“No big mystery,” he said, smiling as my eyes widened. Coincidence about using the word
mystery,
right? Had to be. “I wanted Chinese tonight and Eugenie doesn’t really like it. So I’m eating with you.” He walked toward me and I stifled an inexplicable urge to back away.
His smile wilted when he got close, and his gaze flicked downward.
“What are you look—”
He moved fast, reaching down to encircle my left wrist in a firm grip. He lifted my arm, pushed up my sleeve, and studied the scabbed-over scratch.
“What the hell are you doing?” I jerked out of his grasp and walked around him to the table. The food smelled like twelve kinds of heaven. Maybe even good enough to eat with the wackadoodle. Who surely couldn’t be human, or he wouldn’t have sensed my injury. I didn’t think he was a shifter, though, unless it was some exotic animal I’d never encountered. Maybe he was fae. I needed to research them. I’d never met a faery, but I bet they were pretty like him.
“How did that happen?” His gaze remained riveted on my arm.
“Scraped it on the back fence when I took out the trash last night,” I said. “Stupid of me. I should’ve turned on the floodlights.”
“You’re lying.” He raised his gaze to meet mine.
Enough already, freak show. “What
are
you, Rand?”
He smiled and handed me a pair of chopsticks in a paper sleeve. Maybe I’d poke those pretty eyes out. “I’m hungry.” He sat down at the table, cracked his chopsticks, and dug into a carton of steamed dumplings. “I got you the fried pot stickers.”
I loved pot stickers, which he obviously remembered from the one time I’d accompanied Eugenie and him to dinner. I’d expected to feel like a third wheel, but instead he’d been inappropriately attentive to me, and by the time we left, Eugenie was almost in tears.
Which is why this wasn’t going to happen. I still held my cell phone, and I punched Eugenie’s speed dial. When she answered, I invited her to dinner. “It’s Chinese, not your favorite, but you and Rand can play with the chopsticks and keep me company.”
She laughed. “Sounds good to me. Got to finish up Mrs. Reese’s perm and then I’ll be over. I’ll call Rand.”
I looked at the offending party, who sat at my kitchen table watching me with a bemused expression. Jerk. “I’ll call him. Just come over as soon as you finish.”
I pulled the carton of pot stickers in front of me and slipped my own chopsticks out of the sleeve. “Take off your earrings,” I said, popping a fried dumpling in my mouth and chewing. He wore peridot studs in both ears.
Smiling, he propped his chopsticks against the side of his carton. “Sure, I’ll take off anything you want.” He maintained eye contact while he reached up and removed one stud, then the other. He laid them on the table.
“No, hand them to me.” More direct contact might help me figure him out.
“What ever you want, however you want it.” I ignored the double entendre as he reached across the table. He didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to know what he was, and then I wanted him to leave. I’d keep the food.
A pulse of magic swept up my arm when our fingertips touched. I curled the small gold and peridot studs inside my fist and pulled my hand away. Wizard’s magic—they’d been bespelled to hide what he was, as I suspected. I studied them a moment, the anger I’d been tamping down since the incident with Jake boiling to the surface. “Where’d you get these?”
“Bought ’em on eBay,” he said without a hint of humor.
“Give me your hand.” Touching ramped up my empathy and ability to read aural energy. Afterward, I wanted to know what he was up to. If he’d had a wizard bespell peridot for him—or even if he’d bought bespelled gems on the black market—he was going to a lot of trouble to stay hidden. These days, with no restrictions on any species moving into New Orleans as long as they could mainstream with humans, what good reason could he have for hiding?
He slid his hand into mine, wrapping long fingers around my knuckles and stroking my palm with small circles of his thumb. I ignored his pathetic stab at intimacy and searched for his energy signature. And got exactly nothing. Maybe he had something else pierced with a bespelled peridot, something I couldn’t see.
“You’re frightened of something,” he said, frowning and squeezing my hand, his eyes dropping back to my arm. “What happened to you? How did you really get hurt?”
Holy hell. Was he reading
me
? I jerked my hand from his and rubbed it on the leg of my jeans. “Rand, what are you?” I thought back to my classes on the dominant species in the Beyond. Elves were empathic, and so were some types of fae. I’d almost bet he was one or the other. But why hide?
