Kissing the Werewolf - An Izzy Cooper Novel (7 page)

I was already on my way out the door. “Don’t worry about it,” I called over my shoulder. “And no … I haven’t found out anything about old man Marsh.”

A second later, Muriel popped up in front of me. “Where are you going?”

“To my office. Where else would I be going … seeing how I’m headed out back?” I grumbled.

“I don’t know why you’d be going to your office,” Muriel shrugged her wispy ghost shoulders. “No one is there.”

“Why?” I asked, stopping suddenly.

Again she shrugged. “When the sheriff showed up this morning, your boss and the nerdy guy left in a hurry.”

Now I was getting annoyed. Not only did Muriel know what Tim’s name was, though she insisted on calling him nerd, I was getting the feeling she knew more than she was telling me.

Being dead hadn’t robbed her of her ethereal senses. I knew perfectly well that she could hear, as well as see.

“Well what did you hear them talking about before they left?” I decided it was time to get a little pushy.

“Nothing.”

She answered way too quickly. Now I was sure Muriel was hiding something, but what was it and why hide it from me … her best, still breathing, friend?

It was time to go right to the source and ask Ayden myself, which is exactly what I would have done, if I’d remembered to grab my phone before I left the house.

What was wrong with me today?

Since the dog incident, I never went anywhere without my phone. On the up side, I did have an excuse. I couldn’t think of it yet, but it would come to me.

Another plus was that there was a landline in the office. In light of this, I continued in that direction.

Muriel floated along side me. “I think you need to concentrate on Captain Marsh.”

“I don’t have time right now, but I’ll look into it,” I promised.

The door to the office was locked, so it was a good thing Ayden had been generous enough to give me a key.

There was no note waiting for me on the whiteboard, just a display of gruesome crime scene photos.

Snatching up the phone from my desk, I punched in Agent Fontaine’s number. It rang several times and then went to his voicemail.

Now that was strange. Usually he answered when he saw it was one of his agents calling. I half expected an, I told you so, from Muriel, but she was nowhere to be seen.

There was nothing to do but try again later.

Since I wasn’t real good at looking at crime scenes and profiling yet, I thought I’d do something a little more constructive, like questioning Elias again.

“You can come along if you want!” I called out to an invisible Muriel.

There was no answer. Not that I expected there to be. Muriel was bound to the lighthouse and couldn’t go anywhere.

From the looks of things, I was going to be on my own with Elias. The thought was exhilarating, but yet terrifying also.

After knocking on Elias’s front door several times, I gave up and started back to my car. On my way, I kicked a rock that just happened to be in my way, and I’m not ashamed to admit that while kicking the rock, I imagined it was Jasper’s head.

But since I’m so over that crap, I changed my mind and decided I hadn’t kicked Jasper’s head, but just a rock.

Unfortunately, thinking of the rock as a rock, didn’t give me near the same pleasure, so I kicked another rock, and purposely envisioned the dickhead’s face when I did.

I was just thinking that I should find another rock to kick when I heard the angry - snarling growl. It wasn’t just a regular growl, but a ferocious, I’m going to eat you, growl.

Holding my breath, I slowly turned in the direction I’d heard it, while at the same time, reaching for my gun … the gun I’d forgotten to bring along.

Damn!

When the wolf emerged from the thicket of trees, I couldn’t hold back the half gasp, half scream that escaped my lips. It was easily the biggest wolf I’d ever seen. Not that I’d seen that many wolves, other than in at the zoo.

It was time to face facts. This wolf had to be Elias. The heartthrob of my teen dreams was indeed, a werewolf.

But what if it weren’t him?

What if it were just a wolf, or even worse, another werewolf?

Suddenly I felt like a great big hen that had just wandered out of the chicken coop to come face to face with the big bad wolf.

“Elias!” I half choked on his name.

The wolf began moving toward me, slowly - gracefully.

At first I was only afraid, but that quickly turned to terror when the wolf crouched until the front of his body was brushing the ground. I was sure he was ready to pounce on me, but he didn’t.

There was the gross sound of bones cracking and grinding, and then he began to howl. When the wolf’s body started to morph, I almost made a run for it, and would have, if I could have forced my legs to work.

