A Study In Shifters

by Majanka Verstraete

  I froze in my seat. Roan Black. The Roan I’d dreamt about last night, who I hadn’t seen in months—not since the whole Mannix incident—my childhood friend, had gone to school here? I tended not to believe in accidents, but if this wasn’t a coincidence of epic proportions, then I didn’t know what was.

  My jaguar purred at the thought of Roan. She always seemed pleased when I thought about him or mentioned him, and she’d been heartbroken when we had our falling out after the Big Betrayal.

  “He hadn’t been here for that long, and he kept to himself most of the time,” Wyatt continued. “I thought we were friends once but… Well, he was a jaguar shifter, but he disappeared about two months ago.”

  “Disappeared?” I almost choked on the soda I was drinking just as he mentioned that. “Like, disappeared for real?”

  “I don’t know. He apparently went back home to his family, but a few days later, his family came here to look for him. The police launched a formal investigation but his family asked to drop the conversation, so he probably turned up safe and sound. At least, that’s what his parents said, but I never heard from him again.”

  My jaguar whined and started pacing around. She projected images into my mind of going outside, running, of searching wherever we could, to find Roan.

  My mind couldn’t grasp the fact that Roan had disappeared. All this time, these months without as much as a letter or a phone call, I’d thought he’d been avoiding me because of what happened with Mannix. Because of what I’d done.

  Wyatt twirled his fork around, staring at his food. “It was weird, though. First time we had police over here, and now this… Two days ago, this place was swarming with cops.” A sad, melancholy look appeared on his features.

  What if Roan hadn’t ignored me because of what I’d done—what if the reason I hadn’t heard of him was because he had really disappeared? What if he was in danger? He might have a reason for ignoring me, but knowing him, he wouldn’t have left here without telling his friend, or without calling him to explain things later.

  “Anyway, let’s not talk about these gloomy things,” Wyatt said before I could ask him more about Roan “I’ve seen enough sadness to last at least a month or two, and the funeral is coming up…”

  Roan was really missing. The horrible reality sank in, and a feeling so large, so enormous, I could barely grasp it, settled into my chest. He’d disappeared and instead of helping him, instead of worrying about his whereabouts, I thought he’d just…abandoned me. Like everyone else had.

  My jaguar growled and clawed, throwing her entire body against the cage door I had barricaded her behind. She snarled at me, demanding to be let out. I couldn’t hear her thoughts anymore in my mind, but I could read them loud and clear in the look in her eyes: she wanted to find Roan, no matter what it took.

  “I’m sorry to ask,” Indra interrupted my thoughts, “but did Elise have any enemies? I mean, everyone thinks a jaguar shifter did it, but you have no jaguars here besides Marisol, and she arrived after it happened. Since she can’t time travel, that obviously rules her out.”

  Too big. Too much. Thinking about Roan going missing was something too suffocating to deal with right now. If I let myself understand it completely, if I admitted to myself that I’d failed my friend, then I wouldn’t be able to scrape myself back together, and be the investigator needed to solve this case.

  My inner jaguar wailed and bawled. Let me out, her eyes demanded from me. Let me out.

  But I couldn’t. I had to keep her locked up.

  And I had to stop thinking about Roan. I would figure out what happened to him, but I had to focus on Elise first. There was still the possibility I was wrong about my assumptions, and Roan was back home, safe and sound, and me dreaming about him and then Wyatt telling me he’d gone missing was all a strange coincidence, a fluke in reality.

  “Everyone liked Elise,” Wyatt said as he looked down at his plate.

  Elise, I reminded myself. Focus on Elise. Turn your emotions off. Go into Sherlock Mode.

  Usually, going into Sherlock Mode happened automatically, without me even realizing it. But sometimes, when emotions got too hard, like now, like after my father’s death… I could turn it on and off like a switch. Push my emotions into an empty room in my mind palace and lock the door, until I had the strength and courage to open that door and let them back in.

