Burning Up

left his motorcycle parked on the footpath. Very rude.” A piece of paper was put into his hand.
    Opening it, he found a license plate number. Hot damn. “Thanks.” His cell phone was in his hand an instant later. The elderly man waved away his thanks and went back to his game even as Emmett fed the tip through to the DarkRiver techs. Changelings had made it their business to be up-to-date on all technology known to man—because if the coldly powerful Psy had a weakness, it was that they relied too much on their machines.
    But that technical knowledge also came in handy when DarkRiver needed to hack into Enforcement databases. Emmett had an address to go with the license plate five minutes later. Assembling a team took only a further three minutes—Lucas, Vaughn, and Clay, with Dorian holding a surveillance position. The young soldier was turning into one hell of a sharpshooter.
    “How’re we doing this?” Lucas asked as they got out of their vehicle a short distance from the shooter’s home, his eyes cold.
    “I want the bastard alive,” Emmett said through gritted teeth. “We need to get Vincent’s location.” He glanced at Lucas. “We’re skating way past the edge of the law here.” Changelings had jurisdiction over crimes that involved their kind, but this shooter was most likely human. “It’s daylight—we’ll be seen.”
    His alpha shrugged. “Let me handle that.”
    Trusting his word, Emmett gave the signal and they fanned out, coming in at the suspect’s dirty trailer from all sides. The bike sat near the back—and it was sticky with the scent Emmett had detected at the restaurant.
    Even that close, no one shot out at them, and a couple of seconds later, Emmett’s leopard picked up a new scent. Blood. Fresh and thick. “Goddammit,” he muttered under his breath, knowing what they’d find. He was right.
    The shooter lay slumped over a rickety table, the back of his head blown off execution style. “Vincent knew we’d picked up his scent,” Lucas said, taking in the scene from the doorway beside Emmett. “I bet that blood is still warm.”
    They both stepped back out, Emmett’s frustration making him want to kick something. “Think there might be intel in there that could lead us to Vincent?”
    Lucas nodded at the neighbors in the surrounding trailers, a few of whom were openly staring. “We can’t risk going in and giving the cops a reason to hassle us. As it is, these folks saw us open the door, stand in the doorway. No harm, no foul.”
    “I wouldn’t let it bother you,” Clay said, breaking his customary silence. “This guy, he was expendable. They’d have told him squat.”
    Emmett tried to believe that as he circled the trailer.
    A hint of movement in his peripheral vision, prey breaking into a run.
    He didn’t even think about it, shifting into hard pursuit between one second and the next. The skinny guy in front of him didn’t look back as he snaked through the trailer park. Not until he passed a group of children kicking around a dusty soccer ball. Emmett’s gut chilled as the man’s hand came up. “Get down!” he yelled, thrusting himself into an incredible burst of speed. Slamming into the shooter’s arm, he pushed it up just as the man fired. The shot was silent, the bullet lost in the sky.
    The shooter was already moving, using his body with the fluid grace of an experienced street fighter. His fist hit Emmett’s cheek with enough force to jerk it back, but Emmett didn’t let go of the man’s wrist, holding the gun pointed up, even as he used his free elbow to hit the assassin’s jaw. The bastard didn’t go down.
    Fuck it. Emmett squeezed the man’s wrist, crushing his fragile human bones.
    With a scream, the shooter dropped to his knees, the gun falling out of his hand. “Keep an eye on it,” Emmett ordered Vaughn.
    The jaguar nodded and made sure any kids who hadn’t already scattered got the hell out. Emmett kept his hand around the shooter’s wrist as the whimpering male knelt in the dust. This one, Emmett thought, would know something about Vincent. Dropping into a crouch, he met the man’s shiny-wet eyes. “Tell me what I want to know,” he said very quietly, “or I’ll crush your wrist so badly, they’ll never be able to put it back together.”
    The man spat at him. “I’ll get a cloned replacement.”
    Emmett heard the faint sound of Enforcement sirens and knew he had a couple of minutes at most. Leaning close, he