“You’re using the present tense,” I told Dmitri quietly.
“Yeah, I am,” he said. “They’re still out there, but nowhere in our city, you can be sure of that.”
“Why would a Wendigo attack Luna?” said Sunny.
“Better question,” I said. “Why did a bunch of psychopaths kidnap me and leave me for a Wendigo to hunt?”
“I can’t help you with that one,” Dmitri said. “I don’t get involved with that. Redbacks don’t deal with Wendigo and we like it that way. Packs that do always end up fucked over because that’s what happens when you deal with monsters.”
“Your delicate sensibilities aside, where could I find these things?” I asked.
Dmitri crossed his arms. “I put my foot down there, Luna. A Wendigo almost killed you, and you’re not going to rush in like you always do and make things worse.”
“Hey,” said Sunny. “Don’t talk to her like that. I didn’t see you showing up to save the day when she got kidnapped.”
“You stay out of this!” Dmitri rumbled. “You couldn’t understand all the politics at play. If a were confronted the Wendigo, the repercussions would be disastrous for all of us. Luna just doesn’t understand what consequences her recklessness might have.”
“Oh, I know you didn’t just tell me to sit in the corner like a good little woman while the men keep me safe from the big bad monsters,” Sunny said. “I think you’re forgetting who stepped in when Alistair Duncan was about to arrest you, and who looked out for Luna for all that time when you just left . . .”
“Okay, enough!” I bellowed. “Both of you. Sunny, you’re being rude. Dmitri, stop telling me what to do.”
“Luna, I can’t let you go looking for the Wendigo,” said Dmitri. “If you contact them, every pack in this city will be out for your blood. Packs that use them as underground hitters guard their assets jealously, and everyone else will see you as a traitor to weres.”
“Somebody already is,” I snapped. “Gerard Duvivier. I just have to find evidence.”
Dmitri stopped pacing and frowned. “No. That doesn’t follow. The Loup are small-time and they mostly deal with plain humans. No way would they go after weres in other packs. They’d get their entrails strung out over a ten-block radius.”
“But . . . ,” I started, and then realized he was right. The murderer was the same four times over, and Duvivier didn’t fit. Something about the deaths was hidden, like the thing in the nighttime forest.
“Okay,” I said. “Then I have to go to the source. I have to meet the Wendigo.”
Dmitri came to me and wrapped his arms around my shoulder. My head clunked against his collarbone and I left my arms at my sides. “Why does it always have to be you?” he whispered into my hair. “Why can’t you leave this one?”
“Because it’s my job,” I said, putting my hands on either side of his face and looking into his eyes. “And if I live with this, I’ll have to be afraid for the rest of my life.”
Dmitri’s eyes went hard as jewels, not black and not passionate. Not the eyes I knew at all. “I guess you’ll do what you’ll do,” he said finally. “Like always. I’m going to go make us some dinner. Sunny, you staying?”
She nodded mutely.
“Well, that could have gone better,” I said to Sunny after Dmitri had disappeared into the kitchen.
“He’s just worried about you,” Sunny said. “It’ll blow over.” She was a terrible liar.
“Forget it,” I muttered. “How are we going to find these Wendigo? I mean, are they always so . . . hungry? And misty?”
“Texts say that most of the time, they’re human,” said Sunny. “The Wendigo change can only be passed by blood, and they only change when they hunt. But . . . they hunt a lot. Almost every recorded sighting of a Wendigo has been in, um, creature form. And that’s just the witches who lived to tell about it later.”
I went into the kitchen, where Dmitri was chopping carrots like they’d insulted his mother. “Where are they?”
“Who?” he grunted.
“The Wendigo. You have to know, even if the Redbacks didn’t deal with them. A community of people doesn’t just disappear into the landscape.” No matter how romantic it seems for gangs of outlaws to roam a state forest, a group of any size needs food and shelter and bathrooms, and people notice that sort of thing.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” Dmitri said. “I’m not helping you do something this foolish. Wendigo and weres stay apart for a reason, Luna. Trust me.”
“Fine,” I said. “If you won’t do it for me, then think about the four people they’ve killed so far. Three of them were good people, at least.”
