Page 31

Nate

M aps, newspaper clippings, and copies of police reports lay scattered in front of me. A skittering sound drew my attention, and in a flash, I smashed the cockroach crawling across the desk with one of the books.

“Fucking gross,” I hissed, using a tissue to clean up the mess.

The apartment was in a low-rent area—one of the few places I could find that rented by the week.

The problem was, places like this were all the same.

Preying on the poor and giving them just enough to not be homeless, but not much else.

This wasn’t the worst place I’d stayed in all my wanderings, but it was definitely not The Ritz.

Returning to my work, I tried to focus, doing my best to forget about Cameron. It had been less than a day since I’d seen her, but she was still on my mind. I’d even called Ollie to have some uniformed cops watch her to put some distance between us, thinking it would help.

So far, it hadn’t. I kept thinking of the way she’d ridden my leg, grinding her pussy against me while I’d kissed her. How her body had shuddered when she came. It made me hard just thinking about it.

Shaking my head to clear it, I marked off areas on the big Toronto map that took up most of the desk with a highlighter.

Possible locations for our boy’s hideout or base of operations—if you could even call it that.

I’d seen the fucker. He was out of his mind and as close to fully feral as a shifter could get.

Most likely, he was holed up in a gutter or under an overpass at night, waiting to attack his next victim.

I tossed the highlighter down and leaned back, stretching my aching muscles.

Desk work was my least favorite part of the job.

I preferred to be out and about, searching the streets or forests.

Unfortunately, this was an important piece of the puzzle that needed to be handled.

That didn’t mean my body had to like it.

A vertebra in my lower back popped, and tension released along my spine.

“Oh, shit,” I grunted in relief. “That’s nice.”

I picked up a red pen and began to mark the areas where the feral’s victims were found, along with the garage and alleyway where he’d attacked Cameron.

With a different color pen, I circled the areas where I’d found traces of his scent, then used the highlighter to mark wherever a witness or bystander had seen someone matching his description.

Ollie had passed along other police reports of people calling in to complain about vagrants acting strange, overly aggressive panhandlers, and homeless men. No way of knowing if any of them were the feral I was looking for, but I wanted to cover all the bases.

When I was finally done, the map looked like a child’s art project.

Marks, checks, Xs, and highlighted areas everywhere.

Not a damn bit of it made sense. The original area I’d found his scent didn’t coincide with any of the other areas.

It all seemed random. If that was the case, and all his wanderings and attacks had no rhyme or reason, why was he tracking Cameron?

Surely it would be less effort to just grab another woman with similar looks.

Something here didn’t add up. A feral would have very little in the way of rational decision-making skills. Unless I was wrong about him, and he wasn’t as far along the path to becoming fully feral as I thought.

Tapping the pen on the table, I stared at the map, trying to make sense of the seemingly random pattern of movement. Reaching over and opening the door of the tiny fridge, I pulled out a beer, popped the top, and took a swig.

Eyeing the map, I tried to visualize the areas I’d searched in person. At this point, I’d traversed at least a hundred kilometers of streets throughout Toronto. Halfway through my beer, I finally began to see a pattern. Setting the bottle down, I leaned forward and studied the map.

Strange. A larger number of sightings of the guy were located in high-end areas of town, like the business district, downtown, affluent neighborhoods like Rosedale and others.

Yet, the victims were in poorer areas. The deceased victims, that was.

Cameron was the lone exemption, though the parking garage of the first attack was in an area that was in more of a middle-class neighborhood.

Why would a feral be seen that often in the nicer areas of the city?

It made no fucking sense. Loud noises would make him jumpy and uncomfortable.

It’s why they tended to stay in the wilderness once they slid into being feral.

The fact that he was in a major metropolitan area at all was strange, and rather than staying in the more rundown and isolated areas, he chose the busiest parts.

“What are you doing, asshole?” I muttered.

I’d checked in with every homeless shelter in Toronto, but I’d had no luck yet. Same for churches, temples, and synagogues—places that sometimes took in the homeless.

