“Still gathering info, but it was a male janitor. One of the few with a low-level job.” Her phone rang and she dug it out of her pocket. She pressed a button and put it up to her ear, “Meyer here.”
I would never admit it to her face, but G.M. sounded like a badass when she answered her phone.
“Really. Be right there.” She turned to me as she made an illegal U-turn, almost clipping two parked cars in the process. “We got ourselves a ballgame.”
I could have sworn the car was on two wheels at one point until Gretchen straightened the long SUV out and pressed on the gas. My head whipped back, hitting the unforgiving headrest. “What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“Gun owner in Ohara Township had the werelion come on his property and shot it.”
My eyes widened. “Dead?”
She cut off a garbage truck and hit the gas. “I think so. They have the body down at Saint Margaret’s Emergency Area. We need to be first to check it out.”
Chapter 14
I SAID, “THAT’S LIKE...five miles away.”
“We’ll be there in three minutes.” She weaved in and out of traffic as we crossed the Highland Park Bridge.
I grabbed the oh-shit bar above my right shoulder with both hands and hung on for dear life until we reached the Emergency Room. She ignored the parking spots, pulled up to the door, and threw it in park. Gretchen jumped out and left the keys in the ignition.
I turned the key and pulled it out. I ran in through the automatic doors and darted toward the waiting rooms in the back. I had visited this facility a few times since living in Pittsburgh. When you practiced magic, you expected some bumps and bruises along the way. I preferred mostly holistic and self-healing techniques though.
Heading for the operating room, I noticed a big huddle around one of the waiting rooms. A group of doctors and nurses struggled to get into the small examination room. The stench of wet fur hit my nose so I lowered my shoulder and started to plow through the crowd of people. I used my size and strength to barge through.
Gretchen wasn’t as lucky. I saw her being thrashed around as I backed into the room and slammed the door shut. I opened the door again and shoved two confused doctors out.
The remaining doctor asked, “What’s the meaning of this?” The doctor had short red hair and a bald ring on top of his head. He wore thick black glasses and had a clipboard tucked under his arm.
I locked the door and looked down at the shorter doctor’s shiny head. “This creature is a danger to you. To everyone. Why don’t you have it strapped down?”
“It’s dead.” He tapped his stethoscope.
In that case, I moved the bed so it blocked the door, ignoring the knocking and screaming coming from outside. I stared at the werelion, lying on its back, and studied its features.
The male beast had rippling arm and leg muscles under the light brown fur that covered his entire body. The creature’s body was more like a human with lion features. Long claws poked out of the ends of his bloody fingers and my mind flashed back to the crime scene. I couldn’t find the bullet wounds on the body and assumed the hunter had shot the shifter in the back.
The shifter had a round, blood-soaked face with an extended mouth and nose, appearing more like a lion’s head than a human’s. The fangs creeping out of his lips made for quite a fearsome beast without seeing the destruction he had caused earlier today.
I didn’t sense any magic coming from the shifter, but that could have been because he was dead. I wanted to find out how the demons had control over these humans.
I wasn’t a doctor, but I knew this was a strange storage room for this beast. “What’s the story here, doctor? Why is this creature in a room like this?”
The doctor looked at the clipboard. “The report said that a man shot a standing lion in his backyard. They prepared to take the body to the morgue when it suddenly changed into a human being. The coroner requested an autopsy on the man and when he got here, he changed into what you see right now. We didn’t know what to do. We panicked. Yes, even doctors panic.”
“So you shoved him in here until you could figure out what to do?”
The doctor nodded, still staring at the clipboard. “Precisely. Do you know what this thing is?”
“I wish. We have a slight problem. It’s usually a human being that shifts into an animal and I am getting the suspicion that animals are taking over the bodies of humans, which is a much scarier prospect.” I didn’t want to scare the man, but judging from his widening eyes, it wasn’t working.
Maybe that’s why they could shift without the assistance of the moons. The more I found out about this case, the more it spooked the hell out of me. I was permitted to call myself a wizard but I was also very early in my training. I had a bad feeling this case was going to require advanced knowledge that I simply hadn’t developed yet.
Gretchen pounded on the door, threatening to break it off its hinges. “Merlino. Open this up and let me in there, right this second.”
I couldn’t. I knew if I opened the door, I would get dragged out of the room and possibly arrested. Gretchen sounded pissed. I had to collect something from this beast before I left. That was it. A sample that Alayna could help me analyze.
“Do you have scissors in here?” I made the motion with my fingers for some reason.
“Not in these rooms. I don’t believe we do,” said the doctor, who started rifling through the cabinets and drawers.
“Forget it.” I pinched the werelion’s mane and tightened my grip several times to be sure I had a firm hold. Sorry buddy, but I need something to remember you by.
I yanked and pulled out less fur than I had expected and jammed it into my back pocket.
The doctor screamed, “You can’t do that. You can’t alter a specimen before it undergoes the autopsy.”
“Relax. You already said he is dead.” I pointed to his chest. His face. His blinking eyes.
Blinking eyes?
Damnit.
