Playing Their Parts
A Kindred Tales Novel
Evangeline Anderson
www.evangelineanderson.com
Playing Their Parts, 1st Edition,
A Kindred Tales Novel
Copyright © 2021 by Evangeline Anderson
All rights reserved.
Cover Art Design © 2021 by Reese Dante
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers’ imagination or have been used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Cover content is for illustrative purposes only.
Any person depicted on the cover is a model.
Contents
Playing Their Parts
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
The End?
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Also by Evangeline Anderson
About the Author
Playing Their Parts
A Kindred Tales Novel
Two detectives, hot on the heels of a killer…
Undercover as adult actors on the wild planet of Bachanalius
Will Steel and Cassie find passion while…
Playing Their Parts?
Cassandra Steel and Commander Stone are a unique pair. Together, they comprise the first human/Kindred detective team on the Tampa PD. Their caseload is pretty normal until a heinous new crime is committed—a woman is murdered and it appears that the culprit is a Kindred.
Knowing that a Kindred warrior would never hurt a female, Cassie and Stone start following the trail of the murderer. But it leads them all the way to Bachanalius, a planet devoted entirely to the production of all kinds of alien adult entertainment.
Undercover as “actors,” can Cassie and Stone keep their partnership intact? Will making naughty vids together bring them closer together…or drive them apart entirely? And what about the murderer they are stalking? Will they catch him before he kills again?
You’ll have to read Playing Their Parts to find out.
Dedicated to
Kristie Haigwood and
Shreya Basu Chaudhury
I also want to give a shout-out to Caroline Briggs who had the idea of “Chameleon Kindred” who can change how they look. I riffed on the idea a little in this book, (although I call them Imposters, not Chameleons) and you’ll definitely see more of it in the future.
Thank you all for being fabulous readers and thanks to Kristie and Shreya for helping me come up with a title for this book.
One
“Hope you two don’t have any exciting plans this weekend because I’m afraid I have something new for you. Fresh homicide.” Captain Perkins handed Detective Stonev—Stone for short—a new dispatch.
Watching her partner of two years take the paper, Detective Cassandra Steel couldn’t hold back a groan. She and Stone had plans to go see Lady A perform that night at the Tampa Amphitheater. It was a rare, one-night-only performance and she’d been looking forward to it for months. Stone had somehow managed to get them front row seats—though he wouldn’t tell how, something to do with his Kindred connections, she assumed—but now it looked like their seats would be vacant and Lady A would play without them.
“You have a problem, Steel?” Captain Perkins shot her trademarked laser-beam stare at Cassie. “You object to doing your job, maybe?”
Cassie lifted her chin.
“Of course not, Captain. It’s just that Stone and I have plans and it’s almost quitting time. Just this once, can’t the regular Homicide department handle it? I mean, I’m sure it’s just another asshole who got crosswise with some Kindred warrior’s fiancée and got Rage-killed for his trouble, right?”
Back when the Tampa PD had decided to be the first police department in the world to put a Kindred warrior on their force and open a special branch devoted to Kindred-related crimes, Cassie had been elated to be chosen. Not that she was crazy for the Kindred like so many women were—she wasn’t. But being appointed to the Human-Kindred-Relations or HKR Force, as it was called, was a step up from beat cop—a chance to finally make detective.
Two years later, however, and the HKR Force seemed less like a step up and more like a dead end. That was because the crimes never, ever changed—they were almost all Rage-killings, which was what happened when a Kindred warrior felt like his human fiancée or wife was threatened.
The Kindred were, on the whole in Cassie’s opinion, extremely decent guys—some even called them Feminists because they believed so strongly in the equality of males and females. But any Kindred—be they Beast, Blood, Twin, or some other variety—would go into a murderous fit of berserker fury when the woman they loved was put in danger. Woe be to the would-be rapist or assailant who attacked a female attached to a Kindred—they were liable to end up in a puddle of their own blood, gasping their last before they even knew what hit them.