Dmitri stopped chopping and jammed the knife into the cutting board. “Damn it.”
“Please, Dmitri.”
“The abandoned Paiute reservation,” he said. “Out past the fireworks stand on the interstate. That’s the last I heard of them.”
I touched his shoulder and then went to the front entry and got my gun, badge, and a map of Las Rojas County.
“Hey!” Sunny said. “You’re not going out there alone?”
“Unless you want to get turned into jerky snacks,” I said, “then yes. I’m on my own.”
“Far be in from me to stand in the way of the charge of the Luna brigade, but you’re bleeding,” Sunny said. I looked at the floor where I was standing barefoot, and saw a crimson print. I hit the wall.
“Hex me.” I couldn’t very well go wandering into a Wendigo nest with a bloody cut. I’d seen what blood did to weres—I could only imagine the reaction something like the thing in the forest would have. Even though the cottage was stuffy, I shivered. “I hate this,” I said aloud to Sunny. “I can’t access any of the case files and David isn’t sharing information with me anymore, not with Mac and Morgan staring at the back of his head.”
“What would you advise me to do?” Sunny asked, folding her arms. I pressed an old sock over the reopened cut on my foot and glared at nothing. “Well?” she demanded. Even though she was smaller than me, with a cherubic face and angelic farm-girl falls of wavy brown hair, Sunny had a grit to her that I lacked. She got what she wanted, one way or another, and kept smiling politely the whole time.
“I don’t think you’ll ever investigate a murder, dear cousin, much as I have supreme faith in your witchy powers.”
“It must get awfully dark inside your box, Luna. Step outside it for two seconds.”
“Gods, you’re bitchy,” I said. “All right. I’d try to find a link between the four victims and myself. Dig into their backgrounds. Find out what they didn’t tell us. Rattle their closet skeletons until something breaks.”
She grinned at me. “What are we waiting for? The library’s open late.”
The downtown branch of the Nocturne City Library looks the way a library should look: gray granite on the outside, somber wood and hushed voices and the smell of a million dusty pages on the inside. A bronze statue of Jeremiah Chopin regarded Sunny and me with blank, gleaming eyes as we mounted the steps and passed through the iron-bound front doors.
We went down the marble steps to the cool, slightly misty-feeling basement that housed the newspaper morgue, the genealogical society’s records, and the computer lab.
“This would be so much easier with a police computer,” I muttered, sitting down at one of the battered gray terminals.
“Even cops use Google,” said Sunny. She had a point there. “Give me two of the names and I’ll see what I can find.” I gave her Priscilla Macleod and Jin Takehiko, keeping Aleksandr Belodis and Bertrand Lautrec for myself.
We surfed in silence for a few moments before Sunny said, “The Macleods have a history in Nocturne City. The historical society has a bunch of pages on them.” She typed for a moment. “The Takehikos, too. Mariko Takehiko was the first woman and the first immigrant to own her own business in the city limits. They still own a textile import business. Lots of charity work.”
“Sweet,” I muttered.
“Legit, charitable weres. What about the Macleods?” Similar pithy, congratulatory statements were turning up on my screen concerning the Lautrec family—financiers who rivaled the big downtown firms, at least until Bertrand took a left turn into drug pushing—and alarming clips about the Belodises, who escaped Latvia ahead of some horrific political regime and went from a single tavern on the waterfront to the sort of verbiage that newspapers use to dance around organized crime.
Well, the Viskalcis looked the part.
“Macleod . . . lawyers, until the early 1950s,” said Sunny. “Theodore Macleod was disbarred for jury tampering in a corruption trial. After that, the family sort of fades away . . .” Her breath hitched. “Get this: the police detective on trial for taking bribes? His name was Jim McAllister.”
I rolled my ergonomic stool over to Sunny’s terminal and looked at the photo. Aside from a comb-over so shiny with Brylcreem it could deflect a laser and a slightly more sullen set to his face, the man in the picture could have been Mac, down to the half-smoked Lucky Strike clamped between his lips.
