Lover Beware 04 - Only Human

originally Reule. French."
    "So what does it mean?" The light was about to change.
    She accelerated through it without quite running up the bumper of the car ahead of her.
    "Little wolf." He exhaled. "Get a lot of tickets, do you?"
    "No." She hadn't seen him tense this time, but out of the corner of her eye she did catch him relaxing again. She grinned. "I'm a good driver, actually. Good reflexes. Not as fast as yours, I suppose. I guess it might be nerve-wracking to have someone whose reflexes are half the speed of yours in the driver's seat."
    "Only if they think they're invulnerable," he said dryly.
    "You're the one who ought to feel invulnerable. It takes a lot to hurt a lupus, doesn't it?"
    "Because we heal so quickly, we can take a lot of damage.
    But we have the same nerve endings humans do. We hurt every bit as much."
    He thought of himself as a lupus. Not as a human. For the next few blocks she couldn't think of anything more to say.

Chapter 4
    LILY HATED THE morgue. It was an unprofessional reaction, one she'd tried to overcome, but she had yet to set foot inside the cold, white walls without feeling repelled.
    It wasn't the bodies that got to her. Nor the smell. It was what happened to those bodies here that made her skin feel two sizes too small. Autopsies were necessary. They were also the final, most complete invasion of privacy possible.
    The attendant was new—at least, Lily hadn't run across her before. She was young, African American, her hair cropped very short to show off an elegant head and neck. And she was staring at Rule Turner.
    Did the man have that effect on every woman whose path he crossed? "Detective Yu," she said, holding out her shield in the soft leather case her brother had given her for her birthday last year. "I understand you've got Carlos Fuentes chilled down. We need to have a look."
    She blinked, then stood. "Sure. This way, Detective."
    Lily's shoulders and spine were tight as she and Turner followed the attendant down a short hall.
    "You don't like this place, either," he said abruptly.
    She looked at him. There was strain around his eyes, and 260
    EILEEN WILKS
    his lips were thinned. "I guess it smells pretty bad here to you."
    "It's not the smell that bothers me."
    The attendant spoke cheerily as she pulled on one of the handles and slid the long drawer out. "Here you go."
    What blood was left in the body had settled, of course. The back and buttocks would be livid, but the undamaged part of his face, his shoulders, and his upper chest were waxy and pale. He looked cold beneath the thin sheet. And very dead.
    Lily's lips tightened. She glanced at Rule. "The sheet—?"
    "I'll need it off."
    The attendant looked surprised, then upset as she removed the sheet. That puzzled Lily. Why would a morgue attendant be upset at being asked to remove a sheet from a body? The obvious assumption was that Rule was here to identify the victim and, given the condition of the dead man's face, looking at the body made sense.
    Oh. Lily's lips twitched. The young woman didn't like the idea that Rule might be intimately familiar with another man's body. Well, no one enjoyed having their dreams snuffed out.
    Even the brief, silly ones.
    Rule bent close to the ravaged throat and sniffed.
    "Hey!" The attendant grabbed his shoulder and tried to pull him back. She might have been tugging on a Buick, for all the effect she had. "Just what do you think you're doing?"
    "Exactly what he's been asked to do." Lily took the woman's arm and firmly urged her back. "By Chief Delgado."
    "He was asked to sniff a corpse?" she exclaimed, outraged.
    Lily lifted both eyebrows as if the question were absurd, rather than the action. "Yes."
    The attendant looked as if she would have bolted from the room if regulations hadn't called for her to remain. Lily didn't much want to watch him, either, but perversity or pride kept her from looking away.
    He made a thorough job of it, smelling all up and down the body, paying close attention to the wounds and the cold, flaccid hands. He was intent, focused, and somehow still impossibly elegant. Not like a beast at all—more like a wine connoisseur about to deliver a verdict on the bouquets of various vintages.
    And that thought was both absurd and macabre. Lily bit her lip to keep from giggling like an idiot Only Human
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    At last he straightened, met her eyes, and shook his head slightly.
    "You couldn't tell."
    "He was killed by a lupus," he said flatly. "Beyond