Something very bad was happening there.
Her legs shook, but she managed to make them move. She edged forward until she was just at the corner of the alley. The crackling continued, and her stomach jumped with it like it was filled with a hundred electrified butterflies. But she forced herself into the open so she could see down the long, shadowed alley.
What she saw made ice run through her veins.
There were two men at the end, dressed in black fatigues and boots, holding long metal sticks with blue electric arcs at the tip—and they were torturing an animal. It whimpered and writhed on the grimy pavement, just beyond an overflowing dumpster and before a boarded-up chain-link fence. They kept jabbing and jabbing it, darting in close then backing up as the animal snapped at them.
It was a wolf.
She froze. This was no ordinary wolf—if such a thing could even manage to wander into downtown Seattle. It was massive, easily the size of a man, with shiny black fur bristled out and fangs larger than her hand. It had to be a shifter—and the men were torturing it with their cattle prods.
Olivia swallowed down her fear, edged farther into the alley, and fumbled to get her phone out of the pocket of her skirt. Shifters were dangerous—they were just one of the magical creatures that lived in the shadows of Seattle, and she knew exactly how deadly the supernatural could be. But no matter how dangerous shifters might be, she knew there was a human being inside. And anyone torturing a shifter in an alley was probably worse than the shifter itself.
Besides, she couldn’t stand by and let them kill someone in front of her.
Her hand was shaking, but she managed to swipe her phone on and start recording. Somehow the small ding of the video caught the men’s attention, even over the sparking of their torture sticks and the growling of the beast. They whipped their heads to look at her, then at each other.
Her heart nearly leaped out of her chest, but she mustered up a strong voice anyway. “I’ve called the police!” she lied. “And I’ve got you on camera. Just put the sticks down, and they’ll go easy on you.” God, what was she doing?
The attackers seemed to think the same thing. But in their distraction, the shifter leaped up and snapped at one of them. The beefier man jabbed the shifter in the face with the prod, while the more slender one turned toward her and started sprinting down the alley, stick in hand.
Oh shit.
Olivia stood her ground. “I’m recording this!” Her voice squeaked—that didn’t do anything to slow the man down. She should run… she wanted to run… but her legs were turning to jelly underneath her. Just as the man reached out a hand to grab her still-extended phone, a blur of fur and snapping jaws flashed between them. The man and wolf both slammed against the brick wall and bounced back off again. The man screamed as the wolf clamped its jaws onto him. Olivia skittered out of the path of the rolling, fighting, clawing ball of man and beast. She plastered herself against the cool brick wall, out of the way.
It was quickly over—the shifter had the man pinned with his throat in its jaws. Blood was smeared on his arm, but not at his neck. The second man, the bigger one, had raced down the alley to help his partner, but the shifter let loose a growl that raised all the hairs on the back of Olivia’s neck… and that sound stopped the second man in his tracks. With one bite, the shifter could snap the downed man's neck. But instead, it growled a second warning. The man who was standing finally got it—he dropped his torture stick and held up his hands. The shifter slowly released its grip on the first man’s throat. Then it let loose one of those bone-chilling growls right in the man’s face, spittle and foam dropping onto his terrified, pale cheeks. He didn’t move a muscle until the shifter slowly backed away. Then both men scrambled to run from the alleyway. When they were gone, the wolf loped back toward the dumpster and disappeared behind it.
Olivia’s heart was pounding in her chest, her phone was still gripped in her hand. She tapped it to stop recording and tried to catch her breath, which was raging out of control. She should leave—hustle her stupid-stupid self right out of the alley while she could—but she didn’t trust her legs. She was quivering head-to-toe, and only managed to stay upright because the brick wall was holding her up. Just as her heaving breaths started to calm, the sound of rapid footsteps scraping the pavement drew her attention back down the alley.
The most gorgeous man she’d ever seen was hurrying toward her.
It had to be the shifter—and he was even more massive as a man than he had been as a wolf. Tall and built like a mountain. Broad shoulders with muscles that flexed as he pulled a t-shirt over his head. Words were tattooed across his chest, but she couldn’t read them before they disappeared under his ragged t-shirt. She could still see his ripped abs through the holes and all the way down to his still-unbuttoned jeans. She yanked her gaze back up. His hair was black-as-midnight, just like his fur coat, and it gleamed in the sunshine finally pushing back the shadows of the alley.