“Skylar!”
Lia practically flew across the living room the moment I entered the townhouse. She hugged me tight and then stepped back, sweeping her gaze over me.
“Thank goodness you’re better. Gabriel told us what happened and we’ve all been worried sick.” She paused, cocked her head, and looked me up and down. Then a knowing smile replaced her worried mother-henning. “Though I guess I shouldn’t be concerned at all anymore, should I? Gabriel took good care of you.”
“I…” Couldn’t lie to her. Lia saw too much. I deflected instead. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class right now?”
“Online class. I finished my lesson already and was about to prep for dinner. Want me to make you something first?”
“Um, no. I ate a sandwich.” She tsked, so I added quickly, “I’ll make sure to get a hot meal after my first class.”
“I’ll make sure she does,” Holly said as she stepped into the room, looking no better than before. She hugged me next, and sniffed me. “Man, staying over at Gabe’s has made you smell like him.”
“Well, I had to use his soap in the shower.”
“Uh-huh.” Holly glanced at Lia and winked, then turned back to me. “Did he help you lather up?”
They both laughed when I swatted at Holly’s arm. We’d chat about it as soon as I figured out what the hell to say about my life-changing decision to become his forever mate at age twenty-one. Maybe after Gabriel and I discussed the details and when we’d be adding our names to the shifter bonding registry.
I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to remain Skylar Corazzi or take his last name of Fujimoto.
“Anyway, I need to get cleaned up and changed for my classes.”
“I’m here to talk if you ever want to,” Lia said in a sing-song voice as she headed to the kitchen. Holly snickered and waved me off, then made her way out the door. While we shared some courses, like martial arts and bootcamp, battlemages had their own special classes.
Thirty minutes later, I made my own way out the door, though the smells coming from the kitchen made me want to stay. As I hustled into my first class, several people glanced my way and whispered amongst themselves. Not everyone had gone on the mission to the mall, but everyone had heard what happened by now.
Or did they notice something different about the way I looked, or something in my smell?
In the classroom, a werewolf boy’s gaze flicked to Gabriel, lingered, then darted to me again. He inhaled, then whispered to his friend.
Both looked at me.
Creepy.
Ignoring it, I squeezed past a cluster of students and took a seat. A vampire by the name of Rachel took the chair beside me. She’d been on the mission. “Hey, Skylar, how are you?”
“Good, thanks. Honestly, the shot Riordan gave me was worse than the scratches.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard. Jax had to get one too and she was puking all weekend,” she said, referring to one of the bear shifters a year ahead of us. I’d overheard a rumor they were dating.
“She feeling better?”
Rachel smiled. “She is, thanks.”
“Sucks, doesn’t it?”
I twisted around to look at the speaker, a guy I knew by name but really didn’t know much else about. Cole tended to keep to himself, I’d noticed. His dark hair fell into his eyes, which seemed to shift between green and blue depending on the day.
“Being sick always sucks,” I replied.
“Yeah, but that shot is almost sadistic.” He leaned forward, eyes alight with curiosity. “So, was it awful?”
“God, Cole, what sort of question is that?” Rachel cut in. “Go get a shot yourself and see how it feels if you’re so interested.”
“Sorry, my bad,” he said as he backed off. A flush rose in his cheeks and he ducked his head.
“It’s all good.”
Sebastian and Simon stepped up to the podium, our usual instructor nowhere to be seen. All the chatter died down, leaving a strange silence in its place. Everyone focused on the two sentinels.
“Good evening, everyone,” Simon began. “I know you were expecting your first surveillance class of the year, likely thinking you’d have some boring orientation to get through.”
A few people laughed. Even Sebastian cracked a smile.
“You’ll all have heard what happened over the weekend. While I’m certain there’s been plenty of hearsay,” the mage continued, “that will end today. As of this moment, you are all officially invited to join the investigation.”
