CHAPTER 2

It took me forty-five minutes to make my way through the twisted wreck of the city to SoNo. The magic had really done a number on Atlanta. Downtown had suffered the most, but both Midtown and Buckhead had taken a beating. Once-stately skyscrapers lay in ruins, like the gravestones of human hopes, toppled on their sides. Overpasses crumbled into dust and new wooden bridges spanned the asphalt canyons. Debris choked the streets. Atlanta was still alive and kicking and the city was rebuilding little by little, but the sheer weight and volume of the fallen concrete made it problematic. I had to make a wide circle north around the wreckage.

On the corner of Monroe and 10th Street, something fluorescent had exploded, drenching the walls of the new houses in electric orange that smelled like day-old vomit. The city Biohazard crew narrowed the traffic to a single lane guarded by two guys with stop signs, who let the vehicles and riders through a few at a time, while the rest of the Biohazard team washed the orange pus down with fire hoses.

Around me, the morning traffic neighed, brayed, and defecated on the street. Gasoline vehicles failed during magic. My Jeep had two engines, one gas and the other enchanted water, so even when technology was down, my car still got me where I needed to go, reliably but not very fast. Buying a reconditioned car like mine was expensive, so most people opted for horses, camels, and mules. They worked whenever. They just didn’t smell very good. It was the middle of May, and a hot one at that, and the reek rising from the pavement would have sent anyone running for cover.

To my left a man atop a white horse leveled a crossbow at the stop sign. The string twanged and a bolt punched through metal, right into the O. Bull’s-eye.

The Biohazard guy thrust the injured sign against the Biohazard service truck, pulled a shotgun from the truck bed, and leveled it at the crossbowman.

“Make my day, bitch! Make my day!”

“Fuck you and your sign!”

“Hey,” a woman yelled. “There are children here!”

“Piss off!” the rider told her and pointed the crossbow at the Biohazard dude. “Let me through.”

“No. Wait your turn like everybody else.”

I could tell by their faces that neither of them would shoot. They’d just talk shit and waste everyone’s time and as long as the Biohazard guy bickered with the moron on the horse, he wasn’t waving the traffic through. At this rate I would never make it to my crime scene.

“Hey, dickhead!” one of the other drivers yelled. “Get off the road!”

“This here is a Falcon Seven,” the rider told him. “I can put a bolt through your windshield and pin you to your seat like a bug.”

A direct threat, huh? Okay.

I pulled down my sunglasses a bit so the rider would see my eyes. “That’s a nice crossbow.”

He glanced in my direction. He saw a friendly blond girl with a big smile and a light Texas accent and didn’t get alarmed.

“You’ve got what, a seventy-five-pound draw on it? Takes you about four seconds to reload?”

“Three,” he said.

I gave him my Order smile: sweet grin, hard eyes, reached over to my passenger seat, and pulled out my submachine gun. About twenty-seven inches long, the HK was my favorite toy for close-quarters combat. The rider’s eyes went wide.

“This is an HK UMP submachine gun. Renowned for its stopping power and reliability. Cyclic rate of fire: eight hundred rounds per minute. That means I can empty this thirty-round clip into you in less than three seconds. At this range, I’ll cut you in half.” It wasn’t strictly true but it sounded good. “You see what it says on the barrel?”

On the barrel, pretty white letters spelled out PARTY STARTER.

“You open your mouth again, and I’ll get the party started.”

The rider clamped his jaws shut.

I looked at the Biohazard guy. “Appreciate the job you’re doing for the city, sir. Please carry on.”

Ten seconds later, I got through the roadblock, steered the Jeep down Monroe Street, and turned right onto North Avenue. I made it two blocks before the street ended in a mountain of crushed glass. This intrepid adventure would have to continue on foot. I parked, checked my guns, took my crime scene kit out of the trunk, and jogged down the street.

Maybe Raphael wouldn’t be there.

