Rowan stopped off by a bar that looked as if it had seen better days and went inside. Rather than get a drink at the counter, he asked for the manager. The sour-looking bartender summoned a man who looked even more bitter and who was staunchly against the idea of being used as a glorified parking meter when Rowan asked if he could hide his motorcycle in the back. That is, he was against it until Rowan flashed a $50 in his face. After that, he was agreeable enough to keep the bike until midnight.

Seeing as they were only five blocks away from the police station, Rowan didn’t think that would be necessary. In and out, that was all he wanted. He had a plan, and as shitty and failure-prone as it seemed to be, it was still a plan and this was part of it.

Everything would have to go perfectly. All the pieces had to fall into place exactly, or else he was going to wind up either dead or arrested. Perhaps both, in due time.

And for things to go perfectly, he would have to approach this with a clear mind. That meant he couldn’t be sidetracked about the idea that his boyfriend was pregnant.

Easier said than done.

After thanking the manager, Rowan stashed his bike in the back alley behind the bar. Someone could still come along and steal it. If they did, the plan would fail. But he just didn’t have the time to worry about that. He just had to hope.

Once the bike was stashed, Rowan removed the backpack he’d padlocked to the basket. The backpack, the big padlock, and the two smaller padlocks holding the zipper shut, were all courtesy of Mr. Storm. So was the brick of white powder the backpack contained.

Rowan wasn’t a drug-user. He had no idea what that brick was. Cocaine? Heroin? Fucking flour?

All he knew was that the heavy weight of it against his back was like carrying around a boulder. If he’d felt conspicuous while toting around his disposable camera, this was a million times worse. Every single car that passed by on the street, every random drunk wandering along looking for a spot to take a leak, made him jump and flinch. His shoulders were hunched up so tightly that by the time the police station came in sight he thought he might never be able to relax again.

He had seriously considered calling Chief Archibald and telling him about what was going on, but something told him that was a terrible idea. The person he was making this delivery to either had some massive balls, or they were someone who had intimate knowledge of the police station; Rowan was betting on both options being true. If he made the Chief aware of what was about to go down, the Chief would alert his people, and the person waiting for their delivery would catch wind of it. Everything would go terribly and Rowan would lose his chance.

He had already taken pictures of the backpack awaiting him at the liquor store, and then of the contents, but these weren’t enough by themselves. He needed more. If he screwed this up, he couldn’t get more. Simple as that.

Rowan ducked down a side street and started to wrap his way around to the rear of the police station, out of sight of any prying eyes but for those of the occasional rat that went scurrying past. As he went along, something started to happen inside him. The tension inside him didn’t ease but his heartbeat started to slow. His senses sharpened. His muscles felt coiled and ready, and he was aware of everything all at once. The world seemed to slow down but he still moved through it at the same pace, adrenaline warping his perception of things.

I’m ready, he thought, and stepped out of the alley and into the patch of light at the rear of the station.

He smelled and heard the other person before they moved out of the shadows where they were hiding, and felt their presence in the same instant as he saw them. He tasted their fear, their trepidation, their desire to get this done as soon as possible. They were sweating, the stale remnants of their cologne doing nothing to disguise the various stenches exuding from their person.

And the person was very, very familiar.

“Officer Terry?” Rowan hissed.

“Shh!” Terry hissed. He wore his full cop uniform, so he was clearly on duty tonight. Slinking out of the shadows formed by the overhang above the rear entrance to the station, his familiar bulk was revealed. His face was cast in blackness by the strong light coming from behind him, but Rowan didn’t need to see his face to be able to tell what he was feeling.

The police officer glanced around them hurriedly even though Rowan could tell there was no one else around. Terry probably knew that already too, but the man was nervous as hell, as he had every right to be.

“Let’s do this, quick,” Terry growled. “You’ve got the stuff?”

Rowan slid the backpack off his shoulders and fumbled around in his pocket for the keys to the padlocks. “What’s going on?” Rowan hissed. “Are you in on this, too? Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“Just hurry up! We’ve only got a small window for this!”

Having no idea whether or not he was supposed to feel iffy about this situation, Rowan started unlatching the padlocks.

Terry moved back a pace and glanced quickly around once more. “No one knows. I’ve been working on this case ever since I transferred here from Norfolk. That was eight years ago.”

