Ty snarled. The wolf paced backwards a few steps.
The woman had apparently decided to go with Ty as an ally, because she shouted, “You better not run, Eli! I’m not alone out here, and you won’t get far. Come quietly, and no one else has to get hurt.”
The wolf hesitated. Ty took a step forward and snarled again, even more confident that he was on the right side. The woman could easily have shot the wolf again, even killed him, without any argument against self-defense. But instead she’d twice demanded that he surrender without further violence.
Besides, Ty felt—something about her. There was a ring of truth to her voice, a sense of rightness to her body language. She was on the side of good here, he knew it in his heart.
His gut feelings were hardly ever wrong, and he’d never had one as strong as this. It was almost like his center of gravity had shifted, focused on the woman next to him instead of the earth beneath his feet.
The wolf, meanwhile, had apparently decided that she meant business, because he shivered, blurred, and shifted. In the wolf’s place stood a haggard middle-aged man bleeding from his side, who raised his hands and spat out, “Fine. You caught me. You and your friend.”
“I’m the one you’re going to be dealing with from here on out, Eli,” the woman said, coming forward with handcuffs in one hand, her gun still in the other.
That was smart: even wounded, the man was a shifter. He could still have a trick or two up his sleeve. Ty paced slowly behind her, still in jaguar form, his eyes fixed on the man’s hands in case he tried anything else.
But the woman was able to handcuff him without incident. She hauled him over to her vehicle and put him in the backseat, then hurried back to check over the fallen man—her deputy, it must be.
Ty wanted to shift back, ask her if her deputy was all right, if she needed any further help, but he was too aware of the fact that she now had her back to a hostile man, handcuffed or not. He stayed by the Jeep to keep watch.
And by the look she shot over her shoulder at him, she knew exactly what he was doing.
Ty kept his eyes on Eli as she checked her friend over, apparently decided he wasn’t in need of emergency care, and called back to her dispatch with a brief report of the incident. She classified Ty as unexpected local aid, which he found kind of amusing. It was hard to get less local than he was, around here.
“What—” the deputy was saying as he woke up. “Crap. What happened?”
“You got jumped by a wolf, is what happened,” the sheriff responded. “How’re you feeling?”
“Ugh. Sore.”
“He must not have been trying to kill you,” she said thoughtfully. “Probably didn’t want to go away for murdering a cop. You’re lucky, Gene.”
“Don’t feel like it right now.”
“Give it a couple of days. You got smacked around, and you should get that claw gash checked out just in case, but you’ll be fine. Can you stand?”
“Help me,” he grunted, and a minute later, the two of them came into view, the deputy’s arm around the sheriff’s shoulders. The deputy was older than Ty had realized, maybe as much as sixty. How short-staffed was the sheriff’s department around here, that these two were all the available personnel to come after a dangerous shifter like this?
Not, Ty supposed, that you could make an official requisition for a SWAT team based on the fact that your target was a mythical shapeshifting creature. This town was rife with them, from what everyone had told him, but that didn’t mean the rest of the world knew what hid in the remote forests of Montana.
The sheriff got her deputy almost to the car before the man let out a sudden yell. “Good God, Misty, who’s that?”
“That’s our unexpected aid,” said the woman. Misty, Ty supposed. Beautiful name. Misty settled her deputy in the passenger seat of the Jeep, then turned to face him. “You got a name?”
Ty shifted. He watched her look him up—and up; Ty’s human head was a lot higher than his jaguar’s head—and down. “Ty Neal,” he said, keeping his tone light and unthreatening. “Just passing by on my way to visit friends. Heard the gunshots, thought someone might need some help. Are you all right? He didn’t hurt you?”
She gave him a long, assessing stare. Her eyes were a captivating hazel, he couldn’t help but notice, with golden flecks. Her hair was dark brown, pulled back into a severe bun that was clearly designed not to get in the way. It only emphasized the clean lines of her face, a sharp beauty that didn’t depend on makeup or jewelry.
“Sheriff Misty Dale,” she said finally, holding out her hand for a shake. “I’m fine. And I appreciate the help. Mind if I ask who the friends are that you’re visiting?”
Her voice had a suspicious edge to it, and Ty supposed it might be natural to find that offensive, after he’d just helped her out.
But he didn’t: he had to imagine that for a sheriff of a small town, having a total stranger appear from nowhere during a gunfight had to be suspicious as all get-out, no matter whose side the stranger was one.
“I don’t mind at all,” he said easily. “My friends live just down the road: Ken Turner and Nate Sanders. Also well-acquainted with Carlos Gonzalez, Wilson Hanes, and Cal Westland, who’s the head ranger up at Glacier Park.”
Understanding dawned on the woman’s face. “You must be one of their Marine friends.”
“That’s right. Another reason I wanted to help—I have experience with situations like this.”