Chapter 11
“So, the kid wasn’t a zombie?”
Angel chuffed, and I wondered if he’d caught their scent too.
“It moved fast. Sounded like a little girl. The one I met the day my life went belly-up had blond curls. This one had a ponytail, I think.” Then there was the black-eyed kid who turned into something else. And that cackle would haunt me for a long time.
We wandered the left side of the store, books strewn and out of place in a handful of areas, patrons having left in a hurry rather than ghosts or whatever the fuck that kid had been.
“Let’s head to the other side and do the same thing.
I’m not finding anything. What about you?
” I pointed to my nose. “Does your sniffer pinpoint NHVs?”
He chuffed.
“Chuff once for yes, twice for no.”
He snorted.
“Okay, is there a manual for kitty speak?”
He chuffed twice.
“Hmm. No manual? Is it like romance novels? Lots of pain and you can’t turn back for hours or until you mate the desperate omega?”
He didn’t answer, but since I found a set of glowing handprints near the biblical section of books, it was okay.
“Wade?” I called.
He and Bobby appeared around the edge of the bookcase a few seconds later, specialized scanner in hand.
I pointed to a journal designed to look like a goth grimoire.
The handprints on it weren’t child-sized and the bent spine of the book made me wonder if they’d stuffed something inside.
“Do you have gloves on you?” I couldn’t remember when I’d lost mine.
Maybe over the Veil. I couldn’t imagine a ghost needing my gloves.
Had I stripped them off trying to run away?
He pulled a spare pair out of his pocket as he scanned the shelf. “Detailed enough for prints. Let me see if I can zoom in to catch each finger.”
“Handy machine,” I said, waiting until he moved to the second print before flipping the pages of the book where it sat on the shelf. The pages were coated in scribbles. “Can I pick it up?”
“Be careful of prints, but yeah, we’ll bag it,” Bobby said as he waved Victor’s group over.
I picked up the journal. Why did the symbols look familiar? I flipped through a half dozen pages before Angel clamped down on my wrist and pulled.
“What the hell?” I shouted as I scrambled to catch the book. Victor snatched it from me and stuffed it in a bag.
“There are runes in this book,” Victor said. “We’ll have to have one of our witch consultants analyze it.”
Angel let go of my wrist and licked it.
“Did he hurt you?” Wade asked.
“No.” I showed him my wrist. “No broken skin or anything.”
Wade glared at Angel, and Angel glared back.
“Witch consultants? SED doesn’t hire witches?”
“No,” Wade said, his gaze darting from Angel. “The power corrupts.”
Did he mean they’d had witches in the past and they used the runes for things? I recalled the many tattoos on Angel’s skin and how he said it had been SVs who’d used him. Maybe not only SVs.
Angel lapped at my wrist again with his rough tongue.
“Apology accepted,” I said. “I need to look at the rest of the stacks. It’s what I’m here for, right?
Supernatural handprint detector. It’s good to be useful.
” I didn’t wait for an answer, but instead wandered to the next aisle searching for anything unusual.
How long would my control last? Each new thing made my panic rise.
A lot of the anxiety had to do with the change, standing in a sea of people used to being different, and uncertainty.
“Focus on the mystery, right?” I said to the big cat next to me. “I love mystery. Could live without the pulsing headache and vibration of anxiety growing in my gut, but I’ve worked through worse.”
Angel remained at my side, pressed against my hip like a fuzzy blanket, grounding me.
“Nothing else,” I told him.
We walked the entire store again. I made a mental note about the direction of the prints, the arterial spray, and the escape of whatever it had been. Only one casualty meant either it had aimed for him or had been interrupted.
“Seems very targeted, right? Or am I overthinking?” I said to Angel. Joe had encouraged me to go with my instinct as it was rarely wrong.
I found a stack of clothes abandoned by the back door and picked them up when Angel pawed at them.
“The getting naked part is true?” I asked.
“That must suck in the winter.” I scooped up his stuff.
“Giant shoes,” I grumbled, balancing them.
“Docs? Nice quality, even if I’d hesitate to wear them to crime scenes.
Too many messed up shoes from all the blood and gore. ”
Victor’s crew loaded up the body and the rest of the clean-up crew stood by.
