Skin Trade

by Hamilton, Laurell K.

  “We killed the animal that did this,” Hooper said, pointing back in the direction of the weretiger’s body, though it was all out of sight through the crowd now.

  “Did we? Are you a hundred percent sure of that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Edward was watching us like it was a show. Olaf was back to staring at the body. Bernardo was looking away from all of us.

  “Did anyone personally see the weretiger we just killed do this?”

  Something passed through his eyes—it might have been surprise—but he was too much cop to show it. “No witnesses yet.”

  “Then think like a cop, not someone’s friend. We think we got the only weretiger involved, but we don’t know that for sure.” I pointed at the bodies. “That is a lot of damage for one weretiger in a really limited space of time. The blood hasn’t even begun to clot or dry much. In this heat, that means they haven’t been dead long at all.”

  “I am thinking like a cop. You’re the one who’s complicating things, Blake. When a wife turns up dead, it’s usually the husband. When the kid disappears, look at the parents. When a girl disappears on a college road trip, look at the boyfriend, and then the professor who was supposed to keep her safe.”

  “Yeah, most police work is very Occam’s razor.”

  “Yeah, the simplest solution is the right one.”

  “Until you add the monsters,” I said.

  “The fact that our bad guy was a weretiger doesn’t change how we do our jobs, Blake.”

  “You want to jump in anytime, Ted?” I let him hear the irritation in my voice. He could help more.

  “What Marshal Blake is trying to say,” he said, in his oh-so-reasonable Ted voice, “is that maybe we’re looking for more than one wereanimal. And that if it helped Bendez do this to your officers, then we need to find the son of a bitch.”

  I sighed. Hooper had been right; I was complicating things. I pointed a thumb at Edward. “What he said, and I apologize for explaining way more than I needed to.”

  “You were shaken at the sight of the bodies,” Olaf said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You overexplain when you are nervous or frightened. It is one of the few times you act like a girl.”

  I had no idea what to say to that, so I ignored it. I rarely got in trouble doing that with men, unless I was dating them. Then there was a limited amount of ignoring that they would let you get away with.

  “The bodies were pulled apart, Hooper; either it was something bigger than the weretiger that I saw dead, or it was two of them working together.”

  “There are no bite marks on the bodies,” Olaf said.

  “I’m not even sure these are claw marks,” Edward said, and he did what I didn’t want to do. He hunkered down beside the bodies, just out of reach of the blood pattern.

  I so did not want to get closer, but I breathed shallowly through my mouth and hunkered down with him. When working with Edward, it was always a little bit of a pissing match. He knew I’d gotten nauseous, so he’d make me get closer to it all. Bastard.

  I looked past the carnage and really tried to see claw marks. I had assumed they were there, like my mind had filled them in, but were they really there?

  Olaf knelt beside me; hunkered down, he still towered over me. But it wasn’t the towering, it was the fact that he’d chosen to be close enough that our legs were almost touching. I couldn’t move away from him without standing first, for fear I’d hit the edge of the blood and mess. Standing up seemed to be admitting too much discomfort. Then I had a thought.

  “You know how I said that I couldn’t think as well in the morgue with you close to me?”

  “Yes,” he said, in his deep voice.

  “Would you please go kneel on the other side of Ted instead of next to me?”

  “Are you saying I am disturbing?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  His lips twitched, but if it was a smile, he stood and hid it from me. He went to the other side of Edward. With him not beside me, I could think. Frankly, not as big an improvement as it might have been.

  I forced myself to really stare at the torn edges of the bodies. “Shit,” I said, and stood, not because I wanted to be farther away, but I have a bad knee, and you can’t hunker forever without it beginning to complain. I stood, but kept looking down at the bodies. I wasn’t sick anymore, or scared, I was working. It was always like that; if I could push past the ick factor and the emotions, I could see and think and find out things.

  “I think you’re right. I can’t see claw marks. It looks like they were simply pulled apart, like by some giant.”

