Chapter 1
San Antonio
“Why the hell would Zane and Alyssa come all the way out here to the middle of nowhere?” Officer Connor Malone, Dallas PD SWAT, asked as he looked around the abandoned condo complex he and his teammates were searching. “It doesn’t look like anyone has been here in months.”
“And we’re nowhere close to the place where the actual murder happened,” Officer Hale Delaney, his blond, blue-eyed teammate, added, leaning over to show Connor the screen of his cell phone. Hale had pulled up a map of San Antonio, and the two dots displayed there were a good fifteen miles apart.
“That detective from San Antonio PD said Zane mentioned something about meeting a possible witness out here, but that was two weeks ago,” dark-haired Senior Corporal Trevor McCall answered from the far side of the parking lot, where he and Officer Diego Martinez were sniffing around. As in literally sniffing around, hoping their enhanced werewolf sense of smell might pick up something to suggest Zane and Alyssa had been here.
“Seems more like a place a cop goes to get ambushed than to meet a witness,” the other member of their team, Senior Corporal Mike Taylor, murmured as he tugged on the chain wrapped around the handles of the building’s main doors. “If Zane came out here, it was because he and Alyssa were desperate for a lead. Or thought they were onto one worth the risk.”
Officer Zane Kendrick and his mate, Alyssa Carson, had come to San Antonio more than three weeks ago to investigate what had been described as “a murder with supernatural and ritualistic indicators,” but they hadn’t been heard from since.
While Zane was an alpha werewolf like all the members of the Dallas SWAT team, Alyssa was a human who worked for the Special Threat Assessment Team, an agency that specialized in dealing with supernatural creatures regular law enforcement would never be able to admit existed, much less deal with. Connor’s werewolf pack had originally run across STAT when they’d worked together to take down vampires in Los Angeles, but this was the first time one of the Pack’s werewolves had gone on a mission without more of the Pack for backup.
The trip to San Antonio was supposed to have been little more than a reconnaissance mission. Zane and Alyssa were here to look at the body of the murder victim and see if there was enough to warrant a more detailed investigation. Considering Zane was an alpha werewolf and Alyssa an experienced field agent, it should have been a piece of cake. Nothing should have gone wrong.
But something had gone wrong.
And now both of them were missing.
In the three days since Connor and his pack mates had been down here, they hadn’t found a single clue telling them where Zane and Alyssa were. They’d gotten a look at the autopsy report and confirmed that the knife wounds definitely looked ritualistic, but other than that, they had nothing. Hell, they weren’t even sure if anything supernatural was involved.
“Everybody spread out,” Mike said, cupping his hands to look inside the glass doors of the building. “See if you can pick up a scent or find anything that looks out of place.”
While Diego and Trevor continued around the right side of the complex, Connor headed for the left, Hale following. Connor breathed deeply through his nose, trying to pick up the familiar scents he associated with Zane and Alyssa, while at the same time remaining attentive to other smells that might suggest something unusual had happened there. Like smokeless powder or blood. Even the desiccated stench of vampire.
As for Hale, he didn’t bother trying to find anything with his nose. He’d broken it so badly in a fight when he was younger that it had damaged the olfactory nerves and receptors. For some reason, the damage hadn’t been repaired when Hale went through his werewolf change. Now, he couldn’t smell anything. Sniffing for leads was a waste of time, so he depended on his keen eyesight instead.
Connor and Hale were fighting through chest-high brush and thickets along the side of the building when his phone vibrated in his pocket. Connor didn’t even consider letting it go to voicemail. He’d been desperately waiting for one particular bit of news, and he prayed this was it.
“Rachel,” he said the moment he answered. “Please tell me you’ve found her.”
“Not yet. Sorry,” one of the two female alpha werewolves on the team said softly, and Connor felt despair and anxiety clamp down on his heart like a pair of pliers. “We put up flyers in all the neighborhoods around the SWAT compound and have all the street patrols in the area keeping an eye out for her—sort of an unofficial BOLO. Everyone’s looking for her. We’re going to find Kat. I promise.”
Rachel kept talking, telling Connor what else they were doing in their search for the team’s feline mascot, but he was having a hard time paying attention to anything she was saying. The only thing he could think about right then was that Kat had been missing since the morning he and the other guys left to drive down here to San Antonio three days ago. And he was flat-out losing his mind.
Connor was so freaked out that it was actually starting to concern him. He and the Pack had adopted Kat when she’d climbed in one of the SWAT response trucks at a crime scene nine months ago. He’d never thought of himself as a cat person—he was a werewolf for crying out loud—but all of that changed when Kat had shown up in his life and begun following him everywhere he went. He didn’t understand it, but he and Kat had bonded so strongly that they spent almost every moment of every day together. Hell, she slept on the pillow beside him in bed every night, too. It wasn’t normal to worry this much simply because she’d been missing for a few days, was it? Seriously, he felt like he was about to have a nervous breakdown.
He was able to collect himself enough to at least get Rachel up to speed on what was going on in San Antonio. Not that there was much to tell her in that regard. He gave her the location of the abandoned condo complex, promising to call back once they’d cleared it.
“We’re not holding out much hope of finding them here, though,” he added. “The place seems deserted.”
“Nothing new on Kat?” Hale asked when he hung up, even though Connor knew his pack mate had heard the entire conversation. His nose might be crap, but his ears worked fine.
Connor shook his head. “Not yet. Rachel told me not to lose hope, though.”
“She’s right,” Hale murmured, his voice encouraging even as he gave up fighting through the brush and looked around for a better route. “Kat’s too smart to get herself into trouble. She’s probably out hunting for mice. That or she’s looking for a hunky tomcat to spend some quality time with. Trust me, she’ll be back before you know it. In fact, I bet she’s on her way to the compound right this second.”
Connor didn’t say anything. He knew Hale was only trying to help make him feel better, but his buddy was wrong. Kat hadn’t gone out hunting for mice. She was the pickiest cat he’d ever seen when it came to food. She turned her nose up at anything in a can, even tuna. No, Kat preferred fresh-caught fish, filet mignon, and lightly seasoned flank steak, all of them cooked to perfection. The one time she’d seen a mouse running across the yard at the compound, she’d gotten this look on her face suggesting someone needed to call an exterminator.