“Eight years?” One lock down. Hard to line up the keys in this weird, stark light.

“Been keeping it quiet. Things are too easy to fuck up. Never know who’s going to talk and who’s going to hear. Don’t have much to show for it, honestly. No big breaks, just a lot of little guys who don’t know who they’re working for. Until tonight.”

The second lock opened and Rowan shoved it into his pocket, where it clicked against the disposable camera. Terry didn’t seem to notice the odd sound, staring fixedly at the backpack as Rowan undid the zipper. Then, when Rowan started to reach inside, Terry reached out to stop him.

“Don’t touch it.”

“But, I already touched it. I’ve already touched all over this damn thing, Terry.”

Terry rolled his eyes skyward, seeming to forget for a moment that he’d been almost amiable. “For fuck’s sake, why?”

“I was curious,” Rowan admitted. Alarm bells rang faintly in his head. His fingerprints were all over the evidence now.

“Well, it won’t matter. You’re on our side. We’ll get your prints, show that you carried it for us. Should be others from your boss on there still. We’re good.”

The alarm bells quieted, but only a little. Nevertheless, Rowan let Terry take the bag from him. “None of this makes any sense to me,” he whispered.

“I know, but you have to play the game,” Terry muttered.

“Why would my boss give anything to a cop?”

“All sorts of crooked people in the world. What person in their right mind would ask for a delivery of cocaine to the police station where they work, if they weren’t trustworthy as hell?” Officer Terry shrugged, hefting the backpack in one hand. “Some might call me crooked. I’ve let a lot of things slide. Just biding my time. Come on. I have to get this inside.”

“Me?”

“Need to get you on the cameras.”

“There aren’t any cameras out here?”

“Turned them off. I’m in the security room tonight. It was the only way I could get your boss to agree to the delivery. Had no idea it was going to be you.”

Rowan scurried along behind Terry as they ducked through the rear door together, heading down the quiet halls of the station. Faint voices carried through to them from elsewhere in the building but no one seemed to be near enough to notice them. Either Portsmouth had a lot of part-time cops who didn’t stick around for the night shift, or a lot of officers were out on patrol.

“Glad it is you, though. Wanted to keep this quiet until I could get ahold of the Chief and it’d be pretty damn hard to do that while arresting someone. Just wouldn’t go according to plan. Wait here.”

Rowan jerked to a stop as Terry suddenly dashed towards a side door and threw himself inside. The burly cop placed the backpack down with utmost care, then backed out of the room again and locked it behind him.

Evidence room.

“Little further,” Terry commanded, and led him back even further through the halls to a small room filled with bright lights and monitors. Rowan glanced across the screens, noticing that most of them were blurry and pixelated despite the strong, accurate colors of the images they were capturing. He could see down what had to be all the halls of the station, as well as inside a large break room where a cop seemed to have either died or succumbed to sleep. The front and sides of the building were also on display, albeit in grainy black-and-white night vision.

Two monitor screens were completely dark. Rowan had no doubt that those offered a view of the rear of the station.

Terry leaned over the chair in front of all the monitors, knocking over a few empty soda cans. Dr. Thunder, Rowan noticed, that shitty off-brand that could only be found at Walmart.

Terry ran his fingers over the keyboard on the monitor desk, tapping a few buttons with expert precision. The bulkiness of his hands seemed to defy the ease and grace with which he navigated the keyboard, quickly turning on the last two monitors. The screens burst into life, filled with fuzzy white static before settling into identifiable imagery. Positioned on opposite sides of the building, the cameras were angled inward to offer a full view of anyone or anything that might approach from that direction.

“There. We’re good. Let’s go back. I’ll see you off. Get that on camera, too.”

Rowan was baffled by this entire exchange. He had more questions than ever and was very aware that the time to get answers was running out. The fact that this gruff, burly man, the bad cop, the irritable one with enough impatience for ten men, was turning out to be a key part of this entire operation, was astounding to him. Maybe people were more than his initial impression of them.

Maybe he should have figured that out by now, considering his relationship with a bright and eager music teacher, who had once seemed stern and cold to him.

Maybe the same could be said of me. Somehow. I’m probably not what Derrick thought I’d be like. I hope.

Although, he wondered if he had just ruined that.

