Wild Card

by Mark Henwick

  I crept forward along the side of the tool shed, careful of a coiled hose tossed carelessly nearby. A wide barbeque grill smelling of yesterday’s steaks distracted me as I slipped past, but underneath that was the smell I was hunting.

  Something was wrong. I could lie to myself all night, but every step was more and more reluctant. My body was screaming at me to get out. My hands trembled. Fearful, formless images boiled out of some unmappable corner of my mind.

  I froze, unable to go further.

  And strong arms reached out of the blackness and snatched me into a nightmare.

  Chapter 17

  Fear exploding in my gut. Helplessness. Violation. Shame.

  I lash out. There’s nothing there, it’s not me, but I have to strike out. There’s nothing solid behind the swamping wave of emotion, but if I don’t fight, I’ll drown.

  It’s not me! It’s just Jen’s emotions boiling out of my strongbox. They can’t harm me. Just emotions. No memories to tie them to.

  But what follows out of the strongbox is different, and it is mine, and it does have memories.

  Hands gripping me, wrist and ankle, even though I’m barely struggling. I can’t fight. Something very wrong. Weak. Can’t focus. Pain. Oh, no. No. Stop. Please. I’m screaming and screaming and they don’t listen.

  On and on.

  Couldn’t fight there. But I can fight here. Now. Training forgotten. Mindless swinging and kicking. Screaming. Pathetic, thin sound. So scared. Pain as I connect. Blood. Wooden bench rocking, gardening tools scattering, flesh. Hit there, there! Fight.

  A grip on my wrists. So strong.

  NO! NO! Desperation. Must fight.

  Helpless.

  Defenseless.

  Drowning in despair.

  “Amber! Amber! For God’s sake, it’s me.”

  The screaming stopped. It had been my voice.

  Pack!

  Alex is here. Alex. Pack!

  I was safe if it was Alex. Safe. There was nothing behind the emotions. They weren’t even mine.

  I twisted away. He let me go and I fell onto my knees in the doorway of the shed, and vomited on the ground until my wracked and twisted gut told me there was nothing left.

  I felt his hand on my back and shuddered. He took it away quickly.

  A breeze blew across the garden and cooled the sweat on my face.

  I sat back on my heels, concentrated on deep, even breathing.

  Behind the maelstrom of stolen emotions came my own anger. Anger at myself for getting into this situation, and anger at everyone else who’d been involved. It was unjustified, but it was clean and clear anger, it was my anger, it had a source and a reason. I used it to push the other emotions back.

  Pack it all back into the strongbox.

  Only, it didn’t seem to fit anymore, like a vacation suitcase on the trip home. Random chills continued to slither through me, echoes of the tumult that had struck me. My skin prickled.

  On instinct, I took off my bracelet. Mary had given it to me. It had an Adept energy cast on it that had reliably warned me of danger in the past.

  The skin sensations died away.

  A quiet corner of my mind noted that Adept workings could go wrong. Like a computer program, the bracelet spell needed information from me and if I gave it the wrong information, it gave the wrong result.

  What a frigging wreck. While Olivia was distracting Ricky in his house, I was meant to be in Ricky’s garden making out with Alex. Instead, we’d triggered a meltdown, Jen’s emotions and long buried memories of my own like a volcano exploding in my head.

  I was so broken I couldn’t get intimate with either of my kin.

  As hesitantly as Alex’s hand, the feeling of our bond link crept into my mind. Clever man to use that. The sense of him was as dark as Jen’s was light, but warm and welcoming.

  Alex radiated comfort. And underneath that, bewilderment.

  You and me both.

  The gentle pressure that was Alex in my mind seemed to flow suddenly. I looked around and came eye to eye with his wolf.

  That spiked my heart, but I could handle it. He was scary, but I could see him; he wasn’t some formless, overwhelming panic that had sprung out of nowhere.

