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“I just…” He shook his head, and his shoulders slumped. “I heard she had…gifts.” He almost rolled his eyes then as if the word psychic was too dirty for his mouth.
Well, fuu-uck you, Dominic Tartan. “She has a gift for having babies. That’s about all, as far as I know.”
He crossed his arms. “I thought we were friends, Chavvah.”
I put my hand out to stop Billy Bob from advancing on Dom. Sheesh. I’d never seen the man this tense before. It was a sharp departure from the usually laid-back country doctor. “There are friends,” I said to Dom. “Then there are friends.”
“You can trust me,” he said softly.
“Enough,” Billy Bob said. “Go find another group, Tartan. This one is full up.”
I shook my hand free of the dominant werewolf’s and glared at him. He didn’t back down with the eye contact, which almost made me look away. Almost. “You don’t own me, Billy Bob Smith, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you treat me like a possession. You can trust me to not jump the bones of every man who looks my way, or we can end it here and now because I won’t have it.”
He looked away then. That’s right. This girl was not a pushover.
Babe came over to us then. He raised a brow at the sulky doctor. “Doc Smith.” He nodded to me. “Chavvah.”
I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Hey, bro. We need to get this show on the road. Time’s a tickin,’ and if anything happens to Jo Jo or Michele…” My chest squeezed tight as I allowed myself to envision the worst. “…I don’t know how I’d…”
Billy Bob put his arm around me for comfort, and as a way of forgiving him his he-man routine, I allowed it.
“We’ll find him, Chavvah,” Babe said.
Sheriff Taylor sent everyone off to do their grid search, but when he got to our group, he took Babe, Billy Bob, and me aside. Quietly, he said, “We’ve gotten new information from the FBI. I did a search for similar killings in Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Illinois. I found hits and misses going back as long as they have been keeping records, but five years ago there was a missing person’s filed on a man in Kansas. They found his body out by a ditch on I-70 between Topeka and Wichita. He’d been skinned, his throat slit. I looked the man up. His name was David Brooks, and he was a registered therian, half-vulpes, half-lycan from Midland Grove, one of the Kansas communities.”
Billy Bob and I exchanged looks. Was it a coincidence the victims were hybrid-therians or was that the commonality, the reason they were chosen?
Sheriff Taylor continued, “No other murders were reported, but I suspect, someone started covering up the killings. If it hadn’t been for a human finding David Brooks, I think his death would have stayed a secret as well.”
He didn’t have to say “like the deaths we covered up in Peculiar last year.” It was a given. We tried to keep our tragedies and the way we dealt with injustices in-house.
“If this goes back five years, or at least that we know of, these guys have had a lot of time to perfect their tradecraft.”
The sheriff nodded solemnly. “I’m afraid so.”
“We need to get out there now, Sheriff. We have to find Jo Jo.” I could feel the panic welling again inside.
You cannot help him if you are not clear of mind, sister.
I can’t help him at all! I felt useless. Worse than useless. Helpless.
“What is it?” Billy Bob asked.
“Just my invisible cheerleader trying to give me a pep talk.”
“Brother Wolf?” He sounded surprised.
“Yeah. Him.” I felt as grumpy as I sounded. “What good is it having a spirit guardian when he can’t even see anything on this plane of existence but me? I need him to see Jo Jo, to tell me where he is!”
“You and I are going to have a long talk when this is over.”
I detected a hint of awe and jealousy. Surely, he didn’t think Brother Wolf would put the moves on me.
The gray one is a complicated beast. He wonders why you can talk to me so easily when he must use rituals.
I didn’t have time for a pissing contest over spiritual matters.
I got my brother’s attention. “Billy Bob and I are going. I have a good sniffer, and his is awesome. I’ll call if we find him.”
