Page 2 of Countdown to Murder (A Paranormal Halloween #3)

Mira

I was in a room with two male lions, a dragon, and a wolf. All in human form. All male.

And the dragon was kicking my ass.

“Does the owner of the company personally spar with every new hire?”

I moved in with the intention of kicking the side of his knee, but he blocked the kick and punched me in the face hard enough I heard my cheekbone shatter an instant before the blinding pain hit, but I didn’t let it slow me down.

He was still recovering from the strike, and he’d left himself open.

I faked him with the beginnings of a right jab to the rib cage and caught him off guard with a left punch to a pressure point just inside the shoulder.

His body crumpled in on itself in reaction, and I kicked him in the face.

He grabbed my leg and ripped my knee until it pulled apart and was useless, and I finally backed off, hopping away on my one good leg without letting my guard down.

Kicking was now out, but I could still use my hands.

“It’s over,” he said. “Done. You should change and heal.”

I shook my head. “It’s over, yes, but I can change later.” At home, where there was no danger of being seen naked. No danger of my snake getting pissed and biting the man who’d just decimated us in a fight when no one had managed to do so in at least ten years.

Aaron shook his head. “Not an option. I need to meet your snake. One of us needs to hold you and run with you without being bitten.”

“It’s part of operational protocol,” the blond lion said. “If there’s only a spot to get one person in, you can ride in as a snake in a backpack. We need to know you have control.”

If I admitted I didn’t want to be naked around them, then it would become a thing. Better to walk with dignity and make them think it didn’t matter than to let them know I hated being naked around people.

It hadn’t mattered before I’d gotten in touch with my fucking emotions. Now, it was like my damned soul was naked when I didn’t have clothes to hide behind.

“The snake has been conditioned to change back to human when placed on the clothes she shifted out of.”

With a final glare at the Dragon King, I allowed the shift to happen, and I made certain to keep my willpower in front of the snake’s.

The snake’s brain can’t feel emotion, nor is there logic, or even thought, really. Most snake shifters have no control of their animal, but I’d been trained in some of the most brutal ways imaginable, so I’d learned to control the snake. To an extent, anyway.

I slithered out of the clothes and glided across the floor to the dragon.

He lifted me, ran with me a short time, and handed me to one of the lions, who put me inside his shirt.

The snake didn’t like being in a wad, so she wrapped around the lion-man’s torso and stuck her head out of the shirt’s neck.

He ran through a door, into the sunshine, down a street, through some woods, and then finally back inside and to the gym.

He stopped at the clothes, ripped his shirt off, pulled the snake from around his body, and settled her on the clothes.

The snake curled up on them.

* * * *

Panda

I’d reminded Nathan I don’t do partners, but he was adamant that this was going to happen.

Nothing I said was going to change his mind, which was why I found myself running through the woods behind the Drake offices, in through the back door, through the building, and back to the old school gym.

I’d never seen a king cobra snake in person before, and I’d had no idea how big they are.

Her head and flared neck were as big as my face.

Her body was coiled around my torso more times than I wanted to count.

Her tongue touched my face more than once, but I refused to turn and look at her.

Everyone knows I prefer to work alone. I can work with a team when my skillset is needed on one, but for the most part, I’m the operator who’s sent in when someone will need to die.

And for that, I prefer not to have witnesses.

Nathan had lost his fucking mind, pairing me with a reformed assassin.

It isn’t like I’m an assassin, exactly. More like, I’m the one who takes out the bad guys we know the human justice system would never be able to handle. If a vampire or rogue shapeshifter is terrorizing someone under our protection, for instance.

The snake adjusted when I slowed and stopped, but didn’t move to slither off me.

She had a fairly tight grip around my rib cage, but she wasn’t a constrictor, she was just holding on while I ran.

She was the longest snake I’ve ever seen — at a guess, I’d say fifteen feet long, and most of it was curled around my torso.

And I have to say, having a king cobra head right beside your face while you run is disconcerting. Lions aren’t immune to snake venom, and while I could probably change and heal from the damage, it would still hurt like a motherfucker.

I went outside to test her, though. If she wanted me dead, all she had to do was bite me while I was away from the Drake Security property, where I didn’t dare turn into a lion.

