by Milly Taiden
The man’s face paled. “Oh, got it. Yeah, I’ll be up front watching for anything suspicious.” He turned and hurried away. That was weird.
Charli looked at Devin. “I’ll tell you later. Basically, he’s not a blood-and-guts kinda guy. Well, his own blood, anyway.”
Devin was so shocked by what Charli revealed, he forgot to keep walking. How could a shifter, part wild animal, not like blood and guts? What did the bear eat when shifted? Filet mignon, well done?
“Wow,” Russel said. “That goes against nature, man. Eating dead, bloody animals is up there with sex: you gotta have it or die.”
“We don’t die without sex,” Devin replied.
“Maybe you don’t,” Russel said, “but I sure as hell would. And I’m about to die soon, come to mention it. Need to get a new fleshlight.”
“Flashlight, you mean?” Devin asked. Charli covered her grin with her hand and walked past them.
“No,” Russel retorted. “A fleshlight.”
“What’s that?” Then Devin thought about the context the word “fleshlight” was used in. “On second thought, never mind. I don’t want to know.”
Russel laughed. “Aww, come on, man. I’ll get one for you too.” Charli busted out in laughter ahead of them. “What color you want?”
He shook his head. He’d google the meaning later. “No, you sex addict. I don’t want one.”
Russel slapped him on the arm. “Chicken.”
Devin raised a brow at the name-calling. He could play rough too. “Shove it, Mayer.”
“Yup,” Russel smiled, “that’s what you do with it.” In full belly guffaws, Charli fell against the wall and slapped it with her hand. He watched her grandiose display of amusement. How did she know about male sex toys, anyway?
With little more delay, the three entered the ME’s cold domain.
“Good morning, Agent Sonder.” A woman dressed in scrubs had just completed situating the wolf’s body as they entered.
“Hi, Dr. Williams. Thank you for helping us pull the animal so quickly,” Devin said as he stared at the monstrosity on the steel table before them.
“Not a problem, Agent. I’m curious to find out what disease or whatever this animal has that made it so . . . weird-looking.”
Devin gestured to his female companion. “Dr. Williams, this is Charli Avers. She’s our forensic veterinarian, you could say. She’s here to see what we’ve got.” Charli reached out to shake hands, but Dr. Williams raised her arms into the air, showing off her elbow-length gloves.
The woman smiled. “I’ll have to shake your hand later, Ms. Avers.”
“Please, call me Charli,” Devin’s coworker said.
The lady nodded toward a cabinet. “Well, Charli, everything you need is in the cabinet. Gloves and masks are underneath. Will you be digging in?”
Digging in? Devin’s stomach turned. Maybe he’d join Barry out front.
“Not right now. We’ll just do an external exam here. I will probably have the carcass taken to my clinic so it’s out of your way here. When is the senator scheduled?”
“I’ve been asked to hold off,” the examiner said.
“Why?” Devin asked. He wondered who had the authority to make that happen.
She held her arms up again. “I don’t know why, and was told I’d know when I needed to know.” Disgust rang in her voice. Seemed like someone pulled rank and she wasn’t pleased with it.
Charli asked, “Would it be possible to see the wounds inflicted on the senator? That may help with my part of the investigation.”
“Sure, come on over here.” Dr. Williams led Charli toward a bank of drawers where bodies were held until processed. Yeah, Devin didn’t need to see the senator again. Once was enough.
Russel grabbed his arm. “Do I want to see the body?”
He snorted. “If you do, don’t throw up on my shoes.”
Russel appeared to think about that. “Okay. I’m staying here. Don’t want puke breath when seeing my mate later.”
Devin almost laughed, thinking Russel probably wouldn’t get close enough for her to even notice. Instead, the two stared at the monster on the table. The back of the animal’s skull had been blown away. He’d never seen that before and wondered how that could happen.
The creature’s face had dark, thick growths completely covering it. Only the eyes and nose holes were free from the lumpy material. He reached out his hand to touch it, and the word stop rang in his ears, echoing across the tile- and metal-clad room.
