FOUR
Nadine woke up gradually, aware of a lingering sweet taste in her mouth, a throbbing ache in her ankle, and a competing pain along her throat. Her body felt strangely heavy, her eyes dry and her eyelids like sandpaper as she slowly came around.
“Ah, she’s coming back to us just in time,” someone said; Nadine heard the beeping of a heart monitor a few feet away from her head, and bit by bit, ambient noises filtered through her mind. Her headache—the reason she’d ended up where she was, wherever that was—had utterly disappeared, replaced by a half-dozen other sensations. Not exactly a fair trade, she thought wryly.
The smells of antiseptic and linen gave her the final clues that she was in some kind of hospital, and Nadine remembered the last things that had happened—in a hazy, foggy way—before she’d gone away. The memory of the sickly-sweet smelling rag on her face brought with it a surge of anger. Some asshole drugged me! She opened her eyes, and to Nadine’s momentary shock, she saw the face of the man who’d had the rag.
“You!”
“You’re quite lucky that this man was there,” someone said.
Nadine turned her head and caught sight of a doctor in scrubs and a white coat; he was short but obviously in good shape, his dark hair meticulously groomed, his face clean-shaven, his dark eyes peering at her from behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.
“While none of your arteries was nicked, you would still have been in danger if you’d been left to bleed.”
“He was there—he drugged me!” Nadine turned to look at the man who’d been at the scene, the one who she suddenly remembered had been naked. Something about that fact tugged at the back of her mind. Wasn’t there something about a bear? Was that guy there before then? When did he show up? She frowned.
“I think it’s likely that your experience has jumbled you up a bit,” the doctor said. “This man and his partner bandaged your neck, and brought you to us.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that he drugged me,” Nadine said sullenly, frowning from one man to the other. “Why is he even here?”
“He had to report on the assault to our staff, and to the police,” the doctor said. “And, of course, he was concerned with your well-being.”
“If he was that concerned, he shouldn’t have drugged me,” Nadine said, giving the doctor a sour look. Why isn’t he more worried about the fact that the guy who knocked me out is sitting a few feet away from me?
“I think after the stress of the attack, you should probably wait a little while to talk to the police about what happened to you,” the doctor said. “I’m giving you something to manage the pain in your ankle—and in your throat. The cut was mostly superficial, but I’m sure it stings like a son of a bitch.”
“It does,” Nadine admitted, reaching up tentatively and brushing her fingers against the spot where she could feel the stinging, burning pain. Instead of her own skin, she felt the roughness of a bandage.
“You’ll want to rest,” the doctor said, nodding. “In the meantime, I want to assure you that I know this man, and he is not out to harm you.” The doctor pointed to the other man in the room and Nadine wondered if she had somehow managed to wander into a terrible horror movie. “He’d like to have a few words in private with you. I would recommend you listen to him and hear him out, as much as you can, in your present state.”
“What are you, his lawyer?” Nadine crossed her arms over her chest. She realized then that she was almost completely naked—only a gown and a blanket covering her body from the two men in the room with her.
“I’m just interested in making sure that you’re okay,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back shortly.”
“You’re leaving me alone with him? I just told you—he drugged me!”
“I think you’re confused,” the doctor said gently. “Until your thoughts are clearer, please try to avoid accusing anyone of anything.” The doctor wrote something on the clipboard in his hands and inclined his head towards her. “A nurse will be in to administer some pain medication; until then, please relax as much as your pain allows, and please hear this man out.” Before she could protest, the doctor turned and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
Nadine stared at the man, seated in a chair a few feet away from her bed, looking for the entire world as if he had not a single concern.
“My partner and I have your purse and the pharmacy bag; it’s in our van,” the man told her, watching her intently.
“You drugged me,” Nadine said flatly. “I know you did, even if you are in some kind of cahoots with that doctor to cover it up.”
“I did drug you,” the man said with a shrug. “Just a little chloroform. Nothing that would really harm you.”
“I’d just had my throat cut and my ankle twisted and…been attacked by someone,” Nadine pointed out. “The last thing I needed was to be knocked unconscious.”
