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C rouched behind a wall, Foxx peeked out at the warehouse near the middle of the dock they were on. It was white with a gray roof, and they’d checked around the building, but had only found one door at front, with a bunch of boarded up bay doors, and a side door with one bay on the right side.

Sound-wise, it appeared empty to him. Foxx did hear fifty-six heartbeats from the buildings nearby. Less than what he’d assumed would be there. But then, Gavin hadn’t told them if they’d been recent purchases or not.

“So, we have no clue how many, how strong, or if any are enhanced—oh, by the way, Santiago, enhanced means they’ve been experimenting on the humans and altering them with our DNA.”

The wolf frowned. “That’s…a new concern.”

“Yep, anyway, I don’t think Maverick knows yet about Harlow being a dhampir, so him pretending to be human would be an advantage…in that we could use it to fuck with him,” Foxx said with a laugh. “At least, based on that phone call back then, it didn’t appear that he knew. Because I feel he’d be less mad over you fucking a vampire if he had known about that.”

Harlow shrugged. “I mean, he could have found out sometime in the last month and a half. We did kill a lot of people.”

“But we aren’t sure, because there is no evidence, and he wouldn’t be surprised, or even question you being able to take out a bunch of humans easily, even if enhanced. Either way, holding back can only serve to entertain us! ”

“I will do whatever you think is best,” Santiago drawled slowly, his expression unreadable. “Holding back won’t be an issue if you feel it’s necessary that I do so.”

Foxx smiled as Harlow’s scent shifted, and his heart rate sped up to something human, the man feeling just as he had back before the change.

“I still find it quite impressive that you’ve learned to do that so well in such a short amount of time,” the wolf mused.

Harlow just smirked in response.

“Right, sneak in or…?” Foxx asked, even though he knew the answer already.

“Can’t really sneak in without knowing where everyone is. Might as well just go through the front door.”

“Do you think he’ll try to run?” Santiago asked.

The dhampir scoffed. “It's unlikely. The man knows we are coming for him, and is probably stupidly anticipating it.”

Foxx stood, frowning when Harlow stopped him from walking out from behind the building.

“Before you run off, Brat. We don’t know if there are other spells on the surrounding buildings that could be hiding some of their numbers. Could we at least try not to create a clusterfuck right off the bat? He’s likely infiltrated the police here, and we want to avoid them being called for as long as possible.”

He huffed. “Fine, we’ll sneak UP to the building and then burst in.”

The man was acting like clusterfucks weren’t fun. And like, wouldn’t it be a good thing to know if the police were crooked?!

“Thank you.”

Foxx grumpily waved the dhampir on. “You go first, since you want to be quiet .”

Harlow rolled his eyes, but started off. He followed the man, slipping around buildings, and avoiding any person who drew near them. After following a really dumb, convoluted path, they finally made it to the bloody front door.

Pushing past the dhampir with a hmph, Foxx grabbed the doorhandle and yanked it open, breaking the lock on it easily. The smile that had been spreading across his face as they’d reached the warehouse slowly dropped when he walked inside and found, and heard, no one.

“How anticlimactic,” he sighed as he moved in further and eyed the room. It was semi-large with gray metal walls and a cement floor, and besides some empty pallets, which would make it annoying to walk through, there wasn’t much to bloody see.

“It's likely the spell is set up to block sound from each room,” Santiago mused while closing the door behind them.

Foxx wandered slowly through the room. There were two doors to choose from. After maneuvering through the dumb pallets, he checked the one on the wall to the right of the front door, and found a garage full of vehicles. Tsking, he closed it and headed to the double doors opposite the entrance.

A smile spread across his face as soon he opened it, and the sounds of people talking reached his ears. Based on the size of the space, the room had to take up half of the ground floor, and it legit just looked like a normal, large, open-plan, multi-desked office space, with people in business-casual sitting around, paper pushing.

