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I thought about that for a second. “Are you at leastfromaround here?”
That got a barked laugh. “Of course not, detective. But my sister is still back in St. Louis and knows better than to question what I tell her. She’s got the anonymous tipline on speed dial.”
“I bet she loves it when you call.”
“We have a code. If I just want to talk to her I send her a text first so she doesn’t panic.”
“Ouch.”
Cass shrugged. “Could be worse.”
“True enough.”
I pulled out my phone, scrolling down until I got to the list Ward had put together of various shifter types and names. The RPD already had the same list, and I quickly forwarded it to Cass.
We started running the names, she’d pull the info for each from the DMV or their missing person file, and then we’d add the names to Drew’s list of victims.
The tricky part for a lot of them was that all I had was what Ward was going on—and with several of the shifter ghosts, I got the impression that they were pretty broken.
For example, I had a “Ray Something” who was some kind of felid, Ward was pretty sure. But apparently he’d been almost completely incoherent, something that clearly bothered Ward a lot.
I remembered from our case at Tranquil Brook that Ward didn’t like it when ghosts weren’t mentally stable. He’d said something at the time about how most sickness—like Alzheimer’s, for instance—went away when a person passed. But I guess trauma was different.
It certainly suggested that while an illness like depression or dementia or schizophrenia happened to someone, it was a sickness, while trauma literally became a part of someone’s soul. And while I was a living example of how a disease could completely reshape body and mind, I wasn’t going tohaveArcanavirus when I died. I didn’t have it now. Yeah, it had changed me, but it came in, did its business, and left. The same thing happened with mental illnesses that wereillnesses. They might change the way someone relates to the world, but so did anything that happened to us. So someone who had suffered from, say, depression might have their outlook on the world shaped by depression, their spirit wouldn’thavedepression.
But a person who experienced trauma kept that trauma. It was psychological, not physiological. At least that was the prevailing theory according to Ward and, apparently, some medical professionals who were also mediums who had published the article he shared with me not long after we closed that case.
And now I had a collection of dead shifters who had been so traumatized by what had happened to them in that fucking warehouse that they didn’t all remember their whole names or couldn’t identify what type of animal they shifted into or could barely speak in sentences at all. I guess one guy had just sat in the corner of one of the kennels and whined.
I reached down a hand and ran it over Taavi’s back, and he turned to look at me.
I swallowed. “How you doing, bud?”
He studied me for a minute, then chuffed softly before pushing himself up to sitting so I didn’t have to lean down so far to run my fingers over his t-shirt-covered back. I smoothed my hand up his neck and over his ears, and he let his mouth open a little and his tongue hang out.
I guess I was partly forgiven. By Taavi, anyway. It might be a while before I forgave myself.
What kind of monster lets their friend spend the night alone just because they don’t know how to cope with the trauma of what happenedto that friend? It didn’t even happen to me. I just… didn’t know how to come back and look at him because I knew what kind of horrific nightmare he’d somehow lived through.
I toyed with his ears, the skin warm and soft under the pads of my fingers.
“You said you’ve got three canids?” Cass asked.
“Yeah. One wolf, one… coyote, maybe? I’m not great at IDing canine species. Nothing clear about the last one.”
Taavi huffed his little laugh.
“Har, har, doggo,” I snarked, and he turned his head to lick my arm. “Gross, Taavi.”
Cass laughed. “Bonding with shifters can get weird really fast, can’t it?”
I blinked. “I mean, I guess? Most shifters I know I’ve never seen in animal form.”
She nodded. “My workout buddy is a lynx shifter and he likes to work out in fur. I’ve got a cat, so I get that a head-butt is a friendly hello, but he damn near knocks me over every time.”
Apparently that’s what you called it. Being ‘in fur.’ Although Taavi didn’t have fur, so the phrase didn’t really seem to apply to him. But whatever.
I smiled at her, imagining what it must be like to get head-butted by a lynx. “Raj hasn’t head-butted you ever?”