  Edward stood smoothly. “Like a boy pulls wings off a fly.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Hooper asked.

  “I can see no weapon marks,” Olaf said, then stood.

  Bernardo said, “Lycanthropes don’t just pull people apart with their human hands. They aren’t as strong in human form, right?”

  “I don’t think so, but there’s some debate on it. It’s one of the reasons some lycanthropes are fighting in the courts to be allowed to do professional athletics. If they can prove that the lycanthropy only gives them a little edge in human form, then maybe,” I said.

  “The reason no one knows is that when it comes to a fight, they’re like anyone. They use everything they’ve got,” Bernardo said. “If a wereanimal could make claws appear at the ends of his hands, he’d do that, at least, to take out two cops.”

  “That would make sense,” I said.

  “But just because it makes sense to us,” Edward said, “doesn’t mean it’s what the bastard did.”

  “So you are honestly saying we have another rogue lycanthrope in Vegas?” Hooper asked.

  “You have something in Vegas, and it’s not just Bendez,” I said.

  “How sure are you?” he asked.

  “Let the medical examiner look at it all,” Edward said. “Maybe we just can’t see the claw marks. Maybe once the bodies are cleaned up . . .” He shrugged.

  “You don’t believe that,” Hooper said.

  Edward looked at me. I shook my head. “No, we don’t.”

  “So, was Bendez our guy, or did he just go apeshit for some other reason? Do we still need to question the other weretigers? Did our only lead to the bastard that offed our team die with Bendez?”

  “Those are excellent questions,” I said.

  “But you don’t have excellent answers to go with them, do you?”

  I took a deep breath, a mistake so near the recently dead. I fought my stomach one more time, then said, calmly, “No, Sergeant Hooper, I do not.”

  47

  I WAS BACK in one of the Vegas interrogation rooms, but this time I was on the other side of the table. Paula Chu was on the wrong side of the table this time. She was the weretiger who had so obligingly knelt in her front yard, waiting for the police to take her into custody. She had also been the serious girlfriend of Martin Bendez. Coincidence? Police don’t believe in it. Coincidence is just a crime you haven’t figured out yet, unless it’s not. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t make it not true.

  Paula Chu wasn’t much taller than me, maybe five-five or five-six. Her white-blond hair was cut short, but she had enough little tufts of hair artfully sticking out here and there that I was betting she’d have wavy hair if she let it grow out. Her eyebrows matched the hair, and her eyes were the palest blue I’d ever seen, almost white. She wore makeup that complemented the paleness of her skin and accented her eyes, dragging what color she could out of them. She was so overall pale that without eye makeup she’d have looked unfinished, like dough that needed baking. With the makeup she was lovely and delicate as the first blush of spring.

  The lovely eyes with their uptilted edges had nothing delicate in them when she glared at me across the table. Why wasn’t she mourning her dead boyfriend? Easy: she didn’t know he was dead yet. She’d gone into this room before the fireworks. I sat across
from her and knew that the man she loved was dead, and I didn’t tell her. I was saving it for when I thought it might gain me something in the questioning. Did that make me a bastard? Probably, but after the crime scene I’d just seen, I could live with that.

  “Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?” she asked at last. Her voice dripped with hostility.

  “We’re waiting for someone,” I said, and even managed a smile, though I wasn’t able to push it all the way up into my eyes.

  Edward was leaning against the far wall. He smiled wonderfully at her. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Ms. Chu, but you know how it is.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t know how it is. I know that the police put surveillance on my house, and came and dragged me away. Apparently, I’m a suspect in the slaughter of the SWAT officers and our local executioner.”

  I reacted to it, just a tightening of the shoulders, but she felt it, saw it. My pulse went up just a notch. “Who told you that?”

  She smiled at me. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes, either. “So that is why I’m here.”

  “We didn’t say that, Ms. Chu,” Edward said, in his happy Ted voice.

