With one hand at the back of his neck and the other grasping his forearm, Gavin pulled him to a sitting position. Tucker looked around him in confusion, and Gavin became aware that a small crowd was gathering. “Gavin, what…”

Gavin pulled Tucker’s face up to his chest protectively. “Nothing to see here, folks. Clear the road, please. He’s okay.”

Gavin stood up and pulled Tucker to his feet, looping Tucker’s arm around his neck and helping him to the curb as the small crowd slowly dispersed. Sitting him down, Gavin put his hands up to Tucker’s head, feeling carefully around the large knot on the back of his head. “Damn, you took a hard fall. Sorry I had to tackle you, baby, but that garbage truck was about to flatten you. Do you feel dizzy? Have a headache?”

“No, I’m okay. Well, maybe a littledizzy,” he admitted.

“Right. C’mon. Call your partner and tell him to come for you.”

“N-no, I’m okay. I’ll just…”

Gavin took Tucker’s phone from the case attached to his belt and held it out to him. “Call him,” Gavin said, in a tone that didn’t allow for argument.

Still half in a daze Tucker took the phone, looking up at Gavin in confusion.

“Tell your partner you almost got hit by a truck, and you’re on…” he looked around to find a street sign. “You’re on Gulf Breeze Drive.”

Nodding, Tucker punched in a number and put the phone to his ear. “Bryson? This is Tuck. Um, look, I’ve kind of had an accident. Yeah, I know. I sort of almost got hit by a truck. I’m on Gulf Breeze—can you swing by here and pick me up? I’m not sure if I can walk back there. No, I don’t need an ambulance. No, it was a misunderstanding. Yeah, I know the guy—it’s fine. Look, I’ll explain later, okay? I-uh-hit my head. SoI’ll see you in a minute, okay? Okay, I will. Thanks.”

He turned to Gavin and held out the phone to him, looking up at him trustingly and apparently still dazed enough not to realize it was his own phone. Gavin just stared at him, transfixed by his beautiful face. He took the phone from him and tucked it back in its case on Tucker’s side before dropping a kiss on Tucker’s sweet lips.

He stood up beside Tucker and ruffled his hair. “Stay here until he comes for you.” Without another word, he backed away a few steps and then headed for the shadows across the street again, fading into them, but staying close enough to watch Tucker until the headlights appeared down the street.

He stayed long enough to watch Tucker’s partner rush over to him, kneel beside him, and run his hands over his arms and legs, checking for damage. Watching the man put his hands on his mate was excruciating, and it was all he could do to stay hidden in the shadows. He stayed there until he saw Tucker’s partner helping him into the front seat and driving off with him before he turned away.

Gavin walked quickly back toward the club and found his car. His heart still racing at the close call with the truck, he inhaled deeply, stillable to catch a hint of Tucker’s scent on his hands. Tucker’s scent was irresistible, a mixture of something sweet and musky, with a hint of the tobacco he’d been smoking earlier. Gavin slammed his hands down on the steering wheel, feeling frustrated and angry. He needed to claim his mate, and he didn’t know how much longer he could wait. He had recognized Tucker as his bloodmate the momenthe’d walked into the club earlier in the evening and seen him sitting at the bar. The scent that radiated off him was a bonus confirmation he didn’t really need. He would have known him anywhere.

Gavin had felt the pull of a strong attraction to the man before this, but up until that point, he’d never been in the same room with him. Still,in the end, the surveillance pictures he’d been shown of Tucker were what had finally decided Gavin on coming down to Panama City in the first place, not simply trusting the others to bring Tucker back safely. He’d been attracted to his beautiful face right from the start.

Tucker could have been badly hurt by that truck, even killed, and the idea caused a shudder to skate down Gavin’s spine. As his mate it was Gavin’s job to take care of Tucker, damn it, and he’d come too close to losing him. He’d waited so long to meet his mate, and had just about given up all hope he ever would. It wasn’t anything he’d expected to find on this trip, and with everything that was going on, it was a complication he seriously didn’t need.

Gavin was the alpha of the Tennessee branch of the Dark Hollow Wolf Pack. Their pack made its home high in the Appalachian Mountains, near the Smoky Mountains National Park. Somewhat isolated by their location high in the mountains, their lodge smack in the middle of a three-hundred-acre compound, they had been bothered little by the outside world, unlike the North Carolina branch of the pack, who had been at war with a quasi-military group called the Hunters for years.