Sooner or later I would have to interview him. My heart rate sped up at the thought. I took deeper breaths until it slowed. I had a job to do. The Order might not think I was worth much, but the Pack obviously did. I would be professional about it.

Professional. Just the facts, ma’am. Move along, there is nothing to see here. No need to panic.

This wasn’t my first case and this wasn’t my first murder. It was a chance at work that mattered and I would not blow it by making a spectacle of myself.

Fourteen-twelve Griffin resembled a small hill of twisted metal, decorated with chunks of concrete, mixed with dirty marble, piles of shattered bluish glass, and fine gray dust, the result of magic’s fangs grinding at the substance of the building. A backhoe and some other heavy-duty construction vehicle the name of which I didn’t know sat across the street, next to a tent.

A reinforced tunnel led inside the hill, with two shapeshifters standing guard. The one on the left, in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, was a male bouda in his late thirties, lean, dark, with an easy smile. I’d met him before—his name was Stefan and he and I had no problems. Like most boudas, he was good with a knife and occasionally, if his opponents really pissed him off, he would scalp them after he killed them.

The other shapeshifter, on the right, was larger, younger, and dark-eyed, with chestnut hair cropped short. I inhaled his scent. A werejackal.

I came to a halt before the tunnel. Stefan’s eyes widened. “Hey, you.”

“Hey, yourself.”

The jackal gave me a long look. I wore a white long-sleeved shirt, brown pants, and a leather vest over it. The vest’s main advantage was its million pockets. My two Sigs rested in twin shoulder holsters. The jackal’s nose wrinkled. That’s right, I don’t smell like a normal bouda.

“Jim sent me,” I told Stefan.

Stefan raised his eyebrows. “That Jim?”

“Yup. Did Raphael make it back from the cops?” My insides clenched up.

“Nope.”

Thank God. I was a coward. A terrible, sad coward. “I need to examine the scene.”

The jackal finally identified the scent. “You’re…”

Stefan sidestepped, casually stomping on the jackal’s foot with his steel-toed work boot. “She’s point on this case. Come on, Andrea, I’ll show you around.”

He ducked into the tunnel. I took off my shades, tucked them into a vest pocket, and followed him. A dry stone odor greeted us, mixed with something else. The secondary scent coated my tongue and I recognized it: it was the faint, barely perceptible reek of early decomposition.

When magic attacked a tall building, it gnawed on the concrete first, attacking it in random places until it turned into dust. Eventually the building crashed like a rotten tree. Concrete and breakable valuables perished, but metal and other valuable scrap endured. Reclamation companies went into the fallen buildings and salvaged the metal and anything else that could be sold.

Fallen wrecks like this one were unstable. It took a special kind of insanity to burrow into a building that could collapse on your head at any moment. Shapeshifters turned out to be well-suited for it: we were all insane to start with, enhanced strength let us work fast, and Lyc-V-fueled regeneration knitted broken bones together in record time.

Whatever other faults Raphael had, he made sure to keep the broken bones to a bare minimum. The passageway was six feet wide. Thick steel beams and stone pillars supported the roof and metal mesh held back the walls. I was five foot two, but Stefan had six inches on me, and he didn’t have to duck either. A string of electric lights ran along the ceiling, blinking dimly. Dimly was plenty. We paused, letting our eyes adjust to the gloom, and walked on.

The tunnel angled down.

“Tell me about the building,” I asked.

“It fell about seven years after the Shift, right in line with the Georgia Power building behind the Civic Center. Before it crashed, it was a thirty-floor tower of blue glass shaped like a V. Built and owned by Jamar Groves. Jamar was a real estate developer and this baby was his pride and joy. He called it the Blue Heron Building. People told him to evacuate, but he got it into his head that the building wouldn’t fall. He’s still here somewhere.” Stefan nodded at the ceiling. “Or at least his bones are.”

“Went down with his ship?” The stench of decomposition was getting stronger, clinging to the walls of the tunnel like a foul patina.

