Autumn's Blood: The Spirit Shifters, Book One

by Marissa Farrar

Blake glared back. “What?”

  “All the ‘We’ll work this out’ bullshit.”

  “I was trying to talk him down, General. You almost had two dead men, and not to mention the potential mutilation of an innocent man.” His eyes flicked to Cal. “And at least I did something.”

  Calvin’s shoulders squared and he glared back at Blake.

  Dumas’ face grew red. “I suggest you take some time to get control of yourself, Sergeant.”

  I’m more in control of myself than I hope you’ll ever find out.

  He could feel the desire to shift burning at his nerve endings. He wanted nothing more than to call his wolf to him and show Dumas exactly what he was dealing with. But from behind Dumas’ shoulder, Haverly stared at Blake in warning.

  A groan came from the floor where Blake had dropped the two guys from medical.

  Dumas looked toward the noise and wrinkled his nose. “And Christ, someone sort out a medic for these two. They’re bleeding all over my floor.” He shook his head in disgust and stormed from the room. Cal hurried after him.

  Haverly opened his mouth to speak, but a glare from Blake shot him down. “Don’t say a word,” he snapped. “You wouldn’t have done any different.”

  The other man stared at him. “I think Dumas is right. Go and cool down.”

  BLAKE TROTTED DOWN the steps of the building and stepped out onto the street. He walked quickly, his head down, hands stuffed into his pockets. His emotions were in turmoil. What would have happened if the man had been less able to control his ability to shift? What if he’d been taken away and laid out on a surgical table somewhere and cut open purely to placate Dumas’ sick interests? Would he have been able to stand by then?

  He suddenly became aware of someone behind him. He spun around to find the increasingly familiar form of his cousin standing in the street. The other man’s long hair was tied back, and he wore an easy grin.

  Blake didn’t return the smile. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I think I already told you that.”

  “You shouldn’t even know where I work.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “I followed you. You don’t exactly blend in.”

  It was true. At six-feet-four, with his brown skin, almost-black eyes, and well-muscled torso, he wasn’t one to fit into a crowd. But then, neither was his cousin.

  He wanted to keep Chogan as far away from the research facility as possible.

  “Fine, walk with me.”

  The two men set off down the street, side by side.

  “So have you had any chance to look into what I asked?” said Chogan.

  Blake shook his head. “I don’t know what you think it is I’m supposed to look for. I’m hardly going to be informed if they’re capturing shifters and using them for God-knows-what.”

  His cousin jerked his head back the way they’d come. “What is it they do in there, anyway?”

  “Research and development.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know,” Blake said, suddenly exasperated. “Whatever needs to be researched and developed. I’m hardly hired for my mind, am I?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re smart. You always were.”

  Blake stopped walking. “Listen. I’ll keep my ear to the ground and see if I can find anything out. But I’m not making any promises. I do what I’m told in that place, and that’s it.”

  “Your problem is that you have more loyalty to the people who pay your wages than you do those who raised you.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  “No? Then why haven’t you even been back to visit in almost ten years?”

  “You, of all people, should understand the reason for that.”

  “Don’t punish everyone else for what happened, Blake. None of that was their fault.”

  Blake growled in frustration. “No, it was yours.” And with that, he stormed off, leaving Chogan standing on the sidewalk.

  Chapter Six

  MIA HENDERSON LIFTED her coffee cup and took a sip of her now lukewarm coffee. She checked her watch again and tapped her foot in a thrumming beat on the floor beneath her table.

  Did I get the time wrong? Or perhaps the place?

  Her eyes travelled over the people sharing the cafe with her—a man and a woman wearing business suits, a small group of student-types laughing with their heads together, a solitary woman writing on a laptop. None of these people fitted the profile of a worried, frightened couple.

  She sighed and reached into her bag to pull out the paperwork containing the profile of the missing boy.

  Toby West, fifteen years old. Missing for nine days now. She stared down at the boy’s photograph. He stared sullenly into the camera, his too-long dark hair falling into his face. Across the chest of his t-shirt was scrawled the name of a band Mia had never heard of, but one the boy’s friends said he idolized. He may have been wearing the same shirt the night he went missing.

  A pang of loss and what ... regret? ... clutched her heart. Marcus might have looked like this at some point if he were still alive, something Mia was starting to feel like she’d never know for sure. Her twin brother had vanished one day on the way home from school. Normally, they walked together, but Mia had an afterschool music class that day, so Marcus had gone home alone. Except he’d never reached his destination.

  Other than losing your own child, was there anything worse than losing your twin? She literally felt as though half of her was missing. No wonder she’d set up this charity as soon as she’d gotten out of school. It had taken a lot of hard work and she’d needed to cut through a lot of red tape, but she’d been determined to see it through. She wanted nothing else from her life except, perhaps, to have a family of her own one day, a way to fill the aching hole in her heart that had appeared the same day her brother vanished.

  The bell on the cafe door dinged and Mia glanced up. A beaten-down, middle-aged couple pushed their way into the cafe, the man’s arm around the woman’s waist, the woman’s eyes darting around the room.

