Instead of heading directly upstairs to her room, she made a beeline for the kitchen. Sleep had been elusive the past month, and even though she hadn’t wanted to, she’d seen a doctor just to get a prescription. After taking two sleeping pills she prayed she would finally get at least a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. Once in her room, she didn’t bother to take off her clothes; she just slipped her boots off and slid into bed.

The moment she closed her eyes Jayce’s face appeared in her vision, mocking her. It made her want to scream. Or maybe cry. She turned onto her side and curled into a ball. She would not think about him. She couldn’t afford to give him any power over her when all she wanted was some control in her life. Well, control and revenge.

Chapter 2

Crouching low, he kept to the shadows as he crept along the side of the house. A few streetlights illuminated the quiet neighborhood, but he stayed hidden in darkness. His wolf coat was dark, making it easy to blend in, and his victim’s house didn’t have any working floodlights. He’d busted them earlier.

Dried grass and dead foliage crunched lightly under his paws as he approached the privacy fence surrounding the backyard, though no humans could hear his movements. After a glance around, he saw that he was still alone. The cold January night gave away no other strong scents either. It was the perfect time to hunt.

Giving himself enough room, he ran full speed at the fence. At the last second he used all the strength in his back legs to propel his body over. He landed with a quiet thud on the brittle, icy grass.

His canines ached and his claws extended as he neared the back door. Despite his human side battling him, telling him this was wrong, his beast was winning. It was hungry and this type of hunger couldn’t be denied.

The human must die.

For his woman, this male had to die.

His inner wolf roared and clawed and demanded blood. Killing this human was the only outcome tonight, no matter what his weaker human side wanted. His wolf would take blood.

Creeping closer, he peered through the windowpanes of the back door. Wearing pajama pants and no shirt, the male was in his kitchen, looking into his fridge. He pulled out a beer and slammed the door. The stench of annoyance rolled off the human, strong enough that it trailed outside. It mixed with the equally strong stink of booze, which practically saturated him.

Guilt swamped him as he watched the male open a cabinet and pull out a bag of chips. But he pushed it back down and locked it up tight.

There was no room for weakness in him tonight. Channeling all the rage he possessed, he loped across the yard, then turned back toward the house.

He let his power and hatred funnel through him as he launched himself at the door. Glass and wood splintered around him as his large body broke through.

The human let out a startled shout as his beer bottle slipped from his hand and shattered against the tile.

Without giving the male a chance to cry out or run, he lunged, jaws open and claws extended. Despite the slight remorse he felt, his beast craved the spilled blood. The taste of it and the human’s fears fueled his rage. The second his jaws clamped around the male’s neck, he released a pent-up growl of satisfaction.

It drowned out any and all guilt from his weaker human side.

* * *

Parker McIntyre unzipped his tan and brown standard-issue sheriff’s jacket as he entered the one-story home. It was much warmer inside—as if someone had turned the heat all the way up—and that only increased the stench of death. Even before seeing the body that was inside, he knew it would be a brutal sight.

The patrolman who’d been sent to check things out after the anonymous call about loud shouting had already retched twice in the front yard. Parker continued down a hallway to where another patrolman stood guard outside what he assumed was the kitchen.

“He in there?” Parker asked.

Tillman, the blond-haired rookie, glanced over his shoulder through the open door, then back at Parker. Tillman’s face was pale as he nodded. “Yeah. You, uh, mind if I get some fresh air?”

Shaking his head, Parker stepped past him, but froze in the doorway. What had apparently been a wood table had been smashed to pieces, chunks of wood splintered and scattered across the floor. A stainless-steel refrigerator had been ripped away from the wall and toppled on its side, the door open and the contents spilling across the black-and-white tile floor.

But that wasn’t what made Parker’s stomach heave. It was the blood and gore covering almost every inch of the oddly bright room. Sunlight spilled in through the open blinds, illuminating a man’s decapitated head. It looked like a macabre spotlight shining on it.

The rest of the tile was littered with body parts. Two hands, a torso, one foot mixed in with a ripped-open bag of rotting lettuce. . . . The coffee Parker had drunk an hour ago swished around sickeningly in his stomach.

Crimson splatters covered almost every surface of the kitchen. The counters. The fallen fridge. The broken chairs and table.

