Never Cry Werewolf

by L. A. Banks

  “Demon-infected?” Shogun leaned forward and gave Hunter a glance. “When we went to the location of the second victim in the bayou, there was no sulfur trail.”

  “That’s true,” Hunter said, dropping his voice even lower as he sat forward at the table, leaning on his forearms.

  “Yeah, but we picked it up out there in the bayou,” Sasha said, sending her gaze around the group. “It was thick inside the old Bayou House, as well as out by the kill locations.”

  “But it definitely wasn’t at the site of the second victim or even near where the first one was thrown in the alley in the French Quarter,” Hunter insisted.

  “Maybe the sulfur you guys picked up at the Bayou House was from the past and not fresh. There was all sorts of insanity going on at that house—and you said yourselves that humans had mucked up the scent trail.” Sir Rodney glanced around the table to see if his theory had any takers, then pressed on. “What if an infected Were came out of the demon doors through that house during all the hullaballoo that took place out there before or something?”

  “It could have been old scents that lingered from a time past,” Hunter said. “The scent was so mild, so dissipated, I couldn’t tell.”

  “Neither could I,” Sasha admitted. “If it was a brand-new Were who’d just come through the demon doors, I’d still be tasting sulfur at the back of my throat.”

  Shogun nodded. “It takes days to get that pungent sickness out of our sinuses, Rodney. If my aunt was recently infected, she would have left a reeking trail, not a faint one. That had to be old.”

  “All right,” Sir Rodney conceded. “But we do know for a fact that, based on what you guys sniffed, Lady Jung Suk killed those first two humans. My curiosity is that she actually ate her victims—two females and four men.” He glanced at Shogun and held his gaze. “I thought Weres of any kind abhorred human flesh unless they were infected?”

  Shogun nodded and let out a long breath before pushing back from the table. “Normally, we do. But my aunt is Old World and enjoys forbidden things . . . to her human flesh is probably a delicacy—not to mention that she’s one really twisted bitch.”

  “Aw, come on Esmeralda, have a heart.” Sir Rodney leaned against the living room arch and smiled at the distraught woman before him.

  Esmeralda was gorgeous, and it was hard to separate his mission to get information from her voluptuous form and Creole face. Her hair was a natural, stunning auburn: a lush thicket of deep red tresses that seemed so satiny, men yearned to touch it. She’d formed her kissable pink mouth into a defiant pout and had folded her graceful arms over her ample breasts. Not giving an inch, her hazel eyes stared at him directly as she spoke in a hushed, sensual southern drawl.

  “I am so not about to get in between anything going on with the Vampires, Rodney, you know that. Why would you even try to put me in a position like that?”

  “Because you’re my favorite girl,” he said smiling, pushing off the wall of her antebellum town house. “And because you are the best at what you do.”

  “With friends like you, who needs enemies?” she fussed as his hands lightly rested on her shoulders.

  “I’m not asking you to get involved, I’m asking for information—basic information.”

  She turned her face away. “Yeah, right. Don’t even try to glamour me, I’m immune.”

  “And I am hurt, shocked, and appalled that you would think I’d do something like that to you, love.”

  She smirked. “Uh-huh . . . I can tell the time of the month by you—isn’t it every three weeks you want to come by and talk, and that winds up being the last thing we do?”

  “Ah, now I am truly wounded,” he said, smiling broadly and covering his heart with a palm. He theatrically hung his head. “It’s just that every so many weeks, just at the new moon, I am captured anew by your spell, milady.”

  She laughed and then entered his embrace. “Go away, you horny man.”

  “I just want a little information that could keep me in my glamour.”

  “Okay, what?” she said with an exasperated sigh.

  “If there was, say, a disembodied spirit that wanted to enter a body . . . who around here has the expertise to allow that to happen? Could the Vampires do that alone?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on, love. Please relent from the one-word answers. You’ve now cleared the Vampires of being able to do this deed and I trust you. My own advisors said as much, too.”

