For an intense panic-filled moment, Tom thought it would be the Great Sky Dragon calling him to repeat the vague warnings he'd spoken within Tom's mind. It took a deep breath and remembering the damages to the bathroom to keep him from shifting again right then and there. His back brain equated dragon with safe. He told himself the phone wouldn't eat him, as he stretched his hand to the phone on the wall and picked it up.
The caller ID window read "Trall, Rafiel" which made him draw a sigh of relief. For all his faults—and there were many—and despite the fact that he still carried a torch for Kyrie, Rafiel was the closest thing Tom had to a friend. He was, with Kyrie, almost the only other shifter Tom was friends with. Almost because an addled alligator shifter who went by "Old Joe" didn't exactly qualify as a friend. Not so long as friendship involved more than Tom covering up for Old Joe's shifts and giving him bowls of clam chowder on the side. Kyrie, Rafiel, Old Joe, an orangutan shifter, two now-dead beetle shifters and the dragon triad were the only adult shifters Tom had ever met, period. He guessed there weren't many of his kind in the world. The few, the proud, the totally messed up.
"Yeah?" he said, into the phone.
"Uh," Rafiel's voice said from the other end, as though the phone's being answered were the last thing he could possibly expect. Then, "I'd like to . . . I need to talk to you and Kyrie, when you have a minute."
There was that tone in Rafiel's voice—tight and short—that meant he was on the job. Tom wondered if Rafiel was alone or if he was picking his words carefully to avoid scaring a subordinate. Aloud he said only, " 'Ssup?"
"Murder. There's . . . been . . . well, almost for sure murder. Human bones and stuff at the bottom of the shark tank at the aquarium."
"And?" After all, solving murders was Rafiel's job and he usually managed it without a little help from his friends.
"And I smell shifter," Rafiel said. "All over it."
"Oh," Tom said. "We'll be at The George." And suddenly he felt exactly like a man in the path of an oncoming train.
His dreams had been full of a nightmare about some ancient menace; the Great Sky Dragon had spoken in his mind; and now there was murder, with shifter involvement.
Was the shifter a murderer or the victim? Either way, it could make Tom's life more of a mess than it already was.