All eyes turned to Chapel.
She held a muffin close to her nose, sniffing at the crumble on top while pulling a face as if it had personally offended her.
“If you won’t eat it,” Saint said, reaching for the pastry, “give it here.”
Chapel snatched it out of his reach. “Get your own.”
She made a big production of pulling the wrapper back and biting into it with an air of sheer stubbornness and spite.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then her eyelids flared, her fingers tightened reflexively, and a low, satisfied growl rumbled from her throat.
“Told you,” Kennedy muttered.
Saint looked across the coffee table at Sammy and winked.
The trio continued to snipe back and forth at each other for another minute, but when Dominic leaned forward and cleared his throat, the atmosphere instantly shifted. Smiles faded, postures stiffened, and a palpable tension settled over the room.
“What the hell did we just step in?”
The pack exchanged glances, but as usual, it was Saint who spoke first.
“Only a handful of the shifters were well enough to be questioned, but they didn’t really know much.”
Dominic bit back a growl. “Whatdowe know?”
“They weren’t taken all at once,” Chapel answered. “Some had been there for weeks. Some only a few days.”
“Most of them are shifters,” Thierry added. “But there were also a couple of fae.” His voice lowered to a murmur, and he glanced away. “They didn’t make it.”
A tense silence washed over the meeting, palpable despite its brevity.
“We know it wasn’t localized.” Sitting forward on the sofa, Kennedy shook her head. “They came from all over. Valdosta. Augusta. Jacksonville. Tallahassee. Montgomery.”
Dominic’s scowl deepened, and a dull ache throbbed between his eyes. Dozens of victims from across three states? It seemed like a lot of effort and a long way to go for a snack.
What the hell was going on?
As if reading his thoughts, Chapel said, “A vixen was taken from Jacksonville almost a month ago. None of the vamps ever fed from her, but she said they forced all the shifters to turn on the full moon.”
Despite what many humans believed, shifters and weres didn’t experience a compulsion to shift during the full moon. They felt the pull, yes, and it took years to master control, but even younglings didn’t spontaneously explode into fur and fangs.
Forcealready implied something unpleasant, but the only real way to trigger a shift was through sustained physical or emotional trauma. Some would be able to resist longer than others, but they could only withstand so much.
“The bodies we found,” Saint interjected. “They couldn’t have been dead for more than twenty-four hours, and not all of them were drained either. Some of them hadn’t been bitten at all.”
Which likely meant they had died as a result of whatever methods had been used to force their shift. It also sounded as if the vampires had fed from any of the captives untilafterthe full moon.
But it all came back to the same question.
“Why?”
The pack glanced between each other again, then shook their heads. Surprisingly, it was Sammy who spoke up.
“It sounds like some kind of test.” His face flushed a soft pink when everyone turned to look at him, and he twisted his hands together in his lap.
“Go on,” Dominic encouraged.
“You said some of the shifters were missing?”