Dire Needs: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan by Stephanie Tyler

dialed it back a little to let her think she was losing him, wanted her to get to her house safely. He ran parallel to her and ended up arriving at the edge of the woods facing her house first.
    She burst through the clearing at top speed, obviously not hurt, which was good.
    Not so good was the Crown Vic parked in her driveway.
    He hadn’t heard sirens behind him, and hopefully Vice and Jinx would take care of the mess at the park before the law found out about it. Gwen could be implicated, because they couldn’t let a wolf take the blame, no matter how much he cared about this human.
    Brother Wolf was ready to howl at the moon, which would make her appearance within the hour. Gwen’s slim figure raced onto her porch as he waited, hidden. Sniffed the air and caught the scent of fear—of treason.
    These men weren’t cops.

Chapter 10
    G wen could barely believe what she’d seen. All she could do was run. The woods were a blur as her muscles stretched, her blood churned and her feet flew across the ground.
    She heard voices behind her and she picked up speed, frantic to get away, get home, wake up…
    Hallucinating.
    Maybe… or maybe she killed Cordelia. Or maybe Liam did.
    What about the wolves?
    She was at her front door in what seemed like minutes, but she wasn’t alone. What looked like an unmarked police car sat in her driveway, and there were three plainclothes cops next to her on the porch. Before she could say anything, they flashed their badges and she bent forward, palms on her thighs, to catch her breath.
    She smelled Rifter.
    She looked up but didn’t see him anywhere. Scrubbed her hands over her eyes, hoping to find herself still in the hospital bed, hooked up to meds.
    “Ma’am?” One of the officers touched her arm and sounded genuinely concerned.
    The rustling sound from earlier began again in her ears,like someone was balling up tissue paper, and then it stopped.
    Don’t trust them.
    She stood and pushed the man’s hand off her.
    She was losing touch with reality very quickly, and she couldn’t tell them what she had seen because she couldn’t be sure herself. “I’m fine.”
    “Do you always run like you’re being chased when you’re fine?” the second officer asked.
    She backed toward her door. “You can go now.”
    “No, we can’t. We need to know about Cordelia Smith,” the third said firmly.
    She blanched, thought about how she’d left the woman back in the woods. “She attacked me.”
    “Where is she now?”
    How would they know about the attack so fast? And why were they here, instead of scouring the woods. “I don’t know.”
    “You’ll have to come to the station with us.”
    She realized then that she didn’t recognize them at all—and they hadn’t shown her ID. The town wasn’t that small, and even so, she’d met most of the force, and some from the neighboring towns, in the ER. She had two officers’ cell numbers on speed dial—they’d given them to her more for social purposes than for business—but her cell phone was back in the hospital lot and wouldn’t help, damn it.
    The keys still clutched in her palm might.
    It was then she noticed that the second man held Rifter’s leather jacket in his hands. “Why were you in my house?” she demanded, then reached out and ripped the jacket from his grasp.
    He grabbed at her wrist in retaliation, and she was tired of people grabbing at her, stopping her. Scaring her.
    “Let’s go,” he told her.
    “Fuck you,”she said. She was angry and she’d lost her job and she was about to literally lose everything.
    Which meant that she had nothing to lose.
    She realized that, in some form or another, she’d been fighting her whole life. First there was the illness, and then she’d been fighting for her career in spite of the illness.
    Fighting to live.
    Giving up was not in her—even as she did so, she knew she was prolonging the inevitable, but she had too much to do in a short time. It was as if something