  I had to do that now, for Elise’s sake, for my own sake. Elise’s murderer needed to be punished, and if I couldn’t focus on this case, I would never be able to bring the culprit to justice.

  “She had no enemies,” Wyatt continued. “Why everyone thinks it’s a jaguar shifter is because her father was openly against them. Well, not the species, but their prominent position of power.”

  I closed my eyes, reached for that invisible switch in my mind, locked the door to my emotions in my mind palace, along with all my worries about Roan. Once I solved the case of Elise Felton’s death, I’d unlock that door, and I’d find out what happened to him. But for now, I had to focus on this case, and this case only.

  When I opened my eyes again, I’d forgotten about Roan. Not exactly forgotten—I still knew he was missing, but it was a vague thought in the back of my mind, a loose piece of information that held no real meaning, no real emotions behind it. Just a logical fact of intel that only held importance if it was connected to Elise Felton’s murder.

  “Elise endorsed his beliefs, and at the next gathering, she was going to present a paper to the Gathering of Clans about it.” Wyatt kept looking down at his plate, avoiding my gaze.

  I stared at Wyatt for a few seconds. “You helped her write it,” I concluded.

  “I did.” Wyatt breathed in deeply. “I didn’t want to. I mean, I don’t like any species more than another, and I thought the jaguar clan did just fine as shifter leaders, but Elise begged for my help, and I can never say no to people when they need my help.” He looked at me. “I didn’t agree with what she said in the paper…”

  “Do you still have it? The paper?” I asked.

  “I… Yes, I have it.”

  “I want to read it.”

  Wyatt shook his head. “No, you don’t. Trust me. And there’s no need for you to read it, Marisol. It’ll never get published now. Let it rest. Elise is gone, and reading that paper will only make you think badly about her.”

  I turned around in my seat so I could face Wyatt straight on. “She wrote a paper about jaguar shifters. About how we shouldn’t be in a seat of power. I’m willing to bet that she mentioned me, probably by name, at least once. Because I’m the reason why the jaguars are weak. I’m the reason why everyone is now fighting for my mother’s throne; I’m the half-blood who shouldn’t exist. Since that paper is all about me, I deserve to read it. You know I’m right.”

  With those words, I got up and left Indra and Wyatt sitting there in the cafeteria. I had better things to do than worry about a paper written by a dead girl, but it still hurt.

  More so than what they thought about me, it hurt that my mother never told me the full extent to which people hated me or thought I was too weak for the position my birthright had granted to me.

  I didn’t want the jaguar throne. If I had my wish, my mother would stay Duchess for all eternity.

  Or they could take that throne and burn it, and leave me and my mother alone, and I would be just as happy.

  As I made it out of the lunchroom, I leaned against the wall and took a few rasped breaths, trying to calm down. My hands itched, and my knuckles hurt from balling my hands into fists.

  What else had my mother kept from me? How dire was our situation, really?

  All those years working for the Conclave, operating as an agent under their protection. I thought I knew so much, was so mature, but I’d never really been in the real world, had I?

  In the real world, people despised me for the blood running through my veins. They didn’t praise me for the clever, sharp mind that could solve crimes faster than anyone else. T
hey hated me for the half-human genes that made up my DNA. If they found out the worst truth of all, that I couldn’t shift…

  That would mean the end of the jaguars’ rule.

  I should’ve stayed in that safe fantasy world my mother had crafted for me, where I could solve murder cases and then disappear back into the shadows, where the hearsay about people disliking half-bloods were just rumors.

  Now I was out into the light, away from the shadows, and I had never known how painful light could burn.

  Until now.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Indra commented. We were on our way to the coroner’s office, to see Morant. The cab meandered slowly over the highway, its speed declining as we took the turn into the city.

  Although I had the ability to imagine corpses in crime scenes, it always helped to be able to actually see the corpse, smell it, feel it if necessary. Whenever my Holmes Mode was activated on a case, I used the pictures of the crime scene and the autopsy to conjure up the corpse from my mind. Yet, sometimes the pictures weren’t complete, sometimes things were missed. And even if every single detail had been meticulously captured on frame, pictures didn’t smell—and scents often unveiled many secrets about a murder.

