The wolf is mine, p.1
The Wolf Is Mine, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2023 by Paige Tyler
Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Patrick Kang
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Excerpt from Loving the Wolf
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
With special thanks to my extremely patient and understanding husband. Without your help and support, I couldn’t have pursued my dream job of becoming a writer. You’re my sounding board, my idea man, my critique partner, and the absolute best research assistant a girl could ask for. Love you!
Chapter 1
San Antonio
“Why the hell would Zane and Alyssa come all the way out here to the middle of nowhere?” Officer Connor Malone, Dallas PD SWAT, asked as he looked around the abandoned condo complex he and his teammates were searching. “It doesn’t look like anyone has been here in months.”
“And we’re nowhere close to the place where the actual murder happened,” Officer Hale Delaney, his blond, blue-eyed teammate, added, leaning over to show Connor the screen of his cell phone. Hale had pulled up a map of San Antonio, and the two dots displayed there were a good fifteen miles apart.
“That detective from San Antonio PD said Zane mentioned something about meeting a possible witness out here, but that was two weeks ago,” dark-haired Senior Corporal Trevor McCall answered from the far side of the parking lot, where he and Officer Diego Martinez were sniffing around. As in literally sniffing around, hoping their enhanced werewolf sense of smell might pick up something to suggest Zane and Alyssa had been here.
“Seems more like a place a cop goes to get ambushed than to meet a witness,” the other member of their team, Senior Corporal Mike Taylor, murmured as he tugged on the chain wrapped around the handles of the building’s main doors. “If Zane came out here, it was because he and Alyssa were desperate for a lead. Or thought they were onto one worth the risk.”
Officer Zane Kendrick and his mate, Alyssa Carson, had come to San Antonio more than three weeks ago to investigate what had been described as “a murder with supernatural and ritualistic indicators,” but they hadn’t been heard from since.
While Zane was an alpha werewolf like all the members of the Dallas SWAT team, Alyssa was a human who worked for the Special Threat Assessment Team, an agency that specialized in dealing with supernatural creatures regular law enforcement would never be able to admit existed, much less deal with. Connor’s werewolf pack had originally run across STAT when they’d worked together to take down vampires in Los Angeles, but this was the first time one of the Pack’s werewolves had gone on a mission without more of the Pack for backup.
The trip to San Antonio was supposed to have been little more than a reconnaissance mission. Zane and Alyssa were here to look at the body of the murder victim and see if there was enough to warrant a more detailed investigation. Considering Zane was an alpha werewolf and Alyssa an experienced field agent, it should have been a piece of cake. Nothing should have gone wrong.
But something had gone wrong.
And now both of them were missing.
In the three days since Connor and his pack mates had been down here, they hadn’t found a single clue telling them where Zane and Alyssa were. They’d gotten a look at the autopsy report and confirmed that the knife wounds definitely looked ritualistic, but other than that, they had nothing. Hell, they weren’t even sure if anything supernatural was involved.
“Everybody spread out,” Mike said, cupping his hands to look inside the glass doors of the building. “See if you can pick up a scent or find anything that looks out of place.”
While Diego and Trevor continued around the right side of the complex, Connor headed for the left, Hale following. Connor breathed deeply through his nose, trying to pick up the familiar scents he associated with Zane and Alyssa, while at the same time remaining attentive to other smells that might suggest something unusual had happened there. Like smokeless powder or blood. Even the desiccated stench of vampire.
As for Hale, he didn’t bother trying to find anything with his nose. He’d broken it so badly in a fight when he was younger that it had damaged the olfactory nerves and receptors. For some reason, the damage hadn’t been repaired when Hale went through his werewolf change. Now, he couldn’t smell anything. Sniffing for leads was a waste of time, so he depended on his keen eyesight instead.
Connor and Hale were fighting through chest-high brush and thickets along the side of the building when his phone vibrated in his pocket. Connor didn’t even consider letting it go to voicemail. He’d been desperately waiting for one particular bit of news, and he prayed this was it.
“Rachel,” he said the moment he answered. “Please tell me you’ve found her.”
“Not yet. Sorry,” one of the two female alpha werewolves on the team said softly, and Connor felt despair and anxiety clamp down on his heart like a pair of pliers. “We put up flyers in all the neighborhoods around the SWAT compound and have all the street patrols in the area keeping an eye out for her—sort of an unofficial BOLO. Everyone’s looking for her. We’re going to find Kat. I promise.”
