Moon Shifter 02 - Primal Possession

government tracking him, but just in case Big Brother was watching, he didn’t want to give them an easy way to keep tabs. Paranoid? Probably. But he couldn’t be too careful.
    After checking his watch one last time, he shook his head and started to leave. As he reached the door, he heard the sound of boots crunching across the snow outside. Ducking into a nearby stall, he crouched down and waited. The barn door creaked as it opened.
    “Edward?” Mike’s annoying, nasal voice called out.
    “What took you so long?” he asked as he stepped out. When he saw Mike’s face, he cringed. Half his face was red and swollen. Soon the markings would turn to a garish bruise. If he lived long enough.
    “That bitch did this to me.”
    “So you
didn’t
manage to kidnap her?” He tried to keep the disgust out of his voice. That’s what he got for hiring these morons. Unfortunately he needed brainless thugs for the APL’s ultimate plan. They were going to be sacrificed for the greater good, even if they didn’t knowit yet. He couldn’t recruit anyone too savvy just yet. Not until the first phase of his plan was complete.
    “There were…complications,” Mike said under his breath.
    Edward reached into his pocket and idly fingered the handle of his crescent-moon-shaped knife. It was small but deadly. And he’d made it himself. The handle had been carved from a deer horn and the blade was one of a kind. Impossible to trace to any store. “That much is obvious. What happened?”
    “I took her to that Italian place, just like you said. I excused myself for a few minutes and when I came back, that fucking animal Liam Armstrong was there. He left but he really shook that bitch up.” Mike pressed a hand to the side of his face and winced. “I think she might have knocked a tooth loose.”
    “What
happened
?” He didn’t care about this asshole’s tooth.
    “I tried to inject her with the ketamine you gave me, but she kicked the shit out of my face.”
    “How?” Unless she had martial arts training, he couldn’t see the curvy redhead kickboxing Mike.
    “How do you think? With her fucking steel-toed boots. She kicked at my face and the wheel and—”
    “You tried to inject her while you were driving?” Edward tried to rein in his disgust. God, he’d really scraped the bottom of the barrel with this guy.
    “Well, yeah. I didn’t think she’d freak out like that. Man, she moved fast! And I didn’t want to take the chance that once we stopped in town, someone would see me kidnapping her. I thought it’d take one jab and she’d be knocked out, but I didn’t even get that far.” Mike spread his hands in front of himself in a helpless gesture.
    The ketamine wouldn’t have knocked her out. That’s not what Edward wanted anyway. He’d added medetomidine as an extra sedative. The combination acted as an anesthetic. It would have put her in a semisedated state until they could lock her up. He didn’t like his prisoners to be aware of their surroundings. Now they had nothing. And this moron had screwed up. Adler ground his teeth together.
    Mike had promised to come through for him and Edward had given him the chance because the guy had begged. He’d wanted him to succeed because Edward wanted that redhead. That giant shifter, Liam Armstrong, was very interested in her, and Adler knew they could use that against the entire Armstrong pack. The APL needed to get shifters on video harming humans and if Adler had the animal’s woman, he knew he could send the shifter into a blind rage. In another world Adler could have waltzed into her store and asked her out and taken care of this business himself, but because of his scarred face no woman like her would look twice at him. Women didn’t even want to look once at him. No, he’d had to send someone unthreatening. Attractive. A pretty boy. And a giant moron.
    Edward took a calming breath. He needed answers before he killed Mike. “So what happened to the car?”
    “I had to leave it. She escaped and bolted for the road. I thought I saw that shifter in the parking lot when we left, and I didn’t know if he’d been following us. I couldn’t get the car out of the snow, so I ran through the woods until I couldn’t run anymore.”
    “Did you wipe down the car?”
    His face flushed slightly. “Ah. I wiped down the wheel and handle. Besides it’s not like she knows my last name or anything.”
    Edward’s head cocked to the side. “Did you tell her