Page 64 of Dark

“There was a big cage fight operation that nearly got busted up by the Feds out in Lubbock. Everyone’s busy doing cleanup.”

We locked eyes for a long moment. Ethan nodded down to the coffee table.

“Any progress?”

“I keep coming back to this one.” Photographs sprawled out over Ethan’s sketchbooks like an eerie row of playing cards. I picked up the one of the girl with hazel eyes and tawny brown skin. With those gorgeous cheekbones, she could have modeled. Instead, she was trapped in a stack of case files the detectives in Austin had been working on for over a year. “But it could be coincidence. How many people did I serve every night tending bar?”

“Brody said go with your gut instinct. Topher is linked somehow to these disappearances. We just have to figure out the connection.”

“And I was supposed to be one of them.” I chewed my lip ring, squinting at the girl. Was she on the sound crew at one of the clubs? Someone I’d met when Ellie and I had been dragged along to Meera’s krav maga class? What did we have in common? How were we being chosen?

“You and Cal checked out our booking agent,” I said, thinking out loud. “The club manager. The bouncers—”

“All human,” Ethan confirmed.

I dropped the photograph beside the others. “This is hopeless. We’re never going to figure out the connection this way. And we’re running out of time.”

Ethan’s phone buzzed.

“That’ll be Brody.”

Pecking a kiss to the top of my head, he ducked downstairs to flip the lock. I grabbed my fondue fork, stabbed a green apple wedge, and stirred it through the pot of gooey melted gruyere cheese, white wine and garlic we’d mixed up for dinner. With the freaky werewolf situation not exactly under control, we’d been eating in, which tonight had included two courses of fondue complete with cauliflower, apples, crusty French bread, and (don’t judge) doughnut holes.

Hushed voices sounded on the stairs. Ethan met my eyes at the door, expression grave. I rose, the room suddenly spinning.

“—missing persons report out of Austin—”

“—your bandmates—”

I think I must have screamed, the sudden buzzing in my ears drowning out whatever came next. Ethan was there in an instant, locking me against him in an iron grip as the world threatened to tip off its axis.

“Hayden—”

Breaking free, I swept the rows of photographs off the table, sending them spiraling to the floor.

Brody hooked his thumbs into his service belt. “Don’t have much on Shondra yet. An officer discovered her door unsecured this morning when they went to interview her about Eun-ji. The place was trashed. Obvious signs of a struggle. Eun-ji was grabbed downtown just after dark, so we got surveillance footage.”

Ethan smoothed back my hair, and when I pushed him away, drying my cheeks, went to retrieve the fallen photographs.

Brody unclasped a large manila envelope. “Need you to see if anything jogs your memory. Posture, an article of clothing, a car parked somewhere off in the frame. We’re not excluding anything that could potentially be a lead.”

I took in the grainy images. A streetlamp illuminated a row of parked cars. My hands began to shake as I turned to the next photograph. Two figures. Swallowing, I flipped ahead. A third. Stomach roiling, I forced myself to turn to the next image, tried to focus on the details of the two strangers when all I kept seeing was my bandmate fighting to avoid the gaping maw of the open trunk—

Bile rose in my throat. I flipped the final photograph over and bolted for the bathroom, making it just in time. Thankfully, no one came after me. Sick and shaking, I rinsed my mouth and leaned against the wall, reluctant to go back out just yet.

“You’ve got the shackle marks,” Ethan said in a low voice. “His general condition and the stuff he mumbled up at the cliff. Either he’s telling the truth about someone being after him, or he’s so far gone he can’t tell reality from the movie playing upstairs.”

I clawed a hand through my hair, trying to think. I knew most forced changes were perpetrated by males because females didn’t carry a high enough viral load in their saliva to transmit lycanthropy through biting. But that didn’t mean a female shifter couldn’t have been involved from an operational standpoint.

When I came out, they were studying the photographs. Ethan immediately rose, going to the fridge to grab a Mexican Coke and pouring it over ice for me.

I leaned into his side and sipped it slowly through a straw, stomach still queasy. “Where do we think Topher was staying?”

“A lot of feral wolves band together and form off-the-grid encampments, coming into the cities to steal and forage for supplies.”

“So these feral packs—"

Brody cleared his throat. “They’re packs, but only in the loosest sense of the word. No order. No governing structure. Feral encampments are supposed to fall under the jurisdiction of their local Alphas, but many don’t want to mess with them. They’re warned to stay out of sight and keep out of trouble.”