Page 160 of Secret Shifters Next Door

Tate nodded. “I’ll have my team email the link to you. All the footage is stored on our cloud.”

Duggan nodded. “Thank you. I’ll leave the crime scene team to finish up. I’m going to go help look for this Ryland guy. Call us ifanythingelse happens. Understand?”

We both nodded. Though, I wasn’t sure that we would call. It was bad enough that Ryland had revealed himself. Did we really want the cops to find him? Who knew what kind of information he had on us? He worked for the hunters, and they wanted toexpose our existence. That would cause panic and perhaps a full-blown witch hunt—or shifter hunt, in this case. It might be better if we dealt with it ourselves. Betterandsafer.

Blayne arrived fifteen minutes later, carrying a laptop under his arm. The crime scene team was outside trying to take fingerprints from the porch railing and doorbell. I doubted the guy would have been that dumb. Tate and I pulled Blayne into the spare bedroom and closed the door behind us.

“What’s on the video?” I asked, desperate for answers.

As he booted up the computer, Blayne shook his head. “Not totally sure yet. When Tate texted me what happened, I only took the time to download the videos to my laptop. I watched a few minutes before I came, but not the whole thing. Pulled some other feeds from Steff’s house, but they didn’t seem to have anything useful. We’ll see what we can find.”

Within seconds, Blayne had the program up and running and forwarded to the time-frame we needed to see. He pointed at the delivery guy. “This is worrying. He’s got that hat pulled down and he keeps looking at this clipboard. Not typically unusual, I guess. The problem is this.” Blayne sped the tape up, and I saw exactly what he was saying. “He’s angling his hat to keep his face hidden, but he’s doing it at exactly the right angles. Almost like he knows precisely where the cameras are and at what angle the lenses are set. It’s like he’s seen her system or something.”

“Not possible,” I said. “We had our own team install that, and there’s no way the hunters could have gotten into her house to look at her monitor.”

“Right?” Blayne frowned, looking confused. “If not, he’s really good at guessing.”

The video showed the delivery guy walking up the steps, and something else stuck out. The body, the height, and the musculature? None of them matched Ryland’s body type. I pointed this out and Tate nodded.

“They knew Ryland would be recognized first thing. Probably one of his minions. I checked before I came over. None of the normal delivery services had trucks anywhere near April’s place. Same with the post office. The dude most definitely is not a legit delivery driver,” Blayne said.

Something else didn’t seem right. There was something familiar about the way he moved. The mannerisms. It tickled the back of my mind, and I wondered if I’d seen this hunter before. They tended to hide in plain sight. Ryland was a teacher, for God’s sake. This guy may have been a teller at the bank I used, the guy who made my sandwich at the local deli, or even the mechanic who changed my oil. The thought chilled me.

Tate waved a hand at the screen. “Okay, this is useless. What other angles do we have? Anything?”

Blayne sighed. “Like I said, I’ve got the cameras from Steff’s place next door, but they were even less help. The guy came from the opposite side and left the same way. Again, like he knew there were cameras over there. Not a difficult thing to assume knowing where Steff works.”

“Okay, think outside the box,” Tate said. “Street cameras? Other security systems down the street? Any of those we can access?”

Blayne grinned up at him. “You want me to hack them? That’s illegal, you know.”

Tate and I glared at him.

Blayne nodded. “Got it. Illegal, here we come.”

Blayne had done similar things in the past and already had some back doors in place to access the city street cameras. It took him another twenty minutes to find any nearby security systems and access them. Our systems were better designed than anything you could typically buy. Blayne’s knowledge of our programming made it almost too easy to break through their firewalls.

Once he had access, he ran through the timeline, looking for flashes of movement that looked like our guy. The first thing we got was from a neighbor down the street. It was only a distant image of his back as he walked away.

I pointed at the screen. “Is he walking toward that truck?”

In the top corner of the screen there looked to be a truck parked in a grassy area off the street. Blayne tried zooming in on the image, but it became too distorted. Instead, he scanned through the city feeds. The grassy area was opposite a small park that was at the edge of my and April’s neighborhood.

“I think we’ve hit the jackpot,” Blayne said.

There was a camera attached to a light pole that overlooked the swings and slides of the park. In the upper portion, the truck was clearly visible. We could even read the license plate. It was freaking crystal clear. We didn’t even need to run the plate, though. I recognized the truck. I’d seen it nearly a year ago when we’d chased the hunters off Harley’s property. They’d all jumped into the back of this exact truck. I recognized the big red scrape down the side that looked like it had sideswiped a car at some point. There was no denying it. This car belonged to the hunters.

“Can you zoom?” I asked.

“The video wasn’t zoomed when it was recorded. I can zoom individual frames, though, click through them. It’ll be pretty much the same. Hang on.”

In seconds, Blayne was flicking through blown-up images of the driver side. It was like watching the world’s slowest flip book. Each image showed a half second of time. It seemed to take forever until the delivery guy got to the driver’s side door. The brown suit appeared. The face was still turned away from the camera, though.

I cursed as each frame clicked by without showing his face. Then, blessedly, the guy screwed up. He turned to glance over his shoulder. Probably checking to see if anyone was watchinghim leave. His face was finally visible to the camera, and it was crystal clear. My body went stiff and the hair rose at the back of my neck.

“Wait? What the fuck?” Tate whispered behind me.

“What the fuck indeed. What the hell is going on, Steff?” Blayne asked.

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