Bear Meets Girl

by Catherine Vale

  “I’m sending the essence of myself into her things in order to get the signature of her spirit, and get a bit more of a handle on her,” Cole explained, a hint of exasperation in his tone.

  Angela frowned. “I’ve never heard of a mage doing something like that before. Or at least not the way you’re doing it.”

  Cole smirked a little. “That’s because most mages require spells or incantations in order to do stuff like this, aside from basic conjuring of the elements and things like that,” he said. “I’m a little… different.”

  I’ll say, she said as she turned back to her computer. Plugging her headphones in, she replayed the video footage of the interview, looking over the memory Lieutenant Novak had pulled from Darian’s mind to see if there was anything she’d missed. She was reviewing it for the third time when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

  Pulling off her headphones, she twisted around in her seat to glare up at Cole. “Do you mind?”

  Unperturbed, he gestured at the screen. “Mind if you turn the sound on so I can watch it with you?”

  Nodding, Angela unplugged the headphones and replayed the video. Cole’s brow furrowed as he watched it the whole way through, and then he grabbed the mouse to pause it. “Any idea exactly when this happened?” he asked, pointing to the memory that had been playing on the screen.

  Frowning, Angela shuffled through the notes Novak had left on her desk. “It says here that this happened at 11:35pm.”

  Cole scowled. “That’s basically the same time that fight broke out in the bar.”

  Angela’s brows lifted. “So?”

  Cursing, he jumped out of his chair and looked around for a uniform. When one unlucky enough to be passing through the bullpen drew close enough, he grabbed the man’s collar and drew him close. “Where are the two drunks who were hauled in here for brawling at the Crazy Horse earlier tonight?”

  The uniform’s eyes widened, and he glanced over at Angela. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Let him go,” Angela snapped, grabbing Cole’s arm and pulling him away from the uniform. She sent an apologetic look to the man before he hurried off, then turned her glare towards Cole. “If you want information like that, ask it and I’ll retrieve it for you. But first, you have to tell me why.”

  Cole raked her with a look of disbelief. “Don’t you think it’s a little too coincidental that those two broke out into a fight at the same time your partner was taken?”

  Dread coiled like a leaden rope in Angela’s stomach. “Are you saying that you think they were a decoy? To distract us while they took Raina?” When he said nothing, she picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. “Hey. What happened to the two perps I had brought in earlier tonight? The vampire and the werewolf who were brawling at Crazy Horse?”

  “Hang on a sec.” She heard keys tapping at the other end, followed by the clearing of a throat. “Looks like they were released about an hour ago. They both decided not to press charges against each other, so we had to let them go.”

  Fuck. “Thanks,” she muttered, then let the phone drop back in the cradle.

  Cole’s gaze looked like it could cut steel as they settled on her. “We need to find those two. Now.”

  * * *

  They took Cole’s Camaro up to an apartment complex in Tenderloin, where the database told her the shifter kept a small studio and received his mail. Marcus Lopez, the file had read when Angela had pulled him up. He was affiliated with no pack that anyone knew, and largely kept to himself as far as she could see, listing himself as ‘self-employed’ on his taxes for the last ten years. According to his tax returns he worked from home as a programmer, but if that was even partially true she would eat her boots.

  “What kind of side business do you think Marcus is running?” she asked as Cole zipped through non-existent traffic – not a surprise considering it was past 3:00am now. She asked the question more to try and cut the tension in the air than because she wanted Cole’s opinion – despite the nice interior and cushy leather seats, every muscle in her body was tense from being in such close proximity to Cole, and she could tell he was the same by the set of his jaw and shoulders.

  “Not totally sure.” Cole shrugged as he turned a corner, passing Market Street with its rows of sidewalk tables. During the day they would be filled with people playing chess; at night you could find the occasional bum sleeping in one of the chairs, or on the tables themselves until they were chased away by some beat cop. “But if I had to guess I’d say he’s probably into some kind of gambling, or racketeering.”