  “You didn’t have to; she reacted to it.” She gave me the full weight of those pale eyes.

  I stared into those pale tiger eyes in the human face and felt a thrill of fear, or adrenaline? She meant to spook me, but adrenaline isn’t good for you when you carry beasts inside you like furry hitchhikers.

  I’d been shielding as hard as I could. Hard enough that she hadn’t picked up on the fact that I wasn’t completely human. Interesting to know that I could shield well enough to pass for prey to Paula Chu. But that tiny spurt of adrenaline was enough to make the white tigress get to her feet and gaze up the long distance of that interior landscape.

  It was Chu’s turn to tense. My turn to see it and give her a satisfied smile. Her voice was even a little shaky around the edges. “You can’t be one of us.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  She touched her white hair. “You aren’t pure.”

  “I survived an attack,” I said. Which was true; if she thought that meant I was a full-blown weretiger, not my bad that she misunderstood.

  Her face was instantly scornful. “Then you don’t understand. It’s not your fault, but you can’t understand.”

  “Help me understand,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I thought that if you became a shapeshifter, they took away your badge.”

  “I’m with the preternatural branch of the Marshals Service. The rules are a little more lax.”

  She kept giving me that suspicious look. Her dainty nose flared as she sniffed the air. “You don’t just smell of tiger; you smell of our clan. You smell like white tiger. That is not possible.”

  I shrugged. “Why isn’t it possible?”

  “You should smell like tiger, but only regular, orange. One of us could attack you and make you a tiger, but you’d still not be clan.”

  “You mean I wouldn’t turn into a white tiger, even if a white tiger were my attacker.”

  She nodded, and she was puzzling over me. “Exactly.”

  The white tigress had risen to her feet and was beginning to trot up that long, dark path through the forest that was not, in a place that only dreams should have been real. I had concentrated and gotten her to slow, then stop. She began to pace around the path, like something caged. But she had stopped, and that was all I cared about.

  Chu leaned a little closer over the table. “I smell white tiger. You smell like clan. Are you hiding from us? Did you dye your hair and put contacts in? Your skin is white enough to pass.”

  “Sorry, but I’m all natural.” I wanted to glance back and see Edward in his corner, but didn’t dare. I knew he was there and would help if I needed it, but he was mostly there in case Paula Chu tried to go all tiger on our asses. We had been told to wait for Detective Ed Morgan before questioning her about the crimes. So far, we hadn’t broken that rule. Just two shapeshifters talking shop.

  She half-rose from her chair. The manacles kept her hands from rising and kept all of her from standing completely, but Edward still said, “Sit down, Ms. Chu, you’ll be more comfortable that way.”

  She gave a sound that might have been a laugh, but was all bitter. She let herself fall back into the chair. “Yeah, I guess it is more comfortable.” She stared at me, and I felt the first trickle of her energy like a hand searching in the dark for another hand to hold.

  “Don’t try to read my energy with yours,” I said, and I tried to shut the shields back as tight as when I’d started the interview. But the white tigress was still pacing on the path. She couldn’t get past my orders to stay where she was, but I didn’t have enough control to shut her down completely. That knowledge made my heart speed just a little. It let the tigress inside me start moving down the path again. It made Paula Chu take in a great, noisy breath of air. Her eyes actually fluttered closed, and she shivered in her chair.

  The white tigress inside me began to hurry along the path. I could try to tough it out, or I could leave the room. Normally, I’d have toughed it out, but I couldn’t afford to fall to the ground and start twitching. I’d had a near-change cause blood to flow from under my fingernails. If I did that where the Vegas police could see me, being kicked off this case was the least that would happen.

  I stood up. The tigress was running now, so fast that the black stripes vanished into the white blur of her.

  “Anita, are you all right?” Edward asked, moving a little away from the wall.

  I shook my head. “Need some air,” I said.

