Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(57)

He hadn’t looked for me. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t written. Gods, I was so angry at him. I hadn’t realized how much until this moment. It burned my common sense to ashes.

Emotion boiled in Derek’s eyes. I couldn’t place it. Frustration, rage? A bit of both? Not, that wasn’t quite it. Whatever it was, it was clearly driving him nuts. He looked at me like I was everything that was wrong in his life.

A faint sound came from the other room. A man walked in and halted in the arched entrance to the bedroom. In his early twenties, tan, with a mane of soft reddish-brown hair he had tied back from his freckled face. He wore a similar grey outfit, and when he moved, he walked with the fluid grace of a shapeshifter. Not a wolf. Something else. Something smaller.

Derek kept looking at me. “Yes?”

“The hyenas found Jerome. He is leading them on a merry chase.”

A slight trace of a Slavic accent.

The shapeshifter hesitated. “Perhaps I could help you communicate…”

“No,” Derek and I said at the same time.

“Okaaay. I’ll just go away then.”

The shapeshifter retreated.

“I’m not leaving until I get some answers,” Derek said.

“Then you’ll die of old age at my house.”

“I thought you were severely burned, but maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you hit your head instead and can’t see this situation clearly.”

“Enlighten me. What is it I’m failing to see?”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m hungry. I’m going to get up and find something to eat, so you can get out in privacy. Use this opportunity to think about…”

I stood up. The last shreds of my discarded skin fell into the bath.

Derek stared at me, caught mid-word.

I tossed my hair out of my face, flinging water and loose petals back into the tub, stepped out, and walked past him to my closet to get dressed.





*



When I came out of the bedroom, Derek was sitting in my sanctuary at my kitchen table spreading a thin layer of honey mustard on a slice of bread with a wicked-looking knife. Another slice with an inch-thick slab of smoked ham waited on his plate. He put the top slice on top of the ham.

He’d made himself a sandwich. Maybe I’d get lucky, and the son of a bitch would choke on it.

“You don’t have any iced tea,” he said.

I would strangle him. “That’s just one of the things I don’t have.”

Derek sliced the sandwich in half. “Oh?”

“I also don’t have any patience for people stealing my food.”

Derek picked up half of the sandwich, bit into it, and chewed.

Food held a special significance to the shapeshifters. When a shapeshifter offered to feed someone, he communicated willingness to protect and take care of them. A shapeshifter who couldn’t protect his meat was weak. Derek broke into my house and ate my ham, and now he was rubbing my face in it.

Just you wait. You’ll regret it.

I sat across from him. “Is it good?”

He licked his lips. “Delicious.”

I’d negotiated peace agreements with people I hated. I would not give him the satisfaction of slapping the rest of the sandwich out of his hand. No matter how satisfying that would feel.

I pulled a pad of paper toward me, wrote $20 on it, and passed it to him.

“What’s this?”

“The bill for the sandwich.”

“A twenty-dollar ham sandwich?”

“You chose to eat here. You should’ve asked about prices in advance.” I pointed at the doorway. “The door is that way. This restaurant is closed. Take the rest of your meal to go.”

He finished the first half of the sandwich and leaned back with a kind of languid grace, a wolf in repose. “Let’s be adults about this.”

“That would be a refreshing change.”

“Several years ago, I was in a bad place in my life. I came to Pastor Haywood for guidance. He helped me.”

When did that happen? What bad place? I opened my mouth to ask and clamped it shut. He was a stranger, and I had to treat him like one.

“I told him that if he ever needed help, I would return the favor. He called me on the night before he died. He told me that he was worried and asked for my help. He sounded scared. I left an hour after that phone call, but unfortunately, I was across the country. I didn’t make it in time.”

Oh damn.

“I’m here to find out who killed him.” Moonglow flashed in his eyes and died. “We’re on the same side.”

“I doubt that.”

“Tell me why you’re investigating this murder and what you found, and I will tell you why Pastor Haywood was scared that night.”

Every crumb of information could mean the difference between Kate dying and living. Was there any harm in sharing with him? I searched for the downside and didn’t see one. After all, I didn’t have to tell him everything.

“Deal. You go first.”

“No.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t. You’re a liar.” He picked up the rest of the sandwich and took a nice big bite.

“How am I a liar?”