Only, that particular amulet was supposed to harness good, not evil. And Mama’s stories to that effect were all just superstition anyway.

  Or so I’d thought at the time.

  Now I sincerely regretted not having materialized a Mickey Mouse medallion as the supposed bullet blocker. Because Gunner yanked me back onto my feet with complete disregard for personal space, hands sliding from neck to shoulders as he pulled me in so close we were standing eye to eye...or rather, eye to the middle of his chest.

  “You’re saying it’s an illusion that both your necklace thing and the burnt circle on the dead man’s chest were marked with Japanese characters?” the alpha werewolf demanded. “It’s an illusion that light flew off that man like a fu...” he gritted his teeth, calmed his language with an effort “...like a freaking ball of flame?”

  Before I could answer, one of the werewolves who’d ridden in a different vehicle called toward us from the far side of the underpass. “Everything okay, boss?” Apparently our current altercation had grown loud enough to impinge upon the other werewolves’ search of the surrounding landscape. And from the way the male’s eyes bit into me like daggers, he agreed with Liam that a stranger shouldn’t be trusted with secrets more appropriate to pack.

  But Gunner was too intent upon our conversation to give his underling’s warning the air space it deserved. “I’m fine. Now go,” Gunner responded, biting off the words so sharply that his underling’s scent of submission overwhelmed even the nearby stench of death.

  Despite the clear sign that he was taking his frustration one step too far, though, the alpha’s eyes never left mine even as rustlings in the bushes promised all other shifters were hastily relocating into safer territory far from potential reprimand. And, once we were even more alone than previously, the alpha’s voice turned ten times quieter while its intensity ratcheted up in equal measure. “Explain,” he ordered for my ears alone.

  The compulsion would have drawn a flood of words out of a submissive werewolf, but my fox heritage cut the command’s effects down to a mere itch atop my skin. Still, I didn’t like being threatened, and I didn’t like the way Gunner’s hands turned into manacles biting into my upper arms either. So I found myself spitting out inappropriate comments without passing the idea first by the more rational centers of my brain.

  “What makes you think those are Japanese symbols? Maybe they’re Chinese. Or Korean. What, you took one look at my slanty eyes and assumed I was a geisha? Racist much?”

  I’d found that most Caucasians grew stymied by the assertion that prejudice colored their thinking. Gunner, unfortunately, turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. “No circles or ovals, no complicated symbols,” he growled, calling my bluff with knowledge that exceeded my own. “So the symbols weren’t Chinese or Korean. They were Japanese, just like you.”

  Japanese like all fox shifters. Japanese like the bane of werewolves’ existence. I shivered, wondering for the first time whether Gunner’s interest in me had ever been attraction or if he’d been suspicious of my heritage from the moment we first met.

  For his part, Gunner paused for only a moment, pushing further into my personal space until his nose nearly touched my suddenly sweaty forehead. “If you have nothing to hide,” my companion murmured, his gravelly voice turning almost sweet with anticipation, “then show me your necklace thing so I can compare it to what was on the dead man’s chest.”

  As if he expected there to be blood stains on the amulet. Or for the “necklace thing” to have gone missing during the several hours in which the corpse at our feet turned from living being into so much dead meat.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of another way to get Gunner’s hands off me. He’d proven already that I couldn’t outfight him once his vise-like fingers bit down. And my vulpine disinclination to being constrained was already making it hard to breathe....

  So I fought to keep my inhales steady, hoping the night was dark enough to hide both the red on my cheeks and the fist-sized mass I magically yanked out of the sword sheathed by my side. Only when the amulet materialized around my neck with a near-audible pop of displaced air particles did I wince, the ice of its recently used magic burning against my skin.

  “It’s an amulet,” I informed the handsy alpha, pulling the heavy circle out from beneath my clothing while subtly pushing my companion just a little further away. “And it looks nothing like what was on that dead man’s chest. The symbols must have been all Japanese to you.”

