by Mia Marshall
I made it two steps before I heard Carmichael calling my name. On the other side of the car, an undeniable growl emerged from Mac’s throat, loud enough that I was certain the agents heard. “I think they saw us,” I mock whispered to him and continued to head toward the trees.
“Aidan,” called Carmichael again. I reluctantly turned around. He only called me by my first name when something was really wrong. “Would you mind telling me why, despite reports of a horrible accident involving a vehicle fitting the description of one your associate here drives, and despite reports that the lake actually tilted on its axis, all evidence of such events is being removed a second before Johnson or I can access it?”
“You’re too slow?” Someday, Carmichael was going to smile at one of my jokes. Just not this day. “Look, the elementals and shifters have been hiding supernatural involvement for years. When it comes to discretion, we’re all-stars while you guys, you’re kind of on the bench.”
Sera looked at me with equal parts amusement and shock. “I just used a sports metaphor, didn’t I?” I shook my head, thoroughly ashamed of myself. “Anyway, one of ours has been doing some necessary clean-up work.” I saw no reason to add that I was related to that person.
Sera’s head snapped up as if she’d just remembered something important. “With everything going on, I forgot to tell you. He phoned this morning.” She looked a bit embarrassed, as if worried I’d judge her for taking his calls. “There’s no question someone tampered with the car. All the tires were rigged with small explosives.”
Beside me, I felt Mac vibrate with anger. The agents had the opposite reaction, stilling until they resembled extremely serious wax figures.
“And it just happened to go off as we were crossing the most dangerous section of Emerald Bay Road?”
“There was a GPS device underneath the car. Whoever set it off knew exactly where we were.” Her eyes met mine, and the anger I saw matched the rage rising in me. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, forcing it back into my personal lock box. Several long, slow breaths later, I opened them to see Carmichael and Johnson staring at me with worry in their eyes.
“I feel like I’m always asking this when you’re around, Ms. Brook, but what the hell is going on around here?”
I shook my head. “I really wish I knew. I only have a few pieces of the puzzle.”
While we spoke, Mac separated from the group and returned to my car. He dropped easily to the ground and wiggled into position to view the tire well. When he emerged, he was carrying something dark and square in one of his hands. He chucked it in our direction before repeating the same procedure on Sera’s Mustang.
I bent to pick it up gingerly. I might not be especially tech savvy these days, but I could still make an educated guess that I held a GPS tracker in my hand. As I studied it, the one attached to Sera’s car landed at our feet.
The anger I’d tamped down a moment ago fought for release, and I was not alone. Sera was slowly losing herself, small spurts of fire popping from her body at random moments. Johnson merely looked at her in fascination, but at least Carmichael had the good sense to move out of range. Mac stepped into a thick grove of pine trees that ringed the house, and a series of loud crashing sounds followed.
Their loss of control, more than anything, drew me back to myself. Someone had to be the responsible one, and while I didn’t want the job, it beat watching Sera light things on fire while Mac decimated our local forest on a tree-by-tree basis.
Unfortunately, that meant doing the responsible thing, which was figuring this freaking case out before another shifter disappeared or another car went sailing over a cliff. I cast one long, regretful look toward Mac, then said what needed saying. “All right then. You show us yours, we’ll show you ours. Let’s try putting this puzzle together.”
On days that simply refuse to go the way they’re supposed to, sometimes tea is the only possible solution. So far, this day had involved visiting a friend who lay broken in a hospital bed, hearing that same friend basically break up with me, learning that someone had tried to kill me, and coping with some painfully thwarted libidinal impulses.
This day might require the big mug.
I walked straight to the kitchen and put the kettle on, then dropped in a tea bag and waited, staring impatiently at the kettle. Behind me, I could hear the scrape of benches as the others settled at the rough trestle table in the dining area. “What do you want?” I called over my shoulder.
