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“That you’re qualified to safely remove it,” I finished. “I remember. ” I was with Raphael once when he filed for permits. “Would you say Anapa is capable of murder?”
“Yes. But I don’t think he’d murder my people. He doesn’t seem to have the motivation. I was there when he lost the bid. He was looking over some papers his assistant shoved under his nose. He waved his hand and said, ‘Yes, yes. C’est la vie. ’ Oh, and he invited me to his birthday bash before he left. ”
Interesting. “The third bidder?”
“Garcia Construction. I’ve known the Garcias for a long time. They were in business for about ten years before I started. It’s a family-operated business. They mostly took medium-sized reclamation jobs and didn’t get very ambitious until about two years ago, when Ellis took over the company from his father. They went big real fast, too fast, and bought rights to a huge apartment complex. ” Raphael grimaced again. “It was a monster of a building. I wouldn’t have taken it. ”
“Too expensive?”
“Not too expensive to buy, but too expensive to reclaim. The way it fell, you’d have to shift a ton of rubble before you got to anything decent. Too many man-hours. Ellis started it that May and last February the Garcias were still digging in it when a section of it collapsed. Killed seven workers. Apparently Ellis had sunk all his resources into the building and let the insurance lapse. The insurance companies hate us. The premiums are through the roof. The Garcias did the right thing and paid out the death benefits anyway, out of their own pocket. The company was finished after that. ”
“So how can they afford to bid on Blue Heron?” I asked.
“Word is, they got a substantial investment. This was their comeback attempt. They are decent, hardworking people, Andrea. They wouldn’t kill my crew. ”
“Somebody did, Raphael. What about the seller?”
“The city of Atlanta. ”
That was a dead end for sure. “Did you know about the vault?”
“No. ” He scowled. “Rianna, one of the guards, just had her baby three months ago. It was her second day back on the job. Nick is her husband. You remember Nick Moreau?”
“Nick the carpenter? The one that redid our, no, I’m sorry, your kitchen?”
Raphael nodded. “Yes. ”
I remembered Nick. He’d cracked jokes while he had installed the cabinets and showed me a picture of his wife and told me she was the most wonderful woman on Earth. He’d said they were trying to have a baby and if it was a boy, they would name him Rory, and if it was a girl, they would name her Rory, too.
Raphael had teased him that they were setting the baby up to be made fun of, to which Nick had pointed his hammer at Raphael and told him that if he wanted to name babies, he would just have to make some of his own.
“Was it a girl?” I asked quietly. “Baby Rory?”
“It’s a boy,” Raphael said.
And now his mother was dead. I would get those bastards. I would find them and make them pay.
I got up. “Thank you for your cooperation. We’re done. I’ll inform you when I have a lead. ” This interview is over. Get the hell out of my office and out of my life.
“Do that. ”
Raphael rose and left.
Work was the only thing I had left. Everything else was gone now. I would find the murderers. I would find them if it was the last thing I did. I had to do it to prevent them from killing anyone else, to offer their victims vengeance and solace, and most of all I had to do it to prove to myself that I was still worth something.
I pulled out a phone book and tracked down the three addresses of the bidders.
His scent was still here. I snarled at it, but it refused to vanish.
Hurt and frustration bubbled in me. I was keyed up too high, my skin was on too tight, and I wanted to shoot something just to vent all the pain boiling up inside.
So Raphael had replaced me with a seven-foot-tall dimwit, so what? Good riddance. I was better off on my own.
The back door opened with a faint creak. Ascanio walked into the office and froze.
“What?” I asked.
He opened his mouth, his eyes wide.
“Speak!”
“Breasts,” he said.
Female shapeshifters didn’t have breasts in warrior form. There was no need for them. They were either flat-chested or sported rows of teats. I had breasts. They were covered with fur, but they were recognizable adult female boobs.
“It’s not your first time seeing a pair, is it?”
“Um. No. ”
“Then do act like you’ve been around the block before. ”
Ascanio closed his mouth with a click.
“Don’t test Raphael,” I told him. “If you do, he’ll cut you into itsy-bitsy pieces and leave them in a pretty pile on the floor. ” I decided I liked my beastkin voice. It was deeper, more powerful, and sounded better. In an attractive female monster kind of way.
