EAGLE EYE

  TIGER’S EYE MYSTERIES

  ALYSSA DAY

  This book is for everyone who has ever battled anxiety or depression. Some days, when our brains act like jerks and refuse to see anything but gray, I hope you and I can remember that other days are filled with light. One step at a time, we can get through this together. I hope the gang in Dead End brings you a smile. And I'm so very sorry the past two pandemic years put me so behind on so many deadlines. Thank you for your kindness and patience.

  May the next two years be bright for all of us.

  And for all my readers and wonderful DayDreamers who chimed in on Facebook with all the varied and wonderful (and nutball!) headache cures mentioned in the book. I love you all, but maybe I won't drink vinegar while slathering my head with peppermint oil … but you may see your suggestion in these pages!

  And for Tina Deaton, who reminded me I need to tell readers I know tigers don't purr (they chuff) . . . so here you are.

  But tiger shapeshifters DO purr.

  Really, tiger shifters do whatever they want to do. Who's going to tell them no?

  Xoxo

  Alyssa

  Dear Reader: Dead End remains a haven for its residents and a bit of respite, as so many of you have told me, for my readers. So Dead End and the Tiger's Eye Mysteries will remain pandemic and war-news free.

  Sending all my best wishes that you, your family, and your loved ones are well.

  Alyssa Day, St. Augustine, Florida, May, 2022

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Thank you!

  Books by Alyssa

  About the Author

  1

  Tiger's Eye Investigations

  Memo to File

  From: Jack Shepherd

  It has been subtly (ha!) hinted—yes, I heard you, Tess—that, as the principal of Tiger's Eye Investigations, I should participate in writing my "own darn case reports."

  So, from here on out, I will include my viewpoint on the events that occur in each case.

  Reluctantly.

  (Tigers hate typing.)

  Jack

  2

  Tess

  "We really don't need to make a big deal out of my birthday," I lied, raising my voice to be sure Jack heard me, since I was currently hanging upside down inside the well in his backyard, taking cell phone pictures of some strange markings on the ancient bricks that lined it. It was a chilly November day here in central Florida, so at least I was out of the wind, but still.

  Upside down in a well.

  When I'd protested this whole plan, he'd pointed out that I wouldn't be able to hold him upside down by the ankles, which was a valid point, since he was much heavier than me, and I was a mostly human pawnshop owner and he was a tiger shapeshifter, currently in human form but still with supernatural strength.

  "Of course we do, Tess. It's your birthday," he called down, continuing the conversation we'd begun when I'd driven over to his place with two dozen donuts an hour earlier. Sunday was my day off, and after church, I'd thought I'd do a nice deed. Next time, I'd just go home and take a nap. "Are you done yet? I'm hungry. Hurry up, so we can go get lunch."

  "Hey! You're the one who wanted these pictures. And you just ate twenty-one donuts!" Stupid tiger metabolism. Sadly, the other three weren't enjoying being upside down in my stomach. Maybe I should have stopped with two, but I'd barely snagged the last pumpkin-spiced donut before Jack got it and hadn't been about to relinquish my claim. November was prime pumpkin spice time in Dead End.

  I quickly took several photos—some with flash and some without—of the markings, which looked like runes or hieroglyphs. How he'd noticed them in the first place, I didn't know. Tigers loved water and swimming, but I doubted that included hopping in the well.

  "I got them. Pull me up."

  He did, but shifter strength meant I came flying up and out of the well, only to be caught in a pair of very muscular arms.

  I made an "oof" sound, and gorgeous green eyes laughed down at me.

  "How are you so beautiful, even upside down?" he asked, not waiting for an answer before he kissed me.

  I was still getting used to the idea of being in a relationship, but the kissing part I really loved. Being able to touch him and not worry about seeing how he'd die—I'd already seen his first death—was a gift. The kissing itself was amazing.

  Toe-tinglingly, brain-meltingly amazing.

  Just when we got to the mmm part, where thoughts of finally doing more than kissing started floating through my mind, his phone started buzzing.

  I sighed, and Jack groaned.

  "You should answer that," I said, stepping back and pulling my long red hair out of the bun I'd wrapped it up into when it had become clear that I was going down the well. Jack watched, all of his attention suddenly intensely focused on what I was doing.

  "Jack?"

  "What?"

  "Shouldn't you answer your phone?"

  "Huh?" He reached out and pulled a strand of my hair through his fingers, a faint amber glow touching his eyes. "I really love your hair."

  A lovely, warm feeling of purely feminine pleasure swept through me. I'd dated before—although not much, given my problem—but never anybody like Jack. When kindness, strength, and integrity came wrapped up in a six-foot, four-inch package of pure muscle, wavy bronze hair, and a face that belonged on the shifter version of GQ magazine, it was a little hard to believe that a guy like that was dating a small-town pawnshop owner like me.

