Green-Eyed Envy (3 page)

He didn’t disappoint me, either; he clenched his fist, gritted his teeth, and ground out, “Catnip.” No question mark at the end of that most-distinctly-
not
-a-guess.

Even though I’d expected it, hearing him so easily fill in the blank on that sentence made my heart sink. Before today, I wouldn’t have had the first clue what word would have best completed it. And not to brag, but that meant that the vast majority of other arcanes wouldn’t have, either. As a Fury, it was my job to know juicy little tidbits about all magical races to help protect them or—like now—use against them to wreak justice and, if need be, vengeance on those who commit murders as heinous as the three now being investigated.
Hell, Cass is right. Only another Cat or Hound would have known about the catnip . . .

Scott, no slouch in the brains department, made the obvious connection. “You think a Hound’s behind this.”

I winced at his flat tone of voice. “Not necessarily.” The wishy-washy tone of
my
voice made me wince again.

He snorted. “You already know as well as I do—or you wouldn’t have enticed me here under false pretenses—that the two races most likely to boast a killer with
that
particular MO are Cats and Hounds. And as Da would say, not bloody likely a Cat would count coup against another Cat. ’Bout as likely as a Hound collaring another.”

Now
that
had been a rough period in Warhound history. Anubis, their patron god—as Celtic goddess Epona was their patron goddess—had become enraged when a faction of his followers in ancient Egypt sided with enemy priests attempting to overthrow the Pharaoh that Anubis favored. He not only allowed the faction to be enslaved by a third group of priests vying to get
their
favored candidate on the throne, he actually forged the magical collars used to subdue his own people. Yeah, there was a
reason
I had no desire to run into that particular deity again anytime soon. He made
me
look like a forgiving pussy cat.

“Hey, no false pretenses. I really
was
lonely.” He arched a brow. “Okay, so I had ulterior motives besides seeing you in mind, but that doesn’t make me any less lonely.” I shifted just so, causing one of my negligee straps to cascade from my shoulder to midway down my bare arm. Scott’s eyes followed along for the ride. I smirked. “And let he who is without ulterior motives of his own cast the first stone.”

“ Touché.” His hand skimmed to my arm, slid the strap back in place one slow inch at a time, and then settled on my shoulder, caressing one of my most erogenous zones.

My eyes fluttered open, closed, and open again. “ Mmmm. What?”

He laughed softly. “Problems, baby? I’m not distracting you from your case, am I?”

“Case?” I shook my head to clear it and slid back on the couch until there was a good foot of space between us. “Hey, you did that on purpose!”

“Yeah? So did you.”

He had me there. I ignored his valid point and cleared my throat. “You’re right that the two most likely pools of suspects are Cats and, yes, Hounds. But you also know good and well that I can’t afford to entirely rule out either group until I get some hard evidence. So, would you mind looking at the crime scene photos and giving me your opinion as a Warhound?”

“Sure.” Those amber eyes of his grew even brighter—not a good sign for my departmental budget. Damn mercs. “Just as soon as you hire me on as a consultant.”

Double-damn mercs. “Fine. But just you, Scott—not the Shadowhounds as a whole.”

He shrugged. “Okay by me. Most of them are on other assignments at the moment anyway.”

My face softened as I thought about one other Shadowhound in particular. Patrick “Mac” MacAllister. Husband to Elliana Banoub, Scott’s second-in-command in his familyrun mercenary enterprise. Mac was also half-Sidhe, half-Fury (yes, the first
male
Fury), son of Allegra, my mother. Which, of course, made Mac my youngest brother: my eighteen-year-old chronologically but thirty-year-old genetically youngest brother. Yeah, made my head spin just thinking about it.

“Ellie and Mac?”

He let out a frustrated sigh. “We got another lead on Sean’s whereabouts that didn’t pan out.” Sean Murphy, Scott’s baby brother, had vanished under mysterious circumstances just after we laid down the smack on the mad scientists responsible for both my mother’s and best friend’s abductions.

