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The Peace River Guardians alpha pack rolled up to the dive bar shortly after midnight. Motorcycles and pick-up trucks crowded the cracked, oil-stained lot. Chrome glittered under the full moon and clear autumn sky. Where the moonlight didn’t reach, a cluster of men conducted their likely illegal business.
“Beck. You think this is it?” The question came from the driver’s seat.
Thomas Becker, alpha of the Guardians, nodded. “Fits the description.”
“Half the roadhouses along Highway 101 fit the description.” Cross, the Guardians’ lieutenant, maneuvered dangerously close to the rear tire of a Harley Davidson while backing his silver pick-up into a cramped parking space.
Cross wasn’t far off the mark. Beck could count on one hand the number of bars he’d walked into in his twenty-seven years, and they’d all looked like this.
“By the looks of the lot, you’d think it was a Friday night before a long weekend,” Cross said.
Beck grunted and drummed his fingers on the passenger door arm rest. His experience with bars was limited but he knew a thing or two about the kinds of people who spent time in remote watering holes like this one. Outlaws and their groupies didn’t need the calendar’s permission to go on a bender. And if money meant a thing to him, Beck would bet more than half the people gathered in that squat brick building were hunting something besides a hangover, anyway.
Memories rolled over him while he studied the flat, bland front of the building. Beck hadn’t known a lot of women—unmated werewolf females were harder and harder to come by, while human females weren’t worth the trouble—but he’d known his share. Only one he’d wanted to keep, though, and he’d found her in a place like this.
Lost her in a place like this, too, when she’d chosen to reject the magnetic attraction that affected both of them, and walked away with a human male, leaving Beck staring after her and wondering what the hell had happened. They were enjoying each other’s company one minute, flirting with words the way humans do and with scents the way wolves do, and the next minute, she locked him out. He should have gone after her, but at the time he was a nineteen-year-old warrior slated for battle, little more than a grunt in a large, militaristic pack.
And she’d made it very clear she had no use for, in her words, a flea-ridden dog like him.
Not for the first time, he turned her parting words over in his mind, wondering why she’d uttered them. The yearning in her stormy blue eyes had conveyed a very different message, one he would answer differently now that he led three Earth-bound packs assigned to a less deadly mission.
Anders, the Guardians’ alpha second, spoke from the extended cab’s back seat. “I do not like this. Too many people, too much steel. Wolves do not belong here.”
“Not my pick either,” Beck said, forcing his head into the present. “But the crowd serves a purpose.”
All the testosterone inside would hide the aggression rolling off Anders, whose wolf-born nature didn’t have the first idea of how to blend in. At a glance, Anders was unassuming. He didn’t tower above half the population the way Beck did, and he wasn’t as broad and muscular as Cross. Anders had a young face and smooth jaw, like a lot of first or second year college students. But Anders’ average-guy image stopped there. All the distaste he felt for the human form showed in his golden hazel eyes, which gleamed with a promise of injury to anyone who crossed him.
No, Anders wasn’t likely to draw any attention. In a hole like this, everybody smelled like a predator.
Cross cut the engine and Beck opened his door. Even before his booted feet touched the pavement, the odors of motor oil and gasoline slammed into him. His inner wolf shuddered. While Cross, Anders, and the pack’s two scouts, Maverick and Jared, got out of the truck, Beck sifted through the layers of stink in search
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