  Angela raised a brow. “You don’t think drugs or any other kind of contraband?”

  Cole shook his head. “He didn’t strike me as the type based on what I’ve seen… but then again I haven’t seen much.” He downshifted as they came to a stoplight. “That’s why I like to reserve judgment.”

  Angela nodded, settling back into her seat. She’d figured the same; the shifter hadn’t struck her as the type to deal contraband, though she wouldn’t have put it past the vampire. They would be visiting him as well if they couldn’t get what they needed to know out of the shifter, but the fact of the matter was a lone shifter was an easier target than a vampire who was part of a coterie.

  Cole parked the Camaro on the street two blocks from the apartment building – the closest spot they could find even at this hour – and they hoofed it the rest of the way there. It was close enough to autumn that their breaths misted lightly in front of them, but the cool felt nice on Angela’s face. Shifters were more muscular than the average human, especially the females in comparison, and as a result they had higher body temperatures so Angela was rarely bothered by the cold.

  Still, a treacherous little voice whispered at the back of her mind as she glanced at Cole out of the corner of her eye, I bet he would be nice to snuggle up against and keep warm with on a cold night in the dead of winter.

  Snorting, she shook her head. Yeah, right. He didn’t exactly look like the cuddling type, especially considering how hard he was working on keeping the distance between them, despite the instant attraction between them. He was probably a love-‘em-and-leave-‘em kinda guy… which she supposed made a hell of a lot of sense since he was a hybrid, and neither mage nor shifter would want to settle down with him.

  The thought made her unexpectedly sad, and her heart ached as she considered, for the first time, what life must have been like for him as a boy, growing up straddling the line between two different races that had a long history of warfare between each other.

  “What’s that look for?” Cole frowned down at her. They had stopped outside the building, a shabby structure that had probably once been chic in its heyday, but now sported chips and cracks in the carved limestone as well as spots in the ironwork curling around the balconies and edges jutting out from the building

  “Nothing.” Angela’s ears reddened as she turned away from him, knowing that he wouldn’t take kindly to any pity she showed him. He would probably spit in her face if she even suggested that she felt sorry for him. “I’m just tired, that’s all. Let’s get this over with.”

  She hopped up the stairs and pulled out her uni-key – a spelled key issued to most Protectors that granted entry to most dwellings. Because a Protector’s shield didn’t carry the same weight as a police badge amongst human circles, it was often more trouble than it was worth to try and gain entry by normal channels, especially if they were trying to be stealthy by not alerting the supernatural they were trying to see. So Protectors were given uni-keys, each with a unique signature on them that could tell the main database back at the precinct where the key was used, and at what time when it was scanned, so that Protectors were held accountable and couldn’t just use them willy-nilly.

  “Don’t.” Cole laid a big hand over her wrist just as she was about to fit the key into the brass lock on the door. Angela scowled up at him, but though his expression was stern, it was not unkind. “Due to the nature of our m
ission it’s best that you don’t leave a record. Let me.”

  Angela hesitated for a moment, then stepped back with a nod to let him do it. She watched as he laid his hand on the doorknob, then closed his eyes and muttered some kind of short incantation under his breath. The lock glowed briefly, then popped open with a quiet click.

  Cole opened the door, then stood back and gestured for her to go inside. “After you.”

  Angela stepped inside a lobby that had seen better days, with mirrored walls that were chipped around the edges and black and white tiling that was yellowed with age and in bad need of replacement, or at the very least a cleaning and a wax. She eyed the mud-brown elevator shaft standing off to the left with distrust, then opted for the carpeted stairs that zigzagged up the ten flights.

  She couldn’t even hear Cole behind her as she trotted up to the fifth floor – he was that quiet – but she could feel his hot stare on her ass, and she blushed, thankful he couldn’t see her face. A wicked part of her wanted to turn around and wink at him, or do something to throw him off, and that was a testament to just how much havoc he was wreaking on her hormones because that was so wildly inappropriate considering the situation they were in.

