03 - You Only Live Nine Times Read online

  “I don’t turn into a fucking wild animal. She’s a goddamn half-breed. It’s not normal!”

  He tensed and willed his rising ire to abate. “I don’t want to hear you talk about her or any other shifter that way,” he said lowly.

  Georgia flinched a little from the edge in his voice, but she soon rallied and gave him an unpleasant smile. “Well, maybe you just like fucking animals. Pervert!”

  She flounced away, and Raf watched her go. She could think whatever the hell she wanted about him – he didn’t exactly hold her opinion in high esteem. This was a woman who voiced the opinion that people were just making a big fuss over nothing when it came to blood diamonds, and that mental illnesses didn’t really exist. But, he didn’t like her talking badly about Isis. Yes, she was a big, tough tigress, whose physical strength and speed far outweighed his own, but damn if a part of him didn’t want to curl her into his arms and protect her from the outside world. He scrubbed a hand over his face. It was probably best he didn’t mention that impulse to Isis. In his experience, women didn’t exactly love the whole caveman act.

  *

  Isis smacked her lips together as she applied another coat of lipstick. She didn’t have to see her guest to know she was there. “Selling girl scout cookies, sweetie?”

  The young blonde gasped as Isis turned to face her. “Oh don’t look so surprised, even if I didn’t have an excellent sense of smell, I could scent your perfume a mile away.” Plus, Ms. Kitty had excellent bitch-dar. Yes, this wasn’t going to be a social call.

  The blonde folded her arms over her impressive bust and Isis inwardly sighed. That was one area where she was a little lacking. “You should stay away from Raffy.”

  “And why would I do that?” she enquired calmly, even as her tiger howled at her to scratch this bitch’s eyes out.

  She seemed to struggle to answer for a few moments before triumph gleamed in her eyes. “He just broke up with his girlfriend recently. The last thing he needs is for you to trampling all over him while he’s so fragile.”

  Ms. Kitty almost rolled around laughing at that, but Isis kept herself in check. “Yes, Raffy does give off the impression of being a delicate flower, doesn’t he?” Ha, as if!

  Her face puckered in frustration, and it was not pretty. “He’s too good for a thing like you.”

  Isis curled her claws into her palms. Words like it and thing had been used against her numerous times as a child. Human children weren’t interested in a girl with a tiger father, and the tiger cubs saw her as being defective for having a human mother. They soon shut up when they met Ms. Kitty. But all of the taunting and teasing, not to mention stones they threw, meant nothing to her. This, however, being told she wasn’t worthy of her… ah… guy she really, really liked – the word mate was still a bit too hard to swallow – was akin to pulling on her tail and blowing raspberries at her. Isis rose to her full height, and her tiger squared her shoulders readying to pounce and… Raf strolled through the door holding two cups of coffee.

  “Georgia, what are you doing in here?” The blonde looked at her feet sullenly. “Everything okay?” he asked, warily, his eyes seeking Isis’.

  “Fine.” Isis beamed at him as a wave of calm spread from her nose to her toes. Just his presence was enough to soothe her, beast and all. Indeed, Ms. Kitty was already sprawled out begging for a belly rub.

  Georgia muttered a goodbye and left, blushing and throwing Isis a dangerous look. Raf closed the door behind her and passed Isis her coffee.

  “Jeez, Raffy, watch yourself around her. She wants you.” She tried to laugh about it, to make it seem like she was teasing, but she wasn’t. She. Was. Pissed.

  “Well, yeah, I can tell,” he said, awkwardly.

  Ms. Kitty snorted. “No, I mean, she really wants you. She’s virtually gagging for you to bend her over and boink her brains out.”

  “Boink? Now there’s a word you don’t hear very often.”

  “Yeah, I’m trying to make it popular again. That and snog.”

  “Look, I know she’s interested in me…”

  “More than interested,” Isis insisted, “I can smell it.” Stupid booby mcbitch face!

  Raf looked at her quizzically. “What can you smell?”

