“What did he sound like?”
Blake grimaced. “Bad intent. Like if an Anaconda talked to you while he was squeezing the life out of you.”
Trevor eyed the hole in the red brick in front of them. It really wasn’t Khain’s style. “Those sound like thoughts. At least the first two things he said. I’ve never heard of any
wolven
being able to hear his exact thoughts before, not even the
Pumaii
. No one’s seen him on this side for over two decades, but I’ve studied all the past interactions with him. No one’s ever said they could hear him like that.”
Blake shrugged his wide shoulders. “I know.” He looked hard at Trevor. “Someone beat me here. He saw Khain.”
Trevor leaned forward and grasped Blake’s arm in a pincer grip, causing the other male to wince. “Who? Where is he? I must talk to him!”
Blake pulled his arm away and nodded at the dirty sidewalk just to the left of the gaping hole in the building. He took a step that way and pointed at what looked like a pile of ash. “There’s a twisted piece of black metal in there that is probably a gun, and another gold lump that certainly used to be a badge.”
“Ah fuck,” Trevor breathed, pushing a hand through his hair. “Do we know who it is?”
“My guess is Pickett. I heard him on the radio just before the explosion, he said he was next door. I told him to wait for me, but…”
The two males stared at the pile of ash heavily. Trevor had heard of Khain doing something like this before, but he’d never seen it.
Blake cleared his throat, his voice strained. “Poor bastard. It was his first day back to work since he got hurt.”
Trevor shook his head, unable to say anything. He had never wished so hard to be the
wolfen
everyone thought he was before. To be the one who finally brought the murdering bastard down would be the greatest victory available to his kind.
Someone pushed past him. Trevor looked up and saw Mac heading into the shell of a building. Troy growled at him.
“Back at you, mangy mutt,” Mac said, then stood in the center of the room, hands on hips, head high, turning in a circle.
Trevor heard a new vehicle pull up to the scene and stop behind him. He stepped backwards to look past Blake. The rest of his team was arriving.
Harlan stepped out of the driver’s seat of the KSRT’s work truck and raised a hand to Trevor. Trevor watched him go into investigatory mode immediately, taking in the scene as a whole, his nostrils flaring. Beckett and Crew also got out of the car. Strong warriors, all of them, and Trevor was glad to have them on his side even if none of them particularly cared for him. Except Harlan. Harlan was the only member of the KSRT who hadn’t immediately seen Trevor’s placement as the new boss two years ago, usurping Mac, as an act of war. Harlan was the oldest member of the KSRT, and possibly the one who’d lost the most at the hands of Khain. He’d lost his mother just like all the rest of them had, but having been older already, he hadn’t grown up in the war camps. He’d been mated before all the females had been lost. For almost a full day. Harlan would never rest until Khain was stopped, and he never let his ego get in the way of that. There were four other members of the KSRT, but Trevor hadn’t expected to see any of them. They all worked best alone.
Trevor tipped a hand to Harlan, then turned back to his friend, a weariness settling in his bones that he hadn’t ever felt before, now that his adrenaline was waning.
The woman in the back of the ambulance let out a loud shriek, pulling Trevor’s attention that way. “What’s her story?” he asked Blake.
“This is her shop.”
“Did she see him?”
“Maybe. If she did, it might have driven her mad. All she will say is that some bitch assaulted her and stole her stole.”
“What?”
Blake pulled out his notebook and showed Trevor a page. “I asked her to spell it. Stole her stole.”
“Who assaulted her?”
“I never saw anyone but her and all the girl scouts and their leaders, plus a few other witnesses. None of them were seriously hurt, and all their stories are a bit different but there might be one woman unaccounted for. I just hope she wasn’t fried, like Pickett.” He dropped his voice and leaned towards Trevor. “The paramedics say her only injury is a bite mark to her shoulder.”
Trevor’s eyes widened? “A bite mark?”
Blake nodded. “I smelled it. Fox.”
Trevor looked around, this new information burning his brain. “But there are no reports of
foxen
being on the scene?”
“None.”
“What about
Pumaii
?”
