Thank You For Not Shifting (Peculiar Mysteries Book 2) (21 page)

He frowned. “How do you know what I am?”

“I can smell your nuts.”

He sniffed.

“I’m kidding, Michael.” I took a step closer to the group. They all took a wary step back, except Billy Bob.
That’s my man!
“Is Sunny okay?”

“Yes,” Billy Bob said. “We found her up on the road with Jude. Ruth and Ed took her into town. She’s going to stay at their place tonight.”

“Oh, thank heavens.” It would be dark soon, and all the little creatures and some really large ones would be scurrying about. I watched Hans Fisk fidget under my sweeping gaze of the room. In this group was a killer, and now I knew whom. “Sheriff, arrest Chance Lowry.”

“What?” The accused scoffed at me. “I know you’ve had a hard night, but that doesn’t give you the right to make false accusations.” He took a step back toward the door. Farraday and Thompson blocked his way.

“I can’t arrest the man on the say-so of a ginormous black wolf,” the sheriff said.

Dominic Tartan moved with quick efficiency, pulling handcuffs from god-knows-where and slapped them on Lowry’s wrists before he could protest. “I don’t have the same constraints,” he said.

When the sheriff and the deputies moved around him, he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and flashed a badge.

“I’m FBI. I’ve been tracking the killings for almost a decade now. I’ve been close. I knew the killers were based out of Kansas, and that they spree killed during the Tri-Council Jubilee each year, but they’ve never been this public. I gave the information to Willy to pass along to you.”

So he was Willy’s contact with the FBI. “It was to be their last time,” I said. “Chance and Randy were onto their end game.” The laugh, the one that I’d heard, had been Randy’s. I remembered all the clues he’d left me, how he was a handyman, how he had a tattoo he’d like to show me. The vain part of me would have liked to believe that some of the flirtings had been real, but it had all been part of a plan to try and get me alone.

“Their dad owns a locksmith shop. It made it awful handy for them to break into places easily… like my restaurant.”

“Jacob Lowry had pressed for Peculiar as a location this year,” Willy said. “Is he involved?”

I shrugged, which was hard to do with large furry shoulders. “Someone needs to get Randy.”

“He’s probably shifted and is miles from here,” Hans Fisk said. “How can we get to him before the full moon?”

Chance laughed. I growled and snapped in his face. He shut up then. “He can’t shift,” I said. I’d realized it when he was holding Jude. “That’s what all this was about. All this tragedy.”

“But I saw him earlier,” Tyler Thompson said. “He turned into a coyote.”

I shook my head. “No. You saw Chance turn. Randy wasn’t with us. He was here with Sunny.” My stomach hurt as I thought about what he could have done to her. What he’d planned to do me.

“Why are you in this form, Chavvah?” Sheriff Taylor asked.

I didn’t respond because I didn’t have any answers.

Babe snapped his fingers and walked across the room to me. “I knew it was you!”

My tongue lolled out the side of my mouth. I swished my tail at him, whacking him in the back. “Duh.”

He wrapped his arms around my neck. “Thanks, Sis. Thanks for keeping my family safe.”

“Our family,” I said. I looked back to the group. “Find Randy. No one is safe as long as that psychopath is out there, and in less than an hour, we’re all going to be mindless instinctual animals, and he’s going to be a human running around with a really sharp hunting knife.”

Sheriff Taylor gestured to Connelly. “Run Tartan into town with the prisoner. We need to get Lowry locked in a cell before dark. Do it fast.”

“You got it,” Connelly said. He nodded to me. “Uh, Chav. Glad to see you’re…” He shook his head. The sheriff glared at him. “Let’s go, Tartan.” He grabbed Chance by one arm and Dom took the other.

Undercover FBI. I should have known.

The sheriff had already started directing everyone else to go out and search. Billy Bob walked over to me. He stood disturbingly close, leaned in and peered into my eyes. “It’s really you.”

“I think so.” I licked his face leaving a large slug’s trail of saliva along his cheek and over his nose. “Turnabout’s fair play, Doc.” I laughed. It sounded strange. “I don’t know how to get back to human.”

“Then I will be a wolf with you.”

“I’m bigger than you.”

“I have a thing for big girls.” The left corner of his mouth tugged up. “Why do you look like Brother Wolf?”

