Kean

Trying to stay calm, he paced across the room. Madison was really starting to irritate him. She was so focused on her own mission that she wasn’t communicating anything with him. This prevented him from doing as thorough a job of helping as he could.

“A kidnapping,” he said again, trying to distract himself. “All right. Fine.”

He lifted his nose to the sky, letting his bear come closer to the surface to better take advantage of the more-than-human senses it offered him. He tested the room, filtering out things such as wood, freshly introduced by the ransacking.

“Four,” he said, walking around while Madison stared at the ground still. “I can scent four,” he paused abruptly as he walked nearer the door. “Make that five.”

“Five what?” the tall blonde woman asked, her round, thick cheeks still slightly flushed from their encounter.

She was frowning.

Interesting, she gets the same dimples in her cheeks when she frowns as she does when she smiles.

“Five people,” he said. “Not including you or me.”

“You can detect that?” she asked, her head briefly coming up from where she’d been staring.

He nodded absentmindedly as she took a step away from the wall, still fixated on the ground.

“The one’s scent is strong with…with, umm,” he tried to place it. “Cleaning solution stuff.”

“Housekeeping,” Madison replied as if it were obvious.

“Oh. Like, cleaners?” he asked.

She looked over at him once more.

“I’ve never stayed in a hotel before,” he told her. “We don’t have them in our world.”

“Yes, like cleaners. Maids, whatever. They clean up after a guest is done with the room.”

He nodded. “Well, their scent doesn’t come past more than a pace or two into the room.” He kept sniffing the air. “One of the others…I can taste fear. It was really strong.”

Madison got down on her hands and knees while he watched. What the hell was she doing?

“Then…anger?” He shook his head. “Why would the others feel angry?”

He walked toward the bed when another smell suddenly filtered through, one he’d ignored because he’d smelled it so often before, he was nearly used to it. But it was powerful now, coming through his mental filter.

“Because of this,” Madison said, lifting the bedskirt.

“Motherfucker,” Kean swore as the head of a lifeless body looked out at them from underneath the bed. “Madison, we need to go now,” he urged.

“Not yet,” she said, rifling through the man’s pockets.

“Are you robbing a dead man?” he asked, shocked.

“Do I seriously look like that much of a lowlife to you?” she snapped. “I’m looking for any sort of identification or clues as to where they might have come from.”

Kean walked to the far side of the room, looking out the window.

“Madison,” he said slowly. “We need to go.”

“Why are you so insistent? Have you never seen a dead body before?” she asked.

He rolled his eyes. “Not because of that, though this is the first dead human body I can recall having seen. Oddly enough we look alike when we die. I’m sure some philosopher somewhere would have all sorts of interesting things to say about that. But because of logic.”

“This is going to become a running gag, isn’t it?” she asked, deadpan.

“What?”

“Never mind, go on,” she urged.

Kean gave her a funny look, then shrugged. “Like I said, logic. Five scents, one body. That means four people are gone. One of those is the cleaning lady, one of those is your agent. That means two others took him out of here.”

“Yeah, I was able to infer that much,” she said dryly.

“The cleaning lady, housekeeping, whatever, is the most recent scent,” he told her.

“So?” Madison stopped searching the body and pushed it back under the bed.

Then she leaned over to the night table and stuck her hand inside of it. As Kean watched she rubbed the entire underside of the top, which was now easily doable without a drawer in it.

“Check the other one,” she ordered.

“Madison,” he said without moving. “We need to go!”

“Because of the cleaning lady?”

Exasperated, he moved over to her and took her wrist even as she was standing up. “Yes, because of that. She was the last one here. Which means she came by recently, and saw the room like this.” He glared at her as she wrenched her arm free of his grip and went over to the dresser, repeating her odd motion.

“If you walked into a room like this as an innocent maid—”

“Are you calling me a maid?” she asked dangerously.

Kean shook his head. “What? No. I’m saying put yourself in her position.”

“I’m not wearing one of those ridiculous outfits,” she told him sternly.

“Are you even taking me seriously?” he snapped.

“Not really, though I might if you’d search the other nightstand.”

“FOR WHAT?” he bellowed, walking over to it and ripping the thing apart. “It’s wood, sliders for the drawers, and metal feet. There are some nails holding the back on to it. Any other brilliant questions?”

Madison shook her head, almost done sweeping the underside of the dresser.

“Now, listen to me,” he said carefully. “If you walked into a room like this, and weren’t the badass agent Madison whatever your last name is, would you—”

“Kerber.”

“What?” he asked, losing his train of thought as she interrupted him again.

“My last name is Kerber,” she told him.

Kean was practically shaking with anger.