Just as I was in the process of commanding my legs to obey my brain, the wolf’s skin slid from his hard - male body.

There was no stopping it. My eyes made their way from his beautiful face, to his wide shoulders, and then to the bulging muscles of his chest.

I couldn’t stop there. My eyes had a mind of their own, so on account of this, they continued to his narrow waist, and right on down to his extra thick and long, dangling boy part.

If it were possible for a body to overheat and melt, mine would have done just that.

Thinking of what it was I’d missed out on in high school, was enough to make me want to do a little time traveling.

All traces of the wolf were gone, but his eyes were still on me, and they were still hungry.

“Elias,” I breathed.

Something brought him back. I had no idea if it was the sound of my voice, or the cool breeze against his bare skin, but I was glad of it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the wild look in his eyes, and the thought of being pounced on by a naked and gorgeous werewolf, but if and when it happened, I would sure like Elias to be there to share it with me.

Elias glanced down at his naked body, and then looked up quickly, his dark eyes locking with mine. “I’m so sorry … that you caught me in this position,” he added.

I cleared my throat. Not so much because I really needed to clear my throat, but because it gave me time to come up with a response that wouldn’t sound totally stupid. The extra time didn’t work.

“That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. “I mean … I should apologize for not calling first.”

“Yeah well, if you’ll give me a minute, I’ll throw some clothes on.”

Putting clothes over that body was so totally not needed, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t think there would be enough room to fit my other foot in there.

A few minutes later, he was at his front door, motioning for me to come in.

I hesitated. After all, he was a suspect in a homicide investigation.

Oh the hell with it!

I followed him through the front door.

“Are you here on official FBI business, or should I offer you some coffee?” He smiled, and my heart dropped to my feet.

How could he still do that to me after all these years?

“Umm … both … I think,” I stammered.

There went the other foot, right into my mouth.

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to need some caffeine if you’re going to be interrogating me.”

“Me too.”

Why couldn’t I just be cool, like Annabelle?

The kitchen was rustic, kind of an Old West - log cabin style rustic, but with all the conveniences of modern living. It had the two most important items needed in a kitchen, a microwave and a coffee pot.

The coffee smelled great, and I sure did need a dose of caffeine. Somehow I’d managed to have two breakfasts, but only one cup of coffee. There was just something not right about that.

“You can sit over there.” He pointed to the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the dining area. It too was constructed of pine logs and reminded me of something you’d see from the last century; at least you would have if they’d had breakfast bars back then.

Did they have breakfast bars in the Old West?

I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think it was a good time to broach the subject. At the moment, we had more important things to discuss, like what he’d been looking for on Eerie Lane, and why he’d been running around in his wolf’s body in the middle of the day?

After shifting my weight on the tall stool, and nearly tumbling off the other side, I pulled my trusty notebook and pen from the back pocket of my jeans.

Since I didn’t have my phone, I also didn’t have my recorder. That meant doing things the old fashion way.

To keep my mind off the fact that I’d again made myself out to look like a total klutz in front of the sexiest guy on earth, I cleared my throat and slipped into my FBI skin.

“Do you mind telling me what you were doing at the lighthouse today … with my uncle?”

One dark brow shot up. “I didn’t realize there was a law against visiting a radio station.”

“There’s not … but when I questioned Aaron, he said that you were there looking for something. What was it that you were looking for?”

When Elias smiled, my heart fluttered in my chest like a trapped butterfly.

Was it just my imagination, or was he smiling like that on purpose, perhaps with the intent of giving me a heart attack?

What a perfect way to kill a federal agent. The coroner would classify it as death by natural causes, and no one would be the wiser.

But I was onto him. No way was he going to win me over with his devious smiles.

“Sorry. I just can’t get over the fact that after all these years, I’m sitting here next to you, but you’re only here to question me about looking through a spyglass.”

Since he put it like that, it did seem a little crazy. There was a time when I’d come up with just about any excuse to hang around his house, the outside of it anyway. Actually,
when I thought about it, questioning him about what he was looking at through a spyglass was probably one of my more logical reasons for coming to his house.

“So what were you looking for this morning?” I asked again.

“When I was out early yesterday morning, I saw this gigantic guy walking down Eerie Lane.”

“What time yesterday morning?”