“I don’t know. The bastard won’t talk to me.” Having Billy Bob near me eased my fear, but I still didn’t feel safe. Not with Randy out there. “His mother. Their mother. She warped them. I think she made them believe if they could access the spirits, that Randy could be a shifter.” I recalled how he’d talked about her bathing him with sassafras. “Their rings are eight point stars. Not two overlaid cubes. I’m pretty sure they’ve been messing with forces on the other side for a long time.”

“Being a non-shifter in a shifter home has consequences.”

Was he thinking about baby Jude? “Sunny’s human. It won’t be the same for her and Babe with their children.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that it would, Chav.” He stroked the fur on my neck. “Come back to me.”

“I should be out there hunting him down.”

“You’ve done enough.”

“You should be out there, too.”

“I’m not leaving you. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

About that time, the kitchen door flew open. Randy Lowry stood there—his eyes wild with madness as he trained a 9mm gun at Billy Bob and me.

“You’ve destroyed everything!” I saw the flash of the muzzle, the deafening blast as he pulled the trigger, the bullet ripping through the air heading for me as if in slow motion.

“No,” Billy Bob shouted. He shoved me aside, and I watched as the deadly projectile slammed into his chest.

I roared, a frenzy of emotions overwhelming all my senses. Billy Bob had thrown himself in front of a bullet for me, and I would not let it go unanswered. Randy turned, the skins sliding off his back exposing his hideous eight-point star tattoo, the one I’d seen in Sunny’s vision. I leaped on top of him, his screams barely penetrating the red rage coursing through my veins. In this form, I had him easily pinned to the floor.

“No,” he cried out. “Please!”

I leaned in close, my breath mussing his hair. I opened my mouth, my jaw unhinged, widening like that of a man-eating python.

“Wait. Wait!” he exclaimed as my saliva dribbled on his face.

“I’m going to transform you, human. I’m going to grant your wish.”

Okay, the words came out of my mouth, or rather the big black wolf’s mouth, because I hadn’t said the words. Apparently, I’d stopped being in charge of the body I’d inhabited. I tried not to gag as we, because I was definitely a
we
now, swallowed Randy Lowry down like a bitter pill. In less than a minute, he was…in my belly.

He tasted like chicken.

Not really. I hadn’t tasted anything. It was as if I hadn’t really been a part of Randy’s demise at all. I heard a moan, and it brought me back to the present. Billy Bob! I ran to him, sliding the last couple of feet until I could cradle him in my arms.

I didn’t feel afraid for myself anymore. Chance Lowry was in prison, and well, we won’t rehash the whole people-eating trick I’d just performed on his non-shifting twin. Now, I was only afraid to lose Billy Bob.

“Hang in there, Doc.” I put my hand over the wound in his chest. God, there was so much blood. “Stay with me. Please, stay with me.”

He put his hand on mine. “You’re you again,” he said, his voice raspy and weak. “You’re so beautiful.”

I looked at my hand, all skin and no fur. “I hadn’t even noticed. Can you shift? Will that help?” I was still in my clothes, which meant it hadn’t been a traditional shift, and the eight-point star was still in my hand. I pressed it over his wound, hoping the energy from it would help stop the bleeding somehow.

“I don’t know. I’ve lost a lot of blood,” he said.

He was so pale my heart wanted to seize. “You’re strong. Too strong to die.”

“Chavvah.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t get to die.”

“I am glad for you, Chavvah. I am thankful…” His voice faded as his eyes fluttered to a close.

“No!” I shouted. He was breathing, but it was a quick, shallow panting. The first thing I wanted to do was call my mom. She was a nurse. I needed a nurse. Or a doctor. But the doctor was not fucking in!

Be calm, little wolf
.

Shut the hell up
! If there was ever a moment to panic, now was the time.

Sister, you are strong. You are brave. Be calm
.

This was not how the story ended. Billy Bob and I had a lifetime of stories to create. Brother Wolf could just suck it. “You be helpful,” I cried. “Be helpful.”

I am, little wolf
.

That was the second time he called me little wolf. Oh shit. “I’m a wolf!”

I could feel the pleasure of my guardian spirit.

“Sue me,” I said. “This better work.”

I moved my hand off the hole in Billy Bob’s chest, gathered all the saliva in my mouth until it was full then spit on the wound. The white froth mingled with his blood, but nothing happened. There was no magical healing like I’d seen when Billy Bob applied his juju to injuries. Of course, his was usually in some kind of salve or balm. Maybe I was missing a second key ingredient.

