the wall clock. I generally let the meetings run a full hour so that everyone feels like they spoke their piece. Fourteen more minutes of pure agony. Mahon sat with his thick arms folded-his face in an identical mask as mine. He had been my tutor after all…

I fanned my hands carefully on my lap and glanced down at my nails. They were black with the dirt from the grounds around the Keep. I had spent the first half of the day showing the new work crew how exactly to dig and place stones on the west wall. It helped relieve some of the tension of the unaccounted for murders. The Pack had seen its share of deaths to be sure. It was full of volatile shapeshifters who lost their cool on a moment's notice and over the simplest of circumstances. But, after a ton of meetings like these, the procedures were now clear, and the justice was swift and brutal. The Code kept us all on the stiffest and most necessary leash.

These murders, on the other hand, made no sense. There was no apparent motive. No recognizable scents. Even our human contact at the order, Greg Feldman, had gone mysteriously quiet.

I focused back on my nails and let the claws on my left hand protrude an inch from my skin and carefully scraped dirt out from under my human nails on the opposite hand. The Beast Lord probably shouldn't be caught with dirt under the nails. But, by the blood, it felt good to dig around in the dirt all day, trying to forget the gore of the murders, the frustration of the unfamiliar stench mixed in the blood, the side glances and unspoken questions, the stiff nods and awkward embraces to the families of the dead. What do you say to a kid who lost his dad for no apparent reason?

The door to the conference room slammed open. A couple of the alphas hissed, and everyone's eyes slid into a glow, except for Mahon and me.

"Hello, Jim. Nice of you to join us," I purred as Jim and his cloak of darkness swept into the room. Very dark villain and very dramatic. Then I smelled the blood, and I felt my eyes go animal too. I scanned Jim's body and saw flecks of blood on his boots.

My head of security bowed his head in my direction. "Rat Alpha is dead." He slung some photos from the inside of his cloak onto the table.

Everyone but me stood up to get a closer look. I could see enough.

"Tell us what you know."

"Same stench. Same mutilations. A few hairs on the scene. Nothing I recognized." Jim's eyes glanced up to mine, full of remorse. He took these deaths almost as hard as me. "I have my best people all over the scene, but it's all the same as before."

Everyone seemed to be talking at once, suggestions and demands piling up on top of each other like the stones on the Keep's walls. I thought of the Alpha Rat's family. His twin girls. His wife who liked to make cheesecakes for the pack feasts. Another life cut short prematurely, and no answers to console the family. Enough was enough.

I roared, the noise slicing through the babble of words with an undeniable authority, and then we all sat in silence letting the ringing in our ears come under control. I slowly stood up. My menace rolled across the shapeshifters before me.

"It's time to gather the Pack into the Keep," my voice was as cold as the frozen expressions on the council's faces. "I'm not taking chances with any more lives except one. The murderer's life will be mine."

Mahon blinked twice and stood, "I will begin the fortifications and send the scout teams to evacuate."

I nodded to him and turned from the table. "Meeting adjourned. Jim, come with me."

Jim and I began to climb the stairs to my quarters. Shapeshifters scooted out of the way as they sensed our collective dark moods.

"I'm afraid there's more," Jim's normally musical voice was all rasp and dour today. "Greg Feldman is dead. But I know his replacement."

Part Two

"That? That is Greg Feldman's replacement?"

Jim and I were standing in the shadows of a derelict building on the corner of Unicorn and Fourteenth. We were peering down at a young woman, probably in her mid twenties. She seemed entirely unaware that she was in the middle of the most dangerous neighborhood in Atlanta. She leaned back on a heap of junk that must have been her transportation, quietly scanning the surroundings. Dark hair, dark clothes, worn out sneakers. It was hard to make out much more from this distance, even in my animal form. Clearly she wasn't killing it in the money department. And evidently she had not seen enough of the world to be scared of its monsters.

"She came alone." I pointed out the obvious. Dumb, naive, or determined?

"Yep, t's Kate." Jim shrugged, his voice low, raspy, and slightly slurred in his animal form. "How doyer wanter play this? Wanter formal inner-duction?"

"No," I cocked my head to the side and gazed down at her once more. "This should be a piece of cake. You can stay out here in case she runs out screaming."

He knew what to do. This wasn't our first gig. Damage control and keep watch in case anything crazy starts coming out of the walls. We were in Unicorn Lane after all, and we weren't the only kind of monsters in the world. Although a good tussle with a magical creature might be just what I needed for that knot of pressure in between my shoulders.

