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Nolan peeled back the body bag to expose Jane Doe’s bare white shoulders. All three of us leaned over the corpse, and I half-expected her to open her eyes and stare back at us. But nothing happened. And there were no scars on her shoulder or anywhere else on her body.
“What the hell?” I said, unable to understand why there was no evidence of the wound. I wasn’t willing to accept I was wrong about it being the same girl. The resemblance was too uncanny.
When we pulled back, the dead girl’s eyelid had opened, and she leered at us with her one constricted pupil, her face contorted in a sinister, frozen wink that was more creepy than comical. Brigit, Nolan and I all stepped back in unison. I knew bodies did messed-up things postmortem, but it was hard not to imagine that she was staring at us. I was suddenly all too aware that we were in the middle of a room full of corpses, and the heebie-jeebies set in full force.
I did the only thing I could think to do. I zipped the bag back up, pushed the tray back in and closed the cabinet with a final, satisfying click. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I swore the rank of decay was hanging heavy in the air, and I feared it had sunk into my clothes, hair and pores. I would spend hours in the shower washing the smell of death off me.
When we left, Brigit gave the smiling desk clerk his card back.
None of us said a word.
Chapter Twenty
My original plan had been to go straight from the Medical Examiner’s office to Columbia to talk to Mayhew again. But with the smell of rotten corpse clinging to me, I needed a hot shower and a change of clothes before I went anywhere.
There were any number of places I could have stopped between the financial district and the Columbia campus, but I still felt like I reeked of death and had corpse stink oozing out of my sweat. The only shower that would do was my own.
When I unlocked my door, I almost tripped over Desmond’s work shoes. Kicking them out of the way, I shucked my boots off next to his. The water was running in the bathroom, so Desmond had probably gone to the gym after work and just gotten home. If he’d been in a hurry to go from the office to a workout, it would explain his haphazard shoe disposal. Of the two of us, he was almost always the neater one.
Who was I kidding? He was always the neater one.
I contemplated waiting for him to finish in the shower, but the stench wafting off me was too much to bear. Stripping in the middle of the hallway, I stalked into the bathroom and climbed into the steaming shower stall. Desmond’s brown hair and olive skin looked especially dark against my garish pink tub and rose-print wallpaper.
He also seemed surprised to see me.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, his voice slipping into the husky growl he reserved for bedroom conversation.
I would have loved to act out some slippery, soapy, shower-sex fantasy with him right then, but it wasn’t meant to be. He was a werewolf, and his sense of smell was second to none, even when he was in his human form. The moment he stooped to kiss me he recoiled, his nose wrinkled with disgust.
“What? You don’t like my new perfume?”
“Eau de Putrification? God, Secret, what is that?”
“Death. ” I should have known he’d be able to smell it on me. It was bad enough that the wolves could smell vampires on me, but real human death had its own distinctive, lingering quality. I’d been right to shower.
Desmond put his hands on my waist, but it wasn’t a come-on. He pushed me past him so the full brunt of the showerhead was angled in my face. The water was so hot I thought it might burn off the top layer of my skin. I turned it hotter. To Desmond’s credit he didn’t bail out to get away from the smell. Instead he opted to empty half a bottle of green-apple-scented shampoo onto my head and made a desperate effort to scrub the stink out of my hair by sheer force of will.
In spite of the unpleasant reason for my being there, it felt fantastic to have him wash my hair. He applied just the right amount of pressure on my scalp and wrapped my hair into a thick tail to rinse the shampoo free. Then he handed me a loofah and ducked out of the shower.
I was impressed he’d lasted that long.
A good fifteen minutes later my skin was scrubbed pink, I’d washed my hair again, and we were out of pomegranate body gel. I still detected the lingering touch of old death when I took a deep breath, but I always smelled a little dead.
Desmond was dressed and waiting for me in the kitchen with a pre-warmed glass of AB negative.
“Well…” He handed me the glass. “Now you smell like a rotting fruit salad. I guess it’s an improvement. ”
“Did they teach you how to woo a lady at charm school? You’re excellent at it. ”
“You mean we don’t club women over the head and drag them back to our caves? Hmm. ” He swallowed a mouthful of water. “We wolfmen must have missed that lesson. ”
“Lucas sure did,” I added with an indignant huff.
