Page 63 of Grave Beginnings

“Is there chocolate? I could use some chocolate. Should I worry about Merrill?”

Angel handed over a slice of chocolate cloud cake I didn’t remember choosing, but I didn’t hesitate to try it.

“Fuck, this cake is so good. Which one are you eating?”

Angel got up and brought his box over to my desk, offering me a forkful of his cake. Usually, I had a little squick about eating food other people had touched—trauma—but I reached for the bite anyway. He shook his head. “Open up.”

I snorted and opened my mouth. When he fed me the cake, I licked the fork, gaze on him, and watched him shift his weight on my desk as if his pants had suddenly become tight. Maybe we really could have a chance as something. I couldn’t recall ever having a guy as openly turned on by me as I was by him. Too soon, sure—sooner than I’d ever experienced before—but he wasn’t using my attraction against me, and I sort of liked the attention.

I offered him a bite of my cake in exchange, and hoped the evening might lead to a better understanding of where we both stood.

20

The clickof keys soothed my irritation at finding nothing, no matter how many angles I viewed of the bookshop before the camera split out. Was there a reason for the malfunction? If it was supernatural, I saw nothing before it happened. Nor did there seem to be anything useful in the interviews. My eyes ached from staring at the screen, searching every corner of the grainy footage for anything usable.

I closed the file and stared at the long backlog of cases, and wondered if that was how they all were. A wall of information, but useless because supernatural creatures left no trace.

What about the daycare? Was there more on that? Would I have access? I probably shouldn’t, since I’d been involved, but I couldn’t help but wonder.

“Am I limited in what cases I can look at?” I asked Angel.

“No. Was there something you wanted to find?” There were hundreds of active cases. How could any team get through all that with the tiny amount of staff they had?

“The daycare,” I said.

Angel looked up from his screen to stare at me, his gaze assessing. “You sure you want to look at that?”

“Is there video of me in there?”

“Yes, though I hadn’t looked at it until you said something about your former partner. It was originally assigned to the NHV team for review.”

A dozen questions crossed my mind. How much had he seen? Did I control the zombies? Had I looked like something terrifying and that’s why Joe zapped me?

“I don’t want to see that part. But if there is more from the daycare before all the crazy zombie stuff happened…” I paused and wondered how much they knew about the daycare. “Were they zombies? Or did the kids change?”

“One dead,” Angel said. “No kids. The zombies came through the tear, but I think all the kids were accounted for.” He did something on his computer that popped a file up on mine with little notes. “Merrill listened through everything. His ability is mostly audio. Heard nothing. At least, according to his notes.”

That was a strange way to phrase that. “You don’t believe him?”

“Merrill and I don’t talk,” Angel said. “You saw how he bristled, being near me in the breakroom this morning.”

“Was he on your team?”

“For less than a month,” Angel agreed.

“And he doesn’t like shifters, when most of your team are shifters, right? Probably not a good fit for him.”

“Yeah. Bobby is a vampire variant, but as they are just as rare as SVs, he’s the only one I know of in the Twin Cities. Tiana is a shifter.”

“There are other shifters in this unit though. Not on our team, I mean.”

“A dozen,” Angel agreed.

“I thought there would be more. The media makes it sound like shifters are the most common variant.”

“I think the most common are those with very low-level mental skills. Mind reading, telekinesis, that sort of thing. Nonestrong enough to work for SED reliably. Shifters have physical strength, speed, animal senses, and heal faster. It makes us more of a benefit to units spending a lot of time in opposition to supernatural creatures.”

“Still the odd duck out,” I complained, thinking they were hoping for a lot of stuff from me that wasn’t panning out. Seeing my dead grandmother didn’t seem a useful trait yet. Or whatever shadow beast had been laughing at me the day before.