by A.M. Burns
9
Turtle Creek Park’s one of those parks that always has traffic of some sort, but maybe that’s because Turtle Creek Boulevard runs down the middle of it just to the east of the creek. And since Dallas was rapidly becoming one of the many big cities that never sleeps, there’s always people in and around the park. With an excessive number of apartments bordering the park and the street down the middle of it, the city had never limited the time that people could be in the park. Dense foliage along the creek held promise for all sorts of things hiding in the shadows. I had accurate reports of everything from muggers and possums, to alligators and hookers. I felt safe walking in the park, even when I wasn’t accompanied by two very powerful wers.
Dusty shifted to his wolf form as soon as we hit the park, and in open defiance of the leash laws, he ran all over the place trying to pick up a scent. Paul remained human. It was easier to communicate with me that way since he and I didn’t have the telepathic link I shared with Dusty. Paul led us into the denser part of the park, almost to where the creek's spring bubbled to the surface. The trails here are so overgrown that if you didn’t know exactly where to step, you might need a machete to get more than a couple of feet. I used Dusty's eyes to find the trail. It attracted less attention than the large flashlight I’d brought. I was waiting until we reached the actual scene of the crime for the flashlight.
Paul stepped to the side of the trail where obviously the weeds had been recently trampled and molested by someone falling on them. “Here's the place,” he said in barely more than a whisper.
“Give me a sec before you hit the light,” Dusty requested as he put his nose in gear, covering the smashed weeds and the area around the spot all the way down to the water’s edge. He returned and butted his head into my hand so I could hear his mental voice. “There is definitely a similar smell to what was on Barry Crabtree and Alexia. Much fainter, maybe because of the age of the scene, but it’s here.”
“Dusty says that the smell’s the same as on one of the psi victims we visited this yesterday,” I relayed to Paul.
When Dusty finished his search, I sat in the middle of the spot, and with Paul and Dusty watching out for me, I opened myself up to the energies of the place. This wasn’t the best place in the City for a psychic to open themselves up. A lot of violence happened in this park and this spot had definitely seen its share. A feeling of darkness and despair had begun to grow here. I allowed the energies to carry me as I searched for the essence and images from the werejaguar’s death. The sense of the predator was strong, but I could not distinguish between the werejaguar and the killer and it felt like there were more than those two. There was also the feeling that there’d been more than one recent death in the area, but the energies were too old and scattered to make out a clear picture.
I was just about to give up when I felt a slight movement in the weeds near my knee. I moved the weeds aside, and hidden in a small gap between two pebbles, a tiny figure struggled to stand. I broke my trance and reached down for one of the smallest pixies I’d ever seen. We’re not talking about a Tinkerbelle-style pixie. In real life, pixies are small woodland fairies with only a rudimentary intelligence. On a good day, they might be able to work for a call center in India, but other than that, they are fairly useless for anything other than the basic plant maintenance. Their job is to make sure plants that might not get pollinated by birds and bees are pollinated. They also take care to get seeds to where they had the best chance of germinating and growing, but they are totally keyed into the flow of nature. No one’s quite sure what happens to them during the winter months. Since they are of the fair-folk, most people just assumed that they went to Underhill, or whatever other dimension they come from. I read somewhere a while back that some guy had tried to find out where they came from and where they went. The higher fairies like the elves and such have never paid them any mind and couldn’t answer the question. Pixies have such a short attention span that they couldn’t answer the question, either. So all we know is that as the leaves start to turn they disappear and when the first buds start to bloom they reappear.
This pixie was about as tall as the width of my thumb. I didn’t know enough about pixies to tell if its color was good or not, but there was barely any glow to it at all, and from the little I know, most pixies glowed faintly with the otherworldly light they held. The pixie might account for the feeling that there was more than one person other than the werejaguar present at the time of its death, but I doubted it. If it had been there for the past two days, it would’ve either faded by now or been strong enough to fly away.
“What do you guys know about pixies?” I asked moving my hand so they could see it lying in my palm.
“Not a whole lot,” Paul said with a bit of disdain in his voice. A lot of wers held ODs in low opinion. The best I could figure was that they considered other magic creatures below their notice unless they were forced to acknowledge them.
“Looks wounded,” said Dusty stating the blatantly obvious.
“Is it possible you and your people overlooked it during your search when you moved the body?” I kept my tone neutral because that question could easily be taken the wrong way.
“It's possible,” Paul sounded a bit guilty about missing evidence. “It was close to sunrise and we wanted to get out of here fast. That’s not easy when you’re toting a body through a city park.”
Dusty sniffed the tiny figure in my palm. “It has the strange smell on it.”
“Hmm. So it was here the whole time.” I tried to think if I knew anyone who knew how to communicate with pixies so we could ask it a few questions. Maybe Carmine knew someone in the Council. “I'll get Tiffany on finding someone who can help. Hopefully there’s someone close by.” I scooped out the contents of my left jacket pocket and carefully laid the fairy in the pocket. “If we can keep it alive, it might be a witness. If it dies, it's evidence and another body to add to the count.”
“Let's hope it lives,” Paul muttered to himself more than anyone else. “It’d be nice to question something about all of this.” Doubt clouded his voice. He wasn’t sure it would be worth it even if the pixie lived. Since it was just a pixie, it probably hadn’t seen anything useful, but right now, I’d take anything I could get.
With the pixie safely tucked in my pocket, I swept the area carefully with the flashlight. Other than the smashed weeds, there didn’t appear to be anything out of place. I stood there for a second with the light playing off of the weeds before it hit me.
“Paul, was there a lot of blood here when you moved the body?”
Paul paused and thought about it. “No there wasn't and there wasn’t a lot of blood on the body, either, even though it had been torn to shreds like it had been a wer attack. There should have been blood everywhere.”
“Was there any sign of a vampire attack?” That would explain the lack of blood, particularly if she had been drained first and then torn to shreds. But there should still be a bit of blood on the ground.
“Not that was left, but then she was extremely torn up. But that is not something I have ruled out either. But why would a vampire want the territory from us wers? There haven’t been any territory wars in generations, not since the Council signed all the treaties with the various groups to keep us all civil, at least on the outside.” I could see Paul's face in the flickering flashlight beam as I continued to sweep the area. He was working through the possibilities more thoroughly than he had before he enlisted our help.
“It could be a lone vampire with a grudge, but I doubt that.”
“And both pack and pride could track down a lone vampire,” added Dusty as he sat in the weeds next to my leg, keeping just outside of the area I swept with the light.
“But I’d be able to find a lone vampire.” Paul echoed Dusty's thoughts. “This has to be something more and it doesn't smell anything like a vampire, or at least none that I’ve ever met.”
“Dusty?” Dusty was always great for a second opinion.
&nb
sp; “I've only met a couple,” he said. “Each one smelled different, of course, but they all have underlying smell of decay to them. This scent doesn’t have an underlying smell of decay.”
“Okay then, let's get this Pixie some help and see if we end up with a witness out of it, or not.” I stopped myself from patting the pocket with the pixie. No telling how easy it would have been to kill the little thing.
10
After speaking with Carmine, I left the little pixie in a small bowl lined with Kleenex. She promised she’d get someone who knew about pixies to pick it up later in the morning. I left a note for Tiffany explaining everything. Dusty had already warmed the bed by the time I made it up the stairs just as the first light of dawn peeked through the blinds. I was asleep before he was comfortably wrapped in my arms.
