03 - You Only Live Nine Times (11 page)

“Maybe we need to replace more.  You know what we have to do, don’t you?”

Igor shrugged.  “Give up?” he suggested, gleefully.

“No, we have to go back to the cemetery tonight.”

Igor scowled.  It was going to be a long night.

Chapter Eleven

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“Nothing, mom,” growled Isis, ignoring Ms. Kitty’s pathetic whine.  “Go back to haunting the attic or something.”

“Honey, you don’t have an attic.”

“Yeah, that’s the only thing wrong with my mom haunting my apartment – the fact that I don’t have an attic.”

She gave her three cats each a token head scratch and lay down on the couch.  She flung her arm over her face and sensed rather than felt her mother leaning over her.

“I slimed your kitchen today,” said Cleo.  It was a little-known fact that ghosts actually oozed a bit of ectoplasm now and again.  Isis had found that out the hard way after falling on her ass in the bathroom. 
She had not been pleased
.

“Okay,” she mumbled beneath her arm.

“Jeez, you really are upset,” said her mom, in stark worry.  “What happened?”

“Nothing,” she ground out.

“Man trouble?”

Isis vaulted up off the couch.  “Stop it.  I’m taking a cold shower.” Because her oncoming heat was in no way sympathetic to her misery and decided that her body needed to be on fire.  She pointed a manicured finger at her mom.  “And you better stay out.”

Lucifer rubbed against her leg, perhaps sensing the cause of her woes.  Out of the three cats, Lucifer had always been the most romantic.  The sleek ginger cat had spent many a night howling her frustration that a certain tomcat from two apartments over was more interested in the tabby feline who hung around the buildings dumpsters. 
Dumpsters for hell’s sake!

Isis acknowledged the show of solidarity, female to female, cat to cat, with a nod and slouched into her bedroom, where her mom was already waiting for her. 
Interfering spook!

Cleo gave her a sympathetic look.  Isis had to quell the urge to attack her and wipe it off her – she’d just dive right through her and hit the floor… again.

“Oh, my little kitten, I know you’re put off relationships because of what happened to me but…”

“No, not interested.”

“I was very…”

“La la la la la, not listening.”

“Happy with your father, and I do believe that he would have come back if he hadn’t died.”

Isis scowled.  Her mom was not going to back off, and unlike Isis, she didn’t need sleep or to satiate her burning lustful needs.  Her tiger was no help; the stripy beast was sulking.

“Ugh, nothing’s wrong, okay?  I met a guy, but I don’t think he’d be comfortable being with a shifter, happy?”

“You mean he’s human?”

Isis tapped her foot impatiently.  “Yes.  Are we done, the shower’s calling to me.”

“You mean the showerhead, and don’t give me that look, I used to have urges, too.”

“Ewww, no, gross.”  Was there anything worse than your mom talking about you masturbating?  The answer is yes - it was when she talked about herself masturbating.  Even her tiger perked up enough to make a small gagging sound.

“I thought you said that you didn’t like human males.  That they were weak, pitiful, brainless, soft-bodied, ugly morons.”

Isis prickled.  No, those weren’t words that could describe Raf.  No siree.  “This one’s different.”

“How can he be if he’s got you so dead against him?”

“He just is, he’s… he’s…. humph.”  Crafty spirit, she’d almost tricked Isis into describing him.  Not that she would have any trouble – his image was etched into her mind.  Where would she start?  His face?  His lips?  That tousled hair?  Those sinewy muscles… damnit, she was going to implode any second.

Cleo moved as if to pick up some of the discarded clothes that had remained on the floor since the previous evening when Isis had a hissy fit.  Her fingers passed right through them, and she sighed.  “Why wouldn’t this mystery man be comfortable with a shifter?  The gulf between shifters and humans isn’t so big, you know?  You’re not a complete mystery to us.”

“Fine!  I think he’d freak out about my sexual past.  Happy, Mom?  Is that what you wanted to hear?” 

