conversation.
“To hunt, right? Some Weres?”
“Yeah. Yes, I guess Jack must have told you. I had a run-in with the Sunstrikers. There are a few of them I need to find.”
“Good,” Keith said. He was surprisingly eager, leaning forward and setting his glass aside. “I’m the resident computer nerd, so it’ll be my job to track them down. You have their full names? Addresses, places of work, anything like that?”
Though I knew my face was burning red, both from embarrassment and anger, I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. The pack leader was my boyfriend. I can give you everything you need.”
That earned another round of awkward silence. So, Jack hadn’t told them everything. I was quick to cut into the quiet before they could start jumping to the wrong conclusions.
“I know where to find him. Plus, I’m a private investigator, so I can probably help you search. I’m not after the whole pack, just a few specific people.”
“Oh,” Keith said, his eyes aglow with excitement. “Oh, this is good. This is very good. Lady, forget your after-dinner movie. I’m going to need to pick your brain.”
“Hey,” Bo protested. “That’s not fair.”
Jack pushed his chair back, leaving his food untouched. “Fair? Who said anything about fair? We’ve got a month before we might have a new shifter on our hands, gentlemen. We move fast on this, or not at all.”
Though his words turned my blood cold and killed what was left of my appetite, I nodded and firmed my resolve. With Keith’s skills, and my knowledge of Chaz’s haunts and my talent for skip tracing, it shouldn’t take long at all to find the Sunstrikers.
I hoped.
Chapter 5
(Days left to full moon: 19)
“Stop that.”
For the umpteenth time, I did my best to put a cap on my nervous fidgeting, but even Patrick’s growled command couldn’t scare me into being still for long. Soon the grip of one of my stakes was squeaking again as my fingers tightened on the leather.
We were waiting in a van parked outside of some skeezy-looking place called The Tease in northern Jersey. Nikki was in the bar wearing clothes that made her look like she might be one of the featured strippers taking a night off. How she expected to fight a werewolf in those heels and with that much skin showing was beyond me, but I had problems of my own.
Sitting in the van doing nothing was torture. The belt kept yammering about its violent urges and sending surges of adrenaline through me. If not for my worry about hitting innocent—okay, maybe not innocent, but human —bystanders, I might have charged in with guns blazing.
Keith hadn’t been paying me much mind. His attention was focused on the panels in the back, and on listening in on Nikki’s conversations through headphones that must have led a former life in a sound studio. Their equipment had drawn my interest for a while. Any P.I. worth their salt would have been drooling over the high-resolution video feeds, listening devices, and GPS tracking systems. Judging by the quality, I had to guess that some of the stuff was military grade.
If the belt hadn’t been a constant earache—and if I weren’t feeling so paranoid about whether or not I’d survive to return to my job as a private investigator once the month was out—I would’ve been far more interested. As it was, the van was too overcrowded and I was too irritated to do more than fidget.
We hadn’t had any luck until yesterday digging up any information on where the Weres had gone to ground. Visiting Chaz’s, Dillon’s, and a few other Sunstrikers’ homes a few times a day hadn’t yielded anything of use, other than noting cops staking them out, too. Somehow the Weres had known, and found, places to hide where even I couldn’t find them.
Finding out about Vic had been a stroke of luck. I’d been so frazzled by Chaz’s disappearing act that I hadn’t thought to search for one of the lower ranking Weres to interrogate until after two fruitless days