Page 9 of Taken by the Ripper (Time for Monsters #9)

Her face burned at the blunt comment. She would have assumed he was now mocking and teasing her. But the sincerity in his eyes threw her off center.

“Well then.” She tied an apron around her dress before turning back to the body. “It’s a good thing Mazie doesn’t like being near my patients. No one would give me a second glance.”

He snorted but made no other comments about her appearance. Though the moment she opened the body to peer inside, she noticed he seemed just as hyperfixed on the task at hand as she was.

“Mmhmm,” she murmured as she carefully examined the insides. “Missing a kidney. A slice to a lung and the heart.” She lowered her voice as she briefly glanced at the coroner hiding in the corner like a scared little mouse. “The coroner, indeed, bungled the autopsy.”

“If it were in my power, I’d sack him.”

Turning her head to meet his eye, she jested, “If the sacking came from you, I think he’d go off trotting happily because you gave him the time of day at all.”

Another snort, but this one came with a lingering grin. “I do have that effect on people.”

“Clearly.” She turned back to her work to study the clean slice across the woman’s neck next. Something was odd about it. The slice was too large to be a knife but too clean and precise to be from an animal attack. “Hmm…”

“What is it?”

Instead of answering, she continued her examination by comparing the slice in the woman’s abdomen to the one on her neck. They matched.

“This is interesting.” She pointed to the end of the slit on the neck and next the abdomen.

“If you see here, there is first a puncture wound a bit larger than the slice. Puncture, then slice. Almost like…” She trailed off, her eyebrows furrowing as she spotted something abnormal hiding within the stretches and folds of the woman’s intestines.

“Like what?”

Again, she didn’t answer as she snatched her tweezers and dug in as carefully as she dared. After a few missed attempts, she finally managed to grab onto the item with the tweezers and pulled it out of the body, holding it up to the light.

A black claw.

Identical to the one she’d found lodged into her window frame. But she wasn’t about to tell him that, and she wasn’t entirely sure why.

“What is this?” he murmured, taking the tweezers from her and holding the claw close to his face. “This is not human, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Not even from the creatures you supposedly hunt?”

He shook his head. “But you’re correct. This is no mere animal attack. This is something… other .”

He placed the claw on top of a handkerchief, folded it safely inside, and tucked it into his pocket.

She lifted an eyebrow. “Stealing evidence, Detective?”

The man leaned closer until the mint on his breath drowned out the other smells wafting up from the morgue. “As far as the local police are concerned, this is a knife wound. They cannot know what it really is. Panic, remember?”

“I remember.”

When she found no evidence other than the claw, she started to put the body back together and sew up the autopsy incision. Without glancing his way, she asked the detective, “What, exactly, are you hunting?”

Because now she believed him. About all of it. About the vampires and the creatures that go bump in the night.

“You said what and not who .”

She nodded. “If you aren’t hunting a vampire, then what are you hunting?”

He frowned and opened his notebook somewhere near the middle where he kept a bookmark within the pages. “I don’t know. I haven’t encountered such a creature before. It doesn’t have the same hunting patterns as a vampire.”

“But the authorities don’t know you’re hunting a creature, do they? They think you’re hunting a man.”

His lips pressed into a thin line, causing his scar to become more prominent across his mouth. “The average police? No. Not at all. But those who hired me? Yes. They know that what I’m hunting is not human.”

“It makes more sense why they hired outside help then. You are an actual expert in your field. Just not the one I expected.”

Her gaze lingered a little longer on the scar on his mouth, and unfortunately, he noticed.

A smirk lifted on his face as he touched the place where his scar resided. “Those in my field call it my ‘kiss with a demon.’”

“A real demon? They don’t actually exist.” But then a cold sweat broke out across her hands, and her needle nearly slipped from her fingers. “Correct?”

His smirk refused to fade. “Some say I fought against a succubus and lived. Others say the demon’s kiss was as sharp as her bite.”

“And the truth?”

Instead of divulging the information, he simply turned with a grin stretched across his mouth and avoided the answer altogether.

Her focus returned to tying off the last few stitches. “I was curious about what you thought of my sister,” she asked hesitantly. If there was a way she could fix what Mazie accused her of doing despite its lack of truth, she wanted to try.

“Which one?” he replied distractedly.

“The older of the two. Mazie.”

A frown pulled on his mouth, and he remained silent for a few moments as he scribbled notes down in his little book. “I’m not answering that.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one will like the answer, and if I can avoid making you abhor me, I will.”

His frown seemed to transfer to her as she cleaned and packed up her medical instruments.

