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I stared at him. “So what the fuck are they gonna do if the DNA under her nailsishuman?”
Mays made an elaborate shrug that communicated his disgust with the bill in question. “No fucking idea,” he replied.
I frowned. “How likely is this thing to pass the Senate?”
Mays shook his head, dumping the little device out onto his lab table. “Not a clue. I was surprised it got through the House, if only by a handful of votes.”
This was why I hated politics. Because you have to rely on the good intentions of some fucking bag-of-rotten-dicks politicians who were more concerned about campaign donations and reelection on a family values platform than the actual lives and deaths of their fucking constituents. “Just fucking ducky,” I muttered.
“Sorry,” Mays replied, picking up a tiny screwdriver. “I wish I had better news.”
I ran a hand over my hair and tugged on the end of my ponytail. “If you can’t fix the political system, can you at least confirm that this thing has the same beta blocker that was in Taavi’s blood?”
Mays nodded. “Sure.” Then the damn thing started whirring, and Mays put it down very quickly. “Shit!”
Sitting on the table, the thing just sort of… pooped out a little whitish material.
“How the fuck doesthatwork?” I asked.
Mays gingerly scooted the box away from its leavings. “My guess is that when it’s… installed, there’s a connection directly into the bloodstream.” He picked up a little tubey bit that had also been in the bag and looked into the tiny hole, holding it in front of a massive magnifying glass. “Yeah. There’s blood in here, which means they basically had him mainlining it directly into whatever this was next to.”
“His kidney,” I rasped out.
“Fuck. Yeah, that would do it. Poor guy.”
I grimaced down at it. “Who the fuck would do this? Like. What’s the fuckingpoint?”
Mays just shook his head. “No idea.”
I had ideas. I had about a half-dozen ideas. These bag-of-rat-shit-fuckers wanted to skin shifters as animals, then force them to shift back. They wanted to drive shifters into animal form, then make them go feral like the vampire they were using to kill people—if our theory was right, anyway. They just wanted to fuck with shifters because they hated them. They wanted to force shifters into animal form and sell them off, trafficking-style, and treat them like animal slaves. They wanted to keep all shifters as animals so they couldn’t demand basic human rights. Hell, maybe they wanted to open a goddamn shifter zoo. But those were all just ideas, some of them a lot less likely than the others.
The problem was, I couldn’t conceive of why the fuck you’d do this to anotherperson, even if you did think they weren’t as good as you. I think a lot of people aren’t as good as I am—morally, intellectually, socially, whatever. I don’t think those people should be shot, hung, locked up, put in zoos, chemically castrated, or any of the other hundreds of fucked-up things people did to each other. There was no possible reason I could come up with that would justify forcing shifters to stay shifted.
Because I’m not a fucking monster, but—and I don’t care if they didn’t have fur or fangs or droopy semi-decomposed ghoul flesh—these people absolutely were.
* * *
Taavi was mostlylimp in my arms as I carried him first out to my Charger and then upstairs to my apartment—I was glad I’d had multiple weeks of practice hauling a hundred-some-pound dog up to the third floor, because this time I had to be very careful when I did it. A leg in a cast was one thing, but major abdominal surgery was another. I’d already gone in and unlocked the door, leaving it cracked, so that I could carry him up and just push it open with my hip so there was no awkward dog-key-doorknob juggling necessary.
Once we were inside, I gently set him on the air mattress, which had been covered in sheets, blankets and pillows. He looked up at me and chuffed.
I rubbed a hand over his ears.
“Don’t get used to the pampering, bud,” I told him. “Once you’re done convalescing, it’s back to getting yourself on and off furniture.”
And then I felt like an idiot, because of course he wouldn’t have to do that, because he was going to be able to shift back into a fuckingperson,and he could get back to his life.
I wondered—not for the first time—if he was going to go back to Yuma.
Not that he had a wallet or ID or money to actually do that.
“Can I ask a question, bud?” I was still crouched next to the bed, my hand absently stroking his ears. He didn’t seem to mind.
Chuff.
“Are you—are you planning to stick around Richmond after all this?”
He looked at me for a long moment.
