The bald cop handed the knife over to the younger cop, who promptly stuck it in a ziplock bag he pulled out of the police car.
“Go ahead and test that knife. You won’t find any traces of blood on it.” Braxton ground out between clenched teeth as they turned around.
“I guess we’ll just have to see, smartass.” The cop opened the back door of the police car and thrust him in, slamming Braxton’s head into the frame of the door. “Watch your head,” the cop sneered before shutting the door.
Braxton ignored the brief blinding pain shooting through his skull and blinked away the blood trailing down his head. As a werewolf, he’d heal soon enough. He wasn’t worried about the injury. Holding back the anger that threatened his shift into wolf form was the real challenge. Shifting in front of humans was an absolute no-no in Were Law.
A female’s scream shredded the darkness and Braxton’s concentration. He jerked his head toward the house as his mother raced toward them. The young cop grabbed her around the waist, preventing her from reaching the car.
“Let go of my mother, asshole,” Braxton growled through the car.
“The ambulance is on its way to check you out, ma’am. You really don’t need to talk to the culprit,” the younger cop assured her.
“Braxton,” she cried out.
“Mom, it’s okay. Everything will be okay.” Braxton’s heart ached at the sight of his wild-eyed mother, clothes smeared with his father’s blood.
“You’ve broken the law, Braxton.” Her voice sent a shiver down his spine.
His heart dipped to his stomach. There was no way he could make his mother understand that he hadn’t killed his father. Not while she was hysterical.
“That’s why we’re taking him to jail, ma’am.” The cop nodded and shot Braxton a glare before releasing his hold on his mother.
She sprinted for the car and pressed her bloody palms to the window. “They are coming for you, Braxton. And they are bringing judgment with them.”
Braxton clenched his muscles as the reality of the situation set in.
He barely registered the ambulance pulling up or the activity of someone taking his mother to sit in the back while a paramedic took her vital signs.
News in the Were community traveled like lightning. The werewolf council in Shreveport probably already knew what had happened. If they believed Braxton had murdered his own father, then he had, indeed, broken the law.
The Werewolf Law.
Breaking the Werewolf Law meant one thing.
The Assassins were on their way to kill him.
***
Kate Wolph tugged the starburst-patterned quilt around her shoulders and opened her front door. Stepping out onto the porch, she shivered against the assault of the icy breeze. Easing into one of the wicker rockers on the front porch, she buried her nose into the quilt to keep the January wind from freezing it off. Despite the late hour of three a.m., the woods around her isolated bed and breakfast had a calming effect on her.
The solitude is what had drawn her mother here years ago to buy this particular B&B rather than buying one in the charming town of Eureka Springs. It was the isolation that kept the customers coming back even after her mother died.
Kate swallowed, her eyes stinging with a fresh batch of tears, wondering what her mother would think of the floundering business if she were still alive.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Kate whispered into the cold night air, her escaped tears almost freezing against her cheek. “You were so right about Tom. I should have listened to you. ”
Her stomach churned as the bleak memory of the argument that she and her mother had gotten into before the accident rose up in her mind. Kate had told her mom that Tom Hudson had proposed. Her mother had gotten upset and forbidden her to marry him, insisting Tom was nothing but a con artist, and that he was only interested in living off Kate.
Her mother had taken her eyes off the winding road in Eureka Springs for a brief second. That’s all it took for their car to plummet off the cliff.
It had taken Kate a month to recover from her physical injuries, but she had yet to get over the gaping wound her mother’s death had left behind.
It had taken less than three months after the accident for Tom to leave and take all of Kate’s savings with him.
Now, a year later, she was facing the fact that her B&B, the only home she’d known, was facing foreclosure.
She poked her hand out from under the warmth of the quilt and held the bank letter up to the glow of the porch light.
Her heart froze in her chest as she read, and then reread, the looming threat of foreclosure if she didn’t make up her missed mortgage payments.