Night Life

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "How's it going?" I asked cautiously.

  He grunted. "Can't complain." One hand moved, and I saw the edge of an ink drawing. A woman's arm, engulfed in flames.

  "I need to ask you a question, Perry," I said.

  He spun on his stool to face me. "Well, isn't that special, Detective." He grinned.

  Most people who see Perry for the first time can't manage to not look shocked, or in some cases genuinely terrified. Half of his face is rippled white scar tissue, with a milky eye rolled to the side and a streak of pure white running through his hair. The other half is normal—a thin, ratty face, bad teeth, and icy blue eye. Then they see the tattoos covering him from neck to who knows where, and the bluish clawlike nails of the hand on the scar side. When he talks, you can catch a flash of serpentine tongue.

  "I met someone who has some interesting ink," I said. "Well, not ink. Brands, carved right into him. I was hoping you'd know about that."

  "Branding? Nah," Perry snorted. "Don't go in for that body-mod stuff. The ink speaks to me. The flesh is just so much canvas."

  "Be that as it may. You know anyone who is into it?"

  Perry nibbled on the end of his pen, rolling his bad eye toward me. I took a step back. Not because he disgusted me, but because when the mangled, white eye stared at you, it wasn't Perry looking out.

  "You might try Cassandra LaVey," he said. "Seen her ads?"

  I shook my head. Perry huffed. He turned the scarred side of his face away from me and added another curlicue to the drawing of a gowned woman being burned at the stake. "Let me have a look at you," he said, putting his pen down and standing up. He rubbed his leg on the scarred side. A metal brace peeked out from under his jeans. "Sit."

  "I really don't have time," I lied. "I'm working and all…"

  "This'll just take a minute," he said, jerking the dentist's chair upright. I knew I didn't have a choice and straddled it backward, pulling up my shirt to expose my back.

  Perry grunted softly as his fingers grazed my skin. "The lady Cassandra refers to herself as the body-mod goddess. She does it live at a watering hole around the corner on Saturday nights. Theatrical bitch. Cheapens the art."

  "Branding is her specialty?"

  "If you can call something that requires a dull knife and the hands of a longshoreman a specialty," said Perry. "This tat is hot to the touch. You been putting it through a workout."

  I sighed. "You could say that."

  Perry had given me the tattoo, a pentacle surrounded by the phases of the moon, when I moved to Nocturne City. The ink concoction was supposed to keep the were in me at bay, at least long-enough for innocent bystanders to run away. Results were mixed.

  "So are you going to tell me why you're so interested in branding all of a sudden?" Perry asked.

  "No," I said. With his unique condition, I trusted Perry about as far as I could toss the Fairlane. "But thanks for your help."

  "Hell," said Perry. "If that tat ain't working, I'm no help at all."

  I pulled my shirt down and dismounted the chair. "It's been working. I've just had a lot of stuff making me want to phase lately."

  Perry cocked his head and looked at me with his good eye.

  "I met another were," I continued. "Two, in fact. Him and his sister."

  "Him? He your type?" Perry asked.

  "That's debatable," I said, trying to ignore the memory of Dmitri's eyes.

  "Well, tell him if he hurts you I'll kick his furry ass back to the Dark Ages," Perry grunted, picking up his pen again.

  I smiled and patted his nonscarred shoulder. "What would I do without you to look out for me?"

  "Hah!" he barked. "Since the Hex Riots I can barely hobble to the can. But thanks for pretending to care."

  I looked down. "Seriously, Perry. You're the only one who never gave me crap about helping me."

  The milky eye swiveled to look at me. "What was I supposed to do? Let you keep killing people?"

  My heart plummeted, and I tried to remember it wasn't Perry saying those things. He had a condition, just like me. He wasn't to blame. I wasn't to blame. If anyone was, it was Joshua.

  "You okay?" Perry barked, the human-shaped side of his face frowning. I nodded shakily, and his face went hurt. "Shit. I say something I shouldn't have?"

  "It's fine," I said. "Just the unpleasant truth." I started back to the front of the shop.

  "Hey, Wilder," Perry called. I stopped. "Yeah?"