  Get a grip, girl. Your partner’s in mortal danger right now. Kill the libido switch, stat.

  Getting off the staircase provided some relief, since Cole’s eyes now had the chance to stare at something other than her ass. She let his eyes wander along the yellowed walls and the ratty, navy blue carpeting beneath their feet as she led him over to apartment 503, and tried not to wrinkle her nose at the faint stench of weed, urine and sweat that had soaked into the very fabric of the building – nothing a human would smell, but unfortunately her sensitive nose picked up on it right away.

  “Hang on,” he said as she lifted her hand to press the buzzer. He muttered an incantation, and suddenly his eyes, normally a beautiful violet color, blazed a bright, unearthly blue, startling the scowl straight off her face and making her forget the protest she’d been about to snap at him for being stopped a second time. His eyes scanned the walls back and forth for a few seconds, and then he blinked them, and the color faded away, back to his normal violet hue. “There’s no one in there.”

  “What?” She struggled to sound annoyed, but couldn’t quite manage to scrub the tinge of awe from her tone. “How do you know?”

  “Spirit signature spell.” Brushing past her, he laid a hand on the doorknob and muttered the same incantation from earlier to gain entrance. “It allows me to spot any living beings inside a building, and is much more reliable than simply tracking heat signatures.”

  “No kidding,” Angela mumbled as she followed Cole inside. “So it works on animals too?”

  He nodded. “Even plants,” he said as his eyes scanned the empty apartment. “All living organisms are powered by spiritual energy, even if they don’t all have souls.”

  Angela let that tidbit of information sink into her mind as she took in the sorry state of Marcus’s apartment. The smell of stale pizza and Chinese food assailed her nostrils immediately, layered over the smell of unwashed laundry, and the environment around her confirmed it, she noted as her eyes rapidly adjusted to the darkness. Boxes of takeout littered the kitchen counters, the living room sofa and table, and even the bedside table and dresser next to the bed shoved into the corner. The blinds of the sole double-paned window in the apartment, located above the bed on the far wall, were open, allowing the rays of the half moon full access in helping to illuminate the apartment, so neither Angela or Cole bothered turning on a light. No point in attracting extra attention, right?

  As she and Cole shuffled through the debris littering the surfaces of the studio and checked drawers and shelves for any useful clues, Angela’s mind kept churning back to the way Cole used his magic. Though she’d definitely seen Raina unlock doors with incantations before, she’d never seen her use a ‘spirit signature spell’ before. It made her wonder what else Cole had up his sleeve.

  “Just how old are you, exactly?” she asked as she flipped through a pile of magazines, mostly consisting of Sports Illustrated and Playboy. Men. Species to species, some things never changed.

  “Running somewhere on two-thousand years old,” Cole answered nonchalantly.

  “Two thousand?” she choked, the stack of magazines in her hands landing on the dirty coffee table with a loud, dusty thunk. She opened her mouth to say more, but Cole snatched up something off a table and held it up to the moonlight.

  “Tickets to a horse race down at Golden Gate Fields in Berkeley,” he crowed, his violet eyes glowing triumphantly. “These are the third ones I’ve found, and all different dates. I’ll bet you if we look around you’d find more, but my guesses are that he’s a regular at the races. Maybe even a bookie, taking bets on the side.”

  Angela’s eyes narrowed. “That reads right.” She pursed her lips. “But I doubt we’ll find him there right now.”

  Cole shook his head. “Not unless there are supernaturals running races down there after dark?”

  Angela shook her head as well. “No, not anymore. We have patrols that run regularly by that area now. They’re extra vigilant ever since that scandal a couple years back where vampires were running and betting on races between Fae creatures, and a human stumbled in on the scene.”

  A headache began throbbing at her temples at the reminder of that nightmare – they’d been cleaning up for months after that fuck up, and she doubted the Order’s PR department had slept at all during that time.