“Yep. Jamar was a weird guy, apparently.”

“Only poor people are weird. Rich people are eccentric.”

Stefan cracked a grin. “Well, Jamar owned a huge art collection and he had some interesting ideas. For one, he had a Roman-style marble bathhouse on the second floor.”

“So you’re after the marble?” I asked.

“Screw the marble. We’re after the copper plumbing. The whole structure had old-school copper pipes. Copper prices are through the roof right now. Even copper wiring is expensive. Of course, if you smelt the plastic off of it, it’s worth twice as much, but we won’t be doing that. The smoke is toxic as hell, even for us. There is steel, too, but the copper is the real prize. That’s why Raphael bought the building.”

“He bought the building?” A few months ago when Raphael and I were together, he mostly did work for hire: the owners of various buildings would employ him to reclaim the valuables for a percentage of anything he recovered.

Stefan grinned. “We can do that now. Playing with the big boys.”

The tunnel kept going, lower and lower, burrowing down.

“Why dig so deep under the building? Why not come from the side?”

“The Heron is a toppler,” Stefan said. “It went over right above the sixth floor. And it never caught fire.”

Magic took buildings down in different ways. Sometimes the entire inner structure collapsed and the building imploded in a fountain of dust. More often, the magic weakened parts of the building, causing a partial collapse until the whole thing crashed, toppling on its side. Topplers were valuable, especially if they didn’t catch fire, because anything underground had a decent chance of surviving.

“We were trying to get into the basement,” Stefan confirmed. “There are fire-suppression and heating systems down there, generators, access to both freight and regular elevator shafts—that’s a lot of metal right there. And you never know, sometimes you can get computer servers out. Stranger things have survived a fallen building. Here we are.”

Ahead the passageway widened. Stefan flicked the switch and the twin lamps in the ceiling flared into life. We stood in a round chamber, about twenty-five feet wide. Four bodies lay on the dirt floor, two men and two women. At the far wall, a six-foot-tall disk of metal thrust out, revealing a round tunnel filled with darkness—a vault door left ajar.

“A vault?”

Stefan grimaced. “It wasn’t on any of the blueprints and none of the building-related correspondence we had access to mentioned it. We were merrily digging our way up and ran into it last night. We screwed around with the door for about an hour, but we didn’t have the right tools for it, so Raphael posted two guards here and two by the entrance, and we cleared out. A locksmith was supposed to come in this morning and open the sucker. Instead we found this.”

Four people dead, sprawled in the dirt. Last night they had hugged their loved ones before going on their shift. They had made plans. This morning they were my responsibility. Life was a vicious bitch.

“Okay, let me see the log.”

“The what?”

“The crime scene log? The record of who’s been down here and at what time?”

Stefan gave me a blank look.

“Eh…”

God damn it. I took a small notebook and a pen out of my vest pocket and kept my voice friendly. “I tell you what, we’ll start one. Here, I’ll be the first.”

I marked the date at the top of the page and wrote: “Andrea Nash. Time In: 8:12 a.m. Time out: ___________. Purpose: Investigation.” I signed it and passed the notebook and the pen to him.

“Now you write yourself in. When people come to pick up the bodies, you make them write themselves in, too. We need to keep a record of who comes and goes down here.”

I set my crime scene bag on the side, opened it, took out gloves and put them on. Next came the Polaroid Instant Digital camera and a stack of paper envelopes for crime scene photos and evidence. Other cameras took better pictures, but magic played havoc with digital data. Sometimes you’d get crystal-clear high-definition images, and sometimes you’d end up with a blurred gray mess or nothing at all. Polaroid Instant Digital cameras produced photos faster than anything else on the market and stored the image digitally as a bonus. It was as close to an instant record of evidence as we could get.

“Have the bodies been moved at all?”