Excitement and nervous energy filled the room. I leaned forward and wondered how much they were going to let us get involved.
“You have a unique opportunity,” Simon said once he had everyone’s attention again. “Juniors don’t often get the chance to work on a case as high profile as this, but we need all hands on deck and since we have to work the job anyway, we may as well teach you lot something at the same time.”
Sebastian cracked his knuckles and swept his gaze over the group. “If you screw around, you’re out. If you blow off your assigned tasks, you’re out. You get one chance. Consider this investigation your entire grade, because it is.”
“Mistakes will happen,” Simon said, picking up the lecture. “We don’t expect accurate theories or for students to pick up on every clue the evidence provides, but we do want you to give this your very best. Success isn’t part of the grade; what matters is the effort you give. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” the class said in unison.
“First task is surveillance footage. Break into two groups and review the assigned footage. All security feeds have been uploaded to the class server for your perusal. Take note of everything. Sometimes the clues are in the subtleties and background. Sometimes they’re right in front of you. Sebastian and I have already reviewed these and come to our own conclusions. Now we want you to do the same.”
A vampire two rows ahead of me raised his hand. “What are we looking for specifically?”
“We need to know our patient zero,” Simon replied. “Work together to analyze these, and take good notes. There’s no such thing as too many notes. Trust me, you don’t want to try to remember something later and spend an hour hunting around for it again. Sentinels Fujimoto and Levine will be your class liaisons for the official investigation. Turn in any relevant findings to them.”
“Get to work,” Sebastian barked.
As the two instructors left, the classroom exploded into a flurry of activity, everyone rushing to group with their friends or whoever they thought would be best at the job. I made it a point not to go to Gabe for guidance, instead moving off with a few classmates to the group Stark was supervising. Rachel looked up and motioned to the seat beside her. Cole wandered over a minute later.
“Hey, Skylar, I really am sorry,” he murmured.
“Don’t worry about it. Really. And to answer your question, yeah, I was. I don’t think I’ve ever puked so much.”
“Well, you seem better now.” Cole grinned. “Glad you’re still with us.”
“Thanks, Cole.”
Stark wheeled out a 42-inch screen for our group and hooked up his laptop. Across the room, Gabe had done the same. A few people took out their personal tablets and laptops to pull up the footage for themselves. And so began the tedious process of watching boring mall videos. We reviewed an hour at quadruple the speed before the reported attacks began.
“There, look at that.” I hit pause and rewound the footage back ten seconds.
Rachel leaned over my shoulder and pointed at the screen. “That guy definitely looks like he’s in the early stage of transformation.”
A bland-faced middle-aged man walked by a Sunglass Hut with an odd lurch in his step, almost like he’d been drinking. The footage wasn’t the best quality, so we couldn’t make out details, but the sheen on his brow indicated sweating. I could easily imagine that his face was flushed.
“Crap, he looks familiar too. Look at his Chicago Cubs jacket. We saw him
earlier, didn’t we?” I racked my brain, trying to think back.
“The food court footage,” a guy behind me said. “Sky, swap back over to the other video.”
After some careful timestamp scrolling, we managed to find our guy in the food court. We followed his progress from the line at a Chinese place to a crowded table in the center of the busy area.
“Go back five seconds,” Rachel said. Trusting her sharp eyes, I wound back and slowed down the replay.
It took two viewings to catch what had caught her attention. A figure in a coat and hoodie passed behind the guy’s seat and bumped into him. I managed to pause the footage where a fuzzy glint could be seen in his hand. “Is that a syringe?”
“How the hell would a person not notice getting stabbed with a needle?” Cole asked. “That shit burns when they inject it.”
“Could be like smallpox vaccinations. They just prick you a few times,” another guy in our group said. When we all looked at him, he shrugged. “I got a human uncle. He was in the Navy and had to get that crap.”
Huh. I learned something new every day.
“Hey, Stark, come look at this,” I called over.
