AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He hustled up to the bro, tugging him backwards and away from my wolves, saying something I couldn’t quite read.
I inched forward, hoping I might better be able to tell what Liam was saying to the bro if only I could see his lips.
Liam looked worried but not angry, and though he was too close to his friend for me to see what he was saying, I got the distinct impression he was trying to defuse the situation. Liam patted the angry bro’s chest, pulling him the opposite direction of Emmett and Mason.
Then the bro, getting a second wind on his rage, shouted something at the wolves. Spit flew from his mouth, and his face contorted in an ugly, animal way. He was holding up his now-injured hand and swearing a blue streak at Emmett.
I’m pretty sure he was blaming Emmett’s face for breaking his hand.
I saw him use words like fucking freak and abomination.
What did it was when he said, Too bad wolves don’t eat their young.
Why this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I don’t know, but it must have pushed a button for Mason, because it was him and not Emmett who attacked the screaming asshole.
Attacked was the wrong word. Like I’d told Perry that morning, if one of the werewolves had actually assaulted someone in a rage, that person wouldn’t be in one piece anymore. But Mason shouldered his way past Emmett and shoved the bro.
The guy stumbled backwards and hit Liam.
“Stop,” I commanded, pointing at Carlos, even though he seemed to be in a trance.
The scene froze.
I hadn’t known I could treat this like a DVR. “Think back to the moment he pushed him.”
Everything moved backwards like a movie on rewind, right up to the point the bro hurled his big insult.
“I want you to think about this carefully, really go over it slowly.” I beckoned to Perry, urging him to come to me and watch from my angle, because I was pretty sure what happened next was going to give us the answer we were looking for.
The detective came to stand beside me, and Wilder moved towards the feet of the body, watching it from the opposite viewpoint.
Everything moved in slow motion as Carlos played the scene over in his mind. Mason took two steps forward, planting his hands on the guy’s chest, and pushed. It wasn’t a hard shove, or the dude would have gone flying across the alley, but it was enough to send him stumbling backwards. He fell into Liam, and they both struggled to keep their feet under them.
“Genie.” Wilder snapped his fingers to get my attention. “You should see this.”
“Stop,” I commanded again.
The whole scene became a frozen tableau once more.
I got to Wilder’s side with Perry hot on my heels, and asked Carlos, “Okay, what else do you remember?” The scene was set in motion, and this time I saw what Wilder had wanted to show me.
Liam was about to find his balance and catch the bro, but someone tripped him.
A bare female leg shot out from the building crowd and caught the victim at the back of his ankle. The weight of his falling friend brought him down like a sack of bricks, and we all watched in mute horror as he smashed his head on one of the cinder blocks from the pile I’d used for my demonstration of strength earlier that day, only this one was whole and not broken.
Panic ensued, and the crowd blurred. Carlos’s memory became jittery, I expect because he was running. But things became crisply focused again when he looked at the body.
The cinder block was gone, and the man was bleeding out on the concrete. It was a mess and absolutely looked like an assault.
Carlos’s memory jerked, bouncing as he ran, but before he reached the edge of the salt line I spotted something else. Something that gave me a chill all the way down to the tips of my toes.
There was a blonde girl hurrying away, a bag slung over her shoulders that appeared to weigh enough to make it sag and slow her down some.
She glanced back, and though I’m sure the face meant nothing to Carlos, it meant a great deal to me.
Tansy hit the salt line and vanished.
Chapter Twenty-Three