“Booze.” Sera and Mac spoke in perfect unison. Smiling, I grabbed the tequila bottle for Sera and whiskey for Mac and carried both to the table, but not before adding a healthy dollop of the latter to my own mug. On days like this, even tea needed a bit of help to work its magic.
“Any more requests, you can help your own damn selves,” I announced, plopping down on one of the benches. I deliberately sat away from Mac, fearing that even a soft brush of our thighs under the table would be too distracting.
Johnson stood abruptly and headed out the front door. He returned with a large roll of butcher paper, which he proceeded to unroll down the length of the table. He waved a thick marker around, looking for a taker. Sera grabbed it and pulled herself onto the table, crouching near the top. In strong block letters, she wrote “The Case of the Vanishing and Forgetful Shifters,” then sat back, waiting for contributions.
“You just happen to carry butcher paper in the car?” I asked Johnson.
“I bought a new roll today,” he explained. “I like to keep some in my office. It helps me to see things written out in full.”
His words triggered a memory of sitting across the table while the former, serious version of this man thumbed through my private notebooks. I grumbled under my breath. He caught it, as I’d intended him to, and smiled at me apologetically. “I never did express regret for reading your journal, did I?”
“Nor for arresting me, I might note. Or Sera. When you think about it, it’s really amazing we even talk to you, let alone allow you into our house.”
Carmichael gestured expansively, encompassing the entire table in the movement. “But if we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be the big happy family we are now, would we?” Sera managed a derisive snort and began sketching in the corner. I could just make out the strong lines and exaggerated features of a caricature, and I suspected Carmichael was about to see an unflattering representation of himself. I figured it was best to interrupt her before she finished.
“Let’s make a list of the involved parties.” I looked at Mac, questioning, and he nodded in wordless agreement that the time for secrets was over. The GPS devices and exploding tire had made sure of that.
Sera stopped drawing long enough to write down the names and offer her own suggestions. “It’s not that long, is it? Mainly Will and Carmen’s families.”
“I can’t say I got any sort of teenaged criminal mastermind vibe from Dana,” Mac said.
“Or Brandon,” I agreed. “Not unless he’s discovered some abduction-by-scowling method of which the FBI is unaware.”
Carmichael cleared his throat, perhaps foolishly hoping to keep my brain more on track. “We should write them down anyways. There might be a connection we’re missing.”
“What do we know about the two women?” Johnson asked, pointing to Celeste and Eleanor’s names.
“We know they’re my family,” Mac pointedly told him. He seemed to think that was answer enough.
“If we’re including Dana, we have to at least consider them.” I tried to keep my voice soothing, though the wry look he shot me made me think I’d crossed into condescending. I gave him an apologetic grin he seemed to accept, though he wasn’t happy when Sera wrote “check out” next to their names.
“What about Carmen’s ex-husbands?” asked Mac.
Sera paused in her work on the sketch to add their names. “They were rich and seemed to make marital decisions with their little head. We should probably look into it more.” She wrote “alibi/motive?” next to their names.
Johnson flipped through his small notebook and began to recite. “Mark Avila is an environmental lobbyist in Sacramento. He attended California State University, Sacramento, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business. He met and married Carmen Hernandez eighteen years ago, divorced nine months later. Husband #2, Clay Reeves, owns a ski resort on the Nevada side. He has an MBA from Berkeley and has since moved onto his second wife, who appears to be younger and stupider than Carmen. Both men have solid alibis for the times the shifters went missing.” Sera wrinkled her nose at him and silently crossed out “alibi.”
“Is that it?” Mac sounded uncertain. It was a short list, and his family made up at least half of it.
“What about the Reno book club?” It was a stretch, but at the moment, stretches were still a better option than the near empty page currently facing us. Mac cast a questioning look my way, and I shrugged. With everything else going on, I’d forgotten to mention exactly where Sera and I had gone after we threw him off that day.
“You mean the people whose roof you climbed?” Carmichael was dubious. “What exactly are you accusing them of, beyond a desire for personal enrichment and possession of an easily accessible skylight?”