“So now they’re just holding down the fort at HQ,” Scott continued. HQ referred to the smoke-infested, pub-like room plus windowless office nestled at the back of Liana Murphy’s arcane antique store that Scott’s mercenary group used as its base of operations. Scott’s father, Morgan, had founded the Shadowhounds from that room several decades earlier—the same year Liana cut ties with her family, the high-and-mighty Banoub clan, and used the trust fund money she’d squirreled away to open Hounds of Anubis. She may have given up her inheritance and social standing for love, but she sure hadn’t given up her wits. She and Morgan had done just fine without the support of her family’s billions,
thankyouverymuch
.

I
still
found it amusing that her favorite niece, Elliana, had followed in her footsteps a year ago, throwing over
her
social standing in the Banoub dynasty to marry my brother after jilting her intended husband—who turned out to be a cheating dog in all ways figurative
and
literal. Ellie was another person who was slowly but surely growing on me. Like old, stinky cheese.

“So,” I pulled a sour face. “How much is this going to cost me?”

“You mean
besides
the hot sex?” He wiggled his eyebrows in that appealing way of his.

“Whether you get the hot sex depends on how much you try and gouge me for. Remember: The PD is footing the bill for this one,
not
the Sisterhood.” And the PD’s pockets were nowhere
near
as deep as the Sisterhood of Furies, my immortal superiors.

Fortunately for
both
our raging hormones, Scott knew that and was too honest to price gouge me. Or too smart—he
did
want to take advantage of my ulterior motives to satisfy his own, after all. He named a reasonable consultant fee, and we shook on it. I’d take care of filling out the official paperwork the next day. Really just a formality, since I was the city’s Chief Magical Investigator.

I slid the coffee table closer to the sofa, booted up my sleek new laptop (courtesy of my baby brother, the technoguru, who’d taken one look at my last POS and sneered), and logged on to the magical-case-management software that my big brother, David, had designed for me with help from Mac. David and his wife, Jessica, ran a software empire and had pulled some strings for me to get the database up and running so quickly. They’d also taken a huge loss on the project in order to make it fit into the start-up budget the PD had given me to get its first official Magical Crimes Unit off the ground. Nepotism was most certainly alive and well in the MCU.

Hey, whatever gets the job done. ’Bout time we got the PD’s magical investigations out of the Dark Ages.
Even if both brothers dragged me into the whole process kicking and screaming. Amazing how much less I hated computers now that I had a top-of-the-line model rather than a bargain store reject.

I called up the crime scene photos Trinity had scanned in just hours ago. Scott remained silent while I scrolled through the pictures, until I got to a close-up shot of the victim’s wide-open mouth—and sightless Cat-slit eyes. He let his breath out in a very feline-like hiss and stayed my hand on the wireless mouse. My gaze locked on his and saw the recognition in his eyes.
Oh shit, he knows this guy.

“Harp’s gonna have more than a fit when she hears this, Riss.” My pulse skittered, since that could only mean
she
knew this guy, too. “His name’s Bryant Wilkins, and he was Harper’s fiancé in college.”

BARELY AN HOUR LATER I HAD DITCHED THE hot pink negligee for my red leather uniform. Scott and I waited for Harper outside the branch of the city morgue that housed arcane corpses. Her job for the FBI made her no stranger to after-hour telephone calls summoning her to check out a body, but this was the first time her duty was to ID the corpse rather than investigate its murder. Of course, she didn’t know that yet. Neither Scott nor I had the heart to break the news over the phone, especially since she lived by herself. Way more tactful to just tell her I needed an assist on a case and give her the morbid news in person. On the selfish side, I was glad that she was the one who would ID the victim, rather than his immediate family members. At least we could spare them
that
.

I don’t know who was more surprised—Scott or me—when Harper showed up so very
not
by herself. And judging from the possessive way the golden-eyed, dark-skinned Adonis held her hand, we could have broken the news to her over the phone. No way she’d been alone at her place when she got my call.
Wait . . . dark skin and yellow eyes. Holy shit. Harp’s bagged herself another Hound!

This time, Scott won the
Who’s more surprised?
contest hands down. He did a double take when he caught a good look at Adonis’s face. His mouth and eyes widened comically before he managed to choke out, “Penn?”