If Angel had been human, I’d have asked if we could leave, but didn’t know who to ask instead. He could understand me in this form, right? “Can we head back to the office? Normally I’d interview witnesses, but you said Ezra’s doing that.”
He chuffed.
“I’m going to take that as a yes.” I had to dig the keys out of his empty pants pocket, waving to Wade and Bobby. I unlocked the passenger side door, wondering if Angel wanted to sit in the back, but he waited beside it for me to lift the handle.
The scent of my uneaten food walloped me in the face. “Fuck. Shouldn’t have left that in the car.”
Angel crawled in. I shut the door behind him and got in the driver’s seat. “Do you need the belt?” He sat on the floor, nosing around, and came up a moment later licking his lips, then sprawled the top half of his body across the seat. “Did you just eat my sandwich?”
He chuffed.
“Rude,” I said, but snapped my belt into place and turned on the navigation, looking for a route back to the SED precinct without going through the Veil. “Highway overpass it is,” I said with a sigh. “I hope whatever that was didn’t follow us back.”
Angel gazed at me, his big, brown eyes questioning, but I said nothing the entire drive.
I returned the car after cleaning out the remains of my stolen lunch and dropped it off at the service desk with an apology for the smell.
Angel had snapped up the clothes he’d left behind and vanished inside the building while I’d worked to clean up the car.
By the time I headed to the elevator, he reappeared, human and dressed, hair a mess and no longer in a ponytail. Why was that so hot?
“Do I have a computer to log details into?” I asked him as he swept by me to push the button to go up.
“Yes. I’ll get you logged in once we get upstairs.
It’s likely similar to what you used with the MPD.
” The door slid open and he got in, leaning against the back.
I stepped inside and studied him, a thousand questions going through my head.
The door closed and the elevator began to move.
“I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine,” he said after a few seconds of silence.
“Does it hurt?”
“The change?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes. It’s sharp, but fast. Passes in a few seconds. But I change a lot. If I went days or even weeks without doing it, it would take a long time and hurt a lot. As a shifter, you either embrace the change or avoid shifting to minimize the pain.”
I thought about that for a minute. Maybe it wasn’t so cool to be a shifter variant, even if it meant having fangs and claws, and super soft fur. I rubbed my head as it still pounded, though not as terribly as before. Maybe there was a room somewhere with less fluorescent lights?
“Still have a headache?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not as bad, but the lights make it worse.” The wriggle of passing through the Veil made me shudder, but it vanished as fast as it started, and the door slid open to a long hall of offices. Angel headed down toward the end. “We’re the door on the end.”
Each door led to a central meeting room type of section with smaller offices around it. Most looked empty.
“I expected SED to have more people,” I said as we entered the large bullpen at the end.
“There are three active teams on this side of the city and another five that share the border between Minneapolis and St. Paul, across the border into Wisconsin. We’re the only one on the southwest side.
” He led me to an office with two desks topped with high-end computers facing each other and digital wallboards.
“We’re always looking for more people, but most of the funding goes to equipment, and it’s hard to find variants to fill the active duty roles.
Those who are super powerful go to the military, or we get them after they retire.
” He put his hand on his chest. “Like me.”
He'd mentioned he’d served, and spoken of the horrors of the SVs taking over his kind, but he didn’t look any older than me. “Should I ask how old you are?”
“I’m forty-seven,” he said as he pointed to the desk opposite his.
“You must have good genes.”
“The shifter variant slows aging.”
“Really?” I hadn’t heard that before, but didn’t know any shifters well enough to ask questions.
“Once we hit maturity, yeah. Some people are dumb enough to think it’s the fountain of youth and try to get themselves sick.
But nothing guarantees a shifter variant.
They could have something terrible, like mind reading, or seeing dead people.
Science doesn’t know why the virus triggers different things for everyone, and sometimes nothing at all. ”
“Seeing dead people is pretty crappy,” I agreed. “Why would mind reading be bad? We could figure out if folks were guilty pretty fast.”
“Would you really want to be inside everyone’s head? And worse, criminals’ heads? I’ve read enough about breaking down the thought process of serial killers to never want to linger inside their minds.”