“Oh, I don’t know. ” He gave me a look suffused with teenage arrogance. “I think he might find it difficult. ”
“No, he won’t. We once fought a dog the size of a two-story house. Raphael ripped one of its heads off. ”
Ascanio blinked. “One?”
“It had three. ” I got up and pulled a change of clothes from my bag. My other me was about twenty-five percent larger, but my long-sleeved T-shirt had a lot of stretch in it. I pulled it on and put on my pants. They were more like capris now and they were tight on my calves. “I’m going out. ”
“Like that?”
I pulled out my knife and sliced the hems of my pants. Much better. “Who’s going to stop me?”
“But you’re…not in human shape. ”
Yes, and I was sick of being ashamed of who I was. I looked at him for a long moment. “If I change back into a human, I’ll need a nap. I don’t have time for naps. If someone has a problem with the way I look, fuck them. ”
“Uhh…”
“And stop looking so scandalized. I covered my boobs, didn’t I?”
“But I still know they’re there. I saw them. ”
“Treasure the memory. ” I grabbed my bag off the table.
Ascanio jumped in front of the door. “Can I come with you?”
“No. ”
He fluttered his eyelashes at me. “I’ll be very quiet. ”
“No. ”
“Andrea, I’m sick of being stuck here by myself. Please, please, please, can I come with you? I’ll be good. ”
He’d been cooped up in the office for the last few weeks, at first because he was injured, then because he wasn’t and we wanted to keep him that way.
“I’m going to look for a murderer. If you come with me, you’ll get hurt when we run into trouble on the way. And then I will have to have a very unpleasant conversation with Aunt B, which will go like this: ‘You won’t join Clan Bouda, you broke up with my son, and you let that sweet precious boy get hurt. ’”
Ascanio picked up my desk with one hand and held it four feet off the ground.
“It’s not your muscle I’m concerned about. It’s your brains. Or lack thereof. ”
He set the table down. “Please, Andrea. ”
He was going stir-crazy and doing broom drills. I could relate. I’d been there.
“Can you drive?” If I put my seat all the way back, I’d fit into the Jeep, but driving with my size-twelve feet and three-inch claws would be a challenge.
“Do the People navigate vampires? Of course I can drive. ”
“Alright. ”
He jumped three feet in the air.
“Now, while you’re with me, you will be acting as a representative of our firm. That means you will be respectful and polite. If some jerk calls you an asshole, you’ll call him sir. Even if you have to throw him on the ground and break his legs, you will still call him sir while doing it. You follow my lead and
you follow my orders. That means not taking the initiative and starting fights without my express command. Do you get me?”
“Yes, ma’am. ”
“Excellent. Go get your knife. ”
He ran into the supply room and came out with a tactical bowie knife in a sheath on his belt. The bowie, a “Mercenary Guild” model, boasted a sixteen-inch black blade and weighed almost two pounds. You could chop small trees down with it. It would be sufficient.
“Let’s go. ”
He hesitated. “Carrie and Deb are in our parking lot. I saw them from the window. ”
I went to the back and carefully glanced out of the window. Two boudas waited for us by my Jeep. The one on the left, Carrie, a tall Italian-looking woman in her mid-forties with dark shoulder-length hair, leaned against the vehicle, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Olive-skinned, Carrie had a kind of raw-boned hardness about her that said you’d have to rip her arms off before she’d stop coming after you. Deb, her buddy, was about ten years younger, looked softer, rounder in the face, and stood two inches shorter. Her red hair, cut in a fluffy carefree bob, flared about her tan face. Her brown eyes brimmed with humor. She cracked up easily and usually went for the gut in a fight.
Aunt B used them for light enforcement jobs. That old bitch was at it again. Aunt B and I never saw eye to eye. She’d helped me once during the flare, when the magic made me lose control over my body, but that was the only moment of kindness I had ever seen from her.
“What are you two doing here?” I murmured to myself.
“Maybe they have some pamphlets that will save our souls and make sure we’re right with the Lord,” Ascanio said.
“Did those nice church ladies come by again?”
He nodded. “I asked them if a man died and then the woman remarried, and the three of them met in heaven, would it be a sin for them to have a threesome, since they were all married in God’s eyes. And then they decided they were late to be somewhere else. ”
A little bit of knowledge was a very dangerous thing.