Both women stared at him with warnings in their eyes. He snapped his hand back and cradled it against his chest as if bitten.
“It’s not a good idea to touch it with bare hands,” Charli said. “You never know what kind of microbes or germs are on the surface.” She turned to Dr. Williams. “Thank you for your help. I’ll suit up for external checking. Will you be here?”
“I’ll be in the other room. I have a lot of things to do before we’re overrun with feds and media wanting to know everything about this. Just so you know, I’m labeling this death as an animal attack. That’s all the press needs to know.”
Devin gave a nod. “Thank you, Dr. Williams.” The woman left and Charli headed to the supplies to suit up. Donning a mask, safety glasses, and long gloves, the vet approached the killer.
First thing she did was take a close look at the animal’s face. She thumped a finger against it, then a knuckle. “This covering is very dense and quite hard.” Her scalpel picked at an edge. “It’s also a part of the skin, not a growth like I first assumed. Interesting.”
Next she dug her fingers into the wolf’s fur, down his neck to the shoulder. “Both you guys put on a pair of gloves and feel this.” Devin looked at Russel, who shrugged then went to the cabinet. They came back gloved and ready for whatever. He hoped he wouldn’t end up vomiting. He really hated that.
“Here,” Charli said, “dig your fingers into the fur and tell me what you think.”
Devin slid his hand over the fur, then pushed his fingertips in. The coat was so thick, he couldn’t get down to the skin. “I’ve never felt anything so lush. The fur is jam-packed. I can’t even feel the skin.”
“Hey,” Russel said, “what’s this?” He lifted his hand from the fur and came out with a mashed silver bead between his fingers. “Holy shit, it’s a bullet. These fuckers are bulletproof.”
“That’s not possible,” Charli said. “Let me see that.” Russel handed over the projectile and she held it up to the light. After close scrutiny, she set it on the table in front of Devin. “Take some pictures of that and send them to Detective Gibbons. Then get her on the line for me, please.”
Devin glanced at Russel to see his reaction to calling his mate. The multishifter nodded, giving his permission. As he snapped pictures with his phone, Charli continued her inspection, feeling around the growth surrounding the legs, then higher.
“The muscles are much larger than what they should be for a wolf this size.”
“Larger, as in how?” he asked.
“As in, if Arnold Schwarzenegger were a wolf, he would look puny compared to this guy. That’s why it looks deformed. The muscular system is grossly overgrown.” Her hands slid around the body. “With this mass of body weight, its heart, lungs, and circulatory system all have to be larger, stronger to support it.”
“So basically,” Russel said, “we have a shifter on ’roids.”
“Big steroids,” she confirmed. Having reached the tail, Charli walked around the table and carefully adjusted the fractured skull in the light. After poking around, she frowned and her brows pulled down.
“What?” Devin asked.
She let out a breath behind her face mask. “It shouldn’t be surprising, yet it is. The bone thickness is much greater than it should be. But with the added muscle and fur density, it’s what’s needed to physically support the animal.” She shook her head.
“I’ve e-mailed the photos to Gibbons,” Devin said. “Are you ready to ta
lk to her?” Charli nodded but didn’t look at him. Her frown had been a permanent fixture for the past several minutes.
After a couple of rings, the female detective answered. “Where did this bullet come from, Sonder?”
“Good morning to you, Detective Gibbons.” He almost laughed at her excitement.
“Yeah, yeah. I already said that a few hours ago.” He heard the friendly banter in her voice. “Now, spill. Is this from the critter? Why isn’t it bloody? Did it kill the wolf—”
“Whoa,” Devin blurted. “I think we have some questions for you first. I’m putting you on speaker with Charli.” He laid his phone on the table between the wolf’s feet.
“Good morning, Tamara. This is Charli Avers. How are you this lovely morning?”
“Wonderful, as usual. Thanks for asking. Seems your morning is about as boring as mine.”
Charli laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re more bored than I am, with such a high-profile case going.”