Rachel kept talking, telling Connor what else they were doing in their search for the team’s feline mascot, but he was having a hard time paying attention to anything she was saying. The only thing he could think about right then was that Kat had been missing since the morning he and the other guys left to drive down here to San Antonio three days ago. And he was flat-out losing his mind.
Connor was so freaked out that it was actually starting to concern him. He and the Pack had adopted Kat when she’d climbed in one of the SWAT response trucks at a crime scene nine months ago. He’d never thought of himself as a cat person—he was a werewolf for crying out loud—but all of that changed when Kat had shown up in his life and begun following him everywhere he went. He didn’t understand it, but he and Kat had bonded so strongly that they spent almost every moment of every day together. Hell, she slept on the pillow beside him in bed every night, too. It wasn’t normal to worry this much simply because she’d been missing for a few days, was it? Seriously, he felt like he was about to have a nervous breakdown.
He was able to collect himself enough to at least get Rachel up to speed on what was going on in San Antonio. Not that there was much to tell her in that regard. He gave her the location of the abandoned condo complex, promising to call back once they’d cleared it.
“We’re not holding out much hope of finding them here, though,” he added. “The place seems deserted.”
“Nothing new on Kat?” Hale asked when he hung up, even though Connor knew his pack mate had heard the entire conversation. His nose might be crap, but his ears worked fine.
Connor shook his head. “Not yet. Rachel told me not to lose hope, though.”
“She’s right,” Hale murmured, his voice encouraging even as he gave up fighting through the brush and looked around for a better route. “Kat’s too smart to get herself into trouble. She’s probably out hunting for mice. That or she’s looking for a hunky tomcat to spend some quality time with. Trust me, she
Connor didn’t say anything. He knew Hale was only trying to help make him feel better, but his buddy was wrong. Kat hadn’t gone out hunting for mice. She was the pickiest cat he’d ever seen when it came to food. She turned her nose up at anything in a can, even tuna. No, Kat preferred fresh-caught fish, filet mignon, and lightly seasoned flank steak, all of them cooked to perfection. The one time she’d seen a mouse running across the yard at the compound, she’d gotten this look on her face suggesting someone needed to call an exterminator.
The idea that Kat would be out chasing a tomcat was also ludicrous. While she got along great with Tuffie, the pit-bull mix the Pack had rescued and adopted, she’d never shown any interest in hanging out with other cats.
No. Kat hadn’t run off for either of those reasons. There was definitely some other stuff going on, and he couldn’t help but think the worst.
“Connor. Hale.” Mike’s voice sounded in his radio earpiece. “Come around to the east side of the building. We found something.”
Connor and Hale exchanged looks, then quickly retraced their steps through the brush. Once clear of the overgrown thickets, they both took off running. Connor didn’t have a clue if whatever Mike and the other guys had found was dangerous or not, but he didn’t want to chance it one way or another. They’d barely made it a few hundred feet along the east side of the building when he picked up a pungent scent.
“Blood,” he said for Hale’s benefit. “There isn’t a lot of it, and what’s there isn’t very fresh, but it’s definitely not werewolf blood.”
Which meant it didn’t belong to Zane or Alyssa, thankfully.
They found Mike, Trevor, and Diego standing outside a set of stairs that led down into what Connor assumed was the maintenance level. The smell of blood was stronger now. When he stopped beside his pack mates, he saw something painted in muddy brown along one side of the wall above the steps. It looked like some kind of graffiti. He frowned when he realized that was where the scent of blood was coming from. Someone had used blood as paint.
“What the hell is that symbol?” he asked.
It was a diamond with a long line running vertically through it. A few slash marks had been added to the top and bottom of the vertical line, like the fletching on an arrow. Connor honestly had no idea what he was looking at.
“I don’t know,” Mike murmured, staring at the symbol, brow furrowed above his dark eyes. “But I took a picture of it and sent it to Rachel. She’ll see if STAT can come up with something on it.”
“I’m not sure we can wait for them,” Connor said. “Painting a ritualistic-looking symbol on the wall in human blood falls under the category of supernatural indicators. I think we need to see where these stairs lead.”
When none of his pack mates seemed to have a problem with that plan, Connor led the way down the debris-cluttered steps to the set of metal double doors at the bottom. He expected to see more chains around the handles, like the ones on the front door, but there weren’t any, which was kind of weird.
“I’m picking up some scents,” Mike said.