I slid down on silent paws to the meeting spot in the abandoned building that Jim had suggested and scouted before. A fine mist of concrete dust coated the floor, which unfortunately would leave our footprints everywhere. However, the room was small enough to keep our conversation private but wide enough for movement in my beast form. The walls were crumbling in spots allowing just enough shadow and moonlight to provide a little dramatic fun. I let loose a low grumble of a roar to get her attention and wondered if that would be enough to send her packing in that old heap of rusted parts she called a car. But, two heartbeats later, I heard her footsteps approach the hole in the wall from the street. She hesitated for a split second and then stepped through. It was in that mundane moment, her scent hit me like a magical wave with tsunami magnitude.

My nostrils flared wide. The magic in my shapeshifter blood zinged through me. My hair rose in stiff spikes, and I felt a tingling like icicles along my spine. I couldn't make sense of the sensation in my legs as they bent of their own accord, to either attack or bow. I shook my head quickly, careful not to make a sound, and took a more cautious sniff-like a wine connoisseur twisting a glass in his hand to get the full array of smells. It was unmistakably the salty scent of human, but overlaid with a witchlike assortment of spices -oregano, lavender, thyme, calcium chalk. My nose burned as it caught the slight scent of wolfsbane and silver powder. But there was something more to the scent-something like the smell of a marshmallow that you've caught on fire and then blown out. I would have to get closer to figure out that one, but my eyes were busy cataloging the rest.

The clothes were a disguise, cloaking what I could tell was a well-toned and rather appealingly curvy body. She moved carefully yet casually, with a determined air of both authority and finesse. And while she took a decided position in the moonlit center of the room, I thought in an instant, she moved like a lioness.

She slowly squatted down, muscles shifted beneath her pants, and she carried her weight perfectly balanced on the pads of her feet, coiled like a snake. A strand of dark hair slipped from the tight braid down her back and touched her cheek. The hilt of a sword peaked over her left shoulder. What was she up to? Her eyes had an exotic slant to them and were bright in the darkness, not with the shapeshifter glow, but brimming with intelligence and a spark of mischief. I watched as she raised her right hand, curled her finger, and took a slight breath.

"Here kitty kitty."

Part Three

Mila's head poked through the workout room door at 6:15 am and then bowed, angling toward the floor. "My Lord, the phone is for you. It's Derek."

"I'll be right there," I replied while re-racking the bench bar. An unnerving combination of relief and anxiety wrestled inside of me as I picked up the phone attached to the workout room wall.

"Derek."

"Yes, it's me."

"Glad to see you survived the night with the loose cannon."

There was a pause.

"Barely," he murmured, and my heart shot into overdrive. Pictures of mutilated flesh flashed through my mind. What was wrong with me?

"Is everything ok?"

I heard Derek sigh on the other end of the line.

"Yeah, yeah… it was a crazy night. My leg's messed up a bit and Kate took a nasty hit to her stomach but I think it's all good."

"Broken bone?"

"No, just a flesh wound."

I forced my pulse to slow but let the claws of my feet sprout in and out to relieve some of the tension.

"So what happened?" I growled. Could the kid not provide any pertinent details? I would have to train him how to give concise reports.

More silence and some shoe shuffling was all I heard.

"I thought you said I wouldn't spy," he said in a very quiet voice. Of course.

"You are not spying on her," I wanted to reach through the phone and whack him on the head, but I forced my tone to sound emotionless, like talking to a misbehaving toddler. "You are reporting to me on what caused your injuries. If you don't spit out the who, where, when, and what in five seconds, I will come pummel you myself."

That seemed to get his attention. "Yes, my Lord. First we visited the People at approximately 2:04 am. We were ushered straight to the Big Man himself, wearing all white, sitting like a turd on his throne. He and Kate had a little magic showdown. Kate won. Not sure how but it felt like he was trying to squeeze my mind and then Kate did something weird and there was a giant snake and she basically put Freak Man in his place. Then she asked him some questions and he gave us nothing…" he made a snorting noise, " of course."

I found myself twirling my finger around in the air to get him to speed up before I realized he couldn't see me.

"Derek, can we skip ahead to how the two of you got injured?"