Chapter 15
I HAD TO ACT QUICKLY. I was locked in this tiny room with only emergency equipment, a skinny doctor, some medical machines in the corner and a werelion. I went to the huge cabinets under the sink and ripped open both doors. The doctor protested as I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and jammed him into the cabinet. I leaned with all my weight on the doors and screamed, “Stay in here until I let you out or you’re going to die.”
I jammed a stack of tongue depressors in between the handles of the door, essentially locking them. As I had been saving the doctor, I had also been assessing the shifter’s magic level. I hadn’t detected magic, but a signal of power came through loud and clear.
The werelion sprang up, and before I had a chance to face him, he dug his paw into my shoulder. Four claws sank into my flesh and grabbed hold. He threw me toward the medical machines in the corner of the room. As I flew through the air, I could hear Gretchen screaming from outside, “If you break anything in there, it’s coming out of your pocket. The Pittsburgh Police will not pay for it.” I crashed into the machines, scattering them about the room.
The werelion pounded his chest and roared. The talking outside stopped and I could hear the beeping of the machines I had just been launched into. I threw the blood pressure machine off my chest and sprang to my feet.
I squared up with a werelion who stood about an inch shorter than me, but had obviously more power from what I had seen at that crime scene. I envisioned him wearing my intestines like a necklace. The tiny room worked to the advantage of the shifter.
I panicked, forgetting to use my magic. I lowered my shoulder, took two mighty steps forward, and rammed into the firm midsection of the werelion. He didn’t budge.
For those who’ve never been in a life-or-death fight, once the adrenaline kicks in, you do things that don’t make sense. This had been one of those times.
He jammed his paws together like a club, raised them above his head, and came down on the small of my back with the impact
of a sledgehammer. I dropped to my knees. I was going to die. My life was in the hands of a shifter that had already killed today.
When faced with death, the same rules applied. My heart was beating out of control and memories were like photographs falling off a shelf. I couldn’t quite see all the fluttering images before they hit the ground.
I don’t remember biting the werelion’s family jewels, and if you asked me, I’d probably deny it. But I did. Hard. I immediately hoped this would be the lowest I would ever sink in a fight as a painful yelp shifted into a brooding, rumbling roar.
Gretchen pounded on the door. “Merlino, what in God’s name is going on in there?”
I wished I could get the bed away from the door and let Gretchen in so she could shoot this werelion again.
The doctor kept pounding on the cabinet, but he was much safer in there so I tried to ignore him.
I thought I had enough time to get to my feet. I made it about three-quarters of the way up when the werelion swiped a backhand across my face. My neck spun around and I fell to the floor. This thing had power beyond the normal means of a shifter. Someone was controlling these shifters. Someone powerful.
The shifter attended to his bleeding anatomy and it bought me a few seconds. I took a deep breath and analyzed the air in the room. “Aer sit potentia. Praebueris fortitudinem. Aer sit potentia. Praebueris fortitudinem.”
I manipulated the air to create a defense shield around myself. The werelion charged and bounced off my invisible shield and fell backward into the cabinets.
The screaming doctor seemed to have grabbed the werelion’s attention. Good, let him distract this thing while I develop a plan. I dove down and started to search the depths of the seas of my brain for a plan against shifters. Time had run out already.
The werelion was using his paws to knock the tongue depressors out of the handles on the cabinet. I couldn’t let the killer get to the good doctor so I dissolved the shield. I slithered across the room in silence, aided by the noisy machines, a screaming doctor, and a group of people pounding on the door and window outside the room.
Not on my watch, kitty cat. I grabbed the scruff of his neck and whipped him to the ground, smacking his head off the hard floor. Diving on top, my hands lunged for his throat. I secured a good grip. He wasn’t going to kill anyone else.
I prayed for strength from the Dagda, the Celtic God of Power and Wisdom. My muscles swelled and I maintained the chokehold. I wasn’t going to let this shifter kill again.
The werelion flopped around, trying to break my grip, searching for oxygen. The shifter looked up at me, petrified, making spastic movements to try to bust loose.
The fur began to recede until it was replaced by dark human flesh. The lion’s claws and teeth retreated as dark hair sprouted from the man’s head and face. All the animal features disappeared and an older man lay still on the floor, confused.
I pulled my hands away from the man’s neck and he gasped for air. “Gretchen, get your ass in here and cuff this guy.”
Gretchen responded, “Guy?”
I moved the bed so that Gretchen could get the shifter down to the station. Then I let the doctor out of the cabinet and he gave me an earful as he backed out of the crowded room.
The man who had just been a werelion looked completely lost, almost as if he had no idea what had happened. He appeared docile despite the fact that he had killed gruesomely only hours ago.
My ribs ached and my shoulder was bleeding, but all in all, no worse for wear. I had an extremely high tolerance for pain. We needed to ask this man so many questions, it was going to make his head spin. I hoped we would get some answers but my expectations were pretty low.
Most manipulators didn’t allow their vessels a chance for memory recall. They scrubbed the memories after every shift. Some people dubbed it Amnesia or Blackout Magic.
