But the living can’t keep away. It’s like some sort of sick fascination with death, and since most of them run like fuck when they meet me for real, it makes no frigging sense whatsoever. But then, I’m the one watching them watching dead people, so who’s the real idiot here?
Shaking my head, I turned to leave when the main attraction showed up—Troy and his partner in an unmarked car. My steps slowed as I slid from the Shade and tucked myself into the crowd to watch without being seen.
The morning sun warming his back, Troy Regan headed up the cracked, concrete steps to Liberty’s police department, his thoughts full of his “date” last night. Good first dates ended with a kiss. Great first dates ended with the hottest sex known to man and a comfortable morning-after breakfast in bed as an optional extra. Not many first dates involved a dead werewolf in his kitchen, tracking down his date for a second round and then wiping out an entire lycan pack...but that’s how his had gone down.
Even after an evening like that, he was still on cloud nine. He even smiled as he mounted the steps to the station, sipping on his coffee. No doubt today would be more of the same boggarts or banshees his usual workday consisted of recently. This being Liberty, none of that would get more than a raised eyebrow. For the past year things in the town had been going seriously downhill. Not the usual everyday sort of shit most small-town police departments dealt with like gangs moving in or motorcycle clubs making a nuisance of themselves. That would be normal.
No, Liberty got brownies in basements and boggarts fucking in the library. Literally. Betty, the librarian, would never be the same again, not after the things she’d seen. Hell, even some of the uniformed police at the scene needed serious eye-bleach. Troy shivered. He was so glad it hadn’t been one of his calls.
“So what we got this morning?” He stopped when his partner, John, walked out the building’s front door. Troy held back a sigh. Sometimes he didn’t manage to get his ass in the chair before they were called out. It was the reason he carried two coffees from the shop down the street, safe in their disposable mugs. Grab and go was standard operating procedure.
“Car crash on the north road outta town.” Without a break in his stride John snagged his coffee, cracking the lid and inhaling the steam like a junkie with his first fix of the day. “You good after last night?” he asked pointedly over the rim of his mug. He’d dealt with the bodies at the warehouse last night while Troy had tracked Laney down.
“Yeah. All good. Not infected.”
He kept his explanation short and sweet. John didn’t need to know everything about Laney. Hell, he still didn’t know everything about the hot as hell brunette. Other than she wasn’t either human or a werewolf. The rest? He didn’t have a clue.
John nodded, lifting his mug to take a sip and then groaning.
Troy knew how he felt. The day had just begun but already felt a thousand years long. At least. He managed a gulp of hot coffee before they hit the steps to the parking lot. “Dispatch just called. Looks like we got fatalities.”
“Great, just what I need first thing in the morning.” Troy sighed, opened the door, and slid into the driver’s seat without jostling the liquid in his mug. When pushed, he could drive, drink coffee and answer his cell...a highly coveted skill in the department, provided no one told the captain. Reilly could be really cool, but with a hush-hush background in the military no one in the department was supposed to know about, he could scare the crap out of a guy with a look.
“Yeah, tell me about it,” John mumbled, his nose deep in his mug as he sucked the java down.
Seeing the emergency vehicles up ahead, Troy didn’t say anything else. Braking, he looked for a place to pull over. After parking behind the fire truck, the two men got out the car.
One look at the scene told Troy that no one had walked away alive. Two vehicles had been completely totaled with bits of bodywork and chassis all over the road. He nudged a twisted license plate with his booted toe. What force did it take to twist metal like that?
“High-speed collision.” John’s voice was controlled, same as Troy’s would have been if he’d spoken. That’s what they did—buried the emotion and got on with the job. Didn’t get involved. Troy had seen the fallout when cops did. They burned out. Quickly.
At least this looked to be a normal job, and he released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. That was the big ol’ elephant in the room these days. Each time they were called out... would it be a normal kind of crazy or a nonhuman kind? And the latter could get really crazy, really quickly.
Like last night. He grumbled under his breath, still assessing the scene even though half his mind was someplace else. He still had no clue what Laney was, apart from the fact she wasn’t human.
“Looked like they were racing.” Ignoring Troy’s lapse into silence, John kept up the dialogue as they walked the scene. Uniformed officers kept civilians back, but there wasn’t much detecting to be done. Thick black tire marks slashed across the asphalt, showing where the vehicles had gotten into trouble, and the crash area itself was self-evident.
The bodies had been left where they were, in all their bloody glory. Neither man flinched. Troy learned long ago that if a man sees enough death, he learns not to put all the pieces together. Instead he chose to see the bits of bodies as just that, a part in the puzzle rather than a human being taken apart in some of the most brutal ways possible. The human brain learns to take that step back, to protect itself. Working homicide in the big city does that to a man quickly. It certainly had Troy. Longer on the force, John had acquired the ability over years.
“Yeah.” Troy looked over his shoulder, working out how the crash happened from the evidence scrawled over the road. “The first one lost control around here, spun, clipped the second one and it all went to hell in a handbasket.”
“Agreed.” John motioned another officer over. “We’re done here. Get them covered. They’re still people. Did you pull anything from the plates yet?”
The sound of the conversation drowned out behind Troy as his gaze locked onto a figure in the growing crowd behind the cordon—mainly drivers stopping to have a good look.
Laney. Petite and curvy, the leathers were a dead giveaway that she was a nonlocal, and on a normal day would have gotten a few glances before the officers dispersed the nosy. But as soon as he saw her, he knew he was the only one who could. Her appearance wavered between the badass biker chick and nothing, the same as it did in the bar the other night, between biker chick and modest businesswoman. Hell, she was sexy. The dangerous woman thing never worked for him, but she wasn’t human, so all bets were off.
Keeping the frown off his face with some effort, Troy pretended to look at the tire marks again. Yet all the while he kept her in the corner of his eye. Why he could see through whatever magic or illusion she was pulling, he had no clue. He hadn’t managed to get out of her what she was doing in the bar last night, but one thing was for sure...if she was here now, the possibility that this wasn’t an ordinary accident just ratcheted up about a thousand notches.
A chill hit him, running rampant down his spine. Had she caused the accident?
“John,” he called out to alert his partner and waggled his cell when John looked up. “Got something I need to check out. You okay to wrap here and ride back with one of the guys?”