Catastrophe

by Liz Schulte

It was the first legitimately honest thing he had said all night…or a hell of a good lie. However, the past couldn’t be ignored. Every time I had ever trusted him, he stabbed me in the back. Every. Single. Time. The first time was on him. The second time was on me. A third time and… I closed my eyes. “Take the chains off.”

  This was such a bad idea.

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  I didn’t respond to Corbin.

  “What about the curse?”

  “I can control it,” Thomas said. “I have managed this long.”

  Finally I opened my eyes. “Have you been in the house, Corbin?”

  Corbin’s jaw flexed.

  “That’s what I thought.” Everything in me said this was wrong and that Thomas knew exactly what he was doing. Everything but one part: my stupid, stupid heart. It said he deserved a chance to redeem himself before he died. I wouldn’t stop Corbin from killing him, but I could give Thomas a chance to do one good thing in his life. To just once make the right decision. “We need him. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we need his expertise. We don’t have to trust him.”

  Corbin looked disgusted. “I think you like it a little more than I do.” But he undid the chains, dropping them to the floor and standing with his back to the wall, ready for an attack.

  Thomas cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. “Much better. Do you have a pen and paper?”

  “No,” I said. “You’ll have to make do.”

  “Fine.” He leaned over the table and drew a box with his finger. “This is the house. There’s an entrance here and here.” He marked the invisible box with Xs at the front and back of the structure. “Most of the windows stay shuttered all the time, and several of them are bricked over on the inside.”

  “How do we get in?” Corbin asked.

  “One of the doors will be the easiest way. Security cameras are set up covering every inch of the outdoors, and humans are employed to keep up appearances.”

  “I am not really hearing a lot of solutions from you,” I said.

  He held up his finger. “Patience. The time you selected to attack is probably the best. There will be a guard shift change, from vampire to human. The humans will be easier to subdue.”

  “We’re not hurting any more humans.”

  “You don’t have to kill them. Just knock them out. They’ll be fine. Whatever you do, it will have to be quiet and fast. From the time you enter, you will only have seconds to make it inside. If we try to cause a distraction or interrupt the security camera feed, they will know they are under attack. How are you at picking locks?”

  “The lock won’t be a problem.” The hand of glory would take care of that. It would get us through any locked door, no matter what sort of lock was on it.

  Thomas gave me a dubious look. “It has to be fast.”

  “She said she has it covered,” Corbin said.

  Of all people, Thomas was the last one who needed to know I possessed the hand. Corbin only knew because he was with me the one and only time I’d used it before now. Sy had wanted me to destroy the hand, and that was probably what I should have done, but I couldn’t deny it was a useful tool, and I hated to get rid of it.

  “Where do we go inside?”

  “That depends on which door we go through,” Thomas said. “I think we should go for the front. First, those cameras will have more human traffic. So they will be less likely to notice if someone walks by. Second, if they are waiting for an attack, they will expect the back.”

  Corbin shook his head. “It doesn’t matter how we go in. They are going to see us. We have to go in fast and hard enough that they don’t have time to respond. No matter what he thinks, Paolo doesn’t hire fools. Well, except for maybe one.” He gave Thomas a pointed look.

  “Okay, how about this? We blast by the humans at vampire speed—I’ll hitch a ride with Corbin—kill the initial inside guards, and then charge Paolo’s bedroom. He won’t have any choice but to face us. If we take out the downstairs guards, then how many would he have still with him?”

  “Hard to say,” Corbin said. “What about the elf? Can’t Sy just transport us inside?”

  “Sy’s not going to get involved. This is our fight. He isn’t an option any more than Selene is,” I said.

  Corbin quirked an eyebrow, but nodded. “Then we’ll do it the hard way. Chances are before we clear the guards, Paolo will hear us and descend with everyone he has left.”

  Thomas nodded. “That’s probably right.”

  “Okay, then we’ll be ready.” I stood up. “I’m going to see what Sy and Dempsey have come up with.”

  The pictures and stats of all the victims were laid out in chronological order, starting with Gus. Oddly though, the next three victims were human. Why would a human go to visit a ghoul? I picked up the file on the human and scanned the details, looking for anything that would point me in the right direction. Maybe she had been visiting the cemetery. “Humans can’t see ghouls, right?”

  “Not unless her eyes were opened or she’s a witch,” Sy said.

  A pair of my pants stuck out of the duffel bag. The corner of the note Thomas had sent me was sticking out of the pocket. I hadn’t checked the pockets in Falcon’s clothes. She had to have found something, or why did the skinwalker kill her or the others? I grabbed her bag and sank down to my knees as I rifled through all of her pockets, until my fingers hit a slip of paper. It was a receipt, but on the back was written, “Coven: Patricia, Helen, Virginia, Alice, and Marie.” I looked back down at the names of the humans.

  “They’re witches. Falcon knew,” I said. “I didn’t think about checking her pockets, and the hotels cleared most of the other rooms.”

  Sy smiled. “That explains how the skinwalker chose those three. You didn’t find a connection between them?” he asked Dempsey.

  Dempsey shook his head. “They didn’t live near each other, and as far as we could tell, they had never met.”

  Maybe each one had noticed something was off about the other one when the body was snatched. Whatever it was, Hatchet must have caught on too, because he was the next victim. “How long did it take for you to notice Hatchet was gone?”

  Sy shook his head. “Not long. I had a weird phone call from him. Hatchet never called in, but he did and said it was a werewolf and I needed to come help. I told him to take care of it. Then he didn’t call back. That’s when I sent Falcon.”

  Falcon had gone looking for Hatchet. So it was possible she’d followed his trail directly to the elf, who was the next victim in line. I nodded. “What do we know about the elf?”