  His phone stopped buzzing, and mine started. I glanced down at the screen to see a picture of the mayor, and I sighed.

  "Oh, no."

  The mayor, also known as my Aunt Ruby, was almost certainly calling about plans for my birthday party. Since I really didn't want a birthday party this year and was actually thinking about going out of town for a few days, maybe with my best friend Molly, I'd been trying to avoid this conversation.

  I should have known better.

  "We could pretend we lost our phones," Jack said, his lips quirked up in a smile.

  "Sure. That'll work. She'll just send the police after us." Aunt Ruby hadn't quite gotten the message yet that the sheriff's department wasn't her personal law enforcement division, despite a few tactful conversations Susan Gonzalez, the new sheriff, had started with her.

  I answered the phone. "Hey, Aunt Ruby. Long time, no see."

  An hour and a half, actually, since church. I'd left her chatting with Pastor Nash about the upcoming holiday lights festival. Dead End, being a small town in the South, had more festivals than a tiger had stripes. Not that I'd ever counted Jack's when he was in his tiger form, but it was a lot.

  "Where did you run off to? We wanted you to come to lunch," she said.

  Before I could answer, I heard the low rumble of Uncle Mike's voice in the background.

  "No, I'm not telling her to leave Jack behind. Hush," she said, her voice slightly muffled.

  Uncle Mike muttered something about putting an extra steak or six on the grill, and Jack slanted a grin at me. His superior tiger hearing meant nobody had private phone conversations when he was around, a fact that Uncle Mike was well aware of, which meant my uncle was poking at my…tiger.

  Nothing new there.

  "Tell him I'll bring the steaks and some beer," Jack said, laughter in his voice.

  I passed the message along and Uncle Mike suddenly sounded more cheerful in the background.

  "He says that would be lovely," Aunt Ruby translated. "I've been too busy with mayor stuff to do much baking, Tess. Do you have any pie you could bring over?"

  "I made a pecan and an apple after work last night. I'll stop by my place and pick them up. See you in half an hour. Oh, wait—do you want to talk to Jack?"

  "No, why would I need to? You're bringing him, right?"

  "Didn't you just call him?"

  "No, not me. See you soon."

  We hung up, and Jack put his arm around me, pulling me close. "Did I ever tell you you're the perfect woman?"

  I could feel my cheeks heat up. "Well, ah…"

  "Pecan and apple," he said reverently. "It's like I've died and gone to heaven."

  I narrowed my eyes and elbowed him in the rock-hard abs. Perfect woman, my foot. He'd been talking about the pies. "That could be arranged. The dying part."

  Jack laughed and pulled his phone out of his pocket, glancing down at it and then frowning. "It was Susan."

  I could feel my whole body slump. "Oh, no. Wh
at now?"

  Calls from the sheriff rarely meant good news, and the year we'd just been through had left me with a slight case of PTSD. Too many dead bodies. Body parts. Crazed stalkers. Deranged political officials. Irish mob bosses.

  Ghost pirates.

  Leprechauns.

  Too many…just too many everything.

  "I'm inclined not to call her back. She didn't leave a message; maybe it's not important—"

  The phone started buzzing again.

  "Let's add 'maybe it's not important' to the phrases we never say, with 'what else could go wrong?' and 'it can't get any worse,' okay?" I looked around for wood to knock, salt to throw, or a bomb shelter to hide in.

  Jack put Susan on speaker. "Hey, sheriff. What's up?"

  "Hi, Susan," I said.

  "Shepherd, Tess," Susan said, sounding tired. "This is…weird."

  "Oh, there's something different," I groaned. "Weirdness in Dead End."

  Dead End was a tiny town in Florida, not too far from Orlando in terms of miles, but a million years away in terms of oddness. If aliens ever came to Earth and landed in Dead End, they'd feel right at home.

  "How weird?" Jack asked. "Dead body weird? Alligator in the house weird? Banshee weird?"

  Surprisingly enough, these were all things we'd encountered during the year.

  "Missing statue weird."

  I looked at Jack, puzzled. "What? What statue?"

  "The twelve-foot tall statue of Jedediah Shepherd, Jack's great-great however many times great grandfather? The one out in front of City Hall? Has to weigh several hundred pounds when you throw in the four-foot-tall pedestal it stands on?"

  "Yeah?"

  "It's gone. Vanished. Like it never existed."

  "What? When did that happen?" I stared at the phone and then back at Jack. "We just saw it there the other day, right, when we went for ice cream?"

  He nodded. "Friday evening."

  Susan's sigh came through the phone. "Yeah. Well, I saw it last night, at around eight. Andy saw it at midnight, when he went off shift. Our temporary guy wouldn't notice a statute if it walked up to him and bit him on the butt, so that's no help. And yet, as of nine this morning, when the first report came in, it's gone."

  I blinked. "How is that even possible?"

