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“Anything?” Azriel grabbed my arm as I reappeared in my bedroom, steadying me.
I shook my head, gulping down air as dizziness swept me and my stomach briefly rose. But this time, there was no my-head-is-going-to-explode pain accompanying the shift back to flesh form, and though my legs felt weak, they didn’t collapse underneath me. Although no doubt Azriel’s grip had something to do with that.
He guided me across to the bed and sat me down. He plucked the phone from my fingers, dropped it lightly on the bed, then squatted in front of me and clasped my hands between his. Warmth began to flow through me, gently chasing away the remaining weakness.
“What did she do?”
“Nothing. She just went home and had a bath.” I grimaced. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just jumping at shadows, but she still feels wrong to me.”
“Perhaps our next step should be uncovering whether there are shifters capable of full transformation.”
“Yeah.” I took a deep, somewhat shuddery breath, then pulled my hands from his and picked up my phone. “Uncle Rhoan,” I said, and watched the psychedelic swirls run across the screen as the call was connected.
“Ris,” he said, after a couple of moments. “What can I do for you?”
“Got a weird question for you—are there such things as face-shifters who are capable of transforming their whole bodies?”
He frowned. “Well, I’ve never come across one, but I can’t see why there wouldn’t be. They’re probably rarer than hens’ teeth, though.”
“Would something like that be registered on a birth certificate?”
“I doubt it. Even face-shifters are registered only as shifters—and only if they come from a known line of shifters. If it’s an out-of-the-blue occurrence, or they’re the product of a human-shifter mating, then probably not.” He hesitated. “Why?”
“I was just following a woman who reminded me of someone else, but she looked nothing like her.”
“Could she be a sister or a relation?”
“We can’t uncover much about her, let alone anything about her family. She may exist, but there’s not a whole lot of paperwork to prove it.”
“So you’re thinking a fake ID?”
“Maybe.” I scratched my nose. “I don’t know.”
He studied me for a moment, gray eyes narrowed. “I hope this woman has nothing to do with our two spiderwebbed victims.”
“Not a thing. It’s key related.”
“Huh. Well, the best I can do is run a search for you, but I doubt anything will come up.”
And I doubted whether a search done by Directorate resources would bring up anything more than one done by Stane, but I guessed it couldn’t hurt. “The woman’s name is Genevieve Sands. She lives at sixty-five Greville Road, Prahran.”
“Posh address.”
“Posh woman.” I hesitated. “Speaking of the other deaths—”
“No, Risa.”
“Damn it, I’m just curious—”
“And you know what that did to the cat,” he said with a smile. “You’ve got enough on your plate. Don’t go stealing my work as well.”
I half laughed. “You’re welcome to your work. I’m just curious as to whether you’d uncovered anything interesting—”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be telling you. Talk to you later, Ris.”
“With some interesting information on Sands, hopefully,” I said, and hung up. I tossed the phone back on the bed and sighed. “Another dead end.”
“Possibly not. Despite her assertions to the contrary, she must know who Nadler is, because she would not be named heir otherwise, true?”