  “Not much. Loner. Friends with Hatchet, I think.”

  And so we went down the line until McNeil, and then the trail dried up. We couldn’t connect McNeil to any of the following human deaths. I took out the loup-garou murders, which left only a couple that fell somewhere between the two types of crimes scenes. They had the same staged feeling, but looked more loup-garou-like in the violence.

  “What did McNeil do while she was here?”

  Sy crossed to look at the picture of her crime scene. “I’m not sure. I told her to get in touch with Amos, and I warned him she was coming. He said she never contacted him.”

  I frowned. That wasn’t the impression I had when I spoke with him. I thought back over our time together. Every time I held a knife to him, he’d stiffen and never fight back. Then earlier tonight I’d stabbed him—accidentally, but I still stabbed him. “Can I see that tattoo again?” I asked.

  Sy tossed me the bag with the skin, and I laid it out on the floor, spreading it flat. I’d only seen the tattoo once, but I remembered it fairly well. I wet my finger and ran it over the smudge at the top then checked the tip. What were the chances that Amos had a fake tattoo? “This isn’t Amos. Amos wasn’t Amos,” I said. “I think I was working with the skinwalker the whole time. The tattoo isn’t real. The skinwalker took McNeil and then took Amos. I thought it was weird that Amos never used his ability to change h
is appearance. If I were a doppelganger, I’d do it all the time. But, I figured it just wasn’t his thing. But he couldn’t because he was the skinwalker.”

  “Why leave you the skin?” Dempsey chimed in. “Announcing who he was…it doesn’t make sense. What would it get from doing that?”

  “That depends on what it wants,” Sy said. “If it wants the council, then maybe it does make sense.”

  “What about these people?” Dempsey asked, tapping each file that came after McNeil. “Why did he take them?”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “They were decoys. The skinwalker wanted the council involved. Even as Hatchet he called Sy and told him there was a wolf. Obviously, he had never seen a wolf attack, because none of these scenes actually looked wolflike at all. He used McNeil to get to Amos, who was the last host body the skinwalker took, before today. I think that’s why he didn’t come after me. Amos had better connections. Had I not accidentally stabbed him, he could have stayed in there until it got what it wanted. Now it could be anyone.” Including anyone in this room—except for Sy, who had already been tested.

  I looked at Dempsey, who held up his hands. “You want to test me, don’t you?” he said as he took out a knife and ran it down the top of his forearm. Blood welled, but he didn’t appear to be in a lot of pain. “Satisfied?” He held it out to me so I could see the cut. I nodded and he pulled his sleeve back down.

  Who else could it be? Corbin and Thomas had been here the whole time. Neither of them could have left the skin for me. The three vampires in my room were dead. It wanted me to see something. Did it have to do with the tattoo? “Do you recognize this?” I asked Sy.

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t have any significance to me. Do you have any other idea who the skinwalker could have taken?”

  I shook my head as we hit another wall. “After Paolo’s, I will start looking for them.”

  “What do you think he wants?” Dempsey asked.

  It wanted the council down here. The only reason I could think for that was that it wanted someone on the council, but I couldn’t say why. Was it striving for position or revenge?

  “You know, if the skinwalker wanted to get to the council and it took Amos, it’s possible a council member came to see him after you left again. They weren’t happy with his inability to control you. They expected more,” Sy said, obviously on the same track as me.

  I snorted. “I expected more from them.”

  Sy shifted his feet. “I told them that they had to let you work, that you didn’t like to be micromanaged, but Leilah wasn’t a fan of that idea. She likes to be in control.”

  “Dragons.” I shook my head. “So basically you’re saying the skinwalker might already be a council member,” I said. Well, that would suck. In any of their forms, it would make it infinitely harder to take it down.

  Sy nodded. “It’s a possibility. At the very least, it is worth checking out.”

  “The only thing that really bothers me is why did he wait this long? I mean, you can pretty much see them whenever you want. Why not call them and immediately take the one you want? Obviously not the whole council, but tricking one member into seeing you wouldn’t be hard. One prayer and Holden would be here within minutes.”

  “Amos wasn’t like me. He didn’t know them. And him asking for a meeting would definitely be suspicious. That’s why he petitioned that we take care of this ‘werewolf’ issue. He couldn’t get a meeting. Not before Leilah had the idea to send you. The council is selective in who it chooses to hear. Even among the people it employs. The council prefers to call the meetings than to appear for them.”

  So Leilah sent me down here and then skinwalker Amos pushed me toward the vampires. He told me the council was corrupt and that they were basically willing to sacrifice me for the sake of vampire peace. “And that’s the only reason I was sent. Leilah’s whim.”

  Sy shook his head. “No. You were sent because you agreed to come. Other than that, I don’t know why she chose you, not for certain. I suspect you aren’t far off in your suspicion that she was helping Paolo.” He stood up. “Clear the slate with Paolo and catch the skinwalker. Holden and I will stand with you before the council. We will get to the bottom of what happened here.”

  I nodded, standing next to him.

  Sy leaned down and pressed his lips against my temple. “Be careful, Femi. I expect you to come back. If you have any trouble, get word to Olivia. She will send us.” A moment later, he vanished from the room.

  “You want a lift back to the city?” I asked Dempsey, who stared at the spot where Sy had been with a grim expression. The poor guy’s head would probably explode. I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes.

  He blinked and looked at me. “What was that?”

  “We’re about to head back to the city. You coming or staying?”

  “I’ll come,” he said. He was pale and the bags under his eyes were getting darker. It was easy to forget how fragile humans were. “What’s next? What can I do?”

  “Nothing at all. You get to go home, and I will call you in the morning to let you know how it went.”

  Chapter 22