Yep, she hadn’t liked his reaction to the news that she had slept with Gunner.  Wasn’t that just like humans?  Pretending to be all decent and reasonable and then biting you in the ass. 
Dickheads
.  Ms. Kitty grumbled.  Alright, no matter what he did, she couldn’t think of Raf that way.  Instead, she could get really pissed and lash out at the nearest person – who just happened to be her mild-mannered ghost of a mom.

“Hmmm.”

“Hmmm?”

“When did you meet him?”

“Last night in a cemetery.”

Cleo shook her head.  “Dating has changed a lot since my day.”

Isis snorted.  “Knock it off, Mom.  You met Dad at a séance – that’s no less weird.”

“Don’t you think it might be too soon to start worrying?  You barely know him.”

“You’re human,” scoffed Isis, derisively.  “You don’t understand.  The moment I scented him I…”  She stopped abruptly and gasped as Cleo’s jaw dropped.

“Honey, are you saying you think he may be your mate?”  Delight spread over Cleo’s face.

Isis’ face screwed up in anger.  She had a stupid, big mouth.  Great, now she’d raised her mom’s hopes and actually made her a little happy. 
The hell was she thinking?

“What does your tiger say?”

Giving in to the inevitable irritating questions, Isis flopped onto her bed.  “To hump his brains out, but then tigers aren’t always the most rational of creatures.”

“No.”

“Plus my heat’s coming on.  I’m all out of whack.”

“You’ve had plenty of heats before now and you’ve never gotten into knots over a boy.”

“A man, Mom.”  Yes, he was definitely a man – all male.  She shivered lightly as she recalled the feel of his skin against hers as they held hands in the restaurant earlier.  She’d never been one for intimacies like hand-holding, mostly she liked to skip right to the sex.  But that small tender touch had done more to her than all her previous conquests put together.  Her hand lazily rubbed her stomach as Ms. Kitty purred.

“And maybe because you’re not very familiar with relationships, you’re not very patient.  But then you never have been patient – even as a child.  I remember the time…”

“No!  No reminiscing,” growled Isis fiercely at the threat of anything that could be considered sentimental.  “This isn’t The Wonder Years.”

Cleo carried on regardless, as always.  “You were so desperate to get to the mall, and you couldn’t wait for me to drive you.  So you shifted and ran there as your tiger and then got arrested for indecent exposure!”  She guffawed with laughter and wiped an imaginary tear away from her eye as Isis glowered at her.

“Technically, I was only detained,” she grumbled.  “They didn’t want to arrest a 13-year-old.”  Or rather the shifter-hating cops didn’t want to have to put cuffs on an irate tiger.  She was young and small, but she was already ferocious.  Puberty combined with coming to terms with the first painful shifts could bring out the worst in teenagers.

“Why don’t you give him a chance?”

Isis stared at her mom for a few beats.  She could sit there and argue belligerently all night, but what was the point?  In reality, her tiger and her heart were pushing her to do just that, but it wasn’t just up to her now, was it?

She sighed and mumbled a ‘maybe’ before stomping over to the bathroom.  “I’m taking a shower.” An ice-cold, hormone freezing shower.  “And so help me god, mother or not, if you come into that bathroom I am calling Ghostbusters.”

*

“What the fuck are we doing here again?” complained Officer Leaky.  “This place is dead.”

“Well, it is a cemetery.”

“This is a waste of our time, we could be stopping hold-ups and joining the pursuit of high-speed chases, but oh no, the fucking boy scout has us watching a load of headstones.”  Leaky was feeling pretty vitriolic this night.  “He’s just throwing his weight around to impress that fucking SEA agent.”

Collins sighed. 
Damn rookie
.  “First of all, slow down, Dirty Harry.  You’ve been out of the academy for two weeks; you have to work your way up to the heavy stuff.  You do the tedious stuff, and then you get rewarded. 
Everyone
has to work their way up.  Second of all, you really don’t know Detective Silva enough to call him that, and as a beat cop, don’t let the other detectives hear you talking trash about one of them.  They can make fun of Silva, we can’t.  Ironically enough, Silva would be the only one who wouldn’t bust your ass for talking about him like that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” huffed Leaky.  “Gotta admit that SEA babe is hot though.”

