Draw One In The Dark(52)

The golden eyes gave her the once-over, head to toe. "I don't see anything wrong with you."



For a moment, for just a moment, she could almost smell him, musky and virile like the night before. She got up from the sofa. That was probably what was messing her up. It was all down to pheromones and unconscious reactions and stuff. It was all . . . insane.



She grabbed her right hand with her left, as if afraid what they might do. "Well, that's neither here nor there," she said. "Is it? These windows are going to cost me a fortune, and I will have to work a bunch of overtime to pay for it."



"I could talk to my dad. He knows— I could get someone to do the job and you could pay for them on credit."



Kyrie twisted her lips. One thing she had seen, through her growing up years, and that was that families usually went wrong when they started buying things on credit, no matter how necessary it seemed at the time. And since many of the foster families fostered for the money allowance a new kid brought, she had seen a lot of families who had gone financially to the wrong. "No, thank you," she said. "I can take care of myself."



"But this is wide open," he said. "And there's something killing shifters. What if they come for you? How are you going to defend yourself? I have to protect you. We're partners in solving this crime, remember?"



Kyrie remembered. But she also remembered that she wasn't sure what all this meant to Rafiel. And didn't want to know. She'd been a fool for trusting Tom. She'd be damned if she was going to repeat the mistake with Rafiel. What if he had the door fixed in a way that he could, somehow, come in and kill her in the night?



She couldn't figure out any reason why he would want to kill her. But then, she couldn't figure out any reason why anyone would want to go around killing other shape-shifters. It had to be a shifter. Only a shifter would smell them. So, what would he get out of killing his own kind? And who better to do it than a policeman?



"No, thank you," she said, again. "You don't have to take care of me. I can take care of myself. I've been doing it all my life. Pretty successfully, as you see."



"But—"



"No buts, Officer Trall." Without seeming to, she edged around him, and guided him through the doorway from the sunporch into the kitchen. She locked the door to the outside, then grabbed the extra chair and wedged it under the doorknob, the way she'd secured her bedroom in countless foster homes, when she'd been lucky enough to have a room for herself. "You'd best leave now. I need to have something to eat, and then I'll go to the Athens early. The day shift is often a person late, and if I can pitch in at dinnertime, I can work some overtime, and that will help pay for this . . . mess."



As if taken off balance by her sudden forcefulness, he allowed himself to be shepherded all the way out the kitchen door.



"Thank you again," Kyrie said. And almost told him it had been lovely. Which could apply to the luncheon, but certainly was a gross overstatement when it came to the autopsy, and just plain silly when applied to what they found back here. Which, admittedly, wasn't his fault.



He was still staring at her, the golden eyes somehow managing to look sheepish, when she closed the door in his face. And locked it.



Alone in the house for the first time in almost twenty-four hours, she rushed to the bedroom. She needed to get out of her skirt and into jeans and a t-shirt. Then she'd eat something—at a guess bread, because she imagined that Tom would have eaten every ounce of protein in the house—and get out of here. The diner had to be safer. More people, more witnesses.



Although it hadn't helped the guy last night, had it?



She shuddered at the thought of that bloodied body on the slab. She would park up front, she decided. On Fairfax Avenue. Within plain sight of everyone.

* * *



"Damn," Keith said, after a while of driving in silence.



"What now?" Tom asked. He'd been sitting there, his head in his hands, trying to figure out what he was going to do next. He felt as if his life, over the last six months, was a carefully constructed castle of cards that someone had poked right in the middle and sent tumbling.



If Kyrie was no better than him, then maybe it was something wrong with the nature of shifters. Maybe that was why everyone he'd met was a drifter, or . . .



"I forgot to tell you why I came looking for you," Keith said.



"I thought it was to make sure I was all right," Tom said.



"Well." Keith nodded. "That was part of it, only . . . I went to pay the rent today and I got to talking to the building manager about what happened at your apartment and she said . . . The manager got a bunch of your things from the floor. Before she called the police to look at it."