I tossed my hair from my eyes even before the truck stopped rocking. Elation filled me as the pursing Weres slammed right into my circle.

“Yes!” I shouted, then spun at the sound of crunching metal and screams. It wasn’t us. We were stopped! I sucked in my breath when I realized an oncoming car had smacked into the other side of my circle, amber and black in the sun. Aw, shit. I’d forgotten about the other lane.

Horns blew, and the car that had hit my circle was rear-ended.

“Oh, that was just beautiful!” Jenks said in admiration. His eyes were on the Weres making painful splurges of motion on the pavement. Apparently running into a wall hurt if you didn’t have a round of alphas taking away your pain.

People were starting to get out of their cars, dazed and excited. “Sorry!” I called out, wincing. Breaking my connection with the line, I took down the circle.

In the distance were sirens, and I could see flashing lights. Jenks tapped the window, and Ivy slowly accelerated, taking the first left she could and doubling back a street over, trying to put as much distance between us and the sirens as she could. I exhaled, falling to slump against the tool locker. I put a hand through the window, finding Ivy’s shoulder. She jumped, and I whispered, “Thanks,” before I pulled my hand out. We had made it. We were alive and together. And we had a hostage.

“Damn it all back to the Turn!” Jenks swore.

Nick turned to look at us, and I nudged Jenks’s foot. He was messing about in his bag and he looked ticked. “What is it, Jenks?” I breathed as we jostled along, tired, so tired.

“I lost my fudge!” he swore. “That woman took my fudge!”

Twenty-six

The hamburger place was busy with kids, moms, and teenagers cutting loose after school, telling me more clearly than a page of demographics that the resident population was decidedly slanted to human. I slumped deeper into the molded plastic, my lips curling when I found the table sticky from someone’s pop. Brett snickered, and I made a face at him. The defiant Were was sitting across from me, handcuffed with his own steel to the table support bolted to the floor. Pride had him hiding the fact, and no one was paying us any mind. Just two people having coffee. ’Least we would be when Jenks got back with the drinks.

The Brimstone had worn off somewhere between shaking the Weres and Ivy and Nick dropping us off here, and fatigue was seeping into me like water through mud. Ivy was sure that they knew how to track Brett’s location from an active phone, and the two of them were leading the Weres on a wild goose chase until we figured out what to do with him.

That we had a hostage had really put a crimp in my already stellar day. Jenks, Ivy, and I had already gone round about it. Nick listened wide-eyed as Jenks adamantly protested that we should keep him to kill in cold blood as a warning if the Weres so much as sniffed too close to us. The scary thing was, Jenks was ready to carry it out.