Noah's Boy-eARC Read Online Free Page A

responsible for the animal being loose: police, park or perhaps the owner of the animal. Then whoever was responsible would be fined or given community service, or something similar.
    In that case, Rafiel would function just as Officer Trall, a professional and well-trained police officer.
    But if the killer had been a shifter in his shifted form, it all changed. Because a shifter who killed once, rarely stopped killing unless he were caught. And it wasn’t as though Rafiel could bring the apparatus of the law to bear on him. You couldn’t really tell a judge “This isn’t a dog, it’s a werewolf.”
    Well, you could. But then they put you in a nice resting place, medicated to the eyeballs. And, given that Rafiel himself was a shifter lion, heaven only knew how the meds would affect his shifting. He might become a lion and eat a few nurses not-in-a-good-way. He took a long whiff of the air. There was the smell from the dead body, the smell around it, and another smell.
    “Hey, something wrong? You allergic to something?” the medic asked.
    And Rafiel became aware that he’d been sniffing for all he was worth, as though he expected to find his way with his nose. Which he probably could. In fact, he would swear the smell came from the path to the parking lot, past the closed-up hippodrome.
    “Ragweed,” he said automatically. It had the advantage of being true, not that it mattered. “So, could you write me an informal report on the wounds? In case I have to take this to trial.”
    “You can’t take an animal to trial,” the medic said. Then he grinned sheepishly. “Though I suppose you could take his owner. And maybe you should. But I bet you it doesn’t have one. I bet you it’s one of those wild animals that seem to show up further and further into town every year. Like that Komodo dragon that went around eating people—what was it? two years ago?—and did you hear about the bear who went through the trash dumpster behind the alcohol and tobacco kiosk on Fifteenth? He then ran through bar row, looking in dumpsters. When they tried to catch him, he ran through ten backyards and across five streets before being struck by a car as he ambled across the road in front of Conifer Park. And I bet you that they treated him and freed him, too, probably not too far from town. Ready to do the same again next year. A miracle he didn’t kill someone.”
    Rafiel made a perfunctory nod and said, “Nothing we can do, eh? It’s the way it is. But I still need that report.”
    “Right. I’ll write up something. It won’t be Shakespeare.”
    “No problem. Shakespeare didn’t really report on medical conditions and it wouldn’t do us any good to be told the wound is not as wide as a church door,” Rafiel said. The intensity of the smell was driving him insane. It was separating itself into strands, too: the dead body, or the area around it, and a trail leading to the hippodrome and another…
    He should—to follow proper procedure—go over to where the forensic team was working and see if there was anything else they needed. Instead, Rafiel frowned as Jason put his blood-spattered but intact T-shirt over his badly mauled body. At that moment, the shifter-smell hit Rafiel full in the face, and he stared, his mouth half open.
    The medic was walking away, far enough along the path that he wouldn’t hear anything that Rafiel or Jason said. Jason turned a puzzled and slightly weary face to Rafiel.
    “Lucky you had your hunting knife, huh?” Rafiel said. “I don’t suppose you want to show it to me?”
    Jason blinked. A dark tide of red flooded behind his tanned skin. “I must have dropped it,” he said. “Somewhere in the grass, I guess.” And with a shrug, he continued, “Maybe your team will find it.”
    Rafiel sighed. He sat in the clear space of bench beside Jason. “I’d think you were the killer, you know, and that those wounds were received from whatever that poor bastard”—a head inclination