03 - You Only Live Nine Times (17 page)

“Wouldn’t exactly give him a motive to steal corpses, though.”

“Unless he was trying to frame Forever Young.”

“Well, he’s not doing a good job at it – our connection to Forever Young is tenuous at best.  He could have left all kinds of evidence at the crime scenes, but all we found was part of a surgical glove and a key that may or may not belong to an employee’s locker.  At the moment, we’re working on a hunch.  Plus, he’s five-foot-eleven.  Not big enough to be our huge guy, not small enough to be the other, either.”

“Yeah, oh hey look, here’s that woman, Leslie’s file, Jessie put a star next to her.  Oh-ho!  Read this.”

Raf’s eyes widened.  “Mental break down?”

He scanned through the info Jessie had put together.  Dr. Leslie Uggams suffered a breakdown about a year ago.  A huge, messy breakdown, at the offices of Forever Young.  She tried to attack Dr. Howler and had to be restrained by cops.

“Yep, Jessie says she couldn’t get hold of her medical file, so we don’t know what’s up with her or what caused the flip-out.”

“Well, it’s confidential.”

“That and the doctor handling her case is pretty well-off and the firewalls of his practice are monumental.”

Raf pouted his lips in disapproval.  It was really hot. 
Meow
.  “I’ll pretend it’s the confidentiality thing.”

Isis patted his head affectionately.  “You do that.  Says here she doesn’t have any dependents, so what was that earlier about leaving to look after a sick kid?”

“Odd.  Doesn’t necessarily mean anything, she could have just wanted to go home.  She could have been skiving off work to go shopping.  Or maybe she just means that she had a dog or something.  People treat them like kids.”

“Yeah, and it’s creepy.  I have cats, but they’re more like roommates.”

He snickered and turned away from her.

Miffed, she asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, I just heard you as we were leaving your place.  You were practically kissing them and telling them they had smooshy, adorable faces.”

Isis sniffed, haughtily.  “Well, if I had a human or shifter roommate, I would do the same to them, too.  Ooh!  Dr. Leslie Uggams has a BMW.”

“Maybe we could go and talk to her, maybe she might know something.  Worth a shot I guess.”

“Maybe I should pick up some shoes first.”  She extended her leg and wiggled her bare toes, enjoying the way Raf’s eyes travelled up and down said leg.  “Yours are a little big on my feet.”

“Yeah, you look good in my clothes, though,” he teased, his hand ghosting over her curves.

“I look good in anything.”

“True.”

*

“Shit, fucking hell!” snarled Raf in a manner that would make any shifter proud, and certainly had her tiger howling in glee.

Isis eyed the source of his annoyance was a surprisingly sanguine demeanor.  “Well, it’s not wrong.”

Raf fumed as he paced up and down, clenching his fists.  His pristine, dark blue car had been daubed in red paint with the message ‘shifter fucker’.  Isis couldn’t deny the accuracy of the words, but then, they had been put there maliciously.  Clearly the writer thought that fucking shifters was something disgusting to be embarrassed about. 
Sexually repressed, brainless, a-hole
.  Didn’t know what they were missing.  Ms. Kitty chuffed in agreement.

“Who the fuck would do this?” demanded Raf, speaking to no one in particular.  No, he was just ranting.

Isis did have an answer for him, though.  “Do you really have to ask?  Blonde, too big tits and too little brains - ring any bells?”

He scrunched his nose.  “Georgia?”

“Sure, she’s a bunny boiler if ever I saw one.”

“I didn’t think she’d be this dumb.”

“You’re just so irresistible to woman that they go crazy around you.”  She let out a suffering, sarcastic sigh.  “It’s a personality fault of yours, but I’ll live with it.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, not seeing the funny side of it at all.  “I can’t drive it like this.”

“No.”  Driving around with that message was just asking for trouble.  Actually it was a brazen invitation to some of the city’s more lascivious shifters to jump his bones – male and female.  Oh, no, neither she nor her feline wanted that at all.  Freaking shifters should keep their damn horny paw, claws, hoofs and trotters to themselves.

“Not that I’m ashamed of what we did,” he added, hurriedly.

“Settle down, honey, I know I’m the best thing that ever happened to you.”  She ignored his guffaw.  “I wouldn’t advise
anyone
driving around the city with that advertisement on their car.”

“I have my bike; we can use that.  I’ll drop you at your place and head to the station to have a word with Georgia and my captain.  It might not be pretty.”

Part of her relished the thought of human Barbie getting a verbal smack down for her bitchy antics and wished she could be there, but she realized it might only make things worse.  For now, she would have to console herself with taking a ride on Raf’s motorbike. 