“Good point,” I said. “I suppose I should be grateful for the dead people talking variant. Or at least seeing weird handprints.” I didn’t mention all the voices I’d heard when the ghosts surrounded me across the Veil.
“That was useful,” he agreed, and leaned over me to show me how to log in, and I was suddenly reminded that he’d been all over me across the Veil and the crime scene. Heat flooded my face.
“What?” he asked as the screen popped up.
“Your leopard is pretty cool,” I said. “Big, and sort of bulkier than I thought a leopard would be.”
“The Amar leopard is more in line with the body structure of a tiger than what most people think of as leopards. But you’ll find most variant shifters are rarer types of their animal cousins.”
“He was beautiful and super soft.” My cheeks heated again, realizing his leopard was him.
“Yeah? Still a cat person?”
“Yes.” I drew the word out like I was uncertain if he would run with it. But he let it go and pointed out the case filing system and how to make notes. Our systems were linked; sharing notes, files, pictures, and case folders. It was a major upgrade from the DOS-style format of my old precinct.
“Here’s how to request information.” Angel showed me how to link files that were sent to recon or even the social media team to gather data.
In this day and age, the information we could get from someone’s social media presence eclipsed everything else.
Not everyone was smart enough to keep their public interactions minimal.
“Nice that someone does it for us.”
“We can do it ourselves, but they are honestly faster as it’s their full-time job. I spend more of my time updating notes, reviewing case files, and finding links or more people to question. By the time I’m ready to talk to someone, I’ve got a full picture of their life at my fingertips.”
“So, you’re saying intel here is like the CIA.”
Angel nodded. “You know how they say women in their twenties can find anything about anyone through social media faster than someone working for the government for forty years? Well, that’s how it works here.
Five minutes and they’ve got everything about you.
All those embarrassing moments and ex-lovers you don’t want folks to know about laid out like a fancy wedding display. ”
“Scary. Should I make a list and post it in the bullpen to get the teasing over with?”
He laughed. “You have a lot of those?”
“More than I’d like.” I rubbed my forehead, irritated by the lights.
“How’s your head?”
“Throbbing, and not in a good way, but I’ll live,” I said as I started adding notes. How much was safe to share? I added the bit about the direction of the blood spray, the prints, and the sound of laughter, but could feel Angel’s eyes on me.
“What?” I asked, looking up.
“Do you get headaches a lot?”
“A few times a year, maybe? I wouldn’t say a lot.
” I added in all the basic details from the case and left out my time across the Veil as it didn’t seem relevant to the case.
Angel added a few of his notes to the images, and comments about scents, and his own impression of the body.
I could see how the instant collaboration could be beneficial.
We could even pull up pictures from the scene and add notes to sections.
Like, I wondered about the bite radius; was it a child, or something else?
Could we tell what species it might be by teeth impressions?
“Is that all you’re adding?” Angel asked.
“For now, I guess. I’m sure it will be a few days before we get any lab reports. Do we have data on the victim and any witnesses yet?”
Angel’s avatar popped up on my screen and a folder opened with video interviews. “Ezra’s work.”
“Nice,” I said, browsing through.
“You won’t be saying that when you see our backlog and all the shit you need to review to catch up.”
“Where is that?”
Another section opened on my screen, full of active case files.
“Holy shit!”
“Supernatural stuff is never as open and closed as the mundane stuff. Fingerprints, DNA, that sort of stuff is rare from NHVs. Some of them don’t leave anything other than an energy signature. And the process is complicated, as we have to get authorities on the other side involved,” Angel said.
I hadn’t ever thought about what they would do with those they caught. “Is there a supernatural prison of some kind on the other side?”
“Not exactly,” Angel said. “But I don’t think you’re ready for all that in your first week.”
“Okay,” I said, head giving another warning throb. I glanced up at the overhead lights, annoyed by the brightness. Angel hopped out of his chair and adjusted a switch on the wall that dimmed them. “Thanks,” I said.
“Sure thing. Be right back.” He left the office.
Maybe he had to pee. Not my business. I clicked around the system, finding the photos Wade and Bobby took uploaded already, and began adding notes to them.
I put comments in about the difference between the print on the grimoire and the rest of the prints.
More than one? Or something that could change shape?