  “Then why are you asking me?”

  Sir Rodney clucked his tongue. “Woman, thou art as fickle as the wind, and now my crime against this is consulting my advisors . . . Oh, the shame of it all.”

  Esmeralda laughed and looked up into Sir Rodney’s multihued gaze, giving in to his attempt to glamour her. “They can’t do it without help because they don’t have souls, and they need one stronger spirit to be able to overtake the victim’s and essentially duke it out inside the new body, just as that body’s life force and will are weakest.”

  “Sounds diabolical,” he murmured, sobering as he listened.

  “It is, and a lot of people can’t do it because you’ve got to be willing to play with your own soul, to roll the dice, so to speak. If there’s a moment of hesitation, the victim’s spirit can fight off the taker’s spirit and leave it in limbo while the body dies . . . but then the two that have been joined, when the taker was trying to pattern over the new spirit, start heading toward the Light where all innocents go. Problem is, a taker isn’t going in that direction—so they scorch on impact with the Light. That’s why a lot of witches don’t do those types of spells. It’s very advanced, very risky, and just isn’t worth it.”

  “So nobody around here is actually qualified or predisposed, even for a grand amount of money, to take that risk?”

  “Hell no, sugah. In all honesty, what you’re talking about is a very old and complicated spell. It needs a victim—but that’s the easy part . . . the delicate part is making the transfer at the exact moment the victim expires.” She shook her head. “I don’t know anybody locally with that know-how. You might have to travel up to Salem, Massachusetts, or head to London to some of the older covens. That’s the best advice I can give you.”

  It was the last thing he’d expected to see when he came out of the shadows at the baron’s old manor house. Rather than it being eerily abandoned and burned out, and the perimeter surrounded by armed human henchmen, there were construction bulldozers and normal work crews going about the business of razing the old house with the obvious intent of rebuilding. This was not the quiet lair of a demon-infected Were Leopard in hiding. Hunter sniffed the air. Not even the mildest hint of sulfur came to him.

  Finding the Chens had been a stroke of dumb luck, but he’d gladly take leads from any source he could get. Shogun entered the small convenience store that had a pretty young girl’s picture in the window with an urgent parental message written above it in neat Chinese calligraphy. The request for help to find their missing daughter was heartrending; other locals had pointed him toward the herbal apothecary, who’d sent him on a zigzag mission through the fish market, whose proprietors pointed him to a boutique owner, who remembered seeing a small sign about a lost girl at a convenience store next to a take-out joint.

  It would have been so much easier and would have saved time if there were signs posted all over. But Shogun censored himself and let go of the frustration, knowing that was not the Chinese way. The law-abiding citizenry believed in following the rules. If the police said to wait several days before a true missing persons report could be filed, they would accept that fate. They were also very private, and so it was only logical that their pleas for help would be a small cry done in a dignified way. But that did not diminish their pain.

  Shogun stood outside for a moment, looking at the young woman’s face, her smile, assessing her delicate features. He steeled himself before he entered the store, knowing that her parents’ pain would carve a hole in his soul. If he had a chil
d, losing her like this would be unbearable. The many losses he’d already endured began to awaken within him as he pushed on the door and heard the light chime.

  A weary-looking man peered at him from behind a counter that was surrounded with bulletproof glass. His tired wife shuffled out to stand at the register, waiting on his purchase decision.

  “Lottery?” she asked in a flat tone, observing that he hadn’t brought any grocery items to the counter. “We close soon. Curfew.”

  Shogun hesitated, almost hating to use the phony badge as a ruse now, because he knew it would only inspire hope in the distraught couple. “I have a few questions about your daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Chen. I am so sorry for your loss.” Shogun produced the badge, and immediately the owners ran to the side door beside the glass and unlatched it.

  “Come in, come in,” Mr. Chen said eagerly and then ran to the front door, bolted it, and flipped over the CLOSED sign. “You have news?”

