Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies

by Annie Bellett

  I climbed up into Alek’s truck and breathed in the scent of hay in sunlight and his own vanilla musk. I’d missed that scent, missed the feel of him near me. It wasn’t fair. But I had a job to do. I shoved away my resentment and the mixed emotions of anger and lust and pulled the teeshirt from the bag.

  Reaching for my magic, I focused my will into a locate spell, picturing a link between the shirt, which still smelled faintly of sweat and cigarettes, and the woman who owned it, who had, I assumed, worn it last. I’d been training these last few weeks, plus the ordeal in Three Feathers had pushed me to a new level, I guess. I didn’t even have to touch my twenty-sided die talisman to work the find person spell. Practice practice practice.

  I felt a tenuous link, stretching to the north.

  “North,” I said. “It’s not a strong link.”

  Alek started up the engine with a nod and drove out of the parking lot, taking the single road out of town, heading north.

  “What does ‘not strong’ mean?” he asked softly after a moment.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it’s good though. Where did you get her shirt?”

  “From her mate.”

  I risked a glance at him, at his perfect profile in the shifting light from the streetlamps. He didn’t elaborate, so I turned my focus back to the spell, to that thin silvery thread only I could see stretching into the darkness.

  “You didn’t call,” I heard myself say.

  “We are going to talk now?” Alek said. In the corner of my vision I saw a muscle tick in his cheek. He had stubble, faint and only a shade darker than his white-blond hair. He looked tired, but that might have been a trick of the uneven light.

  “No,” I said. “Bad timing.” I swallowed the “sorry” I wanted to put at the end of that.

  After a long moment, he said, “Neither did you.”

  “Touché,” I muttered. Point one to Alek. Great.

  The thread of silver veered off to the left, growing thicker as we left Wylde behind. I sat up straighter, peering ahead.

  “Left at that turnabout. There’s a logging road there, leads to an old quarry. We’ll have to park and walk, I think.” The quarry was a popular hangout for college students to scratch their names and dirty slogans into the rocks and drink beer and make out. Despite the weak link to Dorrie, this made me hopeful. Maybe Dorrie had run out here with some hot out-of-town wolf to do a little extra-marital mating. Maybe I was about to wreck a marriage instead of find something worse.

  There are far more terrible things than a broken relationship.

  Alek drove the truck as far down the logging road as we could go, until huge logs dragged there sometime in the past stopped our way. He killed the engine and we climbed out. The air was chillier here than in town, a breeze sighing in the tall trees and sticking my sweaty teeshirt to my back. Summer was definitely over.

  I was about to call up a light, which would make holding onto the tracking spell fun, but as I said, practice is practice. Alek beat me to it, pulling a flashlight from under his seat. He shined it ahead of me as I moved carefully down the road and into the quarry.

  The hillside here was cut away, a scar on the landscape. Alek’s light caught bits and pieces of it as he moved, loose gravel crunching beneath our feet. Darkness pressed in on me. Somewhere, not as distant as I’d have liked—which would have been so far I couldn’t hear at all—a wolf howled and was answered by a chorus.

  “I’ve totally seen this movie,” I muttered.

  “This is the part where we get eaten by a chupacabra,” Alek said. He came up close behind me, his muscular body a solid presence at my back. Comforting even as he annoyed me.

  His joke made me smile and then get pissed that I was smiling. “Stop being charming,” I said, refocusing on the teeshirt in my hands, on the sliver thread of magic pulling me forward into the dark.

  “We will talk, Jade,” he murmured, his breath warm against my neck, stirring the small hairs there. It sounded like so much more than just a simple promise.

  I pushed down the hurt that rose and just nodded curtly, not trusting myself to speak.

  We moved slowly through the quarry, the thread growing thicker, pulling me toward where I knew there was a drop-off and a secondary rock fall where they’d mined bigger boulders. We had to be near now.

  “Careful,” I said. “There’s a cliff here somewhere.”

  After Three Feathers and my out-of-body experience as a woman getting thrown off a cliff to her death by my grandfather, I wasn’t overly fond of heights.

