Even though he smelled like the things in the morgue, and what had chased me through the woods, it seemed very far removed from his serious, heart-shaped face and the easy comfort this tidy little home engendered in me. I wasn’t used to feeling so at ease with people I’d just met, especially blood-drinking predators.
“Put the record on, if you want,” Lucas hollered at me. I dropped the needle on the turntable, using the opportunity to look through the cracked door into Lucas’s bedroom. REO Speedwagon issued from speakers that were half static with age.
The bedroom was as immaculate as the rest of the trailer, military corners on the bed and a few dress shirts hanging next to an army jacket in the tiny closet. Everything else was obscured from my vantage.
“This is one of my favorites. This song.”
I jumped at least ten feet as Lucas spoke from directly behind me. “Gods above!”
He laughed, setting down two glasses with lemon circles floating on top. “You’re wound pretty tight, even for a were. Don’t you ever get any R and R in the city?”
“I . . . I do okay.”
“Got a boyfriend?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“He’s doing a piss-poor job, from the look of you.” He took his glass and drained it in a gulp, and I followed suit so I didn’t have to answer him. I hadn’t realized that my mouth was dry as the dirt outside. Lucas sat next to me on the sofa and I choked on the dregs of my tea, an ice cube sliding down my throat.
Lucas reached over and hit me sharply between the shoulder blades. His hand was still very warm and I tried to smile gratefully as I coughed. “Thank . . . you . . . ,” I gasped, finally able to breathe again. He grinned with one side of his mouth.
“Rescuing pretty women is one of my hobbies. Don’t mention it.”
I felt my cheeks warm up, and cleared my throat to cover. Lucas was disconcerting to the worst degree. He smelled wrong and he looked too good for me to reconcile what was hiding under the skin.
And damn it, I shouldn’t even be noticing. Dmitri and I were making it work. He was, as he liked to state often, my mate.
Just remember that, Wilder, and a cute shapeshifting monster or two won’t be a problem.
“So,” said Lucas. “You wanted to know about wild Wendigo.”
“I’m going to level with you,” I said. “I know that Wendigo are responsible for the deaths I’m investigating. I know they’re hunting weres and eating their hearts and turning them into whatever attacked and almost turned me in the city morgue—zombies, minions, whatever you want to call them. What I don’t know is why. If you don’t want me looking too hard at you squatting on this land, or incidents in Nocturne City during times you and your . . . clan . . . were in town—you’re going to help me. Got it?”
Lucas put his twist of lemon into his mouth, sucking the pulp off the rind and wincing at the sour. “The hard sell usually work for you?”
“Don’t avoid the subject,” I snapped. “I can make life really uncomfortable for you if you piss me off.”
“All right,” he said, and stretched languidly, one arm traveling out of sight behind my head. I moved to a stool by the record player. Pretty he may be, but pretty was a far cry from trustworthy. “I’ll tell you what I know, but we need a free exchange of information here,” Lucas told me. “You say Wendigo attacked you in the city morgue?”
“I hate repeating myself,” I said. “They were dead weres. Then they got up, and they were alive again. I don’t know what they were then.”
“Well,” said Lucas. “Wendigo have to be born. What you’ve described is magick and I don’t hold with that hand-waving crap.”
My eyebrows climbed. “I saw the working circles behind the cabin.”
“Some of my clan believes,” said Lucas. “Me, I believe in what I can see. I’m a Wendigo, not one of the faithful. Magick never did anything good for my ancestors, and it’s a damn sight less useful than a bullet.” He got up and fiddled with the tuning knob on the record player. “So whatever got you, it wasn’t a Wendigo. It was probably someone’s idea of a sick joke.”
“Well, I killed their sick joke, all four of them,” I said. “And I still say it was Wendigo-bred.”
The silence stretched long and thin. Speedwagon told me I was under the gun, so I took it on the run.
“You expecting me to flip out and eat you alive?” said Lucas finally, his eyebrows raised.
“Uh . . . I was expecting some form of anger management issue, yes,” I said.
