Mate Bond

“No, I’m not native to the Carolinas. Most people think I’m Cherokee, but my family are from far away, and we left there a long time ago.”

Kenzie eyed him in curiosity. “From where?”

Gil shrugged. “You wouldn’t know it. You’re from what’s now called Romania, right?”

“I am. Bowman’s from Canada. Did you come here to talk about where we’re all from?”

“No, I came here to talk about our case.” Gil set down his beer and pulled a manila envelope from the inside of his jacket. “I found out about Serena Mitton, the girl who was shot. You interested?”

Of course she was interested. Kenzie noticed that Gil had turned the questions about him neatly aside, but she said nothing as he pulled out papers and photographs.

“Death was from two gunshots to the chest,” he said, scanning a sheet, “from a nine millimeter. She died quickly, the report says. Her name was Serena Mitton. She grew up in Baltimore and moved down here to attend UNC at Asheville. She stayed and became a research assistant while she worked on her master’s degree, in the anthropology department.”

Kenzie’s eyes widened. “Did she work for Dr. Turner?” She’d told him all about Dr. Turner when she’d called him this morning.

“Nope. She was an RA in the lab of one Dr. Jane Alston. From what Dr. Alston told me, Serena did no work for Dr. Turner, and didn’t interact much with him either. Nodded to him in the hall, maybe, but that’s it.”

So why had the woman been found dead within a few miles of Turner’s trailer house? Near where the beast had been killed? After she’d called Bowman saying, I don’t like what he’s doing. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Kenzie said.

“Well, they do happen, but in this case, I agree with you.” Gil gathered up the photos: a head shot of Serena and one of the entire department staff. Turner was in that one, at the other end of the row from Serena, looking geeky and professorial, as he’d been when Kenzie had met him. “I checked out the shell casings from the sniper shooting too,” Gil said, “but forensics couldn’t find any useable fingerprints on them.” He closed up the envelope but left it on the coffee table.

“So you don’t know who shot Serena, or who shot at us in the woods, or whether the two are connected?”

“I do not. But I’m working on it.” Gil leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “What I do know about is that thing you were calling a griffin. Dr. Pat, the nice veterinarian, shared her findings with me, plus I studied some tissue samples. It’s an animal all right, but magic went into its making. That much was obvious.”

Kenzie blinked and tried to look surprised. “Magic?”

Most humans didn’t know anything about magic, or at least, not the real kind. There was magic deep inside Shifters, and in the Collars, and in the Guardian’s sword. None of it was stage-magician, make-things-disappear magic, but it was there, and it was powerful.

“Yes, and I know you know what I mean.” Gil’s dark eyes held seriousness. “There is no way that creature could have lived, not in this world, without a boost of magic. Fae magic, I’m betting.”

Kenzie got to her feet very fast. “What the hell do you know about Fae magic? Are you Fae?”

Gil rose to meet her, looking offended. “Hell no, I’m not Fae. But I know about them. I know about the ley lines that run through this Shiftertown and all the way to where you found the thing dead. I’m a bit of a shaman, myself.” He contrived to sound modest.

Shaman. So that was why he’d seemed off. Shamans were human, not Fae, thank the Goddess, but they were able to sense and use magic that was inherent in this world.

“I see,” Kenzie said cautiously. “What does your shaman knowledge tell you about the creature?”

“That it wasn’t born here. Poor thing. Probably bred and raised beyond a gate to Faerie and shoved through to be set on you. The questions are—by whom? And why?”

“By the Fae.” Kenzie’s anger rose. “In their never-ceasing quest to kill off Shifters or enslave us again.”

“No,” Gil surprised her by saying. “I’m not sure a Fae did this, or at least, had control of the beast on this side of the gate. The smell was wrong, and the tissue samples were definitely animal. But the Fae bred Shifters, right? This was the same kind of thing—breeding with magic thrown in. As though someone was trying to redo what the Fae did with Shifters, only making it bigger and stronger.”

Kenzie felt ill. “Not anything I want to hear.”

“I bet you don’t. But look on the bright side. It didn’t work. Bowman hurt it with the truck, sure, but the thing died of natural causes. Had heart failure, Dr. Pat thinks. Its body couldn’t sustain its size and broke down. Whoever bred it didn’t succeed.”

“This time.” Kenzie’s blood grew cold. “What about next time?”

“If we can find out who did it and stop them, there won’t be a next time.”

“We hope.”

Gil looked unworried, which was irritating of him. Then again, he wasn’t a Shifter, target of every Fae vendetta.

He gestured her to the sofa again. “This isn’t all I came over to tell you, or I’d have waited until I knew Bowman would be here. I wanted to talk to you.”

Kenzie let out a breath and resumed her seat. “What about?”