Fuck, he hoped they stayed up there.
And as he heard their voices above him, because it was just a two-story building and his wolf side had ears better than a radar detector, he pictured the fight that was going to roll out as his wolven took over, and they got out their guns, and humans all around went for their goddamn cell phones to take video—
Naturally, things promptly got more complicated. Because it was just the kind of night he was having.
Across the alley, the back door to the club swung wide and a set of staccato heels came racing for the driver’s side of the car. The woman stopped right next to him—and then fumbled and dropped her keys. As she leaned down to pick them up, the ends of her long blond hair trailed into his field of vision—
Beep-beep.
Running lights flashed as she unlocked the sedan with her remote, and Lucan tried to calm himself so he could dematerialize out—but he didn’t get far with that. His wolven side was too close to the surface, still triggered by those male vampires, still too excited that it had been given even a little freedom to come forward.
Great. The damn thing was liable to eat this woman who was wrenching open the door—
“Hey! Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” A human male came bursting out of the club after her, talking at a volume that suggested he’d swallowed a bullhorn at some point in his life. “What the fuck! Leaving me like that! Fuck you, Maria!”
The woman threw herself into the car, slammed the door, and punched the locks. Then she cranked the engine as the man came up and started pounding on the windows and yanking at the handle.
“You bitch!” Pound, pound, pound. “You fucking—”
Lucan had a brief stare-off at a pair of black loafers. Then the woman put things in gear and stomped on the gas.
Under the car, he had to think fast. No dematerializing because there was no chance to calm himself—and she had cranked the tires so hard to the left that he was directly in the path of the rear set of radials. Oh, and then there were the two vampires still up above him, who were looking for the same woman he was.
And surprise, he was the supplier who apparently they ultimately wanted to get to.
Fuck, he mouthed as he reached up into the fruit salad of the Hyundai’s underbelly and grabbed on to whatever he could.
As the wheels spun, and the smell of burning rubber got into his nose, and that man at the window kept yelling, Lucan planked the fuck out of himself, pulling his shoulders off the asphalt and extending his legs out straight. With abs burning, and his ass clenched tighter than a pair of gaffer grips, he held on for dear fucking life as the car’s tires found purchase and there was a thump.
Like the man had jumped in front of her and she’d hit him.
Christ, what was wrong with this alley? Was there some kind of mow-down quota that had to be reached every night?
That was Lucan’s last thought as the Hyundai got rolling and he had to use every ounce of strength and each brain cell he had to make sure his cheeks didn’t get the polishing of a lifetime.
He couldn’t say he’d spent much time considering the relative attributes—or lack thereof—of his posterior region, but the one thing he was suddenly really fucking clear on?
He wanted to keep all of what his mama gave him.
Homicide Detective José de la Cruz knew it was time to head home for the night, but he looked around the murder scene one more time. But like anything had changed since two seconds ago? It was still a dump that had been co-opted by drug dealers, with a hole in its roof, a bloodied-up sofa, and enough coke residue on that busted-ass table over there to give a grown man marching orders. The body that had turned the couch into the biggest Band-Aid in the world had been removed about an hour ago, and the techs had finished up with their photography and sampling about thirty minutes before that. Now, it was just him and—
“It true you’re retiring, Detective?”
José looked across at the kid he’d been partnered with for the last six months—who was actually thirty and had a wife and two children at home. Treyvon Abscott was tenacious, a little bit arrogant, and smart as hell. With his perfectly tended fade and his navy blue departmental perma-fleece, he looked more like a Marine who was off duty than any kind of donut-munching homicide detective—
“Yup, I’m calling it a wrap on this job.” José snuck a hand under his blazer to pull his pants up over his dad-bod belly. “Sixty-four days left. Not that I’m counting.”
Trey walked over to the sofa and stared down at the bloodstained cushions. “Hate to see you go, sir. We’re going to miss you.”
In spite of the guy’s casual khakis-and-fleece action, which was worn no matter the season, no matter the weather, there was a formality to Treyvon that José approved of. Then again, when you felt tired in your bones and weary in your soul, you appreciated when someone two decades younger than you paid you a little respect.
One newbie last year had tried to call him Joey, for fuck’s sake. He’d nearly slapped that nickname right out the guy’s mouth.
“Nice of you to say that.” José closed his notebook and ran his fore-finger over the cover. To think he wasn’t going to have to buy another of these spiral-bound steno numbers. “So I think we’re done here, Trey.”
“Yeah, not much to go on.”
“Nope.”
And yet both of them hesitated to leave. Which was the sign of a good detective, wasn’t it. Until you got your answers, you couldn’t let anything go.
Maybe that was why he was so tired after all this time. Too many questions with blank spaces after them, the catalogue of what he considered failures weighing him down. He was praying that retirement would get him not only a gold-plated watch from the department, but a cord-cutting from all that shit, a freedom, from everything that haunted him.
Dead children. Brutalized women. Innocent men who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.