Chapter 4
HIM AGAIN
put gus down.
now!
— gus
“Of course. I mean, she’s not my grandmother…
Honey’s my cousin on my dad’s side… but we were the only two kits in our immediate clan.
Grandma Jean was my honorary grandma, too.
Whenever Honey went to visit Grandma Jean, I got to tag along.
I haven’t seen her in years, but when Honey said she was running Grandma Jean’s bakery and had an apartment available, I thought it might be a good idea to at least check it out.
Who knows? Maybe Moonburrow needs a librarian.
I could do it. I have my Master’s in library science. ”
My head is spinning at all of that information. Ash is Honey’s cousin? He was moving here? He’s a librarian?
That last one stuns me the most. I’m a dumpster-diving junk collector, and he not only went to school to be a librarian, he has his Master’s in the program?
I shake my head. Sure, we have a library in Moonburrow. We might even need a librarian. Only—
“But now you’re dead,” I point out.
Ash glances toward the dumpster again with a faint grimace. “It seems like I might be.”
“You know… you’re pretty calm for a dead guy.”
“I’m an opossum.”
I wait expectantly for him to add something to that that would make such a simple pronouncement make sense.
“This happens more than you’d think,” he adds after a beat.
“Becoming a ghost? Because Honey’s been holding out on me if that’s true.”
Ash’s smile falters just enough to be noticeable. “Well… no. Not that part.”
“So becoming a ghost isn’t normal for opossums?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Fantastic. Love that for us.”
His hand lifts absently toward the back of his neck before passing halfway through his own shoulder.
How the… I move toward him, reaching out with my hand. It lands on his shoulder and stays there.
What does that mean? I can touch him. Gus can touch him. But Ash… can’t touch himself?
What is he?
I don’t know, and neither does Ash. He stares down at himself, and for the first time since I saw him, real fear cracks through his calm expression.
“This has never happened to me or anyone I know before,” he admits, more to himself than to me.
“So I guess you don’t know how to fix it, huh?” I ask.
He doesn’t think he’s dead. At the very least, he’s at least aware. He’s a ghost, but what if he keeps fading? What if he can’t make it back into his body? What if—
No. No. I’m sorry, but this is way above my paygrade. I’m a raccoon, not a psychic or a medium or a spiritualist. Plus, there’s the little fact that someone did this to Ash, that someone hid his body beneath the trash bags.
Dead or not, this looks like a murder. And though I wouldn’t normally resort to calling the police, what choice do I have?
My mate is an opossum. He’s also a ghost.
And, if I’m being honest, there’s a good chance that Deputy Lick-My-Balls is going to find a way to blame me for the dead body in the dumpster.
Even so, I yank my phone from my back pocket before I can think too hard about any of that.
Ash watches me carefully. “What are you doing?”
“Calling the sheriff station.”
His brows lift slightly. “To tell the sheriff that there’s a ghost haunting the alley behind Grandma Jean’s bakery?”
“To let them know there’s a body in the bakery dumpster while I was actively digging through it.
” I bite out an annoyed sigh. “And the sheriff’s not there, remember?
He’s off with Honey. I’m gonna have to get his right-hand wolf.
” A huff this time. “Damn it. I just know that Deputy Lick-My-Balls is gonna think all of this is my fault somehow.”
Ash’s lips twitch in the corners. “Is that his official title?”
“It is in my heart.”
By the time I’m heading down the walkway to the sheriff station with Gus tucked under my arm like a furious, hissing loaf of bread, I’m guessing the entirety of the enforcers for the Moonshadow Pack are already descending on the alley behind Dough You Believe in Magic to cordon of the crime scene and figure out what to do with Ash’s body.
Makes sense. Riordan told me that he would be heading over, and that he expected me to be waiting for him and whichever wolves he brought with him so that he could get my statement.
Since I correctly interpreted that as he intended to interrogate me—because, oh yeah, he totally is blaming me already—I told him that, if I’m a suspect, I expected the whole ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine from the deputy.
That means I was heading to the sheriff station to wait for Riordan.