Because the World Council had ruled that a Kindred warrior could not be prosecuted for protecting his woman, these “Rage kills” as they were commonly called, were completely justified. Which meant that she and Stone spent most of their time interviewing and then releasing the Kindred warriors involved and then closing each and every case.
There were occasionally a
few variations—some crank had called them the week before, complaining that a Beast Kindred was trespassing on his land. But it had turned out that the warrior had simply been getting his girlfriend’s cat out of a tree that was on the very border between her lawn and the neighbor’s. Aside from rare calls like that one, ninety-nine percent of their cases were the justified Rage-kills.
Besides those, the Kindred just didn’t commit any crimes. They didn’t steal or gamble or get drunk and get into fights with their wives or slap their kids around or kick their dogs. In fact, they were almost too good to be true—honorable and kind to a fault. And, as long as you left their women alone, extremely good citizens.
Cassie knew that any other homicide detective would have given her left ovary to have a case load that was one hundred percent cleared, but the sad fact was, she was bored. There was never any mystery to the crimes she and Stone “solved.”
There was always some kind of straight-forward provocation—like a human guy trying to rape a Kindred’s girlfriend—and then a justified killing where the Kindred in question went into Rage and ripped the rapist’s head off. As far as Cassie was concerned, the rapist got what was coming to him, but it still didn’t make the open and shut cases she dealt with on a daily basis any more interesting.
Which was one reason she wasn’t exactly jumping at the chance to miss a concert she’d been looking forward to for months in order to “solve” another one.
“Sorry to inconvenience you, Steel, but a regular Homicide unit isn’t equipped to deal with this one,” Captain Perkins told her, bringing Cassie back to the present. “And you and your partner are.”
“How much training does it take to deal with a Rage-killing?” Cassie asked, frowning. “They’re open and shut, by the numbers all the way. A rookie uniform could deal with it.”
“This is different,” the Captain assured her. “This is no Rage-killing—at least, we don’t think it is. Or if it is, the warrior in question killed the wrong one.”
“She’s right, Cassandra.” Her partner, Stone, looked up and Cassie saw with a little shock that his face looked pale. Stone was a Blood Kindred—all cool logic and reason to go with his dark blond hair and piercing, Husky-blue eyes. Nothing ever ruffled his feathers, so what was it about this case that had him looking like he’d seen a ghost?
“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning across her desk and reaching for the dispatch. “What’s different?”
“This time the murder victim isn’t male—it’s a female.” Stone’s deep voice was low and shocked. “And the perpetrator appears to have been…Kindred.”
Two
“That can’t be right.” Cassie snatched the dispatch out of her partner’s big hands and scanned it rapidly. Sure enough, the victim was a female. “But…Kindred don’t kill women,” she said blankly. “This has to be a mistake—right?”
“Don’t know until we check it out. Vic was Caucasian, mid-twenties. Found dead in a South Tampa residence on Bayshore,” Captain Perkins said, reciting the facts even as Cassie read them. “The body isn’t even cold yet—just called in by the owner of the house twenty minutes ago.”
“Bayshore?” Cassie looked at the address again and let out a long, low whistle. “This is going to be a mansion.”
If Tampa was a Monopoly game, Bayshore Avenue would have been Boardwalk. It boasted the longest unbroken length of sidewalk in the US, which edged Tampa Bay on one side and rows of stately mansions on the other side. The mansions themselves went for millions—even the more modest ones.
“She must not have been hurting for cash if she was living on Bayshore,” Cassie remarked. “Guess the motive probably isn’t money.”
“Actually, she wasn’t living there—she was working there,” Captain Perkins corrected her.
“Working?” Cassie frowned. “Was she a maid? A housekeeper? Cook?”
“Try porn star,” the Captain said flatly. “According to the owner of the house—who found the body—she and her, uh, Beast Kindred co-star were renting the mansion by days to make some high-class interspecies pornography.”
“What?” Cassie shook her head. “Now I’ve heard everything.” She looked at her partner. “What do you think, Stone?”
Stone shook his head. He still looked shocked to Cassie.