Stefan shrugged his shoulders. “Sylvia found them, she checked their pulses, examined the vault to see that nobody was there, and backed right out of the dig. We know the drill.”

If they knew the drill, they would’ve kept a log. “Where is Sylvia now?”

“With Raphael, being hassled by the cops.”

In legal terms, the Pack had similar rights to a Native American tribe, with the ability to govern itself and enforce its own laws. If a shapeshifter died in the Pack’s territory, it was a Pack matter. These shapeshifters had died within city limits, and the PAD wanted in on the action. They weren’t exactly shapeshifter fans, with a good reason.

We lived in the gray zone between beast and human. Those of us who wanted to remain human lived by the Code, a set of strict rules. The Code was all about discipline and moderation and obeying the chain of command. Sometimes the human brakes failed, and a shapeshifter threw the Code out the window and went loup. Loups were sadistic, murderous freaks. They reveled in killing, cannibalism, and every other violent perversity their insane brains could think up. The Pack put them down with extreme prejudice, but that didn’t keep the PAD from viewing every shapeshifter as a potential spree killer. Whenever a shapeshifter murder occurred in the city, they tried to muscle in on it.

Not that they would accomplish anything. The Pack’s lawyers were ravenous beasts.

I crouched by the nearest body and aimed the camera. The flash flared, searing the scene with white light for a fraction of a moment. The camera purred, printing out the image. I pulled it out and waved it a bit to dry, before sliding it into a paper envelope.

The dead man appeared to be in his late fifties. Shapeshifters aged well, so he could’ve been in his seventies, for all I knew. The skin on his forehead was olive, a warm shade particular to those from the Indian subcontinent. That was the only patch of exposed skin left undamaged. Large blisters swelled everywhere else on his cheeks, neck, and arms, the skin peeling up from muscle, stretched taut and completely black.

Another Polaroid.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Stefan said.

I had. “Has the ME been through here?”

“Yeah. But we chased them off.”

That’s right, even if Pack members died outside of the Pack’s territory, the Pack still had the right to claim their bodies. And technically the building was Pack property, since Raphael had bought it. I should’ve remembered that. Getting rusty, Ms. Nash. Getting rusty.

I handed him the Polaroid camera. “Could you hold on to this for a second?”

He took the camera. I pulled a knife from my belt and sliced the man’s shirt straight down his chest. The thin fabric parted easily. I made a cut through each sleeve and gently turned the body on its side. A large swelling marked the top of the left shoulder, just above the clavicle. I flicked the knife across the bottom edge of the blister. Body fluids gushed out, black and streaked with blood. The stench hit me instantly, the foul, putrid reek of rotten flesh.

Stefan cursed and spun away.

“If you’re going to puke, kindly do it in the tunnel.”

He bent double and shook his head. “No, I’m good. I’m good.”

I stretched the deflated skin down. Two ragged punctures marked the man’s back, close to the top of the shoulder near the neck. The swelling had hidden them before.

“What is that?”

“A snakebite.”

“Aren’t we immune to snake venom?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. Shapeshifters don’t exactly advertise this fact, for obvious reasons, but yeah, a copperhead bites you, you’ll feel it.”

Stefan blinked at me. “We regenerate broken bones, and we’re immune to disease and poison.”

“We’re very resistant to poison but not immune. Remember Erra?”

Stefan’s eyes darkened. “Yeah. I remember.”

Erra was Kate’s aunt and her secret. Kate’s family was magic, the kind of magic that leveled cities and altered the course of ancient civilizations. Her aunt had slept for thousands of years, but the onset of magic had awakened her, and she came to Atlanta looking for trouble and nearly destroyed the city. One of her creations, which she named Venom, broke into one of Clan Wolf’s houses in the city and poisoned everyone within. They died in agony. It was a wakeup call to the Pack. The shapeshifters could be poisoned, if the poison was strong enough.