“My clan has nothing to do with this,” said Lucas. “Maybe a wild clan messing with blood magick, but not mine.” He sat again. “So, a werewolf detective. Against the packs and their criminal activity, against the plain humans and their blind eyes. They must hate you in the city.”
I flinched, curling my mouth into a smile so Lucas wouldn’t see my weak point. “Yeah, most of ’em. A few think I’m all right.”
“Like your boyfriend? The werewolf smoker?”
“How do you do that?” It would be impressive by any standards, but considering that the most contact Dmitri and I’d had in days was a hug, it was miraculous.
“We don’t get to curl up and sleep in our doggy beds at night,” said Lucas. “We have to survive with absolutely nothing except our senses. So mine are good.” He took the end of his ponytail and stroked it, an unconscious motion, and then looked back at me.
“Magick or not, I know that Wendigo killed the four vics in the first place,” I said. “That, I think you know something about.”
“It was a wild clan,” said Lucas again. “I told you.”
“And yet I’m asking again,” I said. “I’m Insoli, and even I hear when a pack takes over territory or a leader gets courted out. You have to at least know who they are. I’ll take a name, even a made-up one.”
“Wendigo are a solitary people by nature,” said Lucas. He stared out at the little encampment and his voice got far away, like he was retelling a legend he’d first heard when he was small and scared. “They band together only to hunt and feed, or to mate and form clans of their own. When the last scion of a clan dies, the clan breaks apart. That’s how you get wild Wendigo. They meet in the wild and form bands, and they hunt. They feed. And that’s all.”
“Something else,” I said. “My SWAT squad ran into some nasty little imp-like things that had your same smell. Know anything about that?”
“Hmm. Brakichaks, most likely,” said Lucas. “The spirits of wild Wendigo summoned back by a shaman—a shaman with no scruples who doesn’t mind someone getting eaten,” he added when I gave him my best wide-eyed look. “Probably got one running with their band. That’s your bet for the zombie act. I told you—the sane among us don’t give magick the time it takes to piss on it.”
“How do I find the band that kidnapped me?” I said.
“And doesn’t someone like you control your territory? I mean, you seem like you’re strong.”
“I am, and a mean son of a bitch,” Lucas said. “But I’m not my father. He was the last of the old-blood Kennuka line. Once I decide to keep a mate, this clan will break up and re-form into something else. It’s the way of things.” He sighed. “I burn them when I find them, but I can’t keep the wild bands out of these woods. They hunt where they please.” He pulled up his shirt and revealed two broad, weeping wounds on his stomach that were only partially healed. “I met a wild one about six weeks ago. The result.”
“If a shaman . . . changes someone into one of those things,” I said, “is there any way to get them back?”
Lucas shook his head. “Wendigo are the wind and the hunger forever. We exist to hunt, we’re hard to kill, and if one of our shaman turns you into his construct, it’s permanent.”
“Sounds like a lonely life,” I said.
“It is,” said Lucas, looking me over in that penetrating way again. “But it’s the only one I’ve got. Now I think we’re done talking about this.”
“I have more ques
tions,” I said.
He shrugged. “I don’t have anything to hide, and you’re just going to ask the same things different ways to entrap me. You think I’d fall for that chestnut? Working in the police has made you pretty damn arrogant.”
After a long moment I said, “Hex you.”
Lucas laughed, his face opening up again. “Don’t take it personally. You’re not too insufferable, for a fucking cop.” He patted my knee and went into the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready. We’ll speak more after the meal. Then you should be getting home. The back roads aren’t safe with the wild ones out.”
“I can take care of myself,” I said, bristling a little.
“I have no doubt,” said Lucas. “Hell, you kicked my ass. But those things you fought were young and too hungry to think straight. These wild Wendigo fooling around with magick won’t be. You’re outgunned whether you like it or not.”
“If this is reassurance, it’s crappy,” I said. “You could come back to the city with me to watch my back, and give this information to the department . . .”