Desmond wrapped his hand around the back of my neck and kissed me. I hadn’t been expecting it. His lips were warm and velvety soft in spite of the harsh dry air. I made a mental note to send the folks at ChapStick a thank-you letter. He didn’t push for more than a kiss, just let the gesture stand as its own entity. And what a kiss it was. My knees turned to gelatin, and I sagged into him, still clumsily holding my glass of blood in one hand while caressing his smooth cheek with the other.
He pulled back, playfully licking my swollen lower lip and sending tingles from my forehead to my toes.
“You still stink,” he said with a roguish smirk, kissing the tip of my nose.
“Yeah well…” There was no obvious comeback, so I went for an old classic. “Your face still stinks. ”
“Real smooth. ”
“Shut up. ”
I finished the blood and went to the bedroom to get dressed. This time I didn’t bother with college-girl chic. I was going to talk to Mayhew as the real me, and if I needed to get rough to get answers, I wanted to be dressed for it. My outfit consisted of leather pants, one of Desmond’s Yankees shirts that was loose enough to hide the knife tucked into the waistband of my pants, and Dominick’s leather jacket to conceal the SIG and its holster.
Some people wore camouflage to go on a hunt. I wore leather and my boyfriend’s T-shirt.
Desmond gave me a once-over when I sat on the couch to pull my boots on.
“So that’s why all my shirts smell like you. I was starting to think I was going crazy. ”
“You are going crazy. Every day you stay with me proves it. ”
There was a brief pause as he sipped his water and digested the hard truth of my words. In the end he gave a half shrug and smiled at me. “Then I guess I’m crazy. ”
I don’t think my heart had jumped as hard when he’d told me he loved me. Since the situation with Lucas had taken a southerly dive this week, I’d been holding my breath for the moment Desmond decided he was fed up with being one point in a ridiculously scalene love triangle and bailed for good. I’d been sure the time had come when he walked out, yet here he was in my apartment, looking like he was always going to be with me.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
“I don’t deserve you,” I admitted, both to myself and to him.
He crossed the room and cupped the back of my head, tilting it back slightly so I was looking at him. “We all deserve exactly what we get. Good or bad. My dad used to tell me that. ”
“You never talk about him. ”
“I do when it matters. ”
“What happened to him?”
Desmond dropped his hand and sat on the arm of the loveseat. “He died. ” He was looking at his hands instead of at me. I didn’t push him further, hoping he’d offer the rest of the story on his own. When I thought he was about to change the subject, he said, “You already know he was Jeremiah’s second, right?”
“The Desmond to his Lu
cas, so to speak. ”
“Yeah. They were a lot like us, and in some ways a lot different. Dad met Jeremiah later in life. He grew up in a Southern wolf pack, actually, on the edge of the western territories. He moved east in his late teens, and his family had to appeal to the king for their right to come into the territory. At the time, Lucas’s grandfather Gerald was the Eastern pack king. He was grooming his son for the crown, so Jeremiah was there for the appeal. There wasn’t a bond between them, not like with me and Lucas, but they liked each other instantly.
“In spite of my father being the son of Mexican immigrants, the Rain family never deterred the friendship. It was ultimately obvious their friendship had formed a fierce loyalty, and my father became the apparent choice to serve as Jeremiah’s second when he came into power. ”
Desmond was so immersed in the story it was like he was telling it from within a trance. I feared anything I said might break the spell, and I’d never know what had become of the two men. I stared at him in rapt silence and waited for him to continue.
“In Jeremiah’s thirty-five years as king, the Eastern pack functioned like a well-oiled machine. There were no territorial disputes, almost no internal conflict. People were happy. Alphas were treated as their own leaders and given enough power to feel important, but enough leash to not overstep their bounds. If there was ever a Pax Lupo—a peaceful time for the wolves—that was it. ”
No wonder Lucas was struggling so much to maintain his position as the king. Not only was he young, but the shadow of his father’s legacy stretched far into the Eastern pack empire. There were old Alphas who would reject change and would resent Lucas for not maintaining the status quo established by his father.
Supernatural politics could teach the White House a thing or two about being convoluted.
“With how relaxed everything was, no one was expecting the invasion. We guard ourselves against internal upset, but these guys were a rogue wolf pack out of Germany. They didn’t go for the outlying territories either, which is what any smart usurper would do. ”
Notably not what Marcus Sullivan had done.
“They came to the city and rounded up as many wolves as they could. I don’t mean these wolves joined forces with them. I mean they kidnapped them and held them hostage. This was six years ago, and it was summer. Lucas and I were doing a semester abroad in France. We didn’t find out about any of it until the dust settled.