“No one who would ever hurt you,” he said. “I—”
Whatever he was about to say, it was lost. I hadn’t heard the door open, but Eugenie stood framed in the doorway, looking from Rand to me and finally at the floor. Damn it. This wasn’t what it looked like, namely her best friend holding hands with her boyfriend, but I couldn’t exactly tell her I was trying to identify his species. Unlike Rand, Eugenie
was
human.
“I was just looking at the cut on DJ’s arm.” Rand’s lie came out as smooth as whipped butter. “Says she cut it taking out the trash, but I think she probably should have a doctor look at it.”
It almost killed me to see tenderhearted Eugenie go from jealousy and hurt to quick ac cep tance and concern for her friend DJ. “Let me see.”
I held out my arm, and she studied the wound. Deeper on one end, where a loup-garou fang had entered, then more shallow where it had scraped. “I dunno. Rand might be right—it kind of looks like it’s getting infected.” I looked at the angry red skin surrounding the scab. It burned and throbbed, but I suspected it would be unlike any infection a local doctor had seen.
“I’ll keep an eye on it.” I pushed a container of fried rice toward her, and she made a face. Eugenie had changed a lot since meeting squeaky-clean Quince Randolph the Mysterious Hippie Plant Guy Who Now Might Be an Elf or a Faery. No more weird hair colors, no new celestial tattoos, no partying on Saturday nights, no fried-food pig-out tours of the neighborhood restaurants.
He’d killed a lot of her spirit, and for what? I swear, half the time he didn’t seem to even like her. Currently, the son of a bitch was watching her like a teenager in history class during a lecture on Edwardian politics, detached and bored.
Eugenie cared about this guy, and he was going to break her heart. I might not be able to stop that, but I’d do my best to make sure he didn’t use me as his weapon.
S
tuffed full of Chinese food and sore from my half-gainer off the sofa, I limped next door to Alex’s house, unsure whether the sick churning in my gut came from too many pot stickers, fear of impending furhood, anger at Quince Randolph for complicating my friendship with Eugenie, or dread over unveiling the real facts of life to a nice human cop whose worldview was about to implode.
Preternatural roulette—a fun game for the entire family. I walked up the front steps of the raised cottage, knocked on the front door, and walked in without waiting. Alex owned a true shotgun house, with the living room opening into the dining room, which opened into the bedroom, which opened into the kitchen. One could literally fire a shotgun from the front door and the shell would go straight through the house and exit the back door. The only break in the line was a long, narrow bathroom off the bedroom.
The house, built around 1900, reminded me of a cute little dollhouse, with intricate old millwork and a hearth in every room except the kitchen and bathroom. I’d never tell Alex his house resembled a Victorian dollhouse, however. He’d only recently finished painting the interior walls in manly earth tones. He’d feel emasculated by
cute
.
Once inside, I spotted Ken standing in the kitchen near the back door—he waved at me. “Want a beer?”
“Sure.” The idea of alcohol kind of made me ill after the Jake incident, but the encounter with Quince Randolph had unsettled me. He’d all but admitted he wasn’t human. Question was: why was a faery or elf hiding his species and hanging out with my friend Eugenie?
Alex and Ken met me in the dining room, and we sat at the heavy (manly) wooden table with our beers. Over the mantel hung my housewarming gift, a framed autographed poster of Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf—an in-joke since I’d given Alex’s shifted canine version the name of Tolkien’s wizard back when I thought he’d been a normal dog.
I hoped the only Gandalf we saw tonight was the one hanging on the wall, but suspected Ken would want solid evidence that everything we told him didn’t amount to absolute nonsense. I’d need to do magic tricks, and Alex would have to bark and fetch.
“How come this feels like an ambush?” Ken took a sip of beer and shifted his steady regard from Alex to me and back again. He was an angular man of medium height, his shrewd eyes a warm greenish-brown. Even in his posture he was neat, precise, and orderly. Unlike everything in the prete world.
Alex thrummed his fingers on the table—his nervous tell. “You remember a while back I talked to you about a new FBI public-threat division based here in New Orleans?”
“Yeah . . .” Ken gave me a curious stare, probably wondering why I’d be part of this conversation. “I still might be interested in being the NOPD liaison if we can get it cleared through channels. Is that what this is about?” When he said “this,” he swirled a finger to indicate the three of us.
