a pressed grey shirt.
“What about you, Viktor?” Blue fumbled with a pocket on her black cargo pants. “What’s your breakfast of choice?”
He sat down on a weight bench, and we shifted to face him. “Your scrambled eggs.”
“Nothing from your homeland?” While she was pressing him for an honest answer, his compliment lit up her eyes.
“Breakfast was vodka in my boyhood,” Wyatt answered in an exaggerated Russian accent that made Gem cringe.
Everyone else chuckled. Everyone except Viktor, whose mind was clearly elsewhere.
He ran a hand over his short beard. “I have accepted an important assignment.”
Shepherd took a seat on the floor beside me. “What about the shit we’re working on now?”
Viktor always had us working on smaller projects. Gem and Wyatt handled a large bulk of that work, so they stayed busy day and night. The rest of us fought like jackals over whatever we could get between big assignments. Sometimes it was investigating crime scenes, other times it was tracking criminals. I preferred the latter. But we also looked into extortion, fraud, and once a case of stolen identity. A Mage had murdered his Creator, who just so happened to be his twin brother.
“Gem will continue with her special project,” Viktor said.
Gem held the rope with one hand. “Do you still want me to translate that recent book I found?”
“Nyet. That will be next. My contact is still waiting on the first two books. Many important details are in them.”
“I’m solving a murder case that’s eight hundred years old,” she boasted to the room.
“Based on a book?” I asked. “What if the author lied?”
Wyatt chortled. “They made a false accusation against someone in a book, hoping it would be discovered almost a thousand years later? Talk about a patient man.”
“No, silly.” Gem let go of the rope and sat cross-legged in front of me. “We usually have at least two sources to corroborate facts, and when names are mentioned, the higher authority can open an official investigation and charm witnesses. I love solving cold cases.”
“If you say so, Agatha Christie. I’ve seen you in action at crime scenes.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to actually see dead bodies. There are other methods to solve a crime. After eight hundred years, there’s no body left to look at anyhow.”
“Why did you call us in here instead of the dining room?” Blue didn’t waste time getting to the point, especially since we had a tendency to drift off topic when we were all put in the same room.
Viktor wrung his hands. “I did not want to risk the boy overhearing this discussion. Or Switch. This is a very sensitive topic to Shifters in particular. Because of our living situation, I must be more careful about where and when we hold our important meetings.”
With his hands in his pockets, Christian strode over and stood near the wall.
Viktor scratched his ear. “My contact has reason to believe there is a fighting ring in the Breed district. Not the Bricks, but right in the middle of good society.”
Blue’s eyebrows popped up. “Someone has a lot of gall to do that in city limits.”
I’d heard of cage fights, pit fights, and illegal rings where Shifters were forced to fight against each other. Some watched for entertainment, while others engaged in gambling.
“These fights are illegal and immoral. The higher authority punishes offenders to the fullest extent of the law, and that is why most are held outside city limits. Those are difficult to track.”
I sat cross-legged. “If the higher authority thinks there’s fighting going on, why haven’t they sent in Regulators to bust everyone?”
Viktor clasped his hands. “It is more complicated than that. We cannot make arrests based on assumptions. Slander is against the law, so we need to gather hard evidence on who is behind the operation. A smart criminal will go to great lengths to hide their identity. Regulators might break up a fight, but what good will that do if they have no evidence of who is in charge? If you want to kill bees, you cannot smash the hive. You must capture the queen.”
Wyatt put on his faded green shirt. “You shouldn’t go around killing bees. I read that if bees ever go extinct, so will everything else. Plants and trees won’t get pollinated, and people will”—he snapped his fingers—“disappear off the face of the earth.”
“What are the clues we have to go on?” Christian asked, ignoring Wyatt’s remarks. We’d grown used to him injecting random facts or wild speculation into a