  The woman on the other side of the table opened her eyes and said, “You’re powerful, but you’re new. You don’t have the control yet.”

  I went to the door and banged on it. “Hit the buzzer,” Edward said. He’d moved closer to me and to the suspect.

  I fumbled for the buzzer. I heard it sound. Nothing happened. Someone had to let us out. Until this moment, I’d been okay with that. I pictured a brick wall across the path of the tiger in my head. She stopped running and snarled at the wall.

  My pulse was still thudding in my throat, but there was relief under the taste of my own heartbeat. I could do this; I’d been practicing for months so I could control my beasts and travel out of town without a posse of wereanimals to help me control all that internal strife. What was it about these tigers that made the control so much harder? Or was it simply being too far away from Jean-Claude and our power base? That thought sped my pulse up again. What if I couldn’t control my powers if I was too far away from . . . my master? I really wished I hadn’t thought of that.

  The tiger in my head hunkered down, pushing her body against the ground of that impossible place. I felt her body tense for the spring and realized my mistake too late. Tigers can jump eighteen to twenty feet vertically. My brick wall hadn’t been tall enough. She was over the wall in one muscular bound, and running full out down the path. If she hit the end of it, she’d hit me. It was like being hit by a small truck from the inside out.

  It was Paula Chu who said, “You are in control, not the beast. That must always be so.”

  “It’s your energy that’s fucking with me.” I put another wall in the tiger’s path. This one was metal, tall and shiny, so tall that it lifted through the trees. She wouldn’t jump this one.

  “I am not doing enough to cause this much trouble, even among the newly found.”

  I shook my head, still not looking at her. “I don’t know what it is about your clan, but your energy fucks with me. It just does.”

  “That would only be true if you were a born member of our clan, lost and now found, but if your coloring is real, then you cannot be pure born.”

  The white tiger in my head snarled and paced before the steel wall. She bared those glistening fangs and roared at me. The sound reverberated along my spine as if she’d turned me into some human-sized tuning fork.

  “I hear your call,” she sai
d, and her voice was strained.

  “I’m not doing it,” I said. I hit the buzzer again, but I knew now. Shaw, or someone, was watching. They wanted to see what would happen to me if I stayed in here long enough. If I changed shape for real, I’d lose my badge. The only thing that had saved it was that I had too many types of lycanthropy, and they couldn’t prove that I was a real shapeshifter. Shaw would love proving that. I wouldn’t just be off this case—I’d be off every case, forever.

  “You are calling for aid. It is a distress call, but only our queens can make the call that loud.”

  I tried to make the roaring tiger inside me be quiet, but she wouldn’t. She just kept calling for help. Shit.

  “What do I do to stop it?” I asked.

  “I can help you calm it, but I would have to touch you to do it.”

  “Bad idea,” Edward said, and took a step closer to me.

  I shook my head and looked at him. “If she can help me?”

  “And if she makes it worse?” he said.

  We looked at each other. The intercom that fed into the room came on. “What the fuck are you doing in there, Blake? The other tigers are going apeshit.”

  “Let me out,” I said, “and it’ll get better.”

  “You cannot stop it on your own,” Paula said.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Let me quiet you. It is the way of tigers to calm the young and the inexperienced.”

  I’d had Crispin do it for me once, when things were much worse than this. But . . . I did not know her, and she was the dead bad guy’s main squeeze. Would she help me, or hurt me?

  “Let me help you, Marshal. One of our people attacked you, and for that our entire clan owes you a debt.”

  “It wasn’t a white tiger,” I said, but I’d moved away from the door and was closer to the table.

  “Anita,” Edward said, and he reached out, then let his hand drop. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “No,” I said, but I kept moving toward her.

  “If it wasn’t a white tiger, then who attacked you?” she asked.

  “Yellow,” I said, and I was standing beside her, staring down into those blue eyes. Just that made the tiger inside me stop screaming. It was as if just being closer to another white tiger soothed my beast.