Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Look,” Bryson instructed me. I shuffled past the scene reports and pulled out the eight-by-ten glossy photos that the crime scene photographer had included. Three men and one woman, all prone and naked, each with a single large-caliber bullet hole to the head.

  “I told you this was about weres,” Bryson muttered, leaning close. “These weres. They were all found at the edge of the Sierra Fuego Preserve, starting about eight weeks ago. All shot in the head. The vics lived in Nocturne City so the state police kicked it back to us.”

  I shoved the photos back at him. “Sad, David, but I’m on SWAT now. I couldn’t look into this even if I wanted to, and that Internal Affairs investigation pretty much cemented my desire to break down doors, not chase down bad guys. Homicide doesn’t need me and I don’t need them, alrighty?”

  “It’s been a month,” he hissed at me. “No leads. I got no way to get into their packs and figure out who had a beef with these . . . people . . . and why. Then, two days ago, I got off shift and went home and found this.”

  He rooted for another photo in his case and thrust it at me. The shot was the door of a pricey Mainline condo. A dead chicken was tacked to the center of the door, and the words SOME PIG dripped blood down the wood.

  I only partially stifled my snort of laughter.

  “This isn’t fuckin’ funny!” Bryson shouted, crumpling the photo. “The packs think that the police don’t give a shit and if I don’t figure these murders out I’m going to end up as the rabbit in a dogfight! I don’t wanna be the fucking rabbit, Wilder.”

  I composed myself and said, “You’re right. The packs will deal with this in their own way and the last thing they want is interference. The dead bird was just a case of someone being polite.” I leaned forward and took off Bryson’s sunglasses, staring into his watery blue eyes. “I strongly suggest you let the case go cold and back the Hex off before you end up with your skin decorating the walls of this nice condo you’ve got.”

  The donuts were crumbs by now and I licked the frosting off my fingers and stood up. “Keep your head down, David. And stop buying your suits off the rack. You’ll be fine.”

  I threw down a few dollars to cover my donuts and started to walk away. “You’re a lot of things, Wilder,” Bryson said. He was practically whispering, but the bastard knew I could hear him loud and clear. “But I never thought a lazy cop was one of them.”

  My glare could have cut sheet metal as I turned on him. “Excuse me?”

  “Ain’t you the one who always got on my ass? Dirty Harry-ette, telling me all the time how to do my job better and be perfect, like you? Now you’re just gonna walk away from this?”

  I came back and stood over him, crossing my arms so I wouldn’t punch him in the nose. “Are you telling me you actually want to solve this case? David, the first time we met you told me you thought we should pen up weres in a national park and ‘let nature take its course.’ ”

  He looked at his hands. “So I don’t like freaks. Doesn’t mean I’m going to let a quadruple homicide go cold. Committees look at that stuff when they promote you, Wilder . . . but I guess you wouldn’t care about that. Now that you’re riding with SWAT you’ve got lofty ideals and all that shit to keep you nice and warm.”

  “At least I have a few left,” I snapped, snatching the photos of the four victims back. Of course I was curious. I’d been a homicide detective for two and a half years and the instincts don’t curl up and die just because you spend your days in body armor, breathing in smoke grenades instead of in business casual, swilling bad coffee.

  “Forget it,” Bryson muttered. “You made yourself clear.” He tried to take the photos back but I pulled them out of his reach.

  “No, now that I know your interest is purely mercenary, I may actually be interested. If you had some sort of altruistic motive, I’d have to look for wires coming out the back of your head.”

  I slid back into the booth and looked over the sheaf of photos again, not seeing the faces of the dead weres this time but trying to find the print of the killer. “You’re sure it’s the same perp in all four cases?”

  “Same gun,” said Bryson. “S&W .44 automatic, no trace evidence on the bodies.”

  “Someone with firearms training who has access to a vehicle,” I mused, setting the four victims out in a quadrant. Two of the men were skinny to average, one white and one Asian, and the woman was pretty and almost delicate, unusual for weres. We tend to be big-boned and tall, not that I’m really complaining

  The third man was markedly different, heavy jaw and brows that jutted, almost Cro-Magnon. “This one.” I tapped him.