  Gunner ignored my weak attempt at humor, and he didn’t give me time to pull the chain over my head either. Instead, his huge hand swiped the amulet out of my grasp, tilting it to take in the distant glow of passing headlights while drawing my neck closer to his own. “Hmmm,” he murmured, seemingly oblivious to our heart-pounding proximity.

  Well, if he could stick to business then so could I. To that end, I let my gaze brush over the raised symbols that covered the amulet’s surface, wishing I wasn’t so sure that the hash-marked lines did indeed match up to the ones that had recently disappeared from the dead man’s chest. But before the overbearing alpha could debrief me further, another werewolf emerged out of the darkness inches from my left side.

  “You’ll want to see this, boss,” the newcomer murmured, eyes narrowing only slightly as he took in my proximity to his alpha. “There’s a footprint on the east side of the overpass. Scentless, small, but most definitely made by a wolf.”

  Chapter 16

  I could feel both my job...and possibly my skin-protecting secrets...slipping through my fingers no matter how hard I clenched said appendages into fists. Still, I stretched my legs to catch up as the two werewolves ahead of me strode up the steep hillside with complete disregard for darkness.

  “I hear you, Allen,” Gunner said, answering a murmur that I hadn’t been able to make out as I lagged, trying to tease out the third shifter’s signature scent. Allen was one of the males who’d ridden in the back seat of the SUV during the drive over, I gathered. Given how easily the trio had teased Gunner then, it was hard to imagine what might have provoked such a cool reaction from his boss now.

  Giving up on the puzzle, I broke into a trot and broke out of the thicket just a step behind as the werewolves paused in an open area where a metal drainage pipe produced a flat, muddy area perfect for capturing passing animals’ tracks. “But I’ve decided,” Gunner continued, flicking a single glance in my direction that suggested I’d been the topic of conversation. Then his eyebrows rose, a clear signal that whatever conversation I’d missed was now over and done.

  Shrugging, Allen got down to business, shining a flashlight between us to reveal indents of bird toes, pinpricks of insect feet...and one perfectly formed canine print just at the edge of the mud slick. The animal had traveled up the slope since the last rainfall, lacking the savvy to skirt around the muddy spot. As a result, its passing had been recorded as perfectly as any fossilized dinosaur track imprinted in Jurassic clay.

  So, yes, the print definitely existed. Still, I couldn’t imagine why Gunner’s underling was so certain the imprint represented the foot of a werewolf. After all, its moderate size would have more closely matched a domestic canine like a Labrador retriever...or possibly a very large fox.

  Did I mention that fox shifters out-mass the wild version by quite a wide margin? Kneeling down beside the track, I found my fingers stretching toward what might very well be the first sign of an unrelated fox shifter that I’d ever come in contact with.

  “Don’t touch that!” My hand was slapped back so abruptly I didn’t even feel the sting before the shifter who had drawn us here began pointing out clues to his eagle-eyed alpha. “There’s no scent,” Allen informed us unnecessarily. “Note the white lines where baking soda stuck to his pads....”

  “Or her pads,” Gunner interjected, his voice so cold I cringed back away from his menacing form. Gone was the thoughtful protector who’d helped me stifle my sneezing only a few minutes earlier. Instead, Gunner had regressed into exactly the sort of terror-inducing alpha I’d assumed him to be at our first meeting.

  So maybe I’d guessed wrong about Allen objecting to my presence. Perhaps Gunner was the one who wanted me gone ASAP.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” the lower-ranking shifter agreed, eyes lowered in instinctive submission as he responded to the same cues that triggered my own urge for flight. Still, the underling’s tone didn’t match his body language, the emphasis on “guess” suggesting he considered a female killer a profoundly unlikely hypothesis.

  And after a moment of skin-saving silence, the male proved his courage by speaking up once again. “Should I run to the store for some plaster of Paris?” he asked, his voice becoming increasingly animated as Gunner’s reproof faded from his memory. “I can take a casting to compare to the feet of shifters around town....”