“It didn’t hurt you,” the man insisted. “In fact, considering the fact that you probably would have struggled if we’d left you conscious, you should be thanking me for doing what I had to do to get you here safely.”
“What the hell happened back there?” Nadine shook her head, wincing slightly at the tug she felt along her throat where the cut was. Stitches, she thought ruefully. I’m going to look like Frankenstein’s monster after this. “I saw a trained bear—and you’re not the guy who was chasing after the guy who grabbed me. Where the hell is he?”
“He’s taking care of something,” the man said with a shrug. “And you’re right—I’m not him. You’re wrong about the trained bear, though.”
Nadine frowned. “I know what I saw,” she said firmly. “I can’t exactly explain it, but I know for a damned fact that I saw a bear working with a guy who was chasing someone.” She shook her head again—carefully. “And I can’t imagine a wild bear would just cooperate with someone like that. It would have to be a trained bear.”
“Not exactly,” the man said. He licked his lips and glanced at the door. “What’s your name, by the way? We didn’t take the time to look through your things to find an ID, so you’re in here as Jane Doe.”
“Nadine. Nadine Sanderson.” She fidgeted against the pillows piled up behind her head and back.
“I’m Dylan Knowles,” the man told her. “My business partner is Matthew Forrest.”
“Why am I supposed to care?” Nadine wanted the man out of her room; more than that, she wanted to talk to the police who were presumably waiting to hear what she remembered of the attack she’d been through.
“Because I technically saved your life?” Dylan shrugged. “I mean if you want to get super technical, I probably could have done a better job of getting that asshole away from you before he cut your throat, but once the damage was done, my partner and I could have just left you there for someone else to take care of.”
“Your partner seemed more concerned about me not dying than you are right now,” Nadine told Dylan, frowning.
“We were both concerned,” Dylan said, smiling brightly. “But the fact remains that once we bandaged you up, we could have just called the cops and skipped out before they got there. Anonymous tip, no one would have known anything.”
“But I would have told them about seeing you and your partner,” Nadine said, realizing why it was that the doctor had told her to listen to the man. “Okay,” she started, taking a careful breath. “What’s the deal with this whole situation? And why were you naked when I saw you?” That part stuck out in her mind and Nadine blushed, remembering the sight of Dylan’s naked body all too well.
“Ah, you remember that part,” Dylan said with a slightly smirking smile. “And it looks to me like you remember it pretty fondly.”
“I’m not remembering it fondly,” Nadine said sharply. “It’s just—I can’t push the image of you naked out of my mind right now. It wasn’t that it’s pleasant, it’s that…” she tried to think of a way to describe it. “It’s embarrassing.”
“For who? I’m not embarrassed that you saw me naked.” Dylan grinned again.
“So explain the situation with the bear to me,” Nadine said quickly, to change the subject. “What happened to the bear?”
“You’re looking at him,” Dylan told her. “That’s a big part of why the doc wanted to give me some time to talk to you alone. There are some things you need to know about—and some things you need to keep to yourself.”
“You aren’t a bear,” Nadine said, crossing her arms over her chest again. “I’m looking at you right now, and you are definitely not the bear I saw helping that other guy.”
“I promise you,” Dylan said, his strange gray-green eyes glinting with amusement, “I am exactly that bear; I’m just not in that form right now.”
“No,” Nadine said. She shook her head. “You’re just fucking with me now. There is no way that you’re a bear in any form.”
Dylan chuckled. “You want proof? I can give you proof—you just have to promise me you won’t scream.”
Nadine’s heart beat faster in her chest. “You can’t give me proof like that anyway,” she insisted. “You’re a human being—you can’t just become a bear.”
“That’s exactly what I can do,” Dylan said, his smile growing broader. “Promise me you won’t scream when I show you.”
Nadine pressed her lips together. Between having her throat cut and her ankle sprained and the drugs still in her system, she wasn’t entirely sure she could trust anything she remembered—much less anything presently happening. I am losing my mind, she thought, trying to understand how she had gone from trying to get home to sleep off a migraine to being in the hospital with stitches in her neck and an IV in her arm. I am losing my mind and this jackass offering me some weird proof of being an actual bear is just proof that I’m losing it.