It was a massacre. As if an animal had torn the victim to pieces . . . Shit. Parker scrubbed a hand over his face. The only good thing about this scene, if he could even use that word, was that it had been left undisturbed. Even though his men had been trained not to touch anything until he or Detective Chance Kinsey arrived at a scene, they didn’t have many murders in Fontana or the surrounding county in any given year, so he occasionally had to reprimand a rookie for charging into a scene.

Not today. No one wanted to set foot inside the house, which explained why all of his men had been loitering on the front lawn when he arrived.

He felt a presence behind him before a familiar voice spoke. “Holy shit,” muttered Chance as he stopped in the entryway next to Parker.

“Exactly.”

After a few moments, Chance said what Parker had been thinking. “Any possibility this is a shifter attack?”

“Don’t know.” But as he stared at the carnage, he did know. This attack was too vicious to have been done by humans. Not that humans weren’t violent—he’d been shot a little over a month ago by an abusive husband—but this kind of attack was purely animalistic in nature. And Parker didn’t know any humans who could rip off someone’s head with their teeth. Though they hadn’t examined the body . . . parts yet, he was pretty sure this guy’s head had been snapped off with large teeth. Something Parker had seen before. But he brushed that thought aside. This wasn’t the time for a trip down memory lane. Not when he had a job to do.

“I want to check out the backyard, see where the blood trail leads.” Parker nodded toward the smashed glass of the windowpanes of the back door. “After we section it off I’ll talk to the neighbors. Can you handle this by yourself until Bonnie gets here?” he asked even though he already knew the answer.

Chance took a cautious step inside the room, careful to avoid any blood spatter, though it was difficult. “This isn’t the worst thing I’ve seen, boss.”

Sadly Parker knew it wasn’t. Chance had served in the U.S. Marines for eight years before joining the department, and he had spent most of those years in various war zones.

In addition to Parker and Chance, there were three other trained crime scene investigators in the department, so it narrowed down who would be working this case. With the current budget and the lack of violent crimes in the county, the department couldn’t afford to have full-time civilian employees on the payroll solely for processing crime scenes. The job definitely wasn’t like the bullshit on television. The department also didn’t have private labs to process fingerprints and DNA. All that was outsourced.

And that was going to make this job that much harder. Sighing, he headed out the front door and motioned to Tillman, the first responder. “Come with me.” He walked around toward the back of the house. After putting on gloves, Parker pulled the latch on the gate of the high wooden privacy fence and opened it.

A trail of blood led from the back door, across the yard, then thinned as it tracked over the back of the fence. Which meant that their crime scene had just gotten that much bigger. “Section off this entire backyard and see how far the trail leads. If it leads into the neighbor’s yard, explain why you have to section off their yard too.”

The officer, now recovered from his earlier nausea, nodded. “Sure, boss.”

As Parker headed back toward the front of the house, he clenched his teeth when he saw a local news van pulling up. One of the neighbors had probably called them. Or maybe that bulldog reporter, Julia Martin, had a police scanner she listened to.

It wouldn’t surprise him if she slept with the damn thing on her nightstand. Right now the last thing he needed was news of a shifter attack leaking to the media. A couple of months ago he wouldn’t have particularly cared, but now things were different. His sister was mated to the brother of the local pack’s Alpha. Not only was she mated, she was pregnant, which meant she was as vulnerable as if she was still solely human.

With all the bullshit his department and the Armstrong-Cordona pack had dealt with lately from a radical hate group, the Antiparanormal League, he didn’t want the locals getting riled up. For almost two decades they’d lived in peace with the shifter pack, and he wouldn’t stand for anything or anyone screwing up the dynamics of his town. Or putting his sister in danger.

Ignoring the presence of the media, he made his way toward a man wearing blue pajama pants with white moose heads on them and a faded black pullover sweater, standing behind the cordoned-off section of the front yard. The college-aged guy waved Parker over, then rubbed a hand over his face. By the time Parker reached him, the stench of booze surrounded him. The guy had a couple of days’ growth of stubble and smelled like a brewery.

“Do you need something?” Parker asked, getting right to the point.

The guy nodded and yawned, then said, “My name’s Blake. I live down the street.”

“And?”

“And I know Scott, Scott Ford, the guy who lives here. What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, though it was hard to take him seriously when he wore frog slippers.