He leaned in, kissed her cheek, and beamed at her, though she caught the flash of sadness in his eyes. Dylan’s death had been just as hard on him. They’d been best friends since childhood.
“Thanks for your help,” she said.
“About that,” he said, his face growing serious. “I know your first class doesn’t start for quite a few hours. I could use your help with something first.” He scrubbed a massive hand across his goateed chin.
A bad sign.
Premonition tightened the skin on her face. “What’s happened?”
“Come to my office and I’ll show you.” The elevator doors opened at that moment and he ducked his large dreadlocked head to enter the now seemingly small car.
After spilling her early evening coffee all over her pajamas, getting mud all over her nice, new slacks, and embarrassing herself with the handbag incident, how much worse could the night get?
She was torn. She didn’t feel nearly as prepared for giving her first lesson as she should, which is why she’d come in early in the first place. But it was Oberon asking and she did owe him.
Kitt sighed. “All right, but only a couple hours.”
“Sure,” he said and swiped an ID card across a panel, then hit one of the red buttons on the bottom row under the Staff Only sign.
The elevator descended. Most of NYAPS was underground. It helped to accommodate the more nocturnal of the student body. The buildings had been a secret Aeternus stronghold before the CHaPR Treaty, but now it was used as a center for knowledge for both humans and parahumans.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” she said as they descended.
“I’m amazed you didn’t hear about it on the news,” he said, not looking at her. “Or at least run into it on the way in.”
“Actually I did see quite a crowd when I arrived, so I used the side entrance to avoid them.”
He looked down at her. “There’s been a murder here on campus.”
“Oh no, you don’t, Oberon,” Kitt said, shaking her head. “I’m not the chief medical examiner anymore.”
“I really need your help. It will only take a couple of hours. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t really important.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and bent his large head closer. “Please.”
Damn him. How could she resist now? He’d used the P word. Something he didn’t do very often.
The elevator came to a stop and opened onto a lounge with worn stuffed chairs, low tables, and a pot of imitation gruel dressed as coffee warming on the counter. Totally functional, but not exactly welcoming. A few security-guard types sat around talking, drinking coffee or reading the paper.
“Hey, Captain,” the guard behind the security desk said.
“Tom,” Oberon replied and placed his right palm against the hand-shaped panel on the wall. There was a snick, a beep, and then the red-lit panel turned green.
“Facimorphic test,” he said and indicated she step forward. “Anyone who comes into this office must do it.”
Kitt had undergone the test many times before; it was standard security in most government institutions. As always, she jumped when the needle pricked her palm.
The guard nodded to them as Oberon opened the door marked Chief of Security. Inside was fairly typical and innocuous—not exactly Oberon’s style. He moved behind his desk and grinned as he gripped the edge. Something buzzed and a portion of the wall slid aside, revealing a circular stairwell.
“Come on,” he said. “This way.”
They descended into an open-plan modern office surrounded by glassed offices and meeting rooms. The place was all leather, chrome, and glass; quite a stark contrast to the lounge upstairs.
“Welcome to the Bunker,” Oberon said, shrugging off his coat as he entered and hung it on a coatrack.
The carpet muffled his heavy shit-kicker boots. He looked like a bouncer at a biker strip club with his Iron Maiden heavy metal T-shirt, black jeans, and thick black stainless-steel-studded belt with a large Harley-Davidson buckle. The tribal swirls and points of his scarification were clearly visible on his bare arms.
“Captain, your hot chocolate.” The friendly face of Antonio Geraldi beamed at Kitt as he handed Oberon a tall takeout cup. “With extra marshmallows—just the way you like it.”
It looked tiny in Oberon’s massive ham fist. “Thanks.”
The yellow parahuman-friendly lights glowed off Tones’s shaven head as he came over and gave Kitt a hug. She hadn’t seen him since he’d worked with Oberon and Dylan at the Violent Crimes Unit.
“How are you, Tones?” Kitt said. “And is that a cinnamon latte I smell?”
