Chapter Seven – Kris

 

Fifteen minutes passed before I put the file back down on the bedspread in front of me. Wearily, I rubbed my eyes, my stomach growling like one of the shifters back in St. Louis getting angry at me or Tiffany for changing out the brand of break room coffee.

“Jesus. How many crimes did this bastard commit?” The rap sheet was like a phonebook, and I was still only a little more than halfway through it. I riffled through the stack of connected pages in the folder, sighing as the fluttering of paper filled the hotel air.

But, even after reading through all this, some things just didn’t add up. The portrait of a hardened criminal painted by the file just didn’t seem to be the Hunter Jackson I knew. The slightly foppish, always smiling dandy of a dragon I’d come to somewhat respect over the last year or so.

Had he really spent two days in a sewage line, waiting for his chance to break into a Paris art gallery? Could he actually be the same man who’d rappelled from the top of a skyscraper, only to insert himself through a sixtieth floor window while carrying the drill necessary to break through to the fifty-ninth?

I closed the folder and set it aside. There was no doubt in my mind regarding the colonel’s dedication to uncovering the truth and collating all the information on Hunter, but I somehow doubted the reports within the folder. The dragon just didn’t seem capable of all that.

Was he?

Because, if he was, wow! Just wow! Some of that stuff put even me to shame, and I was a trained field agent!

My stomach grumbled again, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since that morning sometime, before I’d even met with Col. Harrington. I scowled at myself in the black mirror of the flat screen television at the foot of the bed.

Idly, I thought about Hunter down in the hotel bar. Maybe, if I could get more than just the one drink in him, I could pry open his mind a little, have an opportunity to look into his past. See if he’d let anything slip.

Up until now, we’d only been on a strictly professional basis. In fact, I think the last time he and I had had a drink in public, it had been to broach the subject of his helping me find Col. Harrington. Maybe his asking me out for a drink, even as just friends and colleagues, was a chance to get closer to him? To con a little information out of him.

And, of course, there were worse ways I could spend my evening than with a handsome dragon in the middle of nowhere. Not that I was attracted to him, or anything, but it was impossible to deny that he was a good-looking man, and a decent conversationalist.

Though, he’d never hear me saying that about him.

Never. Not in a million years.

I bit my lower lip, nodding to myself. Yeah. Maybe he’d been right. Maybe I was acting like an old maid and turning myself into a pumpkin before my time. I got up from the bed and went over to my bag, pulled out jeans, a sweater, and fresh underwear, and began to strip down and change.

Moments later, I was pulling my jeans up, and my voluminous wool sweater down over my head. I stuffed my concealed holster at the small of my back, readjusted my top to cover it completely, and headed out the door. Normally, I’d have locked my sidearm up in the safe, but I still wasn’t completely sure what Col. Harrington had dragged me into. I knew it wasn’t legal, but it was better to be secure than it was to be sorry.

I collated Hunter’s file back together and took a moment to pull the complimentary ironing board from the closet. I reached down, eased off the bottom hem of the padded cover, and stuffed the large folder inside. Straining the cloth a little, I pulled the hem back down in place, and surveyed my handiwork.

No, it wasn’t perfect. It bulged almost obviously if you were in the light. But I seriously doubted any hotel staff would think to check there for valuables, like they would the safe. And I didn’t foresee Hunter checking, either, if only because he probably never saw me as the domestic type. Besides, even with the lights on in the closet, it still had enough shadow to obscure the contents.

Grabbing my key card and the Do Not Disturb sign from off the counter, I slipped out into the hallway. Before I shut the door, I hung the red and white lettered sign from the doorknob and pulled it up a little as I closed the door, wedging the edge of it between the frame and the door. I measured the space between the sign and the doorknob with three fingers.

If anyone did come into my room while I wasn’t there, they would probably forget the Do Not Disturb sign stuck in the door in such an odd way. And even if they did remember, they would probably forget to measure the distance.

