Enforcer's Heart: (BBW Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance) (Stratton Wolves Book 3) Read online

  Tom looked at her, using the fingers of his free hand to count down silently. On three, they burst through the doors, Ce yelling, “Ashville PD! Hands up!”

  She stopped dead. There in the middle of the kitchen wasn’t the thief she’d been expecting, but a huge, furred form with its head under one of the steel counters. Not a dog. Way too big. Her mind flicked through a mental checklist she’d memorized from the paranormal species identification course the captain had them take. Massive shoulders covered in coarse gray fur, check. Powerful hindquarters, check. Tail swishing back and forth, check.

  Werewolf. On the day she hadn’t taken her anti-furry pills. Fucking great.

  Without missing a beat, she lifted her gun. “Paws up, Spot!”

  The tail stopped swishing, and with two steps, the wolf backed up, its head emerging from under the counter. At least, she assumed it had a head. It wore a plastic container that covered its snout and entire head. There was a crack in the bottom and a large, pink tongue swept away the remnants of whatever the container had held. The tongue disappeared and an amber eye stared at her through the crack, glittering with malevolence.

  She backed a step instinctively. Shit. This was so not good.

  The snarl started on a bone-deep level, one she felt before heard. The wolf stalked toward her, shaking off the ruined container to fix her with a baleful stare. In the bright amber shimmered death. Hers.

  “Freeze,” she yelled, bringing her gun into aim.

  She’d have to shoot, but she wasn’t loaded for wolf, neither of them were. The department kept the silver bullets on strict lockdown for cost reasons, only breaking them out when they had a confirmed furry on site.

  It curled black lips from vicious looking teeth. The small, still sane part of Ce’s brain, hidden at the back, started to scream about running. Ignoring it, she stood firm. She wouldn’t run. Couldn’t. If she did, this thing could get onto the street where any civilian was easy pickings.

  Not. Happening. Not on her watch. She was a cop. More than that, a cop’s daughter, a cop’s granddaughter. Cop blood ran true in the Callahan family.

  Protect and serve. Emphasis on protect.

  “One more step and I’ll drop you,” she threatened.

  The wolf leaped.

  Chapter Two

  Ce screamed. Or perhaps it was Tom, she had no idea.

  Didn’t matter as she fired a couple rounds in quick succession. The wolf was too quick, bounding from side to side in a zigzag movement as she fired. One of the best shots in the department, she was no slouch when it came to marksmanship, but they didn’t get many lycanthrope targets.

  Not many lycan targets? Try any. The paranormal threats instructor had some words of wisdom for dealing with shifters though. Namely “if it ain’t silver, run like fuck,” which at the moment wasn’t a great help.

  Her brain slowed events, time dilating until she could see the wolf’s fur wave in the breeze of the bullets passing him. They’d all been warned about the speed of paras in the mandatory briefings the captain made them attend. Hearing it within the safe confines of a classroom, even watching it on training videos, was one thing. Seeing it in action was completely different. Scarily different. About to meet her maker kind of different.

  The snarl drew her attention to the creature’s face. She didn’t need to speak wolf to understand the look in its eyes. It planned to make her death painful. And the tree hugging, do-gooder parade said lycans weren’t vicious—their moods and emotions were closer to nature and therefore purer.

  Ha! Bull-fucking-shit to that.

  Ignoring all advice about dealing with lycans, (which amounted to the fact she was fucked, and not in a good way) she aimed at its left foreleg and squeezed the trigger. The bullets hit dead on, tearing through fur, skin, and bone to shatter the joint. A shriek of pain and fury filled the kitchen as the wolf went down, its ruined leg folded under.

  It wouldn’t stay ruined for long. Shifters healed fast. Not giving it a chance to move, she was on it in a heartbeat, boot on the back of its neck and the muzzle of her gun pressed behind its ear.

  “One twitch and I scramble your fucking brains,” she warned, her voice deadly serious.

  The creature froze, rolling an eye back in its head to fix on her. Intelligence and rage directed out the amber depths. Closer to nature. Animal intelligence, rather than human. She snorted to herself. Double bullshit, flying bullshit even… There was no way the creature under her boot had anything less than human intelligence.