Connor glanced over to see his teammate standing there with his eyes closed, an expression of intense concentration on his face.
“I want to say they belong to Zane and Alyssa, but they’re barely discernible,” Mike added. “Like they were here months ago instead of days or even weeks.”
Connor shared looks with Trevor and Diego to see if they’d picked up anything, because Connor couldn’t smell anything other than metal, but they both shook their heads.
“Your nose must be better than ours because we’re not even getting a hint of whatever you’re smelling,” Connor said. “Is it coming from whatever’s on the other side of the door?”
Mike opened his eyes. “Only one way to know for sure.”
Connor expected the doors to be locked, so he was surprised when Mike pushed them open without any effort at all. He was about to question if maybe this was a trap when he picked up two very familiar scents.
“It’s them,” Mike said. “I’m sure of it.”
Pulling his department-issued weapon from the holster on his waist, Mike stepped through the door and moved deeper into the darkness within. Diego, Trevor, and Hale followed. Connor did, too, not even slowing to consider what might be waiting for them in there. Zane and Alyssa were Pack. That meant it didn’t matter what dangers might be waiting for him and the other guys. They’d face whoever they had to face and do whatever they had to do to rescue them.
The basement of the complex was a sprawling collection of interconnected rooms, support columns, and decades’ worth of broken wood pallets and assorted junk covered with a thick layer of dust. The only illumination came from the tiny grated vents set up high near the ceiling. But none of that mattered as they followed Zane’s and Alyssa’s scents toward the west side of the building.
In a puddle of light created by two of the small windows, they found their pack mate and his fiancée leaning against a concrete block exterior wall. Zane and Alyssa were surrounded by dirty plastic bottles filled with even dirtier water and a handful of cardboard boxes and cellophane wrappers—Twinkies and Oreos, he’d guess by what was left of the packaging. But the strangest thing wasn’t any of that stuff. It was the two broken pieces of wood lying across their laps. Like they’d been using the makeshift weapons to defend themselves.
To put it bluntly, Zane and Alyssa looked like death warmed over. Alyssa in particular, as she was bleeding through half a dozen rough bandages that had been applied to wounds along her arms, shoulders, and sides. Both their clothes were smudged with so much dirt, it was like they’d been rolling in it. If Connor hadn’t heard their slow, shallow heartbeats with his own ears, he would have thought both of them were dead.
After holstering his gun, Diego scooped Alyssa into his arms as Connor dropped to his knees at Zane’s side. He cupped his pack mate’s jaw and carefully lifted Zane’s head to get a better look at him in the darkness.
“He looks like he’s lost thirty or forty pounds,” he said softly.
Connor had never seen a fellow werewolf look so gaunt.
“That’s probably because he almost assuredly gave all the food they had to Alyssa,” Mike said as he and Trevor knelt on Zane’s other side. “Even if it was only ten days, that’s a damn long time for a werewolf to go without food. Especially with whatever the hell it was they had to fight off.”
“None of that matters now,” Connor said, knocking aside the scrap of wood and picking Zane up in his arms. “We’re getting both of them the hell out of here.”
Zane came to as Connor and the other guys headed for the door through which they’d come in, his voice hoarse as he mumbled something.
“Don’t worry, buddy,” Connor murmured. “We got you. We’re getting you and Alyssa out of here right now. Promise.”
“Can’t…leave,” Zane whispered. “Won’t…let…us.”
Connor could only imagine that Zane was delusional from hunger and exhaustion, so he didn’t bother to respond to his pack mate’s comment. Up ahead, Mike led the way while Trevor and Hale brought up the rear.
It wasn’t until they reached the doors leading to the stairwell that Connor began to understand what Zane had been trying to tell them. The doors had disappeared, and in place of them, there was simply a rough concrete block wall.
There was no way out.
They were trapped.
Chapter 2
The gates of the SWAT compound were locked as usual, but it wasn’t like that had ever stopped Kat Davenport before. Of course, she normally would have followed the fence around to the left side of the enormous compound and slipped through the small gap that had opened near one of the corner posts. She couldn’t do that now, though, since she was quite a bit bigger than she’d been a few days ago. But that was what happened when she started walking around on two feet instead of four. There were lots of places she couldn’t fit.
But on the bright side, she had hands now. It was difficult to put into words how stoked she was to be able to wiggle her fingers whenever she wanted. It made using magic so much easier. Not that she hadn’t been able to do magic before, while in her cat form, but it had definitely been more complicated.