Collins grinned as he remembered her lithe form.  She had just enough curves to jiggle as she walked.  “Yeah, did you see her ass?  Fucking gorgeous.”

Leaky looked around furtively as if she could hear him.  “Gotta watch yourself though, sleep with one of them and you’ll probably wake up to find she’s turned you into a rabbit shifter or something.”

“Shifters can’t change people, they have to be born.”

“Like it matters.”  Leaky looked around the cemetery and let out a grunt.  “This is fucking boring.”

“You’re not wrong.  Come on; let’s do another sweep of the cemetery, who knows maybe we’ll catch a zombie coming to life.”

“Yeah, right,” he muttered. The only thing he was in danger of was stubbing his toe on one of the ridiculous statues.

Collins shone a flashlight at him and raised an eyebrow.

Leaky hesitated.  “You’re kidding.  Zombies aren’t real.”

“I’ve never seen one, but they’re real enough.  My neighbor’s, cousin’s, chiropractor’s niece went to school with someone whose great uncle turned into a zombie.”

“Wow,” Leaky said in awe.  He wasn’t being sarcastic; he really believed that Collins’ neighbor’s, cousin’s, chiropractor’s niece went to school with someone whose great uncle turned into a zombie

Collins cocked his head.  “Come on, you go that way, I’ll go this way, holler if you see anything.”

“Sure.”

The two officers wandered away from one another.  Bored of flashing his light, pretending it was a lightsaber that he was using to save a modeling agency from armed robbers, Leaky decided to take a pee. Nature always calls at the most inopportune moment.  He spied one of the trees dotted around the cemetery and placed his flashlight on the ground.  Soon he was letting loose a steady, a satisfied groan escaping his lips.

He froze as he heard a noise, a scurry of movement.  Stopping mid-stream, he listened, hearing the unmistakable sound of people arguing.   Squinting into the darkness, he spotted the vague outline of a huge looking figure and a smaller one climbing out of the ground.

Leaky gasped, and the figures abruptly stopped to look in his direction, seconds before fleeing.  Fumbling to pick up his flashlight Leaky stumbled to the ground.  Unable to stop his need to pee he let loose, yelping as he sprayed his flashlight and shoes.  He grabbed the light just in time to see the two dark figures disappearing and to see Collins running in his direction with a barely restrained smirk on his face.

“Need a hand?”

Leaky scowled and threw the flashlight at Collins, who had the nerve to duck.

*

Isis grunted as she smashed her fist into the punching bag over and over again.  The cold shower had appeased her somewhat, but she still felt buzzed with too much energy.  Hence, she was beating the hell out of her punching bag.  He was called Harold after an ex who deserved to be punched –
repeatedly
.

Her phone chirruped, and she paused to snatch it up and snarl a barely human ‘what’ into the receiver.

“Hey, it’s me,” came the smooth, rich tones of Raf making her tiger perk up with glee that she didn’t even try to conceal.  “You okay?”

She was panting lightly from the furious battering she had been bestowing on Harold.  “I’m fine, what’s up?” she asked warily.  His demeanor, when she left him earlier, had been arctic.  She wondered briefly if he was calling to tell her that he didn’t want her investigating the case with her anymore?  To make it perfectly clear that he couldn’t stand to be around a slut like her.

“Someone’s paying another late-night visit to our favorite cemetery again.  I just got the call.  I’m on my way to you, be ready in five?”

“Sure,” she breathed, hoping she didn’t sound as relieved as she felt.

She hung up and ran to the bedroom.  She had five minutes to pull off the sex kitten look and to get rid of the sweaty scent that clung to her skin.

Chapter Twelve

Shep gave them a hostile glare, beetling his bushy eyebrows.

