The Better to Bite (Howl #1)(57)

Grateful, I fired her a quick look over my shoulder. Wow, she’d moved fast. She was almost out of the room. One foot in, one foot out.

“Hmmmm.” Jon didn’t sound particularly believing. I turned back to face him.

“She’s taking gran’s journal!” Cass yelled, her hands fisted now. “That’s stealing!”

I raised the journal. “You should take this,” I told him. “Take it, and give it to my dad.”

“No!” Cass was crying and breaking apart before my eyes, and I hurt for her. “Give it to me! Give it—”

But Jon had already opened the journal. His eyes narrowed slightly as he flipped through the pages. When he neared the end, I saw him hesitate. I knew he’d seen what I’d seen—

His name.

Deputy Jon looked up at me and nodded slightly. “I’ll be taking this piece of evidence in to the station.”

My breath expelled in a relieved rush.

Cass started to sob harder.

“Anna, I want you to come to the station with me. I’ve got some questions for you about that unlocked door.”

Figured.

He inclined his head toward Valerie. “You make sure Cass gets back to her aunt’s, would you?’

“I-I will.” Valerie sounded very subdued. A new attitude for her. But then, maybe I didn’t know her at all. Maybe I just saw the outside, what she wanted me to see.

Maybe that’s all anyone ever saw. If we looked past the surface of our friends, would we see monsters inside? Or just lost souls?

I glanced back at her once more. She’d tried to cover for me. “Thank you,” I mouthed the words.

Deputy Jon led me toward the back door.

“This isn’t over,” Cass whispered. She glared at me as I walked past her. “Why would you want to protect them?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer her. Jon’s hold on my hand tightened, and he pulled me outside.

He put me in his squad car. In the back, figured. He slammed the door and hurried up to the driver’s side. He didn’t speak until he was seat-belted in the front. “Are you afraid of me?”

I thought about it for a few seconds. “No.”

He grunted and cranked the engine. “Remember that.”

I’d try.

“How long have you known about me?”

I could lie and say since I saw his name listed in the journal, but what would be the point? “Last night. When you came back in the house.” He’d tried to catch a scent, like an animal would, and his teeth—let’s just say they’d been a bit sharper than normal.

“That journal can destroy a whole lot of families in this town.” He drove forward, nice and slow.

I saw Rafe on his motorcycle. He was staring at the deputy’s car, at me in the backseat, with stunned eyes.

“It can stop a killer, too.” My hands dug into the seat. “And don’t you think it’s time the rogue was put down?” Rogue. I knew that term, and I used it deliberately. I’d learned it in a science class, a lifetime ago. A wolf who left its pack.

He didn’t answer. Just kept driving.

Maybe that was answer enough.

***

“I want you to stay in this room, Anna, do you understand?” My dad frowned down at me. I was sitting in his chair, positioned behind his desk, swiveling from the left to the right. He’d closed the blinds at the door, the better to keep prying eyes off me—and to keep my eyes off the folks on their way to the station.

“You’ve only told me like ten times already, Dad,” I said with a slight roll of my eyes.

“Yeah, and you still haven’t agreed to stay inside.”

But I didn’t want to miss this scene. Dad had gone through the journal. He hadn’t let me see it again—no big surprise there—but he’d gone through the book, made phone calls, and in his words, “dragged some asses” to get this meeting at the station.

Night had fallen. Thanks to my dad, I knew night wasn’t the best time to talk to werewolves, but night was the best time to have a secret meeting in this town. And that’s what my dad was doing. A meeting of wolves.

Rafe had joked that there weren’t werewolf group meetings, but now there would be. My dad was calling out the wolves in Haven.

“There could be a killer among them,” my dad told me, and my gaze dropped to the gun holstered near his waist. I’d bet my college fund that he had silver in that gun. He’d loaded his shotgun with silver, so it only stood to reason he’d armed his handgun with silver bullets, too. “And I don’t want you anywhere in his sights.”

Too late. “He’s already come after me before.” I rubbed my neck. My necklace was chafing a bit. Itching.

My dad’s lips thinned. “He won’t be coming again.”

“And how are you going to find out who the killer is? Get them all together, and then ask the psycho wolf to please step forward?”

He exhaled roughly. “Credit me with some cop sense, would you?”

I stopped swiveling. “Don’t cut me out of this. I want to be there!”

Voices rose from outside the building. The grumpy, annoyed voices of folks who did not want to be coming out at night to meet with the sheriff. They weren’t going to meet at the station, that would have been too obvious. But there was an old, closed-down theater right behind the Sheriff’s station, and I knew all those grumbling voices were headed for that theater.