  “Her arousal. She’s creaming her panties for you.” And it damn well should not be allowed. Perhaps she needed to arrest Georgia…

  “Please, you can’t smell that,” he said with a chuckle as he sipped at his coffee.

  Isis smirked at the cocky assuredness in his voice. Oh, he really had no idea.

  Raf paled ever so slightly. “You can smell that?”

  “Sure, all shifters can scent arousal.”

  He looked as guilty as if he’d just been caught stealing his neighbor’s panties. “So if I happened to be thinking of…”

  “Let’s just say working with you is very flattering to my ego.”

  Raf started pacing up and down the room, unable to look her in the face. “Fuck, you didn’t think to warn me?”

  Isis blinked at him. “Would it have made a difference?” Would he have tried thinking about baseball or sandwiches to quell his lust? Because she’d tried both of those things, and neither worked.

  “Well, I uh, I guess not. I mean…”

  “There’s no reason to be embarrassed. Being attracted to one another is the most natural thing in the world.” Just like kissing and having sex were very, very natural, and necessary. Not to mention mating… Oh, shush Ms. Kitty!

  He stopped and stared at her with a crooked grin, his dimples deepening. “So you admit you’re attracted to me?”

  “Absolutely,” she answered without hesitation. It wasn’t something she found shameful. The only question was, whether they were going to do anything about their attraction. Her mind told her to back away slowly, so no one got hurt. But her heart and her body said go for it. While her tiger told her to ravish him senseless. Yes, the beast was making no bones about that.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she told him prettily while fluttering her eyelashes.

  “Maybe we should get back to work.”

  She agreed, perhaps they were straying onto a dangerous topic. They worked in silence for another twenty minutes. The quiet was only punctuated by Isis huffing and puffing and making gagging noises at the awful coffee – although, she still drank it.

  After a while, Raf leaned back in his chair. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything,” Isis purred. Oh, this was promising.

  He dithered for a second before blurting it out. “Is the tooth fairy real?”

  Definitely not what she was expecting, and her tiger grunted in disappointment, but she managed to rally. “Not real,” she told him evenly. “Although, we caught a guy a few months ago who was stealing children’s teeth. He thought he was the tooth fairy, but it turns out he was having a psychotic break.”

  “Wow. Shifter?”

  “Zombie.”

  Raf leaned forward, eagerly. “Zombie? You’re serious? Like a real-life brain eating zombie?”

  Damn, he looked like a kid at Christmas. “Yep, minus the brain eating – they don’t go in for that usually. But it explains the psychotic break. To wake up dead and realize you’re still walking around, it’s enough to fuck anyone up. The whole teeth thing kind of made sense given that he was a dentist when he was alive.”

  “I’m still having trouble with the whole zombie thing.”

  “Meh, happens occasionally, but it’s really rare. Some people just suddenly come back after dying and find they’re a zombie. Of course, zombies can still be created, and you have to get a permit to make them, but they don’t tend to retain their personalities from when they were alive. Jeff’s a real sweetie now that he’s calmed down.”

  “Jeff?”

  Isis nodded. “The zombie dentist. He had quite a violent death so no wonder he went crazy for a while. He works in our mailroom now. Although, if you’ve got a toothache he has n
o problem with looking you over – if you can stand zombie breath on your face. Zombies aren’t the best at personal hygiene. Plus he doesn’t really have the co-ordination to use a drill anymore, so don’t let him get a hold of one.”

  Raf shook his head, caught between amusement and disbelief. “It’s like a different world to the LLPD.”

  “Or the same world but one that some people like to see through a Vaseline smeared lens.”

  “I would have said rose tinted glasses, but you’re right.”

  Isis snapped her fingers. “I think I’ve got something. A couple of nights ago, the groundskeeper at the Arkham Cemetery reported a trespasser. Apparently the chains on one of the gates had been cut with bolt cutters. However, patrol officers couldn’t find any damage within the cemetery, so they put it down to teenagers.”

  “Not many teenagers in my neighborhood carry bolt cutters.”

  “In mine, they turn into wild animals.”

  “How about a field trip to check out Arkham Cemetery?”

