Even if everything Cooper was saying about him left a bad taste in her mouth.
A Chief Deputy who wore friendliness like a mask and a partner with a temper bad enough to chew Cooper out for just trying to do the best by one of his witnesses. Something had been rotten in Cooper’s office.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Cooper said.
“You probably do.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the best place. Nobody there was any Martin Powell—or any Gretchen Miller.”
“Or any Cooper Dawes?”
“Not even a clone,” he agreed. “But it was the closest I ever got to being surrounded by people who were supposed to understand me. I still feel like I owe them a lot.”
Even though they’d kept him feeling like a Monopoly piece in a Scrabble box. Maybe Cooper had once believed that his old office was as good as they got, but being with her—and even with Keith—had shown him that there were more people out there in the world who cared about doing the job right. Martin hadn’t been a one-time anomaly.
Gretchen didn’t think Cooper owed them anything at all. They owed him, and it didn’t sound like they would ever realize it. But she didn’t want to twist his arm to make him admit it—that would just hurt him more.
“The scar,” she reminded him.
“Right. He said he’d had Monroe, another guy on our team, bite him. He’d wanted to see if Monroe could turn him.”
She felt like she’d missed something. “But he was already a shifter.”
“He was. But he wanted to be Monroe’s kind of shifter instead. But when it didn’t work, he figured out that already having an inner animal is like having been vaccinated against some virus. Roger’s jaguar acted like an immune system, fighting off the invasion from Monroe’s bite. So if he were a human, he’d either turn or die, but as a shifter, he just got the sniffles for a few days. It’s the same thing that happens when shifters fight each other—you get a lot of biting and clawing then, but nobody turns. At worst, they feel a little run down afterwards. Their animals are too strong to let anyone else’s in.”
“So Roger got a mild case of the shifter flu.”
“And a nasty-looking scar from a basilisk bite.”
A basilisk? Gretchen didn’t know much about those at all. “That’s a giant snake, right? That’s what Monroe is?”
Maybe it was just the fact that snakes gave her the creeps, but Gretchen couldn’t see why anyone would want to shed an awesome shift form like a jaguar to become a basilisk instead.
Judging by his contained shudder, Cooper felt the same way she did. “Really giant. His scales are the size of my hand.”
She shivered too. “No thanks. Keep the giant snakes far, far away from me. Why would Roger want to become a basilisk?”
“He never gave me a straight answer on that. He just said that there were advantages Monroe had that he wouldn’t mind having himself. Basilisks are supposed to be able to kill anyone they look at directly, but Monroe didn’t do that, obviously. I saw him in snake form a few times, and I’m still alive to tell the tale. He said that story was bullshit, but he never said if he had a hunch about what it was Roger was after.”
An obsessive jaguar, a temperamental dragon, and a cagey basilisk. This team was sounding worse and worse by the minute.
And even if she put her bias in favor of big cats aside, how could Roger have wanted to trade one shift form for another? Your inner animal was supposed to be an expression of your soul. It was your subconscious given its own voice and shape. How could anyone want to alter something so fundamental about themselves, especially just to get something as trivial as a special ability? How little could your soul possibly mean to you, if you were willing to throw it away that easily?
Or was she just being melodramatic? She had always longed to be a shifter, and maybe she was just jealous and bitter that Roger, who already was one, would treat it so cavalierly and think that he should just shop around for a new animal form since he was bored with the one he had.
It wasn’t until Cooper spoke up again that she realized that she’d missed what he had really been trying to tell her.
“That’s the only other time I saw that kind of scar,” Cooper said. “And it’s the only other time I ever heard about a transformation attempt failing without the bitten person dying.”
It took Gretchen a second to fully process what he was saying, and then her heart seemed to skip a beat.
“But there’s a lot that I don’t know,” he said. “Just because I haven’t heard about—”
“You think I’m a shifter,” Gretchen said.
For one long, horrible moment, she thought he was going to laugh at her. It was her biggest, oldest wish, one that she’d spent years trying to bury, and for it to come back up again now—it was like suddenly having someone imply that you’d been wrong all your life, Santa Claus was real. It had to be a joke.
Except he wouldn’t tell that kind of joke at her expense. He wouldn’t tell it at anyone’s expense. He was too kind for that.