Peter finished his beer and seriously considered raiding the liquor cabinet for something stronger. Mary’s story inspired that kind of fear, that kind of nervousness.

“The size of a grizzly bear?”

Eyes wide, she nodded as she tucked two long dark curls back behind her ears. “The guy I saw, he had to have been eight, almost nine feet tall. Covered in scratches and bite marks and scars. There was a bunch of other people with him, normal humans I think, but like military or something. They had on some of the stuff I’ve seen you and the other guys wear.”

“But he didn’t catch you? The big one?”

She shook her head. “No, when I saw the fire, I called 911 and told the guy I was with to just go.”

“Why?” Peter asked. “Just curious.”

“Well, I knew if I was going to get my parents and everyone out of the house, I was going to have to be a wolf. No way I could do it in my human form. And I couldn’t show that to the guy I was with, could I? So I called the fire department, put my phone away, and stripped down to shift as soon as he left. I took off across the field, jumped the barbed wire fence, and headed up to the house. But when I got there, I smelled it. The smell of the fire and some…some kind of herb.”

Peter wrinkled his nose subconsciously, her mention of that smell triggering the memory in him. He’d smelled the same thing at her family’s farmhouse as he’d smelled at his own family’s when he’d returned from the service. They’d long been gone, but the smell of their burnt flesh and hair, and that oily herbal scent engulfed everything. Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night with that smell in his nose and on his tongue.

“So I got closer,” she said, pausing to take a drink of her milk. She shook her head. “That’s when I saw him. He looked as big as a house. Like a WWE wrestler, but bigger.”

“What happened?” he asked after she didn’t continue for a moment. He didn’t want to push her too hard. Her clamming up wouldn’t get him anywhere. But this was the first time he’d been able to get an eyewitness account of the only suspects in his family’s murder. Or his mate’s.

She looked him right in the eye. “He smelled me, or heard me. Something. I don’t know how. I was crouched right there in the bushes, looking over the little gravel drive, straight at his back, at the other guys running around there with their rifles and stuff. And he just turned around and grinned, his eyes right on mine.”

“What did you do?”

“What do you think I did? I bolted! I took off, ran as fast as I could, and tried to hide.”

“And they didn’t come after you? Any of them?”

“They tried shooting at me, but I stayed low and zigged-zagged a little. That big guy, he tried to race after me, but realized I had too much of a head start, I guess, and just let me go.”

Peter cursed himself. Dammit, if he’d known they’d shot at her, he would have gone through the fields, searched for casings with a metal detector. Maybe find a bullet buried in the dirt that could tell him something, anything, about these people who were hunting shifters. Had they been using silver? Or normal bullets?

“Heard one of them say to just leave me be, that I wasn’t a threat. Might as well just be a coyote.” Mary made a face as she stared at her milk. “Said they had enough. Then the sirens started coming, and they bolted fast as they could. Just loaded up their trucks, I guess, and left.”

“Had enough?” he asked. “Any idea what they could have meant?”

She shrugged and sighed. “I don’t know, Peter. Enough wolves they killed, maybe? They killed my parents and brothers and sisters. Maybe that was enough bloodshed for them.”

Peter nodded. “Yeah. Maybe. And this guy, are you sure he was that big?”

“I swear,” she said, sitting up with one hand over her heart and the other in the air. “Like Hulk Hogan and Undertaker squashed together. Never seen anything like it, not ever.”

And, coming from a shifter, that was saying something. They both sat there in silence for a while longer, Peter taking another drink from his already drained beer and Mary taking a sip of her milk.

“You believe me, don’t you? Cause that’s the reason I haven’t told you, yet. I wasn’t sure if you’d believe me.”

Peter nodded. “Of course. Why would you lie? I mean, as crazy as this is, how could you make it up? I mean, this is nuts. This is like X-Files stuff.”

“Who do you think they were?” she asked.

He flipped through the possibilities like he was thumbing through a mental Rolodex. Who could they be? Government? A corporation? Something else? What kind of organization could hide from the world the way these people had? They’d have to be buried as deep as shifters, guarding every moment to conceal their existence.

He took a deep breath and shrugged. “I don’t know, Mary. I really don’t know. This is all so new.”

“Do you think…” she began, but trailed off.

“Do I think?” he prompted.

“Do you think this’ll help you? I mean, will this help you maybe find these guys? Pay them back for what they did to my family?”

He reached across the table and grabbed hold of her hand, leaning down and leveling his eyes with hers like a protective older brother. “Listen, Mary. I promise you I’m going to find these bastards if it’s the last thing I do. And I’m going to make them pay. For your family, for mine, and for everyone else they’ve hurt.”

She nodded and sniffed a little. “Thanks, Peter.”

He nodded again and let go of her small, trembling hand. “Now go get some sleep. Or try to, at least. It’s still a school night.”

She rolled her eyes and got up from the table. “Fine.” She stopped at the hallway entrance and got Peter’s attention as he was grabbing another beer from the fridge. “Hey, Peter? Do you think this’ll help?”

He nodded as he popped the top with his bottle opener. “Yeah, Mary. I think it will. I think it’s going to help a lot.”

She disappeared into her room, leaving him alone with his thoughts. How could these people be moving unprotected? Were they part of the government? How long had they been around? And who was this giant of a man? Or, better yet, what was he? Peter had never heard of such a thing, not in all his years in either the shifter lore, or in his time traveling the world with the SEALs.

But—and this one worried him the most and left him with an icy feeling in the pit of his stomach—how much longer would it be before they found the shifters of Frost Security? How much longer would it be before Enchanted Rock became a war zone?