  “I’m thinking,” I said.

  “Well, think out loud. I want to hear your thought process, remember?”

  My jaguar groaned at her comment, not liking her criticism.

  I sighed and didn’t reply.

  “You’re not still upset about lunch, are you? About the paper Wyatt talked about?” Indra crossed her arms. “You are. Why? All Wyatt did was tell you the truth.”

  “I’m not upset at him.”

  “You’re upset at the girl who’s a murder victim in our case? That doesn’t bode too well.”

  “I’m not upset at her either. Maybe. A little. I don’t know.” I pushed my back against the seat as hard as I could. If possible, I would’ve disappeared into the fabric. “I’m upset that everyone out here seems to think half-blood shifters should have no claim to the throne, and I have zero idea as to how to change their minds. I don’t even know if it matters, but I had no idea things were this bad. My mother’s position is weaker than I thought.”

  I wasn’t that hurt that people thought less of me because I was a half-blood. No, what hurt a lot more was that they blamed my mother for it. They blamed her for loving a human and for having a child with him, and to realize she’d been targeted because of me pained me a lot more than my own bruised ego.

  “You want to help her.” Indra touched my shoulder lightly. “That kind of loyalty is good. You’ll find a way. If anyone can, it’s you.” She gave me an encouraging smile. “In the meantime, don’t let it bring you down. We still have a case to solve.”

  I smiled back at her. I’d always despised snakes, but Indra was starting to grow on me. She wasn’t half bad… In fact, she seemed rather nice. And she’d been helpful with the case, too, I grudgingly had to admit.

  “Yes, and rather than more answers, I feel like we have more questions. So, Elise’s father hated jaguars. She wrote a paper detailing how horrible jaguars are, and how weak our seat of power is. Then, someone killed her and made it look like a jaguar did it. It’s a brilliant move from a political point of view.”

  “It completely undermines the jaguars’ position,” Indra said, catching on to my train of thought.

  “If the jaguar clan did it, it means we showed absolute weakness. You can’t let a leader be in power when their own clan starts randomly killing people who oppose them. It shows the leader is weak. That’s what someone wants others to think: that we’re vindictive and petty, and that we killed her. It’ll ruin our position with the Gathering of Clans.”

  “So, it’s a setup.”

  “And it’s a pretty good one,” I said. “The killer is no jaguar. So, if we went to look for a jaguar killer, we’d come up with a dead end, and we’d look even more incompetent.”

  “Then your mother can praise herself lucky to have you,” Indra said as the cab pulled up to the coroner’s office. “You’ve only been here a day, and you’ve already convinced me that your theory, as farfetched and crazy as it may sound, is more plausible than the obvious one.”

  “Now the rest of the world.” I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out of the car.

  “Although I’m still not sure about the political motive,” Indra said as she slammed the door shut. “Everyone may be convinced that no one held a grudge against Elise Felton, but something about this case screams personal to me.”

  I followed her inside the coroner’s office where we were greeted by a woman who I was absolutely certain had more enemies than friends.

  Keres Morant could best be described as a mixture between a black widow spider and Morticia from The Addams Family series. She had long straight black hair that crowned her head, resembling a nun’s hood more than actual hair. Her skin was deathly pale from never going outside, and she had long, spiderlike fingers. She was skinny, all bones and no flesh, and she found everything morbid extremely amusing and fascinating.

  She was a spider shifter, one of the more peculiar kinds of shifters. I’d only met a handful of spiders in my life, but of all of them, Morant was the most elusive one. I could never quite figure out what the thirty-something woman was thinking—although if I had to guess, I would bet most of her thoughts were somehow related to the macabre and the eerie.

  Nevertheless, she was the best supernatural medical examiner we had, and she was nothing if not thorough.

  “Finally,” Morant barked as we walked in.

  “You told us to be here at two thirty.” Indra pointed at the clock on the wall. “It’s two thirty.”

