by Deanna Chase
“Can I get a Bud Light?” I croaked resisting the urge to suck down my water. I remembered asking for cold vodka before, but I can’t believe the bartender would have remembered. She’d barely acknowledged my presence. Of course, I had left with Wyatt, and he seemed to be a bit of a favorite son around here. He must have called ahead for them to have had it chilled like this. It was such a sweet, thoughtful thing to do; I was astounded.
“I’ll bring you a piece of cherry pie too. It’s homemade,” the waitress said before hustling off.
Cherry pie and Bud Light? Maybe she would bring a cup of coffee too and I could have a Twin Peaks déjà vu moment. Where was Agent Cooper when you needed him? Or the log lady. Bet she could kick some angel ass.
My waitress was just putting down my beer and pie when Candy arrived. She raised her eyebrows at the combo putting a large tote bag stuffed with papers on the seat beside her.
“Please bring my friend a slice of cherry pie and a cup of coffee black as midnight on a moonless night.” I told the waitress waving my fork majestically as if I were issuing a royal proclamation. Candy shook her head no at the waitress and sent her away without ordering anything.
The werewolf didn’t appear to get the reference, which was a shame. Wyatt might, but he’d been a bit young for Twin Peaks. And speak of the devil, there he was in his worn Levis and t–shirt sliding in the chair beside me.
“Look, Wyatt,” I said excitedly. “They have cherry pie. You must have some with coffee black as midnight on a moonless night.”
Wyatt looked for a second like he thought I’d gone insane.
“I can call you Agent Cooper?” I prodded. “We’ll discuss the Laura Palmer case?”
He finally smiled. “Will the log lady be joining us? She was my favorite.”
I squealed in delight and planted a kiss right on his lips almost knocking him backwards off his chair in my enthusiasm. Sexy as hell, familiar with cult TV classics, and he arranged to have cold vodka for me. Wyatt rocked. Life would be just horrible without him.
Meanwhile, Candy was looking as if she’d stepped into another universe.
“What is he doing here?” she asked, regaining her composure.
“Wyatt will be joining us in our adventures,” I told her. She opened her mouth to protest and I told her “my kill, my rules.”
That shut her mouth. She glared at Wyatt as he stuffed his backpack under his chair.
“Fine.” She dug in her bag, pulling out a stack of glossies and a little box–shaped magnifying glass. “These are photos of the last twenty kills, with ascending order numbers, locations, and dates on them. I didn’t include any of the earlier ones. Althean’s kills from five years ago back were pretty routine. Basically for offenses against the existence contract like attempting to breed outside our species, assuming wolf form in front of humans or outside the dates specified, not registering, living in a non–designated area without approval, congregating in groups larger than ten without special dispensation, etc.”
I was appalled. Who’d agreed to this shitty existence contract? No way would I have put up with that restrictive crap.
“Althean tended to execute in the traditional manner back then, too,” Candy continued. “They’d have a tiny wing mark on their forehead as a warning and notice of the justice delivered. As you can see by the photos, the kills have become bloody, and the victims are being genetically altered before death.”
If I’d been a werewolf, my ears would have perked up at that one. I didn’t think angels could do that. I didn’t think any but our kind could do that.
“The DNA markers that indicate loupism, or werewolf species, are removed and replaced with strictly human ones. He is basically turning them human, either before or after killing them.”
“They still have the wing marks on their foreheads,” I noted.
Candy nodded.
“They mark the victims as deserving of death, of violating the contract in some way,” she said. “By marking them, Althean is showing that he believes they truly should die. That his actions are justified.”
Why would he turn them human, though? What was the purpose in that?
If this were indeed a genocide, if this angel thought the whole werewolf species should be wiped out, then I doubted he’d turn them human before killing them. Then he’d just be killing a human, plus he’d be removing them from his scope of control. No, I was pretty sure that turning them human happened after their death. But even then, why? Were they such an abomination that even their dead bodies should not be allowed to litter the earth? That all the markers of their species should be removed, to eventually wipe out all trace that they even existed?
I looked at the pictures as Wyatt peered over my arm. They were professionally developed and I wondered if Candy had a photo finishing lab in her basement. I envisioned her stopping in Walmart to pick the gory prints up and snickered.
Candy looked offended, no doubt thinking I found the crime scene photos funny. I didn’t care.
“Okay, so what do these people all have in common? They are mostly female, but no one under twenty years old to date it seems. They are from all over the country. Could they have committed the same offense?” I asked.
Candy shook her head. “I can’t see that they have anything in common beyond their species.”
I frowned. This angel couldn’t be just randomly roving around the country killing werewolves. If he were human, I’d suspect the killing locations coordinated with business travel. Maybe we could access the angel’s travel itinerary for the next few weeks.