“Right.” Alex sipped his beer. If I didn’t have a dawning suspicion that most of the explaining was about to get dumped in my lap, I’d laugh at his discomfort. “Consider the channels cleared. Paperwork’s done. We’re a go, starting now, and there are things you need to know.”
Ken propped his elbows on the table and hunched forward— about as demonstrative as I’d ever seen him. “What do you mean ‘paperwork’s done’? My request for a change of duty hasn’t been filled out, and the pro cess can take up to a month or two.”
“Well . . .” Alex looked at me, which made Ken look at me.
My former partner was so dead.
“What Alex is saying, and doing it badly, is that this new unit has top priority among high- ranking officials,” I said. Yeah, like the Congress of Elders and the FBI’s double-secret enforcer unit. “The usual channels get bypassed. It’s a done deal unless . . .” Unless Ken had a nervous breakdown or got so distraught that I had to modify his memories and send him home with a few missing hours. I had a vial of memory-erasure potion in my jeans pocket just in case.
I pushed my chair back, unprepared for this conversation. “We need some chips. You got any chips? I’m going to run next door and get some.”
“Sit down.” Alex grumbled a curse under his breath.
“Okay, you’re both acting like freakballs,” Ken said. “Spill. And nothing personal, DJ, but how does this concern you?”
I swore if I did turn loup-garou in two weeks, Alex’s throat would be the first one I’d rip out. Mr. Macho, picking at the label of his Turbo Dog beer. More like Turbo Wuss.
“Here’s the thing, Ken.” I shot one last glare across the table. “I’m here to help explain some things about the special nature of this unit because I’ll be working closely with you guys.”
“As a risk- management con sultant?”
Ah, yes. My fake human occupation, which Ken still thought was true. “Um, not exactly.”
“Just tell me straight out if this has something to do with insurance- claim investigations. Because if it does, you can forget it.” Ken’s brows formed chevrons of confusion over his eyes.
I searched for the right words. “Sometimes, you’ve had cases where things didn’t add up, right?” I asked. “Where something defied explanation, or where you wondered if maybe things exist in this world beyond what you’re able to see?”
He gave me blank cop face. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”
I sighed. “Hell, Alex, take off your pants and call Gandalf.”
***
Two shapeshifts by Alex later—plus some nifty magic tricks from me, including a narrow thread of fire intended to travel from the elven staff to the dining room fireplace but which instead burned a small corner off Alex’s antique mantel—and Ken’s hands shook. I could tell because he’d taken out his pen and was flicking the ballpoint in and out, in and out, in and out.
Alex hadn’t bothered fully dressing after Ken demanded he shift to his enormous dog alter ego the second time. He’d pulled the jeans back on and stayed barefoot and bare-chested. Which I found inappropriately distracting. But damn.
“One more thing we need to tell you,” Alex said. “The reason we had to do this tonight involves Jake. He’s in trouble.”
Ken had been staring into space, slightly openmouthed, but now his jaw clamped shut and he focused on Alex. “What about Jake? Please don’t tell me he turns into a dog too.”
I gave him a tight grimace. “No, a wolf. As in big and bad and would eat your grandmother with little provocation.”
“Holy Christ.” Ken finished his beer in a single swallow and crossed his arms. He stared at the table a moment, seemed to reach some conclusion, and nodded. “Tell me where Jake is, and what he needs.”
Hearing those words, I relaxed. Jake had been right. Ken would flounder over this revelation for a few days but he would adjust.
“Remember right after Katrina, when the wild animal attacked Jake?” Alex asked.
Ken nodded. “And when he recovered, the injuries he brought back from Kabul, the ones the doctors failed to fix, disappeared almost overnight. You tellin’ me his recovery was something preter . . . preternatural? Because, man, I thought it was weird at the time.”
“The attack came from a loup-garou, a wolf that carries a virulent form of the werewolf virus.” I considered how much to tell him, and decided he didn’t need to know how magic had turned normal lycanthropy into loup-garou. “He’s had problems adjusting—his temper gets away from him. The wolf controls him sometimes instead of the other way around. He isn’t handling things well, and he’s . . . he’s missing.”
I didn’t want to go into more detail. Jake would be embarrassed and angry we’d brought Ken into this at all.