“Enough fighting, gentlemen. We need to get to work here,” Ryder suggested, but Diego immediately jumped at him.
“Foley’s right about his dog stench. The vamps are bound to smell it and so will the few shifters hanging around. It might even bring them here to protect one of their own, and that’s the last thing we need.”
Diana walked to Rafe and breathed in deeply. A raw, masculine smell greeted her, but beneath that lay another odor. One she supposed that the vampires, with their more sensitive senses, would notice.
Which brought another thought. “Did Maggie smell him last night? Is that what caused her reaction?”
Another casually elegant shrug came from Diego. “In part. Rumor has it that during their lunar cycle, some of the females go into heat.”
Diana winced. Maggie was not going to like hearing that. “Last night you mentioned something about sentient shifters. What did you mean?”
This time it was Foley who answered as he paused by the stairs. “There are shifters who continue to think as humans even after they shift. Others only turn with the moon and don’t keep any human thought processes when they do. They’re killing machines if not controlled.”
Diego jerked his thumb in Rafe’s direction. “Your friend might be one of them.”
“But I remember what happened,” Rafe said, “and last night I was trying to control myself. I remember that.” A slightly dazed look crept onto his features, as if he was trying to confirm to himself that he’d truly had some level of consciousness during his wolf state.
“Then maybe with some training, you’ll be able to rule that animal aspect of yourself,” Diego offered, his tone only a bit more conciliatory.
“Do the shifters have a council, like the Slayers and us?” Ryder asked, moving toward where Diana stood close to Rafe. Even though the shifter was in human form, she sensed her husband wanted to be close enough to protect her, just in case.
Rafe must have sensed his concern. He raised his hands as if in surrender, exposing the pinkish ligature marks left behind from struggling against the iron shackles. He stepped back to the wall where he had been chained last night, giving her space to feel safe—and Ryder a wide berth.
“They have no council,” Foley responded, still lingering by the stairs. “It’s a pack system, with one alpha for each different group, or species, of shifters. Generally, they stay out of the cities.”
“Too densely populated for them to transform freely, I suppose,” Diana mused.
“If the fur ball could be gone soon, I’d appreciate it,” Foley said with another tilt of his head in Rafe’s direction. Then he jogged up the stairs and left the basement.
“So you’re saying we have to go find these packs?” Ryder asked no one in particular.
Diego shrugged in a way that was beginning to annoy Diana. She could tell he was holding back.
Ryder apparently sensed it, too. “Just say what it is you’re thinking,” he told his partner.
Diego glanced at all of them before settling his gaze on Rafe. “If he or another shifter has killed a human, their pack may already be hunting for them. They won’t let indiscriminate killings jeopardize the group.”
“They may find Rafe before we can find the pack?” Diana asked, also letting her gaze drift over to the firefighter.
“You better keep him close if you want both him and Maggie alive. Be prepared. Load silver bullets. Silver anything, actually. It’s even more toxic for them than it is for us,” Diego said, but quickly added with a glance at his watch, “Speaking of which, I need to go before the sun gets much stronger.”
With a wave, Diego hurried up the basement stairs, leaving Diana staring at Rafe and Ryder staring at her. It wasn’t hard for him to figure out what she was thinking—it had to be showing on her face.
“You can’t expect me to take Rafe home,” he said with a scowl.
She didn’t really see an alternative.
“I’m not sure taking him back to our holding area makes sense,” she said. “Not until we can decide how to handle the fact that he’s a shifter. But we need him in a safe place, at least until we know if he’ll shift tonight. Wait…” She whipped out her smart phone to check a website that listed phases of the moon, and gave a sigh of relief. “The full moon phase ended last night, which hopefully means no shift.”
“Hopefully? You’re literally willing to bet the house on that?” Ryder asked sharply.
“I’ve never liked being one of the hunted instead of the hunter,” she said evenly. “I don’t intend to wait for a murderous pack of shifters to land on our doorstep,”
She approached Rafe carefully, wondering just how much fight the fireman had in him. Did he now have powers that could help keep him and Maggie safe? “Diego and Foley seem to think you have a distinct odor,” she said. “Question is, can you smell the other shifters?”
Rafe shrugged, and took a few exploratory sniffs of the air. “I can smell you. And him,” he said, pointing to Ryder with a disgusted wrinkle of his nose. “I assume I could smell someone else.”
She nodded and walked back to where Ryder stood uneasily, his body tense and primed for action. She laid her hand on his chest to reassure him. “Please take Rafe home. I’m going to gather some samples from our evidence for Rafe to scent.”
“You expect him to be able to pick out one odor from the millions in the city?”
“Would you be able to find me through your senses?” she challenged, well aware it was a loaded question. He had and he could.
Bested, his full lips firmed into a thin slash of annoyance. “We’ll drop you off at Federal Plaza on our way home.”
“I’d rather walk. The stroll will do me good and help me clear my head. Sort things out.”
Rafe barely controlled a smirk as Ryder caved and snapped, “Let’s go, Rafe. You can get some rest while we wait for my darlin’ wife to use some good sense for a change and hurry home at a reasonable hour.”
