Chapter Nineteen
My sneakers are propped up on the desk as I read a breaking story about a violent attack at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, where a valuable T-Rex femur had been stolen and one guard was killed, while another clung to life at a local hospital.
Apparently, security saw someone dressed in one of those hyper-realistic blow-up dinosaur costumes, as popularized on Japanese prank videos. Only this guy wasn’t pranking anyone for laughs. Whoever was inside the suit had attacked the guards with what they think was a machete or an ax.
I think back to Mark returning with a long box. Yes, definitely big enough for a massive T-Rex femur.
Just what in the Michael Crichton is going on here?
Well, if it was Mark, then we don’t just have a killer on the loose.
.. we’ve got an infected survivor or two.
The dead guard wasn’t the problem. A shifter bite doesn’t bring you back to life.
No, it’s the guy that survived that could carry on the infection.
And now, there could be a literal Tyrannosaurus Rex roaming the streets of Fullerton in the next few days or so.
Apparently, turning into a raptor wasn’t good enough for him. I didn’t know a person could turn into two different kinds of shifters, like choosing a character in a video game.
From the news report, the attacker had been dressed as a ‘raptor.’ Probably should have followed him instead of swiping his book.
If so, one person might be alive today. Well, I couldn’t have known what he had planned for last night.
How could I? Though I can sometimes receive what I think are normal psychic hits, I certainly hadn’t gotten one about last night.
But now I know... follow this guy at all costs.
I consider who to go to next. Max? Yeah, probably.
Allison? A solid choice, but she’s just now getting home from her radio gig.
And Kingsley’s stuck in court this morning.
At the very least, I can run all this past my right-hand girl, Tammy, who should be back any minute now with our morning Starbucks fix.
At this moment, my office door opens, and I fully expect to see Tammy using the front entrance, rather than parking in the back and entering through there. But no, it’s a tall guy in a hoodie. Broad shoulders. Haunted eyes. I know those eyes.
Ah, crap.
I start to rise just as my inner alarm explodes in my head. As he shrugs off the hoodie, his torso extends, ribs cracking, arms and legs lengthening, skin hardening into scaled armor, teeth sprouting like knives from his skull. When he growls, the walls shake. Hell, so do I.
“Shit!” I grab my water bottle and squeeze. It bursts open, the cap flying off.
The exploding water coalesces in mid-air, hardening, stretching, and becoming a sword made of clear ice, sharp as sin.
I grab the handle just as the creature lunges, dive sideways, and watch as his jaws snap shut where my head had once been just a nanosecond ago.
But my chair doesn’t make it, and explodes.
The computer monitor also gets caught in the crossfire of teeth and shatters into digital confetti.
My desk darn near collapses under the weight of the creature.
As he shakes his head angrily, stuffing from my headrest flies everywhere, I teleport directly behind him, slashing my ice blade across his back. Blood spurts and scales go flying. He roars and turns, tail whipping. It clips my shoulder and sends me flying into a far bookcase.
Whoa, mama!
That tail’s going to be a problem. I flip to my feet, sword still in hand.
“Someone’s gonna pay for that chair and monitor, asshole. And I know where to send the bill.”
He charges, teeth chomping. I duck and roll, the ice sword slicing across his snout and leaving a deep gash. Blood sprays, hot and bright, but he barrels on unfazed... relentless and mad as hell.
I leap onto the filing cabinet, spring off, flipping backward over his whipping tail, and land in a superhero crouch. In the same breath, I surge forward and drive my sword deep into his hamstring.
His roar shakes the room. He stumbles, jaws snapping at empty air—
And that’s when my office door opens again.
Tammy steps in, holding two Starbucks cups. She freezes.
“Mom?”
“Hi, sweetie. We have a raptor problem.”
Her eyes widen, and she shifts instantly. A blink and an explosion of clothes later, my daughter is gone and standing in her place is a nine foot tall Kodiak brown bear, the biggest of the bears. Her claws gleam. Her roar shakes the windows.
The raptor hesitates, looking from me to her. I suspect Mark, likely a brand-new shifter, still has the mindset of a mortal: that is, a primal fear of bears of any size and shape.
My daughter doesn’t hesitate and barrels into him in full bear form, slamming the raptor into the wall behind my desk with bone-shaking force. The entire three-story building trembles.
What follows is animalistic and brutal: claws, teeth, snarls, and fury. They tumble across the room, rolling in a blur of fur and scales, crashing straight through my daughter’s desk and obliterating it.
I hold back, letting her work. I’ll jump in if things turn deadly, but for now? She’s holding her own. In fact, she’s winning.
Finally, Mark the raptor shrieks, then kicks Tammy off him with his powerful hind leg. She slams into the wall next to the coffee machine and falls to her side, dazed but conscious. The wall has a bear-sized dent in it.
Mark bolts for the door.
I hurl my sword at him like a spear, but he’s already through the door, completely demolishing it as he goes though, glass exploding out onto the sidewalk.
I run over in time to see him run along Lemon Street, his clawed feet pounding the pavement, scattering terrified pedestrians. Soon, he vanishes into an alley.
I don’t follow. Like I said, I know where he lives.
Besides, even though she’s presently a ginormous bear, my daughter could have gotten seriously hurt fighting that thing.
So, I dash to Tammy’s side as she shifts back to her cute human form while simultaneously summoning her nature dress, which covers her.
“You okay?” I ask, kneeling beside her.
She grins, breathless. “It was strong, Ma.”
I nod. “It was also a dinosaur.”
We laugh at that, even as people poke their heads through what’s left of my shattered door. One by one, I wipe the memory of a fleeing dinosaur from everyone milling nearby, gently nudging them to move along. They do.
For a moment, I consider heading out to the street and scrubbing the minds of anyone who saw the raptor, but there were too many witnesses. Cars, pedestrians. Too much exposure.
So instead, I focus on the one thing I can control: removing myself and my office from tomorrow’s headlines.
I don’t feel the sickness in my gut until I remember the stolen T-Rex bone from last night. I can already imagine the havoc it could unleash on the city, especially under the control of a lunatic like Mark.