by Lola Kidd
He had no idea what he was going to tell her but he had to subtly hint that she had to leave and that her best bet was in another town and another story. Then he’d warn the shifters wherever he sent her to be careful. Not to get fooled and drawn in by her beauty. Keep on their toes because she was very resourceful.
“How’s it coming?” he asked, coming into the kitchen.
“Good, actually. I’m just making a simple pasta with vodka sauce. It should be done in about twenty minutes. Want some wine?”
She was already one glass deep judging from the bottle. He nodded. “Sure. I work in the evening tomorrow. No reason not to have a glass or two.”
They sat on the couch and he told her about his day.
“Wow, that sounds pretty boring.”
“It was.”
“Is it usually like that?”
“Well yeah, I mean, it’s a small town. We don’t have many shifter problems thank goodness. Most of them are caused by out-of-towners just passing through or issues with people in neighboring towns. Our people have a great relationship.”
“Out-of-towners like me?” she laughed.
“Trouble does seem to follow you,” he joked. “Which is why I’m surprised you decided to stay longer.”
“I knew it would be dangerous the closer I got to the truth. I think I might be onto something here or at least close to something. I don’t want to turn tail and run now. The most trouble I’ve seen is because of a drug addict. It wasn’t like I almost got shot because of my investigation.”
“Tangentially, it kind of was because of your investigation.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, technically. But not really.”
“What do you even think you’re going to find? There doesn’t seem to be any more trails to follow. Everyone who knows anything has already talked to you.”
“Abbott. I’ll go back to Abbott. That was where she was staying.”
“Hospitals won’t tell you anything.”
“Right, but maybe I can find someone who was there at the same time or something. I don’t know. I just don’t feel like I should leave just yet. Obviously you disagree though, right?”
“I think you’re going to be spinning your wheels here. I like having you around, but I don’t know what else you can find here. Abbott shifters are worse than the people here and any humans in town are staunch shifter allies. None of them will speak to you and their KOPs already know about you. You won’t get anything there.”
“Well, this can’t just be it.” She sighed. “There has to be something else for me to do.”
“Don’t want to leave me so soon, huh? Looking for any excuse to stay close.” He laughed until he saw the look on her face. “Oh Tally...you don’t really...I mean you can’t.”
“I don’t know.” She stood up. “I need to go check the food.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. His animal was over the moon. But this...well, this might be a problem.
Chapter Sixteen
Tally felt like an idiot. She didn’t like like him. She just liked having him around as a partner. But she had been lost for words at the moment and now he thought she was like in love with him or something. And she wasn’t! He was good-looking and a nice guy and there for her when it counted but she didn’t love him. He was her only friend in town and knew the most about her investigation. Even more than Bettina. Of course she wanted to stick around and talk with him about everything. She had to find a way to convey that to him. Nicely!
“Look, I don’t want to marry you or anything,” she began. “I just like being able to bounce ideas off you and talk to you. I feel like when I leave town, we probably won’t ever talk like this again. I mean, unless I come back. But I don’t know when that would be. There are other places for me to go and annoy a bunch of shifters. But this is the first place that I found a friend who wanted to help.”
Zach smiled. “You sure you don’t want to marry me? It could be a whole big thing and I am the only unmarried KOP at my station. It would probably do me good to settle down with a pretty lady.”
“Oh, you think I’m pretty, huh?” This was fine. They were bantering like normal again. She breathed a sigh of relief internally.
“Well, you are very pretty. Probably why you’ve had so much luck. I bet if you were a little uglier, you wouldn’t be getting anywhere.”
“So the secret to being a good reporter is to be pretty? Wow, I never knew. I thought it was hard work and diligent investigating. But nope. Just be pretty. Maybe I should invest in more makeup or oh, even hire professional hair and makeup people. How much better of a reporter would I be then?”
Zach laughed. “Come on. The amount of time it would take to sit in hair and makeup would ruin everything. You wouldn’t have as much time to go out and get shit done.”
She sighed. “Oh well, guess I’ll have to settle for this level of pretty then. But oh, what could have been.”
They dissolved into laughter. She straightened up. “Now that we’ve established that I’m going to just be a pretty good reporter, we should talk about what I’m going to report.”
“Right. Over dinner?”
“Yeah, that would be fine.”
They set up the plates while chitchatting about her next story. She needed to write something for the blog soon or she was going to lose momentum. The site was still getting mad traffic, but it would only be so long before people got bored and found some other conspiracy to talk about. Maybe someone who was trying to poach her story.
“What do you mean?” Zach asked as they ate.
“Other bloggers have seen how popular the story is. We’ve gotten a ton of pingbacks and commentaries on our story.”
“People writing stories about their opinion, right?”
“Exactly. They just say if they think I’m telling the truth or not.”
“So far what’s the verdict?”
“Cautiously optimistic?” Tally shrugged. “It’s kind of all over the place. Some people flat-out believe me and a few have written tear-downs of me and our blog. Now we’re starting to get shifters chiming in though and while a mixed bag, it’s going to bring more eyes to my story.”