“More missing bodies, Shep?” purred Isis, in a deceptively laconic way.  Her eyes were hooded, and her lustrous lips curled into a smirk, but he could see the sharpness in her eyes.  She was watching him as closely as a… well,
as a tigress would watch her prey
.

The patrol cops, not the brightest sparks, had tried questioning Shep already about the break in, but Shep had taken offence at their questions, apparently believing that they were accusing him of being in cahoots with the grave robbers.  The patrol cops denied it, but Raf wouldn’t put it past them.  Now they were trying to get him to open up.  While other investigators might have tried coaxing him, even flattering his ego, Isis had decided to annoy the truth out of him.  When it came to opening a door, she was more of a battering ram than a key.  A skilled battering ram, he had to admit.  And damn if it wasn’t fun to watch her work.  He was used to dealing with cops – ornery, arrogant cops – and had plenty of practice at being the reasonable, amenable good cop, while pretending that their dumb behavior didn’t piss the hell out of him. But with Isis it was different.  He could watch her be deliriously wicked all night long with a stupid grin on his face.  Course, very little of his blood was still in his head whenever she was around, and he lost all reason whenever she arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow in derision.

“
A
missing body,” he corrected, eliciting a snort from Isis.  “And it’s not my fault!”  His bulbous nose twitched violently.

“More intruders?  You seem to be getting nightly visits.”

Shep’s eyes flashed with anger, and Raf wondered if he was going to shift into his animal.  It wouldn’t exactly help him.  No mole could be anywhere near as terrifying as a female tiger.  “I’m a groundskeeper, not a fucking security guard!”  He fixed Raf with black eyes.  “Where the fuck were the cops while all these people were breaking into my cemetery?  Lazy fuckwits!  And besides, that vampire never causes any damage.”

“Vampire?” spat Isis, her own eyes blazed yellow, whether, in interest or fury, Raf couldn’t tell, but he suspected both.

The mole scowled and stopped talking.  Isis, now that she had wrested something useful rounded on Shep.  Technically, she didn’t change physically.  But she stood up a little straighter, her shoulders squared, and a deep growl escaped her lips.  With barely any movement, she seemed so much bigger, so much more dangerous, and so much more dominant than the snarky female who had been tormenting Shep a few moments ago.

Raf was amazed to see the quarrelsome mole shifter shrink and almost whimper while refusing to meet her eyes.  What was wrong with the guy? 
Could he not see how hot she was like this?

Shep flinched as she spoke, even though her voice came out as more of a caress than anything else.  “What vampire?”

The mole sucked in a breath as if he was readying to argue, but Isis’ eyes widened, her nostrils flared in warning and the words died in his throat.  “He comes by about once a week,” muttered Shep.

“To visit the grave?” Raf asked, in a calm voice.  Isis backed off a little, satisfied that he was going to tell her what she wanted to know.

The mole nodded, grateful for the interruption.  “He said she was some kind of family member, I don’t know.  He just wanted to come by maybe once a week.  The cemetery closes at night and he, ah…”

“Can’t come by during the day,” supplied Isis.  She turned to Raf, and he saw that her eyes had dimmed slightly.  “He must be a fairly young vampire, resistance to sunlight takes hundreds of years.”

“You learn something new every day,” drawled Raf.

Isis gave him a small smile, and his heart stumbled before she frowned and turned back to Shep.  He’d hurt her feelings earlier, he could tell.  Although, he doubted she would ever admit it.

“And he was here the other night wasn’t he?  He pushed me into that grave,” barked Isis, her mood returning to simmering anger.

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Shep, hotly.  “If he did anything to you, it’s nothing to do with me.  I just look the other way when he visits.”

Isis darted him a sardonic look.  “Do you look the other way when he liberates corpses from their graves?”

“He wouldn’t do that!”

“You two best buddies, honey?”

Raf thought the mole shifter was going to explode.  His doughy, round face turned an alarming shade of puce.  And also, Raf didn’t like the way she called him honey. 
What was wrong with going old school and saying dirtbag?

