I was scrubbing the bug juice off my face with my makeup removal washcloth, when the phone rang. I wiped the soap off my face and sprinted into the kitchen to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Nash?” a smooth voice said into the phone.

The smooth voice belonged to Jim, a werejaguar and the Pack’s security chief. He usually went by Jim Black, if you didn’t know him well. I’d dug through his background during my tenure with the Order. His real name was James Damael Shrapshire, a fact I kept to myself, since he didn’t advertise it.

Atlanta’s Shapeshifter Pack was the strongest in the nation, and my relationship with it was complicated. But the Pack backed Cutting Edge, the business Kate owned and for which I now worked. They had supplied the seed money and they were our first priority client.

“Hey, Jim. What can I do for you?” Jim wasn’t a bad guy. Paranoid and secretive, but then cats were odd creatures.

“One of our businesses got hit last night,” Jim said. “Four people are dead.”

Someone obviously had a death wish and that someone wasn’t very bright, because there were much easier ways of committing suicide. The Pack took care of their own and if you hurt their own, they made it a point to take care of you. “Anybody I know?”

“No. Two jackals, a bouda, and a fox from Clan Nimble. I need you to go down there and check it out.”

I headed into the bedroom. “No problem. But why me?”

Jim sighed into the phone. “Andrea, how many years did you spend as a knight?”

“Eight.” I began pulling my clothes onto the bed: socks, work boots, jeans…

“How many of those did you spend on active cases?”

“Seven.” I added a box of ammo to the clothes pile on the bed.

“That’s why. You’re the most experienced investigator I’ve got who’s not tied up in something, and I can’t ask the Consort to look into it, because A) she and Curran are working on something else and B) when the Consort gets involved, half of the world blows up.”

Kate the Consort. The title still made me grin. Every time someone used it, she got this martyred look on her face.

“This mess looks to be complicated and the cops are in up to their elbows. I need you to go down there and untangle it.”

Finally. Something I could actually sink my teeth into.

I held the phone between my shoulder and my ear and took a pencil and a notepad off the nightstand. “You’ve got an address?”

“Fourteen-twelve Griffin.”

Griffin Street ran through SoNo, one of the former financial districts, sandwiched between Midtown and Downtown. The name came from “South of North Avenue.” It was a bad, unstable area, with old office buildings crashing down left and right.

“What were the shapeshifters doing there?”