Making herself do her job, Kenzie looked in on the indoor Shifter parties going on, making sure that Shifters who needed to go home got there. She left the parties behind, ignoring the slurred pleas for her to stay, and finally went back home. A few hours in the quiet wouldn't come amiss.
Not meant to be. A car sat in the narrow driveway of the O'Donnell house, and when Kenzie walked inside, she found Gil Ramirez in her living room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
"Sorry," Gil said, when Kenzie paused on the threshold. "I let myself in. When I called him tonight, Bowman said it would be all right to wait here for you."
"Bowman said . . ." Kenzie trailed off and slammed the door, sliding out of her jacket. "Bowman so needs to learn to text me."
Gil chuckled. "He's an old-fashioned guy. I can respect that."
Kenzie made an impatient noise and walked through the living room to the kitchen. "Did he tell you to help yourself to beer? Or did he want you to wait for me to be the gracious hostess again?"
"If it's a bad time, Kenz, I can talk to you later."
Kenzie turned around with two bottles of beer to see Gil standing in the living room looking apologetic. She flushed.
"No, it's fine." She came back in and handed him a bottle. "Bowman just drives me crazy. Not your fault."
Gil accepted the opened beer, gestured to the sofa, and waited until Kenzie had seated herself before sitting down beside her. Human courtesy.
"So a mating ceremony today?" Gil asked, sipping beer. "Celebrations in my family can be pretty wild too."
"Your family is from here?" Kenzie said. "North Carolina, I mean?"
"No, I'm not native to the Carolinas. Most people think I'm Cherokee, but my family are from far away, and we left there a long time ago."
Kenzie eyed him in curiosity. "From where?"
Gil shrugged. "You wouldn't know it. You're from what's now called Romania, right?"
"I am. Bowman's from Canada. Did you come here to talk about where we're all from?"
"No, I came here to talk about our case." Gil set down his beer and pulled a manila envelope from the inside of his jacket. "I found out about Serena Mitton, the girl who was shot. You interested?"
Of course she was interested. Kenzie noticed that Gil had turned the questions about him neatly aside, but she said nothing as he pulled out papers and photographs.
"Death was from two gunshots to the chest," he said, scanning a sheet, "from a nine millimeter. She died quickly, the report says. Her name was Serena Mitton. She grew up in Baltimore and moved down here to attend UNC at Asheville. She stayed and became a research assistant while she worked on her master's degree, in the anthropology department."
Kenzie's eyes widened. "Did she work for Dr. Turner?" She'd told him all about Dr. Turner when she'd called him this morning.
"Nope. She was an RA in the lab of one Dr. Jane Alston. From what Dr. Alston told me, Serena did no work for Dr. Turner, and didn't interact much with him either. Nodded to him in the hall, maybe, but that's it."
So why had the woman been found dead within a few miles of Turner's trailer house? Near where the beast had been killed? After she'd called Bowman saying, I don't like what he's doing. "I don't believe in coincidences," Kenzie said.
"Well, they do happen, but in this case, I agree with you." Gil gathered up the photos: a head shot of Serena and one of the entire department staff. Turner was in that one, at the other end of the row from Serena, looking geeky and professorial, as he'd been when Kenzie had met him. "I checked out the shell casings from the sniper shooting too," Gil said, "but forensics couldn't find any useable fingerprints on them." He closed up the envelope but left it on the coffee table.
"So you don't know who shot Serena, or who shot at us in the woods, or whether the two are connected?"
"I do not. But I'm working on it." Gil leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "What I do know about is that thing you were calling a griffin. Dr. Pat, the nice veterinarian, shared her findings with me, plus I studied some tissue samples. It's an animal all right, but magic went into its making. That much was obvious."
Kenzie blinked and tried to look surprised. "Magic?"
Most humans didn't know anything about magic, or at least, not the real kind. There was magic deep inside Shifters, and in the Collars, and in the Guardian's sword. None of it was stage-magician, make-things-disappear magic, but it was there, and it was powerful.
"Yes, and I know you know what I mean." Gil's dark eyes held seriousness. "There is no way that creature could have lived, not in this world, without a boost of magic. Fae magic, I'm betting."
Kenzie got to her feet very fast. "What the hell do you know about Fae magic? Are you Fae?"
Gil rose to meet her, looking offended. "Hell no, I'm not Fae. But I know about them. I know about the ley lines that run through this Shiftertown and all the way to where you found the thing dead. I'm a bit of a shaman, myself." He contrived to sound modest.
Shaman. So that was why he'd seemed off. Shamans were human, not Fae, thank the Goddess, but they were able to sense and use magic that was inherent in this world.
"I see," Kenzie said cautiously. "What does your shaman knowledge tell you about the creature?"
"That it wasn't born here. Poor thing. Probably bred and raised beyond a gate to Faerie and shoved through to be set on you. The questions are-by whom? And why?"
"By the Fae." Kenzie's anger rose. "In their never-ceasing quest to kill off Shifters or enslave us again."
"No," Gil surprised her by saying. "I'm not sure a Fae did this, or at least, had control of the beast on this side of the gate. The smell was wrong, and the tissue samples were definitely animal. But the Fae bred Shifters, right? This was the same kind of thing-breeding with magic thrown in. As though someone was trying to redo what the Fae did with Shifters, only making it bigger and stronger."
Kenzie felt ill. "Not anything I want to hear."
"I bet you don't. But look on the bright side. It didn't work. Bowman hurt it with the truck, sure, but the thing died of natural causes. Had heart failure, Dr. Pat thinks. Its body couldn't sustain its size and broke down. Whoever bred it didn't succeed."
"This time." Kenzie's blood grew cold. "What about next time?"
"If we can find out who did it and stop them, there won't be a next time."
"We hope."
Gil looked unworried, which was irritating of him. Then again, he wasn't a Shifter, target of every Fae vendetta.
He gestured her to the sofa again. "This isn't all I came over to tell you, or I'd have waited until I knew Bowman would be here. I wanted to talk to you."
Kenzie let out a breath and resumed her seat. "What about?"
Gil sat down again, facing her, his beer untouched on the coffee table. He cleared his throat. "I wanted to ask you about the mate bond."
Kenzie started. "The mate bond? Why?"
"Is it true that a human can form one with a Shifter?"
"Yes." Kenzie's heart beat faster. "I know several human and Shifter couples who have it. The humans, after the mating ceremonies, get a dose of Fae magic to extend their lives to match Shifter lifespan. That's from a treaty from the Shifter-Fae war. Fae are shits, but they honor treaties. A pride thing. Why?" She heard herself babbling, but Gil watching her closely with his warm eyes was making her nervous.
"What does it feel like?"
Kenzie swallowed, and her eyes stung. "I don't know. Unfortunately."
"I heard you don't have one with Bowman." Gil leaned forward and touched her knee, a gesture not of sexual need, but of sympathy. Friendship. "I know it hurts you, and I understand why. I'm asking you this for an important reason."
Kenzie's fingers moved restlessly, her throat hurting. "I hear that it's a warmth in the chest, in the heart. There's an answering warmth in the mate. That's how it starts, but then you know. You know with your whole being."
"A warmth, here?" Gil pressed his closed fist to his heart. "You sure?"
"As sure as I can be without feeling it myself." Kenzie's gaze went to Gil's hand, her attention sharpening. "Why?"
"Because I think I'm feeling it." Gil dug his fist into his sweatshirt. "It's there, and it won't go away."