Page 41 of Flesh and Fury

“Did you read about that in the Weekly World News?” Eoghan asked, rolling his eyes. “Because their stories are always true. They confirmed that Dick Cheney is a robot and that doctors have successfully transplanted a chimp’s head onto a human baby’s body.”

Ari scratched his head. “It was the hat that I couldn’t understand.”

“What?” Eoghan asked.

“The hat!” Ari said, pointing to his head. “When the python swallowed the farmer, he was wearing one of those big, round, pointy straw hats with the wide brim…you know…like they wear in China.”

“What about it?” Alo asked, looking highly amused.

“When they found the python, they knew he’d swallowed a farmer even before they cut it open because of the outline of the hat. I don’t understand why it didn’t come off in the struggle. And did he swallow the hat before or after the wheelbarrow?”

“And what was a Chinese farmer doing in a rainforest with a wheelbarrow to begin with?” Eoghan asked.

Ari turned and pointed at him. “Exactly! See? You’re right, Eoghan. There’s a lot of unanswered questions about reptiles.”

“I think there’s a lot of unanswered questions about your sanity, partner,” Eoghan said.

“Maybe,” Ari conceded.

“I guess we’ll never know,” Eoghan said, eyes dancing.

“Yeah. I guess not,” Ari said, sitting back.

They all started laughing as Joe shook his head. He pounded the steering wheel. “Jesus, you kill me, Brown. You just kill me.”

A thought occurred to him. “Hang on…reptile, you say? Komo…shit! Are you talking about one of those like thirty-foot-long lizards who live on an island made of hot lava somewhere?”

It was Eoghan’s turn to roar with laughter. “Oh. My. God. You’ve been watching One Million Years B.C. again.”

“Raquel Welch was a babe in that movie.” Ari said, waiting until his partner finished smirking and asked again. “You said she’s one of those Komodo dragon thingies, right?”

“Thingies?” Alo asked as his chief drove onto the freeway. His laughter was tightly controlled but Ari could hear the implication under his words.

“First of all, wow, do you need to watch more Animal Planet or what?” Eoghan said. “And second, Komodo dragons reach a maximum of three meters which is just over ten feet. The answer as to where they live is yes, there is an actual island in Indonesia which is called Komodo Island, but they’re found all over Indonesia. They lay eggs which take eight months to mature, and those eggs are often eaten by adult cannibalistic Komodo dragons along with the little ones who manage to hatch. If they survive and escape, they crawl into trees and eat insects until they’re big enough to live on the ground. They’re mean as fuck and they’re known to eat everything including fish, birds, mammals, and even humans if they get in their way.”

Ari shook his head and frowned. “Just like pythons, they eat babies.”

Joe’s laughter from the driver’s seat filled the car as Eoghan went on. Ari simply nodded as he listened to his partner spew information. When he was finished, Ari smiled. “All you had to say was that Rana is an apex predator who, when shifted, makes an easy meal of a guy like Andy Red Crow and any of his kitty buddies here in Denver.”

“Yes.”

“And Chinese farmers?”

“I’m going to have you seen by a doctor,” Eoghan said.

The two grizzlies in the front started laughing again and in the end even Eoghan joined in. They pulled up to the hotel ten minutes later and parked, handing off their keys to the valet. They hadn’t seen Red Crow’s big, black truck pull in but sure enough, as soon as they got out of the Blazer, he and Rana walked over to them.

Ari wasn’t really sure what they were supposed to be doing here other than making sure that the two leaders really were on the same page when it came to helping out John Townsend, who’d lost his people to Tillis Bradshaw’s bloodthirsty killers. Either way they sliced it, they’d have to be on the same page if this was going to work out and thus far, Ari wasn’t sure they were, even though Priest said they were.

Rana smiled at Ari, and he returned the smile. Now, knowing what she was, he tried to pick out lizard characteristics in the way the woman looked. She was small with long, black hair falling almost to her waist in a single braid down her back. But other than her brown eyes and beguiling features, she didn’t look any more lizard like than anyone else. She certainly didn’t have a forked tongue that he could see. Ari shook himself out of his musings as she grinned at him.

“You’re trying to figure out what kind of shifter I am, aren’t you?” she asked. “Because you know I am, don’t you?”

Ari nodded. “Let me guess.”

“Okay,” she said, smiling back at him.

“You don’t appear to be an opossum, a centipede, or a honeybee,” he said.