  Mia straightened in her seat and tried to make eye contact with the new arrivals, a sympathetic smile on her face. The woman caught her eye and glanced away uncertainly, checking the rest of the room before coming back to her. She nudged her husband and nodded in Mia’s direction. They swerved between the chairs and tables to come to stand opposite. The woman, her blonde hair cut in a bob around her face, her blue eyes rimmed red, offered her an apologetic smile.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” she said. “My husband wasn’t keen on coming to you for help. He needed a little ... persuading.”

  Mia gestured to the seats opposite for them to sit down. “I completely understand, Mrs. West.”

  “Call me Dana, please,” said the woman as she took a seat. “And this is my husband, Robert.”

  The husband didn’t make eye contact with her, but instead stared at the table, his hands clutched in his lap. Right away, Mia could see where their son had inherited his dark looks. Toby was the spitting image of his father.

  She caught Dana staring at her.

  “I’m sorry.” Dana gestured to her own features. “I had thought you’d be ... older.”

  Mia smiled. “Don’t worry. You’re not the first person to say that. I got involved with charity work right out of school. I can promise you I know what I’m doing, Mr. and Mrs. West.”

  Instead of following the majority of her friends to college, Mia had left high school to spend her days volunteering at another missing person’s charity, and her evenings and weekends working the front desk of a hotel. She’d saved every penny and two years later had used the money to start up her own charity, Missing Lives.

  “Oh, I wasn’t trying to imply—”

  Mia cut her off. “It’s fine, honest. Now, I’ve got the background the police compiled about your son, but what I really want to find out is about the real boy. Not just the front he might put on to everyone else, perhaps even including yours
elves. And please, don’t worry about being unsure about all of this. Often people feel like they’re taking charity by coming to us, but that’s the whole point in our existence. We use all of the money donated to us to pool into finding missing people, to putting in extra resources, hiring PI’s perhaps, when the police think their leads have cooled.

  She saw the expression on Dana’s face. “I’m not saying their leads have cooled of course,” she hastily added.

  Dana’s forehead crumpled. “They don’t have any leads. It’s like someone snatched him off the face of the earth!”

  Robert took his wife’s hand, finally lifting his eyes to Mia. “The police say he probably ran away. He’s been having some problems at school, getting into fights and stuff. The police have got him painted up as some kind of young thug, but he’s not like that.”

  Many of the cases Mia took on were similar to Toby’s. She was perfectly aware of the correlation between her searching for all these lost boys and her own desire to find her missing twin brother. Perhaps she hoped one day she would be able to unearth the secret about what happened to him, stumble across some kind of clue that could bring her continual searching to an end.

  “No, he’s not,” Dana interrupted. “Our son, he’s ... well ... different.”

  Robert shot his wife a glare.

  “Of course,” Mia said, trying to empathize. “All children are different, all their own individuals—”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Dana said.

  “Dana ...”

  It was impossible not to recognize the warning tone in the husband’s voice.

  What’s going on here?

  Dana shrugged off her husband’s warning and leaned over the table, closing the gap between herself and Mia. She lowered her voice as if she was worried someone might overhear them. “We know our son, Ms. Henderson. Perhaps more so than most parents know their teenage boys. Like we said, he’s different from other boys, different in a way I’m not even sure how to explain. We think those differences may have something to do with the reason he’s gone missing.”

  “Okay,” Mia said slowly. “You’re going to need to give me a little more to work on than just ‘different.’”

  Dana clenched her jaw and nodded.

  The other woman’s strength amazed Mia. She understood how it felt when someone you loved went missing, to have so many questions, questions you would probably never learn the answers to. She didn’t know how Dana was holding herself together.

  Robert sighed and leaned across the table, matching his wife’s stance. He began to speak, obviously giving in to his wife’s way of thinking. “Toby has a way of zoning out sometimes, like he’s not even in the room with you or his head is somewhere else. He’s got a way of seeing things that are about to happen. And I don’t mean predicting world events or anything like that, but he’ll say things like ‘A cab is about to come around the corner,’ and the next moment, that’s exactly what happens.”

  He seemed to run out of steam, and his wife nudged him in the ribs. “Go on, tell her the rest.”

  “It’s going to sound crazy,” he said.

  Mia offered a reassuring smile. “I can handle crazy.”

  The man’s dark eyes flicked down to the table and he reached out to fiddle with the little pot of sugars and sweeteners. “He vanishes from his room at night. He’ll go to bed and we’ll go in to check on him and he’ll be gone. The window is normally left open.”

  “It’s pretty normal for a teenage boy to sneak out at night.”

  “We live on the fifth floor of an apartment block in the city,” Dana said.

  “Oh!” Mia blinked in surprise. “He’s sneaking out by the front door, then?”

  “Impossible,” Robert said. “We’ve gone to extra measures to deadlock the door and keep the key on us, so we know he’s not getting out that way.”

  “Have you asked him about all this?”

