Just work . . . I pressed my lips together to hold in the retort. Calling him an ass wouldn’t help me.

The ambient sound changed, then changed again as a door closed. “Jane?” Rick said a moment later. The single word was filled with all sorts of meaning. Is it really you? Why are calling? Are you nearby?

“Brute’s been injured,” I said, without intro. “I smell his blood. It was probably done by a powerful vamp I’m chasing.”

“The Fifty-two Killer.”

“Yeah, but cute names the press have given him don’t begin to tell about this guy.”

“I’ve been reading into the situation in case I need to come down there.”

That made sense. Rick knew the city better than any other PsyLED special agent. “I need to know how to capture Brute without getting bit, and how to help heal him. When a were can’t shift—” I stopped midthought.

Rick laughed, but the low sound was grim, not humorous. “They’re deadly. I have firsthand experience. And I’m betting you can’t sneak up on Brute and knock him out, like you did me.”

“Yeah. Kinda used that one on him already.”

“You did always hit first and ask questions later.” He sounded like he was taking a trip down memory lane and it was all rose petals and kisses.

“How do I stop him?” I bit out the words.

Rick hesitated, then said, “I left a few things in a public storage unit on Tchoupitoulas Street.” He gave me the unit number. “Do you still have my house key? It fits the lock.”

An uncomfortable warmth filled me, not sexual, but heated all the same, as if someone had just injected hot-pepper sauce into my veins. “I have it.” Dang it. I had it on my key chain in my pocket. Why hadn’t I tossed it? Was I still— I stopped the thought before it was born. No. I wasn’t. “What do I do?”

He told me how to get in and what to do and how to deal with Brute. When he started talking about a special rifle, I passed the cell to Eli, who took the particulars. When he was done, Eli listened a moment longer and then said, “Yeah, man. Sorry. But thanks.” He closed the phone and handed it back to me.

“Let’s go,” I said. Eli nodded and we drove away from the scent of bleeding werewolf. “What did he ask you?”

“Is she okay? Is she waiting on me?”

The peppery feeling reared up in me. It was anger, not something softer and sweeter. “Hu-whaaaa-at? Am I waiting on him? Like some lovesick fifteen-year-old with too many hormones and not enough brains? Am I waiting on him? You got to be freaking kidding me!”

Eli slanted a glance at me, his dark eyes catching the passing park lights. He was amused.

“Well? Am I?” I asked, and I couldn’t avoid the street-snark head roll.

“No, babe. I’d say you moved on and up. Way on and way up.”

“Okay, then.” I sat back in the seat and realized I had just acted like a fifteen-year-old with too much ’tude and not enough manners. I scowled at the street and then felt my mouth curl up into an unwilling smile. “Am I waiting on him. As if.”

Eli chuckled softly. I relaxed into the seat, my fifteen-year-old-teenager fit passing. I had moved on a long time ago, but something about Ricky Bo still pushed my buttons. Not the hot, jump-in-the-sack buttons, but the hot, want-to-belt-him buttons. They were located in close proximity in my brain. I think they were located close in humans’ brains too, which was why people fell out of love and into fury so easily. Design flaw, I thought, and laughed along with Eli. As he drove, Eli contacted his brother and told Alex to get inside the security system at the storage unit and shut off the cameras. I was tired or I’d have thought of that. Eli was right. I needed a nap.

Even in the Big Easy, traffic thinned just before dawn, letting us get to the storage unit in record time, where I covered us in the hallway while Eli went inside. The trip would have been a lot faster on Bitsa, but when I saw what Eli left the unit carrying, I shut that thought up. No way could I get away with carting that on a Harley. It was a long, charcoal gray case. A gun case. A honking big gun case.

Back in the SUV, Eli opened the case and placed the weapon in my lap before driving away. It looked like a . . . I had no idea how to describe the weapon except that it was long barreled, matte black, and looked really high-tech. It was a gun, but a gun like I’d never seen before. “Uncle Sam’s R and D department at DOD would be very unhappy to learn that our friendly PsyLED cop has that pretty baby,” Eli said, sounding satisfied and wearing his smallest smile, the one he saved for military hardware and tactical ops.

While I inspected the gun, he called Alex again and told his brother to restart the security system. There would be no record of our visit.

The gun was heavy and had a scope, but no place for a standard magazine or clip. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. What is it and why do we have it?”

Eli voice took on that pedantic but affectionate tone used by all gun lovers when they talk about a weapon. “It’s the military’s new, fully automatic version of a Dan-Inject dart gun. The man in the field calls it a Bongo, after an African elephant that needed sedation and transplantation to an area with fewer humans.”

“Fully automatic?” I quoted, turning the weapon in my hands, careful to keep my fingers away from the trigger.

“In this case, the term doesn’t refer to the method of firing rounds, but to the darts themselves. There are five or six different meds included in each dart, so they can be calibrated in the field to the species and weight for dosing, so one weapon can be used for various different-sized animals. And retrieved and reused.”

A frisson of fear shot through me. “And they have a sedative that will work on a three-hundred-pound werewolf?” What about skinwalkers? But I didn’t say it. Not yet. If Eli knew the answer to that question, it put our entire relationship on a completely different standing.

“Seems so,” he said, smelling stress-free and sounding relaxed. “It’s nearly instant sedation—true instant sedation being a thing of novels and the movies. Using civilian and veterinary sedatives, sedation takes ten minutes to half an hour on most species. The military version is faster, taking about half that time because it’s a two- or three-part med. The first part is a fast-acting paralyzing agent. It takes the target down, makes them relaxed, makes their limbs feel heavy. The second part puts them to sleep. For werewolves, there’s a third part, a very slow-acting sedative to keep them under longer, so they can’t start to wake up, panic, shift, and/or bite.”