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Brutal but effective. Logan had smiled to himself several times over the past year, hearing wolves relay that story, shudder and declare they were steering clear of that region and the one north of it, over the border where the Arctic wolves ruled. Logan had learned about the agreement between the packs that had allowed them to crack down heavily on trafficking in this region.

“You’ll be working with a team of seven other wolves as part of the day monitoring shift. The night shift is also comprised of eight wolves. All of you are responsible for a regional area, which will be outlined on a map on the screen above your desk. There are open case files for each region and ongoing investigations, as well as any contacts that might be in place among different allied shifter groups. The full scope of your duties will involve what you’ve already been doing, only here you’ll be able to coordinate efforts to locate and rescue those in peril without physically leaving the room. The command center is manned twenty-four hours a day, which is why the eight of you will be working in rotating shifts that overlap to ensure that there are always two of you at your stations at any given time.”

“Smart. Do our hours rotate, or just our days?”

“Just your days,” Brooks explained. “Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun, Tues, and Thursday is the rotation you’ll be on. Shifts are scheduled to last seven hours, but your first and last half hours overlap with the shifts that come before and after you. Your afternoon meals are delivered, but there is also a coffee and tea station as well as a refrigerator and mini stove for cooking on. The command center has its own restroom too. Everything pertaining to your region will be on the shelves and filing cabinets surrounding your desk, but you’ll understand more of that in a minute.”

When Brooks paused to tap a code in the key code lock before pressing his palm to the scanner, Logan took a moment to admire the layers of security woven throughout the building.

“Your badge is at your station, and you’ll be able to program your code and biographical information into the system. Choose your backup questions carefully, if you miss the code, it will immediately trigger the system to ask you one. Miss that and it locks the entire command center down, meaning no one will be able to activate the door to get in or out until a threat assessment has been conducted.”

“Why does that feel like a politely worded warning to watch for a flood of security if I screw it up?” Logan asked.

“Because it is.”

“Gotcha.”

Stepping inside the command center, Logan was completely blown away by the mix of state-of-the-art and primitive in terms of communications systems. Like at the cabin, there was a CB radio, but as he looked more closely at the desks, he realized that there were landlines at each station, too.

There were two wolves currently in the room, working on opposite sides of it, each with a different regional map on the large, flat screen mounted on the wall, dots lit up in a variety of colors denoting various locations.

One of his fellow intelligence officers was hunched over his laptop, typing at a rapid rate, but the second, a willowy white-haired female with distinct streaks of chestnut woven through the strands of her hair, stood and came over to greet them.

“Councilor, thank you for making it so I can resume my morning fishing sessions with my grand pups,” she said as she walked forward, arms wide like she was coming in for a hug. “Emmy Knight. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in person, Logan.”

“Em! Come here! I owe you more than just one hug for all the times you saved my skin,” Logan said as he enveloped her in his embrace.

“I believe the count is seven now, which I will collect here and there, I promise you,” she replied as she squeezed him tight. “Though I am thrilled that number seven will be the last, you had me worried there when we lost the ability to contact you.”

“Sorry about that. Was a boneheaded move on my part, leaving my phone in a position to be compromised.”

“It happens to the best of us,” she said as they stepped apart.

“Thanks, that’s kind of you to say.”

“Because it’s true,” she replied. “Remind me to tell you about the time I got pinned down in Rotten Bayou. Between the gators, the leeches, the mosquitoes, and the snapping turtles, the bullets were the least of my worries.”

“Yeah, you will definitely have to share that, if only because it sounds interesting as hell.”

“I’m going to leave Logan in your capable hands, Em, and let you show him the ropes while I go sort out his transmission.”

“My…” Logan squawked, “how badly did I screw it up?”

“Not as bad as you would if you’d driven another twenty miles,” Brooks said. “But the parts are coming in this afternoon, and I stayed late in my office last night clearing my afternoon so I could help install them. She’ll be road ready again by tomorrow, but if you want my advice, you’ll let us store her in one of the heated storage garages at the shop until after the spring thaw and the ground hardens again, otherwise, the chances are high you need a tow before you get her home in this snow.”

“Please,” Logan said. “And thank you in advance. I’d much rather her stay up there until I can put her in the garage at the house.”

“We’ll see to it,” Brooks said before taking off.

“Your timing is impeccable,” Em declared. “There’s been a lull in correspondence today, but we’d better get you set up before things get hot again.”

“Lead the way,” he declared, focus immediately shifting from his vehicle to the task at hand.

“This is your station right here,” Em explained, leading him to the only desk in the room with nothing on it but a badge on a lanyard with his name, photo, and the title intelligence specialist printed on it.

He slipped it over his head and focused on the rest of her explanation.

“Your region comprises pieces of the northern United States and southern Canada. Every pack territory and shifter holding are outlined. There are two regions, with eight intelligence specialists assigned to cover each of them. Every open case file is organized by region, group, species and then the individual number assigned to it. In some instances, there may only be a handful of cases, while others have dozens. There’s a notepad in your top drawer with a place to enter the case number at the top, that needs to be done on every note you take.”