I wanted to leave Gus behind. That didn’t happen. After I ripped open the trash, retrieved the keys, and grabbed Gus around the middle so I could toss him back inside the kitchen before I locked up the bakery, Gus stared clicking and chittering and shaking his head.
Ash told me that Gus was insistent on going wherever I go. I so desperately wanted to call bullshit. Honey might’ve been able to convince all of Moonburrow that she could make sense of Gus’s opossum squeaks, but there was no way in hell that Ash understood him, too.
But then Gus curled his tail around Ash’s ankle, glared at me, and I gave up. I locked the bakery, hauling ass out of the alley before the wolves showed up.
I thought Ash would want to stick around his body; I know I would’ve if our roles were reversed.
To my surprise, he decided he’d rather follow me to downtown Moonburrow.
Not because he has any idea that we’re mates or because he feels the slightest thread tying us together.
The return of his polite, casual behavior is definitely not indicative of a male who just stumbled upon his fated mate, and when I not-so-casually asked why he wants to stick by me, he just pointed out that, so far, only Gus and me can see him.
I get that. I’d probably want to hang near anyone who could talk to me if I were a ghost—even if that means everyone we pass on the way to the sheriff station gives me a strange look when it seems like I’m either talking to myself or to the wild opossum who’s shrieking like I’m committing murder because I chose to carry him instead of letting him trot down by our feet.
The Moonburrow sheriff station itself isn’t really a station so much as glorified office space squeezed between a butcher shop and another laundromat in downtown Moonburrow; not Mrs. Ames’s, thank Alpha.
If you didn’t know what was hidden behind the tinted glass door, you’d probably walk right past it, figuring it was either storage or somebody’s dentist.
Inside, the station smells like paper, cedar wood, and wolf.
Not so much wolf that it would trigger a panicked reaction in most prey shifters.
More like just enough to remind everyone that, in Moonburrow, law enforcement and pack politics go claw in claw.
Obviously, right? After all, the Alpha is sheriff.
The Beta is the chief deputy. Everyone who works here is a high-ranking member of the pack, and if the wolf from the bakery this morning is sat behind one of the two desks in the waiting room as I enter, I jerk my chin up so he doesn’t think I’m quailing now that there’s a little trouble.
Though maybe I should’ve given the wolf cop a couple of donuts if I knew something like this might happen…
I can’t help it. Raccoon clans aren’t exactly known for respecting authority unless forced to. Our kind of shifter respects survival. That’s why I didn’t wait for Riordan to come to me. Nope. I made the choice to go down to the sheriff station, and now I’m going to own it.
The wolf looks at me, snorts to himself, then goes back to whatever he was doing on his computer.
Now that I’ve stopped walking, Gus squirms free from my hold.
He lands with a thwap on the floor, tiny claws clicking against the polished floor as he heads further into the waiting area as though he owns the place.
Ash is hovering to my left. He doesn’t seem as transparent as he did out in the sunlight as he drifts ahead of me. It’s so weird, the way he moves. He doesn’t quite walk normally anymore. Like he told me, he just… drifts. Sometimes his shoes touch the ground. Sometimes they don’t.
I try not to let that bother me.
That, or how I can see my reflection in the glass door in front of me—but there’s no Ash there. Roxy with a scowl on her face and her hair in a messy bun, flour turning my black jeans dusty and my boots white… she’s there. But the handsome opossum shifter? There’s no sign of him at all.
Ghost, I remind myself. He’s a ghost.
And I’m willing to bet that, when the wolves start nosing around Ashton’s body and the only living scents they find belong to Gus and me, I’m going to have to explain that I’m not the one who killed him.
Someone had to have. Maybe not at the dumpsite, but it doesn’t matter.
He remembers dropping in the alley and that’s where I found him.
But someone put him in the dumpster. I’m pretty proud of my sniffer.
Before we left the alley, I went around the entire dumpster and partway out of the alley, searching for the scent of the person—shifter, witch, whatever—who did this to Ash.
