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“Actually, she says she’s the Alpha of New Orleans.” She had trouble keeping the incredulity out of her voice as she stared at me.
Whatever.
The bedraggled but handsome detective in his early thirties came to stand next to her on the opposite side of the tape from us. His shirt and auburn hair were equally rumpled, and it looked as if he hadn’t shaved in several days. The dark circles beneath his bright blue eyes matched those of the young officer. Not a lot of sleeping going on around these parts. He pulled a pair of dark-framed glasses from his shirt pocket and slipped them on, obscuring the signs of exhaustion. The lenses were smudged and in desperate need of cleaning.
I wanted to put this whole man into a washing machine on the delicate cycle and help him sort himself out.
“Eugenia McQueen?” the man asked, giving me a wary once-over, like he was hoping he’d picked the right woman. To be fair, Mags did have a more regal first-glance appearance to the human eye. To a werewolf, though, there’d be no mistaking who was the leader here. My power would dwarf both hers and Wilder’s. A wolf with its eyes closed would have no problem figuring out which one of us to bow to, even in human form.
I offered my hand to the adorably human detective. “Please call me Genie.”
“Aren’t we supposed to call you Your Highness or something?” The detective wasn’t trying to be a jerk—I could tell from his tone—but the question was still annoying. The news broadcasts, loving a chance to mix royal-watching with the supernatural, insisted on using my full title. Her Royal Highness Eugenia McQueen, Alpha of New Orleans, Heir to the Southern Pack.
It was a mouthful, to say the least.
I felt, more than saw, Wilder smirking next to me. Apart from outsiders who didn’t know better and formal gatherings where tradition was essential, Wilder was the only one who called me Princess and got away with it.
“Genie is fine.”
He shook my hand, having settled on what my name was. “Detective Bryce Perry.”
His skin was dry and faintly rough, but his handshake was firm. I liked it when men didn’t shy away from a good grip with me. Truth be told, I was the one who had to hold back, lest I accidentally crush someone’s fingers. When alphas met each other it was like a contest to see who could shake hardest and longest. I’d seen two particularly stubborn men go an hour once before one yielded, on the verge of losing a finger to lack of circulation.
“You’re in charge of the supernatural cases?” I asked.
Perry gave a curt nod and pushed his thick copper-tinged hair back from his face, making him look five years younger in an instant. “Yeah, I’m on the night beat and Detective Mercer does the day shift. Guess I’m keeping this one though.” He smiled apologetically when he saw my confused expression. “This one was a bit… Well. It’s been a long night.”
I could win a who has had the longest night contest without even getting into the super-grim stories, but Detective Perry was obviously exhausted, and I just wanted to know my wolves were okay.
He lifted the police tape and indicated we should follow him as he headed in the direction of the weather-beaten bar. “I met your sister once,” he said, making friendly conversation as we walked. “She’s something else.”
The way he said it, much like the way he’d fumbled over my title, told me a lot about him. For one, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with this new world of shapeshifters and vampires. I couldn’t blame him. It was a lot to swallow. But the other thing it told me was that Bryce Perry wasn’t put off by powerful women. When he referred to my sister, Secret, as something else, his tone was more awestruck, reverent even.
She had that effect on people.
“Where did you meet Secret?” I asked, eager for any tidbits. She and I had a standing biweekly Skype date, but I still loved to know what was going on with her professionally. She was one-third of an FBI task force in charge of mediating human and supernatural relationships.
“All law enforcement assigned to supe-specific departments had to take mandatory training in DC last year. She was leading a couple workshops.”
I had a hard time imagining Secret in a classroom teaching cops and marshals about different classifications of supernatural beings and why someone should never, ever call a werewolf a bitch. She wasn’t the most patient woman in the world, and she had a zero-tolerance policy for bullshit. Come to think of it, I’d have given my left arm to sit in on one of those training seminars. I’d have to email her and ask for a drop-in pass for a future one.
I suppressed a smirk. We were here on business, after all. Focus, Genie. “I’m sure it was very educational.”
“Hell of a lady.” He nodded approvingly. “And she’s like you, hey? Royalty, I mean.”
“Princess by birth, Queen by marriage.” This was such an abbreviated version of Secret’s rise to pack leadership it was borderline lying. But to tell him the entire thing would take hours, and that wasn’t what we were here for.
“Wild.”
We arrived at a parked squad car where a heavyset older officer was leaning against the hood typing something into his phone. I peered in the backseat of the cruiser, half-expecting to see Emmett and Mason inside, but the car was empty.
“They still inside?” Perry asked, indicating the heavy wooden door at the front of the bar. It was so weathered and scarred it looked as if someone had tried to take it down with a battering ram at some point in the past.
“Yeah. They’ve been pretty calm, no trouble. This who they called?” The older officer jerked his chin towards me, his expression cool and unreadable.
Actually, Emmett had called his father, and his father had called me via Magnolia, but the end result was the same, so I just nodded.
At least this guy didn’t care enough to ask who I was.