“What would a vampire want with a dead body?” yelled Shep.  “He only comes to visit that grave, and he always climbs over the fence, he never cuts the chain.  Whoever is doing this it isn’t him.  As for attacking you, all I can think is that he’d met you and knew that you deserved it!”

“That’s enough!” snapped Raf, looming over the little mole, irritated by the insult he had given Isis.  He knew Isis was trying to piss off the mole shifter, and in his heart he seriously doubted anything he could say would hurt her steel-tipped feelings, but he had a desire to protect her.  Yes, him, the puny human wanted to protect the big, bad tigress from harm. 
Maybe it was daft, but there it was.

Both Isis and Shep glanced at him in surprise, and Shep actually cowered a little from him.  Raf felt a flare of guilt for that.  He wasn’t the type to intimidate, or bully.  That was the type of cop his dad had been, both at work and at home, and Raf had always promised himself that he would be different.

Thankfully Isis was there.

He placed her delicate yet strong hand on his arm, and his ire melted quicker than a snowcone.  Now there was an image. 
Melting a snowcone all over Isis’ body and then licking it off…

“Can I go?” asked the fidgeting mole shifter.  “The first I knew of tonight’s break in was when your cops came running over to my cabin.”

“Do you know the vampire’s name?”

“No, he never told me and I never asked.”

“Fine, you can go,” rumbled Isis.  “But we may be back with more questions.”

Shep sucked in a breath and then flitted away with an impressive amount of speed for a shifter his age – or any age, really.

Isis cocked her head on one side, wordlessly asking Raf to follow her.  He did, but then he’d probably follow her anywhere.  He was such a sap.

Leisurely, she sauntered over to the newly desecrated grave, swinging her hips, making her round ass bob.  She stopped at the new grave, ignoring the leery looks of the patrol cops stood around trying to look busy.  They stood a little straighter when they spied Raf.

The body of a freshly buried male panther shifter had been taken, but the grave hadn’t been filled in.  Unlike the previous bodies, they hadn’t tried to cover it up.  Maybe they didn’t see any reason to after the incident two nights ago when they were forced to leave with just the arms of their dead victims.   The cops already knew something was wrong, so why waste time filling in the graves.

Raf eyed the two patrol cops.  They were the same cops from the previous night who had let the vampire escape.  He had to wonder whether they were just a bit incompetent or whether they were just too afraid of supernatural creatures to actually attempt to tackle them.  “What tipped you off tonight?”

The blonde patrol cop called Leaky blushed.  “Well, I needed to take a leak, so I, uh, thought I’d use that tree over there.”  He pointed to a large, gnarly specimen.  “That’s when I noticed people moving around over here.  I tried to pursue but…”  He left the rest of that hanging.

Collins nodded.  “By the time I got here they were gone.”

Raf scratched his chin.  “They must have been carrying a body, how could they outrun you?”

Heat rose to Leaky’s cheeks.  “Well, they were fast, even with the body and it uh, took me a little while to, you know, zip up.”

Meaning he was still pissing and allowing their intruders to carry on with what they were doing.  “Did you at least get a good look at them?”

He bobbed his head, making his Adam’s apple shake.  “There were two of them.  One of them looked to be really big, and one of them looked to be very small.”

Raf waited for more details until he realized that was all he was going to get.  “Nothing else?”

Leaky shrugged.  “It was dark.  But I think the big guy was carrying the body by himself.  He had to be nearly seven feet tall and strong.  I doubt he was human.”  He flicked his eyes to Isis nervously, but she remained casually blank.  Raf was grateful that she wasn’t saying anything to the patrol cops, perhaps sensing that trying to cajole them would only make them clam up.

Raf quelled the urge to yell at him and instead gave him a stern look and told him to stick around for the crime scene technicians.  Isis puttered around the grave, sniffing and frowning at it.

