Page 2 of Blood and Bone

Eoghan began dragging him toward the break room. “You’re gonna have to learn to roll with it, man. After a honeybee shifter, albats, and space fairies, I’d have thoughtyou knew that. What happened just now. That’s not our case. Now, come on. Coffee first.”

Ari sighed. “Okay, babe. Whatever you say.”

Chapter One

Ari and Eoghan topped up their coffees and walked into Chief Deputy Priest’s office a couple of minutes after leaving the bullpen where people still talked about the reporter and his exploding head. Ari had so many questions about what he’d just witnessed but he hadn’t imagined the urgency in Priest’s voice when she’d ordered them into her office. Whoever this escaped fugitive was, had to either be someone important, or have done something heinous or of special note in the past.

“Have a seat and I’ll bring you both up to speed,” she said the second she spotted them coming through the door. “This won’t take long. I’ve already told Wordy to gather your gear, so it’ll be waiting for you. You both have overnight bags, right?”

Ari nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He and Eoghan always had clean clothes in their lockers, along with their firearms—which he was rapidly learning, weren’t worth a whole lot in the scheme of things. Over the last few weeks, he’d discovered several weapons which were far from standard Marshals Service issue that worked better for the kind of creatures they faced. Wordy, their weapon’s master, cared for them like his own children down in the armory. Ari found out that the I.S.R. also possessed alien tech which had been either accidentally left behind on Earth or unearthed after being purposely hidden for later retrieval by whatever species of alien had invented it. He’d spent countless hours down in the basement of the building learning everything he could about the various tech they had access to. It was endlessly fascinating to him.

“Good. Because you’re going out of town on this one,” she said.

The Golden State’s U.S. Marshals Service Interspecies Response office was based in Los Angeles, but their particular unit covered the entirety of California. Since coming to work here less than two months ago, he’d learned they had only twelve full-time marshals assigned to their office; there were still some he’d yet to meet since they spent a lot of time out in the field. Wick St. Clair had become a friend, and he knew him the best, but only because he and Eoghan had a case where he’d been assigned as backup. Little by little, he was learning the names of other marshals, but their officedidseem to be stretched thin with the amount of territory they had to cover. Their pace was oftentimes frantic but Ari had always preferred being busy, moving from case to case with lightning speed at times.

“You said something about me knowing the fugitive in question, ma’am?” Eoghan asked.

She gave him a clipped nod, picking up a file folder and sliding it toward him across her glass desk. “You know Riversong Wilkins, right?”

Ari watched his partner frown as he picked up the folder and flipped it open. He leaned over Eoghan to get a better look at it. Inside was a mugshot of a woman with long, brown hair, high cheekbones, and sad, dark eyes. Something about the way her pupils seemed tinged with an almost violet glow told him he was looking at a supernatural being, most likely a shifter of some sort. Vampire eyes glowed red and since this woman looked human but for her eyes, he figured she had to be something else.

“Shifter?” Ari asked.

“Mm…hm.”Eoghan gave an affirmative nod as he looked at the picture. He glanced up at the chief. “Yes, I knowWilkins.” He glanced back down at the folder, tapping the photo before looking back at her. “Glad and I picked her up with her boyfriend a few years back.”

“What’s her story?” Ari asked.

“Riversong wasn’t our target and in fact, we didn’t know anything about her at first. We were called in by tribal police to help them catch her boyfriend,” Eoghan replied. He glanced up and met Ari’s eyes. “They told us he was a lowlife, who’d been convicted multiple times by their tribal council. He’d been jailed on tribal lands for everything from shoplifting to pickpocketing. He wasn’t a good criminal because he kept getting caught.”

“He sounds like a real piece of work,” Ari said.

“That and more,” Priest said. “The tribal police only enlisted the I.S.R. when he moved on to a bigger and better crime…grand larceny. He ran off the reservation and that’s when they called us for help.”

“Is she Native American?” Ari asked.

“Yes,” Eoghan replied.

“That’s kind of funny, isn’t it?” Ari asked. He held up his hands. “I mean, funny in a strange way. Some Native Americans are good trackers, aren’t they?”

Eoghan nodded. “This tribe has excellent trackers, but their tribal council decided we should be called in as soon as it was confirmed that Riversong and her boyfriend crossed into another reservation’s territory.”

Ari widened his eyes in surprise. “Another shifter reservation?”

“Actually…it was the Redding vampire clan’s reservation. That’s why we were contacted. The tribal police had absolutely no intention of following them onto a vampire reservation,” said Eoghan.

“I should say not. So, what did he steal?” Ari asked, looking between Eoghan and the chief.

“He absconded with tribal council funds that had been locked away in a safe over the weekend,” the chief explained.

“Who had these funds?”

“The tribe’s treasurer,” she said. “The money should have been dropped in the night deposit at the reservation’s credit union, but he got a call from his daughter who’d been abandoned by her date at the spring dance. And after he’d dealt with the problem, he’d returned to find his safe had been broken into and the funds had been stolen along with several expensive watches and some jewelry.”

“Well, that must have been embarrassing. Where’d Riversong come into the story?” Ari asked.

“It wasn’t too hard to figure out who’d broken into the desk,” Eoghan said. “The boyfriend—a guy named Jack Vandross—had been working in the tribe’s municipal building where the treasurer’s office was located. He’d left behind fingerprints and the tribal police ID’d him easily.”

“So, you tracked him?”

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