  "If you see Cassandra," he said, "tell the bitch I said hello."

  * * * *

  The passenger's side of the Fairlane was a ruin of paper and old cartons. It's a sad fact that when I'm hungry there's almost nothing I won't eat. Lately I'd been on a ChickenHut jones and had the empty nugget boxes to prove it. Plus I got a perverse pleasure out of eating there, since they had made my life so miserable when I'd been an employee.

  I had to pay for community college somehow.

  Stephen Duncan's face peeked at me from his case file. I had to give that back to McAllister. It was Bryson's to screw up now. Much as I would posture to anyone who asked, the witch had done his job. I was scared, and I couldn't shake the back-of-the-neck tickle of being watched. I rubbed the cut on my chest. It still stung.

  I shuffled the Duncan file into a semblance of order while I thought about Professor Hoskins some more. He seemed to know what he was talking about, but he also seemed a few cashews short of a nut assortment.

  I scribbled county records on my hand so I wouldn't forget to go look over the Cedar Hill files at some point and stuck the key into the Fairlane's ignition, placing Stephen's picture neatly in the clip on the front of the file.

  It was then that I saw it: a shadow on his neck, peeking out of his Alder Bay jersey. A tattoo or a birthmark, something spidery and maleficent. As I squinted to make it out, my mind conjured images of the burning Ghosttown sidewalk.

  County records could wait, and the branded witch be damned. Quickly as it ebbed and flowed over me, the fear was gone and replaced by my aroused predatory instincts. I stepped on the accelerator and drove toward the jail.

  * * * *

  Stephen had been transferred from the central holding cells to the county jail, and the booking officer there barely glanced at my credentials before shoving a sign-in sheet at me and going back to her magazine.

  I went through the metal detector and got wanded by an equally surly female guard before getting buzzed through two gates and a door to the interrogation room. Stephen was led in a moment later, scraggly and miserable in a bright yellow DOC jumpsuit.

  "What do you want?" he said, flopping in a chair across from me.

  I had brought props and shoved a glossy of Lilia's crime scene at him. He glanced at it and then sat back.

  "Don't know her."

  I held the photo no more than an inch from his face. "Look again. You do."

  He reached up and slapped the picture away. "I said I don't, so I don't. What is it with you people? I didn't kill Marina, either." He looked down and away from me. "Why won't you believe me?"

  "When I find someone covered in blood next to a dead body, I guess I'm just naturally suspicious. Especially when he fucks two women in a row who are murdered. That's a piss-poor track record, kid."

  "I don't have anything else to say," said Stephen, and kept his word by shutting up and staring at the center of the steel table between us. I let a silence stretch as I mentally roved over the pathetic list that I had assembled. Dmitri, who could have done it but didn't, and I knew that just like I knew what blood tasted like. Stephen, a spoiled, sexually dysfunctional torture junkie if all the evidence was to be believed. And out there somewhere, the faceless murderer who drifted through decades with a wake of mutilated women behind him. There was muscle tissue and tendon connecting all of them, but I couldn't see it yet and it was driving me crazy.

  "At the Raven, you told me that the were had killed Marina," I said finally. "Did the were kill this girl, too?" I took a deep breath and prepared to
lie my ass off. "I have a witness who saw you with her multiple times, Stephen, and compelling evidence that you are a killer. You of all people should know that lying to me now is just going to hurt you at trial."

  Stephen didn't have to know that Dmitri had never actually followed Lilia to any of her trysts. Interrogation is the equivalent of poking an alligator with a sharp stick—anything for a reaction.

  He twitched when I mentioned someone had been watching him. Lawyer street-smarts didn't seem to be genetic in the Duncan family.

  "I don't have anything to say," he repeated. He took a deep breath and said in a truly nasty tone, "I didn't know the bitch."

  I grabbed Stephen by the back of his neck and slammed his face into the table, pressing his cheek on top of the scene photo. "Her name was Lilia Desko," I said. "She was drugged, mutilated, and left in an alley to bleed to death. Look at her," I demanded as Stephen struggled. "Because she wasn't just a body. She was a girl with a future, and someone loved her. You did this to her, and there is nothing you can do to hide from me."

