Page 5

Chapter 4

Guardians of the flame

CHARLIE

Y awning, I pull my truck up to the station and park. I gather my go-cup, my tablet and my purse before heading into the station. Blearily, I dig through my purse for office keys, but the sound of raucous laughter has me frowning.

It’s 8:30 in the morning. The fire house is never animated at this time of day. What’s going on?

I follow the laughter to the kitchen where I blink several times, certain I must be hallucinating.

“Charlie!” Dale’s booming voice has me flinching. “Come join us. Your new partner here is making breakfast.”

“Not my partner,” I mutter, sliding into a chair and staring blankly around. No less than seven firefighters are lined up at the counter, plates in hand as Lennox serves what looks like toaster strudels with strawberries and Cool Whip, microwaved bacon and sausages on the side.

Dale’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he smiles at me. Smiles! Before today, I assumed he didn’t have the correct facial muscles to lift his lips into a proper smile.

“She never was a morning person,” he says to Lennox with a wink. “It’s why you had to wait two hours for her to show up.”

“Two hours!” I swing my gaze to Lennox. “What time did you get here?”

“6:30,” he says pleasantly, tipping a toaster strudel onto a waiting plate. “You told me to be here early.”

Oh. I did, didn’t I? “Sorry,” I mumble. “I should’ve been more specific. I don’t start before the sun does.”

“Not a problem,” he replies cheerfully. “The extra time allowed me to get to know your colleagues better.”

I look suspiciously at the faces surrounding me. These people worshipped Ramón and have as much as told me I need to remain true to his memory until my dying day. I thought I’d give them a decade before attempting to introduce a new beau, but they seem quite taken with a guy I barely know myself.

Realizing the direction my thoughts have drifted to, I push my chair back and stand.

Dale frowns at me. “Sit and eat.”

Shaking my head, I reply, “I had some toast already. I need to get to work.”

“Since when don’t you eat with us?” Angela demands, her expression concerned as she searches my face.

“C’mon,” Dale pushes. “Sit down.”

I want to argue with them, but I don’t know why.

Angela is right. Even once I stopped fighting fires with the crew, I was still considered one of them. It was hard to sit and eat with them after Ramón died, but they understood. They waited patiently until I was ready to come back to them.

But this… is different.

Why would they accept Lennox so readily into our tight-knit group. It feels like a betrayal. Not just to me, but to Ramón. He earned his place at the table, but he only got to sit at it for a few short years before giving his life in service to his city.

What has Lennox done to deserve their attention? To deserve mine?

“I’ll be in my office when you’re ready to work,” I say to Lennox without meeting his eyes.

Ignoring the murmurs that follow, I make my way to my office, climbing over boxes before collapsing into my chair.

I get barely ten seconds to myself before Lennox pushes his way in. I open my mouth to blast him, but before I can speak, he says, “I’m sorry, I overstepped. I shouldn’t have done that.”

My grump starts to dissipate. “You’re sorry you pitched in to feed a bunch of hungry firefighters?” I force a smile, though I don’t meet his gaze. “Don’t be. They work hard and deserve a treat once in a while.”

He doesn’t say anything and I look up. His expression is serious. “No, Charlie, I’m sorry I barged into what is clearly a family dynamic without your permission or blessing. I shouldn’t have done it. Getting to know them was a thinly veiled excuse to get to know you better. I should have waited until you were comfortable before introducing myself.”

The gorgeous deep blue of his eyes holds me while my heart thumps at his words. At his bald honesty. He wants to get to know me better. He wants to get to know my colleagues better.

My mom is always warning me about red flags when I go on dates, but this guy is the opposite of red flags. A flush stains my cheeks as I realize I’m fantasizing about introducing the detective to my mother. What’s wrong with me?

“You’re forgiven,” I tell him. “I’m actually a little surprised the crew accepted you so readily. They usually haze newcomers who wander into the station.”

He flashes a grin. “They did. When I showed up at 6:30 asking for you, I thought your chief was going to take me out with the axe he was sharpening. I explained who I was and my purpose for being in the fire station. He said I could stay as long as I bought the groceries. When I asked what that meant, I found myself bundled into the back of one of the trucks and off to a grocery store. The rest you can probably work out.”

Now that I’m past my pique, I can see the humour in Lennox’s introduction to my favourite fire station. Dale probably got him to pay for the groceries too, which isn’t cheap when filling that many hungry bellies.

My smile dims as I remember my reason for asking him to meet me. “I found something.”

He quickly switches gears as well, dropping into the chair across from mine. “On the body?”

“I think so. Can you get us in to see it?” It would have been removed from the scene once the building was rendered safe.

A phone call and a short drive later, and we’re at the city morgue. I flash my credentials to the security guard while Lennox signs in.

“Lennox Wolven-North.” A woman in a lab coat approaches us, then surprises me by giving Lennox a lingering hug. Eventually, the woman steps away from him, her sharp gaze searching his face. “It’s good to see you again. You’re the lead detective on my shifter body?”

