Page 32 of Grave Beginnings

The scent of my uneaten food walloped me in the face. “Fuck. Shouldn’t have left that in the car.”

Angel crawled in. I shut the door behind him and got in the driver’s seat. “Do you need the belt?” He sat on the floor, nosing around, and came up a moment later licking his lips, then sprawled the top half of his body across the seat. “Did you just eat my sandwich?”

He chuffed.

“Rude,” I said, but snapped my belt into place and turned on the navigation, looking for a route back to the SED precinct without going through the Veil. “Highway overpass it is,” I said with a sigh. “I hope whatever that was didn’t follow us back.”

Angel gazed at me, his big, brown eyes questioning, but I said nothing the entire drive.

I returned the car after cleaning out the remains of my stolen lunch and dropped it off at the service desk with an apology for the smell. Angel had snapped up the clothes he’d left behind and vanished inside the building while I’d worked to clean up the car. By the time I headed to the elevator, he reappeared, human and dressed, hair a mess and no longer in a ponytail. Why was that so hot?

“Do I have a computer to log details into?” I asked him as he swept by me to push the button to go up.

“Yes. I’ll get you logged in once we get upstairs. It’s likely similar to what you used with the MPD.” The door slid open andhe got in, leaning against the back. I stepped inside and studied him, a thousand questions going through my head. The door closed and the elevator began to move. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine,” he said after a few seconds of silence.

“Does it hurt?”

“The change?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes. It’s sharp, but fast. Passes in a few seconds. But I change a lot. If I went days or even weeks without doing it, it would take a long time and hurt a lot. As a shifter, you either embrace the change or avoid shifting to minimize the pain.”

I thought about that for a minute. Maybe it wasn’t so cool to be a shifter variant, even if it meant having fangs and claws, and super soft fur. I rubbed my head as it still pounded, though not as terribly as before. Maybe there was a room somewhere with less fluorescent lights?

“Still have a headache?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Not as bad, but the lights make it worse.” The wriggle of passing through the Veil made me shudder, but it vanished as fast as it started, and the door slid open to a long hall of offices. Angel headed down toward the end. “We’re the door on the end.”

Each door led to a central meeting room type of section with smaller offices around it. Most looked empty.

“I expected SED to have more people,” I said as we entered the large bullpen at the end.

“There are three active teams on this side of the city and another five that share the border between Minneapolis and St. Paul, across the border into Wisconsin. We’re the only one on the southwest side.” He led me to an office with two desks topped with high-end computers facing each other and digital wallboards. “We’re always looking for more people, but most of the funding goes to equipment, and it’s hard to find variants to fill the active duty roles. Those who are super powerful go to themilitary, or we get them after they retire.” He put his hand on his chest. “Like me.”

He'd mentioned he’d served, and spoken of the horrors of the SVs taking over his kind, but he didn’t look any older than me. “Should I ask how old you are?”

“I’m forty-seven,” he said as he pointed to the desk opposite his.

“You must have good genes.”

“The shifter variant slows aging.”

“Really?” I hadn’t heard that before, but didn’t know any shifters well enough to ask questions.

“Once we hit maturity, yeah. Some people are dumb enough to think it’s the fountain of youth and try to get themselves sick. But nothing guarantees a shifter variant. They could have something terrible, like mind reading, or seeing dead people. Science doesn’t know why the virus triggers different things for everyone, and sometimes nothing at all.”

“Seeing dead people is pretty crappy,” I agreed. “Why would mind reading be bad? We could figure out if folks were guilty pretty fast.”

“Would you really want to be inside everyone’s head? And worse, criminals’ heads? I’ve read enough about breaking down the thought process of serial killers to never want to linger inside their minds.”

“Good point,” I said. “I suppose I should be grateful for the dead people talking variant. Or at least seeing weird handprints.” I didn’t mention all the voices I’d heard when the ghosts surrounded me across the Veil.

“That was useful,” he agreed, and leaned over me to show me how to log in, and I was suddenly reminded that he’d been all over me across the Veil and the crime scene. Heat flooded my face.

“What?” he asked as the screen popped up.

“Your leopard is pretty cool,” I said. “Big, and sort of bulkier than I thought a leopard would be.”