Tamara snorted. “It’s already started. One of the big news stations from Seattle called wanting an exclusive. How can information possibly get out that quickly and that far? I barely have the file started.”
Charli laughed again. “That’s social media for ya.”
“Yeah, no kidding. So what have we got in these pictures Devin sent?”
Charli ran down the list of things they’d discovered about the strange shifter, including the bullet. “I was hoping your dad could take a look at it and tell us what he thinks before he goes to the lab over the weekend.”
“I’ll send these to him, but I can give you some insight also. I’ve done a lot of work with him when I’m not on call,” Tamara said.
“Anything is greatly appreciated.” Charli straightened, then reached for the projectile.
“It looks like a normal bullet from a .22 handgun, which our victim had on his person at the scene. The front isn’t damaged like those that hit solid material, but the sides are crumpled as if impacting something.”
Charli nodded. “So how can a bullet have characteristics of both impact and nonimpact?”
“I’ve actually seen this recreated in the lab. Usually the gun is fired at something like gelatin or tofu, where it impacts softly, but stops with enough force that the back end presses against the front, making the material buckle and overlap like this.” Silence came over the line. Devin was about to ask if she was still there when her voice flowed out again.
“Going off what you described, Charli, it appears we have a bullet-resistant animal. Maybe even bulletproof.”
Russel joined in the conversation after being unusually quiet. “What’s the difference between bullet resistant and bulletproof?”
Devin heard a tiny gasp from Detective Gibbons and a second of silence. He wondered if the icy detective was affected more by her mate than she led everyone to believe. His fellow agent had himself a mind game with his mate, and Devin questioned who’d break first. He hoped he was there to see it.
Gibbons cleared her throat. “One material no bullet can get through, and the other stops lower calibers or lower speeds, but not all bullets. Very few materials are totally resistant. And nothing in nature is that strong, that I know of.
“If the animal has this type of protection, then it’s something that could rewrite ballistic physics. My dad would absolutely fall over himself to see this fur.”
“I’m sure a lot of scientists would,” Charli added.
“So if the wolf is bulletproof, how was its head injured?” Gibbons asked. “Was it bashed in?”
Charli stood over the front of the table. “The bone fragments look like they were blown out. I’d guess the senator pulled off the only stunt that would’ve been able to kill this animal. The bullet happened to go through the wolf’s open mouth and out the back. And unfortunately, there was a second wolf there luckier than the first.”
“Yes, unfortunate for the senator,” Gibbons said. “Devin said this is a homicide. Still the same?”
“I’d say yes. But who the responsible human is, I don’t have a clue.” Charli looked at Devin. “Ever had an issue where you needed to see the human side of the shifter locked in animal form?”
“Yeah, but never found a solution for it. The animal stayed an animal after dying.”
Charli sighed. “Detective Gibbons, I’ll poke around more and see what else I find. I’ll let you know if anything significant shows up.”
“Thanks, Charli. Talk to you later.”
Devin pushed the End Call button on his phone. Charli stepped back and sighed.
“I think I’d have better luck and top-notch equipment if I went another route rather than taking this thing to my lab.” She stripped the gloves off and pulled out her phone. She looked at Devin just as Barry walked into the room. “Only one person in the world can help me, and she happens to be fewer than thirty minutes south of here.”
CHAPTER SIX
At her office desk at the Fish and Wildlife Service, Marika set her coffee cup on a file that had brown rings from previous mugs. She would’ve used the cute coaster she received as a birthday gift from Charli, but she couldn’t find it on her desk. She knew it was somewhere. Maybe on the table under the loose piles of papers, or maybe on top of the file cabinet under the stack of journals and magazines. She’d find it one day. Yeah, right. Just like she’d find her mate one day, her animal reminded her for the millionth time.
Now that Charli had found her man, Marika wanted hers too. Not to mention her fox went on nonstop about how it was time to put away the microscope and lady toys and find a man who would give them kits. Lots of kits. Marika put the brakes on there. Kits in the plural was fine, but kits as in their own baseball team wasn’t in the plans. She’d gone to school and worked hard to get where she was. Did her animal really want to waste all that time?
