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“Mason is going to hate you.”
“Tell him I love him, too, but murder waits for neither man nor elf nor orc.”
26
I was lyingon my stomach on the couch, my face off the edge, trying to melt into the cushions, when a wet nose poked me in the face and snorted, spraying snot all over me.
“Ugh! Fuck!” I half pushed myself back, glaring daggers at the somewhat self-satisfied expression on Taavi’s Xolo face. “That wasdisgusting.”
He chuffed.
“Fuck you, you hairless asshole. The fuck was that for?” I scrubbed at my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
Taavi looked pointedly at the digital clock, then back at me. I blinked at it. After seven.
“You’re hungry,” I guessed.
Chuff.
“Fucking hell. Okay, fine.” I pushed myself up and headed into the kitchen to figure out what the fuck we had in the house.
Taavi followed me. More than a week post-surgery, he was doing much better, and I got the feeling he was starting to get a little stir-crazy. The drugs were out of his system, and he probably couldn’t wait to actually stop being a dog.
But not yet.
I blew out a breath as I looked in the fridge. There were some mushrooms I probably needed to use up, some cream. And yeah, parmesan.
I might prefer sauce from a jar, but I could actually make my own food from scratch. Cream, butter, parmesan, some spices, and I could throw together an alfredo. There were some pea-protein Italian sausages in the freezer, so I could do that and mushrooms and make dinner.
Taavi helped by making sure he was directly in front of wherever my feet needed to be.
“Bud, I’m going to trip over you and potentially kill both of us,” I pointed out.
He looked up at me, then deliberately side-stepped just far enough that if I turned around, I wouldn’t step on him. I snorted a laugh.
“Great, thanks, bud.”
I mostly ignored him as I made dinner, my brain still spinning through everything that had happened in the last three days.
The warehouse, the goddamn lab at Brachiofortis Pharmaceuticals, and the hellhole Raj had called me to in an empty field a few miles off Jeff Davis near Doswell.
By the time Ward and I had gotten there, they’d already laid out four bodies and were hard at work on removing another seven. We’d IDed two vampires, one ghoul, a faun, three shifters, two Arc-humans, and two normal humans. All of them had been homeless or itinerant, like Taavi. I’d told Raj about Ewing’s so-called medical trials, and he had all the bodies tested to see if there was any trace of either the stimulant Ewing had referred to as ARH14 or the beta blocker we’d found in Taavi.
According to another interview with Ewing, ARH14 produced very particular chemical markers in the rats they’d used in the lab, and the FBI scientists had been able to find traces of those reactions in the cells of both the vampires and the ghoul from the grave. Thanks to Ward, this had surprised no one, since every single victim had talked about agreeing to participate in a medical trial in exchange for cash.
Cash they’d never gotten, of course.
I’d asked Taavi if he’d agreed to participate in any medical trials, and he’d said no, so I still wasn’t sure how they’d tracked him.
We knew someone was pulling records—but we’d run backgrounds against every single government or public servant on the Oldham list, and we still had a good handful of dead shifters, plus Taavi, we couldn’t link to a radical MFMer.
And that made me nervous.
Either it meant that our list was incomplete, or it meant that somebody we didn’t expect had access to information they shouldn’t have access to, maybe through bribery or some sort of family or friend connection. Either way, we weren’t finding them, which meant there were still leaks that had to be identified and plugged.
My phone rang, and I scowled at it when I pulled it out of my pocket to see the cartoon tiger giving me a thumb’s up.
“I am sick of you, Tony,” I said, hitting the speaker button and setting it on the counter. “And I don’t want to deal with any more dead people right now.”
