Page 49 of Shifters in the Night

When they arrived, Zed, Jillian and Sonja were standing in the clinic’s lobby, surrounded by a navy haze of disbelief. Alex was asleep, laid out on a full hospital bed, hooked up to monitors. He looked so pale, blood soaking through a bandage on his head. Will was standing next to Alex’s hospital bed, making notes on what she was sure was his chart. Zed put his hand on her shoulder, warm and heavy, while she hugged Sonja and Jillian.

“He’s all right, just tired. A not-quite-mild concussion, which is sort of lucky when you consider he got hit over the head with a hammer,” Zed told her. “Will just now let him go to sleep.”

“A hammer?” Lia whispered, swallowing heavily. There were certainly a lot of tools lying around New Ground’s site, but they weren’t the only people in town with access to a hardware store.

“Will’s pretty sure, from the shape of the wound. And they managed to hit him in the corner of the parking lot where there just happens to be no video coverage?” Jillian added, frowning. “That seems convenient.”

“It’s so weird,” Sonja said, shaking her head. “We’ve had assaults here before. We’ve had murders. But there were patterns. This is just so random. What was the point of just knocking him out and walking off?”

“We had our local touch-know come in and touch Alex’s scalp, which was uncomfortable for her,” Zed noted. “But Cordelia didn’t see anything helpful. And honestly, I’m grateful for it. She doesn’t need that in her head.”

“I think we should call Jon,” Will said, stepping into the lobby. “He’d want to know someone close to you was hurt.”

“This job is for his biggest client,” Lia argued. “I don’t want him leaving early. As soon as he comes back, we’ll let him know what happened. Besides, it’s not like I was hurt.”

Will frowned as he considered it. “All right, but my condition is that until Jon is back in town, we’d like you to stay with us. He’d have a boot up my butt if I let you stay alone out there.”

Lia tried to object. “I couldn’t put you out like that.”

“You’re Jon’s lady friend,” Will said, patting her shoulder. “That means you’re family.”

Something about hearing Will acknowledge her place in Jon’s life made her chest feel heavy and warm. Jon’s brother had kept his distance until now, but having him call her “family?” Yes, that was an emotion she was happy to absorb.

“But I don’t have any clothes or anything with me,” Lia said.

Bael cleared his throat. “Um, no, but you did have a laundry basket with a bunch of your folded clothes on your couch, which I put in the back of my car while you were changing. You should have two or three days’ worth of stuff in there.”

Lia scowled at Bael, even as he had the gall to look proud of himself. “Sneakier and sneakier.”

13

JON

Jon knew he was being a grumpy asshole about traveling all the way down to Stiles Point, but he thought it was an overreaction for Eva to threaten him with the blowtorch.

To be fair, he was both grumpy and distracted, so maybe he did deserve to have Eva tell him she would singe his balls if he didn’t get his head out of his ass. It was a bit of a mixed metaphor, anatomically speaking, but it got the point across.

Jon had texted off and on with Lia and Will for most of the weekend, but he could tell there was something “restrained” about their responses. They weren’t telling him something. Will assured him way too many times that everything was just fine. And Lia sounded shaken about something, brittle. He didn’t want to be the guy who couldn’t spend time away from his girlfriend, but he was thoroughly weirded out.

Also, he’d just referred to Lia as his girlfriend, and he didn’t care what Will said about it. He was not too old for the term ‘boyfriend.’ The very idea sent a little thrill through his belly … which was disrupted when Eva hollered from the bilge of Ernest Welldon’s fishing trawler, the Saint Marie.

“All right, the last of the nest stuff has been cleared and the important bits are back in place,” Eva called.

“Starting it up!” he yelled back from the captain’s wheel, sagging in relief when the engine roared to life.

Eva’s head poked up through the deck, grinning at him. “That’s some beautiful music!”

“Important bits?” he said, chuckling. “Is that a technical term?”

“You’d know that if you kept up with the industry publications,” she told him airily as she pushed her way through the hatch. Jon helped her to her feet.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a jackass today,” Jon said.

“Buy me a beer and I’ll forgive you.” She waved him off. “At least you admit when you’re being a scatter-brained, cantankerous jackass,” Eva said.

“I just said ‘jackass,’” Jon noted.

They packed up their tools in silence and presented the invoice to the client. To his credit, Ernest only winced a little bit when he saw the total and then wrote the check without argument. Having already packed their bags from the motel, the pair of them were ready to head back to Mystic Bayou immediately.

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