“What are you?” Cade asked. “A cop?”
“Yes,” Julian said, at the same time Alex said, “No.”
“She was,” Julian blurted. “Obviously she isn’t anymore.”
“I could be,” she said.
“I’m all the cop we need around here.”
“Yeah, you’re doin’ a great job so far. How many are dead?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Start with him. Can’t you touch him and…” She wiggled her fingers like a sitcom witch performing a spell. “Voodoo the truth free?”
“It wasn’t him,” Julian said.
“Just because he’s your brother doesn’t mean he couldn’t have killed someone.”
“That is what it means. Exactly.”
Alex threw up her hands. “He’s a werewolf.”
“What is there about this town that you don’t understand?” Julian snapped. “We don’t kill people.”
She stared him right in the eye as she said with utter conviction, “One of you does.”
Barlow wanted to smack her. Alex could see it on his face. But he didn’t want to do it in front of his brother. Which meant he hadn’t told Cade who she really was.
Interesting.
The two had been together for centuries. They appeared very close. Yet Barlow was keeping secrets. Was Cade keeping secrets, too?
“No one here would dare hurt anyone from there,” Julian said.
“I think you’re wrong.”
“I don’t care what you think. I know. Whoever’s killing the Inuit does not live here.”
“You’d rather believe a lone werewolf wandered out in the middle of nowhere and started snacking on the pets,” Alex said. “Instead of the logical answer that someone from a village full of werewolves has decided you aren’t the boss of them?”
Doubt flickered over Julian’s face, there, then gone the next instant. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I believe.”
But she’d gotten him thinking. Which was good enough for her.
Alex had also started to think. She’d come here to find the werewolf that had murdered her father, only to discover a werewolf murdering villagers. What were the chances they were one and the same?
Pretty damn high.
Especially if she bought into the theory that Barlow’s wolves were different—and considering their seeming lack of a desire to kill everyone they met, she kind of did—then it would follow that the one wolf that had murdered before was now doing so again.
She was going to have to start meeting people, giving them a good, long look-see. She’d winged—or eared—the werewolf that had murdered her father with a silver bullet, and silver left a mark—in both forms.
However, cheerily chatting up the populace when she was supposed to loathe them was going to arouse Barlow’s suspicions. She’d just have to do it when he wasn’t around.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked.
Barlow lifted a brow. “Trying to get rid of me?”