  Cautiously, he sidled alongside. In this form, his worry for me made his breath whine, but it didn’t trigger a reaction from me. The strongbox stayed mostly closed. I slipped my arms around him and buried my face in his pale ruff.

  “That’s clever, wolfy,” I whispered, crying into his fur. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I got a cold, wet nose against my shoulder for that, and a tender little gnawing of teeth against my skin. Dumb to be less scared by that than the phantoms in my head. Teeth like those were dangerous, capable of breaking my bones with a single bite. But that I could manage. That was about as back-to-front broken as I could imagine.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  “It’s shit, Bian, complete shit.”

  “Calm down.”

  That wasn’t a mistake she would have made if we were face to face. As it was, I was calling her while driving back to Manassah and her comment made everything worse. I was alone, having left Olivia so successfully distracting Ricky that the man had no idea what had been happening in his back yard.

  At least my plan for Olivia and Ricky had worked.

  And it was good I was alone, because that gave me the leeway to shout at Bian.

  “I’ll calm down when I’m dead. I don’t care about being thrown in the deep end, but it’s not just me. Saving David’s life nearly cost three lives because nothing had been explained to me. You and Skylur forced me into healing Jen without any idea what I was doing, and that’s completely screwed things with both my kin. I have to stay away from Jen because I might infuse her, and I can’t get near Alex without having flashbacks of Jen’s rape. Why the hell should I be calming down?”

  “Because yelling isn’t helping.”

  “Nothing’s helping. No one’s helping. I need time to get help. We all need Diana back in Denver. That’s what I should be doing.”

  “I understand this is causing problems with your kin—”

  “My kin are being so frigging understanding, it’s setting my teeth on edge.”

  “But you’ve agreed to help the pack find the rogue.”

  “I can’t handle the hunt for the rogue if I’m liable to have a breakdown any second, however much Skylur wants me to do it for Altau. For that matter, you’re all telling me I could go rogue myself at any time. And I can’t be a liaison with the Were because I don’t know what Altau wants and Skylur doesn’t trust me enough to tell me. I’m neither Were nor Athanate. I’m not going to—”

  “But you are our liaison.”

  “I was and I’ve reported back that the pack isn’t going to do what you asked. Now I’ve resigned. Access to my Mentor is a right, isn’t it? As far as we know, Diana’s in New Mexico. I’m going there to find her.”

  I hated this. I never backed away from tasks I’d taken on. It made me even madder that I couldn’t see any way around it. And going on like this with Bian was hardly likely to get me the favor I needed for Tullah—an introduction to someone in the Empire of Heaven so I could arrange contacts between the Chinese Adepts and Mary.

  Whichever way I went, something failed.

  If I went to New Mexico and found Diana, maybe she could help me with the mess inside my head. Then I might have a chance of learning to being useful around here instead of a liability. I needed to visit New Mexico anyway. When I’d offered to help Larry escape from Matlal just before the Assembly, I’d taken on an obligation to him. And even though he’d been killed by Matlal, the obligation remained to rescue his kin down in Albuquerque.

  “Let’s discuss this with Skylur at the reception tomorrow,” she said. “You think you’re okay for that?”

  “I don’t know, Bian. Tell me everything I could possibly do at the reception that might get me into trouble.”

  “Amber—”


  I’d been so focused on the conversation, the squawk of the siren and single, lazy spin of the blue police lights in my mirror shocked me.

  “Crap, got to go. Police.” I ended the call, kicking myself as I slowed. What kind of a blind, dumb-ass, walking target was I making of myself if I couldn’t even spot a police cruiser coming up behind me?

  And why the hell was I being pulled over?

  How easy would it be for the Nagas to lift a police car?

  I slid the HK out and sank into my seat. Trying to make myself a smaller target was pretty futile when the Nagas were taking out vans with RPGs.

  But I recognized the figure trotting up to my door and let the HK go.

  I tried for normality. “José, you been demoted back to cruisers?”

  “Can it. Got a call from Edmunds, gotta go, now.”