"Oh yeah, so we were headed back to Kate's apartment and some guy named Guster, or something Russian-sounding, was escorting us with one of his bloodsuckers. Then out of nowhere this old gnarly vampire hits us-had to be the oldest vamp in the world. I have never seen or smelled a bloodsucker like that. Nothing human in him."

I had encountered a few myself but according to Pack intelligence the people didn't own any Ancients. I would need Jim to look into that more closely. Maybe we could get some Rats to stake the vampire stables again.

Derek hardly had taken a breath and was rushing on, "Anyway I was on a horse and Kate had told me not to get down no matter what. I was like 'hell, I will!' But then my horse took off when that thing sprang on us. I mean it dropped out of the sky."

I realized I had been holding my breath and slowly exhaled so Derek wouldn't hear. It had to be the most words I had ever heard him string together in his life. Enter Kate Daniels and suddenly the floodgates open.

"That's when I shifted into beast mode and went after that monster. Kate was going haywire with her glowing sword thing. I mean she was freaking amazing. I've never seen a sword move that fast. That vamp clawed up my leg pretty bad, and Kate got a swipe straight to the gut. Didn't faze her. She just went all crazy eyes and plunged her sword straight into that thing, chewed out Guster's vamp, and then set the whole scene on fire."

Wait, hold up. Set the scene on fire? Of all the crazy-ass things to do….

"Why did she do that?"

Probably to piss off the People. They loved breaking down crime scenes in their meticulous lab geek sort of way.

"No idea, but it was awesome," he sighed, his voice taking on a distinct tone of awe.

Great, my teenaged ward had a new crush. I smirked. At least I wasn't the only one affected by this woman's dramatic flare.

I took a deep breath and purred, "What happened after that?"

Derek took a couple of beats and lost the gusto from before. "I guess I blacked out from the shift or fight or something. But somehow Kate got me to her apartment. And my leg looks a lot better this morning."

I let the silence stretch for a moment. I guess she wasn't kidding about not wanting the additional responsibility of a teenage werewolf. Toting around a sleeping shapeshifter male with a gash in the stomach had to be no small feat for a human woman-I didn't care how chiseled her legs were.

"Where is she now?" I asked quietly.

"Asleep on the sofa. Curled up with some slimebag human. He smells like a hospital and expensive cologne." Derek offered.

I felt my eyes go gold and fur sprout down my arms before I shifted back into human. I poked a claw out of my fingertip and slowly scraped it down the wall, translating the image into human flesh while simultaneously imagining a very graphic scene from the night before. I thought she said she was "too busy" to date. Also, why the hell did I care so much?

"My Lord?" Derek's voice penetrated through my vision.

"Hmm…"

"I shouldn't have blacked out. I failed you and my mission." Shoot, here I was daydreaming and I should have been reassuring the kid.

"No, Derek. You didn't fail." Maybe I had by sending him. I underestimated the amount of trouble one human female could attract in a twenty-four hour period. "You did just right. Are you calling from the apartment?"

"No, I slipped up to the spy station Jim stationed upstairs. Needed some new sweats."

I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew what I didn't. I didn't want to sit on my ass waiting for another death report of a shapeshifter or a newly assigned human mongrel from the Order, for that matter. Screw Jim's hyper-protective, over-bearing security protocol.

"Derek, get back to Kate. Can you make sure you two sit tight for another hour?"

"Yes, my Lord."

"Good, see you then."

I hung the phone up, and my decision was made.

"Mila, get me a shoulder roast from the kitchen," I roared down the hallway. "I'm going for a little morning jog."

Part Four

The street was showing its full morning glory by the time I excused myself from Kate's apartment. Proximity to that woman was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I was beginning to tolerate smelling her unique bouquet without completely losing my cool. A curse because her flippant ability to catch me off guard every time she opened her mouth made me feel like I just tightroped during a category five earthquake. Everything about her was confusing and mysterious, from the way she guzzled seafood fried rice for breakfast to the way she apparently slept on a daybed in Greg Feldman's old living room to the way she stored a decaying vampire's head double bagged in her pantry like a sack of potatoes. Not to mention that she warded her apartment like demons might come after her while she slept.

If there was one thing in my life that I could count on-it was Jim's coffee warded off all constipation-and that my head and my gut were always in line with each other. In walks Kate Daniels and my head and my gut start screaming at each other like boudas in a hissy fight. No matter. Discipline and order were also my life. I could leave both my head and gut fighting like toddlers in the gutter and get the job done. If she was right and the murderer was in that Coca-Cola building, my pack would have the fight we had been itching for for weeks.