  “Ugly bastard,” Bryson offered around a mouthful of bear claw. “Name’s Bertrand Lautrec. His prints were in the system for assault.” He rolled his eyes. “Imagine that.”

  “He’s Loup,” I said. “He must have gotten the bite . . . they only change bone structure like this when they get the bite rather than be born were.”

  “Thanks for the biology lesson, Professor X,” Bryson said. “This means what, exactly?”

  “The Loup are violent, drug-pushing sons of bitches,” I said. “If anyone would nail a chicken to your front door, it’d be them.” I tucked the photo into my bag. “I’ll check him out for you, David, but my involvement ends there. I’m not bailing your ass out of this mess . . . I have my own job to do. Got it?”

  “Fine, whatever,” said Bryson. His face lit up like he’d just had a death sentence commuted. “You and the Loup go sniff each other’s privates or whatever and get back to me. Here’s my cell.” He offered me a card and I reached out for it, then grabbed his index finger and bent it backward.

  “Shit! Not again!” Bryson howled.

  “Let’s get something straight,” I murmured in his ear. “I am helping you out of the goodness of my gods-damn heart, so use that thick head of yours for something other than squishing beer cans and show me a little respect.” I applied a little more pressure to make sure I got the point across. “This time, I won’t bother breaking it, David . . . I’ll just rip it off at the root if you keep pissing me off.”

  “All right all right all right!” he yelped. “Hormonal bitch! Jesus!”

  “Glad we got that straightened out,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to go home and see if I still have a cottage after the quake, and if I do, I’m going to spend the rest of the day off with my boyfriend, not thinking about your case.” I tucked Bryson’s card away. “I’ll call you.”

  “Wilder?” he said. “Sometimes you’re not a total estrogen case. Thanks. For the help, not for almost breaking off my finger.”

  “Aw gee, David. Any more sentimentality and I’m gonna start crying.” I dropped him a wink and left the Bungalow.

  CHAPTER 3

  At home I saw Dmitri’s molten-copper hair first, backlit by the sun as he paced the driveway, motorcycle boots wearing a circle in the crushed seashells. I parked the Fairlane and collected the bags from Lemon Thai, the hole-in-the-wall restaurant up the beach that was Dmitri’s favorite.

  He stopped pacing and whipped his head toward me when I shut the car door. “Where the Hex have you been?”

  I held out the bag of pad Thai and fried rice like a white flag. “I had to do a work thing. I’m sorry. Here’s lunch on me.”

  “It’s your day off,” Dmitri stated flatly. He took the bag, stomped over to the front step of the cottage, set the bag down, and came back, taking me by the shoulders.

  “I feel bad about last night,” I said, even though the small part of me wanted to add, I feel bad that you were such a self-centered ass. I leaned up to give him a kiss hello, but Dmitri turned his head, his nostrils flaring and flattening. His black eye was already practically a shadow.

  It took me a few seconds to realize he was scenting me, and the only reason he’d be doing that was to seek out the scent of someone else.

  I shoved him away, hard. “What is your damn problem, Dmitri?”

  “It’s
the same man,” he said. His grip on my arms tightened. “You’re my mate, Luna . . . I don’t want to smell other men on you. Ever. Do we understand each other?”

  In, out. I breathed and then met his eyes. The black was starting to spill out of his pupils and across the dirty emerald of the iris. The daemon magick that fueled Dmitri’s phase to full was roused by passion, but even more so by rage. Asmodeus, the daemon who’d given it to him, had anger in him like a living thing had blood. The daemon fed on Dmitri, on his emotions, the black eating his eyes.

  Ignore it. This isn’t about the Hexed daemon. “I understand that this is getting old, Dmitri.” I slipped his grip with an angry jerk and went to get my food. “Either you trust me or you don’t,” I said simply. “Come inside when you’ve figured it out.”