Well, normal if one could get past the fact that everyone was wearing black trousers, black ties, and white dress shirts, with their hair of normal boring colors all cut to the same length and parted to the right side. Oh, also, if one ignored the automatic guns some of them were toting.

He had to say, it was sort of screaming twilight zone, seeing fifty-eight people in the same room wearing the exact same outfit, with the exact same haircut.

Without thinking, Foxx leaped forward, laughing while he lightly landed on his feet right next to a shocked man with a machine gun, who was in the middle of it all. The shouting and gunfire started almost immediately, with screams following the moment Harlow and Santiago entered the room and started killing.

The human right beside him attempted to step back, likely in an effort to shoot him, but the man’s eyes went dead as one of his own people put a bullet between them.

Foxx snorted and tugged the gun from the dead human’s hold. With an evil smile, he held it out, and as he began to spin, he pulled down on the trigger. Giggling, his vision became a blur while the smell of blood rose up in the room.

“I SWEAR TO ALL FUCK, brAT, IF YOU SHOOT ME—” he heard Harlow roar over the noise.

Foxx took his finger off the trigger, pouting as he slowed to a stop. “Spoilsport.” He shook his head when he wobbled on taking a step forward.

Oh, he was dizzy… So much fun, but…so dizzy.

Foxx took another stumbled step. Shaking his head a few more times to get his vision working properly, he lengthened his claws and shoved them into a human’s back as the man raised a gun and aimed it toward Santiago. Blood sprayed over him while he yanked them out.

Eyeing the chaos, a smile slipped back onto his face. Harlow was taking them out with bullets, looking as if he was using their own weapons to do it too, while Santiago was slicing through his opponents, leaving torn apart bodies in his wake. And as for the humans…ugh…

Why were these fuckers such bad shots? They were literally just killing each other at this point.

Tsking, Foxx sprinted forward, decapitating each human he passed. He didn’t want to waste time here. There was only one person he was interested in spending some sadistic fun time with now, and that was Maverick.

Between the three of them, on top of the humans accidentally offing themselves, the room was quickly cleared. Leaving all of the bodies behind, they headed out the double doors opposite the ones they’d come through, and found themselves in a hallway.

“I wonder how long it will take for the people in the other buildings to realize something is up?” Foxx mused.

Harlow snorted. “Not sure if anyone had time, or tried to alert them, but if they didn’t then it may be a long while, since they wouldn’t have actually heard anything due to whatever spell is in place.”

Turning a corner, at the end of the long gray hall, was what looked to be a thick sliding metal door. Foxx tried to tug it open, pulling harder when it didn’t move at all, before huffing and letting go. “Someone’s going to have to help me, it’s not budging.”

“Step aside, please,” Santiago said politely.

Foxx moved out of the way. The werewolf stepped up, and hands gripping the recessed handle, he pulled.

For a moment, nothing happened, as the wolf’s muscles started to bulge in his efforts. But then there was the sound of something straining, before a loud snap and a screech, followed by metal scraping against metal as the door finally slid open.

Together they stepped past the wide doorway, a low threatening growl greeting them inside. Another room with metal walls, this one was filled with crates instead of pallets, but unlike the room just past the entrance, this one was not empty.

Crouched on the other side of the room, in their bi-pedal form, was a pure white female werewolf with two toned eyes. The right light blue, and the other topaz. The creature stared at them with eyes full of anger and hunger while it flashed its sharp teeth.

Studying the wolf, Foxx’s eyes slowly widened in shock as he had a rather startling realization.

Sure, the coloring was odd, but that wasn’t the shocking part. The shocking part was that he knew the strawberry pastry-like scent.

That’s—

Foxx moved without thought when he saw Harlow tense, grabbing the dhampir around the middle just as the man leaped to attack. “It’s Iggy!” he yelled, his words echoed by Santiago.

“What the fuck?!” Harlow shouted. Arms flailing, he just barely managed to stop himself from toppling over after Foxx abruptly put a stop to his forward momentum.