I came up with nothing. Ash’s scent continued to fade, with mine and Gus’s lingering, but that was all.
It was like no one else was there… but how is that possible?
How is any of this possible?
Gus stops in front of the glass door. He scratches at it with his claws before turning to look imperiously at the wolf at the desk.
“Is he ignoring us?” murmurs Ash.
The wolf doesn’t react to him at all. I’m not surprised. No one has acknowledged Ash yet, and I’m beginning to think it’s going to stay that way.
Still, I shake my head. “Nah. Hotshot over here is ignoring me.”
Now… am I aware that, once again, it looks like I’m talking to myself? Oh, yeah. But, hey, at least it gets the wolf’s attention.
He pushes his desk chair away from the computer, swiveling so I can get a good look at him in his shit-brown uniform. He has a shiny metal nameplate over his heart that says his name is Barrow with a brand new badge that marks him as a deputy.
“Were you talking to me, miss?”
Miss? I’m a good couple of years older than this pup. “Am now,” I tell him. “I’m here to speak with Riordan.”
Barrow sniffs. “Deputy Lobo—”
“Chief deputy, you mean.”
Okay. Like with Honey, I get my kicks busting Riordan’s chops.
Same with Max. It’s the raccoon in me. They lead the pack, and they’re the embodiment of law enforcement in Moonburrow.
So I fuck with them. I used to call Max ‘handsome’—mainly because it was obvious that Honey was crushing over the sheriff before it came out that they were fated mates—and I make it my purpose to see if I can get Riordan to lose his cool every time we meet.
Riordan has a secret, and one that I made sure I figured out the second I heard whispers about it.
Because of it, he’s determined to be constantly in control.
Nowadays, I’ve changed my nicknames for the dynamic duo to Sheriff Stick-Up-His-Furry-Ass and Deputy Lick-My-Balls because a) I refuse to flirt with a mated wolf even if it’s adorable seeing how possessive Honey and her opossum are over her predator; and b) it’s fun to watch the most powerful shifters in Moonburrow squirm, knowing they’ll never use their dominance against a rascally raccoon who’s just having some fun.
But, just like how I retaliated at the bakery because Barrow was disrespecting Honey’s baked goods and implying she was a murderess, I don’t like the way that this pup gets Riordan’s title wrong.
I can do it because I’m not part of the sheriff’s office, and because prey shifters aren’t part of the hierarchy of a wolf pack. All of us are at the bottom, and that’s not something anyone can change. But he’s a wolf. Riordan is number two here in this station and on pack territory.
A basic deputy is the lowest rank under the sheriff. The highest? Is the chief deputy, and that’s exactly who Riordan is. Technically, he’s probably the acting sheriff with Max out of town—and that’s something this dickwad should know.
His gold-colored eyes darken after I correct him. “Yes. The chief deputy. He called to say that a witness was coming down to the station. I guess that’s you.”
I sure as fuck hope so. Witness sounds a lot better than suspect. I like witness.
“Could be.”
He doesn’t get up from his seat. He just points to the door that Gus is pacing in front of. “Go through there. First room on the left. Sit tight, cupcake. You might be waiting a while.”
Cupcake? Oh, I’ll show him cupcake… a poisoned cupcake. Scooping Gus up, I give Barrow my middle finger before moving into the next room, holding the door open just long enough to let Ash slip through before I let it slam shut.
“He wasn’t very nice,” remarks the ghost, frowning at the closed door as if he can see through it and glare at the deputy. “You should make a complaint for how he talked to you.”
I shrug, vaguely mollified that, rather than pointing out my rude gesture, Ash is instantly on my side.
“Forget him. He’s probably just got low blood sugar.
” Ash gives me a look. I give him a smile.
“Tough guy didn’t get his daily donut. Now he’s taking it out on me.
Whatever. Come on. Let’s go wait for Riordan. ”
“That’s the chief deputy?”
In front of Barrow, I’ll call him the chief deputy. Behind his back, he’s Deputy Lick-My-Balls. All other times, he’s Riordan Lobo.
“Sure.”