  I turned my back on him and he growled. I was disrespecting his status as a pack member, however fallen, versus mine as an outcast.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” I sighed. “We both know you’re not going to do anything about it.” I looked back over my shoulder. Dmitri had that twisted-up confusion on his face, the kind that he wore too often around me. When he’d met me, and he was a murder suspect with a dead girlfriend. When he’d been called home to Ukraine by his pack and saddled with a mate who wasn’t me. When he’d left them, and come to live with me.

  It shouldn’t be like this. “Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up.”

  I went inside, and left Dmitri in the driveway staring at the water.

  He came in after I’d eaten half of the pad Thai and sat beside me. After a few seconds he wrapped my shoulders with his heavy veined arms and muttered “I’m sorry” into my hair.

  I rotated my head to nuzzle into his shoulder. “Yeah, well. You should be.”

  “I know I can be a real ass,” he said, reaching across me to pick a prawn out of the nest of rice noodles.

  “That’s an understatement,” I muttered.

  “It’s just that when I think about you leaving me, being with somebody else, and then to smell that man . . .”

  “Bryson,” I supplied.

  “To smell him on your skin . . .” Dmitri growled softly. “The daemon doesn’t always give me the best control.”

  “Here’s a wacky way-out idea,” I said. “How about trusting me a little?”

  Dmitri’s lips twitched a little bit, which was the closest he usually got to smiling. “Probably should, huh?”

  “It might be prudent if you don’t want to wake up with your eyebrows shaved off.” I touched the tip of his nose and then kissed him quickly.

  He turned it into something longer, and before long I’d forgotten all about the food even though I was still so hungry I could feel my stomach trying to chew through my spine.

  We made love on the carpet in front of the sofa and he hissed in pain when I rolled him over and took the top. I saw more bruises, lower down near his gut, and I slowed even though it killed me. Sweat went into my eyes and stung. “They really got you.”

  Dmitri grabbed my hips and resumed our motion. “I told you I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fair enough,” I whispered, and returned to the business at hand, although I put my arms on either side of his face and supported my own weight without making a big deal of it. We all had our pride.

  “Sweetheart?” I said, after I was nestled into his chest, listening to his heart beat.

  “Mmm?” Dmitri’s growl was more felt than heard, rumbling through me in vibrations that went to all the right zones.

  “Do you know who’s pack leader of the Loup these days?”

  Dmitri stiffened. “Why would you want to know that? Why would I know that?”

  “I dunno, maybe because you used to be the most feared pack leader in the entire city?”

  “I think it’s Gerard Duvivier nowadays, but you didn’t answer my question.”

  Damn it all. I was hoping he’d let that one slide on by. But Dmitri was a lot smarter than his scraggly ex-biker outsides suggested. He’d been smart enough to survive a Soviet prison, become a pack leader in a tough city—and hell, he put up with me most days.

  “I’m looking into some murders for David. It’s just a consulting thing!” I added when Dmitri’s face grew a sudden stormcloud of a frown.

  “You told me that you were on SWAT. No more murders, no more people who commit them. No more of putting yourself in these situations where you can get killed!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was in my bra, Bryson was very insistent, and I just wanted to get rid of him. I think he might actually be on to something. I’m just going to go talk to the packs because he’s not getting anywhere, and someone has started to send him presents in the form of dead birds. No one really deserves that.”

  “No,” said Dmitri.

  “Yeah, I mean Bryson’s a complete ass, but he is a cop and someone is offing these weres . . . might even be another serial killer like Alistair Duncan.”

  “No,” Dmitri said again. “You’re not looking into this any longer, Luna.”

  I lifted my chin off his chest and looked into his eyes. They glittered, like the edge of a knife too close to the skin. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re Insoli,” said Dmitri. “You’re not even a detective any longer. I’m saying no, Luna. I won’t let my mate put herself in danger just because she can.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see what you’re saying.”

  “I know what you’re thinking . . . ,” he started. “Luna, I’m doing this because I care about you. Somebody has to.”