“Most diseases are viral or bacterial in nature,” I said. “Lyc-V is a jealous virus, so it terminates these other invaders. Ingested poison is localized to the stomach. The second it tries to enter the bloodstream, Lyc-V will shut it down. A snakebite is another story.”

I rose, pulled a rag from my pocket, and wiped my hands. “The snake injects toxins directly into the body, and these toxins are biological: enzymes, coagulants, and so on. Some just attack the area of the bite, but some attack the nervous system, and Lyc-V doesn’t recognize them as a threat until the damage starts to spread.”

“So what’s this one?”

“Hemotoxic. Probably from a viper. The moment the venom enters the victim, it begins to coagulate blood and clot the blood vessels. Lyc-V exists in all tissues, but most of it is in the bloodstream. Clog the arteries and the virus can’t get to the venom fast enough to destroy it. I once knew a werebuffalo who fell into a nest of rattlesnakes. Looked just like that when we pulled his corpse out.”

Stefan peered at the body. “How did a snake manage to bite him on his back? He wouldn’t have been lying down in the dirt. Sitting, maybe.”

Shapeshifters took personal hygiene seriously. “Filthy animal” was a common insult people hurled our way. The guards wouldn’t have been lying down in loose soil unless they absolutely had to.

“I don’t know.” I took a ruler from my bag and held it up to the bite marks. Three and three-eighths of an inch. Two inches would mean a big snake. Two and a half inches meant a fifteen-foot rattler. Three and three-eighths was crazy.

“I can tell you that if I was an intelligent snake, this is the place I’d bite,” I said. “If you cause coagulation in the arteries leading to the brain, death will follow like that.” I would’ve snapped my fingers, but I was wearing latex gloves.

“So we have giant super-smart vipers who slithered in here, killed our people, opened the vault, stole something from it, and slithered out, undetected?”

“Appears so.”

“Okay. Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t something dangerous.”

I flashed him a quick smile and set about processing the scene.

The scene was a nightmare. Raphael’s workers had been in and out of it barely twelve hours ago and two dozen scent signatures clung to the ground, not to mention the stench of decay rising from the bodies. In the Georgia heat, even this deep underground, corpses decomposed fast.

A cursory examination of the bodies showed multiple snakebites. I noted four different fang spans and wrote them down. I divided the scene into rows and searched it, wall to wall, picking up every bottle cap and every hair.

A truck arrived from the Pack to take the bodies back to the Keep, the Pack’s huge headquarters just outside Atlanta that everyone insisted was not a castle, despite it being a dead ringer for one. I jotted down some notes for Doolittle, the Pack’s chief medmage, outlining my snake theory. He would be the one examining the bodies. I packaged the fingerprints I had collected into a large envelope and addressed it to Jim. The Pack had its own fingerprint database, and Jim was in a much better position to identify the prints than I was. I knew the theory behind fingerprint analysis and had been taught some rudimentary skills in the Order’s Academy, but in practice I just saw a bunch of whorls I had no idea what to do with. I also wrote out a quick preliminary assessment for Jim, requested background files on Raphael’s entire workforce, and sent the whole kaboodle to the Keep with the body crew.

I went into the vault and stood in it for a bit, visually examining the contents. It was filled with antiques. A pair of elegant, long-necked cats, pure black, with eyes of what were probably real emeralds sat against the wall. To the left of the cats, a stone tablet as tall as me rested on the floor, carved with figures in robes and weathered with age. To the right, a small wooden chair, gilded with gold and painted with brown, stood, its feet fashioned into the semblance of lion paws.

On the shelves were an ornate gold necklace resting in a glass box on top of a scarlet velvet pillow; a set of small bottles, crystal wrapped in bands of gold; a wooden cabinet, empty; a large chunk of sea-foam crystal on black velvet with a carving on it—three men on one side and a woman waving good-bye. Or maybe hello.

Nope, it was probably good-bye. Life was mean like that.

Age permeated the scene, emanating from the items like an aroma from a flower. How many people had died for these things? I knew of at least four and I had a feeling the body count would continue to climb.