I turned the corner, narrowly missing an old lady pushing a grocery cart, and came face to face with Jim and Jennifer-both leaning against the Pack jeep I had parallel parked between a beat up Honda and double wide hay cart.

"How was your morning jog, my Lord?" Jim practically sang the words to me. I mimicked Jim's stance and crossed my arms over my chest, leaning against the brick building behind me. I knew Jim was on to me, but being Beast Lord had its few perks, like not answering questions until I was good and ready.

"I see now why you assigned me as Head of Pack Security…" Apparently Jim wasn't finished. "No one wants an impossible job." People started jay-walking across the street to avoid crossing through the sidewalk between us.

"What's the point of creating a security protocol if the Beast Lord himself isn't going to follow it?" He droned on. It was better to let him blow all his steam out at once. Plus, I cycled through Heads of Security like the wererats went through bags of potato chips. Jim rarely lost his cool, and he was worth the occasional venting.

"Besides….a morning jog? What are you-a sixty year old man? I told you I had a team in place above the girls' apartment, and that I would check on the kid this morning… myself."

"I'm sorry, Jim," I purred. "Next time I'll let you wipe my ass and flush too."

Jennifer snickered. I turned my glare on her. "Why are you here?"

If I had known that Jennifer would marry Daniel and become the female alpha of the wolf pack, there is no way in hell I would have climbed into bed with her after the New Year's party four years ago. As far as one night stands go, it wasn't a terrible ordeal. She never fussed, never seemed to have any expectations beyond the one night, and, to my relief, had remained steadfastly discreet about the whole affair. In fact, I am pretty sure she had not mentioned our relationship to her new husband. Daniel was all about pack politics. When his first wife died suddenly a couple of years ago, he quickly zeroed in on Jennifer. Young, vivacious, and slightly vindictive, she provided an obvious counterbalance to his mature, diplomatic, and calculated leadership style. To say I was shocked when they appeared before me to announce their engagement a year ago would have been an understatement.

"I want in," Jennifer said, leaning against the Jeep and crossing her long legs, one over the other.

"Excuse me?"

"Whatever is going down tonight, I…. want…. In," she said the words very crisply. At least she kept her eyes lowered towards my chest. Testy but not challenging. Everyone must be feeling a little bold this morning.

It must be conspire-against-Curran-day. "Alright. Let's discuss this on the way back to the Keep." I crossed the sidewalk and moved to the driver's side. Jennifer claimed shot gun without a word, and Jim and his dark broodiness filled up the back seat. Should be an enjoyable ride. I rolled my eyes.

"So why do you want in?" I asked, waiting for a horseman to pass before I pulled into the street. I could imagine the reasons. She was a new alpha female, untested, wolves were snarking about Daniel's choice of bride. Shapeshifters were waiting to see her in a fight before issuing a challenge.

"I need this fight. Daniel needs to know he did the right thing choosing me," she kept her eyes straight ahead on the road before us. "And you owe me," she added in a murmur so low, it could have been a growl.

I glanced at Jim in the rear view mirror, but his scowl was still fixed as solidly to his face as his eyes were out the back window.

"Careful." I squeezed the steering wheel, it groaned, and I released. My hands left clear indentions, and I felt a little satisfaction as Jennifer's eyes widened.

"It so happens that I could use you on tonight's adventure." She sat up straight and grinned. "The human will need a babysitter during the fight."

Jennifer threw up her hands and huffed, "You can't be serious."

Jim's eyes met mine in the mirror. "Kate's going?"

"Of course," menace flooded my voice, "We have been searching for this murderer for weeks and have come up with nothing. Ms. Daniels shows up on the scene armed with nothing but a new sticker on her badge and a glowing toothpick of a sword, and tracks this lead down in a matter of days. In the last twenty four hours, she has mind-controlled one of our most promising pupils, gone head to head with the People's leader, skewered an ancient vampire, and dragged an unconscious teenage werewolf across the city to safety. She might be a crazy b*** but I am not going to keep her out of the fight."

I took a breath and eased up, "Besides, you've seen her fight, Jim. Think she can handle it?"

Jim peered back out at the passing scenery and growled, "If there is one thing I know about Kate Daniels, it's that she is full of surprises."