  The alarm snapped off, courtesy of Tom, but she didn’t take her eyes off the creature. Not with as fast as it was, and the fact the only threat she posed was her ability to give it a really bad headache.

  “Fuckit,” Tom muttered, sliding his cell from his pocket while keeping his gun trained on the werewolf. “What the fucking hell is one of them doing here? There have been no reports of lycan activity recently. At all.”

  Ce shrugged. “Not a clue. Perhaps he’s just a fan of prawn cocktail,” she said indicating the ruined container.

  Tom shook his head as he dialed with his thumb. “Hey, yeah, this is Pineton. I need backup at Gabriani’s. We’ve got the biggest fucking werewolf you have ever seen pinned down. We’re going to need the dangerous animal team, some form of containment, and silver bullets.”

  Ce looked up sharply at the last two words, already shaking her head. But the words were out, loud and proud, ringing in the air. She felt the creature under her boot shift, as its expression became calculating. She’d banked on it not realizing they didn’t have silver bullets, but Tom blew that out of the water.

  She was already pulling the trigger as the creature moved, clipping its ear with the first bullet but the rest passed harmlessly over its fur. With a wordless bellow, she threw herself backward, a perfect roll she’d have killed to be able to do in gymnastics class way back when, and came up on her knees, finger on the trigger. She emptied a full clip into the oncoming werewolf, right into its face, but it still came.

  Snarling, bleeding, it knocked her back, and hunkered over her with sharp teeth snapping the air inches from her nose. A bullet hole was by its eye, but as she watched, flesh filled in and fur flowed over the gap. Healed within seconds. Fucking hell… If this thing killed them because the captain didn’t issue silver bullets as mandatory, she was so coming back to haunt his ass.

  The creature pulled back as if to look her in the eye before it killed her. She heard gunshots and Tom’s scream of rage, but the creature barely flinched as the rounds hit its side.

  She became aware of the breath filtering from her lungs, as though a higher power had focused her attention to allow her to savor the moment. To appreciate her last few seconds of being alive, and right then she was truly alive. From the beating of her heart, to the breath punching in and out of her lungs, and feeling of her clothes over her skin… She felt it all. Even the coarseness of the lycan’s fur under her fingers as she jammed her hands into its throat to keep its jaws away was a welcome sensory experience.

  Anger and determination flooded her. It wouldn’t end this way. Couldn’t. She wouldn’t allow it. One hand firmly around the creature’s throat, unsuccessfully choking it, her free hand flailed, looking for something—anything—to use as a weapon. Her fingertips met cold tile and hope faded.

  Fuck. Why couldn’t she have been attacked somewhere useful, like a silver merchant’s workshop? There, she could have used anything, a silver teaspoon, to gouge the creature’s throat out, or its balls. She didn’t really care which, as long as it couldn’t tear out her throat.

  Her finger touched the edge of a cold handle under one of the units.

  Wooden and smooth, it was obviously well used. Without turning her head, she caught the gleam of light on the edge of the blade in her hand. Hell, yeah, she’d lucked out. Tightening her grip, she plunged the knife into the side of the werewolf’s throat. Perhaps if she hit it hard enough, often enough, it would bleed out.

  As soon as th
e blade touched skin, the werewolf screamed. The sound was filled with agony and terror. It reared away from her, and she scrambled back as far as she could. Which wasn’t very far. Within seconds, her back hit a stainless steel refrigerator and she had a front-row seat as the lycan twisted and contorted in pain.

  “Shhhit,” she breathed, watching in horror as it shifted.

  He didn’t make it to human. Instead, he locked between the two forms, morphing between one and the other. Fur receded and bone snapped as a paw became a hand, but just as quickly, the fingertips sprouted talons and fuzz erupted from pores to cover the skin. Same with the rest of the body. He rose on two legs, bones grinding for bipedal motion, stopping, re-snapping, crunching to lupine as the torso became human.

  “Ce, watch out!” Tom cried a warning as the creature leaned toward her and she yanked her body to the side. Too late, the creature crashed over her, dead as a dodo. Its upper jaw lupine, lower jaw human, the razor teeth—nothing to stop them—sliced her jeans and tore skin.

