Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(16)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"I’m not just a mechanic," I told her, using her words, "I’m Zee’s friend." I spun abruptly on my heel so that I faced her and pulled my T-shirt over my head, using my toes to push off my tennis shoes and socks at the same time.

"Are you trying to tell me you’re a stripper, too?" she asked, as I took off my bra and dropped it on top of my shirt on the floor. From her tone of voice, I could have been doing sit-ups instead of undressing.

I unsnapped my jeans and pushed them off my hips along with my underwear. When I stood wearing nothing but my tattoos, I called the coyote to me and sank into her shape. It was over in moments.

"Werewolf?" Ms. Ryan had scrambled out of her chair and was backing slowly to the door.

She couldn’t tell a coyote from a werewolf? That was like looking at a Geo Metro and calling it a Hum-Vee.

I could smell her fear and it satisfied something deep inside me that had been writhing under her cool, superior expression. I curled my upper lip so she could get a good look at my teeth. I might weigh only thirty or so pounds in my coyote shape, but I was a predator and could have killed a person if I wanted to: I’d killed a werewolf once with nothing but my fangs.

Kyle was up and beside her before she could run out the door. He took her arm in a firm grip.

"If she were a werewolf, you’d be in trouble," Kyle told her. "Never run from a predator. Even the best behaved of them will have a hard time restraining themselves from chasing after prey."

I sat down and yawned away the last of the change-tingles. It also gave her another look at my teeth, which seemed to bother her. Kyle gave me a chiding look, but continued soothing the other lawyer.

"She’s not a werewolf; they’re a lot bigger and scarier, trust me. She’s not fae either. She’s something a little different, native to our land, not imported like the fae or werewolves. The only thing she can do is shift to coyote and back."

Not quite. I could kill vampires – as long as they were helpless, imprisoned by the day.

I swallowed, trying to get moisture to my suddenly dry mouth. I hated this sudden, gut-wrenching fear that assaulted me without warning. Every time I saw the little hitch in Warren’s walk, I knew I would destroy the vampires again – but I paid the cost of their elimination with these panic attacks..

Kyle’s calm explanation had given Ms. Ryan time to restore her calm facade. Kyle probably couldn’t tell how angry she was, but my keener senses weren’t fooled by the cool control she’d regained. She was still afraid, but her fear was not as strong as her rage.

Fear usually made me angry, too. Angry and careless. I wondered if showing her what I was had been such a good idea.

I changed back into my human self and ignored the growl of hunger that the two quick changes left me with. I put my clothes back on, taking time to tie my tennis shoes so that the bow was even before I resumed my seat, giving Ms. Ryan time to regain her composure.

She was seated when I looked up, but she’d moved to the other side of the table and taken the chair next to Kyle’s.

"Zee is my friend," I told her again in measured tones. "He taught me everything I know about fixing cars and sold me his shop when he was forced to admit he was fae."

She frowned at me. "Are you older than you look? You’d have been a child when the fae came out."

"All of them didn’t come out at once," I told her. Her question settled my nerves. It was Zee whose life was at stake here, not mine. Not just yet. I kept talking so she wouldn’t ask why Zee had come out. The one thing I absolutely couldn’t tell an outsider was the existence of the Gray Lords. "Zee only admitted what he was a few years ago, seven or eight, maybe. He knew that being a fae would keep people away from the shop. I’d been working for him for a couple of years and he liked me so he sold it to me."

I collected my thoughts, trying to tell her what she needed to know without taking forever about it. "As I told you, he called me yesterday to ask for my help because someone had been killing fae in the reservation. Zee thought my nose might be able to pick out the killer. I gather I was sort of a last resort. When we got to the rez, O’Donnell was at the gate and wrote down my name when we drove through – that is on record. I imagine the police will find it, if they think to look. Zee took me through the murder scenes and I discovered that one man had been present at each house – O’Donnell."

She’d been taking notes in a stenographer’s notebook but stopped, set down her pencil, and frowned. "O’Donnell was present at all the murder scenes and you verified that by smelling him?"

I raised my eyebrows. "A coyote has a keen sense of smell, Ms. Ryan. I have a very good memory for scents. I caught O’Donnell’s when he stopped us as we went in – and his scent was in every one of the murder victims’ houses I visited."

She stared at me – but she was no werewolf who might rip my throat out for challenging her – so I met her stare with one of my own.

She dropped her eyes first, ostensibly looking at her notes. People, human people, can be pretty deaf to body language. Maybe she didn’t even notice that she’d lost the dominance contest, though her subconscious would.

"I understand O’Donnell was employed by the BFA as security," she said, turning back a few pages. "Couldn’t he have been there investigating the deaths?"

"The BFA had no idea there were any murders," I told her. "The fae do their own internal policing. If they had gone to the Feds for help, I’m pretty sure it would be the FBI who would have been called in, not the BFA anyway. And O’Donnell was a guard, not an investigator. I was told that there was no reason O’Donnell should have been in every house that there was a murder in, and I have no reason to doubt that."

She’d started writing again, in shorthand. I’d never actually seen anyone use shorthand before.

"So you told Mr. Adelbertsmiter that O’Donnell was the murderer?"

"I told him that he was the only person whose scent I found in all the scenes."

"How many scenes?"

"Four." I decided not to tell her that there had been others; I didn’t want to tell her why I hadn’t gone to all the murder scenes. If Zee hadn’t wanted to talk about my trip Underhill with me, I thought it would not be something he wanted me discussing with a lawyer.

She paused again. "There were four people murdered in the reservation and they did not ask for help?"

I gave her a thin smile. "The fae are not fond of attracting outside attention. It can be dangerous for everyone. They are also quite aware of the way most humans, including the Feds, feel about them. ‘The only good fae is a dead fae’ mentality is quite prevalent among the conservatives who make up most of the rank and file in the government whether they be Homeland Security, FBI, BFA, or any of the other alphabet soup agencies."