Tones grinned. “I knew you were coming in today and picked up your favorite.”
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you remembered. I see you’re as thoughtful as always,” she said, surprised.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Tones said and tucked in his chin, dropping his voice. “Someday you’ll make some lucky female a good wife, Tones.”
His impression of Oberon was so spot on she almost snorted her latte all over his Converse All Stars.
Oberon leaned his bulk against the nearby table. “Not if I strangle you first.”
The Aeternus male, Tones, was dressed in his usual attire: a pair of designer jeans and a mustard yellow T-shirt bearing the message kittens are people too. For as long as she’d known him, he’d worn shirts with slogans espousing the ideas of a card-carrying member of Parahumans Against Animal Abuse. She was so glad he was working here, too. It certainly made starting the new job a little less daunting knowing friends were around.
A woman with Nordic blond hair stepped forward. Though she looked familiar, Kitt just couldn’t place where they’d met before. She wore a dark gray Prada suit over a white T-shirt with a pair of extra-dark sunglasses perched atop her head, which left her deep emerald green eyes visible. On any other woman the outfit may have looked a little pretentious, but on her it just looked . . . lethally professional.
“Kitt, this is Antoinette Petrescu,” Oberon said.
The hand Kitt extended stilled, then shook, and she could feel her smile sliding away before she could catch herself. She greeted the newcomer with a rather weak, “Hello.”
This was the woman responsible for her brother’s death, albeit indirectly. Still, the shock of meeting Antoinette face-to-face for the first time since Dylan’s murder was not something she had yet prepared herself for. She took a deep breath and, before she dropped it, placed her coffee cup on a nearby table. This was just enough time to pull herself back together.
“Oberon didn’t tell you, did he?” the female Aeternus said.
“No, he didn’t.” Kitt shot Oberon a narrowed glare. “I’m sorry—it’s just the shock. I wasn’t expecting to meet . . .”
“I understand,” Antoinette said with an awkward little smile.
Oberon’s eyes rose to look over Kitt’s shoulder and his brow creased into a deep frown.
Kitt sensed him long before she saw him. Her whole world bottomed out, taking all the air in the room with it. Her heart leapt into her throat and began beating double time, filling her ears with its racing boom-tha-boomp rhythm. She’d last seen him just over eighteen years ago. She closed her eyes, still not daring to look at him.
“Raven.” It came out in a hushed expelling of breath, as if even her voice was afraid to give him form.
As she turned, she opened her eyes. And there he was—just as she remembered—dangerous in every sense of the word. Her pulse quickened, just like it had in the old days.
He leaned against the edge of a desk, his crossed arms stretching the sleeves of a black T-shirt over his flexed biceps and a scar that sliced through his right eyebrow and continued under his eye only enhancing his lethal charm. He hadn’t changed a bit—at least not physically. The same devastating sense of danger that had drawn her to him all those years ago was still there.
“Hello, Kitten,” he said, his dark-rimmed pale blue irises ripping through eight
een years of carefully constructed barriers to lay bare her soul again.
She swallowed, trying to dislodge the lump that formed in her chest and stopped her breath. She spun on Oberon—right now, she could not claim him as her friend. No—a friend would’ve told her that her ex-lover had returned.
Oberon self-consciously rubbed his chin and jaw and avoided meeting Kitt’s eyes. “You were supposed to stay out of sight,” he said to Raven.
This night was deteriorating faster than a snowman in the sun. “You could’ve said something,” she whispered.
“I asked him not to,” Raven said. “Not until you were settled in here. But when I heard your voice, I just couldn’t stay away, Kitten.”
“You have no right to call me that anymore.” It sounded a lot calmer than she felt. “What are you doing here?”
“I gave him a job,” Oberon said.
“You did what?” she said, incredulous.
The ursian just shrugged. She had the sudden need to be as far from Oberon and her ex-lover as possible. “What did you need me to do?”