  I let him go. He jerked away from me, shaking. "I didn't do it!" he shouted. The spoiled-little-boy façade cracked, and his eyes had the same wild desperation as when I'd first seen him at the Hotel Raven.

  "Then tell me who did, Stephen," I said.

  His head shook wildly before the words were even out. "I can't!"

  "Then what can you say? Because at this point I'm still seeing you ripping those girls open."

  He sniffed hard. "We went out. Lilia and I."

  Finally. "How long did you patronize her?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Six months? Since I moved back to the city to live with my dad." He rubbed his wrists under the shackles. "She was kinda sweet and dumb…trusting for a hook—I mean, a working girl."

  Trusting enough to take a needle from a stranger? "Did Lilia have a habit?"

  He nodded. "She shot some meth, I think. We did coke together." Stephen bit his lip and looked stricken. "God, don't tell my father that."

  "I'm not wearing a collar with a little bell, Stephen, so it's safe to assume I'm not the DA's lapdog."

  "She was trying to clean up, though," he said, his face going soft. "She'd been going to rehab through the city's free program, outpatient. It was tough. They made her quit cold turkey and then she'd get frustrated and shoot up again, and then she'd cry and whine about it. Honestly, Detective, it was irritating as hell."

  If Duncan the elder was so flat you could have spread him over toast, Stephen was all over the place, leaping from hostile to nostalgic to irritable in the space of a sentence. He wanted to talk about irritating as hell, he should look in a mirror.

  "Well, she had at least one man standing behind her efforts," I said, thinking of Sandovsky.

  "Oh, yeah, the boyfriend," said Stephen with a snort. "Some winner he must have been."

  I decided it wouldn't help my cause to say that from where I sat, Dmitri was more of a man than Stephen could imagine on a good day. I just asked, "When did you see Lilia last?"

  He shrugged. "Three weeks ago, I think. Marina started getting jealous."

  "Wrong, Stephen," I told him. "My witness tells me you saw her the night she died."

  "Your witness is full of crap," he told me, trying to cross his arms indignantly. For the first time I saw a resemblance to Alistair.

  "Right now, I trust him a whole hell of a lot more than I do you," I said. "So why don't you be straight with me? Think of it as a refreshing change from being a weasly little prick."

  Stephen drummed his fingers on the table. He either couldn't sit still or stared off into space. I wondered if it was lack of sleep and stress, or if he'd found a friend in jail with more cocaine.

  "I didn't want Marina to know. We were getting pretty serious. But Lilia and I got together sometimes. Marina may have been on the game but she was very traditional. Wanted kids, wanted to meet my dad. All that mail-order-bride shit."

  "And Lilia wasn't traditional?"

  He snorted. "Hell no. She was a wild child. She said my old man could go screw himself if he didn't approve." The drumming abruptly stopped and he went back to staring. "I liked that about her."

  I tried to imagine Stephen showing up at the Duncan manse with Marina in tow, introducing her to Alistair as the love of his life. I couldn't see it. Senior seemed like the type who would rather eat rat poison than accept anyone who had even a hint of low class.

  "I didn't kill them," he told me again.

  I sighed. "Stephen, at this point it doesn't matter. They're still dead."

  "Then maybe you should be out doing, oh, I don't know, your job instead of storming in here and harassing me."

  He just had to get indignant, didn't he?

  I grabbed him again, and this time he struggled. He was strong, but not any stronger than an ex-lacrosse player should be. I jerked down the collar of his jumpsuit and got a look at the mark on his neck, inky tentacles seeming to spill off his skin. A sigil, one that pulsated with magicks that gave it life.

  I felt a shock as my hand came in contact and jumped back. The same burned-ozone smell that had caught me when I'd been attacked rifled the air in the interrogation room.

  Stephen was looking at me warily, rubbing his cheek where I'd planted it in the tabletop.

  "What's your problem?"

  I sat down, rubbing my raw palm. "How long have you had that tattoo?"

  He blinked stupidly at me. "What tattoo?"