“I didn’t know Lieutenant McAllister’s father was involved in the scandals,” said Sunny.
“Everyone was in deep to the were packs back then,” I said. “Cops, crooks . . . they ran this city.” The Macleod trail dried up after the trial and their money and name went the same way so many weres did as the twentieth century wore on—straight down.
“So,” said Sunny, tapping her teeth with her index finger. “All old families. All strong packs. What’s it mean, Luna?”
Something tickled me, in the part of my brain that’s the first to see the caravan of hunches coming around the bend, and I stood up. “Let’s take a look at some papers, Sunny.”
She followed me to the newspaper morgue and with the help of a mostly mute reference librarian we located the first five years of the Nocturne City Inquirer, the paper Jeremiah Chopin had founded when he built his city on top of timber and tide flats.
The papers were sparse for the first year, four or five pages each, most of the stories written by one Emmaline Stout, with a chatty style and questionable grammar. Most of the photos were Jeremiah Chopin felling a tree for the new city hall, Nocturne City’s chief engineer driving the spike into the end of the Northern Pacific Railway line to connect Nocturne and Seattle, the skeletal frame of the Blackburn mansion going up on the site that in thirty years would be Nocturne University.
In year three, a column by a Spiritualist called Mortimer Edgars appeared. Sunny shook her head as we read the tiny, crooked type. “This guy was on the far side of nutty-nuts, let me tell you.”
Edgars talked mostly about his “companion spirits,” who prophesized that there would be reliable train transportation to Mars in the next fifty years, but occasionally he delved into witches, weres, and daemons, and got most of the facts wrong every time. Angry letters to the editor from families whom Edgars had smeared became prevalent.
Edgar’s last column was titled “On Foreigners” and it began, Do not mistake my usage of the word ‘foreigners’ to mean those denizens of Nocturne from the dark continent or the shores of Araby . . .
“This is going to make me lose my lunch,” said Sunny. “The purple prose alone would be enough to stun an elephant.”
“Patience,” I said. Edgars continued, No, dear readers, I speak of a far more insidious menace: those that bear a friendly face of comparable color and composure to your own but who underneath hide the most dastardly and blasphemous of secrets . . . the secret of the Non-Human . . .
“Hex me,” I muttered, skipping ahead. If Edgars had attempted to out the witches and weres of Nocturne, he was suicidal as well as a terrible writer.
These so-called wear-wolves don human guises, and their families and clans are numerous and far-flung. The primary clans that I have investigated (and indeed, who claim to be the original five in our fair city, with pride!) include the Warwolves, the Loup, the Oriental Ookami, and the strange and reclusive Viskalcis.
“Holy shit,” I muttered, already reaching for the PRINT key on the document scanner’s terminal. “It’s them,” I explained to Sunny. “It’s all the packs of the dead weres.”
“Luna,” said Sunny in a tight voice, “read the last bit.”
But the most prideful and ostentatious and indeed hateful of these Wear-wolf clans, and the one who has the unmitigated nerve to claim that they are the city’s protectors, are the Serpent Eye. A rough and unrefined lot . . .
I felt like someone had injected ice water directly into my heart. “No,” I said.
If you want to get technical about it, I chose to be Insoli. Joshua, the were who gave me the bite, was a Serpent Eye. If I’d stayed with Joshua instead of running like heaven and hell were after me, I’d be one of them now. Prideful and ostentatious and hateful, just like him.
“Why me?” I asked Sunny, loudly and desperately. The librarian shushed us. “I’m not a Hexed Serpent Eye,” I hissed at her. The printer whirred and spit out my selections and I grabbed them in a fist, practically running from the room. Sunny followed me, lugging my shoulder bag.
“Luna, there’s got to be an explanation.”
“The explanation is that Joshua couldn’t screw me that first night so now he’s gonna screw me any way he can!” I said. “It’s his fault those sons of bitches came after me!”
“Joshua disappeared six months ago,” said Sunny. “Really, Luna, he’s probably on some Mexican beach. How could he have engineered four murders when he’s in hiding from the feds and the SEC?”