“I don’t believe you, and I don’t believe what’s happening to me right now,” Nadine said, looking down at the shape of her body underneath the blankets. “Clearly I’ve lost my mind.”
“You haven’t—just had it knocked around a bit,” Dylan told her. “Look—you absolutely did get attacked by a guy who was running away from my partner and me. And you absolutely saw a bear. That bear was absolutely me.”
He put one hand out, and in spite of Nadine’s attempt to ignore him, she couldn’t help but see, in a matter of moments, a rippling start up underneath Dylan’s skin. She gasped, shifting backward on the bed, her heart pounding faster in her chest and her stomach lurching inside of her as the hand in her field of vision began to transform. Fur appeared as if it had somehow come up through his skin; his fingers widened somehow, blunt claws pushing out through the tips, and in a matter of moments, what had been a long-fingered, articulate-looking hand became a broad bear paw.
“I am not seeing this,” Nadine said, even as she stared at the paw that Dylan let fall onto her lap. “This is—you or the doctor or someone spiked my meds, or…or you did something.”
“I could turn into a bear completely, but the nurse might come in any time now to give you the pain meds,” Dylan said matter-of-factly. “And it would be kind of hard to explain why there’s a bear in your hospital room.”
Almost unwillingly, Nadine’s gaze traveled up from the paw that felt so heavy in her lap; the bear fur—mottled tan and brown—extended up about halfway along Dylan’s forearm, and then transitioned somehow into his normal, human flesh.
“Do you mind if I transform back? It’s kind of hard to hold it just in one part of my body.”
“I don’t really believe what I’m seeing right now, so sure,” Nadine said, shaking her head slowly.
Before her eyes the fur melted away. The pads of the bear paw elongated, once more becoming fingers. The hand remained on her lap for a moment and Nadine squirmed, both fascinated and repelled by what she had seen.
“If you want, I can repeat the performance later—when you’re feeling a little more yourself,” Dylan suggested.
Nadine tore her gaze away from his hand on her lap and found his face; he was absolutely beaming, utterly pleased with himself, his eyes glinting with amusement.
“Assuming I ever believe this,” Nadine said slowly, scowling at Dylan slightly, “why would you show me? You could have just told me the bear thing was a hallucination.”
“Because I need to explain to you why you need to keep your mouth shut about the guy that attacked you,” Dylan said. His hand retreated from her lap and he sat back in his chair, his gaze intent on her face. “It may have occurred to you that neither my partner nor I are law enforcement.”
“That wasn’t exactly in the top three on the list of things that has occurred to me in the past twenty minutes,” Nadine said, “but now that you mention it—yeah, it’s kind of obvious that you and your friend aren’t wearing police uniforms or anything.”
“That’s because we’re sort of…mercenaries,” Dylan said, a slight frown puckering his forehead. “We’re freelancers of a kind. We hire out to other people like us, to take care of certain things that can’t come to law enforcement attention.”
“Other people who turn into bears? How many of you are there?”
Dylan shrugged. “Bears—probably a few thousand in the United States all told. Not a whole lot. The guy we were chasing down isn’t a bear though—he’s a lion.”
“So there are lions and bears,” Nadine said numbly. “Are there tigers, too?”
Dylan smirked. “Is this the part where I say ‘oh my’?”
“I think I’m supposed to say that,” Nadine said, looking down at her hands. “Okay, so you were chasing some guy who turns into a lion, because…” She looked up, raising an eyebrow in query.
“He and some of his friends pissed off our client, who’s another were-lion,” Dylan said matter-of-factly. “In fact, the particular guy we were chasing, by the name of Alex—remember that?” Nadine nodded. “He actually killed a friend of our client. Which is why—and keep in mind, you have to keep your mouth shut on this—he is now dead. He won’t be holding a knife to any more women’s throats. He also killed another bystander while we were chasing him.”