“Okay, Madison Kerber. If you walked into a room like this as a maid—which you’re not,” he said emphatically before she could interrupt him, “and you saw this scene before you. What would you do?”

Madison looked up at him as she removed her arm from the dresser, hand still empty.

“I’d probably tell my boss.”

“Okay, and what would they do?”

“Umm, probably—”

Sirens began to scream loudly outside the hotel, reaching up to the twenty-second floor even.

“Call the police,” he finished, shaking his head. “Can we go now?”

“Not yet!” she said, looking around the room. “Ah, bathroom.”

Kean walked over to the window. He saw several squad cars pulling up to the building. Then a large van pulled in behind them. The words Special Weapons and Tactics Unit were emblazoned on the side.

“Seriously?” he muttered to himself. “That’s a bit of overkill. Do they not have anything better to do these days than reply to a standard ransacking with their heavy response unit?”

His eyes ran over the military lines of the tank-like vehicle they were driving.

“Okay, maybe not.”

He walked over to the bathroom door to see Madison doing the same thing to the vanity under the mirror. “We need to go.”

“Why are you so worried?” she snapped.

“Um, I’m a shifter. Not all of us enjoy the easy freedoms that you do. If they see me in here, you can guarantee I’m going to be blamed for this. Then they’re going to put me in jail, and use that as an excuse to invade my fucking homeland!” he said, his voice rising to a roar by the time he was done as his worries boiled over.

Madison smiled. “Okay, let’s go,” she said, pulling her hand out from under the sink.

“Wait, seriously?” he asked. “I thought I was going to have physically remove you from the room. What the hell changed?”

“This,” she said, opening her hand to reveal a little metal rectangular object.

“Okay,” he said, leading the way from the bathroom. “What is that?”

Madison stopped suddenly. Her eyes were wide in astonishment as she looked at her hand, then back up at him, then back at her hand.

“You don’t recognize this?”

“It looks like a metal thing?” he said lamely.

“You really don’t get along well with technology, do you?” she asked.

His lip pulled back silently. “Not a huge fan.”

“Obviously. This is a USB stick,” she said, as if that should explain everything.

“A what?”

“Oh for fuck’s…Okay,” she said patiently.

Kean looked past her. The building next to the hotel was reflecting the flashing lights of a number of police vehicles.

“This plugs into a computer. You know what those are?”

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Okay, so it goes into one, then you can store electronic data on here. Computer files can be stored here. Then you take it and plug it into a different computer to access it.”

Kean considered that for a moment. “But why not just send it over the internet?”

Madison threw her hands up in the air. “You know what the hell the internet is but not a USB stick?” she asked, exasperated.

“Who doesn’t know what the internet is?” he replied.

More sirens started screaming outside. Yeah, okay, just a little overkill on the response there, boys. Must be a slow day.

Unless the maid had smelled blood, or seen the body? Unlikely. He tested the air. “Can you smell the blood?” he asked, switching topic as he gestured toward the front door.

“Yes, now that I realize it’s what I was smelling. Why?”

“The police sent their heavy response unit. They showed up in a friggin’ tank. I’m trying to figure out why the hell they would come in such force for a simple destroyed room.”

Madison shrugged and walked past him to the door. “Housekeeping must have smelled blood. After doing this for so long, they probably recognize it fairly easily.”

Kean frowned as she left the room. He followed, pulling the door quietly closed behind them. “Shall we go then?” he asked hopefully, wondering if she was going to take him somewhere other than out of the building as fast as possible.

“Absolutely.”

“Finally,” he said with intense relief. The sirens had not been helping the constant pounding within his head from his bear as it rebelled at being trapped in the city.

They walked down the hallway and he punched the button on the elevator.

“What are you doing?” Madison asked, looking at him in near abject horror.

“Summoning one of the elevators,” he responded slowly. “Which of course, is going to bring a full load of police with it, isn’t it?” he finished as he thought through his actions.

Madison smiled, and then lifted a hand, curling her fingers into a fist except for her index. He followed her pointing.

“Ah, stairs. Excellent. I could go for some cardio,” he replied, stepping into the stairwell.

He stopped almost immediately as the clatter of police came from below.

“Um, they’re no more than a few floors below us,” he commented, stepping back out into the hallway and closing the door as quietly as he could. “They’re going to see us before we even get one floor down.”

Madison didn’t seem to miss a beat. “Okay, well, time to test out your acting skills,” she said, pulling him after her.

He followed her, trying to figure out what she was on about.

The elevator chimed to indicate it had arrived.

Madison pulled herself into a little corner near the elevator.

The doors began to slide open.

Her hands snaked around his neck.

Police stormed out.

Madison kissed him. Hard.