  “Two thirty one,” Morant said. “My time is precious, and I don’t like waiting.” She didn’t even turn around to face us. Wearing a white lab coat and a grey apron, she looked more like a chef ready to prepare a tasty dinner than a mortician.

  “If your time was so precious,” I stated while I descended the three stairs leading to the sunken pit where Morant was standing in front of a slab holding a dead body covered with a sheet, “you wouldn’t waste it over the crazy theory you concocted that Elise Felton was killed by a jaguar shifter.” Although I was upset that Morant of all people would jump to those conclusions, I still respected her. We’d worked together on many cases in the past, and Morant was usually excellent at her job.

  “Ah. Miss Holmes.” Now, Morant did turn around. Her gloves, grey and coming halfway up her front arms, were covered in blood. “I was wondering when I’d see you again.”

  Keres Morant seemed like the kind of person born and bred to work in a morgue. I didn’t mind being in the morgue, but the place was obviously making Indra feel queasy. She looked a little green around the ears as she descended the stairs. My jaguar wasn’t too fond of the smell, either, but she was used to it by now—I’d spent too much time in morgues already, working on cases.

  We were surrounded by dead bodies on all sides, tucked away in freezers, of course. The only one on display was the one currently covered by the sheet, and I already knew which body was hidden beneath. If I hadn’t guessed from the size and length, the card around her toe, which poked out from beneath the sheet, gave her identity away.

  “However, your assumption is wrong,” Morant said. “I never said Elise Felton was murdered by a jaguar shifter. I merely suggested it looked as if she was killed by a jaguar. Mark my choice of words.”

  I moved to stand next to Morant as she removed the sheet. Indra gasped from next to me, and I had to bite my tongue not to do the same.

  Elise Felton’s slightly bloated, obviously dead, already in postmortem stage body looked a lot worse now than it had in the picture Rollins had shown the Conclave and the pictures we’d received from the police.

  And the smell was horrible. For us shifters it was even worse than for humans because most of us had heightened smell. My jaguar gagged, and I resisted the urge to throw up.
Instead, I dove back into Sherlock Mode and turned to Morant. “It looks like a jaguar shifter did it, but that’s certainly not the case. The crime scene revealed an entirely different story.”

  “Not just the crime scene.” Morant’s smirk swallowed up most of her face, and she looked positively insane. “The body too. The amount of blood loss isn’t consistent with an attack by a jaguar, leopard—any puma really. On top of that, the claw marks aren’t deep enough.” She pointed at one of the long gashes running across Elise’s upper torso. “Not enough strength behind it to come from a real jaguar, and it’s not really consistent with how a jaguar would kill, either. Attack, sure, but kill? That’s another story.”

  “Relative to their weight, jaguars have the strongest bite of any cat on the planet,” I explained, turning to Indra who probably didn’t understand what we were talking about. “We’re much more likely to bite for the kill than use our claws.”

  “Their bite goes through the skull and brain of any opponent, so don’t provoke them,” Morant said to Indra. “And Holmes is correct. A lot of people have the misconception these animals will most often use their claws to kill, but that certainly isn’t the case. Lions and leopards prefer to suffocate the prey by biting down on the throat and holding it. Tigers will bite through the spine on the back of the neck and crush it. Jaguars, on the other hand…”

  “If it has the opportunity, a jaguar will always go for the bite,” I concluded the sentence.

  “Jaguars can open their jaws wider than any other cat, and that’s how they fit in those thick skulls of other animals. So, even when in combat with another big cat, like a leopard or tiger, a jaguar would always go for the bite kill,” Morant said.

  I nodded. “Someone killed her and staged it to make it look like a jaguar kill.”

  “There’s more.” Morant rubbed her hands, as happy as a child on Christmas morning. “Once I figured the murder was too obviously staged to have been committed by one of the big cats, I started digging a little deeper. More specifically, at the claw marks. Now, I already mentioned they’re not deep enough to have been done by any of the big cats, but I have another surprise.”