Hunter's Trail

It was a tenuous plan to begin with, and he just kept striking out. Two of the wolves on his list—Lydia, the lowest werewolf in the pack, and Astrid, the fourth highest—weren’t home when Jesse called on them. Ryker, number eighteen on the list, turned out to be a broody, obnoxiously well-groomed aspiring actor who answered his door shirtless and stayed that way for the whole interview. He came off to Jesse as too vain and one-dimensional to deceive the rest of the pack, and when Jesse pushed him, Ryker immediately cowered into his chair. He was all bluster.

The next closest werewolf, number seventeen, was a meek Hispanic woman named Rosarita Hernandez who was so grateful that Jesse could speak to her in Spanish that for a moment he thought she might cry. She pushed tamales and iced tea at him and showed him pictures of the cats she used to have before she’d become a werewolf. She was not going to be the one who’d lied about the nova, either.

An accident on the 10 freeway forced him to slog through forty-five minutes of traffic, and by two thirty, Jesse was tired, frustrated, and really needed to use the bathroom after all the iced tea. The whole endeavor was starting to feel like a waste of time he didn’t have.

After a pit stop to use the bathroom, though, Jesse found his first real possibility. Drew Riddell, number three on the list, was a short, thick Caucasian man with short, curly hair and a restless energy that practically came off him in gusts. After a few calls to Riddell’s home and office, Jesse tracked him down at a construction site off Fairfax. Riddell was a contractor, and when Jesse walked up, he was deep into a heated argument with an older man in a hard hat with an electrical company logo on the side. Jesse hung back and watched the two men for a few minutes. If you knew to look for it, Riddell’s body language had “dominance” written all over it.

After the electrician had slunk away, Jesse approached Riddell and identified himself. The shorter man jerked his head toward an RV parked nearby. “Let’s talk in there,” Riddell grunted. He had a hint of an accent, maybe midwestern.

After a few minutes, conversation with the werewolf, however, Jesse wasn’t convinced that Riddell was the guy who’d turned the nova. He was aggressive, but no more so than most of the LA residents Jesse had pulled over back when he was on traffic duty. Riddell denied changing in between moons and attacking a human. And he didn’t seem to have any particular animosity toward Will.

“Then why are you trying to . . . I don’t know what the term is . . . overthrow him?” Jesse asked.

Riddell shrugged his beefy shoulders. “I don’t know that any of us want to overthrow Will, so much as help Ana.” He paused, and then added, “Okay, there are some who want to overthrow Will. Not me, though. I don’t want to be alpha, so I don’t really care who is. But I do want Ana to get her answers.”

“Even if it meant kidnapping and torturing someone?” Jesse asked, unable to keep the anger out of his voice.

If Riddell was distressed about being accused of a felony by a police detective, he didn’t show it. “You’re talking about the girl, right? Bernard?” Riddell shrugged. “I’m a werewolf,” he said seriously, his voice low and unapologetic. “And a contractor. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to get what you want.”

“All the same,” Jesse retorted, his voice hard. “If you go near her again, I’ll arrest you for kidnapping, assault, and conspiracy to commit murder, just for starters.”

Riddell looked at him speculatively for a long moment, his nostrils flaring slightly, and Jesse realized the other man was searching him for signs of a lie. “I believe you would,” he said at last. “You’d catch hell from Will and Dashiell, but you don’t care about that, do you?”

Jesse shook his head. There was another long silence, interrupted by the buzz of a table saw just outside the trailer and the traffic noise from Fairfax. “All right,” Riddell said finally. “I’ll leave her alone. Not because I’m afraid of you, but because if I got arrested, Dashiell would make sure I died in jail before the full moon.”

As he drove toward the next name on the list, Jesse thought back over the interview. The werewolf could have been lying about not attacking any humans, but there was really no reason for it. Why lie about that if he was willing to be up front about conspiring to kidnap Scarlett? And he had believed Riddell when he said he didn’t want to be alpha. The man might be aggressive, but he didn’t seem like a leader.

Half an hour later, Jesse was knocking on the door of the second name on Will’s pack roster: Terrence Whittaker, another one of the guys that had gone after Scarlett outside of Will’s house. Whittaker lived in one side of a ramshackle old duplex in central LA, on a street with rusted cars parked on every lawn and pockets of loud music blasting out of half the driveways. Whittaker’s lawn, like all the others, was strewn with pieces of litter in varying stages of decomposition. A big, muscled Harley was parked alone on a strip of blacktop next to the paint-thirsty building. Jesse parked behind the Harley and circled the motorcycle to get to the peeling front door. No doorbell, so he raised a fist to knock.

The door popped open before his knuckles made contact. A thin, shirtless black man in his late thirties opened the door and looked Jesse over, leaning casually into the door frame. Long, thin scars were scattered over his arms, including one on his shoulder that strayed most of the way across his chest. A forty-ounce can of beer dangled from the fingers of one hand.