Chapter Twenty-Four – Luke

 

“I told her.”

“Told who what?”

“Her. I told her everything.”

“Wait.” Tabitha stopped, and I could practically hear the wheels turning in her head even here on the other end of the phone from her. Could imagine her eyebrows twitching like crazy as she put two and two together. “The girl that disappeared, her roommate is another woman, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

“God. Dammit. And, to think, I actually gave you the benefit of the doubt. I thought something was fishy when you mentioned her the first time around, but didn’t mention anything else about her. Them, they, all that crap.”

“I’m sorry, Tabitha. It just kind of happened.”

“No, you’re not,” she snapped. She let loose an exasperated sigh. “But, like it fucking matters, right? You shifters are just doing whatever the fuck you want to do. Run around, save the fucking world, rescue the damsel in distress.”

“In all fairness, she rescued me.”

“Whatever,” she growled. “The real kicker to this whole thing is that it’s you, Luke. Out of all the agents here, including even Kris, I thought you’d be the one to at least think this through with your head instead of your dick.”

“Hey! It’s not like that.”

“Does it matter if it is, or if it isn’t? You deliberately held back information, didn’t you? Just so you wouldn’t get the lecture that was coming? Did you at least get what we needed from Roxanne?”

I gritted my teeth. “Yeah. And we have another complication, too.”

She just sighed.

I told her about Stryos, about the fight down in the storm drains, and about how it had gotten away.

“A capcaun?” she asked. “That would explain it.”

“What do we know about them?”

“They’re Romanian folk beasts, like the zmeu. But they’re all a little different from each other, so it’s hard to narrow them all down. They’re more like a loose grouping than anything else, with similar characteristics to each other. Hold on. Kind of like with shifters, and you being weak to silver and being able to transform, but how your animal phenotype is a floating variable.”

I repeated that last part back to her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, you’re a shifter, but also a lion shifter. Just like this Stryos is a capcaun, but also a capcaun shade. Or, I don’t know, a tiger can be a Bengal or a Siberian. This thing can move in the shadows but is still more of an ogre with dog-like qualities.”

“How do I kill it?”

“Same way you fought it before. Silver and light. Something more powerful than a cell phone the next time you run into it, though.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“All else fails…”

“Burn it? Yeah. Figured. Anything else?”

“Nothing, other than letting you know that the capcaun is likely wherever the zmeu is keeping his victim.”

“Still no line on that, though?”

“That reminds me, actually.” Rustling on her end of the line as she went through some papers. “You mentioned the smell of minerals when you were in the Illuminati House, right? Well, turns out there is an extensive cave system through that area, the Peppersauce Caves. Over a mile of mapped passages just southeast of town.”

“Any chance there’s a way into the caves from the house?”

“Maybe? There’s nothing I could find that specified caves beneath the house itself, but mineral composition is primarily limestone in that area. Could be an unmapped cave system that branches out to beneath the mansion, or there could be its own separate one.”

“Well, if I can get inside the house tonight, I can use the powder I got from Roxanne on the gold coin, and it should lead me to the rest of the trove. Roxanne said they tend to keep their victims and their treasure together, so if I can find it, I can get Heidi before he can hurt her. We’re still inside the window.”

“Has to be tonight, then. How much time till sunset?”

I checked my watch. “Two hours. I can work with that. Won’t try going in till after midnight, I think.”

“One other thing.”

“Go for it.”

“Zmeus have an advanced sense of intuition.”

I grunted. “Great.”

“You need to be careful when you’re stalking this thing, or it will know you’re coming,” Tabitha said, emphasizing the word “will.” “You need to throw it off its game somehow, or it’s going to know what’s up.”

“Lovely. Just fucking lovely.”

A knock at the door came. “Luke?” Molly asked from out in the hallway. “You okay in there?”

“That her?” Tabitha asked, and I could practically hear the smirk in her voice.

I grunted. “Gotta go. Let me know if you find out anything else.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, you too.” I hung up the phone and tossed it on the bed. “I’m fine, you can come in.”

She opened the door and peeked her head in. “Change your mind on me?” She paused, smiling a little. “Because, you can, you know. If you’re embarrassed or something. You don’t have to show me, if you don’t want to.”

I chuckled. “No, no cold feet. Or paws. Just checking in back at the office and letting them know the situation, that’s all.”

She nodded. “How do we want to do this, then?”

“Give me five minutes. If you knock again, and I don’t respond, just come in. That work?”

Before she could nod or agree, I already had my hands hooked into the bottom of my shirt, had begun to pull it up and over my chest. When I pulled it off my head, she was still standing there, watching me.

She pressed her lips together in a thin line, pretended to look elsewhere when she realized I’d just caught her staring. “Whoops,” was her quiet mutter as she made her way back outside.

I just shook my head as I moved on to stripping out of my jeans and my briefs. After all, it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen it before.

After that, I began the change. My legs shrinking, my arms lengthening. My fur growing from my skin, my mane sprouting from the back of my head and neck, my tail forming from my body. Within moments, my jaw had reshaped itself, my ears had moved, and a fine pelt of fur covered my entire body.

Outside, Molly had begun to pace. Each of her footsteps seemed to resound on the tile outside as she walked the length of the hallway, back and forth, back and forth. Clearly, she was as nervous as I was about this whole thing.

But no amount of nerves was going to stop me. I’d jumped from jets, I’d faced down demons, I’d defused bombs. Nervousness hadn’t slowed me down one bit, not yet. And I wasn’t planning on letting it start.

I licked my chops and waited for the knock to come.