He hadn’t meant to become distracted. He knew he shouldn’t have thought of Derrick, that he should keep his head in the present and worry about all that later when this trouble was over.

He stepped outside with Terry, moving on autopilot because his mind had cast itself back to the shadowed front of the school building and the way Derrick had walked away from him. The powerful light above the door hit his eyes and he blinked, staggering a little and snapping back to the present.

Terry turned in his direction, clearly distracted from his survey of the area. “What…” he said.

The sentence would never be finished. A flicker of light darted through the alley across from police station, a sliver of silver in a shade that would make the moon jealous.

Rowan saw the flicker and knew he had fucked up. He should have been paying attention, adding his superior senses to Terry’s to ensure that the outside was safe. He was a wolf. He would have been able to move faster, more accurately, to ensure that what came next just didn’t have a chance to happen.

As soon as the silver flicker faded from the alley, there was another flash of light that went spiraling across the open space. It moved fast, too fast for even a wolf to track. It was there and then gone, as if it had never been, but for the sound it made.

Every person in the world knew that sound. It was the sound that came when you were playing in the backyard, waving sticks around with your siblings or your neighbors even though you had been warned repeatedly that you could poke an eye out. It was that swish, that satisfying whisper that meant you had been fast enough to cleave the air in two.

That sound, and nothing else for a second or two.

Then, Terry let out a soft murmur. Rowan turned to look at him, puzzled, not understanding. Things hadn’t quite clicked together in his mind. He couldn’t make sense of it all when it came in such fragmented pieces, not yet knowing what it all meant.

Damn quiet for such a big guy.

There was a reason for that.

Terry had one hand resting at the hollow of his throat, fingers deftly exploring the hilt of a knife that had buried itself in his neck. A small trail of blood trickled down from underneath the hilt. Such a small amount. Insignificant.

“Terry,” Rowan said. His voice came in a rasp. He lifted one hand, watched it waver through the air in front of his own face. That hand might have belonged to someone else, as distant as it seemed from the rest of him. A piece of information came back to him, gleaned from his days of furious reading in an attempt to escape from the world that he just didn’t agree with. “Terry, don’t…don’t touch it. Leave it in. Hold on.”

And, then? Then what?

“I’ll call 911!” Rowan sputtered, forgetting for a moment that he was looking at a cop, that he was standing in the back of a police station. That wasn’t important. The important thing was that Terry not touch the fucking knife, didn’t remove it, didn’t so much as nudge it. The blade had formed a seal with his skin. No doubt it had done massive damage, lethal damage, but as long as it was in there, he wouldn’t bleed out. They could get an ambulance, or an emergency chopper to ferry him to Norfolk across the water, where the hospitals were bigger and better equipped.

He turned and saw that someone had slid in behind him, blocking him off from the safety of the police station, was closing the door even as he watched. He knew this person, because he had worked with them on plenty of occasions at the Liquor Depot. His name was Gavin, and Rowan only remembered that because of the fact that they both wore name tags while working. Gavin was a scrawny guy with no outstanding features, no identifiable factors. You hardly even knew he was there unless he was talking.

He wasn’t talking now, and so Rowan hadn’t noticed he was there.

Gavin gave him a bored look, then shut the door so quietly that no one else in the station could possibly have heard it. And if they did, so what? Doors closed all the time. They didn’t automatically mean that there was a life or death situation going on.

I should be angry. Furious. I should tear his head off. Do something. But I’m not moving. I can’t move. What the hell is happening to me?”

Telling this story later on, everyone who heard it would reassure him that he had been shocked, stunned into inaction by the sudden brutality of Terry’s injury. It would make sense then and he might even be able to forgive himself one day.

But right now, he hated himself, but it was a distant sort of hate that he just couldn’t act upon.

Footsteps echoed from behind him and he turned around, incredibly slow. And standing there in the alleyway was none other than Mr. Storm, his boss. The man looked just as he always did, day in and day out at the liquor store. Cheap but immaculate suit, brown tie that went with his belt and nothing else, and greased hair that made him look as if he was trying out for a part in a middle-aged version of the movie Grease.

The only thing different was the knife in his hand, polished to a sheen that would make the moon jealous.

“Everything is going according to plan,” Mr. Storm said. Then, he threw the knife.