In recent times, the Hunters’ sole mission had been to exterminate the wolves throughout the southern United States. Some of Gavin’s soldiers had been on a kind of semi-permanent loan to the North Carolina pack to help with that threat. However, the larger North Carolina pack had finally put an end to the Hunters only a few months before, and the pack was beginning to settle down to enjoy some well-earned peace and quiet.

Then, approximately a month before, something unthinkable had begun happening to the natural pets of the clan. Something or someone was turning the usually docile pets into vicious killers.

The natural pets were the offspring of the wolves and their human mates. At puberty, some of these children became wolf-shifters, while others never shifted at all, staying more humanlike. They had no need to drink wolf blood like the human pets except during mating and, since the alphas had loosened the restrictions on pets in recent times, they took jobs either in the clan hierarchy or in the public sector, always maintaining their close connection to the wolf pack. Theydidn’t initiate bloodmatches themselves, though many had established such a match with the wolves of the large clan. Natural pets were actually considered by many wolves to be more desirable as mates than humans, since they didn’t have problems adjusting to the lifestyle as human pets sometimes did and weren’t so dependent on wolf blood.

Then, just a few months before, and seemingly for no reason, some of the natural pets had begun disappearing. Exhaustive searches turned up no trace of them, but when the pets resurfaced, sometimes weeks later, they had become brutal killers, seemingly insane with their bloodlust. Their bodies remained the same, though enhanced, larger, and more muscular. They moved almost as quickly as the wolves, and they had the supernatural strength of a wolf. In their bestial nature, they resembled the feral pets that humans sometimes turned into when they had done without the blood of their wolves for too long, but theirbodies didn’t shift. Even without the shift, they were much infinitely more fierce and savage.

The first of the pets to disappear was a male from the North Carolina branch, a man named Paul Kingfisher, who was living in Sylva, a little town in the foothills, and had a thriving little practice as a tax attorney. On the morning he disappeared, he told his wife he had a meeting with an important new client. At the time, she had been busy getting the children off to school and hadn’t questioned him further. He had finished his breakfast, dropped a kiss on her cheek and took off out the door with a little wave. She had no idea that it was the last time she’d ever see him alive.

When he hadn’t come home that night, his wife, also a pet from the North Carolina branch, contacted the alpha of the pack, Marco. Though the pack had searched long and hard for the man, no trace could be found of him. Two weeks later, there was an vicious attack on the teenaged children of the missing pet while their mother was at work. They were beaten and torn to pieces in their own home. The outraged, grief-stricken wolves tracked the murderer down relentlessly and finally cornered him on a remote mountainside. Though he’d fought them fiercely, the pack overpowered him, and when he was dead, they were horrified as they realized it was the missing man, Paul Kingfisher. He had killed his own children.

His wife had literally gone mad with grief, and she was still being treated in a private facility, her care being managed by Dr. Cornsilk, another natural pet and well established ally of the pack.

The doctor and Dr. Jeremy Tate, his colleague and the chief of staff of the hospital on the other side of the mountains in Brevard, North Carolina, had done the autopsy on the remains of the pet personally, searching for any clues as to what happened, but found little other than some small hypodermic punctures in his arms. The only thing that showed up in the blood chemistry work-ups was a high level of testosterone and somatotropin, or human growth hormone, along with high concentrations of steroids. Someone must have injected him with the substances, but who? And to what purpose? Dr. Tate, a human whose only sister was mated with a wolf in the pack, had offered the full services of his hospital’s laboratories, but so far, nothing more had been discovered. Nothing else significant showed up, and they were left with a puzzling and tragic mystery.

Since then, three other pets had gone missing, and two of them had made subsequent horrific attacks on the public. When the wolves hunted them down, they, like the first pet, had fought viciously, and been killed. Though autopsies had been performed, with similar findings, the wolves were no closer to solving the mystery and great unease and unrest had seized the entire pack.

The latest pets to go missing were a young mannamed Tommy, from Gavin’s own branch. He had been on loan to the North Carolina branch when he’d gone missing, along with his fiancée, another pet from the North Carolina pack. Tommy had been living in the Mountainwood lodge while they were still assimilating the captured Hunters into the pack. He’d been helping with construction and had found his mate there among the pets of the pack, a young female pet named Melinda. The young couple had a strong love match, and had both gone missing after a trip down the mountain to do some shopping for their impending mating ceremony. No trace of Melinda had been found. Tommy, however, had surfaced in a killing spree that left a trail of dead in his wake. For reasons they had yet to fathom, he evaded capture and left the area, traveling southward, and ending up on the Gulf coast of Florida. The wolves had tracked him there, and hoping to capture him alive, Gavin had joined the hunt.