“There are others?” My throat tightened. “As if it isn’t bad enough you’re dying.” My voice broke on the last word.
“Please, Sunaya.” Roanas’s fingers curled around my jacket collar, pulling me closer. Even though he was sinking fast, his tawny eyes burned with a ferocious intensity. They cut through the fog of tears and pain in my brain, demanding my attention. “You must find out… who did this. There are other shifters… being targeted. Not just… about me.”
“Targeted?” My eyes narrowed as my brain tried to catch up with the implications of that. “Targeted how? And why?”
“The facts… are in my case file…” Blood spilled over Roanas’s lower lip, and I blinked back tears. “The Enforcers have been slow… to put the different cases together… but they are related.” His voice strengthened. “I was investigating… and so they’ve taken me out. You must connect the dots, Sunaya. Find out who did this. Stop the killings, avenge me, and… and…”
“And what?” Shards of ice scraped along the walls of my insides, the fear inside me painfully sharp. I gripped Roanas’s hand hard enough to grind the bones against each other, holding on for dear life. I never wanted to let him go.
“And… be careful.”
His face went slack then, the life gone from his eyes. And as he slid from this world to the next as silently as the hot tears rolling down my cheeks, I vowed not to rest until I caught the bastard who did this.
Chapter Two
By the time I left Roanas’s house at seven in the morning, every last tear in my body had been burned away by the seething fury in my heart. I’d called the Enforcer’s Guild using the telephone in Roanas’s kitchen to report the murder, only to have two Enforcers show up at the doorstep – several hours later, the lazy fucks – and start interrogating me.
Yeah, okay, I get it. I was with him when he died, so I couldn’t be ruled out as a suspect. Even though I’ve only worked on homicide cases a handful of times, I’d done enough to know that this was part of procedure. But what really pissed me off was that they’d brushed me off, when I’d asked about similar cases.
“Oh, come on Baine,” Nila, a blond Enforcer, had scoffed as the coroner and the crime scene technicians filed out of the house with Roanas’s body and what pertinent items they’d found in tow. I studiously ignored the covered stretcher as it went past us, but my heart clenched all the same. “You should know better than to believe in conspiracy theory crap like that. We’ll find out who did this to your old man, but don’t be surprised if we drag some rat out of a hole who happened to have a bone to pick with him, rather than a serial murderer.”
“He told me someone was targeting shifters before he died,” I’d said between gritted teeth. “And don’t try to tell me he was just hallucinating or paranoid, because I don’t believe it. Roanas doesn’t make mistakes like that.”
“Didn’t,” Nila corrected me.
“Look,” Brin, the other Enforcer, had interjected before I ripped Nila’s face off. “I’m not going to deny there have been other silver poisonings in Shiftertown recently.” He’d given me a stern glare, as if I were a whelp that needed to be put in her place rather than a fellow Enforcer. But then, Brin and Nila were part of the Main Crew, many of whose members routinely treated the other Enforcers like we were beneath them. “But we don’t have enough evidence to determine whether or not the murders were related. We’ll work to find your friend’s killer, but in the meantime you need to back off and stay out of our way.” He stepped forward and shoved his nose into my face, menace bleeding from every pore in his hulking body. “Have I made myself clear?”
I’d responded by flipping him off, and then I walked out with the case file Roanas had mentioned tucked beneath my leather jacket, which I’d torn the house apart to find while I was waiting for the Enforcer’s Guild to arrive. No way was I turning it over to them. Brin and Nila weren’t exactly known for being thorough – their work was half-assed at best, and more than likely they would end up pinning this on the wrong person just so they could collect their bounty and go home. Besides, they were both humans and didn’t give a rat’s ass about Roanas.