We played it three more times for Stark, then twice more after he called Gabriel over. By then, I was absolutely convinced we had discovered our patient zero and our first look at the person behind the outbreak. A shame we couldn’t see his—or her—face.
“Do we have any other shots of the person with the needle?”
“I’ve been skimming through the other cameras, and whoever they are, they knew where to walk. There are no facial shots,” Rachel replied.
Gabriel frowned. “All right. What about our victim? Can we follow him?”
“We lost him for about five minutes when he used the restroom. The time difference from the food court to this point where we see a change is about ten minutes. And if we go forward another two minutes…”
Our patient zero lunged at a group of shoppers in GameStop. From there, the chaos started, mere minutes passing between attacks and the deceased victims rising from the dead.
“I’ll tag these for Simon and Sebastian to review,” Stark said. “Good work, guys. We already figured this guy was our patient zero, but none of us caught the needle or noticed him in the food court.”
“That was all Rachel,” I said, giving credit where it was due. She lifted her chin, flushing with quiet pleasure.
“Swap over to camera thirty and go to timestamp 16:25,” Stark directed.
“What are we looking for?”
Gabe leaned down over my shoulder, his breath stirring my hair. My nipples automatically tightened, because apparently him standing within arm’s reach meant my body had to respond.
Dammit. Not cool, body. Not cool.
“We’re looking for Blaire. See? That’s him there, in the arcade,” Gabe said. “We couldn’t figure out when he got attacked.”
“And there’s the same figure in the coat. Look, he tripped right into Blaire.” I frowned at the footage and watched it crackle around the edges. “They’re laughing about it. Shaking hands now.”
“I don’t see a needle, but the angle is wrong,” Rachel said. “Easy enough to do when he tripped. Still, something doesn’t add up.”
“What do you mean?” Cole asked.
Rachel leaned back in her seat. “Well, this is only twenty minutes before our other patient zero, but Blaire was fine when we saw him upon arrival. Sebastian assigned him to go out and help with the initial sweep.”
“So it takes longer for shifters to get sick. I mean, that makes sense, right?” A theory began to coalesce in my mind. “You guys shouldn’t be affected at all, so what if that’s why it took so much longer for Blaire to turn?”
“A strong possibility.” Simon’s deep bass made me jump in my seat. Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one. Our entire group startled. Somehow the big mage had come up behind us without anyone noticing. That took skill. “Good job, everyone, but you missed one thing.”
Simon tapped the screen around our mystery plague bearer.
“Isn’t that just static?” Rachel asked.
I looked harder at the distortion and suddenly felt like the world’s biggest idiot. It must have shown on my face, because Simon chuckled and gestured for me to elaborate.
“It’s magic,” I said. “Whoever this person is, they’re either a mage, a fae, or had a cloaking spell laid on them.”
“Why bother?” another shifter asked. “They have a hoodie on and obviously seem to know where all the cameras are.”
“Extra insurance?” I guessed. “That, or they needed to hide their true appearance.”
“You think they might be a darkling.” Gabe’s brows drew together.
“Someone from the Hidden Court?” Cole released a long, low whistle. “That’s a wild guess.”
“I mean, why not? Who else would perform a crazy zombie experiment in the mall?”
“All excellent questions. Ones which will be considered carefully throughout the investigation,” Simon replied.
A bell tolled on campus. People groaned as they abandoned their tasks and grabbed their bags to head to the next class. As tedious as it was to go through security footage, it was also interesting. I’d learned a lot by watching people. I guessed the rest of my classmates felt the same.
“Don’t worry,” Simon said in a low voice. “You’ll all have additional tasks to complete as homework. Keep an eye on your student e-mail accounts this afternoon.”
Hungry for more, I grabbed my bag and headed outside despite an increasing number of shifter eyes on my back.
9
Shifters Give the Best Gifts
Bright and early on Tuesday morning, I took my first Destiny Making class. Professor Tennant was kind of eye candy, bright-eyed and dark-haired, prone to giving a student a genuine and friendly grin whenever they correctly answered a question.
