"You stole my bike and rode it over here. Why don't you take it back to my house?"
Logan's blue eyes flashed yellow, and a shiver worked its way down my spine. I was well aware of a shifter's warning signals after almost a year with Jack. But curiosity won out over nerves, or nerves made me chatty, one or the other, and I suddenly had a burning question.
"So. Logan. Do you have nictitating membranes when you're in human form too?"
He tilted his head in a chillingly birdlike way, and those bright yellow eyes focused on me for a moment like I was prey.
Jack endedthatwith a hand to the middle of Logan's chest, shoving him.
Hard.
"You forget your manners, Mackenzie," Jack growled, and suddenly I was way too close to two alpha predators, and there was not enough Extra-Strength Tylenol in the world for this.
"Stop it, both of you," I snapped, pressing on my temples with my fingertips. "Don't we have enough to worry about with Fae problems, missing sisters, and disappearing statues? Do we really need a Shapeshifter Testosterone-Off on top of all that?"
The next few seconds still held the tension of imminent confrontation, but then Logan's eyes flashed back to blue, and he threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, Shepherd. I envy you. I truly do."
Then he walked toward Jack's bike. "I'll follow you to the town square. We can look for clues. Or orangutans. Or what the …heckever. We can all be detectives together."
But when we reached the square in front of City Hall, nobody had to be a detective.
Because the statue was back.
7
Tess
We worked our way through the small crowd of onlookers and stared at the statue for a while, like everybody else, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing happened.
Someone had slightly crookedly replaced the oversized stone Jedediah Shepherd, as we could see from the lines carved in the concrete from where it had previously stood. There were no drag marks or other scrapes; it was more like a giant hand had lifted the statue and then carelessly dropped it in approximately the same place.
I said as much to Jack, who was standing on my right.
He gave me a thoughtful look. "Do we have giants in Dead End?"
I laughed. "There's no such thing as—"
"Really? Do youreallywant to go there?"
I thought about life in Dead End and shrugged. "Okay. There are no giants that I know of here. And even if we had giants, why would they want to make a statue disappear and then re-appear?"
"Who knows why giants do anything? They're all mean buggers," Logan said darkly. He'd followed us and now stood on my left. Apparently I was the shifter buffer.
Yay, me.
"You know giants?"
"I met a couple of them once. It was not a pleasant experience," Logan muttered.
"You probably tried to swindle them," Jack said. "Or stab them. Puts pretty much everybody in a bad mood."
"But it's a good question," the eagle shifter mused, ignoring Jack. "What would giants—oranybody—want with a stone statue? It's not even a good statue."
"Hey," Jack said mildly.
"He's not wrong, though. I always thought it was kind of ugly, Jack, no offense," I said apologetically. "If he's really your great-great whatever, it's strange that he doesn't look much like you."