I called Stefan down and catalogued the vault, item by item, and had him sign the whole thing as a witness. The list was so long my pen was in death throes by the end of it. Something must have been taken out of the vault, but what? I crawled over every inch of the damn place, looking for any indication of a missing item, but the vault was dust-free. No mysterious outline, no empty hooks, nothing that would give me any sort of clue about what had been taken. For all I knew, instead of taking something out, the attackers had put something in. Wouldn’t that be the pits.

By the time I finally emerged from the tunnel, covered in dirt and bone tired, the sun had almost completed its escape below the horizon. Scene processing was a slow and tedious job. The next time, I’d find myself someone to slave with me.

Stefan rose from the steel drum on which he was sitting. “Done?”

“Yes. Any news from Raphael?”

“No.”

Either the cops had held him up or he was going to great lengths to avoid me.

“Stefan, that stuff in the vault is very old. We have no way of knowing if any of it is magic or not. You guys need to keep away from it. Don’t touch it, don’t sniff it, don’t try to transport it. I’ll ask someone with magical knowledge to come down with the Keep. They will move it and quarantine it.”

Stefan squinted at me. “I get what you’re saying, but you’ll have to talk to Raphael about it. He’ll probably come by here after the cops let him go. You want to leave him a note?”

Good idea. “Got something to write with?” I shook my exhausted pen. “Mine is all out.”

“Sure, in the tent.”

I glanced at the work tent sitting a few yards away. “Thanks.”

I walked to the tent, pushed the entrance flap aside, and stepped into it.

It smelled like Raphael.

His scent permeated every inch of the space, from the tent walls, to the foldout desk and chair, to the papers neatly stacked on the desk. Every object pulsed with it, calling to me, singing, “Raphael…Raphael…Mate…” The scent enveloped me, warm, welcoming, mine, and every inch of me screamed in frustration. I stumbled back out and nearly fell over a rock.

“Are you okay?” Stefan called.

“Yes.” I had to get out of there.

I turned and marched away.

“What about the note?” Stefan asked.

“I’ll leave a message on his phone.”

I kept walking, trying to put distance between me and that cursed tent. If someone had barred my way, I might have shot him.

I stopped by Cutting Edge’s office—it was locked, Kate absent—deposited my trace evidence into our office vault, and drove home. I climbed the stairs, which turned out to be web-free and singed with dark soot from the PAD flamethrowers, and stopped by the Haffeys’ apartment. Nobody answered my knocking. Hopefully Mr. Haffey had made it through.

I walked to my apartment, got inside, and leaned against the door, afraid that the world outside would somehow bust in and get me.

My place was dark and empty. It served as my little haven, especially in the three weeks I had holed up here, trying to come to terms with being thrown out of the Order. It was my safe little prison cell, just me, myself, and I. Well, and Grendel, but the poodle, as good of a listener as he was, couldn’t really hold up his end of the conversation.

My place didn’t seem safe now. It felt stifling and barren.

No Raphael. I remembered what it felt like to wake up in the morning and find him holding me. If I closed my eyes, I could hear his laugh. He made me so happy, but more importantly, I made him happy. Whatever my shortcomings were, I knew that I could make his day. I never realized how much joy it brought me. I didn’t have to even do anything. I just had to snuggle up next to him on the couch, while he peered at his business reports, and his face would light up.

And now he was gone.

This sucked. This sucked so, so much.

“This sucks,” I said, my voice alarmingly loud in the silent room. I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to pick up the phone and call him and tell him how I felt. I should’ve done it weeks ago, but lifting that phone felt like trying to pick up Stone Mountain.

Our happily ever after ended in one fight and both of us were to blame for it. Back when Erra was rampaging through Atlanta, Kate and I had barely survived a huge fight with one of her creations at the Order. The Order’s office was half burned, half flooded, every window shattered, the walls still smoking. That’s when an emergency call came in from Clan Wolf. They were under attack by Erra too and they were dying. Kate and I wanted to help. Ted, the resident knight-defender, ordered us to stand down. He needed us at the Order.