“I will not know until I see it,” he said shortly. “I think we’d better get over there, Cassandra. Come on.”
Cassie sighed. It looked like Lady A would have to wait for another day. And yet, she was intrigued. Finally, after two whole years, it seemed like they had an interesting case. Not that she wanted anyone dead, but maybe there was an actual mystery involved here.
And she was determined that she and her partner were going to be the ones to solve it.
Three
“You drive. I need to think,” Stone said shortly as he folded his big body into the passenger side of the Kindred shuttle that doubled as his squad car. He’d brought the vehicle with him when he came from the Mother Ship to join the Tampa PD and had taught Cassie to drive it when she’d asked him to, even though it was against regulations.
Cassie had been secretly pleased that her seemingly silent and uptight partner was willing to bend the rules a little for her. It had been, she thought, the true start of their friendship.
Teaching her to drive the shuttle had been the start, but their friendship didn’t really take off until about six months into their partnership when her marriage had dissolved.
Not that the end of Cassie’s marriage was Stone’s fault. Part of it was about the long hours she was working and part of it, she suspected, was the fact that her ex-husband had been ridiculously jealous and controlling.
Keith hadn’t liked the idea of her riding around all day with a big, muscular, handsome Kindred, even though Cassie had explained over and over again that he was just a partner. Even if she had wanted to put the moves on Stone—which she told herself she most certainly didn’t—the big Kindred was way out of her league.
Not that she was bad looking. She had a pretty face—really pretty, some said—with big brown eyes and jet-black hair she wore in a tight French braid most of the time. She had good skin too—a smooth olive complexion she could attribute to her Italian grandmother. But that was where her prettiness ended—at least as far as Cassie was concerned. She had big hips and a wide behind and thighs that her ex, Keith had referred to as “tree trunks” when he was being especially cruel.
There was no getting around the fact that she was a curvy girl, which definitely disqualified her from the beauty queen circuit, while Stone looked like a Greek god descended from Olympus to grace the world with his presence. From his piercing eyes—a pale blue, ringed with black usually only seen in a Husky—to his classically handsome features, he was a catch. Which made it surprising that he was still single.
Cassie supposed it might be his distant, detached manner that kept her partner from “calling a bride,” which was what the Kindred called courtship and marriage. Stone could seem as cold and hard as…well, as a stone, if you didn’t know him. She’d seen girls who were initially attracted to his movie-star looks quickly repelled by the cold reception they received when they threw themselves at him. The big Kindred exuded an air of chilly austerity that froze everyone out.
Well, everyone but Cassie. Despite their differences, she had been determined to get to know her partner. She had been curvy all her life and she was comfortable in her skin and she also wasn’t shy about getting to know people. So she’d decided not to let her partner’s good looks and Spock-like inscrutability intimidate her. And little by little, her efforts had paid off.
Though Stone had been cool and distant when they were first assigned to each other, he had slowly warmed to her. After Keith was out of the picture, he seemed to loosen up—at least around her. It was as though he finally gave himself permission to like her as a person and not just a partner.
In fact, at one point right after her divorce, she’d almost thought he w
as attracted to her. That had been foolishness, of course—just wishful thinking on her part. She’d been emotionally vulnerable at the time and she knew it, so she’d drawn back a bit, cautioning herself not to ruin their relationship by reading more into it than was actually there.
There was no doubt her partner was devastatingly attractive and she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t had at least a little crush on him at one time—which was completely over now, Cassie hastened to assure herself. But when you added sex to a friendship, it almost always ruined the friendship, as she knew from past experience. So it was much better to just stay friends and partners that to try and bring romance into the mix.
Stone seemed to feel the same because shortly after Cassie’s divorce, they had finally reached a happy medium and settled into a friendly routine. Cassie was glad her new partner had allowed his icy veneer to melt for her. After all, she didn’t want to marry him or even date him, she told herself, she just wanted to know she could trust him to get her back in a tight spot. And she wanted Stone to feel the same way about her.
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