I said, trying for patience, “Your expert either hunts them or studies them academically, right?”
Morgan frowned, thought about it, then nodded. “Yeah.”
“I live with two of them. Trust me when I say that I know shapeshifters better than your expert.”
“So because you’re fucking some shapeshifters, I should just trust you?”
I smiled, but it wasn’t my happy smile, it was the one I did when I was trying not to get mad. “Yeah, actually, I know shapeshifters in ways that your expert couldn’t imagine.”
“I don’t need to hear about your kinks, Blake.”
I took that last step, invading his personal space. I stepped until either he had to back up or we’d touch. He stood his ground, so that we were a hair’s breadth apart. From any distance at all, you’d think we were touching.
Morgan blinked down at me. That blink was a nervous gesture; his tell, like in poker. He didn’t like me this close, or…
I spoke carefully, letting the anger seep into my voice. “My kinks are none of your business, Morgan. Catching this bastard is. Do you want to help me catch him, or her, or do you want to piss and moan and criticize my sex life?”
“What am I supposed to think when you tell me you’re living with two of them?”
“You’re supposed to think that I am a valuable resource of information about a little-known minority in this country, and that my insight might be invaluable to this investigation.” I spoke lower and lower, and watched him lean in to hear.
His face was almost touching mine when I finished. He had an odd expression on his face as he said, softly, “Invaluable.”
I didn’t kiss him, didn’t touch him at all, but in that moment he surrendered to me, and I fed on his anger. One breath, it was inside him; the next, it was on my skin like a warm rush of air. I closed my eyes and breathed it in, and it was good, and I hadn’t meant it.
Edward touched my shoulder and eased me back from the detective. Morgan stayed standing, staring at where I’d been, as if I hadn’t moved.
Bernardo whispered, “Your eyes.”
We heard someone behind us. Edward got his sunglasses out of his pocket and handed them to me. I didn’t ask why; the look on all their faces was enough. My eyes had gone all vampiry. I’d had it happen a time or two, but I’d always been able to feel it happen. I slipped the glasses on and realized that I hadn’t done it on purpose, but Morgan was still standing there, staring at nothing. Not knowing what I’d done to him, or how, I didn’t know how to bring him out of it. Feeding on someone’s anger had never done this before. Shit.
Bernardo started walking down the hall. “Sheriff Shaw, how you doing tonight?”
Of course, it would be Shaw. Double shit.
“Bring him out of this, Anita,” Edward whispered.
“I don’t know how.”
“Do something,” Olaf said under his breath as he moved not down the hall but to block Shaw’s view of Morgan and me. With his broad back in the way, I moved closer to the detective.
I said, “Morgan, Morgan, you in there?”
“Hurry,” Edward said.
I snapped my fingers in front of his face. Nothing. In desperation I shook his shoulder, enough to bob his head, and said, harshly, “Morgan!”
He blinked and raised his head. He looked around as if he didn’t expect to be standing in the hallway. I waited for him to accuse me of using magic on him, a serious breach of so many laws, but he just looked around us. “I’ll get to work on those subpoenas.”
“Subpoenas?” I said.
“Yeah, so we can get claw mark casts from the weretigers. Either that’ll clear them, or we’ll know we have our bad guy, or girl.” He smiled at me, a real smile. Then he moved past us toward Shaw, who was finally getting past Bernardo.
“What the hell is going on here?” Shaw asked.
Morgan, still smiling, explained about the subpoenas and all of it.
“It’s not possible for them to shift just claws,” Shaw said.
Morgan corrected him and parroted back almost word for word what I’d told him.
Shaw looked past Morgan to me as he said, “And who told you all this?”
“Marshal Blake.”
“She did, did she?”
Morgan nodded and went off to do what I’d wanted him to do, and what minutes before he would never have done at all. Mother of God, what had I done? And was it a good thing or a bad thing?
52
SHAW CAME DOWN the hallway, so angry it bordered on rage, and that little voice in my head said,
“You did something to Morgan. I don’t know what, or how, but you did something.”
I moved a little behind Edward so there’d be no chance of Shaw getting too close to me. I didn’t trust myself around all that rage.
“You can’t hide behind Forrester forever, Blake.”
“Think of it as more for your protection than mine,” I said, smiling sweetly. Which was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong thing to do. Why had I done either? What was wrong with me?
His face began to mottle with his anger. His big hands folded into fists. “Are you threatening me?”
“No,” I said, and tried to make that one word inoffensive.
His cell phone went off, and he stepped away, sort of sideways to us, as if he didn’t want to give us his back, to bark into the phone, “Shaw, what?” He was quiet for a few minutes listening, then nodded and said, “We’ll be there.”
He walked back to us, the anger level lower, and his face edged with lines that hadn’t been there a moment before. I was almost a hundred percent sure what the news would be.
“We have another dead stripper. It looks like it’s this Vittorio again.”
I didn’t chastise him for not giving us the files on the earlier stripper deaths. The tiredness in his face showed just how much this case was taking out of him. “We’ll follow you,” Edward said.
“Fine.” He turned and went back the way we’d come. We trailed behind him.
Edward dropped back and whispered, “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He lowered his voice even more, “You fed on him somehow.”
“His anger,” I said.
“I’ve never seen you do that.”
“It’s new.”
“What else is new?” he asked, and the look in his eyes wasn’t one I liked seeing from Edward. He was my friend, my good friend, but there was still part of him that wondered which of us was better. I knew who was better-him-but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of that. There was a part of him that was no longer certain he’d win, and a bigger part of him wanted the question answered. Now he looked at me, not like a friend but like he was wondering how much more powerful I’d grown, and what that might mean if we ever hunted each other.
“Don’t go there,… Ted,” I said.
He gave me eyes as cold as a winter sky. “You need to tell me about the new stuff.”