  For the first time in several minutes, I was tempted to smile. There was something so geeky about the enthusiasm infusing the underling’s voice. As if arts and crafts were far more interesting than the blood and gore of a crime scene. He seemed to be envisioning a Cinderella-like hunt for our perpetrator...albeit with a much less fairy-tale ending. How surprisingly un-werewolf-like of him.

  Unfortunately, Gunner shut the initiative down with the verbal equivalent of a slap. “No,” the alpha growled, voice brooking no further debate. “We’ve learned all there is to learn here. Wrap it up and head back to base. I’m taking Mai home.”

  SO I GOT BACK INTO the vehicle with a surly werewolf...this time without the added buffer of teasing pack mates watching from the back seat. Only my problem wasn’t the expected inability to run away from an angry alpha. Instead, Gunner opened my door like a gentleman then hesitated there on the roadside rather than slamming the barrier shut in my face.

  “About earlier,” he started. Then, running one hand through his hair, he shook his head as if his behavior was far too complicated to explain verbally.

  “Gunner?” I asked when the silence between us had lengthened to awkward levels, half a dozen vehicles having whizzed past us on the highway. I only realized this was the first time I’d used his name aloud when my companion’s scent shifted to dewy pleasure seconds before the door closed between us with a firm yet gentle snick.

  Then the male was in the seat beside me, was pulling out into traffic as he headed in the direction of my neighborhood without bothering to ask where I lived. He’d clearly researched my statistics in the time we’d spent apart this afternoon. Which should have chilled me...but instead created a warm puddle of pleasure centering around the bottom of my gut.

  “You need to get home to your sister,” Gunner said finally, deftly switching lanes to zip past a slow-moving vehicle. “So I guess that gives us nine and a half minutes to discuss your pay rate.”

  “My pay rate?”

  For the first time since entering the vehicle, I swiveled to face the confusing male beside me, not daring to hope that I’d heard him right. Because, possible two-sided attraction aside, I’d blown it multiple times over the course of our job-interview-turned-criminal-investigation. Why would Gunner still want me on his team?

  “Funds provided for services rendered,” the alpha elaborated, his tone turning honey smooth. Well, if Gunner was going to be flirtatious...then I could afford to push whatever slim advantage I might possess.

  I cleared my throat then launched into the bare truth. “I need more than cash under the table,” I informed him, the dour face of Kira’s social worker rising up in my mind’s eye. “I need a job description that sounds conventional and dependable, a weekly paycheck that I can report to Social Services. And I need seven thousand dollars on top of that, up front, to pay for Kira’s school.”

  My requests were outrageous, but Gunner merely shrugged, taking one hand off the wheel long enough to toss his phone into my lap. “The passcode is 9653,” he told me. “Text Allen and tell him what you need.”

  It was a good thing A came at the beginning of the alphabet, because Gunner’s address book contained more contacts than I was likely to muster in ten lifetimes. Still, when I found the appropriate entry, I had to laugh. Because the plaster-of-Paris werewolf was apparently Gunner’s accountant too.

  “Tell him what you told me,” Gunner prodded as my fingers hovered over the phone’s touchscreen, unwilling to repeat my demands in print. “Five minutes until we arrive at our destination,” he warned.

  So I typed. I added a link to the payment portal for the academy, the email address of my least favorite social worker, and an explanation that it was me sending the text with Gunner’s consent.

  And the whole time I was doing so, a slender sliver of wishful thinking made me imagine what it might be like to revoke my outcast status, to have friends ready and willing to come to my aid. Perhaps that’s why I knocked the previously requested seven thousand down to six thousand—surely I could come up with an extra grand from Arena fights before the deadline. It just seemed pushy to ask for so much money when my new employer was taking time out of his busy schedule to run me all the way home.