“Yeah, he was here, but he took off. Said he had to report to Kalista.”
“You didn’t stop him?”
Blake shook his head, his lips pressed together. “You know we have no jurisdiction over the
Pumaii
. He could have bitten me himself and I would have had to stand aside and let him go.”
Trevor growled, knowing that was true, but hating everything about it.
This was big, the biggest event to happen in his career, and he wasn’t going to wait very long to hear from the leader of the mercenaries who tracked Khain when he moved into the real world.
If he couldn’t hunt Khain down, he would settle for hunting down Kalista.
Trevor physically held himself in place, trying to decide what his top priority was, but the sound of a new vehicle pulling up to the edge of the crime scene caught his attention. He wouldn’t have to hunt Kalista down after all. Her car, an obscene silver Bugatti Chiron, purred in the same way Trevor knew its driver did.
“Fuck,” he said on a huff of air, wishing the Chief would show up so he wouldn’t have to be the one to talk to her.
The car door opened and a six-inch white heel dropped into view. Trevor snatched his gaze away, looking straight ahead.
“The Light save the baby Jesus,” Blake breathed. “Who is that?”
“You never met a
felen
before?”
“No. I thought they lost all their females too.”
“They did, but Kalista is one tough female. She got sick. Almost died. She’s fought Khain directly a few times, some people think that gave her more strength than most of the females somehow.”
“How old is she?” Blake’s voice was lowered, and his eyes were on the approaching female.
“Not sure. Over a hundred and fifty, I’ve heard.”
“So she’s mated.”
Trevor knocked Blake in the back of the head. “Yeah, she’s mated. The
felen
don’t mate like we do, but they do mate, and they do live longer when they are mated, just like us. I heard her mate is a healer and that might have been what saved her.”
“She’s still so...” Blake ran out of words and his tongue poked out of his mouth. Trevor couldn’t blame him, but he could make fun of him.
He popped his friend on the back of the head again. “Get it together, Romeo, the
felen
are all like that. Even the males. Walking, talking sex and it won’t be any better once she gets here.”
Blake tried to look away but he couldn’t do it. A goofy grin spread over his face. Trevor still didn’t look, but he could imagine Kalista looking back boldly, giving him a half-smile, possibly biting her lip or running her hand up her neck into her hair. Ah, fuck, just what he needed.
She strode up to them and stopped. “Lieutenant,” she said, her voice thick and sultry, reverberating in the back of her throat and making him think of lips closing around his dick. The velvety softness of tongue and mouth…
He steeled himself and turned to her, ignoring Blake’s sappy smile. She was curvy and tall. Six feet he guessed, which put her seven inches shorter than him, but with those heels, she could easily look him in the eye. She wore a white, one piece bodysuit that separated into straps just above her breasts and crossed around her neck. Her dark, dappled hair was twisted up into a bun, her feline eyes watching him shrewdly, invitingly.
“Kalista,” he barked, not meaning to sound so harsh, but unwilling to follow in Blake’s idiot footsteps either, and the roughness seemed to be the only way to make sure he didn’t. Too bad he was positive Kalista liked it rough. She’d made that clear the only other time they’d ever spoken. “Where did your male go? We need a full report. And why weren’t we notified that Khain was on the move?”
“Relax, Lieutenant,” the female said, her lips pursing slightly on the words. “I’ve got your report. You were notified. Your dispatch was told immediately.” She raised her perfect eyebrows and barely cocked her right hip. “Are you saying they never called you?”
Trevor shook his head.
Kalista tsked her tongue, her facial expression barely changing. “Naughty dispatch. Then again, they didn’t have much time between when we called and the big explosion. That and we haven’t called them in years. Maybe some policy needs revising?” She turned her head and smiled at Blake, then turned her knowing eyes back on Trevor, dropping the cute act. “Something big is coming.”
Trevor sighed in relief at her change in attitude. “Why do you say that?”
Kalista motioned to the building. “He popped into our dimensionality about two blocks that way, went straight into this building, and popped out of our dimensionality shortly after. Plus he was trying to jam us, which he’s never done before. He had this planned, and the purpose of it was not to kill humans. In my opinion, he hasn’t finished coming after
shiften
yet, and this is part of it.”