  “Wait.” Alek’s hand touched my shoulder as he moved up beside me. He sniffed at the air and made a face. “Blood,” he said.

  So much for hoping we were going to wreck some love tryst. Why couldn’t my life be full of sex instead of violence?

  That thought got shoved in the way-way-later file as well. Thinking about sex or violence while standing next to Alek was a supremely bad idea. I’d realized in the last month that I didn’t really know this man at all. We’d had a thing, a good thing, I thought. But I knew next to nothing about him other than he was hot, good in bed, a Justice, and would happily watch Babylon 5 and rub my feet at the same time.

  “Old blood?” I asked, but he was already moving ahead, taking the light with him. I stumbled trying to keep up and plowed right into him as he stopped, his flashlight illuminating something blue and black and dead all over. I smelled the death, that horrid scent of drying blood, before my eyes took in the body.

  My brain didn’t want to make sense of it at first. The blue and black was what was left of the clothing. Blue jeans crusted with blood. Black teeshirt with a Decepticon emblem still emblazoned on it, torn almost beyond recognition. Also covered in blood, and worse. Dried blood covered the stones all around the body. The tiny body. A child.

  I lost my grip on the spell and the teeshirt. I sank down to my knees, shaking my head, trying to deny what I was seeing, smelling. Limbs going in directions limbs shouldn’t go, attached by what looked like Silly String but was probably strips of flesh. Something had ripped into his belly, and grey intestine bulged out, sharp fecal stench mixing with the sick sweetness of pooled blood.

  His face was intact. I knew that face. That face made faces at me, and every other patron of Lansing’s Grocery, the only market in town. We all shopped there. Everyone in Wylde pretty much. You had to drive an hour to get to a Walmart, so Lansing’s it was.

  “Jamie,” I said. “That’s Jamie.” What was he doing out here? No one had reported him missing. He was seven. A little brat of a kid who always hung around the store, cocky and funny. “He likes Yu-Gi-Oh. They could order them off the net, but they come to me instead. Every Christmas and his birthday.” His birthday was in November. Not so far away.

  “Jade,” Alek said. He pulled me up and into his arms and I shook there for a moment, weakness winning out. I needed to be held. After a moment I pulled away, not looking at Jamie’s body.

  “We have to call Sheriff Lee,” I said. I patted my pockets, but I’d left my phone charging in the store. Shit. This really was like some stupid horror movie.

  “Wait,” Alek said. He had turned away from me, sniffing the air, his shoulders tense. He looked more beast than man as he moved off into the darkness.

  I picked up the flashlight from where he’d set it on the ground and followed him until I saw what he had scented, not twenty feet farther into the quarry. More bodies, looking like just more rock until I was close.

  I forced myself to walk toward them, carefully stepping around drying splashes of blood and bits of gore and bone. Two adults lay sprawled and torn to pieces. I hardly needed to see their faces to know who they were.

  Emmaline and Jed Lansing.

  “These are that boy’s parents. We have to call Lee,” I said, stumbling backward, turning away. Too much death. I was so sick of death. I pulled my braid forward and used it to wrap around my mouth and nose, trying to block the stink. It didn’t work.


  “We need to find Dorrie,” Alek said.

  Dorrie. I’d forgotten her. Whatever had done this to Jamie and his parents had probably gotten her, too. I didn’t bank on finding her alive, not after seeing what lay near my feet.

  I walked stiffly back to where Jamie lay and picked up Dorrie’s teeshirt. The thread of silver reappeared as I reached for the comforting heat of my magic. I wished I could track whatever or whoever did that to Jamie, could tear into whatever it was and show it that this was my town, my people. I wanted to rip things apart and my rage scared me even as it warmed me and shoved away my nausea.

  We found Dorrie, in her wolf form, partially down the steep hillside less than a hundred feet from Jamie. There was no blood on her that I could see. I held the flashlight steady while Alek skidded his way down to her, loose stones bouncing away down into the dark below. He felt for a pulse, but we both knew there wouldn’t be one. Then he lifted her easily and carried her back up the nearly vertical slope, acting as though she didn’t weigh two hundred pounds. Shifter wolves, like most shifter’s animal halves, are much larger than their wild animal counterparts. More like dire wolves.

