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“For you.” I slipped a twenty across the counter. “For making a good drink and for not banning me from here for the entirety of my stay in town.”

Eyes wide and lips parted, the barista looked from me to the twenty before taking it with a nod.

I stepped out of line then turned back to Dante, his arms crossed, eyeing me with a cocky grin. I resisted the urge to disfigure his pretty face with my scalding-hot beverage.

“Leave town,” I warned him.

“Not on your life.” He flashed that sardonic fucking smile.

My eye twitched.

“On yours, then.” I shoulder checked him, stomping out of the coffee shop, glad that the millennials scuttled out of my way.

They had much worse things to be afraid of than me, but I was okay being a version of a monster to the general public.

It kept me safe.

four

My day did not improve after the coffee shop fiasco. I didn’t even get to work out my frustration on any supernatural being since no ghosts, revenants, or leshis skulked out of the shadows to attack.

Sucked for me.

And I didn’t find the person pretending they weren’t a werewolf, the person who had, apparently, situated themselves in this town, going unnoticed for years—if my theory was correct.

No, my life was never that easy.

I spent the entire day in the library, trying to find as many reports of animal attacks as I could. And they went back years. Three decades. Three fucking decades.

Those were just the reports I could find. Thirty years ago, the library suffered a fire that destroyed all older records. Could’ve been a coincidence. Though I didn’t believe in them. Coincidences were too fucking convenient, given what I’d learned. All of these attacks had markers of a supernatural, in that the COD was brutal, unusual, and barely in line with what was written on the autopsy reports.

I wondered if the police chief thought any of this was strange—he’d been at all of these scenes. But then again, I found that law enforcement typically worked hard to shove anything and everything into their belief framework.

So the accidents, the animal attacks, the crashes remained as COD. Some of the more unusual deaths didn’t point to werewolves, but a lot did. And almost all of them lined up with full moons. There were also a large handful of straight-up missing persons cases, still open, within fifty miles of Dreadwood Falls, in and out of Gerald’s jurisdiction, presumably to ensure that he didn’t see a pattern.

It meant, at least to me, that at least one creature was well installed within the community. They liked it here. Had made it their home.

There were rumors that the werewolf gene ran in families, but I was skeptical of that. Most legends and myths had a kernel of truth to them—fuck, that’s how most hunters got their information. Not always good information. Always spotty information that was full of holes and lies.

It was our job to sort the truth from the lies. I was good at that, evident by the fact that I hadn’t died. I had plenty of scars from my many mistakes, which was better than those who paid with their lives for not doing their fucking research.

Half-cocked hunters thought this job was all about silver bullets, enchanted knives, and exorcising demons. In reality, it was mostly reading, practicing Latin, and enduring shitty motels.

Fighting monsters was maybe 20 percent of the job.

I was a thorough researcher and had a well-honed instinct that I didn’t completely understand but had come to trust. My instincts were telling me that there was one, maybe more than one, wolf responsible. Again, werewolves operating in packs was a hotly contested myth in hunter circles. The concept worked well for packing a screen with shirtless dudes in tween movies, but other than that, it wasn’t worth shit.

Or so I’d thought.

Though I needed some concrete proof to believe it. Which I hadn’t found in my years of doing the job. And I’d done a lot of fucking research on werewolves. Yes, their animal counterparts were pack animals. Yes, they had strong family lines, hierarchies, and packs. But werewolves were not just wolves. They were people too. And people, when given power, the first thing they wanted to do was not find a mate, make babies, and live in a small town where they can occasionally eat hearts. They wanted more power, more strength. And the more they gave in to the beast inside of them, the harder it became for them to masquerade as humans.

So I was skeptical, but I wasn’t ruling the idea out. If there was anything I’d come to learn on the job, it was that nothing was too weird or outside the realm of possibility.

Though the sheer number of deaths in Dreadwood Falls could not be just attributed to a werewolf. I didn’t have all of the police reports—yet—but I knew that the kills couldn’t have all been the same. Car crashes, household accidents, heart attacks in completely healthy men and women. Weird shit happened sometimes, having nothing to do with the supernatural.

But not that many times. Not in this small of an area.

Another thing I’d learned: the benign stories—published only to fill a gap in the newspaper—were usually the ones with the most fucked-up underbellies.