Kate ripped off her Order ID and walked out. I didn’t. I was a knight. I had sworn an oath and I didn’t get to pick which orders I obeyed.

Raphael took it personally. In his mind I had rejected the shapeshifters, the Pack, and therefore I had rejected him. He was the prince of Atlanta’s boudas, the favorite son, loved, admired, and supported on every turn. To him being a shapeshifter was the most natural thing in the world.

To me being a shapeshifter meant being hurt, degraded, and living in fear. Every bone in my body had been broken by shapeshifters before I was ten years old. I’ve been stabbed, punched, kicked, whipped, and set on fire. I’ve watched my mother being beaten to a bloody pulp repeatedly and with vicious glee. I had rejected that life and chosen the Order instead. The knights were my pack and Ted was my alpha.

Raphael knew all this, or most of it. I had told him about my childhood. But to him all that abuse had been inflicted on me by “bad” shapeshifters. The Atlanta Pack consisted of “good” shapeshifters, with laws, discipline, and safety. He thought they deserved my loyalty above everyone else simply because all of us turned furry. He had expected me to walk away from everything I’d worked so hard for and be his bouda princess. We had an ugly fight and went our separate ways. Neither of us said we were through. We just stopped talking.

I meant to call him. I had planned to do it after we finally took Erra down, but in that last fight I was injured. My shapeshifter status came out, and the Order cordially requested my presence at its headquarters. It wasn’t the kind of invitation one declined. So I went to stand trial. I thought it was my chance to change the Order for the better. There were other people in the ranks like me, closet shapeshifters, secret not-quite-humans. I wanted to prove that we were worthy of knighthood. I had a stellar record, years of exemplary service, and the decorations and awards to prove it. I thought I had a shot. I had tried, so desperately tried, and in the end it was all for nothing. The Order got rid of me and that was that.

I couldn’t change the past, but I could work on the present. I was miserable without Raphael. I knew exactly why I hadn’t picked up the phone. Sure, some of it was pride. Some of it was anger. I was tired of everyone judging me. The Order judged me for being a shapeshifter. The shapeshifters judged me for having the wrong kind of father. In a time when my life really sucked, I had needed Raphael to be that one person who didn’t judge me, and I was angry because he did. But deep under it all was fear. As long as I didn’t call him, Raphael couldn’t tell me that we were over.

How is it that I could run into a gunfight against overwhelming odds and put myself between bullets and civilians, but I couldn’t scrape together enough courage to speak to the one person who mattered the most to me?

I walked into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed Raphael’s number. We had something, damn it. We loved each other. I missed him. He had to miss me, too. We needed to stop being stupid and sort things out.

The phone rang.

He would understand. If he just gave me a chance, I would make him understand all of it.

Something wet touched my cheek and I realized it was a tear. Jesus Christ. I wiped it off. It was good that I was alone and nobody could see it.

The answering machine clicked on. Raphael’s voice said, “Raphael Medrano. Leave a message.”

Keep it together. Keep it professional.

“Hi, it’s me. Jim asked me to look into the murders at your work site. I need to interview you, so I thought maybe we could meet at my office tomorrow morning.” Neutral territory, no memories to get in the way. I hesitated. “I know we didn’t part on the best terms, and I regret that. We both made some mistakes. I hope we can put this aside and try to work together on this investigation.”

I miss you. I miss you terribly.

“I would like a chance to clear the air. I…I have some things to tell you that are long overdue. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I hung up.

It hadn’t sounded right. That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say. But then again, crying hysterically into the phone and sobbing about how his scent made me want to curl into a fetal position wouldn’t do any good. Sorry and tears had to wait until we met and were alone.

I could do this right. I just needed to sleep on it.