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Of course, I couldn’t tell Slim about pelts and shifters. But the story held together pretty well as a simple murder mystery...as long as I tweaked the tale to include Bastion being poisoned and the killer possessing the only cure.
We couldn’t go to the police, I embroidered, because the murderer had left a note threatening to ditch the antidote if we brought in backup. We couldn’t take Bastion to a hospital for the same reason. Plus, it was too late to pump his stomach and the poison was too exotic to be easily identified via conventional lab tests.
Our only solution was to tail Mr. Smythewhite and try to find what he was hiding from us. To my ear, the story sounded far-fetched and Gothic. But Slim went for it. He straightened like a soldier granted a promotion then asked: “What can I do to help?”
Luke’s eyebrows rose before I could answer. “Honor, may I speak with you for a moment?”
With my eyes, I tried to relay what I’d thought was obvious. We needed to nullify the Slim problem and I needed to track down the killer. Taking Slim with me was the obvious way to kill two birds with one stone.
But Luke was having none of it. Not even when I teased him. “There’s nothing to worry about, Luke. This isn’t the habitat for zombie giraffes. Zombie buffalos maybe....”
Rather than laughing, he responded with the bone-rattling rumble of a growl. Werewolf not woelfin. How had I let myself forget that? Flashing Slim a pained smile, I followed Luke around the corner into the living room.
There, he planted his feet, looked me in the eye, and proved he really was one of the skinless. “No.”
“No what?” I asked even though I understood his statement already.
“No, you’re not taking a middle-aged human along as your sole backup. He’ll stay here and watch Bastion until one of your pack mates can come to spell him. I’ll go with you on the hunt.”
“Luke.” I took a step forward until we stood toe to toe, which meant I had to tilt my head back to peer up at him. “I need someone I trust here with Bastion. You....”
Luke cut off the incipient baring of my soul with a hard jerk of his head. Side to side. An abrupt negation. Then he stilled as, in the room we’d been in a moment earlier, Bastion moaned.
My cousin’s pain sharpened my rejoinder. “Stop being an alpha asshole,” I demanded. “This isn’t your responsibility. I’m taking Slim. Bastion needs a protector. Are you willing to stay here and watch my cousin or not?”
***
HE STAYED. WE WENT. It should have been a success—winning an argument with one of the skinless.
Instead, as Slim and I sat in his car staking out Mr. Smythewhite’s office, I felt so lonely I called my sister up.
“Are you sure Mr. Smythewhite is still in there?” I asked Grace over speaker phone.
Because, in addition to playing bodyguard, she’d taken on the role of telephone actress. She’d rung Mr. Smythewhite before he left his office, pretending to be the secretary for a very important client. Predictably, he’d been more than happy to wait for a document to be messengered over.
“I texted you this already.” From her tone, my twin wasn’t pleased to have her work questioned. But she answered anyway. “I called him back fifteen minutes ago rescinding my request. He’ll be at his car shortly. Are you doubting my abilities?”
Despite her snark, a roughness in my twin’s voice suggested she’d been crying. No wonder when the most recent report from Luke suggested Bastion was now bruising wherever he was touched, the same way all of our parents had done forty-eight hours before passing away.
“It’s not over until it’s over.” I winced as soon as the placation emerged from my lips. If I was the one sitting alone in the Smythewhite house while one cousin rushed to the deathbed of another, that pep talk would have grated. So I hastened to return to a topic we could agree upon—protecting the weak. “How’s the household there?”
“Clarence was out like a light the minute he got home from chemo. His mom retreated to her bedroom an hour later. I’m sitting in the hall just in case we’re wrong and she’s the culprit.”
Despite Grace’s willingness to rattle off a status report, her annoyance at being left guarding the least important cog in the sleuthing machine was palpable. I was going to owe her much more than a night of dancing once all this was through.
In the meantime, all I could do was toss out more praise and hope she didn’t find a way to strangle me long distance. “That’s great. I...”
A beep from Slim’s phone saved me from putting my foot in my mouth a second time. Two previous messages had alerted us to data being added to the police station’s internal server. First, a kid had been caught shoplifting at a convenience store. Then officers had been sent out to deal with a drunk and disorderly downtown.