“He’s dead,” Nadine said flatly. Dylan nodded. “And I need to not tell the police about it because he’s a shape-shifter who turns into a lion.”
“Also because a murder investigation is something everyone wants to avoid,” Dylan added.
Nadine licked her lips and looked down at her lap once more, trying to work her mind around the details that Dylan had given her.
“Where the hell is the nurse?” she said finally, looking up once more. “I feel like a lot of time has passed.”
“Just do me a favor,” Dylan said, meeting her gaze levelly. “Keep your mouth shut about what you saw—the bear stuff, the fact that we were chasing after the guy. Stick with the story of some guy grabbed you while you were walking from your car to the apartment, tried to convince you to drive him somewhere, and then you fought back, and he cut you and drugged you.”
Nadine took a slow, careful breath. “I think I can stick to that,” Nadine said finally. The image of Dylan, naked, looming over her, leapt up into her mind once more, and she pushed it aside ruthlessly. “Where’s your partner?”
“He’s been taking care of closing out that assignment,” Dylan said, looking away. “He’ll probably make an appearance soon. Let me go and check on your nurse.”
Dylan stood, and Nadine watched as he moved around her bed and then walked out of her room. She couldn’t help but notice that his spare, slim body—almost gangly-looking—was a lot faster, and a lot more graceful, than she would have expected. He opened the door quietly and stepped through it, clearing his throat. Nadine sighed and closed her eyes as the door closed behind him, wondering for at least the tenth time since she had come back into consciousness, how it was she had ended up in such a mess when all she had wanted was to get a little sleep and hopefully get rid of her headache. The next time I get one of these, I’ll go to a damn hotel. That would be safer. Nadine sighed and shook her head, wondering if she was going to have to call into work the next day, too—and explain how she had ended up in the hospital.
*
Matthew looked at Dylan intently, watching as the other man paced the living room floor, prowling back and forth like a caged animal.
“On the plus side,” Matthew said, shifting his weight against the couch cushions, “we made a hell of a bonus on the job.”
“On the down side,” replied Dylan, “we’re ‘out’ to a one-natured human, and the guy we killed has friends.”
“We knew he had friends when we took him out,” Matthew pointed out. “And we wouldn’t have ‘come out’ to that girl if you hadn’t transformed while we were chasing him.”
Dylan let out a low growl. Matthew knew it wasn’t directed at him.
“We didn’t know his friends were any kind of organized,” Dylan countered. “God. Maybe you were right, maybe we should have just dropped her off at the hospital. Or called Ray and told him to send someone for her.” He sighed.
“What’s done is done,” Matthew said. “We need to focus on what we need to do next.”
Matthew slipped his hand into his pocket and took his phone out; he opened up his messages and shook his head. The bonus on the most recent job—given to them two days before, when their client had confirmed that Alex was dead, his body delivered—would carry them for more than a month. He re-read one of the texts he'd received.
You and your partner better keep out of the streets. It’s dangerous for rogue bears with delusions of grandeur in South Florida.
Matthew hadn’t been able to trace the message, but it was one of several that he and Dylan had received in the last day.
“We have to get Nadine,” Dylan said, coming to a stop and turning to look at Matthew intently. “They’re going to go after her.”
Matthew frowned. “Why?” He flipped through the most recent messages: threats, most of them, from burner cell phones. Matthew wasn’t sure just how many friends Alex had, but it seemed to him like all of them were determined to settle the score—and that they blamed Dylan and Matthew more than their client.
“Because they’ll have smelled her on Alex,” Dylan told him. “They’ll come after her, too; and she’s not as capable of taking care of the situation as we are.”
Matthew snorted. “She’s the one who stomped his instep and elbowed his solar plexus while we were figuring out how to disarm him,” Matthew pointed out. “I mean, sure—she ended up getting sliced at the throat and spraining her ankle, but she’s pretty tough.”
Matthew didn’t want to admit it, but he had come to grudgingly respect the hapless bystander they’d had to rescue. Once he had heard about the relative aplomb with which she’d accepted the knowledge of what Dylan and he were—and he had the crisis situation of the disastrous end of the job behind him—Matthew had almost wanted to get to know the woman better.