Leaning against the back of the stool, he rested one elbow on the breakfast bar. “About two or three in the morning.”

His answer caused my eyebrows to do that scrunching thing. “What were you doing out at that time of the morning?”

“Running.”

“Running? Do you usually go jogging in the middle of the night?” Taking apart his story was going to be easier than I thought. Maybe I was actually picking up on some of Ayden’s interrogation techniques.

He shook his head. “I wasn’t jogging … I was running.”

“Running?” I echoed. “Oh yeah, running!”

So now I could add foolish to feeling stupid, or maybe it was pretty much the same thing.

A thought occurred to me. “You wouldn’t have happened to have been hunting, while you were running?”

“Sure,” he nodded. “Rabbits and such.”

Well there was no law against hunting rabbits, unless one didn’t have a hunting license. Problem was, I wasn’t sure that a werewolf needed a hunting license, or even how that would work.

Oh well, it was probably best to change the subject and stay totally away from the, werewolf hunting rabbits illegally, thing.
Granny was always telling us that a smart woman chooses her battles wisely. That’s what I would do in this situation.

Obviously, getting information on a potential homicide suspect was a little more important than killing a rabbit or two, no matter how morbid it was to kill bunnies.

“What did this guy look like?”

Giving me a lopsided grin, he turned away. “You won’t believe me.”

Well, given the fact that I came from a family of witches, and I was sitting here questioning a werewolf, I didn’t think there was much chance of me not believing him.

“Try me,” I urged, returning his smile.

“He looked like the Frankenstein monster from those old classic movies.”

I couldn’t stop my jaw from hitting the floor.

It took a minute to recover, and during that time, he was staring at me - waiting for a response.

“I hate to ask you this,” I said, clearing my throat, “but do you self medicate … drink, anything like that?”

The thought of a drunken werewolf running amok on Mystique Island was really ugly.

Elias shook his head. “I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Maybe it was just a big guy and your imagination added other details … or could it be that wolves don’t see things quite the way they really are?”

“No,” he wagged his head again. “That’s what I thought at first too, but I saw him again, after changing back”.

“Go on,” I prompted.

“After changing, I followed the guy to the Smuggler’s Bay Lodge. It was weird because he just stood outside, as if he were waiting for someone. Dale must have been out running too, because he was only half changed into human form when he went through that window.
The guy got a hold of him before he’d even made it back to his human form.”

Again, my mouth was hanging open. “You witnessed the murder, and didn’t tell Ayden about it when he questioned you?”

“You know he wouldn’t have believed me. He’d just run me in for more questioning.”

“You’d be surprised. Agent Fontaine is a lot more open minded than what you might think.”

“Maybe so, but he’s not an islander, and I know he’s one of those, by the book, kind of cops. He might know about some things, but how is he going to believe something that I’m having a hard time believing myself?”

He had a point.

“So are you going to keep this between us for now?” he asked, adding sugar to his words by way of his devilishly sexy smile.

Several things came to mind in that moment, namely getting fired, and possibly going to jail. At the very least, keeping this info to myself would be obstruction of justice, but it could get worse. If Elias turned out to be the killer, and at this point I couldn’t be absolutely sure he wasn’t, I could also be charged with aiding and abetting.

“Oh what the hell?” I shrugged. “But only for a day or two.”

“That’s okay,” he said, reaching out to caress my arm.

As soon as our skin made contact, I felt my blood turn to liquid fire.

My first reaction was to jerk away.

But why, especially considering the fact that I loved the way it felt when he touched me?

After giving it some thought, I realized I was afraid of Elias. I didn’t so much fear him physically, but I knew he could really do me in, emotionally.

If Jasper could tear me up with what he’d done, I could only imagine what Elias could do. My feelings for Elias had been around longer, and I suspected they ran much deeper than anything I’d ever felt for Jasper.

“No more keeping things like this to yourself, or I’ll have to tell my boss everything,” I warned.

Elias nodded.

Sighing, I got to my feet and put my little notepad back in my pants pocket. I wasn’t even sure why I’d taken it out. It wasn’t as if I’d actually written anything in it, but I had managed a cool picture of Frankenstein while I’d been doodling.

“I have a question though,” he said, drawing my attention back to him.

I paused, waiting for him to ask his question.