Basic shields didn’t block out surges, but Kat wouldn’t have needed the tingling shock to recognize attraction that intense. Anna looked discomfited, maybe even pissy, but Patrick just grinned at her and swung his leg over his bike. “Anna Lenoir. You screwed me out of three grand last year. I chased McPherson across seven states before you put him down.”
Whatever else, she recovered quickly enough to shrug. “When he showed up in Vegas, that made him mine.”
“That’s what my client said when he refused to pay up. Don’t suppose he cut you a check?”
“No such luck, cupcake.” She pounded on the roof of her car. “Out, Mendoza.”
Miguel stepped clear of the passenger side door with a sigh. “Want me to listen for company, Kat?”
Kat hesitated, then glanced to Andrew and Julio. Four shapeshifters, and if there was one thing she’d learned from Alec, it was that wolves lived by their hierarchy, whether they wanted to or not. “Who’s calling the tactical shots here?”
Andrew squared his shoulders. “Kat, you and Miguel are on lookout. Patrick and Anna too, only more with eyes and ears and less with psychic ability. If there’s trouble, it’s not the kind we can plan for very well, except that they’ll probably bring a shifter or two. So we fight.”
“And if we’re outnumbered?” Anna asked quietly.
“Then we need to make damn sure that, no matter what else happens, these crazy fuckers don’t get what they’re after. So someone needs to take responsibility for it, and cut and run if necessary.” He looked around. “Any volunteers?”
None of the shifters looked like they wanted to offer to run away from the fight. Neither did Patrick.
Kat braced her feet and met Andrew’s gaze squarely. “I can do it. I’m not that fast, but I don’t need to be.
If I can get clear of the fight, I can make sure no one can get close enough to matter.”
Andrew dug his keys out of his pocket and held them out to her. “You keep whatever we find,” he whispered, “and if things are bad out there, you get gone.”
“You better follow me,” she replied just as quietly. She reached for the keys and caught his hand as well. “I can agree. I can promise. But you shapeshifters don’t have the monopoly on blind instinct.”
He nodded, with only the barest movement of his head. “Now, where is this thing, anyway?”
Kat pocketed the keychain and retrieved her phone. “A quarter mile northwest of here.” She indicated the tree line behind the ramshackle shop. “That way.”
They made their way quietly in the darkness, past a dilapidated storage shed and two cars that hadn’t run in any of their lifetimes. It grew darker when they entered the trees, and the steady, low drone of the gnats on the swamp faded.
In its place rose another kind of buzz, one that she thought she was imagining at first. The itch started at the base of her neck, then skipped down her spine until goose bumps dotted her arms. “What is that?” she whispered.
“Magic,” Patrick replied quietly. “Big, scary magic.”
“We must be close.” Julio looked unusually pale in the scant moonlight.
The backlight on her phone had shut off. Kat used her thumb to activate it again and squinted at the display. “Twenty feet or so? At this point, the buzz is more accurate than the GPS.”
Andrew hefted his shovel and spun in a slow circle, finally settling on a direction. Five sure steps later, he stopped. “Here. It’s right here.”
He began to dig.
Kat slipped her phone into her back pocket, tightened her grip on her gun and stepped close to Miguel.
“Have you picked up anything?”
“Nothing,” he whispered. “But I don’t like it. It’s not—not quiet, exactly. It’s…silent.”
“As the grave.” Anna began disrobing as she offered the words, kicking off her boots as she tugged her shirt over her head.
Kat half-closed her eyes and cracked her shields, just enough to let her power ease out in a slowly growing circle. She brushed Miguel first, whose excellent shields couldn’t hide his unease—or his vague appreciation of Anna’s naked form.
Patrick next. Kat pushed past him quickly, uninterested in sharing his far more intense interest. Julio was his usual pool of steady strength, and Andrew was quiet concentration. She flicked past Anna and got a sense of steely determination and the tiniest flicker of satisfaction.
The circle widened. She used Callum’s trick of quieting the minds she’d already touched, relegating them to silence by imagining them each packed away in a cardboard box. Her own imagery—not as fancy as Callum’s chalices, chains and locks, but it worked.
Beyond her group…nothing. Stillness that spoke of the utter absence of people. She could keep pushing. Test her limits, stretch herself thinner, like warm taffy. Eventually she’d find minds. She could dip into the hearts of every person in ten miles, taste their emotions and know their fears.
Instead she held her power in a tight sphere. Five hundred feet in all directions, and if anything disturbed that quiet, she’d know.
Magic zipped through the air, raising the fine hairs on the back of Kat’s neck, and a pale wolf shot off through the trees. Anna, making her own sort of perimeter sweep.
Miguel reached for his shirt, and Julio stopped him. “You might need to use your words, baby brother.”
But Miguel only snorted out a laugh. “It’s all right, Julio. If I need my words, they’ll be there.” He dropped the rest of his clothes, knelt and shifted. He was a lean man, tall and almost slender, and his wolf form reflected that.
He ran off, and Andrew struck something with his shovel. The sound rang out, hollow and metallic, and Kat eased closer to Patrick. “Is this what it always feels like? Like someone’s about to jump out at you at any second?”
“Sometimes.” Patrick had stripped off his leather jacket in spite of the cold, leaving his arms bare of anything but the full tattoo sleeves that ended at his wrists. Each hand held a gun. “These are the good times, though. The bad times are when it doesn’t feel like that, and they jump out at you anyway.”
“Yeah, speaking of jumping…” Julio arched an eyebrow. “You really want to have a couple of honking guns at the ready? This isn’t exactly an unpopulated area.”
Patrick grinned and lifted them both. “No one will hear these. Silent and untraceable. You don’t want to know what they run on the black market, though. I could have had a beach house in Malibu.”
Andrew knelt and uncovered a battered metal container. “Looks like a fire-resistant lockbox.” He looked up at Kat and held her gaze. “It’s locked, but I can open it, no problem.”
Opening it felt risky. So was leaving without being sure they’d gotten what they’d come for. “We should check.”
He wrenched open the lid a split second before a howl shredded the night, and an even louder shout reverberated through Kat’s mind with an echo that felt like Miguel, smoky and smooth.
“They’re here.”
It was all the warning they got before emotion exploded five feet behind her. Feral anticipation, determined focus, and a satisfaction that crawled over her as she spun around. Two men stood behind her, one already in motion, lunging past her toward Andrew. The other…
Shock held her in place. She recognized the dark eyes and floppy hair, that half-cocked smile that made him look like he was laughing at a joke he would share in the next breath. Christopher Gilbert. The man who’d taken her to dinner and discussed movies adapted from video games with such enthusiasm that she’d been enjoying herself for the first time in months—until a shapeshifter jumped them on the street and he’d vanished into the night while she’d fought off her attacker with a stun gun.