If Mazie wanted to escape Whitechapel, all she needed to do was bat her eyelashes and look pretty.

Any wealthy man might snatch her up in a heartbeat.

Unless his name was Claude La Cour—a man married to his work.

La Cour sighed and finally tucked his notebook into his pocket. “Mazie is a lovely young woman who is nearly half my age and sticks to my clothing like an unwanted burr. She has a place somewhere, but not with me. Does that satisfy you?”

“Blunt, a little bit rude, and to the point? Yes, it does.” She placed her supplies in her basket and tucked a cloth around them. She wouldn’t tell her sister what he’d said, but the matter was done. He wasn’t interested, and that was that.

Prolonged silence filled the morgue as she untied her apron and folded it neatly on top of the basket. For a moment, she thought the detective had nothing else to say on the matter, but then he spoke.

“Are you going to ask what I think of you ?”

Her head snapped up to find his intense blue eyes focused on her, almost as if he’d set his sight on an elk during a hunt and refused to look away for a single moment lest it bound away in fright.

In truth, her own legs itched to leap away, to escape this foreignly impossible situation. Especially when she wasn’t quite certain what he was trying to accomplish with such a question.

“I can imagine quite well what you think of me,” she said as she looped the handle of the basket around her arm.

“I’ve heard it time and again. Poor Miss Thompson.

A mother to her sisters. No marriage prospects of her own.

Can’t lure a man with such a disrespectful position for a woman.

” She huffed and turned away. “I don’t want to hear it again. Not from you.”

It would only cause more humiliation coming from his blunt and honest mouth.

“I don’t think that.” He sighed. “I know I came across that way when we first met. But I admire your dedication. I respect your commitment to your trade. And—”

She spun around and pointed a finger at his face. “What do you want, Detective? If you’re attempting to butter me up, save it for someone who will fall for your charm. If you want something, then just say it.”

“I wish to call on you again!” he blurted.

Her eyes widened. Slowly, her hand fell to her side in disbelief. Even the coroner slipped out of the room as if mortified on her behalf. The only time a man came to see her was when they wanted drugs or to sleep in the infirmary for the night. But to call on her? As in courtship?

“What do you really want?” she rasped. “A favor? Drugs? Another glimpse of my sister?”

He captured her hand in a movement too quick for her to pull away and cupped it between both of his. “Tea and biscuits in your drawing room?”

“With Mazie present, I presume.”

He shook his head. “Just you and I.”

She stared dumbfoundedly at him, trying to register his words and intentions. The handsome, hotshot paranormal detective from Paris wanted to court her ? She didn’t believe it. What was his angle?

“I-I-I should go.” She tore her hand out of his grip and backed up, searching frantically for the door behind her. When she located the door handle, she turned with enough force to stumble outside.

“I’ll give you a ride home.”

“No! I mean, it’s a nice, warm day. And I would like the exercise.”

“Clara—”

The use of her given name spurred her panic faster, and she spun around and walked quickly away from him even when her legs itched to run. Surely, he was not truly sincere with his intentions toward her.

She refused for a man to humiliate her again.

Refused!

Unfortunately, her confusion and fluster followed her all the way home, and it refused to unlatch from her mind as she spent the remainder of the day with her patients.

Alone. Because that was her fate. That was what he had said.

Someone who had courted her years ago who had thought he could convince her away from her profession to become a mother and housewife. And he was right.

When her own self-doubt clung to her clothing like a medicine stain, she wearily climbed the stairs to the upper floor late at night while her patients slept soundly downstairs.

For now. More often than not, someone woke in the dreary hours of night screaming for some reason or another.

It was so common an occurrence in this household that Mazie and Norma slept right through it.

But Clara? No, she could never sleep through it.

One by one, she pulled the pins out of her hair and placed them inside her apron pocket.

For once, her hair wasn’t a kinky mass of a mess, rather curling nicely over her shoulders and down her back.

If only she got to enjoy them for longer than just a few minutes before she slept on it and made it look like a rat’s nest by morning.

She opened her mouth in a large yawn as she entered her room and set her lantern down on the table beside her bed.

But then she felt the cold, chilling presence of someone else in the room moments before a draft from the open window caressed her skin. It was the way gooseflesh crawled across her arms. The way the back of her neck prickled with discomfort. The way every part of her body became alert.

She spun around and pulled out a scalpel from her pocket, holding it in both hands to protect herself from the threat. The knife may be small, but it was better than nothing.

“Who’s there?” she cried, forcing herself to be brave rather than give into the wallowing fear trying to consume her whole.

Her gaze darted along the shadows flickering across the wall with each twirl and bend of the lantern flame. And then she saw him.