  I was stupidly glad there was no blood other than a bit of dried gore around her mouth. Then that sank in. The torn bits of Jamie, of his parents. Blood on the wolf’s mouth.

  “How did she die?” I looked at Alek as he set her down carefully outside of the patches of blood and gore staining the area around Jamie’s body.

  “Looks like a broken neck,” he said with a shake of his shaggy blond head. His hair had definitely gotten longer and he didn’t have it pulled back in his normal queue.

  “That wouldn’t kill her, would it?” Shifters healed quickly, almost as quickly as sorcerers from what I knew. Especially if they could just shift, trading their human or animal body for whichever one wasn’t injured. Then wherever they went would put them in a kind of stasis, I guess, where they could heal the damage to that body while they ran around in their other one. They were tough to kill what with all the metaphysical body-swapping.

  “Not like this,” Alek said. “If the connection between body and brain were severed, yes, but this is sloppy. Not even full spinal break. It is lie.”

  “And the blood around her mouth? Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.” I pressed my lips into a line and stared earnestly into his face.

  “It is,” he said. “I think those people were killed by wolves. I think we are meant to believe it was this one.”

  “But?” Please, Universe, let there be a huge-ass but attached to the words he was saying.

  “It wasn’t this wolf. I think she was dead already. There is something, I do not know how to say it, something wrong with her scent. Something tainting her.” He raised an eyebrow at me in silent question.

  I drew on my magic again, searching the dead wolf’s body for signs of magic, signs a spell had been used on her that would either make her kill a child, or kill her while making it look like she’d died falling down a hill.

  “Nothing,” I said as my magic slid over the dead body with the same reaction it would have had sliding over the boulders around me. “Now can we call Lee?” Sheriff Lee was a shifter, and she was a wolf, but she also had a duty to the human residents of Wylde. Humans like the Lansings had been. This was a crime scene.

  Fuck. I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat.

  “No,” Alek said. “We cannot call police.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, rising to my feet even as he did. “I swear for a moment you said you weren’t going to call the police.”

  “Think, Jade,” he said, biting off each word as though they would cut his tongue if he weren’t careful. “Little boy and two adults killed by wolves? Here? Now? With the Peace being reaffirmed and every alpha around in town? Your town is crawling in wolves, in shifters. But they won’t be able to stop the humans here from going on warpath, from hunting every wolf they find, wild animal or shifter, until they get enough bodies for retribution. And that is not saying what the alphas will do, how they might turn on each other as suspicion grows.”

  He shifted his weight and looked down at Dorrie’s body, her red and brown fur lit up by the abandoned flashlight. “Someone killed her and tried to frame her, a Wylde pack wolf, for these murders. This is Justice work, not human police work.”

  “The Lansings are human, normals. Besides, Sheriff Lee isn’t human; she’ll understand the need for silence on aspects of this crime,” I said, wrapping my arms across my breasts as the wind picked up. I pretended the shivers I felt were all the breeze and not the chill suddenly clutching at my heart.

  “True. But more than local cops will get involved. A child is dead. A whole fucking family is ripped apart out here. This will bring in too much attention, too many complications.”

  “Alek,” I said, but then stopped. I knew what he was proposing. He wasn’t going to leave the bodies here, where someone could find them in the next day or so. This place wasn’t exactly deserted, especially on weekends. He was going to hide them, cover up the crime. It might not have been Dorrie who killed Jamie or his parents, but we both knew no wild wolf had done this. “You can’t.”

  “I have to,” he said, his voice rough, coming out as more growl than human speech. “Wait in truck if you want.”

  “No,” I shrieked. “No, fuck no. I am not going to let you do this. People are going to notice they are missing. They have friends, family. You going to deny their family closure? Fuck you. I won’t let you do this.” I shoved him, hard. He didn’t even give me the dignity of stepping back.

