The lion leapt across the entrance of the Goldport Undersea Adventure. He bounded across the next room, amid two rows of large tanks. The private company that had bought out the municipal aquarium had outfitted this room to look like a submarine's control room, with gauges and the sort of wheels that turn to activate pressure locks, and buttons and things. When the aquarium was open and functioning, the screens above the controls showed movies of underwater scenes in various bodies of water around the world.
Now dead and silent, with the aquarium closed due to inclement weather, they were just large, dark television screens. The whole building was empty except for a woman in the back office and the lion, who sniffed his way down the pretend mountain path that wound among tanks stocked with fish from the world over.
As he padded past the tank with piranhas, the lion growled softly, startling the exhibit of sea birds on an elevated area and causing them to fly up till they met with the net that kept them within their space.
The lion didn't care. He had picked up the scent he had been looking for. A sweetish, almost metallic scent. The smell of shapeshifters. He put nose to the ground and followed it, growling softly to himself, past the little suspension bridge with the artificial river underneath—momentarily disoriented where water had sprayed and diluted the scent. But the scent picked up on the other side of the bridge.
The lion couldn't think why the scent was important. There was a part of his mind—as if it were someone else, another mind, locked deep inside his brain—telling him the smell related to death and killing.
The lion didn't know why death or killing would be important, and he couldn't smell death in the air anyway. There was no decay, no blood. Just a smell of fish and water and chemicals, and the smell of people, many people, some of which had probably passed by days ago but left behind the olfactory trail of their passage.
Then there was the clear bright scent of a shapeshifter. Not that the lion knew what a shapeshifter was, or not really. Just that this was the scent he was seeking, the scent he must follow, deep into the broad chamber decorated with a cement chest and a hoard of plaster coins that his other mind remembered as unconvincingly painted to resemble gold.
The chamber was vast, with a tall ceiling lost in darkness. The lion crouched close to the ground, and followed two trails of smell—or rather, one trail that wound itself around, in front of two vast tanks. Inside the tanks swam creatures the lion's inner mind told him were sharks. Large, with sharp, serrated teeth, they swam towards him, while he sniffed at the glass.
The lion paid them no more attention than he did the yellow tape that blocked one of the tanks and the service stairs, discreetly hidden behind some plastic fronds, leading back to the top of the tank. There was no smell there at all, and the lion didn't look at it. Instead, he turned to follow the interesting scent out of the chamber, towards the front of the aquarium.
And stopped when he heard a voice, coming from the opposite direction of where he had come. "Officer Trall?"
The words made the lion turn, giving something like a half-grunt under his breath, as he loped very fast back the way he had come. Very, very fast, his paws devouring the distance he had traversed so cautiously.
Steps followed him. Human steps. Steps in high heels—the inner voice told the lion. A woman.
The lion gave a soft, distracted roar as—the inner voice yelled to hide, to change, to do something—he leapt into a corner of the entrance chamber, around the side of the ticket booth, and into the narrow hallway that led to the bathrooms. He hit the door of the men's bathroom at a lope, and rolled into the room.
As he rolled he . . . shifted, his body twisting and writhing even as he tumbled, till a tall, muscular blond man landed, from a somersault, in the middle of the bathroom, by one of the closed stalls.
From outside the door, the voice called, "Officer Trall?"
"In here," the man who had been a lion answered, his voice shaking slightly. "Just a moment."
And it was just a moment, as he reached for his clothes—khaki pants and a loose-cut shirt that, with his mane of long, blond hair gave him the look of a surfer about to hit the waves—and slipped into them and his shoes with the practice of someone who changed clothes several times a day.
In fact, Officer Rafiel Trall of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Goldport Police Department, had clothes hidden all over town and in some of the neighboring towns as well. One thing shifting shape did—it ruined your wardrobe. Though he controlled himself—well enough during the day, with more difficulty at night—he still destroyed clothes so often that he'd developed a reputation as a ladies man throughout the department.
Every time he came back wearing yet another set of clothes, all his subordinates, from his secretary to the newest recruit, elbowed each other and giggled. Rafiel only wished his sex life were half as exciting as they thought it was. Not that he could complain, or not really. He dated his fair share of women. He just couldn't allow any of them to get close enough to see his . . . changes. So he had a lot of first and second dates and rarely a third.
He looked at himself in the mirror, frowning, as he combed his fingers through his hair. Receptionists, women officers, even the medical examiners and legal experts who had sporadic contact with the Goldport Police Department, all warned each other about him in whispers. He'd heard the words "fear of commitment" so often he felt like they were tattooed on his forehead. And it wasn't true. He'd commit in a minute. To any woman he knew would accept him and not freak out. In less than a minute to a woman like him, a shifter. Of his kind.
The thought of Kyrie came and went in his mind, a mix of longing and regret. No point thinking about it. That wasn't going to happen.
Instead, he opened the door—his relaxed smile in place as he met the aquarium employee who waited outside, a slightly worried look in her eyes. She was small and golden skinned, with straight black hair and the kind of curves that fit all in the right places. Her name was Lei Lani—which made him think of her as one of the Bond girls—and she was a marine biologist on some sort of inter-program loan from an aquarium in Hawaii.
Looking at her smile, it was easy to imagine her welcoming tourists in nothing but a grass skirt. Of course, thinking about that was as bad as thinking too much about her first name. Neither encouraged his good behavior.
"I'm sorry," Rafiel said. "One of those sudden stomach things."
"Ah. I was just checking, because I really should lock up and go home. I mean, everyone else has, and I only stayed because I live so close by here."
"Yeah. How bad is it out?"
"Blinding. As I said, if I didn't live within walking distance, I'd have left long ago. I mean, I'm not even sure you should drive in this. Perhaps you should stay at my place till the weather improves."
Was that a seductive sparkle in her eye? Did Rafiel read it correctly? It wasn't that he wasn't tempted, but right now he had other things on his mind.
He shouldn't have been so reckless as to shift shapes while there was someone else in the building, but the hint of shifter scent he'd been able to pick up even with his human nose had forced him to check it out. After all, a shapeshifter at a crime scene could mean many things. The last time he'd picked it up, it had, in fact, meant that the shifters were the victims. But there was always the chance it meant the shifter he smelled was the killer. And a murder committed by shapeshifters, properly investigated, would out them as non-mythological. Which meant—if Rafiel knew how such things worked—that at best they'd all be studied within an inch of their lives. At worst . . . well . . . Rafiel was a policeman from a long line of policemen. He understood people would be scared of shifters. Not that he blamed them. There were some shifters that he was scared of himself. But the thing was, when people were terrified, they only ran away half the time. The other half . . . they attacked and killed the cause of their fear.
"I'll be okay. I have a four-wheel drive, and I've lived here all my life. This is not the first blizzard I've driven in," he said. He was still trying to process the input of the lion's nose. There had been a clear shifter scent trail throughout the aquarium. It had circled the shark area.
The shark area where, yesterday, a human arm had been found—still clutching a cell phone—inside a shark. The aquarium had been shut down—though the weather provided a good excuse for that. And the relevant area was isolated behind the yellow crime-scene tape. The dead man had been identified as a business traveler from California, staying in town for less than a week.
The question was—had he fallen in the tank or been pushed? And if he'd been pushed, was it a shifter who'd done the pushing?