Deciding discretion was definitely better, Diana didn’t contradict him. But she’d be home when she had enough information for them to work with, and not before.
Chapter Eleven
Maggie pressed the heels of her palms against her eyeballs, damming in the tears of frustration and self-pity. She would admit it to no one, but she was feeling sorry for herself. Thankfully, it was late and she was alone in her basement lab at FBI headquarters.
Taking a steadying breath, she once again looked at the sample of her blood Melissa had drawn that morning.
Totally normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
She removed that slide and placed the one with Rafe’s blood beneath the microscope. As with hers, there was not a single thing to confirm Rafe’s not-so-crazy tale of being a shifter.
No aberrant cells were visible the way they were with Ryder’s and Diana’s blood.
But she had seen Rafe transform with her own eyes. She had experienced the pull of his change deep inside her. It was as if he had reached beneath her skin and grabbed hold of her soul to rip it free of her body.
And she had experienced something else. Something almost as troubling: attraction.
From the moment Lieutenant Rafael Lazaro had walked into the interrogation room the afternoon before, there had been a visceral, almost primal connection between them. Undoubtedly because of his chomping on her arm and the tainted blood they now shared. Or whatever it was.
Based on the bite-mark impressions they had taken from Rafe in his wolf form, Maggie had definitively confirmed that he was the animal that bit her.
But she had not yet determined whether he was responsible for the murder of the jogger and the other woman a month ago. For now, he was still suspect number one on their list.
Pushing away from the microscope, she went over to the body of the jogger, which had finally been sent over from the ME’s office. In her mind she replayed the likely mode of attack: From behind, claws digging into the victim’s shoulders as the animal took her down.
&nb
sp; Without thinking, she shifted the heavy body to its side, and abruptly realized she shouldn’t have been able to do that without help. She looked down at her arms, now possessed of a strength she’d never had before. Yet another sign of what was happening to her.
Swallowing, she returned her focus to the body. A deep bite marked the victim’s upper left arm, from her shoulder blade in the back to her crushed collarbone in the front. Upon closer examination, Maggie estimated that it was bigger than Rafe’s bite. She also noted one other distinguishing feature—a missing tooth, a canine.
Laying the victim back down, she snapped off some photos, then measured the bite radius, jaw length, and spacing of the tooth marks in order to compare them to Rafe’s.
After recording her findings, she continued with her assessment.
Along the front of the victim’s body was the greatest evidence of damage. Several bite marks to her upper thighs, hinting at a sexual assault, but impossible to confirm due to the absence of parts of her groin, nether lips, vagina, and uterus. But again there was the larger gap-toothed bite pattern that was distinct from Rafe’s.
The jogger could have died from the attack to her lower body, but the trail of blood on the ground Maggie and Diana had noticed that night hinted otherwise. The victim had been alive for minutes, her heart pumping furiously to sustain life, only to have the blood rush from the severed arteries in her abdomen.
Until what Maggie believed to be the killing stroke.
She shifted to inspect the lateral bite mark across the victim’s throat. The force of that bite had flattened the esophagus and larynx, blocking most of the woman’s air flow. A sharp jerk, like that of a dog shaking a tug toy, had yanked the victim’s spinal column from her skull, putting an end to her life and her misery.
Once again Maggie carefully studied the injuries, making notes of the measurements along with her observations. Searching for that one identifiable feature, namely the missing tooth in the bite mark, and finding a hint of it in the flesh just beneath the victim’s chin.
Returning to her worktable, Maggie compared the figures in her notes to Rafe’s bite impression, and blessedly, she no longer had any doubt.
Rafe had not been the one to kill the jogger.
Relief flooded through her, but it was tempered by reality. Her conclusion did not change the position she was in because of his bite. Worse, it meant they still had a killer on the loose. One who might possibly strike tonight if the moon was still waxing full in its cycle.
She needed to find out.
She plopped down at her computer workstation and quickly surfed the web for a moon-phase calendar. “Waning gibbous” was what it read for tonight, indicating that the height of the full moon had been two days ago on the night the jogger had been killed. Searching for “werewolf lore” she skimmed through one entry after another, but all had a similar theme—the shifting only occurred during the three days at the height of the full moon cycle.
She hoped they were right.
A knock at her lab door broke into her thoughts. She quickly cleared her browser history to hide her search, closed it down, and called out, “Come in.”
Diana hurried in, still huddled in her winter jacket, bright splashes of color on her cheeks from the morning cold. Beneath the pink, however, was paleness of another kind, which only grew more noticeable as Diana laid eyes on the victim.
Maggie fought back concern, aware her friend would not appreciate it, and used humor instead. “It was all I could do not to hurl, myself.”
“Have you confirmed the cause of death?” Diana asked, and strode over to Maggie’s worktable to skim over the papers there.
“Her neck was pulled apart between the C2 and C3 vertebrae from a violent shaking by the throat. The action created an internal decapitation, separating her spinal cord from her skull. If that didn’t immediately kill her, a crushed esophagus and larynx would have led to asphyxiation. And if that didn’t do it, exsanguination would have occurred shortly thereafter due to the damage to the abdominal aorta and nearby arteries.”