“There are at least five or six different lions involved in this—maybe other kinds of shifters as well,” Dylan pointed out. “Do you think she can take all that?”
“Why are you so concerned about her?” Matthew frowned, looking up at his longtime friend. “I mean, I get not wanting her to bleed out or talk about what she saw, but this is kind of above and beyond.”
“What do you think is going to happen if she gets cornered?” Dylan crossed his arms over his chest, pinning Matthew down with his gaze. “She’s going to either try and find us—and lead them to us on accident—or she’s going to go to the cops and it’ll blow the whole thing wide open.”
“You like her,” Matthew said, staring up at his friend. “You want her.”
Dylan shrugged, rolling his eyes slightly. “She’s hot. She smells like sex. Neither of us has gotten laid in weeks.” Dylan’s lips twitched with the start of a smile. “Are you telling me you don’t want her?”
Matthew pressed his lips together, taking a slow breath.
“If you want her, I’m not going to cut in,” Matthew said, shaking his head. “But yeah—whatever, she’s hot and smells like candy.” He couldn’t resist smiling slightly at the memory of the woman he’d met—no longer the hapless victim, but a defiant, if slightly drugged woman in the hospital. She had taken a shower sometime between when she’d arrived and when Matthew had finally disposed of Alex’s body and gone to the hospital; underneath the sharply antiseptic smell of the hospital soap, he’d caught her pheromones.
“We’re going to have to keep her here, you know,” Dylan said. He smiled slowly. “At least until we can guarantee her safety.”
“What are you getting at?” Matthew felt the animal within him starting to rise up, a sensation like crackling electricity rushing through his bones. His heart beat faster in his chest.
“We could give her the choice,” Dylan suggested. He raised one eyebrow. “Let her get to know us both, see if she favors one of us.”
“What if she likes us both?” Matthew asked with a smirk. “What do we do then? Come on, Dyl. You’ve seen what happens when two bears go after the same woman.”
“If she likes us both, we work that out,” Dylan said with a shrug. “I mean it’s not like we belong to a sleuth anymore. We can go by our own rules.”
Matthew’s eyes widened. “You don’t want to see if we can find another clan to join?” That was news to Matthew. He had thought—he had assumed—that once they had established themselves, once they were clear of the scandal that had caused their exile, he and Dylan might look into joining one of the other clans; maybe one in Florida, or in another state, depending on how things went with their business.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Dylan said. “In the meantime, we need to get her and bring her back here.”
“Are we sure we’re the safest people she could be around?” Matthew glanced down at his phone as another text message came in.
Just try to keep working, asshole. We’ll find you and we’ll take you down.
“I mean, these aren’t threats of a good time we’re getting. They’re going to find us eventually.”
“And when they do, we’ll be able to handle them on our own turf,” Dylan said, shrugging the concern away. “Or we’ll go after them. We’re bears, man. Since when are we scared of a bunch of lions without even the strength to call themselves a pride?”
Matthew pressed his lips together, considering the problems that came along with what Dylan was proposing. It was true that the lions looking to avenge Alex would almost certainly have scented his corpse and having done that, they would have found Nadine’s pheromones on the man. They’d go after her if only to get information about the circumstances of their friend’s death, along with trying to find out whatever Nadine might know about him and Dylan.
“How did they get our numbers?” Matthew frowned, looking at his clan-mate. “I mean, I know they caught our scent on him—they couldn’t avoid it. But how did they get our phone numbers?”
“That is an excellent question,” Dylan said, nodding slowly. “We need to figure that out, too. Maybe they got to someone affiliated with Beckerman and found it out that way. We know they didn’t get to Beckerman—we’d have heard about that.” Dylan began to pace again. “But they don’t have our address. They’ll probably track us eventually, but for right now we’ve got a window before they get to us.” Dylan exhaled sharply, threading his fingers in his hair and staring up at the ceiling. “She’s going to have to take some time off of her job. We can’t risk her going to and from work every day.”
