“Please?”
“Ah, now there’s the magic word. Pass me a Guinness first, would ye?”
“Wait… You saidtwogenerations back. Hamish would bethreegenerations back from Bebe, wouldn’t he?”
Badger pointed at the fridge with an arched eyebrow.
She grabbed a bottle from the fridge and fought the urge to shake the crap out of it before turning and handing it to him. Then she remembered the church key and grabbed it from the front of the fridge and handed it over, too.
“Thank ye.” He popped the cap and took several swallows from the bottle. “I have one more thing, but ye need to see it fer yerself. It’ll answer yer question.”
“One more thing?” she snarked. “You haven’t dropped enough on me today?”
He pulled out his phone, called up a video, and handed the phone to Dewi.
She hitplay. It was a video of an elderly Black woman and Dewi realized this was from Badger’s visit to Corrine. It was a short clip, and when she talked about finding the puppy in Imani’s bed, Dewi nearly dropped the phone. She hit pause and, jaw gaping, stared at Badger.
“Holyshit!” she whispered. “Way to bury the fucking lede, Badger!”
“Why are we whisperin’?” he whispered back.
She stuck her tongue out at him, rewound the video, and watched it again.
And a third time.
“Still don’t change, no matter how many times ye play it, Dewi.”
“Imani’s a shifter, too.” She set the phone on the counter and he took it back. “Two generations back.”
“Yep,” he said.
“Why didn’t you start with that headline?” she asked.
“I needed you to see the larger picture. Lots of threads tangled together.”
“Why the hell couldn’t you tell Imani was a shifter when you met her!”
“Fer starters, ye snarky thing, ye met her, too. I can ask the same question. As did Duncan. Secondly, if she only shifted the one time, and bein’ so young, it’s like as not she doesn’t even remember it, much less ever did it again. She’s, what, seventy?”
“Seventy-two, I think.”
“Okay, then. I wasn’t tryin’ to read her or sniff her when we first met at the party. We had no clue about this. Then later, I was too worried about Primin’ people so they didn’t remember the fight between the wee ones. If she only shifted the one time, seven decades ago, maybe we didn’t smell the shifter in her because it was so faint.
“Not to mention Tamsin was there. Imani isn’t a wolf shifter—she’s acorgishifter. Our snoots are attenuated to Tamsin. Imani was huggin’ all over Tamsin all day. Anythin’ we thought we scented, our brains filed it away as bein’ Tamsin. If the DNA confirms it’s Hamish, and he is Tamsin’s uncle, the scent was similar enough for us not to notice any difference, especially when we weren’t payin’ attention.”
Dewi wearily leaned back against the other counter again. “What do we do now?”
“I dunno. We need a long planning session with Peyton and Duncan and Trent. We’re literally in unknown territory, even for our kind. Bebe’s a shifter, Imani doesn’t know she can shift, and Dania and her sisters might very well be shifters, too, but we don’t know what kind yet. Shifter blood runs throughout this whole family and now we need to go through and evaluate everyone to see who else might have the abilities. But we can’t do anythin’ until I get the DNA test results back an’ know what we’re dealin’ with.”
“So the next step after that?” she asked.
“Startin’ tomorrow mornin’, after I’ve got some sleep in me, first I run by Leila and Earl’s house early and get swabs from them and the girls and send them in for testing. I stopped by on my way back but they were out. I also need to get swabs from Davis Junior and Caleb and their wives and kids, and we’ll need to come up with a way to subtly evaluate them. Meanwhile, I start lookin’ for Hamish. Or traces of him. Figure out if he’s still alive. I’ll start in the St. Louis area. As soon as I receive test results, I’ll upload them and run searches. Find out if Hamish has any other offspring, maybe under a different name’.”
“We really can’t just send Bebe home with them on Monday, can we?”
He nodded his head. “We can. Again, we’ll Prime Lu’ana and Reggie to make sure that holds. That if something happens, they immediately call us and come over. They’ll go home, go to sleep, bring her back in the morning, and go to work. There’s not much risk.”
“Unless Bebe shifts in a grocery store.”
