Better Off Undead - Cynthia Eden Page 0,13

stalk was obvious. The way the men would stop every few moments, their heads stiffening, their necks shooting up as they sniffed the air around them—dead giveaways.

The two werewolves kept Mary Jane in their sight as she hurried through the city. And he—well, he followed them.

After all, he’d journeyed to New Orleans for one reason. Mary Jane Hart. He could play nicely with the werewolves for a time, if that niceness got him what he wanted. And if raising a flag of truce didn’t work…

Then he would just take what he needed. He was very, very good at taking.

Chapter Four

“He’s not going to become a vampire.” Dr. Bob Heider took off his tortoiseshell glasses and rubbed the lenses. “The guy’s blood showed no signs of any mutation. You don’t have to worry about this one.” He put his glasses back in place then gestured toward the body on the slab. “He’s not rising.”

Some of the tension left Jane’s shoulders. She and Dr. Bob hadn’t always gotten along so well, but now things were going much better between them. He wasn’t bullshitting her on the paranormal cases—after all, word had come down that she was the lucky detective who got to handle the monsters—and she was slowly finding her footing in the land of the supernatural.

“Have you been able to tell what killed him?” Jane leaned closer to the body. “Any puncture wounds to show that a vamp attacked?” Because a vampire could have attacked the guy, but not transformed him. In order for a normal human to become a vampire, the human had to get the vampire’s blood so the transformation would occur. No blood, no new vamp.

Unless you happened to be born waiting to be a vamp…like me.

Dr. Bob nervously cleared his throat. She looked up at him. The overhead lighting reflected off the guy’s very high forehead. His hair was receding fast, despite the sweep-over attempt that he’d tried this week.

But he didn’t meet her stare. Instead, he kept looking down at the clipboard in his hands, as if every secret in the world were written there.

Maybe the secrets were.

“Dr. Bob?” Jane prompted.

Sweat beaded on his forehead.

Crap.

“Y-you saw the claw marks on him,” he said.

“Hard to miss them. But I wondered if maybe the killer was just trying to throw us off—make us think a werewolf had attacked.”

Dr. Bob shook his head. “I measured the wounds. They’re all are the same.” He put his clipboard down. She realized that his fingers were shaking. He eased closer to her. His gaze nervously swept toward the closed door, then back to her. “The measurements are all the same.” He lifted his shaking fingers, spreading them just a bit as he curled his fingers. Then he made a clawing motion at her.

Her brows shot up. “What in the hell are you doing?”

“Werewolf attack,” he whispered, then threw another nervous glance toward the door. “Oh, shit, do you think your guards can hear me? I don’t want to get my throat ripped out.”

She grabbed his hand before he could do one of those annoying-ass claw motions again. “No one is ripping out your throat. You work for the werewolf alpha, remember?” He’d been on Aidan’s payroll long before she came into the game. Aidan paid the ME well to make sure that paranormal murders didn’t leak to the press.

Most humans didn’t know about the paranormals. Aidan wanted to keep things that way.

“Aidan doesn’t like it when his own kind kill.” Dr. Bob licked his lips and beetled his bushy eyebrows at her. “You know what happened the last time a werewolf turned on him.”

Yes, she did. Death. But Aidan hadn’t been the one to kill the wolf who’d betrayed him.

“I think this human…his name is Alan Thatcher—I think he was killed by a werewolf.”

“Alan?”

“His prints turned up in the system. Guy had a charge of marijuana possession when he was eighteen. The charges were later dropped, but his prints were still on file.”

She nodded.

“I don’t think our vic was killed at the scene.” Dr. Bob tapped his chin. “There wasn’t enough blood at the scene, not based on the type of injuries he received. A werewolf killed him, then took his body to the cemetery.”

“The scene was staged,” she murmured, dropping his hand. And that wasn’t good. A werewolf killer on the loose, one who wanted people to know about his crimes? Aidan definitely won’t like this.

And I don’t like it damn much, either.

Jane’s gaze slid back to the victim. Alan Thatcher.