“Hmmm, clinging to you while we travel at high speeds, sounds good to me.”

Chapter Nineteen

Isis slipped into a clingy shirt.  It was one of her favorites.  The deep sea green color highlighted her vibrant eyes, and it had an almost obscene neckline and clung to her figure, making her waist look tiny, and her boobs look huge. 
So why did her eyes stray toward Raf’s t-shirt so casually slung across her bed?
  It was an itchy cotton material that swamped her, and wearing it would give anyone who saw her the impression that she was actually a fan of the Los Lobos Lions –
Los Lobos perpetually losing football team that ironically didn’t contain one single lion shifter
.  Ms. Kitty yowled knowingly.  Ugh, why was she even bothering to ask the question?  Wearing that t-shirt made her feel a hundred times more sexy than usual – and she was always smoking – because it belonged to
him
.  That sometimes stiff, sometimes playful, always gorgeous human that had her heart thumping like a bass drum and her sex almost begging for him to take her.  People always said that men thought with their pricks; they neglected to mention what happened when women let their hoohahs take over. 
Lots of girly simpering and sighing if Isis was anything to go by.

Oh, but it wasn’t just sex.  If it were, it would be easy.  A few quick bangs and out.  But this, oh this!  There were feelings involved.  She enjoyed his darn company.  Horror of horrors, she’d actually consider cuddling with him.  Even their shower tryst, although it couldn’t be called sweet lovemaking, was more than sex.  Would she have come so hard with someone other than him?  Could she have?

Naturally, she wasn’t given time to come to grips with her thoughts.  Because the most irritating ghost since Beetlejuice decided to pop by for a visit. 
Even for a ghost her timing sucked.

Cleo popped into view and Isis almost jabbed her eye with her mascara wand.  “Fuck, you scared the hell out of me!”

“Sorry, honey.”

“All these fricking years, you’d think I’d get used to that,” Isis grumbled under her breath.

Raf hadn’t mentioned any specific plans about seeing her later, and it was moving toward evening, but she wanted to be fully prepared, in case he happened to pop by.  Yes, earlier he had seen her, hair wet, devoid of make-up and decked out in men’s baggy clothes, so imagine the look on his face when he caught sight of her in full-on sex kitten role. 
Meow
.  She’d even put on a mini-skirt – that’s how damn committed she was to making Raf hard as a rock just by looking at her.  Course, it would help if her eye wasn’t now bleary and bloodshot from having a mascara wand jabbed in it, but she’d heal.

Cleo wrung her ghostly hands as she idly walked up and down – straight through the middle of the bed.  “I’m sorry about earlier, honey, with your young man.”

Isis immediately felt a swell of annoyance at the term ‘young man’.  She’d never introduced any of the boys or men she had dated to her mother.  Probably because dated was such a strong word for what she had done before.  And you really couldn’t rock up to your mom’s house and cry, ‘hey Mom, meet my fuck buddy, I forget his last name’. 
So wrong, so very wrong
.  But maybe her reticence had partly been because of her mother.  She was sort of tedious.  Knowing her mother, she would have made her erstwhile boyfriend sit down to have tea with her while she knitted and babbled about how awful reality TV shows were while displaying a ludicrous amount of knowledge of just what happened in all of them.  No, that wasn’t what any of her men were for.  They were for satisfying urges and that was it.  Or at least, that was true of her previous men.  Her current man extracted some very strange urges she never knew existed inside herself. 
She was back to the cuddling again
.  How long had that unholy desire been buried inside her?  Too long, purred Ms. Kitty.

“I was trying to stay out of the way,” insisted Cleo with an apologetic grimace.

“Well appearing and walking right through him kind of ruined that,” drawled Isis, laconically.

“He seems like a lovely young man,” commented Cleo, changing the subject

“Yes, he is,” she said, tersely.  Her tiger snarled and Isis gave her the beast a figurative bonk on the nose.  It was one thing to get jealous over her cats, it was another to do so over her dead mother.  She was dead for hell’s sake!  Couldn’t do anything even if she wanted.

“But?”

Isis pursed her lips at Cleo the persistent ghost.  “But nothing. You’re right; he’s lovely.  What isn’t there to love?” 
Not a darn thing by her reckoning.

“You’re worried.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Don’t tell me how I’m feeling!” snapped Isis, burning with fury as her tiger bared her teeth.

“You’re worried because he’s your mate, and you think that you’ll get bored of him like you have with all the other men in your life.”

“It’s not my fault I was bored with them – they were boring!”  Isis felt her blood boil, and her animal roared.  The fact that her mom just stood there – or hovered there – smiling benignly and acting all reasonable only made her madder.

“And you’re worried that you might leave him like your father left us.”