Gretchen helped the naked janitor to his feet. A nurse came up and draped a hospital gown over the nude man and he began crying. I knew it would be almost impossible to get any information out of him. Gretchen handed the man off to another officer, who Mirandized the perp as he led him through the Emergency Room. I couldn’t believe this gentle looking man was responsible for those horrific murders I had just seen.
Gretchen turned to me. “What the hell happened? Are you all right?”
“Just my shoulder and my back. And my head a little. Nothing major.”
“What about your bloody mouth?”
Oh yeah, a blood sample. This could provide some information.
I ran over to the cabinets and started to search. Nothing in this one. I moved some people out of the way, tore open another drawer and found a tiny plastic container. I scraped the dried blood from the corners of my mouth into the small oval, found a cap for it in the cabinet and sealed it up. I put it in my back pocket with the hair from the shifter.
“Merlino, what are you doing?”
“Detective stuff.” I tried to sound tough.
“We need to get down to the station so we can question this perp,” she said, as she pushed her way through the crowd.
We ran outside just in time to see Gretchen’s car being towed away. With all the commotion, I don’t even think she noticed. She said, “Let’s go find out where they are taking him.” She pointed to the two cops dragging the shifter away.
A small crowd had already gathered outside the Emergency Room, and we pushed through to get to the arresting officers. About ten feet in front of me, I noticed something strange about the shifter’s hands. They were moving in an odd manner. I thought he was just trying to bust out of the cuffs until I saw the first claw extending.
Then, fingernail after fingernail changed into claws. His hands morphed into paws, much narrower, and he easily slid out of the cuffs. A female cop lunged for the man as he shifted into animal form. The lion snapped at the officer and took a chunk out of her forearm. Her desperate screams threatened to shatter my eardrums.
The other officers took a few steps back as the man went into full shifter mode. He threw his head up at the sky and roared. The beast started running on two feet, but went down to all fours and quickly reached an amazing speed. The cops fired a hail of bullets at the werelion, but couldn’t slow it down.
I ran after him, hopelessly, as blood dripped from his crotch. How long could we follow the blood tracks? I ran out of breath almost immediately and watched the werelion dodge traffic on Freeport Road and cross the railroad tracks across the street.
The werelion zipped toward the river and out of sight. I yelled to Gretchen, “Have someone follow the blood. He’s bleeding.”
“What blood?” she asked.
“Right there.” I pointed to the trail of blood that I had just seen. It was gone. I ran along the same path as the werelion. Nothing. It had evaporated. What was I dealing with here?
Gretchen screamed, “Merlino, what the hell was that?” She’d apparently taken a shine to calling me by my last name.
“What do you mean?”
She pointed across the street. “I mean. That thing just turned into a lion and ran off. That’s what I mean.”
“Oh that. Right. What did you want to know?”
She threw her hands up. “Anything. Everything. Everything you know.”
“Prepare for disappointment. You know as much as I do. We both watched the same thing.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I know that. What I need to know is how it happened.”
“That makes two of us and I’m not trying to be a smartass.”
She shook her head, disgusted. “You don’t have to try, Merlino. You’re a natural.”
I took the jape in stride. “Thank you. As for our shifter friend, he’s not following the normal protocol. They need a source to shift. Most of the time, a full moon can provide enough of a source, but they didn’t use that. There’s only one other explanation that I can come up with and even this is a longshot.”
“Spill it,” she demanded eloqu
ently.
I didn’t want to believe this, but she wanted to know. “They are being controlled by a powerful practitioner.”
“How would that work?”
“I’m not certain. They would have to have some type of being controlling them. A powerful being.” I specifically left out the word demon. “Again, this is just a guess. I’ve never come across this in my experience.”
She mocked me, “You mean in your vast amount of experience, you haven’t dealt with this yet.”
I let her have the first swipe free of charge. This one was going to cost her. I smiled. “You mean, Lieutenant Gretchen Meyer, with twenty-two years of experience in crime fighting can’t figure it out on her own. She has to turn to a twenty-three-year-old. Pretty embarrassing, Lieutenant.”
Her purple face gave me some satisfaction, but it didn’t answer any of the questions in my head. She muttered under her breath, “Asshole.”
I held her keys out.
She spun around in two circles. “Where’s my damn car?”
I tossed her the keys. “Tera’s Towing. I think they’re located right down in Sharpsburg.”
She stuffed the keys into her pocket and this time she didn’t mutter, “Asshole.”
I convinced one of the officers to give me a ride home. He pulled out onto Freeport Road and my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a call. I never got calls from anyone, only texts that possibly led to a phone call.
I didn’t recognize the number and the way this day was headed, I probably shouldn’t have answered it.
Chapter 16
I SWIPED THE ACCEPT button and held the older model phone to my ear.
“Detective Merlino here. What can I do for you?” I sounded like such a jackass, trying to deepen my voice. I tried to speak like Humphrey Bogart, but in my own words. No doll face or sweetheart. Alayna had introduced me to the classic actor and I enjoyed using his voice style to sound older, although I hadn’t mastered it yet.
Bloodline Awakened Supernatural Thriller Series: Books 1-3 Page 7