“Hell of a savage attack. I’m almost afraid to ask, but—”
Maggie shook her head. “I don’t think it was Rafe who killed her. I didn’t find any bites on her that match the impressions we took from him…yet.”
…
Diana released a relieved sigh. Thank God for that. Although that alleviated one kind of worry about whether they were safe with Rafe, it didn’t stop the concerns that the pack might be out for his hide, unaware of who had actually done the two killings.
She took another deep breath and braced herself to inspect the body. She walked over to the victim and did a cursory exam to confirm Maggie’s report.
“So it looks like, in addition to Rafe, we have a second unsub of indeterminate origin.”
“I’d say a werewolf, for sure. But we both know that can’t go in any report.” Maggie handed the metal clipboard with her notes to Diana. “I haven’t added the results of Rafe’s blood test. But he’s a match to the droplets and splatter on my hand.”
“Is his blood…different?” Diana asked as she skimmed Maggie’s report, afraid that the ME would be treated to a view of non-human cells such as those now floating around in her own bloodstream.
“No. Nothing in mine either. Whatever causes the change is invisible to the tests I’ve run so far. Or there’s not enough titer of any foreign cells to register. Or maybe it’s not even carried in the blood.”
Both good and bad. No way for anyone involved to be flagged as alien or otherworldly, but also no hint of how to stop the changes going on in Rafe’s and Maggie’s bodies.
Diana handed her back the clipboard. “Melissa kept samples, as well. Maybe she’ll have better luck isolating what causes the change, but as far as this report is concerned—”
“We’ll have to talk to Jesus and see how he wants us to handle the information we do have.”
Diana nodded. “Did NYPD send over the victim’s clothes, too?”
Maggie walked over to a large banker’s box sitting on her table. The victim’s name and date of death were written on the box. Maggie lifted the lid and removed the evidence bags with the remnants of the jogger’s clothes. “What are you hoping to find?”
“The scent of the other werewolf. Maybe Rafe can acquire the odor and track the other wolf tonight.”
“Only problem is, he’ll probably stay human tonight. The full moon is done,” Maggie said.
Diana reached into her pocket and rocked her smart phone back and forth. “I checked the moon phases, too. I’m hoping his senses have been enhanced even in his human form. Well, at least we’ll be safe tonight.”
Maggie’s forehead scrunched with concentration, considering the safety issue. “Diego said something about ‘sentient shifters.’ Does that mean there are some who can shift at will?”
Diana scoured her brain, trying to recall every little tidbit Diego had imparted last night in the basement of the Blood Bank. He clearly had more information than he was sharing, maybe because of his role on the Vampire Council. “He did say that, and he seems to know a great deal. I wonder why he’s holding back.”
She had thought about having Ryder ask his partner, but then she’d remembered her husband’s harsh words about his involvement in her cases. About treating him as an “office gofer.” As much as she wanted to ask for his help, she had to once again establish the boundaries between her job and her personal life.
As her gaze met Maggie’s, her friend’s worry was impossible to miss. She walked over and hugged her hard. “We’ll figure this out, Mags.”
“What if we don’t, Di? What if I become like Rafe?”
Diana had asked herself a similar question more times than she liked to admit, since her future was so uncertain. Vampire or human? Alive or dead? It seemed almost crazy to think that dead could ever be better than immortal. Maybe that was why she still clung to the hope of life. Of normalcy. But for how long? What would she say when she was
a wrinkled old lady and Ryder was still a vibrant, handsome man? Would she regret her choice?
She blew out a breath. “It’s not an easy thought. I know that, believe me. But would you rather be dead?”
Maggie let out a harsh curse and pressed a hand to the pit of her stomach. Color fled her face, leaving behind only the faint darker hints of freckles along the bridge of her nose. “I know why you weren’t in the hospital the night of the raid, but if you’d been there, you would have seen it in David’s eyes. When the doctors told him he might never walk again, I saw it. I knew he was wondering in that moment if he wouldn’t be better off dead.”
Pain gripped Diana’s heart, because some part of her still held herself responsible for everything that had happened that night. Everything that had happened to David.
But she couldn’t dwell on that now. Not when they had murders to solve and two people who needed answers about what they were becoming and what that meant to their lives.
“We need to go to David. See what he’s found out. After that, we can decide what to report to Jesus.”
Chapter Twelve
David was working at his desk, phone cradled to his ear as he jotted down some notes as Diana and Maggie approached.
“Thank you. You’ve been a big help,” he said into the phone and shot them a glance out of the corner of his eye. “If there’s anything else you can remember, please give me a call.” He repeated his name and phone number before disconnecting.
“Was that a promising lead?” Diana asked. Although at this point she’d take anything, however flimsy.
“Definitely. Why don’t we go discuss it in the war room?” Without waiting for a reply, he wheeled away from his desk, tossed his notepad and papers onto his lap, and pushed toward the room holding all the materials on the cases.
With anyone else, Diana might have been annoyed at his usurpation of her role as lead agent, but not with David. They had always treated each other as equals, and besides, it was nice to see him showing a little spirit. She hated the whipped-dog David, who had been in residence for far too long.
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