“I’d like you to go with Antoinette to the medical examiner’s office and find out what’s going on. You know what to look for—I need to know if this body is the same as the last one.”
“Shit, Oberon, I resigned from there a couple of weeks ago. They’re not going to just let me walk in and look at a body.” Kitt could sense Raven’s eyes on her. Her skin heated.
“I’m trying to find out whether Tez is on tonight or not, but she’s not taking my calls.” Oberon’s frown deepened. “If anyone asks, say you’re there to pick up some stuff you left behind.” Her late brother’s best friend took a huge swig from his cup.
“Why don’t we just wait for the report to be released?” Antoinette asked.
Dylan had said she was quick, and Kitt could see why he’d admired her.
“Firstly, Kitt performed the autopsy on the first victim and knows the case, and secondly”—Oberon’s fists clenched—“that fucking little prick, Neil Roberts, has frozen me out, and if the head of the Violent Crimes Unit is interested, then there’s something big going down and I want to know what it is.”
Kitt was well versed on what Oberon thought of his ex-boss. She’d heard it so many times she could almost recite it word for word from memory.
Suddenly the room spun, her legs trembled, and she actually felt the blood drain from her face, leaving a pricking sensation in its wake. She felt nauseous and her temples pounded. She’d tried to keep Raven from her thoughts, especially since he’d brought the twins back to mind, but now here he was, standing right in front of her in living color and all she could think of was getting out of there.
“Are you okay?” Antoinette asked, reaching out for her.
Kitt felt disoriented and roughly shook off the female’s suffocating touch, pushing away the overly attentive hands. She needed air—
A large dog raced forward, growling and snapping. Kitt dropped to a crouch, her inner cat coming out to protect her. Before she could stop herself, she hissed at the animal and the change prickled along her limbs as white and silver fur sprung through the pores of her skin.
As the animal leapt, a black blur solidified, pushing her out of the way of the snapping jaws and took the full brunt of the attack. The malamute’s snarling maw clamped down on Raven’s forearm and the dog shook its head from side to side, worrying the flesh. Kitt heard teeth scrape on bone a split second before the dog’s sharp canine incisors opened an artery in Raven’s wrist and fresh hot blood splashed her face.
Chapter 3 - Dead Man Running
“Cerberus, NO!” Antoinette yelled and rushed forward.
“Raven—” Kitt’s inner cat was just as unsettled as her human side, but she was aware enough to know not to attack the dog. She reversed the change and returned to full human form.
The animal let go the moment Antoinette grabbed the him.
“It’s all right, boy,” she said in a soft, calming tone as she rubbed and ruffled the dog’s thick pelt to comfort him. “I’m sorry, he’s not usually this jumpy.”
The smell of fresh blood overpowered everything else and the doctor in Kitt took over, squashing all feelings of insecurity, fear, and doubt. Raven’s right arm was a jagged and raw wound, blood spurting with every beat of his heart. It would heal as long as he didn’t bleed out first.
“Get me a towel or a clean cloth,” she ordered to no one in particular.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Raven said as she pressed torn skin and muscle together.
“Liar,” she mumbled as his blood welled between her fingers.
He chuckled, and then hissed as she applied more pressure. “He was only reacting to your distress, you know.”
“I know.” Kitt glanced at the dog as she took a kitchen towel from Tones.
The animal’s head hung low with ears forward and big sad blue eyes looking between them and Antoinette. He’d only been protecting his mistress.
She just had to slow the blood loss long enough to let the wound heal over and seal. While she stood there pressing the makeshift bandage over the shredded flesh, she kept her head down and on her task. If she looked up into those eyes—Raven’s eyes—she’d be undone.
“I was sorry to hear about Dylan,” he said in a whisper.
She nodded, still not daring to look at him.
“Has your father let you return home?” he asked just as softly so no one else could hear, though she could feel their eyes on her. “Have you seen them yet?”
His free hand wiped the blood from her cheek with another towel and she finally raised her face to him, then shook her head again.