  We ran back to his cruiser and he drove us away with roadside gravel spraying from the wheels.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a murder. I don’t know what else,” he said. He looked embarrassed. “Wally and I, we worked out a code for talking over the radio with other people listening.”

  “I remember. You called Lieutenant Edmunds on his cell and said ‘game’s off’ when you had to close down Project Snakebite.”

  “Yeah. Maybe not that dramatic tonight, but he used a couple of words, ‘timely’ and ‘cowboy.’ That’s top priority, get here now, and bring you. Couldn’t raise you on your cell, and Jen said she didn’t know when you’d be back in. I was driving by on the chance. Just plain luck I spotted your car.”

  I rubbed my face with my hands. “I’m not sure I can help, José, I’m kinda losing it here. In fact, I may need to go away for a while.”

  “Huh?” He looked surprised.

  “I don’t want to talk about it now. How far have we got to go?”

  “Here already,” he said. We’d barely gone a mile. “Wash Park.” And he turned onto South Vineyard Street.

  “No.” I felt the first premonition of what was about to hit me. My voice shook. I couldn’t handle this. I was still a mess from my disaster with Alex.

  José turned and look at me. “What’s up?”

  “Number?” My voice sounded hoarse.

  “971.”

  “No,” I said again, as if repeating it would make it change. I stared at the familiar small bungalow coming up. “No.”

  Another cruiser was already there. The house lights were on. Curtains drawn. Yellow crime scene tape. Uniforms standing guard.

  José pulled up outside the house my family and I had been living in, all those years ago, when my dad died.

  Chapter 18

  It got worse inside.

  From the hall, we could see an elderly man who had been tied up and killed. His throat had been torn open in the living room. Blood soaked the carpet and had sprayed over the furniture and walls. Around the body, there were what looked like paw prints in blood.

  But I knew, somehow, that wasn’t what I’d been brought to see.

  José hadn’t known this was where I’d once lived, and I doubted Edmunds had any idea either. I wasn’t going to believe the choice of this house for a murder was a coincidence. This was aimed at me. That told me that there was one specific room in the house that the killer would use for whatever sick message they wanted to communicate.

  We took plastic booties and gloves from the crime scene kit beside the front door, and I put them on with trembling fingers and a churning stomach. I breathed shallowly. My Were sense of smell was an advantage in warning me there was more to come, and it was a massive liability in the depth of detail it was feeding me. It was fortunate I had nothing left in my stomach.

  Edmunds started to say something to me, but I moved past him as if I was in a trance.

  Narrow corridor to the side. Door at the end. The second bedroom. The bedroom that an older child would have. My bedroom. The one where Dad had died, surrounded by machines we couldn’t afford and which had failed him anyway.

  All the furniture had been moved out. A part of my mind noted the planning and preparation, the time needed. And the sheer inhumanity of it. She—I already knew it was a she—would have been alive while the killer calmly stacked things out of the way. She must have known what was coming.

  I stepped carefully into the room.

  At a word from Edmunds, the CSI agent slipped out.

  She was lying face up in the middle of the room. Four foot-long marlinspikes had been driven into the floor and she was tied, spread eagled, to them.

  She was about my size and hair color.

  She had been dressed in my clothes, though the shirt was unrecognizable; all that was left was shredded strips of cotton soaked in her blood. The jeans were pulled up, open, and splattered with blood, badly torn about the left thigh. My unmistakable boots were on her feet, soft shafts pinched tightly by the restraining rope, but looking bizarrely undamaged.

  Her right cheek had three chevrons cut into it as a parody of a sergeant’s badge of rank. Other than that, her face hadn’t been mutilated. She looked shocked, but oddly calm beneath all the blood.

  I prayed her body had shut down at the end and she wasn’t conscious. She hadn’t died quickly or easily. She’d been eviscerated.

  “We got a fingerprint match off AFIS,” Edmunds said behind me. “Lucky break. She’s a vet.”