  She leaned her head back.

  She’d just been bitten by a werewolf. A dead one, but a werewolf nonetheless.

  On the very day she’d forgotten to take her anti-furry pills.

  ***

  After dropping off Layla at home, kicking the three city kids into the cells at the pack house, and calling young Jenson’s parents to pick him up, Riley figured he was due a break and headed to the local pub.

  Honey’s Bar was an oddity even in their world. Honey wasn’t a shifter, but she could always spot one in a crowd. Riley didn’t know why, and neither did she, but it sure was helpful for running a bar smack bang in between a wolf town, a lion town, and a bear town. There had even been talk of a were-hedgehog pack in the area, but he’d always figured that was just an urban myth. Until he’d found out Honey’s man, Blake, was the were-hedgie head honcho. That he hadn’t seen coming.

  Riley was an alpha, an enforcer, and a scrapper to boot, but Blake was something else entirely. Fights in Honey’s Bar tended to be short, sweet, and ended by Blake throwing the perpetrators out. That his shifted form was a hedgehog was… yeah. But the upshot of it all was that Riley could relax, have a drink, and forget about dumbass teenage werewolves, at least for an hour or two.

  He parked his truck around the side and headed for the front. Before reaching the door, a figure detached from the shadows by the window. Instinctively Riley paused. Menace rolled off the tall figure; a deep breath gave the reason.

  Male, young, and so saturated with his ex-wife’s scent that Riley had to stop himself from turning to see if Jenna was present. She wasn’t. She never was. He knew because this had happened before. More than once.

  Sighing, he folded his arms. “Really? You want to do this here?”

  The figure stepped forward into the light away from the bar. Riley resisted the urge to roll his eyes. As he’d expected, it was one of the newer members of the pack: Paul.

  Being a few hours out of the city, they often got drifters. Wolves who hadn’t settled with any pack. Some spent a few days and then disappeared, moved on, but some stuck around and tried to integrate into the pack. Sometimes they managed it. They settled in, became productive members of the extended lupine family. Married or mated, had kids or pups, and generally fell off Riley’s radar.

  Some, though, didn’t.

  Some, drawn in by his ex-wife’s tales of abuse and neglect, decided they were her knight in shining armor, and that Riley had to pay for his crimes. Suckers. Riley learned long ago that Jenna was a fantastic actress, prepared to tell any lie to further her own aims. Usually, that meant trying to get rid of him in a challenge fight like this.

  “Just me and you. Out here.”

  “That’s true. I wouldn’t want to face Blake in an all-out fight, either.” Riley wrinkled his nose as the guy stepped closer.

  Tall and whipcord thin, every time Riley had seen him, he had a ring of amber in his eyes, as if his wolf was constantly on alert. He and Max marked him as an issue the day he arrived, an assessment that still stood.

  “Huh,” Paul shrugged. “I’m not bothered about that asshole. Pussy-whipped human. He’s just gotten lucky not to be in a fight with me.”

  Riley snorted. Asshole and pretentious to boot, this guy was really ticking all the boxes. He spread his arms. “Fine. Then we do this here. But so we’re clear, you shouldn’t believe every sob story, no matter how pretty the face.”

  Paul didn’t reply. Instead, he dropped his head and attacked. Riley sidestepped at the last minute, lashing out, slamming his elbow onto the back of the guy’s neck. Paul howled and spun around. Riley was ready. A swift front kick, followed by two crushing punches. The first Paul deflected, the second clocked him between the eyes. He blinked, stunned, then slowly toppled backward to crash into the dirt. Unconscious.

  Riley straightened, rolled his shoulders to set his leather jacket more comfortably, and strode into the bar. He passed Blake in the doorway and paused. “Wolf. Out for the count. Deal with him while I call Max, would you? He’s one of Jenna’s. Again.”

  Blake’s gaze shifted over his shoulder to the crumpled figure and his lips thinned. “Sure thing, bud. He bleedin’?”

  Riley shook his head. “Nope. Maybe a little nosebleed but that’s it.”