“They look so much like you.” His eyes locked on her and he placed the cloth over her shoulder before tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Same coloring, same features”—the pad of his thumb brushed her lower lip—“same mouth.”
Her lip tingled. She could almost smell the pine needles and the loamy scent of the forest floor where they used to make love many years ago. When had his face gotten so dangerously close?
“Stop that,” she hissed and pulled back. To distract herself, she lifted the edge of the cloth on his arm.
The flow had stopped and she unwrapped the kitchen towel, carefully twisting his arm one way then the other, wiping away the blood. The wound knitted nicely. Finally, she let his arm drop and stepped away, throwing the ruined cloth in a trash can.
“You should be fine now,” she said with her back to him.
“I told you it was worse than it looked,” he said.
“I’m sorry Kitt,” Oberon said. “I shouldn’t have asked you down here. It was a bad idea. Tones and Antoinette can go.”
Kitt shook her head. “No, I’ll go.” At least at the M.E.’s office she knew what she was doing, and for the moment she felt that a sense of the familiar would be good.
“Thank you,” Oberon said and nodded at the Aeternus female.
Antoinette stood. “Cerberus, stay with Tones.”
The still-shaken animal padded over to lie at the computer tech’s feet and dropped his head onto his front paws, his soulful eyes still begging an apology. Kitt almost felt sorry for the big malamute mutt.
Kitt chanced a glance at Raven. His hangdog expression matched Antoinette’s animal companion. Appropriate, really. She opened her mouth to say she would talk to him later but closed it again.
Not yet.
She needed a little more time. Maybe a trip to the parahuman morgue might give her more time to think about what she wanted to say to him.
As she followed Antoinette to the door, Kitt stopped near Oberon and looked up. “I’ll talk with you later,” she said in a calm, controlled voice, once again reining in those rampant emotions.
Oberon had the good grace to at least look sheepish, rather difficult for a seven-foot ursian.
Antoinette glanced at the felian and could tell in the illumination of the green dash lights that Kitt’s mood was heavy.
<
br /> After a few more minutes of silence, Antoinette turned to Kitt. “Are you okay?”
Kitt closed her eyes and sighed. “This is just not the day I’d imagined when I got up this evening.”
“I guess the last thing you expected tonight was to get stuck with the woman responsible for your brother’s death,” she said.
Kitt turned to look at Antoinette, her expression horrified. “I’m so sorry for the way I greeted you. Please, I don’t blame you for Dylan’s death, it’s just you remind me that he’s gone, not why he’s gone. If I’d known we were going to meet, I’d just have been more prepared.”
“Oberon’s an insensitive son-of-a-bitch sometimes.” Antoinette glanced at her, caught the wounded look on Kitt’s face, and knew she’d said something wrong. “No disrespect meant. Hell, he’s the first person I’d choose to have my back in a fight.”
The felian relaxed and smiled. Kitt’s resemblance to her brother was uncanny, but the smile made it more so.
“Dylan was a good agent and pretty decent male too,” Antoinette said. “I liked him a lot.”
Kitt’s smile deepened. “He admired you too.”
“Really?” Antoinette glanced from the road to Kitt and back again. “He didn’t give much away.”
“He told me you were one of the sharpest humans he’d ever met, but maybe a little pigheaded and quick-tempered for your own good.”
“Pigheaded, hey?” Antoinette smiled, remembering how professional he’d been that night just a few short months ago. “Well, I guess he pretty much had me pegged.”
After a couple of minutes of silence, Antoinette bit her lip and turned to Kitt again. “Look, I have a brother and can only imagine what you must be going through. I saw Dylan . . . after . . . you know . . . and just wanted to tell you it would’ve been quick, he wouldn’t have suffered. Dante was only interested in prolonging my pain and your brother just happened to be in the way.”
“Oberon told me.” Kitt looked down at her hands. “But thanks for saying so.”
Death’s Sweet Embrace Page 2