“Any press is good press,” Zach said. “But have you thought about how this is affecting shifters? I mean if the story gets really big. If it turns out to all be true. That there is a big shifter conspiracy. What do you hope will happen?”
“I can’t really say. That’s not my domain. I uncover the truth and set it free. I don’t make laws or tell people how to react.”
“Right, but what do you hope happens? What do you want to come of all of this?”
“I want to make everyone safer.”
He snorted. “That’s a non-answer if I ever heard one.”
“Not really,” she bristled. “I want people to be safe. I hope that by getting this information out, it’ll help everyone be able to make better decisions in respect to their safety.”
“In relation to shifters?”
“In relation to everything,” she insisted.
“Come on, you’re not telling the truth. You don’t have to hold back with me. You aren’t going to hurt my feelings.”
“I’m not holding back. I haven’t thought about it farther than that.”
“Let’s do it now then.” He leaned back in his chair. “Let’s say you’re right. Shifters are going crazy and attacking people. We know that much is true. We have reports of it happening. But let’s say it’s a widespread problem. These shifters aren’t mentally ill people, just normal everyday people. So what happens after everyone finds out this can happen?”
“Hold on.” Something was forming in her mind. His words just set off a chain of dominoes. “Mentally ill. What if they’re mentally ill? Not in their right mind. I mean, what happens to a shifter who’s mentally ill? I’ve never heard of them having something like schizophrenia or anything similar.”
“Yolanda wasn’t crazy. She didn’t have any mental disturbance. This attack came out o
f nowhere.”
“Her human wasn’t. I’m talking about the animal.”
Zach leaned back into the table, letting his chair hit the floor hard. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that happening before.”
“But maybe that’s it. Mental illnesses and psychotic breaks can happen later in life and come out of nowhere. It happens with humans all the time. Maybe that’s what is happening with these animals.”
“We need to look this up. Check to see if it happens in the animal kingdom. I’ll see if I can find anything about shifter animals having problems.”
They sat in silence, both poring over Google results on their phone. Eventually, Tally looked up. “Whoa, it’s been twenty minutes.”
Zach looked up and rubbed his eyes. “Time to take a break from the screen. What’d you find?”
“Animals can in fact get mental illnesses. Obviously, we aren’t too sure about wild animals, but captive animals like dogs, cats, horses, birds, primates, elephants, and such do get stuff like anxiety, depression, and PTSD. But I’ve seen nothing about more psychotic illnesses. The closest is that some animals in captivity have been known to self-mutilate.”
He nodded. “That makes sense. I know a buddy had to put his dog on Prozac ‘cause it was tearing up his house while he was out for work. Didn’t make the connection that it was a mental illness. I thought it was like a tranquilizer.”
“Yup. What about you?”
“Nothing scientific. But that makes sense. Shifters don’t really let humans study them. We barely know how the magic compelling works. I would expect some of their animals to get illnesses though. It just makes sense. While we have a lot of special traits that set us apart from humans, we aren’t really all that different on some levels. I mean, we can mate together. That means we have to have significant similarities.”
“Yeah.” She shook her head. “We need to talk to a scientist. Someone that would know about this kind of thing.”
“There aren’t any big colleges or universities around here,” he told her. “If you want like a big-time professional, you’re going to have to go to a bigger city or at least a more populated area.”
“Like what’s closest?”
He pursed his lips and looked toward the ceiling as he thought. “I guess the one that’s about three hours away.”
“Road trip?” she suggested.
“Not a chance. I don’t have another off day until a week from now. I don’t think you’d want to wait that long.”
“No,” she said glumly. She’d been doing this alone for a few weeks. It would have been fun to have a buddy to do the trip with for once. “I’ll email the professors at the university who I think might be able to help in the morning.”
“I’m going to talk to some of the old-timers around town. My boss seems like the best bet for getting any new info.”
“The chief? Isn’t he like fifty? You need some really old-timers.”
“Like the KOPs in Abbott?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Damn. I forgot that you guys age slower. Those guys looked younger than me.”
He laughed. “Most of them are very, very much older than you. Much older than your grandparents even.”
“So how old are you?”
“How old do I look?”
“I would say early thirties, late twenties maybe. But since you’re a shifter, you could really be in your hundreds.”
“I’m fifty-three.”
“That’s not too old.” Her mind filled in the rest of the sentence: to date. Damn. While she knew that he was a bad plan, her mind was still very attracted to him. She was going to have to work harder to keep her mind professional and on task, because there was still so much for her to do in town, and she didn’t want to ruin it all for a little crush.
Chapter Seventeen
Zach had a much easier time getting to work on time. The guys gave him shit again, but it was because he was working in the afternoon. Not because Tally was sleeping at his place. He was going to offer to let her sleep at his place the rest of her stay though. She had to be out of the bed and breakfast the next morning and if she wanted to stay, there weren’t many great options. His place was nice and it was free. Win-win in his opinion. It didn’t go unnoticed by his animal that he’d have her close by and be able to wake up and go to bed under the same roof as her every day. Also a win.