“We didn’t like them,” said Sera firmly, as if that should be enough to declare the matter settled.
The three men continued to look skeptical. They clearly were not taking my and Sera’s gut instincts seriously enough. One little misdemeanor trespassing and you lose all credibility. “The homeowner had a big gun,” I pointed out. Still nothing, since I was talking about someone in Reno. Big guns were considered a form of home decor. “One of them is related to Carmen, so if we’re looking at her exes, it’s only fair to look at the rest of the family.”
They were starting to appear convinced, so I played my trump card. “And she hit me really damn hard,” I finished.
That did the trick. Mac stared at me, and I didn’t think it was worry I saw in his eyes. It was frustration that I hadn’t told him sooner, combined with annoyance that someone as large as he should never hit a woman, no matter how much he might want to return the favor. “To be fair, I’d probably just said something tactless.” The entire table snorted in unison.
“Add the Reno Book Club to the list. Innocent women don’t often smack people in the face, even annoying trespassers,” said Carmichael. Sera did so quickly, thrilled to include those women in our list of suspects.
“What are we really looking for here?” I asked. “A connection to the shifters? What about motive? Access?”
Carmichael shook his head. “Motive’s a waste of time. There’s no telling what goes on in someone’s head. Go with facts. Evidence.”
“Like the drugs.” I was onto something. I knew it, and the others’ interested faces told me they agreed. “We need to find out where they come from, which we’ve been trying to do, but we also need to figure out who’s been buying syringes. Something is being done to them while they’re missing. Maybe more drugs? Some sort of chemical lobotomy? We need to look into who might have access to that kind of equipment.”
“Exactly,” said Johnson. “We’ll make an agent out of you yet.” He smiled, but I noticed his eyes drifting over my shoulder toward Vivian’s potted plants. He wasn’t one hundred percent invested in his own agent work these days, I thought.
“Who else?” Sera asked, after writing “drugs” in capital letters, the straight line in the letter d forming a lit joint.
We sat in silence for a long minute, before Johnson finally spoke up. I think he’d been waiting to see if the rest of us shared his knowledge before spilling it. “There’s the missing bobcat child.”
Three heads snapped immediately toward him. Carmichael was in the loop, so he merely sat back and watched our reactions. “How do you know this?” Mac’s voice wasn’t exactly accusatory, but it was definitely a few notches past suspicious. The shifters were a tight-knit group, and if the abduction was common knowledge, he’d have heard about it by now.
Johnson met his gaze, his voice calm and level. He may only have the tiniest smidgen of earth blood, but he was as calm and grounded as any earth I’d ever met. “A mother took her eight-year-old son to the local playground. He disappeared, and her panicked reaction was quite public. For once, we were able to get to the scene before the shifters had a chance to hush it up. When we asked if the child was a shifter, the mother was distressed enough that she forgot to pretend she had no idea what we were talking about.”
“Eight? That’s so young.” I forced myself not to think of the terrified young boy, wherever he might be. If the pattern held true, he’d be returned in a few days, worse for wear but alive. There was only one problem with that scenario. “It doesn’t match the pattern. The others were in their teens.”
“But the others were first-born,” Sera noted. “Was he?”
Johnson nodded. “He’s her only child.”
“So, we’re missing first-born children from the bears, mountain lions, and bobcat families,” I summarized. “All predators. No, wait. Bears are omnivores, right? And mostly peaceful?” Let’s hear it for Wikipedia, making me slightly less ignorant one day at a time.
“Yeah, but they’re still the most dangerous animals in the area. Far more so than a bobcat. Any other common threads? Other than being shifters and first-born?” Sera looked around the table, looking for any possible explanation.
Mac shook his head, as clueless as the rest of us. “I’ll talk to some of the other families tomorrow, see if they’ve lost anyone. Most of the non-predators are quieter and hard to find, and they avoid the bears and cats. Even shifters can be slaves to the circle of life. I know a few of them, though. I’ll check with the marmots and otters, see what I can find.”
