Noah's Boy-eARC Read Online Free

frozen and vaguely threatening in the afternoon light.
    The guy’s name was Jason Cordova, notwithstanding which, he spoke English perfectly and without the slightest hint of an accent. His only Spanish words came flying out as the emergency medic bandaged his arm and shoulder, which had been mauled by something. Something with sharp teeth. His white T-shirt, smeared in blood, lay on the bench by his side.
    Jason was dark enough to be some variety of Hispanic, though most of it, Rafiel thought, would be due to his working outside in the sun. He wore his hair short, with the tips dyed white-blond, and he looked at Rafiel, shook his head, then tried to shrug, which brought about another outbreak of Spanish, in which the word “Madre” featured prominently. “Thing looked like a dog,” he said, at last, looking at Rafiel out of narrowed eyes, though they seemed to be narrowed more in pain than in suspicion. “But it didn’t fight like any dog. And it didn’t bite like any dog.” He shook his head. “I was lucky I had my hunting knife, because the day labor office is in a bad area and— Anyway, I must have cut it halfway to pieces before it let me go. And its jaws were like…steel clamps.”
    “I’ve never seen a bite like this,” said the medic who’d come with the ambulance Rafiel had called. He blinked grey eyes behind coke-bottle glasses. “I’ve treated all sorts of injuries, even people mauled by mountain lions.” He looked at Jason. “You’re very lucky to be alive.”
    “Yeah, I feel lucky,” he said, in the tone that implied he didn’t. “I’m unemployed, divorced, crashing on a friend’s sofa and, in good months, making enough to pay for my own food and fuel, and now I’m going to have to pay for the ambulance someone called. It’s not like the park has insurance.”
    The medic grinned, and started to put his stuff away in a little bag. “Nah, the park will pay. They don’t want you to go to a hospital and have to show papers. I’ve sent the ambulance back anyway, so it’s just my time.” He stopped. “And I suppose you do have papers.”
    “Sure I have them. I was born in California, so I have a birth certificate,” Jason said, sounding vaguely amused. “I suspect I was the only one. I mean of the workers. But I didn’t tell the owners. They can’t pay minimum wage or do all the paperwork stuff, and if I’d told them I wanted that, they’d never have hired me.”
    “Yeah, I won’t tell them. You keep a watch on that. I disinfected as much as I could, but there might be something left in there. It’s a deep wound. If you notice a ring of red form and start to expand, get yourself to emergency and fast. Oh, and…”
    But Rafiel was no longer listening. Instead, he was smelling the air around him. It didn’t much matter to him—or not exactly—whether the creature was a dog or a mountain lion, or some mutant, undefined creature.
    What mattered—and this was very important—was that he could smell shifter in the area, all around, in fact. There was a sweet-metallic tangy scent that he knew all too well. He smelled it every day in his own clothes, rising from his own body. And he smelled it from Kyrie and Tom and the dozen or so shifters who frequented The George—the diner Kyrie and Tom owned together.
    The thing was that the scent lingered in areas where shifters had been. Sometimes for hours. It had been so strong around the dead man, that Rafiel was sure the man had been a shifter. But was the killer a shifter or not?
    It made all the difference. As Rafiel stood here, away from the scene, he could hear the forensic team discussing their findings in the blood-spattered area with long grass, where the body lay.
    If the killer was just a wild animal on the loose, then Rafiel could let the team figure it out in their own way. There would be the routine police investigation, the normal adding up of evidence till they could take the case to trial and corner whoever was