“No,” said Lucas, setting a plate of corn tortillas at my elbow. “The treaty forbids it. Don’t ask me to do something I could be killed for.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Didn’t realize the treaty was so scary.”
“It’s archaic and outdated,” said Lucas with the old grit in his tone. “It hardly bears speaking about. Now eat. Then I’ll see you to the edge of our land. You should be out of the forest before the moon comes up.”
After I downed two bowls of chili so hot it could strip paint off my car, a pile of tortillas, and more iced tea, I put my hand over my bowl when Lucas offered me more.
“No, thank you. It was great, but I’m stuffed.”
“You’re all gristle,” said Lucas, pinching my bicep.
“What do you eat normally, salads and diet water? Maybe on special occasions the smoker lets you have a rice cracker?”
“I like the bacon cheeseburgers at the Devere Diner,” I said, swatting his hand away. “I burn through a lot chasing down bad people and clapping handcuffs on them.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Lucas. He pushed back his chair, seeming oversize in the tiny space as he stood up and shuffled our plates into his hands and up his arm. “You’re not bad, for a were.”
“My ego has just been engorged,” I said drily. “Stop, before I lose all reason.”
Lucas ran water into the sink. “And then, there’s that mouth of yours. So Luna. What makes a good-looking girl like you decide on being a police officer?”
I decided to be honest. “I got tired of smelling like cooking oil and having drunks grab at my ass as a waitress, and the police academy was admitting.” I drained my last glass of tea. “I’m sure I failed the written test, but I did fine on the physical.” I’d done so well that the academy had given me a blood test and a stern interview, and only admitted me when they were sure I wasn’t taking steroids. It had taken some work to find the balance of hiding my were strength versus using it to get ahead, but I’d managed to make it through the basic training, the classes, the gun training, and the forensic units, all without outing myself as a were. At least until a blood witch decided to turn my city into his own personal abattoir.
“At first it was money, and just something to do until something better came along,” I told Lucas. “I’m not exactly sure what I thought would come along. I was a trainee doing a traffic stop with my senior officer when a passenger we stopped took off running.”
Short and skinny, a black-haired, hollow-eyed junkie whose paranoia got the better of him. Fast and agile enough to get past Officer Dixon, he jumped the guardrail of the freeway and took off into one of the dark underparts of the city.
“Just for a minute,” I said, “I forgot about hiding what I was. I forgot to be afraid of what would happen if I lost it and started to phase. I just knew the guy wasn’t getting away from me.”
I made the jump, fifteen feet down, the breath slammed out of me as I hit the concrete at the wrong angle, but I got up and I followed the reek of sweat and cooked meth. I followed the trail of the junkie’s fear until I caught him and tackled him into a pile of rotted cardboard boxes.
“I arrested him, and I called for backup and I just felt . . . calm. Like when you know you’re in the right place at the right time. I knew that right at that moment, handcuffing that guy was where I was supposed to be. Only time I’d ever felt like that.”
Lucas dried off his hands and came over to me, close enough to trade body heat. “You’re lucky. My mother worked in a beauty parlor before she married my father. Not many Wendigo women make it to adult-hood without a mate.”
“Did your father . . . Did he have this crazy idea about protecting your mother all the time, by any chance?”
“He was a good man, but he was a hard man,” said Lucas. “On the balance, my brother and I and our mother were better off when he died.” His eyes clouded, but he took a breath and changed the subject. “You have any family?”
“Yeah, but they don’t want much to do with me,” I said. “My cousin is the only person who I can hold a conversation with without it devolving into a screaming match.” Since my family wasn’t a subject I wanted to be on, I stood up and looked at the photographs on the trailer wall. “Are these yours?”
“That’s our father,” he said, pointing to a formal portrait circa the 1970s. “That’s me, when I was a baby.” Baby Lucas was bald and had a bad-tempered cast to his brow even as an infant.
Lucas jabbed the center photo. “My brother, Jason, and me, just before Pop passed.”