“Did you see the reports from last night’s attack?” Beau asked when he came back from a quick call.
“Haven’t looked at any yet. I was catching up on my paperwork. Should I be looking at one in particular?”
“The one about the attack on a human. I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it already. Too busy with your lady friend to watch the news.”
He got up and started sifting through the reports to find the one in question. It wasn’t hard to find since they color-coded things. Rhett’s wife had set up the system and it was so much better than what they had before. Other shifter stations were already copying it too. He was glad because if he’d had to search for this one long, he would have lost it.
It was a quick skim. “There’s nothing here? Just a summary from the human. Have they not found the shifter yet?”
“We have, but he insists that it wasn’t him and he has an alibi.”
Zach looked at the report again. “Are we assuming it’s a local?”
“That’s where we looked first of course. There’s probably only one buffalo shifter for a hundred miles. Maybe even on the entire coast. Rhett’s looking into it right now.”
“If we don’t know who the shifter is why is this big news?”
“The way the human described it. Look at what happened before the attack and how he described the shifter. Wild, out of control. Never even saw the thing shift back. He was only able to escape because another shifter came along and helped him out.”
“So it could be an out-of-town issue. Maybe these guys were in town and they were having a fight. The human doesn’t want to admit what was going on, so he lied.”
“The shifter who intervened isn’t a bad guy though. He’s been in town for years and never had any problems. I only know the guy because he came to a community outreach thing we did some years back.”
Zach nodded. “Fine. So that’s out. So it was a buffalo shifter. That should make this easy to track.”
“Unless it’s an underground shifter.”
“Shit. And of course this has to happen while we have a human reporter in town who wants to nail shifters for being dangerous.”
Beau nodded. “My thoughts exactly. You think she’s going to run with this and see it for what it might be?”
“Maybe. Probably.” He ran his hand over his hair. “Fuck! She was getting ready to leave town too. She’s going to be emailing professors today. If we’re lucky, she won’t even see it. Maybe she’ll keep up with her original plan.”
“Professors?”
Zach filled him in on Tally’s theory about crazy shifters.
“Wow. That actually makes sense.”
“Yeah.” Zach studied his cousin. “You know something, don’t you? Beau, is she onto something here?”
Beau bit his lip and looked down. “I can’t really say much but...I mean, I can’t confirm anything. I could get us killed for even talking about this. Maybe steer her in another direction?”
Zach’s blood ran cold. “I won’t be able to. She knows this is a good lead. It’s her only lead really. The Lionheart story hit a dead-end. This fired her up. It sounded like a long shot to me, but it was better than her going back to Abbott.”
“Have you tried using magic to compel her?”
“They tried in Abbott but there was no effect. I’m really bad at it so it isn’t even worth trying.”
“Rhett?”
That was not what Zach wanted to do at all. The level of magic that Rhett could do might turn Tally’s brain to mush. He had protected his own mate from having it done to her. Though, if Tally was getting close to th
e truth, there was a chance that the Abbott shifters, or someone even worse, would do it to her anyway. Those kinds of shifters didn’t care about humans. Rhett had driven a human crazy and that had been the end of it for him. He’d never wanted to use magic on another human again. Zach couldn’t even imagine asking him to do it to Tally.
And he didn’t want that to happen to her. He wanted to keep her safe. His animal wouldn’t let it happen anyway. “Out of the question. Rhett wouldn’t go for it.”
“Wouldn’t go for what?” Rhett asked, coming from his office.
“We have a potential issue with our intrepid reporter,” Beau told him. “She’s looking into something that is going to get her killed. The best way to save her is to make her forget. I think so anyway. The low level that the Abbott dragons tried didn’t work. I think we need to go deeper before someone else gets wind of this and does it themselves.”
“I’m not going to wipe her mind.”
“What if Magnus comes and tries to do it? Are we going to be at war with the dragons again? We barely got out of that last time,” Beau pointed out.
Magnus wasn’t an Abbott Keeper, but he was part of the team. He was their heavy. Their closer. They only called him in when things weren’t going their way and they needed someone who could make a difference. He was very good at what he did and very dangerous. He was not someone Zach wanted anywhere near Lake Magnolia right now.
“This is different,” Rhett said. “Tally might not be able to be wiped. And Magnus isn’t even in town.”
“Is he still investigating on his own?” Zach asked.
“Yup. I’ve talked to him a few times actually. Nothing big, but I don’t think he’s coming back anytime soon and he for sure isn’t going to try to melt any human’s mind. The dragons aren’t any better at it than I am. In fact, they’re less skilled than me. If she was able to resist them once, she can do it again. Though if she’s close to getting her cover blown, it might be smart to bring her in and let me get a look at her.”