  Not that the drive was a hardship in such a high-class vehicle. The faintest smile lingered on Gunner’s lips when I glanced in his direction, and the SUV’s brakes were silent as we pulled to a halt in front of my apartment complex seconds after I hit send. But Gunner stilled me with a hand on my arm before I could reach over to open the door and emerge from the vehicle.

  “Your sister’s sleeping,” he noted, nodding toward the darkened window three floors above our far-too-close-together heads. “She won’t know the difference if you come run with the pack tonight. I can get you home before dawn.”

  And with his attention turned directly upon me, the magnetism of Gunner’s proximity flowed between us like the glowing magic of a star ball. I could imagine his fingers sliding across my cheekbone, his lips settling at the pulsing indentation at the base of my throat. There was so much more to this alpha than mere physical attraction. He was protective, funny, kind...

  ...And dangerous. So dangerous I didn’t even trust myself to answer aloud as I shook my head and pushed my way out the door.

  “Tomorrow then,” Gunner answered before the metal barrier slipped out of my fingers and cut him off from view.

  Then I was sprinting toward the dimly lit entrance of a building that suddenly felt more like a fox’s underground and secretive lair than like a human’s welcoming and airy residence. It took all the self-control I could muster not to turn my head and look back.

  Chapter 17

  I made it up two flights of stairs before the werewolves ambushed me. Was already dreaming of my sofa bed, in fact, imagining warm sheets and soft pillows while pretending there wasn’t a hard bar that always ended up poking into the middle of my back. Then, in the midst of that waking hallucination, three sleek-furred four-leggers slid out of the shadows, ruffs raised and lips curled as they growled me back in the direction from which I’d come.

  “Really?” I demanded, my voice a hiss as I tried to vent my displeasure without waking sleeping residents. “What do you want?”

  A louder rebuttal might have done the job better. But knowing my sister, the girl would come running out of our apartment in her nightshirt if she heard a commotion. Plus, heaven forbid one of the complex’s human residents stumbled out of their own residence then called the police upon sighting three wolves attacking a women so close to their home turf....

  The image of Kira and cops and werewolves all mixed up into one steaming stew of catastrophe was enough to prevent me from resisting as I was herded downstairs past the entrance I’d come in through and toward the basement where a second exit opened onto the alley out back. There, though, I hesitated rather than pushing the heavy fire door open even though one of my herders lunged forward to nip at the air beside my knee.

  After all, nothing good ever came out of that secluded cesspool by the dumpsters. Rushing out now with three werewolves at my back and nothing but darkness before me felt far too much like walking into a trap....

  Luckily, I was now far enough away from both sister and human residents that I could afford to make a little noise. So I resisted the wolves’ nudges and peered around me instead.

  On my right was the laundry room, on the left was the resident storage area, and not a single human ear was close enough to hear what was about to go down. Which meant now was the perfect time to whirl and kick out at the closest shifter, grinning when he yelped at the bruise to both his dignity and to his sensitive nose.

  “Back up,” I gritted from between clenched teeth, dodging just in time to bypass the shifter leaping toward my unprotected neck from the other side. So maybe these werewolves weren’t just here to mess with me? Maybe they were aiming for a more final end to our engagement than that?

  Well, that put an entirely different spin on matters. I hadn’t been willing to indulge in full-scale battle to salvage wounded pride, but I’d do a lot to protect my own skin.

  Unfortunately, half of my star ball still hung around my neck where I’d left it to avert Gunner’s suspicion. Which meant the sword I pulled out of its sheathe was really only half a sword, the jagged tip menacing but the internal structure flawed by its recent loss of mass. The weapon would be as likely to shatter as to stab if I thrust it into an attacking shifter....

  Of course, the three wolves leaping toward me as a single unit didn’t have to know that. So I bought time with pageantry, whirling the sword in complicated circles while adding in kicks and leaps possessing no function beyond looking pretty and—I hoped—intimidating my trio of foes.

  All I needed was a few seconds to strengthen the metal of my sword, a few seconds to bring its molecules back into alignment....