Noah's Boy-eARC Read Online Free Page B

towards the crime scene—“turned into, except that they say he’s been dead since probably really early morning, before you came to work. They think he was one of the guys they hired yesterday, and he decided to bunk here for the night. And your wounds are fresh. So it’s clear there’s yet a third shifter around—or maybe merely a second, if that’s only his smell around the corpse—but he’s still around and you got those wounds in a shifted fight with him. Don’t go telling me about a hunting knife. You might have cut the other shifter up pretty bad, but it was all teeth and claws, wasn’t it?”
    Silence went on so long, that if Rafiel couldn’t smell the scent of shifter coming from Cordova—a scent made stronger by exertion, and mixed with that of his blood—he would have thought he was imagining it.
    But then Cordova spoke, his voice very tired. “I see. The police know.”
    “Eh. This policeman knows,” Rafiel said, inhaling for all he was worth, intent to detect a shift in adrenaline that would signal that the man was about to attack. Or shift and attack. It never came. Rafiel extended his legs in front of him, doing his best to appear at ease.
    Turning, he found that Cordova was staring at him, studying him. “What…do you change into?” the man asked at last.
    “Lion. You?”
    “Bear.” And to what must have been sudden comprehension in Rafiel’s face, “Hey, I’m broke, and I guess I like liquor? I don’t know. I don’t remember much when I’m already tipsy and then become…you know…That hike from the forest preserve about killed me too. Just happy we heal fast. And that the person who found me thought I’d got drunk and undressed while drunk, and got me clothes and food.”
    “I have a cell phone,” Rafiel said, “strapped to my thigh with one of those plastic coil things. Stays in place even when I shift. That way, if I end up too far from where my clothes are, I can always call friends.”
    “Smart that,” Cordova said, and looked down at his feet. “Only you have to have friends who know, and I don’t have those. Even my wife didn’t know. She thought I kept disappearing and was having an affair, and when I didn’t want to talk to her about it, she said I was emotionally unavailable.” He shrugged.
    They sat side by side a little while, then Cordova said, “But that guy, the dead one, I don’t think he was shifter. I think the shifter-smell is from the killer. It’s really strong around all that area, and it goes that way.” He pointed the same way Rafiel had been smelling it.
    “Could it be one of the other workers?” Rafiel asked. “Where did they go?”
    A grin answered him. “It’s as I told you before,” he said. “They ran so fast, they’re probably halfway to Mexico by now.”
    “Yeah, but what path did they take out of the park, do you remember?”
    This got him a very odd look, as it should have, because Jason was not stupid. Clearly, from his diction, his vocabulary, the man was smart and well-educated. He stood up on visibly shaky legs. “Three of them went that way. And a bunch ran that way. And then a few ran that way.”
    He pointed in three directions, in which the park ended in a fence, bordering a little used road. Which made sense if you were an illegal worker trying to run away.
    “Not that way?” Rafiel asked, pointing in the direction of the path to the parking lot.
    Jason shook his head. “Nah. None of them had cars, you know? The owners picked us up in a truck.” He hesitated a moment. “Say, you’re not going to try to catch them or…?”
    “I’m not INS,” he said. “And if I caught them, there would only be a mess and they’d end up on the streets again.”
    “It’s just,” Jason said, gesturing with his head towards the ticket house where a motley group of people clustered, “that I don’t think they have much choice.” The people in the ticket house looked Greek and seemed to be the extended family of the