“We should probably run some of this stuff by her,” Matthew pointed out. “I mean, I don’t doubt that she’s got a will to live or anything, but I doubt she’s just going to go along with ‘hey, you’re going to have to completely abandon your life for the next couple of weeks, so come with us.’”
Dylan snorted, a smile playing at the corners of his lips. “We have to get to her before those asshole lions do—that’s non-negotiable,” he said firmly. “Then we figure out just how much of her life is going to be derailed because of this.”
“So do we even know how to get to her? I mean, we know about where her apartment is, but we don’t know where she works.”
“We’re investigators, dude,” Dylan said, shrugging and letting his arms fall to his sides. “If we can’t figure out where she is, then we’re not worth the money anyone’s paying us.”
“Stake out her apartment and wait for her to get home?” Matthew raised an eyebrow. “I mean, that’s the easiest course of action, isn’t it?”
“What if they’re already tailing her, though? They might snatch her on her way home.”
“Do we track her? That’s going to be a tough thing,” Matthew said.
Dylan shrugged. “I got a little out of her before you showed up,” Dylan explained. “I know she works an office job, some kind of data analysis thing. It’s about a thirty-minute drive from her place.”
“Almost everything in this damn county is a thirty-minute drive away from everything else,” Matthew countered.
“Yeah, but we can figure it out,” Dylan said, shaking his head. “Based on what she told me, we do a little research and we’ll know where to go. We stake out her office, get to her when she goes to her car, and explain to her that we need her to make a quick stop at her place and then come back with us.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t think she’s going to go for it,” Matthew told his friend. “She seems to be pretty independent.”
“You do like her,” Dylan said, grinning. “Even more than that, you respect her.” Dylan shook his head. “You sneaky son of a bitch. You played all annoyed and superior when she was knocked out in the back of the van, but you want her, too.”
Matthew rolled his eyes. “I want to keep her from getting killed or from exposing us,” Matthew insisted. “Wanting her…I can take or leave it. There’s plenty of girls down here.”
“So how are we going to get her to do the right thing and come with us? Since you’ve got her figured out after talking to her for what—twenty minutes?”
“I’m not competing with you,” Matthew said firmly. “If you want her, then go for it—I’m not going to stop you. But don’t let this fuck with your head. You want her and you want to protect her—that’s two different things going on. Keep your mind on protecting her first, that way, she’ll live to maybe get interested in you.”
“Oh, she’s totally already interested in me,” Dylan said, brushing that concern aside. “She saw me naked.”
Matthew laughed. “Not every woman who sees you naked is just massively impressed with your physique, asshole,” Matthew pointed out. “Alicia didn’t think much of it.”
“She blushed when she mentioned it,” Dylan said, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “And she mentioned it in the context of not being able to get her mind off of seeing me naked.”
“You traumatized her,” Matthew told his friend, laughing harder. “She couldn’t get it out of her head that some naked guy, who may or may not have been a bear moments before, was giving her a dose of knockout gas. Of course she blushed. That’s mortifying as hell.”
Dylan rolled his eyes. “Whatever, asshole,” Dylan said, shaking his head. “Let’s track her, and convince her to keep her own hide safe with us, and worry about which one of us is going to bed her later on.”
“Okay, what have you got for us to go on?” Matthew took a deep breath to suppress the last of the laughter bubbling up in his chest and set his mind to work on the problem of tracking a woman they’d both only met briefly in a moment of stress, figuring out where she was with the bare minimum of information they’d been able to get out of her when she was in a less than candid mood.
At least with their usual jobs, Matthew reflected as they both got to work on finding Nadine’s online presence, their clients had done the vast majority of the intelligence-gathering. They had an idea of either where the item had been taken from, or who had done it, or something that would give them a lead on tracking. All they had for Nadine was a name, an apartment complex, an approximate commute, and a scent trail they could follow provided they could find it.
