I sighed. “Lucas Kennuka. Five homicides, assault on a police officer, and . . .” My legs wobbled as the night caught up with me like a tidal wave catches a beach bungalow. “Look, just go easy on him, all right, Mac?” I tilted my head toward the flames that were just visible over the ridge. “That fire . . . that, you wouldn’t believe, even if I had the energy to explain it.”
Mac looked at the fire, back at me. “There will be questions, either way.”
Sunny supported me as I woozily rolled my eyes. “I think that’s the least of our worries right now, Lieutenant,” she said. “Could we maybe talk about getting an ambulance for my cousin before she bleeds to death in the street?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Mac, still gazing at the fire. “I called a bus.”
We watched in silence as an ambulance worked its way among cars that the earthquake had flipped on their sides and wreckage thrown by the tenements that lined Garden Crest.
The EMTs came running, flashing lights in my eyes and speaking their staccato code to one another. They tried to pull me away from Sunny but she wouldn’t let go of my undamaged hand, and finally they let her sit next to me in the back of the ambulance while one EMT took my blood pressure and gave me painkillers and the other stitched up my forehead.
“Ow! Damn it!” I growled at the EMT, who backed away with his hands raised.
Sunny coughed and brushed her lips with a finger. I clapped my free hand over my mouth and felt fangs still there. t" wSorry,” I told the EMT. “Just been a stressful night.”
More police cars arrived while they worked on me, a cluster of officers around Mac, and eventually Captain Morgan pulled up, wearing sweats, her hair in a ponytail. She looked toward me and gave a great, long-suffering sigh.
“Officer Wilder?” she demanded, putting one foot on the bumper of the ambulance.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m off the force, effective immediately. Can you at least tell me it’s without pay while the painkillers are still working? Takes the edge off.”
“If that’s what you really want to hear,” said Morgan. “I was going to tell you that Detective Bryson is in stable condition at Sharpshin, and I hope you follow suit. But really, I’ll say the rest as well.”
“That’s fine,” Sunny assured her when I started to open my mouth. Morgan gave us both a severe glance.
“Do not think for one second that we will not be talking about all of this later, Officer Wilder.” She nodded curtly and stepped down as the EMT shut one of the ambulance doors.
“Captain?” I called. She turned her head back, a long-suffering look in place.
“Yes, Officer?”
“I’m sorry. About my insubordination. It won’t happen again.” Saying that out loud was, by my reckoning, by far the most painful thing I’d done tonight.
Morgan’s lips twitched. “Apology accepted, Officer.” I looked at Sunny. “See? I can not antagonize people. Sort of.”
“I’m so very proud of you,” she said.
The EMT put a gauze patch over my cut. “You riding with her to the hospital?” he asked Sunny.
“As long as I can,” Sunny said.
Mac came jogging over before the other door shut. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. You gonna be okay?”
I nodded, even though the movement caused lights to twinkle at the corners of my vision. “Yeah, I think so, Mac.”
“Good.” He started to walk back to the cluster of uniforms and SWAT, then turned around. “Hey, Wilder. Where’s your car?”
The hospital emergency room was a riot of blood and crying and nurses running back and forth while constant codes blared over the PA, but Sunny got me to a quiet curtain and after a few hours an intern looked at my head and my side wound, restitched Sunny’s work, and declared me fit to go home.
“Normally I’d tell you to stay overnight, but it’s the ninth circle of hell here and I’m up to my ass in major injuries. Go home, Officer.” He scribbled a prescription, gave it to Sunny, and rushed out of the curtain as a gurney rolled by surrounded by nurses shouting vitals.
“Male, approximately age thirty, unconscious and unresponsive, blood pressure one forty over sixty and falling, stab wound to the upper left chest . . .”
I watched Lucas’s face, half hidden under an oxygen mask, roll by toward the trauma unit, his shirt cut open to reveal the thin deep wound over his heart.
“I’ll be damned,” I muttered as he passed me by.
Sunny came out of the curtain.