  Dana nodded. “He always told us he couldn’t remember. We even took him to a psychiatrist at one stage, but the doctor said the only explanation he could give was that Toby’s dream world and waking world were spilling into one. He was basically sleepwalking.”

  “Isn’t that a possibility?”

  “I’d say perhaps, but that’s not all.”

  “No?”

  “Sometimes, when we’ve gone to wake him up the next morning, we find mud and twigs or leaves on his bed sheets or the window sill and rug.”

  Robert spoke again, quietly. “And sometimes the mud is on his hands and feet as well, as if he’s been running around in it.”

  Mia frowned. “But your son remembers none of this?”

  Robert and Dana shook their heads in unison.

  “What do the police say?”

  Dana’s restraint finally broke down. Her voice cracked and she stifled a sob with the back of her clenched fist pressed against her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

  Mia smiled reassuringly and reached across the table to place her hand over Dana’s. “You don’t need to be.”

  The older woman nodded and continued. “They only know Toby is a sleepwalker and we’ve taken him to a doctor about it. We didn’t dare mention any of the other stuff in case they thought we were nuts as well.”

  Mia understood where they were coming from. So often, she’d discovered parents worried about divulging information to the police, terrified they would end up looking like the perpetrators of whatever crime had removed their child from their lives.

  “Leave this with me,” she told them. “You’ve given me a couple of things I can get started on. If you hear anything else, call me as soon as you can.”

  MIA WALKED AWAY confused and disbelieving. Surely these parents weren’t trying to say what she thought? In fact, she wasn’t even sure what it was they were trying to say!

  At least she felt like she might have something new to go on. Her first port of call was to get a map of the city, pinpoint the family’s apartment, and mark out each of the parks nearby. If the boy had somehow been getting out of the apartment in the middle of the night—be it consciously or subconsciously—then it sounded like he was heading to wooded areas when he did so. When Toby went missing from his bedroom, there was a good chance he might have been on one of his excursions. Perhaps someone saw him or someone who looked suspicious.

  The shrill of her phone ringing came from her purse. She delved around to fish out her smartphone and swiped the screen to answer.

  “Mia Henderson,” she chirped.

  The voice on the other end was muffled, but she recognized it instantly. “Mia, you need to come back to the office.” She heard her assistant sniff, her breath hitching. She was trying not to cry.

  “What is it, Tina? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve just opened a letter from the State Department. They’re cutting our funding.”

  “What? Did they say why?”

  “Only that the tough financial climate has meant they’ve needed to make some difficult cuts. I guess we were one of them.”

  Mia tried to stem the worry bubbling up inside her. “I’m on West Washington Street. I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.”

  Chapter Seven

  BLAKE WATCHED AUTUMN leave the building, her smart suit jacket pulled up around her ears in protection against the cool evening. As she walked, she reached behind her head and unclipped her hair. The spiral blonde curls fell around her neck and shoulders, and she ran a hand through them to shake them loose.

  How would those curls feel beneath his palm? Soft like silk?

  He shook the thought from his head. This was business. He couldn’t let himself think in such a way.

  Blake didn’t feel the cold, one of the benefits of his metabolism running at an abnormally high rate. The other advantage was his ability to stay in shape, without an ounce of fat on his body. Despite this, he didn’t take his physique for granted. Though he never stepped into a gym, he made sure his apartment had enough equipment to allow him to work his body to the poi
nt of exhaustion. He didn’t work out for vanity, but for practical reasons. He hated the possibility of getting into a situation only to be beaten simply because he wasn’t strong enough.

  Out of habit, to fit in with the rest of society, Blake wore a black leather jacket, though he had no need for the item. His skin burned hot beneath the insulated material and he knew he’d be more comfortable if he were able to strip off both his jacket and t-shirt and walk bare-chested in the cool evening air. Instead, he turned up the collar, a mimic of Autumn’s actions, and broke into a jog after her.

  “Doctor Anderson,” he called gently. “Wait up.”

  She turned as he caught up with her. “Oh!” She clutched a hand to her chest. “You startled me.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

  She gave him an expectant half-smile, a slight worry in her eyes, probably at being on a street alone with a man twice her size.

  “I wondered how your first day went.”

  Autumn arched an eyebrow. “Are you sure I’m allowed to talk about it?”

  She surprised a laugh from him. “To me, you are.”

  “Good to know.” She smiled and stuffed her hands into her pockets. “I can’t exactly say it went well, but it’s early days yet.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to complete what’s been asked of you?”

  “You’re not going to go back and report to the boss, are you?”

  He laughed again and she smiled at the sound. “No, I promise.”

  Autumn started to walk once more, and he matched her pace. “What he’s asking has never been done before,” she said. “Plus, the lack of information I have on the subject matter doesn’t help.” She turned to face him, her eyes narrowed slightly. “You know where the samples came from, don’t you? You know what this … species is?”

  Blake hesitated, considering his answer. He didn’t want to give her any information to help her; the last thing he wanted was for her to succeed at her job. That didn’t mean he couldn’t give her information which might send her down the wrong track.