“Marmots and otters?” I didn’t mean to squeak that. I really didn’t. “Those otters by the river, they were shifters?”
Mac ignored me, perhaps wisely. I might forget him in a heartbeat if I could hang out with otters on a regular basis.
“Focus, H20,” said Sera, despite the fact that she was working on a drawing that now claimed several feet of the paper. I looked closer, and realized it was us. All of us.
I stood dripping wet in a puddle of water, while Sera’s hair crackled with flames. Mac was braced like a weightlifter, the Airstream held proudly above his head. The two agents stood next to each other, a matched set of perfectly smooth suits and ties so tight they appeared to be cutting off their air. Simon leaned against a wall in human form, cool as could be, while his feline tail wrapped around Vivian’s leg. And there was Vivian, tablet firmly in hand and four intact limbs. I could just make out “Missile Launch” written on the tablet screen and hoped the agents didn’t think to question that too closely.
It was us, the way we should be, and yet we were falling apart.
“All this, it’s barely a start.” I ran both hands through my hair, tugging as I went. “It doesn’t matter how many people go missing if we have no idea what’s happening to them. We don’t know why they’re returning with their brains all messed up, why they have amnesia or are unable to shift. We have no idea why someone would ever want to do that, particularly another shifter. And we have no idea why we’re involved enough that someone would want us dead, or even who in the car was the target. All of us? Just me or Sera or Mac?”
I stopped to catch my breath, but I wasn’t done ranting. “You know what? I would really, really like to learn that answer, because I’ve had enough attempts on my and my friends’ lives for one year. I’m pretty much over that. It’s time we figure out what the hell’s going on.”
I spoke with authority, though it would have been more impressive if there were any answers to be found. Even so, we stayed up well into the night, swapping ideas, refining theories, trying to make sense of something that resolutely avoided a logical answer. Eventually, the liquor in the bottles dropped several inches, and everyone’s eyelids were drooping and heavy. I glanced at Mac, and we both offered the other a
weak, rueful smile, knowing we were both too worn out and exhausted to continue our earlier plans. Tonight would not be the night, after all.
Whoever he—or she—was, this kidnapper had a whole lot to answer for.
As the small hand of the clock crept toward the two, the agents finally decided they’d run out of ideas. They left, yawning the entire time, and Sera stumbled toward her bed, leaving the two of us alone. We stood a foot apart, preparing to go to our separate beds. Right now, I could think of no lonelier place than the warm queen-sized bed awaiting me upstairs, but I was simply too tired for tonight to be our first night together. “Tomorrow?” I asked.
He wrapped his hands around my waist and pulled me easily to him, placing a single soft kiss on my lips. “Tomorrow,” he agreed, reluctantly disengaging. He moved to leave through the back door, but stopped abruptly, turning back to face me. “You know, you were right about one thing.”
“Just the one?”
He smiled, slow and wicked. “You probably should know my first name before we sleep together.” He leaned forward and placed his lips by my ear, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath, and he spoke a single word.
A moment later, he closed the back door behind him, leaving me standing alone in the room, an unabashedly dopey grin on my face.
CHAPTER 17
I awoke to a silent house the next day. Normally, Vivian’s quiet rustlings pulled me from sleep, the everyday sounds of water rumbling through pipes or dresser drawers sliding open and closed. I’d hear her getting ready for her day at school and burrow into my cozy bed, appreciating the small joy of being warm, safe, and surrounded by people I loved.
That morning felt different. I slipped on my green robe and stepped lightly down the spiral staircase. Despite everything that had happened over the last few days, I half hoped to find Simon reclining in a sunbeam or Mac drinking his morning coffee, mystery novel firmly in hand. Instead, I found a profoundly quiet house. It was the kind of silence you only find in a truly empty space. The conscious mind can’t explain it, but the subconscious picks up on the absence, the lack of even the tiniest movement or breath.