Yes. Go Team Paters!
No, Mari wasn’t going for that. Besides, it wasn’t her fault she hadn’t found her mate. Her fox disagreed. It had been established the first hour of her first day at the lab that her counterpart was not a fellow employee. The fox was ready to move on then.
But Marika held her ground, telling the animal to chill out. She would go to social events to meet others and keep an eye out for him. But as time went on, and Charli’s vet clinic took up more and more of her time, Marika submerged herself in work, seeing less and less of the world outside the lab.
Then a few months ago, she’d been recruited to study data from ancient beings who had come to Earth and supposedly “created” shifters. The story behind it all was fascinating and so unlikely that if she hadn’t met a descendant of the beings, she never would’ve bought into it. But government officials were part of the group to discuss the research, so she figured some of it had to be legit.
This was far more important than birthing a bunch of kits, which anyone could do, as long as they were shifters to begin with. This was creating something from nothing.
Up to about a week ago, that had mollified her fox. But the sudden appearance of the bear shifter Barry, who claimed he wasn’t born a shifter, sent everything into a spiral between her and her fox.
Her animal wanted what Charli now had: someone to snuggle with on cold nights and chase through the fresh mountain air and have a family with. Marika wanted to know how Barry, the ideal specimen for her project (probably the only suitable person on the planet), happened to fall into her—rather, Charli’s—lap. She’d slept little this past week, examining and comparing Barry’s physical characteristics to hers, a naturally born shifter. She couldn’t wait for the couple to pop out a cub so she could see what nature would do.
Her cell phone rang. She quickly felt around her buried desk for the device, accidentally jarring the file folder her coffee sat on, knocking over her Styrofoam cup. Marika jumped up looking for something to sop up the liquid before it soaked into all her papers scattered on the desk. Seeing nothing, she whipped her lab coat off and threw it on the desk.
On the seco
nd ring, she remembered why she’d knocked her coffee over in the first place and searched her pants pockets for the damn device. Coming up empty on the third ring, she realized the sound came from her lab coat, now soaking up the brown liquid.
She slammed her hands onto the coat, feeling for something hard and rectangular. Fingers touching a solid object, she flipped the coat over and over, trying to find the pocket, flinging cold coffee drops around the desk.
During the fourth ring, she pulled the device from a pocket. Without looking at the call ID, she swiped the screen and icon for a Skype call.
“Hello, I’m here. Don’t hang up.” She sucked in a gasp of air and heard the tinkle of her best friend’s laughter from the tiny speaker and saw her happy face on the small phone screen.
“I know not to expect you to pick up until at least the third ring, Mari,” Charli said. Marika grinned. Her friend was right. No matter how hard she tried, she could never keep up with where she stowed the damn phone. “Whatcha doing, girl?”
Marika dropped the lab coat onto the desk. “Not much, just cleaning up spilled coffee.”
“Let me guess,” Charli said. “Using your lab coat again because you still haven’t brought in paper towels like I keep telling you.”
Well, dammit. She did keep forgetting to bring a roll. She did keep using her white overcoat. And like best friends, they knew each other inside and out.
“Okay, Ms. Smart Ass, what are you doing? And if the answer’s sex, I don’t want to hear it. Or your answer.” She smiled at her own funny, and her shifter ears picked up noises across the phone line, but she didn’t see anyone else onscreen. She’d die laughing if Charli was in a room of shifters and everyone heard her remark through a speaker. She bounced on her toes waiting to see.
Charli choked on the other end. “Oh my god, Marika. I can’t believe you just said that.” Marika knew it! She burst out laughing and jumping, imagining Charli’s red, red face among the group of shifters.
Barry’s voice came from the background. “Charli, tell her if we were having sex, a phone call to her would be the last thing on your mind as you’re shouting out my name.” Marika then heard a slap and subsequent “oww” with laughter from Barry.