“Brother Wolf!”

Be patient
.

“Doc,” I said. “Billy Bob Smith, come back to me. I promise I won’t be so stubborn. Just please don’t leave me.” Fat tears along with some pretty awful snot streaked my face. I lay across his stomach, my hand back on the wound. “Brother Wolf, please help me. Save him. Save him.”

“He doesn’t have to,” the low, familiar voice of a certain werewolf shaman doc said. “I…I’m recovering.”

I wiped my runny nose on the bottom of his shirt before I sat up. He moved up on his elbow. A grimace told me he might be better, but he was still in pain. I didn’t let him get too far before I kissed him. I didn’t go all passion-diva on him because he groaned at one point, and it wasn’t because it felt good.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just didn’t think I’d ever have a chance to do that again.”

“You’re going to have the rest of our long, long lives.” He gave me a crooked grin. The wound on his chest looked raw, but it had stopped bleeding. He poked his finger about an inch or two in and plucked out a bullet. “How?”

“I’m part wolf now,” I shrugged sheepishly. “I have my ways.”

“You spit on me.”

“Yep. A great big loogie.”

He stroked my hair back from my face. “Thank you.”

“You took a bullet for me. It was the least I could do.”

“And I would again and again.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I said. “I prefer you among the living.”

“I prefer you alive as well.”

“Then we’re agreed. Neither of us takes a bullet again.”

“This is going to be an interesting life with you.”

“A laugh riot, I’m sure.” I could feel the heaviness of the rising moon and the gentle tingle along my skin. “It’s almost time. Do you have your phone on you?”

Billy Bob dug it out of his pocket. I pulled up a text and added contacts as quickly as I could. I typed in:
All is well. Bad guy dead. Happy full moon.

“You’re like a ninja with that thing.” He kissed me softly, sweetly, and so sexily it made my hair sizzle.

“We’re not having sex as wolves.”

“It is a full moon. We’ll be running on pure instinct, baby.”

“Not this girl.” I laughed then, and it felt really great.

“Did you really eat a full grown person in a few bites?”

“Uhm, I don’t think there was much biting going on. It was more like I swallowed him whole.”

Billy Bob raised his brows, suddenly very interested.

I smacked him hard across the chest.

“Ow,” he said, rubbing his hand over the healing wound.

“I’m sorry!”

He grabbed me in his arms and pulled me onto his lap. “I really do love you, Chavvah Adine Trimmel.”

“Who told you my middle name?”

“A doctor has his ways.”

“Sunny.”

“Yep.”

“I love you right back, William Robert Smith.”

He cringed. “I won’t call you Adine again, as long as you never call me William Robert ever again. It was my father’s name, not mine.”

“I’d rather call you Doc, anyhow.” I booped his nose with the tip of my finger. “My favorite character in Snow White.”

“You can call me Doc or Sleepy or Horny.”

“Is that the eighth dwarf?”

He smiled and leaned his head back, the gray in his eyes swirling. “I love the magic of the moon.”

I’d never thought of the full moon as magic. It had always been like getting my period—a monthly visitor I had to deal with no matter how unpleasant the side effects. At this moment, I understood what Billy Bob meant, and in many ways, I’d become a believer. How else could I explain turning into a big, scary spirit guardian? That shit had nothing to do with biology.

You are learning, child
.

It pleased me that he thought so. The air rippled around us. “It’s coming,” I said.

I hoped his wolf loved mine as much as he loved me and vice versa.

Not in that way! Though we’d be animals, so no judging.

The change was swift for both of us, and when our beasts had completely replaced us, our human thoughts faded.

“
S
o,” my supposed BFF for life, walk through fire, always have my back, girls before squirrels, best friend said. “Let me get this straight, and stop me if I go off track. A spirit guardian, a god-like creature, for lack of a better term, gave you the ability to possess his big, black bad ass wolf form, and you chugged back a serial killer like he was a two-dollar shot on ladies night at the Gin and Bear It?”

I pursed my lips and wiggled them back and forth before answering. “That’s about the truth of it.” The eight-point star, it turned out, was a conduit right to the
aether
. At least, for a spirit-talker. Billy Bob and I planned to play around with it in his sweat lodge, and no, that wasn’t a euphemism. Apparently, I was an unnatural phenomenon when it came to matters of the spirit.