  “I have to,” he said again, folding his arms around me. I struggled but the effort was half-assed. “They would have closure, perhaps, but there is too much more death down that path. Death of wolves. Death of innocents. The guilty is a shifter, maybe more than one. You and I know this. The humans aren’t equipped to get justice for his family, to stop whoever did this from doing it again. I am.” He pressed his lips to my forehead, burning hot against my chilled skin. “This is who I am, kitten. This is what I do.”

  It was the endearment that broke me. Or maybe his logic. He was right, but I hated him for it.

  I refused to help with the bodies, stubbornly sitting in the truck after Alek loaded Dorrie’s body into the back and covered her with a tarp. I pretended it was morals instead of cowardice and pain that kept me from helping Alek cover up the murders. A family murdered, three people I saw weekly, people I knew, if not well. A wolf shifter killed also, left nearby in a way where someone clearly intended whoever found Jamie and his parents to think the wolf had killed them.

  I pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around them, staring out the windshield toward where Alek was doing whatever he was doing. This was fucked up. I worried it was Samir; my evil ex reaching out to stir up shit in my life and see what I’d do again. Somehow I didn’t think it was, however. This felt too impersonal for Samir. Killing a child, a whole family, I’d totally lay that at his feet. But he couldn’t have known that I would be the one to find the bodies. And he would have known I’d never fall for the whole “look over here at this dead wolf that must have broken its neck or been chased off by its pack after eating these people” trick. It was stupidly obvious. Too obvious. Meant for hysterical relatives, perhaps. Law enforcement faced with an angry and grieving community. People who would be looking for the obvious, the easy answers, the easy way to retaliate.

  This wasn’t Samir. This was something else, someone else. Shifter business. Great.

  Of course, I’d been wrong about that before. Recently.

  When Alek finally returned to the truck, he was covered in dust and bits of gravel. Grime lined his face like bad makeup, highlighting his cheekbones and the wrinkles in his forehead. He pulled his sweat-soaked shirt off and used the inside of it to wipe his face. He grabbed another shirt from a bag I hadn’t noticed stuffed behind the bench seat of his truck. I tried not to watch, but couldn’t help myself, grateful for the dim light from the n
early full moon as it crested the trees. Alek climbed in without saying a word to me, started the truck, and backed up down the logging road.

  “There will be a huge search when the Lansing family is reported missing,” I said after a tense moment.

  “Yes,” he said. That was it, just yes.

  “They will look out in the woods. They will check the quarry.”

  “No one will find their bodies.” He said the words as though they were a comment on the weather, but he said them in Russian. Alek sometimes reverted to his native tongue when truly upset. First his accent would get very strong, then English would fail him.

  He sounded certain. I let it go, for now. I didn’t really want answers. Yet.

  When tires hit asphalt, I spoke again.

  “I want in. All the way in. No ‘Justice business, you shouldn’t get involved’ bullshit from you. You made me a part of this and I’m going to see it through.”

  “All right.”

  I finally turned and looked at him. He glanced at me but his face gave nothing away.

  “Good. So it’s settled.”

  “It is,” he said in an infuriatingly agreeable tone.

  “So where are we going with Dorrie’s body?”

  “The vet.”

  “I don’t think Dr. Lake’s practice is open this late,” I said.

  “It is now,” he said. “I made a call.”

  Vivian Lake, the town vet, let us in the back. Her office was the bottom part of an old Victorian-style house. The tiny wolf-shifter merely pursed her lips and sighed as Alek preceded us into the house with Dorrie’s body over his shoulder. I didn’t know what he’d said to her on the phone, but unlike the last time I’d come here asking her for an autopsy, she definitely wasn’t surprised.

  It was weird déjà vu. Alek and I showing up with a dead shifter was basically how Alek and I had met. Only that time the shifter, Harper’s mom Rosie, hadn’t been actually dead, just frozen by evil magic and being used as a battery by a warlock.

  A trick that technically, since I’d eaten Bernie the bad warlock’s heart, I could also do. Not a fun thought. I left Bernie’s memories the hell alone most of the time, not wanting that power. The one time I’d touched them, I’d made a huge mistake and gotten my not-really-my-father killed. Fuck that.