Aidan looked up at Mirren, who nodded grudgingly.
“There’s something else you need to know, but Nik should be the one to tell you.” Cage Reynolds’s voice carried quiet authority.
Nik closed his eyes a moment, and for just a flash, before his jaw tightened and he looked up at Aidan, Mirren thought Zorba looked like one tired Greek. Not like a guy who was tired after a hard day, but like a guy who carried around a bone-deep weariness that had taken a while to accumulate. Mirren had been there, and it wasn’t a happy place to live.
“I have an ability to read history from objects or people.” Nik paused and, when no one spoke, continued. “I picked up a brick at the job site, not thinking about it, but when I got a flash of history from it—just something from the brickworks or factory—I decided to go through all of the bricks that had fallen on Rob and the other guy. Cage and Robin helped me sort through them, and I sketched any scene I caught that had specific faces in it, or anything unusual.”
“The other guy was Mark Calvert.” Mirren wondered if Nik Dimitrou might have the same trouble controlling his visions of the past as little Hannah had with her future visions. Between the two, it could be a powerful combination of abilities. Or a couple of head cases.
“Yeah, Mark.” Nik finished off the glass of whiskey Mirren could’ve sworn had been full only a couple of minutes ago. Hell, if he saw visions every time he touched something, he’d carry a bottle in his pocket.
“Sounds like Cage thinks you saw something interesting,” Aidan said.
Robin reached inside the plastic bag she’d come in with, extracting some folded sheets of construction diagrams. She looked at Nik; when he nodded, she held out the papers to Cage.
Cage pulled the sheets from her fingers, glanced through them, and handed them across the table to Aidan. Mirren walked behind him and leaned over Aidan’s shoulder as he unfolded them.
He was no art critic, but his eye told him these drawings were first-rate. There was Max, laughing. Mark and Rob, talking. And on the last sheet . . . “What the fuck is that? A stray cat that wandered in from the woods?”
Except, come to think of it, he’d never seen any cats around here. Dogs, either, except for Hannah’s ugly-ass bloodhound.
“Don’t think so.” Nik leaned forward. “I think it’s a shape-shifter.”
Aidan had been frowning at the drawing, his eyes lightening as he examined it. “It’s too goddamned big to be a domestic cat. If the Tribunal is working with shifters, they’re taking this battle to a whole new level. It’s a leopard?”
“Jaguar,” Cage said.
Once again, Mirren leaned over the back of Aidan’s chair and looked at the drawing. They were right; now that he sized it against the pile of bricks Nik had drawn for scale, he saw that the animal was too big to be a house cat. “This area’s surrounded by heavy pine forest. What makes you think it isn’t a wild cat?”
“Melanistic jaguars—what people call black panthers—aren’t native to the United States,” Nik said. “Two of our Omega Force team members in Houston were jag-shifters, and even in shifter form they’re rare.”
Aidan was silent for a few moments, staring into the fireplace as if he’d like to pick up a smoking log and heft it at something. Finally, he turned that angry gaze on the only shifter in the room. “Robin, do your people have any type of central governing body—like the vampires have the Tribunal?”
If Robin had been in eagle form, Mirren imagined her feathers would have ruffled. “By ‘my people,’ do you mean eagle-shifters? Or are you lumping all shifters into one big homogeneous population group?”
Aidan simply looked at her.
She sighed and shook her head, and Mirren felt some tension ease from his shoulders. He kind of liked Robin, despite the weirdness of the bonding, and didn’t want to see her alienate Aidan over semantics.
“Sorry,” she said. “It was a fair question. The answer’s no. Each species of shifter has its own independent governing body or leader—what you’d call an alpha, although different species have different names. For golden eagles, it’s the Goia. But there’s not one group that sets rules for all shifters. We don’t get along well enough.”
“Thanks.” Aidan gave a tight smile and rubbed his temples. “Okay, so we probably have a shifter either acting independently, which isn’t likely—shifters and vampires don’t generally inhabit the same areas—or we have a shifter working for a vampire.”
“Or the Tribunal. Or Frank Greisser. Or Matthias,” Mirren added. “There’s a whole fucking list of options.”