If she meant to kill me, I wanted to face it sooner rather than later.

She hadn’t though, which meant she’d probably have my back.

Or at the very least, wouldn’t stick a knife in it.

I couldn’t pull her off me from inside the shirt, so I ripped it off before carefully unwrapping her. She let me place her on top of the pile of clothes, and I stepped back. Rumor has it that snakes can’t understand verbal cues, but I’d never gotten close enough with one to ask.

Looked like that was about to change.

The shift from snake to human looked painful, though it only took a handful of seconds.

Arms formed and grew, the head changed shape, the torso molded into the right silhouette, the tail split into two and the legs formed.

It all happened at mostly the same time, and suddenly there was a very naked woman standing before me, one bare foot on the old high-school gymnasium floor, the other on the clothes she’d come out of when she shifted into her snake form.

But it wasn’t the floor I was looking at. In clothes, Mira looked incredibly petite. Naked, she’s like a tiny little sex goddess, carved from pale granite. She’s supposedly twenty-seven years old and still a virgin, which would put her off limits for my dick even if we weren’t working together.

But we would be working together, whether I liked it or not, and I figured it was a bad idea to piss off a known assassin with her skillset, so I stopped staring and walked away from her, toward the doors.

“I’m going to pop some burgers on the grill.

Ya’ll should come with me so she can get dressed without an audience. ”

Drake Security had bought an eighty-year-old high school building and repurposed it for the company’s needs. The old cafeteria prep room had been fitted with commercial appliances, and I’m adept at cooking the foods I love.

By the time everyone made it to the kitchen, I had buns out and open, burgers almost ready to come off the grill, and fries in the fryer. Ranger grabbed the mayo, mustard, and ketchup from the refrigerator, and everyone started preparing their own buns.

“What did the snake learn about me,” I asked Mira as I settled a burger on her open bun.

“You aren’t the same kind of lion as His Majesty.”

I felt my brows lift. An occasional bear picked up on it, but it was rare.

“I wasn’t aware snakes could pick up on.

..” I wasn’t sure how to politely respond.

On the one hand, I didn’t want anyone knowing we aren’t the same kind of lion, much less what kind of lion I am.

I wanted to change the subject to her sense of smell without confirming her statement, but I didn’t see how.

“Most shapeshifters don’t pick up on the difference. ”

“Jacobson’s organ. More taste than smell, but it isn’t really either, if you want to get technical.”

“Can you pick up on subtle scents in human form?”

She shrugged and walked out of the room without answering, and I looked to Nathan.

“Aaron already knows, and Ranger won’t say anything. Your secret’s safe with us, but Fawn is probably going to know, which means Kendra will. Probably Josef, too.”

Aaron glared at Nathan, and I nearly took a step back when Nathan met his gaze.

“Something I should know?” I asked.

“No,” Nathan said without looking away from Aaron. “We need more qualified female guards. It’s been a problem for a while, and losing Cora for all but the most imperative missions has hit especially hard.”

I grabbed my plate and walked away from them. They’d work it out better without an audience. Mira had sat at a table and was eating her burger when I stepped into the cafeteria.

“There are fries, too,” I told her.

She wrinkled her nose. “The burger is fine. I don’t eat as much as other shapeshifters. Why do you need women guards?”

“Hard for me to follow a woman into a public bathroom,” I told her.

“Who is Cora?”

“The new wolf alpha. She doesn’t have time to work for us full-time anymore. When we call her with a big job, she can sometimes break away to help, but we’re trying to function without her. The alpha wolf job landed on her unexpectedly, and it’s important she succeeds.”

She looked from me to Aaron when he walked in. “You don’t like me. What can I do to fix that?”

He shook his head. “You were specifically trained to use emotions against those who have them.”

“Yes, but I’ve learned that almost every female in this country is taught such things. The difference is that I wielded it from a position of not feeling emotions. That is no longer the case.”

“English is your second language?” I asked.

She looked to me and didn’t answer, and I felt my eyebrows raise again. “If we’re going to be partners, you’re going to have to talk to me.”

“Goes both ways. If your answers won’t be free of charge, I see no reason mine should be.”