“I’m with you there.” Harley scanned the people around them, who were gyrating under the colorful strobes on the nearby dance floor while strategically placed black lights found the fluorescent paint on the exposed parts of their bodies. She wondered what constituted suspicious in a place like this. “Let’s hope we get lucky.”
Caleb only grunted in reply.
As they made their way through the club, Harley realized it was one thing to memorize a floor plan on a piece of paper, but a completely different thing to figure out where you were in that same building when it was filled with people. Within minutes, she had no idea where she was in relation to the entrance and even less idea how much more area they needed to explore. The place was much bigger than it looked in the drawing.
“We’ll cover more ground if we split up,” she said to Caleb.
From the scowl on his face, Harley knew his first instinct was to say no. Not because he thought she was wrong about being able to cover more ground on their own, but because he was worried about letting her search alone. Even though they’d only been working together for a few weeks, he’d already become like a big brother to her. It was sweet in a bittersweet kind of way, since she’d long ago given up on her real family.
“The sooner we find these people, the sooner we can get out of here,” she added before he protested. “We’re in Paris. Don’t you want to look around a little before McKay puts us right back on a plane home? Besides, we’ll be in constant radio communication. If I run into trouble, you can be there in seconds.”
He still seemed resistant to the idea, but after a few seconds, he relented. “Okay, but don’t do anything crazy, all right? At the first hint of danger, I want you on the radio. Not once something happens, but the second you get a funny feeling, okay?”
Harley nodded. “You, too.”
Another grunt.
Giving him a smile, she slipped into the crowd before Caleb could change his mind. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being part of STAT or working with Caleb. On the contrary, she loved hanging out with her teammates. But she’d been on her own for a long time. Depending on other people was something she would have to get used to again.
She wandered through several smaller rooms, each filled with mobs of dancing people, pulsing music, and flashing lights. Harley tried to ignore the extraneous and focus on the details, looking for anything that suggested there was a human—or supernatural—trafficking ring working out of the club.
As she moved from room to room, she depended on her eyes to lead the way. As a werewolf, she should have been putting as much trust in her nose and ears, but she wasn’t a big fan of that. While her boss, Nathan McKay, had hired her because of what she was, she wasn’t keen on using her werewolf abilities. Besides, they were kind of unreliable anyway. Sometimes, she could smell a pizza delivery vehicle from half a mile away. Other times, she could barely smell her own perfume. Then again, maybe they were so inconsistent because she didn’t make use of them. But since she refused to hone them, at the end of the day, her ears and nose were going to do what they wanted.
Which was why she was a little shocked when a familiar scent tickled her nose. She smelled a werewolf. And it wasn’t Caleb or Jake. Even with her less-than-reliable nose, she knew that for sure.
What were the chances of another werewolf in the club not being connected to an alleged supernatural trafficking ring?
Harley stopped and sniffed the air, trying to be as subtle as she could. Then she was moving again, intent on tracking the scent to its source. Should she radio the team about her discovery or wait until she had more information? As sketchy as her nose was, it was possible the other werewolf had been in the club days ago and she was simply picking up residual scent.
She wove through the crowd, circling dance floors and around tables, then moved through an archway that led to a set of dimly lit concrete stairs and the lower level Jake had asked her and Caleb to find. She absently listened to her teammates reporting in over the radio, saying they still hadn’t found anything. Tuning them out, she focused on her nose, trusting it to lead her down the steps even as she lost the trail more than once.
There was yet another dance floor downstairs, this one filled with people moving to a much less chaotic rhythm than those on the level above. There were fewer flashing lights, too. That should have made it easier to scan the room and locate the source of the scent that had drawn her down there, but nobody stood out.
Maybe she was completely wrong about the scent.
Maybe it wasn’t a werewolf at all.
Then she caught a glimpse of someone out of the corner of her eye that made her snap her head around, but she didn’t see anyone. Sure she’d seen something, she skirted the outside of the dance floor in that direction. She was starting to question herself again when she spotted a tall, attractive guy with broad shoulders, casually disheveled brown hair, and scruff on his square jaw. He was circling the dancers on the floor in much the same way Harley was but in the opposite direction, keeping pace with her so they stayed exactly opposite each other.
Yeah, like that’s a coincidence.
A little voice in the back of her head told her to get on the radio and call Caleb and the rest of her teammates, but she ignored it, too mesmerized by the handsome man across the room from her. Every