“I’m not like him.” 
Selfish, tiger bastard
.

“No, you’re more like me.”

“I thought you were trying to help me, not insult me,” she murmured, although with not nearly as much zeal as one of her usual insults.

“You know before I met your father, I wasn’t interested in settling down.  I was like you; I wanted to have fun and be my own person.  I was worried that being in a relationship would mean that I would have to give up being me.  But it wasn’t like that, being with him was wonderful.”

“Yeah?  Then why did he leave?”  Her mom had tried to talk to her about it over the years, but she’d never been interested.  Her dad ran out on them when she was two and then he died in a car accident.  He didn’t love them enough to stay.  What else was there to say?

“He just wasn’t ready, honey.  We were so young, and his tiger was so wild.  He never really left us completely, not for long.  He kept coming back, but every time his tiger became too much he made himself go.  He didn’t want to hurt us; he was always afraid of that.  Believe it or not you were a very small baby, so frail…”

Isis and her tiger scoffed at that. 
Her?  Frail?

“Until you were a teenager I was convinced you were human.  But, your dad he was coming back to us and then, the car accident… “  Cleo stared off into space for a few seconds, a look of such dejected sadness on her face that it elicited some weird, guilt-like emotions from Isis, that she would never admit to having.  “I think, eventually he would have settled down with us.  He just never had the chance.”

“You missed him,” stated Isis, flatly.

“So much, losing him was like losing a part of me.  I’m so glad I had you; you made my life worth living.”

“Jeez, I never knew I meant that much to you,” she muttered, ignoring the burgeoning guilt.  She hadn’t exactly been a wonderful daughter. 
More like wild hellcat
.

“Yes you did, and you still do.  But you’ve always been so independent that you refused to acknowledge that you meant that much to me, or that I meant that much to you.”

“Humph.”

“I think you and Raf will be very happy together, and he seems very enamored with you.”

“Don’t know why, unless it’s my looks.”  Her tiger agreed vociferously with her mother’s sentiment, but Isis felt the need to argue.  Or maybe, even though under pain of torture she’d never admit to it, she wanted a little reassurance from her mommy. 

“He seems patient and kind and perfect for you.”

“You only haunted him for like half an hour.  You’re just saying all this garbage because you want grandchildren.”

Cleo’s eyes sparkled.  “I do, and with your genes there’s a good chance they’ll be able to see me.”

“Keep dreaming, specter.”

Her phone trilled, and Isis made a lunge for it before they started talking more in-depth about, ugh,
feelings
.  She’d had her fill for the day, nay, the week.

“It’s me,” chirped Jessie.

“Hey nutsy, what’s up?”

“You know you asked me to check the Vampire Directory the other day, well guess what?”

Isis waited a few beats before growling at her to get on with it.

“A vampire called Elijah Grey has just been added to the system today,” proclaimed Jessie in a rightfully smug voice. 
There really was no one in the SEA half as good as her
.  “He says he’s been in Europe and only just returned to America, which is why he never registered before now.  But, he claims he is Elijah Grey, who happened to be the brother of Elspeth Grey.”

Isis blew out a breath.  “Nutsy, that’s great.  Have you got an address for him?”

“Sure do!”   Jessie rattled it off and said her goodbye.

Hmmm, maybe they do have a witness to their grave robberies.  Plus she was almost positive this guy had whacked her round the head, sending her flying into an open grave.  That at least deserved a punch in the face. 
If not a kick to the nuts.

She called Raf; no answer.  He was probably dealing with the Georgia issue.  Rather than waste time she decided to check out the vamp on her own.  It was probably for the best.  If the vamp was a little testy, she didn’t want to have to worry about keeping Raf safe.  With a hasty goodbye to her mother, currently trying out her various ‘boos’ on the cats –
all to no avail, they were unflappable
– she made her way over to the address Jessie had given her.  Raf might be a little peeved that she went without him, but she’d find a way to make it better.  Hey, she could just take off all her clothes and distract him.  Ms. Kitty growled in agreement at such a good suggestion. 
Yep, that’d work
.

*

“Igor, I think we’re finally ready,” chirruped the doctor, excitedly.

Igor grunted, unenthusiastically.

“Not long now, my love,” whispered the doctor over their beloved’s body.

“Humph.  What about Igor?” demanded Igor of himself. 

“What about you?” asked the doctor, puzzled.

“What happens to Igor when he’s alive?”  Igor sneered and pointed at the mish-mashed corpse the doctor was simpering over.  If the doctor continued, it wouldn’t be long before Igor was vomiting over it, or tearing it apart out of anger…

The doctor waved a blue gloved hand dismissively.  “We’ll all be one big happy family.”

“Humph, happy…”