  His wife clutched her hands to her chest as though in prayer, and then squeezed her eyes shut. Two big tears rolled down her weathered cheeks and she spoke quickly in broken English. “My daughter is good girl—she no out at parties! She no have boyfriend! She study hard, work hard!”

  Mrs. Chen’s sob drew Shogun to her as he tried to comfort her and usher her to the back room with her husband. “I know, ma’am, I know,” he said, and then lapsed into Mandarin to ease communications.

  “Have you found her?” Mr. Chen asked, his voice hesitant and unsure. “Alive . . . please, say alive.”

  Mrs. Chen released a bloodcurdling wail, her pain like claws against Shogun’s conscience. “I keep the incense lit for her soul,” she wailed, pounding her chest with her clasped fists. “My only child, I will call the ancestors, I will make medicine. I will call the ghosts . . . I will beg the Dragons, but my only child cannot be taken away from me like this!”

  “We thank God that the authorities sent you—someone from our people,” Mr. Chen said, beginning to tear. “Someone who knows our community, who cares about one missing girl and knows that she matters to us, even if she does not matter to others.”

  Shogun covered Mrs. Chen’s hands with his own, almost unable to look into the poor woman’s face as he spoke to the couple. “I care, sir. I . . . my heart goes out to you both. We have not found her yet, but we will look for her until we do. Please, if I can ask you questions about the last time you saw her, about where she was and who she was with . . . what her normal patterns were . . . then we will start from there.”

  CHAPTER 14

  She hated dead ends worse than she hated demon doors. Sasha clicked off the cell phone call with Hunter and stashed it in her back jeans pocket. This was so not what she’d wanted to hear. Sir Rodney’s message wasn’t much better. Two damned bars left and she needed to find a charger, or else by the time Shogun tried her, her phone would be dead.

  Mentally crossing another name off her list, she glanced at the sky. In less than an hour it would be dark. Shogun would have to be headed into the sidhe with Sir Rodney. She wanted to kick herself for all the precious time that had been squandered today. The news had finally released the names of the two victims, a young blond co-ed and her Goth boyfriend . . . couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. Sasha shook her head. What a waste. Somebody’s parents were probably laid out prostrate with grief over this and couldn’t even tell their child good-bye—this was a definite closed-casket scenario.

  But at least a diligent journalist had given her a name trail. With the sun going down, any student who lived on campus or in the surrounding apartment areas would be home. The curfew was a blessing, in that regard. Wouldn’t be too hard to find the friends who had commented on the news. Walking across the rolling expanse of the campus, Sasha whipped out her cell phone and called Winters. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Hey, dude—can you go on Facebook and tell me the names of all the people who sent in RIP stuff for the two kids from Tulane who got killed?”

  Sasha had to pull the phone away from her ear as Winters’s excited voice assaulted her sensitive hearing.

  “When are you gonna let me strap you with a Crack-Berry or like an iPhone, Captain? Or I could get you a Palm Pre, if you wanted to go light . . . Do you know how many apps are out there these days—stuff that can solve almost every issue you have in the field—but nooo. Oh, my God, tell me you did not call me to do an FB search—like, that is so—”

  “Winters, my phone is dying. I left my charger because I didn’t expect to be gone all day. The stores are all pulling down their grates because of the curfew, and—”

  “So do your shadow thing and go get a new charger from Radio Shack, c’mon.”

  His comment annoyed her, but she had to smile. She hadn’t thought of that. Somehow stealing stuff was always a remote thought . . . Now, blowing stuff up, that she was good at. “Okay,” she finally said in a huff.

  “You sure you don’t want us to investigate something sexier than that for you—like I could hack into the Pentagon—”

  “Noooo,” Sasha said, shaking her head. “Just a nice, clean, legal search, thank you very much.”

  “Fine. Gimme a coupla minutes. Go find a charger, juice up, and I’ll call you back.”

  “Oh, man, here we go.” The local police officer wiped the sweat from his brow as he spoke to his partner. “I get so tired of this stupid shit, Dwayne, I’m about to turn in my badge.”