“Hey, you got one of those cute, plastic bags you use?” she called, with her custom sauciness.

“If you mean an evidence bag, then yeah, sure.”

He passed one to her and she scooped up something he had missed. 
Cats’ eyes, can’t beat them
.  It appeared to be a piece of blue plastic.

“Reminds me of the gloves the coroner uses,” he commented. 
Or his doctor, she of the mercilessly cold hands.

“Hmmmm.”  Isis eyed it thoughtfully.  “It looks like someone stepped on it.”  She passed it to Raf and he in turn handed it to Leaky to be given to the crime scene technicians.

“You think the crime scene techs will get anything?” she asked as they wandered back to his car.  Like the last two nights they had spent in this cemetery, their visit had been a bust.

“Not really,” admitted Raf, “did you scent anything?”

“Just the weird dead smell again.”

When they reached his car, he held the door open for her, and she nodded her head in thanks before slipping inside.  He jogged around to the driver’s side and slid into the seat.  Their drive back to Isis’ apartment was peppered with talk about the case.  They were both tired from the past few nights and yawned regularly.  To keep awake, they went over what they knew, which wasn’t much. 

He parked his car in the underground lot and placed a hand on her arm to stop her from leaving.  “I’m sorry about earlier, for getting weird.”

Isis regarded him a little cautiously.  “It’s okay,” she said slowly.

“No, it’s not.”  Usually, he was the straight talker in any relationship, and his girlfriends had all indulged in passive aggressive bullshit until he couldn’t stand it.  He didn’t want to do the same to Isis.  “I don’t like to dance around the truth, so here it is.”  He took a deep breath.  “I like you, Isis.  You already know I’m attracted to you, so it can’t be a surprise.  And I was jealous at the thought of you being with Gunner, and I didn’t know how to act.  We barely know each other, and god knows why you would want to be with me, so instead of doing anything, I just shut down.  And I’m sorry.  It’s my issue, not yours.  But there it is.”

Her yellow eyes stared at him for a few beats, not betraying anything she felt.  “There’s nothing to be jealous about.”

“I know, we’re not…”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she muttered impatiently.  “I mean, what happened with Gunner.  First of all, I’m part animal.  When I’m horny, I have sex.  It’s just about satiating a need.”  She gave him a rueful smile.  “And don’t pretend it’s different for humans – plenty of them have one-night stands.  That’s all it was – a few one-night stands to satiate a need.  Plus, I was hoping for a promotion at work.  There were no feelings involved.  I don’t do
feelings
.”

“No?”

She bit her lip.  “Not usually.”

Hope swelled in his chest.  “So you think there’s something between us, too?”

“Yes,” she murmured, almost in an anguished voice.  “You know I do.”

He let out a mirthless laugh.  “I don’t know anything about you.  I know you’re scary and beautiful, and funny and smart.  I feel drawn to you, and I feel this need to be near you and, don’t laugh, but I want to protect you.  But I can’t see what you would want with a human like me, and that bums me out.  I don’t know what I can offer you.  To know that you’ve been with a big, powerful guy like Gunner…”

Isis grabbed his jacket and pulled him to her for a bruising kiss.  He tensed for a second in surprise before giving himself over to the sweetness, and the delicious pressure of her mouth against his, her gentleness opening him to her.  Awkwardly, she grasped him as tightly as she could, pressing her body against his. 

Too soon she left his mouth and trailed her lips over his cheek, dipping to nuzzle his neck and then moving up to his lobe.  His hands clasped her waist, trying to drag her as close to him as possible.  He felt her body ripple.

“Oh, no,” she breathed before nipping his ear.

“What?” he groaned.

“My heat,” she whined.

“Your what?”

Isis drew back from him.  “I’m going into heat in a couple of days, and my hormones are all over the place.”

“Wait, you actually have heats?  Like an actual tiger?”

She nodded a little sheepishly.  “Not many shifters have them, but tigers do.  A couple of times a year, I’m a big steamy bowl of need and horniness.”