  “Multiple lacerations. Got it.” Blake deadpanned. “Get Honey to grab you a drink, I’ll deal with him.”

  ***

  Werewolves, Ce decided, were assholes. Every last fucking one of them. From being bitten, she’d been put into the “care” of the local wolf pack until the full moon. Since she’d shot and killed one of their kind, they were less than pleasant company, conversing with her in snarls or grunts and watching her with hungry eyes. Not the good type of eating either…the see-what-her-insides-looked-like type of eating.

  That was before the asshole-in-chief had ordered her locked away in one of the bedrooms. She was reduced to muttering to herself, her only source of companionship, as she paced the space between the walls and the ratty bed.

  Now she was talking to even that.

  “Bastards,” she muttered under her breath, hearing the sound of merriment downstairs. The pack lived together, in what had looked like a converted warehouse. Badly converted. The rooms were little more than boxes created with boards between the old steel beams. No windows, but there was a half inch gap under the door. Too small to do anything with, but enough to give her a tantalizing glimpse of freedom.

  Assholes. All of them.

  Heavy boots thundered against the stairs down the short corridor and she sighed, flopping onto the bed to grab the thin pillow to stuff over her ears. The party downstairs was bad enough, but as the evening had progressed, some of the merry-makers started to filter upstairs.

  In couples.

  Amorous couples, at least one of which had failed to make it to a bedroom so she’d been forced to listen to a couple of furries fucking on the other side of the (very) thin wall.

  “Ugh,” she muttered to herself, holding the pillow ready for use as ear defenders when something slammed into the wall near her door. She couldn’t do another round of “Oh god, fill me, big boy” like the last two.

  “Little pig, little pig…” The low, rough voice was right outside her door. “Let me in.”

  Ce bit back a gasp, frozen on the bed as fear trailed long fingers down her spine. There was a wolf right outside her door, she could practically hear his stubble scratching the cheap wood as he spoke.

  “Little pig…little pig,” the voice sing-songed, turning the nursery tale into something chilling. Sliding off the bed, Ce looked for something to use as a weapon. Anything would do, just as long as she had a fighting chance if he came through that door.

  “Let me in…” The door handle jiggled, but it was locked, the key in the alpha’s pocket. So this wasn’t a sanctioned ‘visit’ or he’d have unlocked the door. Shit. Her gaze fell on the old bed, a wooden affair that had seen better days.

  “Or I’ll h
uff…and I’ll puff…”

  Hauling the ragtag mattress off, she threw it behind her, blankets and all. Her lips compressed into a thin line at the sight of the wood slatted bed-frame. She ripped two pieces loose and spun to face the door. Not the best weapon, but better than nothing.

  She just wished she was facing down vampires. With two stakes, at least she’d have a fighting chance.

  “And I’ll blow your door down!” The heavy whack of a boot against the door rattled it in its frame but it held. The bellow of rage rocked the thin barrier just as much, and all sounds of merriment downstairs ceased.

  She backed up as the door took three more heavy hits. The sounds of footsteps on the stairway did nothing for her confidence, not when the last kick cracked the door by the hinges. One more and it would give completely.

  “You killed my brother, you cop bitch.” The unseen wolf snarled, his voice lower than human. “I’ll rip your face off and eat your heart!”

  Bellows sounded in the corridor outside as the door exploded inward. Ce screamed in fury and fear, ready to take on whatever came at her with her makeshift weapons. The door splintered and fell into the room, the sound muffled by the mattress in front of her. She got a brief glimpse of a big man before a streak of fur came from the side and bowled him out of her field of view.

  The alpha, Kevin, stepped through the gaping doorway. His pale gaze flicked to the wood in her hands and his lips compressed. “Come on, you’re leaving.”

  ***

  “Hey,” she bellowed a couple of hours later, hammering on the panel that separated the van’s cargo area from the driver’s cabin. “This is kidnapping, you know? I have rights!”

  She did, didn’t she? She was bitten with the possibility that come full moon she’d have a hair problem no amount of girly pink razors would solve, but she still had rights. Everyone had rights. Werewolves had rights…fuck, even those little assholes who called themselves brownies had rights.