It’s not that I’m untrusting of people. And it’s not that I’m paranoid. I don’t expect people to try and snoop on me; I just understand that it, like anything else in the world, is a possibility. When dragons fly through the skies, witches cast spells and brew potions, and vampires actually exist, is it so extraordinary that underpaid hospitality staff would go through a tourist’s personal belongings while they’re downstairs having a drink?

Moments later, I was stepping out of the elevator just off the lobby, and turning towards the bar I’d seen earlier. Outside, the sun was finally settling low, sending an eerie twilight over the small city. I’d never have been able to live up here full time, not with actual night not starting till almost eleven o’clock. Girlish laughter drifted out from the hotel bar, undercut by a familiar near-baritone chuckle.

I stepped through the open doors of the bar and stopped in place as my eyes settled on Hunter at the bar.

He was sitting there with a young woman, both almost conspiratorial in the way they were leaning in to each other. She giggled, flicking her hair back over her shoulder as Hunter spoke: “Have you ever been to Mexico? You’d adore it there. The finest mescal and tequila, the music and the food. And, more importantly, it’s warm in the jungles. You’ll hardly remember what the cold is like.”

I clenched my jaw and gritted my teeth, my hands forming into fists at my sides.

“Oh yeah?” she asked with a grin, leaning in closer to him. “You know, here we’ve got other ways of staying warm.” She stopped, pulled back a little as she looked past him and locked eyes with me. “Oh! It’s your business associate you were telling me about.”

I recognized her. The receptionist from earlier. What a bimbo. I bit back a growl, and kept my hands at my sides, even as I fought back the urge to go marching across the bar and tell her exactly what I thought of her. Instead, I forced myself to turn and leave.

“Kris?” Hunter called as I stepped out the door and strode to the elevator, my flats clicking with each step on the tiled floor.

“She okay?” the bimbo asked.

I punched the elevator’s up button, with enough force in my one finger that I almost broke the housing. Which was good, because I’d first considered using my fist. A sometimes curse of being a supernatural creature is awareness of our surroundings. Improved hearing, improved smell. Not quite as improved as my shifter employees at Full Moon, but much better than the average human. And, like any curse, it’s something you can’t just turn off.

“Oh,” he replied with a sigh that was loud enough for me to clearly hear, “she’s probably fine. We need to catch an early flight, and she was chastising me about not being up in the morning.”

The elevator binged.

“Well, the real question is, are you up tonight?”

Growling, I stepped inside and slammed the four button with my open palm, sending the whole car shuddering. The doors closed as if in fear for their lives, and it began to rise up to the level I was staying on.

I rode up, my arms tightly folded over my chest, my eyes narrowed as I stared at the door.

How could he do something like that? How could he sit down there and flirt with some girl, while we were on a mission? How could he be so disrespectful to me?

The doors opened on my floor, and I stomped out, my footfalls echoing even in the weird silence of the hall. I imagined people behind the doors turning up their TVs to counteract my noisy entrance as I made my way down the hall to my room and came to a stop, ruthlessly rammed my keycard into the slot, and opened up the door. I barely even remembered to check that my Do Not Disturb card had, in fact, not been disturbed.

Slamming the door behind me, I marched over to the bed and collapsed onto it, my teeth still grinding. But, as I stared up at the growing shadows on the room’s ceiling, a realization began to slip into my consciousness.

I was acting like a fool.

Hunter was barely even my agent. He wasn’t one of the shifters. I knew what I’d been getting myself into, as far as discipline with him, when I’d brought him on board to help find Col. Harrington.

None of his behavior was even a surprise. I knew he was playboy dandy from the moment I’d met him nearly ten years ago. He’d always had a way with women. Not one that I necessarily agreed with, but not one that had ever really made me angry. After all, it wasn’t like he’d ever put on airs about any of them being a serious relationship, or anything of the sort. And it certainly wasn’t like Hunter had changed between then and now.

Why was I so upset, then?

I tried to use logic to deconstruct it, the same way as I would any crime or supernatural incident I’d been trying to decipher.

If he hadn’t changed, that meant…

I sat up in bed, shaking my head. “Oh, hell no!” I exclaimed to the room. “No, fuck that!”