Page 27 of The Beast's Baby
“Yup,” he replied with a small smile. “Said she’s always liked that sort of thing. She likes puzzles and finding solutions to things. And she likes communicating without using words. We used to play stupid games, make up our own words for stuff. Made us laugh. She’s funny like that. If she wanted me to find her and wasn’t able to tell me how or where she would write a coded note and where better to leave it for me to find than in a place only we knew about, right?”
Isobel nodded agreement. “Let’s go then,” she encouraged.
He got the car moving without further ado, glancing at Isobel as she dragged her fingers through her hair, sorting herself out. She seemed unfazed. Perhaps she found it easy to sleep around and she wouldn’t really consider their tryst anything more than a scratching of whatever itch she was under. Hadn’t he wanted that? Hadn’t he longed to be the one who got to do the scratching? So, why was he searching for the answer to what had actually brought her into his lap?
She was right.
It didn’t matter.
He just thought, in the dim light of the car she looked exceptionally beautiful. And he was allowed to think that now. But he wasn’t going to say it out loud.
***
“Well?” Isobel asked and he pulled his head out of the rusty metal cabinet he’d buried it in a mere second earlier.
“Give it a minute,” he instructed, making her cock her eyebrows impatiently.
“We might not have five seconds,” she remarked. “We should hurry and get the hell out of here. We can’t drive around in your car either. I mean, they have the make and plate number, don’t they? And I can’t walk far in these shoes.” She was wearing his dirty trainers from the gym bag he always kept in his trunk. He’d forgotten about it until they arrived at their destination, and she had looked at him as though he shouldn’t claim genius status anytime soon. “Maybe I should just shift,” she remarked. “I can cover more ground as a wolf anyway.”
The factory was the type of location Olive had made clear she loved: delipidated, abandoned, forgotten. She said it reminded her that even the most useful things that had been built to be permanent could be left neglected. She said it reminded her of why she did her job.
“Maybe you should,” he agreed.
He sat back, leaning his head back to look up at the metal cabinet. One in a long row of them, all stood against one of the crumbling walls of the place. Olive used to stash snacks in there for when she drove out to the place on impulse. To think, she’d told him. Because it was so quiet.
And it really was so quiet.
Isobel seemed to hesitate and he turned his head to her. “What?” he asked.
“Have you ever seen someone shift?” she asked.
“No,” he admitted. “But I’ve seen wolves plenty of times. I work with them, remember. Every single guard at the facility is a wolf.”
“What’s Cora?” Isobel inquired. “She’s not human.”
“Dragon,” he replied as casually as he could.
“Oh,” Isobel said, as though she knew exactly what that meant. “That makes sense.”
He frowned at her. “Have you met many dragons?” he asked.
“A few,” she said.
He tilted his head, watching her face, realizing she was serious. “So, this isn’t new to you?” he asked.
“You didn’t know?” she returned. “I thought you had those folders on everyone.”
“We do, but yours said nothing about you knowing about shifters,” he said, his curiosity instantly getting the better of him.
“And what doyouknow about them?” she asked as though she didn’t want to answer any more probingly personal questions. He wasn’t going to let her off the hook quite so easily.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head as he pushed himself to a standing position. “I want to know howyouknow about shifters, then I’ll tell you the very little I know about them.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Do you only know about wolves and dragons?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he admitted, attempting to look apologetic. “It’s the only ones I’ve come in contact with and the shifters I work with don’t want to talk about their community because it’s, you know, very hush-hush.”
She couldn’t keep the smile down, even though she went serious quickly enough, saying, “Hush-hush sounds about right. It was like that for me too. All of my life, actually. I lived with shifters. I was raised by them… By wolves.”
