human, checking over my polish. I smiled at the bright red perfection.
“You clever, sneaky little kitty. Do you have the complete hybrid form?”
I smiled at the admiration in his voice. “Not quite, but I can transform my legs and my hands, and I get ears and a stubby little perfect tail. Not quite full fur coverage on a good day.”
“Will you show me?”
“You just want me to get naked for you.”
“I absolutely do want you to get naked for me, but I want to make sure I make our future plans accounting for all of your natural weapons.”
“After dinner arrives,” I promised. “It’s not that I didn’t trust you, but I don’t trust the CDC with that status. Until now. The unmated part of things was the problem, really.”
“I get it, Harri. In your shoes, I’d hold that secret close to my chest, too. You told me when we talked about it, and that’s all I care about. We’ll just say you recently discovered it post mating. Mating makes virus levels spike substantially, so they won’t think twice about it when we update your file. But until this serial killer is bagged, we won’t update your file. I don’t want any unnecessary risks during this job.”
“Is that because you’re an overprotective lion in your boss capacity or you’re an overprotective lion in general?”
“All of the above. I won’t lie, I wasn’t planning on letting you do that job by yourself, even if you rejected my advances. It’s too dangerous, and the risks to you are too high. This guy is probably a rapist on top of being a serial killer. Add in the possibility there are children we have to rescue? No chances at all with this guy. Part of the problem will be tracking him down. All I know is that there are some leads in Detroit, where two of the killings took place. Milwaukee had two killings, as did several other smaller cities and town. He seems to hit in pairs before moving on, and he is hunting in the general Great Lakes area. It has been six months since the last set of killings, and the killings are usually ten to twelve months apart.”
I did the math. “We have four to six months at most until more bodies, probably two, turn up? Of women believed to have been pregnant and forcibly stripped of their babies and their reproductive organs. So, you’re in a hurry because you want these two women to survive their pregnancy. And only four months because it takes time to get a woman pregnant unless the rapist asshole gets lucky with his timing or he is part sex demon and can control her fertility.”
“Yes. The thought that we are dealing with someone who is part devil or demon has crossed our minds, but they could also be working with a succubus or incubus. We doubt that, however. The murder of an infant is abhorrent to sex demons. A week shouldn’t matter at this stage, as all evidence points that the women were at least eight months, usually right around nine months, pregnant before they were murdered.”
“So a week at the spa won’t endanger them?”
“We don’t believe so. We don’t even have any real leads, just a general location and a time period. Mostly, I knew you had a set period of time off and wanted to accommodate that. I should have more investigation details by the end of the week.”
His consideration of my customer service job made me smile. “We have some potential leads.”
“What do you mean?”
“Women missing from the right time period, following his pattern. And that’s a pattern. We need to review all of the cases and put together a timeline.”
Someone knocked on the door, and Sebastian went to answer it. “After dinner. We are at the pleasure part of our evening, and the work portion happens after the pleasure portion.”
“Are we ever going to work?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
As the first box had contained an unexpected peril in the form of a watch too expensive for me to even look at, let alone own, I freed the rest of the items from the basket, wondering what other horrors waited. While my older brothers had done well for themselves, had they done ‘stupidly expensive watch for their sister’ well? Had my family entered some form of illegal trade, opting to spoil me with their illicit gains?
What was even going on in my life?
Sebastian returned to the bathroom with two silver-covered dishes, which he set near