  There was such a thing as playing innocent, but this was taking it too far. "The one on your neck, Stephen. The sigil."

  "Detective Wilder," he said, edging his chair back. "I don't have any tattoos. Now I think you should leave, and not come back unless my lawyer is here."

  "You don't see it…," I murmured. The sigil on Stephen's skin squirmed under my eyes and made the point between them pound. I could accept that he couldn't see it. Even the most novice caster witch knew how to glamour. But not to feel the oily slippage of a working scribed into his very skin?

  Stephen stamped his shackled feet on the floor. "Quit staring at me with your mouth open! I told you to get out!"

  Now he sounded like Alistair, too.

  "Just a word of advice before I go," I told him. "Even if you didn't kill those women—which I doubt—you're involved. The less you tell me, the harder I will nail your pampered ass to the wall as an accessory."

  "That's it then," said Stephen. "You had a bum time growing up and you're taking it out on me?"

  I stood up and buzzed for the guard before answering him.

  "I'm trying my Hexed hardest to make sure you go to the gas chamber before you kill anyone else." The door lock clicked and I stood aside for the jail guard.

  "And by the way," I said as he walked past me, "I did have it rough, but the day I am jealous of you is the day hell opens a hockey rink. You're worse than pathetic. You're trash."

  "You think you know what's going on? Think you'll figure it all out?" Stephen hissed, jerking against his shackles. "Never! You're just a stupid Insoli whose bite should have poisoned her!"

  "Move, Duncan!" the guard ordered, putting him back in line. I watched them go, mouth open again.

  Where had a human boy like Stephen learned old were curses like that? If I could figure that one out, I had a feeling I'd be a good deal less confused about this case.

  Fourteen

  At the Twenty-fourth, I stopped in to check my messages and update the status of my other open cases. A few of the day-shift detectives nodded or waved at me. I hung around so much I was becoming familiar, which was funny because with the blending of night and day that comes with stress and no sleep, I felt like I hadn't been to work in weeks.

  Detectives with tough cases are easy to spot—we're the ones with circles under our eyes, mussed hair, clothes that have been slept in, on our fifth cup of coffee. We don't stop, though, because we've become consumed by the victims and the mechanics of the crime, and the only escape is to assign guilt to someo
ne.

  Sometimes we can't handle it, and we beat suspects like Bryson; or we drink, smoke, start taking cash to look the other way. Or we turn it inward and eat our service weapons.

  I had eight messages, none of them from Captain Roenberg. Al Duncan had taken my threat seriously.

  My phone trilled as soon as I set it back in the cradle, a blocked number with a Nocturne City prefix.

  I figured the worst it could be was a mouth-breathing death threat and picked up. "Yes?"

  "Hey, Detective," said Dmitri easily. "I was hoping to catch you before you went home. You got a minute?"

  I must have held the phone, stone silent, for a good thirty seconds because he said, "Luna?"

  "I'm here. How did you get this number?"

  "Called the main police line and asked for you, like everyone else." He chuckled. I could hear rock music and hubbub in the background on his end and someone shouted, muffled, "Dmitri, you want another beer?"

  He must have nodded affirmative because I heard him swig before he said, "You don't talk much, do you. Detective?"

  "I talk plenty! Most of the time people wish I'd stop talking!" I snapped with more vigor than I intended.

  "If you say so." He chuckled again.

  "Why are you calling me?" I demanded.

  "Listen, if you don't want to talk…"

  "No!" I cried when I heard him start to hang up. "Actually, I'm glad you did call. I have something I need to ask you, as a fellow were."

  He swigged again. "Sure, you could do that. But how about asking in person?"

  Another incoherent moment for Luna. Was he saying what it sounded like he was saying? No. Couldn't be. Could be. What to say? Be professional. Be cool.

  "I suppose that wouldn't be too awful." My voice came out a purr. Too cool. Way too cool. Verging on sexy. Gods, what was I doing? Every time I met Dmitri I ended up either injured or pissed off. Sometimes both.

  "Glad to hear it," Dmitri said. "Want to come over to the Crown?"

  "No offense, Sandovsky, but if I never step foot in your pack house again, I'll be a happy woman."