  Jack suddenly whipped his head to the left, staring off into the distance, and his eyes hardened. "I think I have an idea."

  I followed his gaze and saw an enormous bald eagle, beautiful and majestic, glide across the sunny November sky toward us.

  Right toward us.

  Really, really, exactly toward us.

  "Jack? Is that bird…attacking us?"

  "What?" Susan said.

  "I'll call you back, Susan," Jack said grimly, ending the call and turning to me. "I'm going to get a shotgun."

  "Jack! You can't shoot an eagle! It would be awful! And it's illegal to shoot them, anyway," I said, grabbing his arm.

  "Not this one."

  "What?"

  The eagle, still heading toward us, shrieked out a loud scream like I had never, ever heard from an eagle before.

  "That doesn't sound like an eagle. That's the call of a red-tailed hawk," I said slowly. Uncle Mike and I had done some bird watching back in the day.

  The eagle was still headed straight for us.

  "Should we run?"

  "I'm not running."

  "But the eagle—"

  "It's not an eagle."

  I backed up, preparing to run away from the not-eagle-that-sure-looked-like-an-eagle who seemed to be heading straight toward my face. "Jack. What do you mean, it's not an eagle? Also, wait! That bird is the size of a pony! That's not a normal eagle!"

  "It's not an eagle at all. It's a Scot."

  "A Scottish what?" I tried to remember any Scottish birds that looked like eagles and hung out in Florida but came up empty. "There's a Scottish crossbill, but it's only found in Scotland."

  Jack glanced at me, eyes widening. "Tess, you know the strangest facts."

  "Yeah," I said modestly. "I read a lot. I kick butt on trivia night."

  "Not a Scottish bird," he growled, still watching the eagle, which suddenly swerved, smoothly changing its flight path to soar left of where we stood and to the roof over Jack's back porch, where it landed, settled its feathers, and then stared at us. "A lying, backstabbing, treacherous Scottish thief."

  He caught my hand in his to stop me when I took a step toward the porch, shaking his head. "Trust me, you don't want to get any closer."

  A shimmer of light and magic, very similar to the one that surrounded Jack when he shifted shape, formed around the eagle and, moments later, a very large—and very naked—man sat on the roof in its place.

  My mouth fell open, but I couldn't think of any words that could fit the situation. Jack said a stream of them, but they sounded like very bad words in a language I didn't know.

  And the eagle—now man—laughed at us both.

  "Jack, Jack, Jack. That's not very nice, and it's not true, either." The eagle man winked at me. "When I stabbed you, it wasn't in your back."

  3

  Tess

  "You stabbed Jack?" I made sure I was only looking at the naked eagle shifter's eyes, but my own narrowed. "You might want to just fly right back on out of here, bird man."

  The man flipped long, black hair back out of his face and laughed down at me, amusement shining in his dark blue eyes. He was ruggedly handsome, like a guy you'd see on one of those outdoor shows on the Discovery channel. Or maybe he could host his own show:

  Naked and Definitely Not Afraid

  "Leave, Mackenzie. Now," Jack said, glints of amber fire in his green eyes.

  Oh, boy. When the tiger's eyes started showing through, somebody was in trouble. A man who'd previously stabbed Jack would seem to be number one on the list.

  "I can jump down right now, if you're sure your lady can handle all this awesomeness. Wouldn't want her to make any unfortunate comparisons, would we now?" Mackenzie's Scottish accent almost charmed me into not realizing he was threatening to hop down off the roof stark naked. And looking at naked strangers probably wasn't something I should do right after church. Seemed wrong, somehow.

  I threw my hands in the air when Jack just stood there glaring at the man, saying nothing, and then I sighed and ran into the house to grab some of Jack's clothes for him to wear. But when I came back out with a pair of jeans and an old flannel shirt, Mackenzie was already dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a Glenmorangie sweatshirt, standing a safe-ish five feet away from Jack.

  I put the clothes down on a chair on the porch and walked over to Jack, figuring that asking where he got the clothes was beyond the realms of shifter etiquette. "So, are you going to introduce me?"

  "No," Jack said. "He was just leaving."

  "Logan Mackenzie at your service, beautiful lady," the man said, grinning at me with a look of purely wicked flirtation on his face. He was maybe six feet tall or a little less, closer to my five eight than Jack's six four, and he was all long lines and muscle, like Jack. Maybe all shifters were like that? From the hard work of all that shifting? I'd have to ask Jack about it later.

  "Tess Callahan," I said automatically, because apparently even finding out that the man had stabbed Jack didn't override a lifetime's conditioning in good Southern manners.

  Jack stepped between us when Logan started toward me with his hand out.

  "Tess doesn't touch people. And I warned you what would happen if I ever saw you again. I wasn't kidding. Your last favor from me was when I didn't break your arm after you left that knife in my side."