The guy had dimples. Those dimples distracted the girls, and many of the guys, and led to us hanging on to his every word. For once, a fair portion of the student body proved willing to discuss the coursework instead of the tragedy at the mall.
But seeing as I had a guy, I didn’t care much for discussing Professor Star-Eyes, which meant I tended to tune those conversations out and focus my attention elsewhere.
Since last night, our campus officially served as headquarters for the investigation, a variety of sentinels and mages coming and going at all hours. When I’d asked Gabe about it before leaving that morning, he’d shrugged and said, “Free labor and a helluva lot more resources at hand.”
“Doesn’t the Cook County Field Office have stuff?”
“Yeah, but the campus has a much larger lab. Plus, some of the brightest minds are already here as teachers of this fine, elite institution, remember? The professors can do more for the investigation here than they could if they had to go after-hours during their own time.”
“Makes sense when you put it that way.”
“I’m sure the main office is just as busy, but they’re doing the bulk of the work from here.”
Then the rest of the day fucking dragged after Destiny Making. I reported to the computer lab for my first class in Statistical Methods and contemplated cutting my own throat forty minutes in when the surly mage professor busted out a complex bar graph and told us to find numbers using skills he hadn’t even taught us yet because, “Didn’t you read the textbook?”
Eventually, the torture ended, and I returned home—it was still weird to think of Gabe’s place as home, since most of my belongings remained at the townhouse—and crashed with my mate until late afternoon.
After sex and showers, I made dinner before Gabriel reported for his TA duties and I met with my new personal trainer. It sucked losing Gabe, but his replacement had a Ms. Olympia title under her belt. Svetlana was pretty damn cool and treated me like any other sentinel.
Rinse and repeat for Wednesday then Thursday. Mating changed life very little, except for the amo
unt of time I spent sleeping beside him, and uh, the sex. Though I had the feeling Gabriel wasn’t pouncing me nearly as often as he wanted because he radiated sexual energy like the heat from an oven the entire time he tutored me for my first stats quiz Wednesday evening. Thursday, he was up and showered before me, even suggesting dinner out.
Was it normal to not bone every day? Then again, we’d only been bonded since Sunday.
With an hour free for dinner before he had to report to his duties as a TA, we walked hand in hand down the path toward the campus food court. My schedule was wide open. Through a feat of grace and fortune, I’d gotten Thursday evenings and Fridays off, though the Wild Hunt Club would be meeting the next evening to honor Blaire and hold his memorial.
Fewer shifters watched us these days, and the newness of our mating diminished to the occasional but heartfelt congratulations. Even Sebastian and Simon had sent a handwritten card, as well as a gift, treating us to a fancy dinner at Gibson’s Steakhouse that really made Gabriel look misty-eyed for a few moments. The gift card valued at half a grand seemed excessive until I pulled up the online menu and saw the thirty-two-ounce tomahawk steak cost a hundred dollars. When I asked Gabriel if he planned to share his two-pound hunk of pricy meat, he’d just given me a look and raised one dark brow, as if to ask, “Are you fucking kidding?”
Two days after that, we received an enormous refrigerated box from the Prey of the Month Club. The attached gift card notified us of our new twelve-month subscription from Stark and promised each month would be a new selection of exotic meats.
Apparently, shifters really took bondings as seriously as weddings, and in lieu of attending parties and purchasing overpriced gift registry junk, they gave lavish food-related presents.
Someone must have tipped off my parents to the fact, because an entire case of my grandfather’s homemade limoncello arrived the next day. A separate package from my parents held loaves of fresh focaccia bread, a jar of precious white truffles, and a variety of smoked meats. We wouldn’t have to buy meat again for the rest of the year.
The Plague Doctor (The Paranormal University Files: Skylar Book 4) Page 7