Page 687 of Love Bites

“It talks!” Connelly said.

“Score one for the squirrel,” I said.

He frowned. “How do you know what I am?”

“I can smell your nuts.”

He sniffed.

“I’m kidding, Michael.” I took a step closer to the group. They all took a wary step back, except Billy Bob.That’s my man!“Is Sunny okay?”

“Yes,” Billy Bob said. “We found her up on the road with Jude. Ruth and Ed took her into town. She’s going to stay at their place tonight.”

“Oh, thank heavens.” It would be dark soon, and all the little creatures and some really large ones would be scurrying about. I watched Hans Fisk fidget under my sweeping gaze of the room. In this group was a killer, and now I knew whom. “Sheriff, arrest Chance Lowry.”

“What?” The accused scoffed at me. “I know you’ve had a hard night, but that doesn’t give you the right to make false accusations.” He took a step back toward the door. Farraday and Thompson blocked his way.

“I can’t arrest the man on the say-so of a ginormous black wolf,” the sheriff said.

Dominic Tartan moved with quick efficiency, pulling handcuffs from god-knows-where and slapped them on Lowry’s wrists before he could protest. “I don’t have the same constraints,” he said.

When the sheriff and the deputies moved around him, he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and flashed a badge.

“I’m FBI. I’ve been tracking the killings for almost a decade now. I’ve been close. I knew the killers were based out of Kansas, and that they spree killed during the Tri-Council Jubilee each year, but they’ve never been this public. I gave the information to Willy to pass along to you.”

So he was Willy’s contact with the FBI. “It was to be their last time,” I said. “Chance and Randy were onto their end game.” The laugh, the one that I’d heard, had been Randy’s. I remembered all the clues he’d left me, how he was a handyman, how he had a tattoo he’d like to show me. The vain part of me would have liked to believe that some of the flirtings had been real, but it had all been part of a plan to try and get me alone.

“Their dad owns a locksmith shop. It made it awful handy for them to break into places easily… like my restaurant.”

“Jacob Lowry had pressed for Peculiar as a location this year,” Willy said. “Is he involved?”

I shrugged, which was hard to do with large furry shoulders. “Someone needs to get Randy.”

“He’s probably shifted and is miles from here,” Hans Fisk said. “How can we get to him before the full moon?”

Chance laughed. I growled and snapped in his face. He shut up then. “He can’t shift,” I said. I’d realized it when he was holding Jude. “That’s what all this was about. All this tragedy.”

“But I saw him earlier,” Tyler Thompson said. “He turned into a coyote.”

I shook my head. “No. You saw Chance turn. Randy wasn’t with us. He was here with Sunny.” My stomach hurt as I thought about what he could have done to her. What he’d planned to do to me.

“Why are you in this form, Chavvah?” Sheriff Taylor asked.

I didn’t respond because I didn’t have any answers.

Babe snapped his fingers and walked across the room to me. “I knew it was you!”

My tongue lolled out the side of my mouth. I swished my tail at him, whacking him in the back. “Duh.”

He wrapped his arms around my neck. “Thanks, Sis. Thanks for keeping my family safe.”

“Our family,” I said. I looked back to the group. “Find Randy. No one is safe as long as that psychopath is out there, and in less than an hour, we’re all going to be mindless instinctual animals, and he’s going to be a human running around with a really sharp hunting knife.”

Sheriff Taylor gestured to Connelly. “Run Tartan into town with the prisoner. We need to get Lowry locked in a cell before dark. Do it fast.”

“You got it,” Connelly said. He nodded to me. “Uh, Chav. Glad to see you’re…” He shook his head. The sheriff glared at him. “Let’s go, Tartan.” He grabbed Chance by one arm and Dom took the other.

Undercover FBI. I should have known.

---