After about an hour, they’d put the pieces together, and found out where their target worked. Dylan had actually managed to sort out a lot of Nadine’s usual haunts, finding her social media presence and tracking the few times she’d posted her location, and Matthew had found her business persona on a few networking sites. Between them, they had a fairly well developed idea of the places to look for their quarry; Matthew only worried that if they were able to find it, it wouldn’t exactly be impossible for the lions to get the same information. Dylan dismissed the concern.
“None of them appear to be investigators of any kind or they’d have already tracked us down,” he pointed out.
“So where do we go first?”
Dylan considered the question. “First we check her apartment, make sure that it’s intact and that she’s not there, and not being staked out yet,” he said slowly. “Then, we go to her job—it’s still business hours there, and she seems like exactly the kind of woman who would go straight back to work as soon as possible. Gotta win those brownie points, you know.”
Matthew grinned slightly at that. “And after that, her stores and shit?”
Dylan nodded. “I can’t imagine she’s going to want to walk around a whole lot with the busted ankle, but she’s stubborn as hell. If she’s got some kind of routine, she’s going to want to stick to it just to prove she can, injuries or no.”
“And you’re over there talking about how much I respect her,” Matthew said, clucking his tongue against his teeth. “You’re practically in love with her already.”
“Shut up, asshole,” Dylan said, shaking his head. “We’re going to get her, we’re going to keep her away from the lions and whatever else is after her, and we’re going to figure a way to run those assholes out of town or get rid of them.”
Matthew nodded slowly. “Let’s not take the van for this,” he suggested. “I doubt she’ll feel like getting in it after what happened to her.”
“The car?”
Matthew nodded. “It’ll seem less like we’re trying to abduct her. She might even come with us willingly if we manage to get across the idea that it’s for her own protection. Who knows—maybe she’ll just agree to it on principle, since we saved her damn life before.”
“I think we’ve played that card,” Dylan said, smirking slightly. “But yeah, the car is a safer bet. Makes us look less like predators.”
They had invested their initial earnings in two vehicles: one—the van—was for jobs, like the one they’d been on when they’d met Nadine, the other was a used sedan, almost completely nondescript. The Honda blended into the scenery anywhere they went. It had the added benefit of a decent amount of trunk space, and it had gotten all of its scheduled maintenance.
Matthew changed into a pair of jeans and a tee shirt, and he and Dylan left the house, both of them scenting the air, trying to catch any hint that they were being tailed themselves. He thought about their predicament as they drove across town to where Nadine lived, considering the number of texts they’d both received. They didn’t have any real idea of how many people were involved—there were about a dozen numbers showing up on their phones, but that didn’t mean much.
Alex was involved in drug running, Matthew thought, remembering the information that the client had given them when he’d given them the case. His pals probably have five phones each—buy them weekly, to keep the cops off of them as best as they can. He made a mental note that he and Dylan should probably get some kind of app that would allow them to run their business without giving out their actual phone numbers to their clients.
They arrived at Nadine’s apartment complex and talked their way into getting a key to the unit itself, Dylan flirting with the woman at the front desk until she blushed and giggled and wanted to be as helpful as possible. They had documentation that made them look at least slightly like legitimate investigators; Matthew hinted that there was an issue of something that had been stolen from Nadine’s property, and they were just trying to get as much detail as possible.
There was no sign of Nadine; although Matthew could smell her honey-lavender-lemon scent on everything in her cluttered apartment, she wasn’t in it. He followed her scent outside, and found her parking spot—empty of her car. Dylan took the opportunity of sniffing around the building to try and catch the heavy musk smell of lions, or any sign that their foes had visited the complex, but other than Alex’s scent—watered down after a couple of rains—there was nothing.
As one, Matthew and Dylan went back to their car and started off again, heading to Nadine’s office to wait for her there; by Matthew’s estimate, she would be getting out of work in another two hours—and they wanted time to make sure that there weren’t lions lying in wait for their unwitting bystander there.
“I fucking hate lions,” Matthew commented to Dylan as he drove towards the address he’d found for Nadine’s office.
“Except for the ones who hire us,” Dylan countered.
“Well, yeah, if they’re paying us they’re okay. All other lions can die in a fucking fire, though.”