“Jam you?”
Kalista sighed and rolled her eyes before she explained. “Normally
felen
can read Khain easily. We can roughly tell where he is even in the
Pravus
. We don’t know what the
Pravus
looks like or how it corresponds to our dimension, so roughly, I’d say we can tell if he’s still near Illinois or not. When he pops into our dimension we can hone in on him, figure out exactly where he is, but it takes some doing. We have to move around to feel exactly where the pull is. And we can read him. Not his exact thoughts, but his intent. But this time when he came over he was repelling and jamming us. I felt him immediately, like a constant scream in the night, but I was too far away to tell exactly where he was. Nalan was in the area, and he said that from this close, it felt like he and Khain were two like poles of the magnet that repelled, instead of two unlike poles, like it used to be. Like Khain had been messing with whatever he has inside him that lets us track him.”
Trevor nodded, then lifted his chin at Blake. “Meet your new like pole.”
Kalista’s eyes fastened on him and she drew closer to him. “Really? You were attracted to him?”
Blake blubbered for a moment, staring up at the
felen
before he managed to speak. “I-I knew where he was yes, and I felt him come here. I could hear him too.”
Kalista took his arm and purred into his ear. “How fascinating. I really must talk to you more. Figure this mystery out.” She led Blake away but before she had gone more than a few steps she turned back. “Lieutenant?” She nodded at the building. “The explosion? He didn’t do it.”
Trevor stared hard at the building, the surrounding storefronts, his crew and the patrol officers investigating and cataloguing everything.
If Khain didn’t cause the explosion, then who did? How? Why?
Trevor gritted his teeth and felt them ache to grow long, his body itch to shift.
His wolf wanted out very badly.
***
Trevor headed back to the station, leaving his brothers and his crew at the scene to finish the investigation. He’d told Mac where to find him and that he wanted a full report the second the investigation was done. He’d told Blake to head to dispatch when he left and review the procedures when any
felen
called in with a location on Khain, and he’d given Kalista his cell, telling her he wanted a heads up the instant any
felen
so much as got a hint of Khain being on this side.
As he drove, he thought about the mysterious female that may or may not have been on the scene. One witness had described her as tall, with dark black hair and paper-white skin. No one else had seen her at all, and the lady who’d been bitten by the fox only screamed when asked about her.
Trevor fiddled with the buttons on his tactical pants, hoping she hadn’t ended up another pile of ash, or worse yet, been working with Khain. He knew Khain had supporters, but he’d never heard of a human being one of them.
Trevor pulled up to the station and parked his truck, then headed to an unobtrusive door on the side of the building. He stood in front of the lock and waited for it to read his retina and open, resisting the urge to blink, to pull back, to run screaming through the parking lot. He hated that eye-scanner thing.
The door opened only for long enough for him to slip inside the dark hallway. He pulled his arms and legs in quickly, before the door slammed on them. Only one person could pass at a time unless it was two moving quickly, that was one of the heightened security features of the outside door.
Trevor walked fast, his footfalls echoing in the cool chamber. The hallway slanted down, taking him straight where he wanted to go, the underground tunnels. He twisted left, then right, then around, until he found the room he was looking for.
He pushed open the wooden door, noting by the smells that came at him that Wade had been the last one in here, two, maybe two and a half weeks ago.
The only history the
shiften
were allowed to record were all in this room. Three hundred and eighty four thousand and two prophecies, most taken down centuries ago. Only a few had been recorded in the last thirty years, but that was the section Trevor headed for. He needed to hear the One True Mate prophecy again, see if there was any reference to them being called The Promised.
He knew there wasn’t. He had the prophecy memorized, but he would not trust something so important to his memory. If Khain were hunting down the One True Mates meant for the
shiften
, that would change everything.
Trevor pulled out the DVD recording he was looking for and stuck it in the DVD player over the small TV in the corner, then turned everything on and sank into the overstuffed lounge chair, his mind spinning.