“What?”
I looked back toward a pair of uniforms in the waiting area. Looked toward the doctors working over Lucas. One of them caught my eye. “Hey, you know this guy? He your John Doe? He has a custody tag on his chart.”
Lucas choked, then, spitting a mouthful of blood against his mask, and a nurse shouted, “I’ve got a rhythm!”
The two uniforms got up and went down the hall toward the cafeteria.
“Nope,” I said to the doctor. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“Hex me,” the doctor cursed, and ripped the red tag off Lucas’s gurney. “Get him prepped for surgery and call the ICU.”
Sunny, standing a few feet behind me as Lucas rolled away, gave me a disapproving look. “We all have our reasons,” I told her, and didn’t elaborate. Lucas had done a terrible thing, but he’d saved my life. We were even, and if he was smart, he’d never show his face to me again.
Sunny rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything more.
As we exited the hospital and its sounds, I heard the distinctive chug of a bike over the ambulances and traffic diverted from the quake-ridden freeways for the morning commute.
Dmitri was waiting for me as the traffic parted, and I nudged Sunny hard. “Did you call him?”
“No,” she said, drawing the word out. “No, this one was all on his own.” She moved away from us as Dmitri and I regarded each other. “I’ll go get the car.”
“You didn’t come for me,” Dmitri said when I was close enough to touch. He didn’t try it. “When you figured out what the Wendigo had done, you didn’t ask for my help.”
“This was mine to deal with,” I said. “And you made your feelings pretty clear.”
He sighed and rubbed his chin. “Luna, you of all people should know I don’t always mean what I say.”
“I do,” I said. “But this was mine to do, and I didn’t want to put you in that position . . . that night.” I pushed a hand through my hair. “You scared me. I had to go deal with this on my own, and I’m always going to deal with my problems on my own, as long as this daemon blood is in you, because I never want to see you like that again.”
Dmitri finally reached out and took my hand. “Okay.”
I blinked at him. “Okay what?”
“Okay. I won’t try to force you anymore. You’re Insoli. You and I, we’ve got our problems. But you’re mine.” He looked at me, and all I could think about was Lucas, back there in the hospital. How cool his skin was to my touch. How he’d made me feel safe before.
I felt something like a stone in my chest, made of my feelings for Dmitri.
“I know this won’t be easy,” Dmitri said. “But I want to give it another shot. I think it could work out, Luna. We can make it work.”
I smiled at Dmitri, sadly, before I dropped his hand. “I think you’re right. It could work out. I could learn to let you in and you could learn to stop being an alpha and maybe we’d have a few good years before the daemon blood made you forget.” I inhaled, breathed out, and felt the next words crawl out of me like little pieces of flesh. He’d come back to me, even with everything that had happened. I couldn’t let him do it again.
I grasped responsibility like a handful of broken glass. “But I won’t do it, Dmitri. We’ll never be able to sit still with each other. I know I take too many chances and I have a horrible temper and those are my poisons to purge.”
I swallowed and took a step back, onto the curb. “This isn’t about me, Dmi
tri. You’re changing. One day, this thing inside is going to take you over and as long as you’re with me, you won’t try to help yourself. You’ll just try to protect me.”
Feeling like my bones weighed a thousand pounds each, I met Dmitri’s eyes. “When those days come, the daemon bite will finally take you over and I won’t have Dmitri, anymore. You’ll get hurt, or killed, trying to be the person you were. And that will be the saddest day of my life and I just . . . I can’t. I can’t and won’t be responsible for you dying. I’m sorry.”
Dmitri sagged in the seat of his bike, his eyes flickering from green to black in the space of half a heartbeat. For the first time, I wasn’t afraid to see the daemon in him.
“Are you telling me this is it?” he demanded roughly.
I kept smiling, because it was either that or cry. “No, Dmitri. I’m telling you
good-bye.”
EPILOGUE
It was a month before all of my investigations and inquiries were through. By the time I went to the Seaview Gardens, the new cemetery by the cliffs on Highway 21, the scar from Lucas’s knife wound had faded away to nothing but a pale white starburst.