“Yes,” he says, stepping away from her, his body language stiff. Nodding in my direction, he says, “Along with Fire Investigator Lopez.” Lennox turns to me. “Charlie, this is Doctor Edie Thornton, our shifter pathologist.”

As Edie Thornton looks at me, her gaze unblinking, glacial hostility emanating from her, I have to fight the urge to step away from her. Something primal is telling me I’m standing face-to-face with a predator who is more than capable of killing me.

When I blink, the hostility is gone as if I’d imagined it. The doctor’s expression is smooth as she says, “Please call me Edie.” She gives my hand two quick pumps before holding up a clipboard. “Follow me.”

I stare after her for a few seconds, perplexed, then follow.

A frown teases Lennox’s features and I wonder if he caught the weird moment. Maybe there’s history between them. The hug certainty seems to point in that direction. Jealousy shoots through me. I don’t want Lennox to have any kind of history with another woman. But he’s over 700 years old, so of course there’s going to be history.

After spending the entire previous night searching the internet for clues, I couldn’t find even a hint of another woman in his life, despite his age. He seems to have lived the life of a monk. A monk partial to law enforcement.

I steel myself as we step into the morgue’s examination room, wrinkling my nose against the smell of death. Except there’s no smell other than the usual bleach smell associated with hospitals.

The room is brightly lit and has just enough space for the three of us to stand around the metal table where our victim rests.

I try to glance at the body without looking directly at him, starting at his hairy toes. Dead bodies give me the heeby jeebies, but this particular body is connected to my fire, so I don’t have a choice but to suck it up and spend time with him.

Meeting Lennox’s gaze, I nod at our dead wolf. “It’s on the back of his wrist, or, er… foot. The front right one.”

“Ah, you’re talking about the brand,” Edie says, pulling on gloves and lifting his front right paw from the table, turning it over.

I shuffle closer, squinting. Edie uses her index finger to shift the fur above his paw, revealing a small patch of skin, rough and raised in an image. It’s obscured by singed fur and skin, but I recognize it.

“What is it?” Lennox asks, leaning over for a better look. “It looks like a beetle but with jagged edges.” He shakes his head. “If he’d died in his human form, we’d have a clear view of it.”

“I’m sure he’s sorry he can’t accommodate you,” Edie says sarcastically, replacing Greystone’s paw on the table. I don’t want to say anything about the brand in front of Edie so I keep silent as she continues. “We don’t have a clear cause of death yet, but there were no defense wounds. His attacker left no evidence on the body.” She moves around the gurney, pointing as she speaks. “The heart was removed posthumously. There is no smoke in his lungs which means he was already dead when the fire was started.”

“The crime scene investigators have determined that he was killed elsewhere, then moved to the warehouse,” Lennox says.

We finish going over the body before saying goodbye to Edie. Ignoring Lennox, she shakes my hand, holding it a little too long and hard for my liking. As she releases me, her glittering gaze on my face, I step quickly back, feeling safer next to Lennox. The shifter pathologist is one strange lady.

As we leave the morgue, I ask, “You’ve known her a while?” I’m starting to think most shifters know each other.

He nods but doesn’t offer anything more, his attention on the body we left behind.

Now how do I know that? It’s almost like I was mining his thoughts, the image of the dead shifter clear in my head. Which is weird considering I very studiously avoided looking directly at it.

“She seems intense,” I prompt.

“She lost her mate,” he offers, as though I’ll understand. “She’s been working with the police for almost as long as I have.”

“So she knows her stuff?”

“We’ve worked together before,” he says carefully, but doesn’t agree with me. Huh. There’s definitely history between Lennox and Edie, but I’m clueless as to what it could be. Too bad social media was a recent invention.

He waits for me to unlock my truck, then opens the driver side door for me before loping around to the other side. I marvel at his old-fashioned chivalry as he climbs in next to me but don’t comment on it as I eagerly turn to him.

“I have to show you something.” I pull my legs up onto the seat and flip around to face him, draping one of them over the console, my booted foot landing on his thigh. “Look at this.” I twist my knee to the side and pull up the cuff of my jeans, showing him my ankle.

He leans over, staring for several long seconds before lifting his eyes to meet mine, dawning realization making his dance with excitement. “Fire bug.”

I wait for more of a reaction from him, but there isn’t one. He just looks at me curiously, so I continue, “It’s the same brand our victim has.” Greystone Boulder-Wolf had the same brand many arsonists get. It’s like belonging to a secret society that only those in the know, know about.

Lennox and I grin at each other. Fire or police, there’s nothing like a clue falling into place to energize an investigation. “Where to next, partner?” I ask.

“My office,” he says, tugging my cuff down, his big, blunt fingers brushing my skin and sending a wave of tingles up my leg. “Now that we know Greystone may have been an arsonist, we’ll see if we can link him to other fires.”

He briefly cups my thigh and our eyes meet, then his phone dings with an incoming message. His hand falls away from me as he checks his phone and I put my feet back on the floor of the truck, an ache of emptiness filling my chest.

“Scratch that,” Lennox says, his urgent tone sending me reaching for the ignition. “We have an address for our victim.”