Harper had her own moment of shock when Scott stepped forward from the shadows next to me. “Mutt?” She flushed and shot me an accusing look. “You didn’t tell me
he’d
be here.”

I motioned to Adonis “Pot? Kettle? Hel
lo
! ”

Her normally tan skin grew even more flushed. “Yeah, well—”

The mysterious Penn seized the opportunity to get a word in edgewise. “You do not seriously believe I would allow Christabel to leave my condo in the middle of the night to come to the gods-forsaken
morgue
alone?”

My lips trembled from the effort to hold back laughter as I switched my attention to Harper. “
Chris
tabel?” Scott had let it slip that Harper was actually her middle name, in honor of her mother’s maiden name, but he’d always refused to reveal the Cat’s true first name. Now I could see why.

She shot me a
drop dead
look while patting Penn on the arm.
Down, boy,
I thought with an inner sneer, but managed not to roll my eyes. Barely.

Scott spoke up again before Harper—oh, calling her
Christabel
was going to be
way
more fun than calling Elliana
Ellie
—could. “Do I even
want
to know why the hell you’re holding hands with my pompous asshole of a cousin?”

I could
really
go for a tub of popcorn right now . . .

Penn’s gaze zeroed in on Scott, and he frowned, narrowing his eyes as he sized up the other Hound. Recognition suddenly hit.
“Murphy?”

I couldn’t resist a sardonic, “And here I thought that was my special nickname for Scott when he’s being an ass.”

Adonis nodded as if I’d confirmed something for him. “So. The half-breed in charge of the Shadowmutts.”

I flashbacked to a few months previous when Scott had to restrain me from kicking the shit out of Ellie for a similar snarky comment about my missing best friend (and sister Fury), Vanessa. This time
I
was the one throwing myself between Scott and one of his smart-ass cousins. I shifted Nemesis and Nike into physical form, drawing magic through them to amp up my Fury strength to keep Scott from tearing into Adonis. Though with the other Hound’s decided lack of charm, tact, and self-preservation, I wasn’t 100 percent convinced he was worth the effort. Still, letting Scott rip him apart would mean a whole lot of paperwork that I didn’t want to deal with in the middle of a murder investigation.

Harper had her hands equally full holding Penn back from Scott. She whispered to him fiercely, showing that she hadn’t completely lost her backbone as I’d suspected when she’d let Penn—who could be none other than
the
Pennington Banoub, Elliana’s eldest brother and the financial genius currently heading up the Banoub family dynasty—pull his macho man routine and call her Christabel.

Once certain that Scott wasn’t going to break my hold, I drawled, “Now, now, boys, don’t make me get out the water hose.”

My words had a similar effect to the threatened hosing. They stopped struggling and settled for scowling at each other in that testosterone-laced way men have. Would have been sexy if I didn’t have other things going on. Like, you know, stopping a serial killer.

“Can we count on you two to behave, or do I need to break out the cuffs?”

They threw even deeper scowls my way but remained tight-lipped. I nodded at Harper, and we stepped back from our menfolk. She focused on me. “Not that I wouldn’t just
love
to catch up on old times standing on the street outside the city morgue in the middle of the freaking night, but would you mind telling me what kind of FBI help you need so desperately that I just
had
to come down here now?”

The part I’d been dreading. The hesitation in my stance must have clued Penn in that I was about to give
Christabel
bad news, because he settled his arm around her shoulders. She just arched a brow. “Harp, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I asked you down here to ID a murder victim.”

She had trouble processing that for a second. Then her mouth drew open slightly, and she let out a choked “ Ohhh.”

I rushed to reassure her. “He’s not a family member. But Scott thinks it’s a past ”—feeling the heat of Adonis’s gaze on me had me amend my original phrasing to—“acquaintance of yours. From college.”

Harper steeled her expression and her spine, then nodded. “I see. Cat, then?”

“Yeah. The third victim of three, discovered just today.”

Her mouth widened again. “Wait. The third of three. You mean those other two Cats we heard about—”