I put the charm, devoid of magick now, on the flat stone that was carved LAUREL LYNN HICKS, BELOVED DAUGHTER.
“Not doing this for forgiveness,” I told her. “Just putting things back where they belong.” I doubted I’d ever be able to forget seeing Laurel on her floor, and the twist inside of knowing it was my fault. But I could make it right, for her spirit at least.
“Be seeing you,” I said, noticing that someone had left daisies in the flower holder next to the stone. Laurel, at least, wasn’t alone.
I drove my rental car downtown, and didn’t hesitate on the steps of the Twenty-fourth before going in. I nodded to Rick at the front desk, and slipped past Morgan’s office to knock on Mac’s door.
“C’min,” he muttered around a mouthful of something. I smelled turkey and rye bread, and even though my stomach was fluttering my mouth watered.
“Spare a minute for the prodigal daughter?” I asked, sticking my head around the frame. Mac set his sandwich down in the deli wrapper and brushed his hands off, motioning me in.
“You look good for someone who’s been through hell, Wilder. Pale, though. You eating?” He offered me the unchewed half of his sandwich.
“Not overmuch,” I said, thinking of my silent, still cottage and my bed, which was just plain empty. I waved the sandwich away.
“What’s on your mind?” Mac said. “You’ve got to be close to going back on active duty with SWAT, yeah?”
I let out a little laugh, dry. “Yeah. You would get right to the point, Mac.”
He stared hard at me. “Wilder, what is it?”
There is no easy way to say the hard things in life. You just have to get it out fast, like tearing off surgical tape.
“I’m quitting, Mac.”
McAllister didn’t choke on his sandwich, but only because he’d stopped chewing. He swallowed fast. “What? The Hex are you going on about, Wilder?”
I looked at my feet. “The Kennuka case proved that I can’t do this anymore, Mac. I lost my edge. I went over the edge and it’s been real damn hard to come back.”
The time alone, especially at night, had at least given me the space to see that I’d let Lucas wrap himself around my heart and brain like thorns strangle a tree. I was no kind of cop, and not even that great of a person.
“I can’t do this again,” I told Mac. “I’m going to quit.”
Mac started to laugh, a hand over his mouth and his eyes crinkling up. “Oh, Luna. You truly are the queen of dramatic bad timing.”
I’d expected Mac to shout at me, maybe swear or even fling some furniture, but the quiet chuckles were downright creepy.
“What exactly is that supposed to mean, Mac?”
Mac reached into his desk drawer, underneath his pack of cigarettes, and pulled out a black leather case. He tossed it across the desk and I caught it reflexively. “This came through today. I was going to call you in the morning when I got off shift and offer it to you, but hell, in person is much more theatrical.”
I flipped open the case, a little larger than a deck of cards. A silver-and-bronze badge gleamed there, with my number and my name underneath the crescent moon rising that was the seal of the city. Beneath my name, the rank spelled out LIEUTENANT.
“Things change, Wilder,” Mac said, rolling his wrapper into a ball and launching it at the wastebasket in the corner. A dozen crumples of paper attested to previous attempts. “Nobody can ignore people like you and Kennuka any longer. The commissioner handed down the directive right after you transferred to SWAT. It’s a new task force, with a new lieutenant. You were the only one I recommended.”
I smiled at Mac, and handed the badge back. “I’m not the woman for the job, Mac.”
“You’re the only were on the force that I know of, and even if there were ten of you, you’re the only one I’d want. I’m the departmental liaison for this thing. It’ll look good when my pension rolls around. Help me out here, huh?”
Standing up, I touched my stab scar. “This won’t end the way you and the commissioner think it will, Mac,” I said. “People hate us, and the weres in this city hate me even more, especially now that the six most powerful are dead and everyone else is chewing on throats to fill their shoes. You’d have a bloodbath on your hands.”
“As opposed to when you run off half-cocked and light stuff on fire?” Mac said.