  Of course she was. There was nothing lucky about it. Another of the tokens that Liu talked about.

  I knelt down beside her, careful not to touch anything.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Barbara Green, originally from Colorado Springs, no immediate family, seven years in the Cavalry, two tours in Iraq, honorable discharge.” He slowed and I glanced back. He was flicking through screens on a tablet computer. “Looks like she had problems since then. No police record, but no continuous employment either. Diagnosed with PTSD. Treated at the VA medical center… initially.” He cleared his throat.

  Treated. I bit off the rising anger. Not useful at the moment.

  “Also registered at the St Francis Shelter on Curtis. No known permanent address.” He trailed off.

  I’d never met Barbara, but I knew her and many like her.

  Some soldiers come back to the love of their family and the greetings of their friends. They ease back into their civilian lives and carry the price of their service lightly, but no less honorably. Some soldiers come back in a coffin draped with a flag and everyone can gauge the price of their service. Some soldiers don’t really come back and the price of their service is beyond understanding.

  I heard the commotion outside before the others, but I ignored it.

  I concentrated on the repulsive visible facts in front of me.

  Her abdominal organs had been removed. From the amount of blood spray, she’d been alive when the killer started. She’d been hollowed out; even the front of her ribs were gone. There was no sign of the organs or missing rib bones. Her thighbone looked to have been bitten through. I’d leave confirmation to the ME, but I guessed postmortem.

  There was a trace of Were scent, but thin, as if it had been masked.

  I leaned forward trying to learn everything I could in the few moments I had left with her.

  I was trying not to even breathe on her, not to add to the horrors that had been done to her and the indignities that were to come. Trying to apologize that I never knew her and had done nothing for her.

  Apologize; for what had been done to her was my fault.

  And imprint her face into my mind, so I would never forget it.

  “This case and site is now under FBI jurisdiction,” Agent Griffith’s voice came loudly from the corridor. “You will hand over any and all evidence or observations you have gathered and then you will leave.”

  I stood and turned to go with the others.

  Griffith did a double take and rounded on José. “Morales, what kind of an operation are you running? What’s she doing here?”

  “She’s here
as a consultant,” José said calmly, hiding his anger.

  “On what?”

  “Veterans.” He turned and walked away.

  Griffith caught my arm as I passed.

  “Stay away, Farrell. If I find you’ve tampered with evidence, or in fact, if you ever get involved again at any site under this investigation, I will arrest you for obstruction.”

  I said nothing. I looked down at his hand and he let me go.

  Edmunds and I followed José, stripping off the gloves and boots by the front door.

  Outside, we stood by José’s cruiser and watched as Griffith’s team moved in and took over.

  “How did Griffith get on it so quick?” I asked.

  “He’s probably got an alert on AFIS matches requested from Denver.” José sighed. “He also has a team listening to the radio.” He glanced at Edmunds, unable to turn off his detective mind, even after the FBI had taken the case. “So, anything else? Neighbors? Who reported it?”

  Edmunds shrugged. “Lady next door saw a green van parked on the drive this afternoon. ‘Some kind of commercial van’ she said. Driver wore blue overalls. Didn’t see anything else. Old man’s daughter called him. When he didn’t answer the phone, she called the neighbor. Neighbor said he wasn’t answering the door either and the curtains were drawn. It was at about 9 p.m. she got here. Called us right after that.”

  Edmunds flicked through his notebook. “Looks as if the rope and tape could’ve come from any hardware store. Perp used the shower to wash off the blood, then sprayed the bathroom with bleach. But CSI are pretty sure there’s got to be DNA somewhere. And partials, epithelials, and so on. You can’t do this and not leave evidence.”

  He and José talked on, but I tuned them out.

  Barbara had been tied up. The rogue had to have been in human form up to then. But I was sure her thigh and the old man’s throat had been bitten. I had no idea what DNA did when a Were changed. Would they find two sets of DNA? One with peculiarities?

  How much of a problem was this for the whole paranormal community?