Page 36 of Grave Beginnings

“It’s okay,” I said, honestly. “I’m not used to anyone—other than my grandpa—touching me.” Even occasional hookups hadfelt sterile for the last few years. My trauma, or just the shittiness of the men I happened to choose? I suspected a mix of both.

“Shifters are touchy-feely,” Angel said, absently. “I wasn’t for a long time after the war. But it’s grounding. If it ever bothers you, let me know. Not everyone likes it.”

“It’s nice,” I said. “The way our magic mixes…is strange. I’m not used to it, but it’s not bad,” I amended.

“Yeah, that’s intense,” he agreed. He slid off my desk and returned to his. “Eat. You’ll feel better.”

I ate the second cake slower, savoring it. “Is this stuff from the cafeteria?”

“Nope. Bakery across the Veil.”

I nearly spit out the cake I was eating.

Angel waved his hand at me. “It’s fine. Run by an Ajumma whose bakery was swallowed up when the Veil spread. She didn’t move, and still does okay. Has stuff for everyone now. NHVs and the normies like us.”

We were normies? I didn’t feel normal anymore, but I ate the rest of the second cake. “You walked there and back? You were only gone, what, twenty minutes?”

“It’s a five-minute walk.” He typed away at his computer for a minute, adding a bunch of notes, and a file popped up on my computer. A hybrid notation of my encounter across the Veil appeared. I browsed through it, wondering if I should add to it or leave his interpretation as it was. “It’s closer than my car is parked,” Angel added after a few minutes, startling me out of my thoughts.

I sighed. “I don’t know who’s in my spot. Sorry.”

“It’s Victor’s bike,” Angel finally said. “Pretty sure he parked there just to piss us both off.”

“What?” Holy fuck, that asshole. “So, are you two a thing?” Dammit, it wasn’t my business.

Angel snorted. “He wishes. No. Never. Vampires are a messy bunch, emotionally and in general. The ones like Bobby, whohave a vampire variant, are a little more predictable. The NHVs like Victor have lived a long time and it makes them cold. That’s why Hanna separated the teams. NHVs treat a lot of us HVs as cannon fodder.”

“It’s not like we wanted to become variant.”

“Oh, they treat human non-variants even worse. I think it’s more about the human aspect than the variance. I’ve already given him shit to stay out of your spot tomorrow. If he’s still there, I will pick the damn thing up and move it.”

“Can you do that? Physically?”

“I’m not as strong as a vampire, or most NHVs, but I can pick up his crotch rocket and move it a few feet. Wade could probably carry the damn thing and dump it off the roof.”

“Wow. It’s going to take some getting used to.”

“What? Being around shifters?”

“No. Working with superheroes.”

“I don’t think any of us think of ourselves as superheroes. More, mutants, if you’re going the comic book route.”

That made sense. I didn’t feel like a hero, even if I’d seen something everyone else hadn’t. Being strong didn’t make someone a good person. “I guess a hero is a personality rather than a power. You work to help people, so that would make you a hero, not a mutant even if we are variants. You run toward the scary, instead of away.” I’d run away. Fuck, that ate at me, but I shivered at the idea of that shadowy nightmare thing catching me. The memory of its cackle had dug itself deep into my brain. I knew I’d never forget that sound.

“Do you know what it was?” I whispered the last question, afraid to hear the answer. What if it wasn’t something I needed to be afraid of?

“No,” Angel said after a long moment.

My gaze snapped up to meet his. How did he, who’d worked in the military and now in SED for ages, not know what it was?

“I don’t,” he said again. “And that worries me. None of us,even NHVs, know every creature that exists across the Veil. The other world is vast. It’s why the manual keeps growing. But I’ve never encountered what you describe. Is it demonic? Something from another culture, perhaps? It’s why I added notes and put in a request for review from all NHVs. They will be all over that building you were in.” His avatar appeared on my screen again and a little gold star appeared next to the file. “That marker is a request for review from NHVs. If someone is requesting a review from you specifically, it will appear in your pop up on the right.”

A list of files appeared. Interviews and digital scans of the scene. “Will we get feed from the cameras in the shop and anything surrounding it outside?”

“Yep, though it might take a few days to pull the footage. Most businesses are on older systems rather than fully automated digital stuff. We will probably have all that by the end of the week.”

“Good to know,” I said, clicking through the interview list—all videos with notations from Ezra. While coming in this morning had been chaos, everything else had been highly organized, though it was strange that I didn’t actually own any cases. I wondered if the collaboration hurt or helped them solve anything. Their long backlog made me think it was the former, but SED had a lot of complicated issues that I could see miring the ability to close a case.