  “You’re a jerkoff.” I got up, pulled on my T-shirt, and walked upstairs, my footsteps heavy enough to rattle the few pictures of me and Dmitri that graced the walls of the cottage.

  “I’m not doing this to . . . to dominate you. I just think . . .” He stood up, pulling on his jeans.

  “No, Dmitri.” I turned on him. “You didn’t think. You never think that maybe I’m not some meek little pack wife now, that I still want to do things for myself, and that I miss being a detective more than anything!”

  Wait, I did? That was news to me.

  Dmitri chuffed out a laugh. “You know what? This is never gonna work as long as you assume that you can stay exactly the same and I’m just gonna take it. I expect things from my mate, Luna. If you’d been inducted into a pack, you’d know that.”

  “Oh, Hex you,” I snarled. “Don’t you dare bring that up.”

  “You go investigate the Loup and I can’t guarantee that I’m gonna be around when you come back. I can’t deal with you just thinking about you, Luna. I’ve tried, and it fucking doesn’t work.”

  I fetched my worst glare against his impassive stare. “Threaten someone who hasn’t faced down a serial killer or been thrown off a bridge by a blood witch, because next to them you just come off as sort of pathetic.”

  Torn between crying and screaming, I ran and locked myself in the bathroom. The tough-girl lines only went so far before Dmitri realized he had the most power to wound me, and that whenever he reminded me that I’d never be a member of his pack, he had.

  It was after five when I parked at the Justice Plaza and took the creaky elevator to our floor. Cleolinda, our secretary, was still at her desk, punching the keyboard like it had done something to personally impinge her honor.

  “Hey there, Cleo.” I leaned on her desk and proffered an iced macchiato from the coffee stand at the curb.

  “Girl, where you been all my life?” she asked, taking the coffee without breaking her stride at the keyboard. “What do you want?”

  “Not much gets past you, huh?”

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks. I’m busy, Wilder . . . what do you need?”

  “I need a sheet on one Gerard Duvivier,” I said.

  “A sheet.” Cleolinda whistled between her teeth. “Now, the last I knew, badass SWAT officers did not need to pull the history of the bad men they kick the door in on.”

  “I bought you a freaking macchiato, woman. What do y
ou want, my firstborn?”

  Cleolinda looked me up and down, one eyebrow ranging above her purple cat’s-eye glasses. “Uh-huh. Duvivier, you said? Sounds froggy.”

  “French Canadian,” I said. “Just print off the sheet, would you?”

  “Bet you didn’t give your desk man back at the precinct this crap,” Cleo muttered as she pulled the file and hit the PRINT key. “There it is. Now get out of here before I kick your skinny werewolf ass.”

  “Love you, too, Cleo.” I saluted her with the sheaf of papers from Duviver’s file and beat a retreat.

  The Loup ran the Bowers, a section of the city that had been nice for about five minutes eighty years ago, before the junkies coming off the boats moved in and turned the neighborhood into what everyone in a uniform called Needle Park. Keep the junkies all penned up in one atrophied limb of Nocturne City and leave the rest to the were packs, and the witches.

  Usually, it kept everyone happy. Usually.

  The Loup’s pack house wasn’t hard to find. It was a big, sprawling Victorian like everything else in the Park, converted into some kind of private club. The Loup made a lot more money than the average were pack in Nocturne, dealing drugs and keeping their little corner of paradise in a stranglehold so tight it was starting to turn blue.

  I parked the Fairlane in an alley behind the mansion-cum -club and didn’t lock it. These days, with one headlight dangling and the chrome on the bumper smashed to hell, the Fairlane was looking about as dented as my love life. If someone was dumb enough to steal it, more power to them.

  I sighed. There was a time when I loved that car like a baby. Suddenly, with the ground under my Hexed feet moving and Dmitri turning into someone I didn’t know, it mattered less than gum on my shoe.

  The kitchen door yielded to me and I pushed into a space that was too small and smoky and greasy for my nose and eyes to handle.

  “Hey, you! Out! No dancers in kitchen!”