Neither case seemed relevant to Bastion’s pelt, but it wasn’t lost upon me that the serial killer had struck nightly and was due for another murder very soon. If I was wrong about Mr. Smythewhite being the culprit....
Slim read the information his thumb-drive hack had garnered in silence. In response to my questioning gaze, he shrugged and shook his head.
“Amber alert.”
A lost kid was no good, but the crime was unlikely to be related to Bastion’s pelt. I opened my mouth to say so, then reached over and slammed Slim’s phone down into his lap to stifle the glow.
“Wha...?” He started. But I clenched down on his knee to hush him.
We couldn’t afford to be seen or heard by the businessman who had just stepped out of his office’s front door.
***
PREDATORS RECOGNIZE each other. Watching Mr. Smythewhite now, I couldn’t understand how I’d missed his darker side when I first set eyes on him at the benefit ball.
Because his head turned left then right. Slowly. Carefully. He wasn’t checking for traffic—there was none on this side of town at this late hour. Instead, he was watching for observers, almost as if he could feel Slim’s and my gazes boring into his skin.
“Close your eyes,” I demanded.
My temporary partner wasn’t as quick on the uptake as Bastion would have been. “Huh?”
“Slim.” I reached out, half expecting to have to slap my hand over his face to make him obey me. “Now.”
Slim’s eyes flicked shut one second before I was forced to resort to drastic measures. I closed my own...then waited while questions without answers bounced off my skull.
What kind of power might a woelfin pelt provide for an ordinary human? Could murder combined with woelfin magic pump up mortal senses until they were supernaturally strong?
I could only guess at the answers. Luke would have known I was watching him. Possibly would have even heard my hushed whisper from this distance.
My skin tingled. I swallowed against a throat as dry as the Sahara. I itched to open my eyes and see if Mr. Smythewhite was stalking toward our car.
Instead, I let my right hand drop to the gun I’d recovered from Luke’s dining room. I could barely grab it at first, the pelt wrapped around my arm puffed up like a cat scared of lightning. But, finally, I got my hand in position...and if a finger had been on the trigger, I would have shot myself when the purr of a nearby engine started up.
Luckily, I have a high regard for gun safety. So all I did was bark my knuckles on the side of the car while Slim asked: “Can I open my eyes yet?”
“Wait one more second.” Mr. Smythewhite’s car slid onto the road, the breeze of its passing pressing hair into my face and exhaust into my nostrils. I hoped his eyes were human-dull enough to miss our presence, our shapes blending into the seats’ shadows. I hoped Slim wouldn’t move and give our fakery away.
He didn’t. In fact when I opened my eyes to catch taillights shining one block in the distance, Slim’s eyelids were still squinted shut like a kid playing blind man’s bluff.
“Okay,” I told him, “now you can look.”
***
WE DROVE WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS, staying far enough back so the streetlamps wouldn’t give away our presence. “Tell me more about Jimmy English’s death,” I said, breaking through the silence that hung heavy over our car.
I’d racked my brain earlier, trying to guess who Mr. Smythewhite would choose as his next victim. Originally, I’d assumed those who touched my pelt attracted the killer. But Mr. Smythewhite wasn’t heading toward Clarence, Bastion, or Luke—those with whom I’d had recent skin contact. So maybe his choice of victim was random after all.
Slim shrugged. “There’s not much in the reports that didn’t make it into the paper. The officers in charge seem to think good old Jimmy was drunk and hiding from the law. The current hypothesis is that he tripped over his own feet then cracked his head on the pavement. The coroner’s report matches the idea of an accidental fall.”
“Just like Serena fell from the second-story landing.” I rubbed my pelt. “But our killer didn’t drop Clarence over that same landing when he had the chance.”
The hunt had subdued Slim, but a spark of his former fan fervor glinted back to life as he suggested: “Maybe it’s like The Case of the Spotless Dalmatians....”
His voice trailed off as the sleek sports car in front of us pulled into an alley clearly intended for cleaning staff and garbage trucks. Mr. Smythewhite’s vehicle would stick out like a sore thumb come morning. Now, it purred into darkness then disappeared.
The murderer had chosen his prey. We couldn’t risk alerting him to our presence.
“Drive on,” I murmured so quietly I wasn’t sure Slim would even hear me. It was time to stash our vehicle and derail Mr. Smythewhite’s upcoming homicide.