  “Why don’t you check in with patrol and see if there’s any suspicious activity down there,” Cole suggested. “If not, we’ll check out the track in the morning.”

  A quick phone call confirmed that there was no activity down by the track. Angela’s heart sank a little as she hung up the phone. “I don’t want to give up,” she said quietly, feeling like she was a huge failure already though she knew how stupid that was. No one expected her to find Raina this fast, and yet…

  Cole’s eyes softened, and he reached out to squeeze her shoulder. Heat flooded through her at the contact, but he didn’t pull away though he was sure to sense the change in her breathing. “We’re not giving up,” he said softly. “We’re just regrouping a little. You need your strength if you’re going to give it your all tomorrow in finding Raina.”

  Angela hesitated, guilt swamping her at the thought of turning in while Raina was still out there, alone and at the mercy of her brother, for God’s sake. “We could go after the vampire, she began.”

  Cole jerked his head sharply to the left, a loud and clear negative. “There’s no way we’re visiting a vampire’s coterie in the dead of night to shake him down for information. Not as you are now. We’d be better off going after him during daylight hours, if we still need him after we’re done with the shifter.”

  Angela bit her lip, wanting to argue, but having nothing good to say. The truth was that exhaustion was creeping in, slowing her thought process and making her far too edgy to proceed rationally, especially since this whole kidnapping thing had already taken an emotional toll on her anyway.

  “You’re right,” she finally said with a sigh, taking far too much comfort in the warmth seeping from his hand on her shoulder, and into her weary body. She moved toward the doorway, letting his hand slip from her shoulder before she gave into the desire to lean into his big, hard-looking body. “Let’s go home.”

  Racetrack tickets in hand, they returned to the Camaro, and she gave him directions to her apartment in the Mission District. “Sorry I’m so weak,” she muttered, leaning her head back against the seat as she gazed out the window. “I wish we could just keep going.”

  Cole laughed softly. “You’re not weak,” he said, reaching out and patting her hand. “You just don’t have thousands of years of endurance training that I do. Give yourself a couple centuries before you start beating yourself up. Then you might have a reason for it.”

  Silence descended upon them, more
comfortable than the last one, and Angela looked down at her hands, noting that Cole had elected to keep his there. Her heart began to beat a little faster, wondering if he intended to move things further along between them, and whether or not that was something she even wanted. She knew for sure that it was wrong for her to even be thinking about sex when her friend was in danger, but she couldn’t help it; it had been so long since she’d last run into a male she was attracted to that she almost didn’t remember what it had been like.

  Yeah, and the one time in forever that you do run into someone, he happens to be someone you can’t have. Go Angela.

  She sighed. Truthfully, there was no way she could have a lasting relationship with Cole; their lifestyles were just too different, with him being a nomad, and her having a highly committed career. But there was no denying the sexual attraction; she felt his pulse jump as well, and knew that even this small amount of skin contact was affecting him, too.

  Would it really be so wrong to pass up the chance to make love again? To feel the heat of a lover’s caress, the sensation of skin gliding against skin, the sound of a male voice moaning her name…

  Cole cleared his throat, drawing her attention. “You know, you’ve really got to stop doing that.”

  Angela blinked up at him. He was sitting stiffly behind the wheel, his brows drawn together in consternation. “Doing what?”

  “Thinking… whatever it is that you’re thinking that’s making you so horny.” He turned to look at her, his violet gaze so full of heat that it scorched her even more with desire. “It’s hard to concentrate on traffic when all I can think about is getting you naked.”

  Angela swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry. “That’s gotta be the weirdest reprimand anyone’s ever given me.”

  Cole laughed as he pulled up to her building, but it was strained. “Maybe, but it’s true. I… it’s been too long since I… never mind.” He unlocked the passenger’s side door with the flick of a button. “I’ll call you in the morning.”