Pulling out of the vampire's hold, he snapped, “What do you mean it’s Iggy?!” He eyed the wolf for a moment, squinting at the furry tits he saw, and the lack of anything in the crotch region, before pointing. “That is a female werewolf, and based on what I saw when the man had to strip down after getting coated in nasty sludge during a hunt, Iggy very much has all the dangly bits that this wolf is missing.”

Santiago sighed. “Iggy has albinism. In rare cases, when introducing the werewolf virus to a male human with the condition, it can trigger a specific genetic mutation, in which their wolf, or werewolf forms, are female, resulting in the individual developing the ability to give?—”

“Birth,” Foxx finished with a clearly horrified shudder.

His right eye started to twitch as he stared at the two, while his brain truly struggled to comprehend…ALL of that.

“Birth?! In what world?! Is this a prank or did we suddenly get fucking transported into one of Foxx’s weird and semi horrifying romance novels?!”

“They aren’t weird, they are an escape from reality! Not a reality I would want to live in, but fun nonetheless!” Foxx huffed.

“Sure, fine, whatever. Someone who is biologically male can now get pregnant, nothing to worry about. No questions here,” he said sarcastically. “Oh wait, I do have one. Since when has Iggy been fucking albino?!”

He and Foxx stepped back when Iggy lunged.

Santiago met the attack, his hands latching onto the werewolf’s wrists, as the man demanded with a deep growl, “Change!”

The power in the wolf’s voice had Harlow’s hair standing on end. Even so…nothing happened.

Looking clearly shocked by that fact, Santiago shoved Iggy back. Taking advantage as he stumbled, the werewolf lifted the man up and tossed him across the room. Iggy hit the wall with a yelp, the wolf disappearing as he landed hard on the pile of crates below, busting through them.

“Did you seriously never notice that Iggy wore contacts?” Foxx huffed.

“Iggy wears contacts?” Harlow asked, before glancing over at the vampire. He winced when he spotted the baffled expression on his boyfriend’s face .

Foxx sputtered. “Y-you literally picked him up and growled in his damn face. How the hell didn’t you at least notice at that moment?!”

Yeah, that would have definitely been the time to notice…

“He what?!” Santiago barked.

Ignoring the werewolf, he defended, “Well, I didn’t actually look-look at him!”

“He was INCHES from your face, Harlow!? How could you not?!” the vampire cried.

“Well, I didn’t notice, okay!?”

“By the Goddess, BE MORE OBSERVANT, OLD MAN!”

“What if I don’t want to?! Ever think about that, Brat?!”

They both flinched back when Iggy attacked again with a roar, Santiago tossing the other wolf away, just as he had the first time.

Foxx glared at him in a way that told him this conversation would be brought up later, before sighing and turning to Santiago, whose back was to them.

Looking past the tall man to Iggy, who was stumbling to his feet, the vampire’s eyes briefly became shiny. “His threads look fine, so he’s not dying, even if something is obviously wrong. But if whatever they did isn’t hurting him, with all the changes still going on inside him, it may be too soon for anything to show up as wrong there.”

Santiago took a deep breath. “They did something, but you are right, it’ll take time to figure out what. Until then, what matters is our ability to contain him.”

Harlow clucked his tongue. “Can you? Contain him, that is?”

Without turning away from Iggy, the man said, “I’ll take care of him. You go.”

“Are you sure?” Foxx pressed.

The werewolf nodded. “Go, take care of Maverick.”

Without another word, they started toward the frosted double doors on the left wall.

“Harlow, Foxx!”

They looked back, pausing right in front of the doors when the man called out to them, just in time to watch the Alpha clash with Iggy as the wolf tried to attack them.

With a neutral expression, but eyes full of rage, Santiago was unflinching while Iggy violently struggled in his hold .

For a split moment, the pack leader remained silent and unmoving, before his face twisted with the rage Harlow had spotted in the wolf’s eyes, the man snarling, “Make. It. Hurt.”

“Death will be a mercy,” he chuckled darkly.

With nothing more needing to be said, they headed through the doors.