“Okay,” I said, forcing myself to breathe normally. “Assuming Joshua is incidental in all this, then what’s the link beyond pack?”
“Family,” said Sunny simply, pushing open the door to the genealogy room. “All of the dead weres are descendants of the first families of the first packs in the city.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed, a little bugged that I hadn’t seen the connection first, “but they’d have no reason to go after me. I’m nobody in the scheme of the Serpent Eye. Hex it, I’m not Serpent Eye.” I kicked the nearest file cabinet with a growl.
“Joshua is,” said Sunny. “Maybe they wanted to get to him and so went to you?”
“That doesn’t make any sense—we fucking hate each other’s guts,” I said, “and anyway, Serpent Eyes increase their pack with the bite, not by birth, so . . .” I trailed off as I saw where my logic had led me. “Oh, crap.”
Sunny looked up from the census record she was scanning. “What?”
“Serpent Eyes make mates and pack members by the bite and always have,” I said. “Crap. Crap. Crap.”
“Stop with the ‘crap’ and tell me what’s wrong!” Sunny snapped. I put my face in my hands and groaned.
“I have to find Joshua Mackelroy.”
I left Sunny and drove myself to Batista’s subdivision. The same three house patterns repeated over and over again, Day-Glo lawns, the whole bit. Out of all the men in Tac-3, Batista was the one I trusted. Mostly because he was the only one who’d never made a comment, intended kindly or not, about me being un-human. It just didn’t seem to register. He reminded me of Mac, if Mac was a gun-toting Puerto Rican.
Batista looked just this side of stunned when I turned up on his doorstep. “Javier, I need a favor and I need you not to ask any questions,” I said when he answered the bell.
“Luna,” he said, sounding nonplussed. “You holding up okay? Heard you got slapped all to hell when those putos snatched you. Shouldn’t you be resting or something?”
“I’m fine, fine,” I said. “But I really need this, Javier. Help me out?”
“You know I’d do anything for anyone on the team,” Javier said. He cast a look over his shoulder. A late-night talk show blared from farther inside the house. “Marisol’s in the kitchen,” he said. “But we can talk.” He stood aside and let me in, taking us into a small study. Marisol’s hand was obvious in here, too—pictures of kittens decorated the wall, and the carpet was pale green
. “What’s up, Wilder?”
“I need you to log on to the FBI database and look up the last known whereabouts of a subject. Name’s Mackelroy, Joshua.” I paced, the memories I had of Joshua making it impossible to sit.
Batista paused in his typing on his sleek computer. “Why do you need me to do that?”
I bit my lip before I told him. “This is my case, Javier. My . . . my kidnapping. If anyone at the Twenty-fourth finds out I’m digging . . .”
“Okay, okay,” Batista said. “I get it. But if anyone in the department finds out about this I am not losing my pension. ¿Comprende?”
“Crystal,” I said. Batista typed and I looked out the window at his spotless yard, trying not to think about the last time I’d seen Joshua. I’d let him go so easily after he’d almost beaten me to death, and then done worse. Trying to be the bigger person, to hold the moral fucking high ground. Tried to let it go for Dmitri’s sake.
“You’re in luck,” Javier said. “The Feebs picked up Mackelroy two days ago trying to fly from LAX to Guam and from there to God-knows-where. They’re holding him at the field office.”
“He’s in custody?” I said. I shouldn’t have been surprised—Joshua was brutal and efficient but intelligence wasn’t an attribute he rolled high on.
“Probably married to his cellmate by now,” said Batista. “That what you needed, Wilder?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks, Javier.”
“You bet,” he said. He took me back to the door, alert for Marisol. “Wilder, you be careful, hey?”
“I always try, Batista, but the bad guys usually have other ideas.”
“Mackelroy has warrants,” said Batista. “One of ’em is for assaulting a police officer. That wouldn’t be you, now, would it?”
“It would,” I said. “But believe me, I’m after him for something bigger now.”
“If you’re gonna beat the shit out of the guy, try not to leave any marks,” said Batista. “Marisol will skin me alive if I lose my job. Not to mention the guys holding her gold card.”
Second Skin Page 11