  “Yeah, it isn’t even dark and the crazies are out. What is it about screwing with mausoleums, huh, Leroy? Why desecrate the dead? That is so disgusting.” He peered in and held his nose. “Man, the bodies ain’t even in the caskets.”

  “What? Don’t tell me some old maggoty bones were left on the ground for stray dogs to yank all over the place—that is so nasty!”

  “Naw, man. The bodies ain’t in there.”

  “You think we should bother calling this in, with all the hell that’s been breaking loose here lately?”

  “Do you wanna be standing in a graveyard all night on vandalism detail all because a couple of punks turned over some old-ass graves and flung ashes everywhere? Because the bodies are missing, you and I both know that’s a lot of paperwork for felonious acts, taking it up from just being a stupid pledge prank. So you tell me, partner, if that’s what you wanna do tonight.”

  “Hell to the no, partner. Put it in the report tomorrow morning . . . we could say we had to respond to a more immediate situation, but we’ll report it so the family can get their insurance claim. You know, tell the truth all way up till the last part . . . we got the anonymous tip that something was going on over here, we came, we saw, and then we had to leave to provide backup to another officer.”

  He whipped out his cell phone and called their buddies in another squad car. As soon as the call picked up, he hit SPEAKER. “Yo, Jeff, we got us a bullshit detail here, wanna ask for some backup? No, not you coming to us, us coming to you. Isn’t there a curfew violator that’s getting a little rowdy?”

  Laughter filled the cell phone and the officers pounded each other’s fists.

  “Cool.”

  They both looked at each other as their NOPD patrol car radio squawked.

  “Like I said, we had to pursue another incident of higher priority.”

  Sasha tapped her foot as she waited for her phone to charge while sitting in the back of the darkened electronics store. Everything seemed to be hurry up and wait, and she was glad to at least be able to write down a list of names provided by Winters.

  “Slow down, slow down, Sparky,” she said, writing the names down quickly on the back of some receipt paper she’d pilfered. “Can you give me a sublist—like kids they went to school with from around here.” She let her breath out hard. “I know there are hundreds of condolence notes on there. Well, if you’re gonna whine, put Clarissa on the phone.”

  All her old contacts were still in hiding in the sidhe, including Ethan McGregor and his family. It would have been a big help to have
his wife, Margaret, a nurse from Tulane Hospital, on the scene. But who could blame the couple for going on hiatus until every evil being involved in that last big debacle was brought to justice? The McGregors had kids to worry about; in their position she’d be locked away in the sidhe, too. Then there was the little Pixie who lived in the teahouse gardens, or used to, anyway . . . it would have been great to ask her if she’d experienced any more Were invasions on the grounds, but she was long gone, too.

  Sasha kept walking. Most of the kids on the FB pages that Winters had hacked lived in off-campus apartments. There was a common theme, though: It seemed to be a Goth crowd, based on what he’d told her. The couple of pics he’d sent confirmed it, and she was sure if the police and FBI were diligently doing their jobs like she assumed, none of these kids would want to talk to anybody with a badge. On the other hand, after having interviewed the first five very tearful teens, even the sublist of twenty-five students to talk to seemed daunting.

  She took out her cell phone again and looked at the pics. Maybe she was going about this all wrong. The FB comments from some of the friends of the victims had a decidedly Vampire-like theme. Zeroing in on the angrier responses, she studied Fanglegnd4eva. You guys were supposed to live 4ever—this sux.

  Okaaaay . . . Sasha quickly called Winters back. “Dude,” she said, beginning to jog. “Can you get into Fanglegnd4eva’s page? This guy seems really ticked about their deaths.”

  “A lot of people process their grief by getting pissed off, Trudeau. My two seconds of pop psych for the trouble.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, listening to Winters’s fingers click the keyboard. “But he made your top twenty-five list because he kept posting and posting, asking them if they’d ‘come back,’ and then challenged them to not forget their friends, right?”