  “Yes, yes, please yes. I mean, not that I’m bored of doing this or anything…” Or sick of smelling the lingering scent of booby mcbitch face. Rawr.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Six

  Raf followed Isis as she followed her nose around the cemetery. Watching her sniff her way around was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. Well, almost. They were in the company of the groundskeeper, Trip, another octogenarian mole shifter who bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain other groundskeeper.

  “You know a guy called Shep?” asked Raf, as Trip dodged a statue of an eagle.

  Trip snorted. “My brother, thinks himself all high and mighty because his cemetery has an extra two hundred square feet on mine. But I told him, I sure as hell did, that it’s quality, not quantity that matters.”

  “Huh.” There wasn’t much else to say to that.

  They continued to follow Isis for a while as she continued to follow her nose. Trip grunted, snorted and sighed in impatience while Raf pretended he wasn’t taking every opportunity to study Isis’ lovely form. Course it didn’t help that she kept bending over to look at graves. He caught a twinkle in her eye that told him she was doing it entirely for his benefit. He didn’t know whether to strangle her and lie at her feet and worship her.

  Isis stopped in front of some fresh graves that didn’t have headstones yet. She grimaced. “How long ago were these filled in?”

  “Couple of days ago,” sniffed Trip.

  “So the same day someone broke in here?” clarified Raf.

  Trip shrugged a yes and ambled away. Apparently Shep was the social butterfly out of the twins. Raf walked over to Isis, who had her hands on her hips and was frowning at the grave. “What do you think?”

  “That weird dead smell is pretty faint, but it’s strongest here. I think whoever was giving off that smell spent most of their time here. Probably doing manual labor, because it reeks of sweat.”

  “Really?”

  “Let’s just say you’re lucky to have such a feeble human nose.”

  Raf chuckled as he pulled out his phone. “In this case, I agree with you.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting permission to dig up that grave.”

  *

  They tried asking a judge to permit them to dig up the body, but no judge would go for it on the basis of a whiff of a strange, sweaty, dead smell. Instead, they asked permission from the family of the deceased. They gave it willingly on the basis that the cops leave them alone. Apparently the dead man was a second cousin and had been a pain in the butt, and they were pissed that he was still causing them aggravation in death. He also happened to be a wolf shifter. Sure enough, when the coffin came out of the ground, it was empty. Completely empty – the entire body had been taken in this instance.

  “Yikes,” commented Isis on seeing the empty space that used to be home to a resting peacefully wolf shifter.

  Raf turned to Trip. “There should definitely be someone there, right?”

  “Of course!” snapped the mole shifter as his nose twitched almost violently.

  “Looks like they were successful in making it look like nothing happened.”

  “I wasn’t here that night,” said Trip, defensively. “It was my assistant who reported the break-in and dealt with the cops. Lazy sloth shifter.”

  “Unh hunh.” Raf nodded automatically as Trip launched into a diatribe about why sloth shifters were the worst employees in the world. He didn’t bother to listen. He was running through the possibilities as to what someone might want with all these dead bodies. His eyes, on the other hand never left Isis as she stepped away to take a call. He felt a twinge of something as her musical laugh floated toward him. Who the hell was she talking to?

  “You know what this reminds me of?” asked Trip.

  “What?” replied Raf as he dragged his eyes away from his feline companion. There was always the possibility that Trip might say something of use. Raf wasn’t so rude or drowning in so much lust that he wasn’t keeping his attention focused on the case.

  “Burke and Hare,” the mole replied with a smug grin.

  Raf raised his eyebrows. “Is that supposed to mean anything to me?”

  The mole huffed and opened his mouth to answer, but the sultry tones of Isis got there first.

  “In Scotland in the nineteenth century, Burke and Hare allegedly killed people and sold their bodies to be dissected by universities.”

  “Not allegedly,” grumbled Trip.

  “Our perp isn’t killing, just stealing,” said Raf, amiably.

  “Burke and Hare started off by finding bodies, and only started killing when demand became too much.”