Outside, a dog barked, shattering the silence of the afternoon.

A thought formed in my mind, spinning up from a vague notion to a fully realized idea.

What if my guy wasn’t spending the nights in his human form, but as his wolf?

Sleeping in dog parks or open woodland? What if the victim on the jogging trail had been spotted and then tracked from the guy’s nesting spot?

Before I could talk myself out of the idea, I searched the number for animal control, then called. While it rang, I pulled out a sheet of paper with Ollie’s personal information printed on it. Another item he’d given me to assist in my search.

“Good afternoon, Toronto Animal Services, how can I help you?” a voice on the other end said after three rings.

“Hello, this is Detective Oliver Vickers with Toronto PD. I was wondering if you could help me out?”

“Of course, Detective, what can we do for you?” The woman sounded happy to help, but also a bit confused. It probably wasn’t every day a detective called them.

“I’m working on a case,” I said. “And this is going to sound a little strange, but I wanted to see what kind of reports you all may have about wolves, big dogs, or maybe overly large foxes.” In the dark, to a human, those animals might all look similar.

“It has to do with some of the witness statements.”

“Wolves?” the woman said. “I’m not sure about that. I’d have to dig through the records. How far back are you looking for?’

A quick scan of the dates I had gave me a bit of a time frame, but I decided to go even farther back in case the guy had been lurking in Toronto before his first attack.

“Two months?”

“All right, Detective Vickers,” the woman said. “I can look up all those reports, but it may take a while. Can I send them to you tomorrow sometime?”

“Sure, that works.”

I gave her Ollie’s official email and hung up. I’d let him know to forward the reports to me when they came in.

The map sat, almost chiding me over my lack of progress.

This guy was becoming a pain in my ass. He wasn’t following any of the typical feral behaviors.

It was ridiculous. He was desperate, but from what Ollie and I could find, he hadn’t stolen anything off the victims. At least then, we could have tracked usage on credit cards and triangulated from there.

No, the guy was surviving by stealing from stores, and…

what? I supposed he could have been eating small animals in his wolf form.

That would give him sustenance without attracting too much attention.

Still, a feral should have been on the outskirts of the city.

I kept going back to the rich areas of the city where men of his description had been spotted the most.

The guy was desperate enough to invade a pack’s territory he didn’t belong in, yet he was still sane enough to keep to certain areas more than others. In a fit of frustration, I finished my beer and tossed it across the room into the trash can, the bottle rattling into the bottom of the can.

My phone rang. It was an unlisted number. Hope and excitement surged through me as I answered.

“Is this who I think it is?” I asked.

“Hello again, Nathan. How are you?”

“I’m great, but now isn’t the time for pleasantries. Do you have an ID on the picture I sent you yet?”

The electronically warped voice chuckled on the other end of the phone. “My dear Nathan, you must learn that sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to.”

I sank into my chair. “Nothing?” I asked, a depressed tone creeping into my voice.

“The CCTV picture you sent me became a bit clearer after I scrubbed it, but it’s still not great.

Whatever store you were in needs to upgrade their security cameras.

Facial recognition turned up nothing. This man is not on any national databases.

That tells us he’s not a part of any formal organizations, past or present.

After digitally cross-referencing it with mugshots, there was also no match.

Meaning, he’s not been in the system, either. ”

Most shifters who were born and raised in packs tended to strive toward something better—to become lawyers, businessmen, politicians, or even cops like Ollie.

A shifter’s one goal was to make something of themselves to allow them to surreptitiously help their packs behind the scenes.

Shifters who were exiled for crimes against their alpha or for other reasons lost that support, and as they slipped into becoming feral, they tended to make bad decisions and end up in the system somewhere somehow.

Unlike me, most didn’t keep their sanity and humanity.

Many of those exiled never even made it to a full feral.

They tended to get killed by humans well before the full transformation took place.

The fact that this guy was this far gone but had managed to stay off the radar was really fucking weird.

“What about the general description? Anything there?” I asked.