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“You and I both know a court won’t give credence to a channeled drawing,” Raj replied. As much as I trusted Raj, I hadn’t told him that Ward didn’t bother channeling spirits because he could just give them physical form. We were mostly trying to keep that under wraps so that A, people didn’t freak out as much, and B, it was an ace in the hole if we had to do something particularly epic. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I let out another sigh, and Anubis whined from near my feet. I reached down and rubbed a hand over his head, soothing him and myself. “Fine. But you know another medium who can cold-call like he can?”
“No, but we could have a second in the room.”
“I can get Kwan.”
“Someone who doesn’t work for Beyond the Veil, Hart,” Raj reminded me.
I snorted. “You got somebody?”
“I—Yes. I do.” It sounded to me like he wasn’t actually sure of that, but I wasn’t going to spit in my own cake.
“Fine. How soon can we set it up?”
“I’ll reach out to the medium and see what I can do.” I heard the shuffling of papers. “Was that all?”
I thought for a second, then figured, fuck it. “I’ve got a shifter problem,” I said, very conscious of the single dark brown eye focused on me from close to the ground.
“A dead shifter?”
“Nope.”
“A living one?”
“Yep.”
“This the reason you asked me about a vet?”
“Yep,” I said again.
Raj was silent for a minute. “Are you not talking about this because you’re at the precinct?”
“Yep.”
Another pause. “Brown’s in an hour?”
I couldn’t help the smile that flickered over my lips. “I’ll bring pies.”
“Chocolate chess, if they have it,” Raj replied, then hung up.
The dog was staring at me like I’d lost my mind. “What? You don’t like pie?”
Chuff.
“Good. Cuz I’d have to dump you at the SPCA if you didn’t like pie.”
That got me a snort and a flop back into the bed.
“Half an hour, doggo,” I told him. “Then pie.”
* * *
Proper Pie Companywas a little out of the way, but it’s fuckingpie, so of course I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity. That, and I knew Raj was obsessed, and I wanted him to cooperate with my only-slightly-nefarious plans.
I ended up with three bulging paper bags, one with a whole raspberry sour cream pie at the bottom, along with some banoffee—for later—the second with three slices of chocolate chess pie and plastic forks. The last bag held six small hand-pies in an assortment of flavors, two of which bore the distinctive little green stamp that marked them as vegetarian. In other words, mine. Shifters not only can eat meat, unlike yours truly, but their bodies need more protein because of some biology thing Elliot had explained to me once while consuming an entire rack of ribs.
I’d texted Elliot to see how he was today, and he’d just said that closure was both better and worse than he’d expected. I told him I missed him and I wished there was more I could do.