  Isis growled impatiently, and Raf was a little surprised to see Trip pale. The noise had sent vibrations through his own body – happy, sensual vibrations. “As much as I would love to storm the Los Lobos State University campus and arrest a few professors – I dated one from the medieval literature department once and let’s just say that his head wasn’t stuck in his books, it was up his ass – they don’t need to steal cadavers. Lots of people donate their bodies to science.”

  Trip sniffed and started wandering away, mumbling. He was a little put out that they weren’t more impressed with his Burke and Hare idea.

  “Call us if any more bodies go missing… that is if you notice them,” called Isis to his departing figure.

  He turned with a furious look on his face, but merely pushed his hands into his pockets and stomped away with more purpose.

  Raf bit his lip to stop himself from smiling. “Should you have done that? He didn’t look happy.”

  “He’s a mole shifter; he was born unhappy.”

  The crime scene unit did a sweep of the area and all they found was a small key with a blue keychain attached. It had been trodden into the dirt. It was close enough to the missing shifter’s grave for them to believe it was dropped by the perpetrators, so the technicians took it away to try and get some prints.

  Isis yawned and closed her eyes while stretching out her long limbs. “What now, partner?”

  Stand outside in the sun all day watching her stretch her lovely body? Well, that was one plan. But he figured they had other more pressing matters. Although, considering the way his cock was pushing at the fly of his jeans, he didn’t think anything in the world could be considered more pressing at that moment.

  He cleared his throat and talked quickly to try and hide his discomfort, and her smug, knowing grin certainly wasn’t helping. Oh, he could think of something much better to do with that mouth…

  “I think we should check out other cemeteries and see if anyone else happens to have mislaid a body. I want to know how bad this really is.”

  *

  They spent the rest of the day trawling around other cemeteries. Bodies were missing from another two - both shifters. The crime scene technicians found a few usable fingerprints on a couple of the caskets, but they belonged to the people who
worked at the funeral home who were horrified at even the suggestion that they had anything to do with exhuming dead bodies and gladly gave them prints to eliminate themselves. The only evidence they found at each crime scene was the weird smell – and that really wasn’t helpful.

  Isis resisted the urge to take off her boots and rub her feet as Raf drove them home. She was far too proud to admit it, but her feet were kind of hurting and the idea of doing any more walking had them screaming in protest. They must have walked freaking miles around all the cemeteries! She could spend hours running around in her four-inch stilettos, and she was still up for a game of paintball – in the stilettos, naturally. But these darn two inchers were like torture devices for feet. Hmmm, maybe her feet had just molded into a shape that requires high heels.

  Her phone buzzed and belted out The Mississippi Squirrel Revival. Raf gave her a curious look as she answered. “Hello, Isis Martin’s house of erotic pain, how may I help you?” She bit her tongue to stop herself from laughing at the hungry look on Raf’s face. Humans were so easy, purred Ms. Kitty. At least she hoped so.

  “Why, yes Mistress Isis, I’d like to make a booking. How’s Friday? May I bring my own whip?” teased Jessie in return.

  “Enough, what do you have for me?”

  “Seriously?” squeaked the squirrel in surprise. “Wow, he must be really something if you’re more interested in work than bantering. Is he hot? The name Rafael sounds like he’s hot.”

  “What?” Isis demanded as her scalp prickled with annoyance. Her tiger rumbled in warning. She didn’t want other females thinking he was hot. Definitely not other shifter females. Jessie may only be a squirrel shifter, but she was still female, unmated and cute in her own way. Too fucking cute in Ms. Kitty’s opinion. Isis tamped down an alarming urge to snarl the word mine.

  “Gunner said you’d been partnered with a sexy cop.”

  Isis barked out a laugh that had Rafael raising an eyebrow. “I have serious doubts about the source of your information.” Okay, she definitely could not imagine the gruff polar bear shifter describing another male as ‘sexy’.

  “There was a little interpretation on my part,” admitted Jessie. “Gunner said that he seemed like a good guy, and I took that to mean sex god. Why else would you submit to working with a human? I mean, you always say that humans are breakable and slow and idiotic and…”