“I won’t do it,” I said. “I can’t look out for every were and caster witch in the city.” I put my hand on the doorknob. “I can’t even look out for myself.”
“Luna,” said Mac. “You can walk out that door, and for a while you’ll be okay with whatever you chose to do after this. But eventually you’ll come back. You have it in your blood, just like the were. This city will eventually rip itself apart, unless we have some people like you out there. So go ahead.” He put the badge away and pulled a stack of files close to him. “You’ll be back.”
I walked out of Mac’s office, thinking about how I always managed to be in the thick of trouble even when I tried to live a life that took me nowhere near it. I let Lucas get to me because I was angry and restless and didn’t trust my instincts. I was ruled by the were now, with a grasp more subtle and fine than when it had taken my body and killed, but I was ruled all the same.
There was no way I could be the head of a unit that saw people like Lucas and things like Wiskachee every day. No way in any of the seven hells.
A minute later, I walked back into Mac’s office. He didn’t even look up from his paper when I took the badge from his desk.
At least he didn’t say I told you so.
The press conference didn’t get much coverage in the wider media, although Janet Bledsoe showed up, no doubt hoping I’d start another riot and burn the city down so she could be the headliner on the evening news.
Even though it was after Labor Day, I fidgeted inside the pantsuit and wine-red silk shirt Sunny had insisted I wear. The heat was abating, slowly, like it always did at the end of a long summer, crawling away from the pavement and my skin, leaving sweat in its wake.
“Will you stop twiddling at your buttons!” she demanded. “You look fine.”
“I look like I belong in the Hexed circus,” I muttered. “How does Mac do this?”
“This? I leave crap like this to Captain Morgan,” Mac said. “You’d better get out there before they eat all the free pastries and start turning on each other, Wilder.”
“Words of support just when I need them most,” I said. I was hiding everything behind a sharp remark these days. When Dmitri had come to get his things, I had suggested flippantly we hold a garage sale with the proceeds going to my retail therapy.
Dmitri had been gone for a month. My wit was doing a piss-poor job of keeping me company.
The blue curtain smelled like dust and cigarettes, and the podium in the Nocturne City PD pre
ss room was supported on one side by a stack of bricks. The microphone squealed when I got too close, and the chatter in the room lulled.
I looked out into the sea of lights and faces, ranging from disinterested to hostile.
“Good morning,” I said, my voice reverberating through the tiny room in the basement of the Justice Plaza. None of the reporters reacted, even to raise a pen. Their eyes were as unblinking as Lucas’s eyes, just before Wiskachee consumed him.
I inhaled, closed my eyes, and then looked back at Sunny, and Mac. Sunny smiled at me and Mac made a move along gesture.
They were behind me. I turned back to the reporters and their cameras. “Good morning,” I said. “I’m the lieutenant heading up Nocturne City’s newest police task force, officially designated the Supernatural Crimes Squadron.”
A few cameras snapped and I let my words sink in, meeting each pair of human eyes with mine. I blinked slowly, and let them blaze gold. “My name is Luna Wilder, and I’m a
werewolf.”
Read on for an excerpt
from Caitlin Kittredge’s next book
WITCH CRAFT
Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
Chaos crept up on me like someone had tossed a stone into a pond. I was sitting in a window booth at the Devere Diner, shoving a double bacon cheeseburger into my mouth while across the expanse of red formica table, Detective David Bryson did the same with a grilled chicken club.
“Cholesterol,” he explained around a mouthful of lettuce and dead bird. “Doc said I’m going to keel over if I don’t cut back on the carbs or calories or what have you. Put me on one that whatchacallit—Long Beach Diet.”
“South Beach,” I corrected him, taking a pull at my diet soda. Just because I have a werewolf metabolism doesn’t mean I need to abuse it.
“However you call it,” Bryson said. “All I know is that in a week, I get to maybe eat a burger once in a while.” He regarded his sandwich the way most people regard a dead pigeon on the sidewalk.
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