I paused, staring at Jason’s face. He was taller and stockier than Lucas, more of a fighter than a runner. He was also very, very familiar. “Jason . . . doesn’t live with you anymore,” I said flatly. Lucas blinked.
“He left to find his own way a few years ago.” Lucas lowered his voice. “I’m trusting you with this next part, you understand? Don’t go gossiping.”
“I don’t gossip,” I said.
Lucas’s jaw worked. “Jason just went wild. Didn’t even try to start his own clan. He just . . . gave up.”
“Lucas,” I said, lifting the photo off the hook. “Do you mind if I borrow this? I promise to bring it back.”
“Why?” he said. “Will it help your investigation?”
“Very much so,” I said, still staring at Jason’s face. The whine of the bullhorn and the screams of the people behind the cordon came back to me from a long way off.
You must have something to live for . . .
“The sooner you find that wild clan and their shaman, the better,” said Lucas. “I don’t like to speak ill of my own people but some of them are just bad. Makes it hard for the rest of us to lead decent lives.”
“Some weres, too,” I agreed.
“We should go,” said Lucas. He got the army jacket from his bedroom, even though I was still sweating through my top.
“All right. I’ll follow you back to the road.” I watched him walk ahead of me and felt guilt stab me between the shoulder blades. It’s never easy telling someone the family member they haven’t seen for a while won’t ever been seen again. It flat-out sucks, actually. But Lucas didn’t know, and he had to.
Outside the heat was still drifting out of the dirt and sending zephyrs across my face like spiderwebs, but the air had started to cool down. Lucas stopped me as I stuck the key into the Fairlane’s door.
“I enjoyed our meal.”
“Lucas,” I said in a rush, at the same time. “I have to talk to you about your brother, Jason.”
“You got some reason to think Jason’s involved?” he shot back.
I shook my head, not breaking our eye contact. If he thought he was going to pick up on my tell for lying, he had a disappointment coming. Spend enough time talking to liars and you learn to be a pretty damn good one yourself, on or off the job.
Lucas startled me by putting a hand on the curve where my neck and shoulder
met. His hand was bigger than Priscilla’s, but my skin pricked at the memory of the claw wounds in my shoulders. “I have not seen, heard from, or talked to my brother since the night he blew up at my father and me and walked out. Not when Pop died. Not ever. I don’t know what he’s been doing, just that he’s wild and I don’t give one thin ass-hair about him since he turned his back on us. He’s living his life.” Venom had crept in, and Lucas’s face twitched, ugly, even though he remained dispassionate, to a casual observer.
His hand was much cooler than my own skin, dry and slightly puckered from the dishwater. He smelled like lemons on top of the normal copper and steam. I fought the urge to turn into his grasp.
“You haven’t heard from him? At all?”
“That’s what I said. Not a phone call, a postcard, or a gods-damn Pony Express rider.”
Oh gods. Telling someone their family member is dead should be some sort of torture in the hottest of the seven hells, not a bullet point on a job description. “Lucas, there’s a reason you haven’t heard from Jason.”
Jason looked at me, unconcerned, and then simply leaned out and down off the ledge.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “But your brother . . . we had him as a John Doe, but I recognized him from the family pictures. He’s dead, Lucas. I’m very sorry.”
Lucas stuck a hand straight out and caught it on the side of my car, letting it support his weight. He blinked twice, long and slow, shock painting broad strokes across his face. “Why . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping maybe you would.”
He shook his head, looking away from me. “Jason would never . . . who killed him?”
I blinked. “He wasn’t murdered, Lucas. He jumped off his apartment building. His body is still in the morgue.”
“Oh . . .” Lucas let all the air out of his lungs. “I have to go inside.”
“Wait!” I caught his arm, and he hissed softly. “Do you think . . . when you’re able . . . you’d mind talking to me a little bit about Jason? Coming into the city?”
“Can’t,” Lucas whispered. “The treaty. If I get caught by a were who still follows it, I’d be killed on sight for trespassing.”
Second Skin Page 18