“Any ideas?” I asked Wyatt.
He reached into the backpack under his chair and pulled out one of those tablet computers. I’d seen them in the stores and they looked very cool, but I wasn’t sure what I’d do with one. Wyatt swept his fingers over the screen and there was an amazing blur of boxes, shapes and colors. He tapped at the screen, and then waved his fingers around some more. Like Merlin. Without the hat.
“Okay,” he said turning the tablet so we could all see it. “I’ve plotted the last twenty years of werewolf kills against this map and loaded the details into a statistical program. I know twenty years is way outside our window, but a big sample is critical when trending. The bigger the data set, the more accurate the predictions are.”
I stared at him. What the fuck? How did my lawn–mowing, eye–candy, neighbor turn into a math geek?
The map was a mess of colored dots, more concentrated in some areas than others. I couldn’t make sense of it at all. It reminded me of those ink blots tests. Was it a butterfly? Maybe, a polka dotted phallus? Candy glanced at the map, and then glared at Wyatt.
“Did you hack into my computer and get this?”
Wyatt looked smug.
“Your smart phone communicates with your network, no doubt to synchronize your appointment schedule. I just pulled the network IP address, impersonated your cell phone to get a toe in, and voila!”
Whoa. Wyatt did more than kill zombies in his spare time.
“I have passwords, and firewalls! I paid a lot of money to an expert for security from this kind of breach,” Candy said, more angry at her security dude than Wyatt.
“Yeah, it looks like Barrett’s work,” Wyatt commented. “He talks a good line, but he sucks. If his dad wasn’t connected he wouldn’t get any work at all. I know one company who hired him because they wanted to get in good with his dad, then promptly replaced the whole system. Go with Edmonds Smythe next time. I can still get through, but it will take me a lot more than ten seconds.”
“I might go with you, next time,” she said to Wyatt.
I admired her ability to take a hit to her pride and move on. And Wyatt was proving to be very useful. Useful beyond moral support and hopefully good sex.
“We have restrictions around where we can live, mainly to keep us from forming large groups and becoming a threat,” Candy said, returning her attention to the map. “In cities, we’re allowed a greater density. We need to be especial
ly careful in urban areas to avoid detection and a violation of the existence contract. In wide open spaces, we’d be more likely to formulate rebellion and go undetected since we wouldn’t need to restrict ourselves so much.”
Clearly, the angels liked the werewolves to be confined to the cities, outside their preferred habitat. So they must have been more worried about organized action than public safety. If the angels had been concerned about protecting humans, they would have rounded up all the werewolves and stuck them in some remote area. Like a werewolf concentration camp. Interesting.
“Does the map of the kills reflect the overall distribution of werewolves?” Wyatt asked.
Candy looked again and nodded.
“It seems to. An equal percentage of the population in each area, but of course, we’d need to run numbers just to make sure.”
Wyatt turned the tablet back to face him, ran his fingers over it as we watched with baited breath. It took a few moments. I ate my pie and drank beer while he worked his magic. Finally he turned the tablet around. TaDa! The map had been replaced by a spreadsheet showing locations and numbers in descending order.
“Actually, there’s a ten percent greater incidence of killing in the smaller cities and rural areas and a seventy percent greater incidence in North America.”
Candy frowned at the tablet. “You would have needed to know the address of every werewolf for that. That information is encrypted on a virtual server. Even I don’t have full access.”
Wyatt nodded. I was beyond being shocked by any of this. Wyatt was clearly not what he seemed, either.
“Yes, I know. Now if we plot just the kills with the genetic alteration, we see that at this point they are all in North America. Connect them in their order of occurrence and you do begin to see a pattern. If I run a regression analysis and plot that on our map, we can see a prediction of future hits somewhere along this line. Then, I’ll just run a second regression on the timeline pattern and it will tell us where in this predictive line he is likely to be by certain dates. If we select where we’re interested, I can try and narrow it down with some statistical probability.”
I looked at Candy to see if she was understanding any of that. Nope. We’d both been staring at Wyatt as if he’d suddenly began speaking in a strange alien language. I, for one, was turned on as hell. Wyatt was proving to be rather smart for a human. Who knew?
“Why would he kill in this pattern?” Candy asked.
I shrugged. “Angels are really weird about patterns and things weighting out to a neutral state. Who knows why they do these things.”
“This accounts for location and timeline,” Wyatt continued, “but we still need motive and any other commonality in the victims to better predict his next hit.”
“Tell us, oh mighty Oz,” I said. “Who will the angel kill next and where? And can I have a heart too, if it’s not too much trouble.”
He shot me an annoyed glance, then peered at the screen.
“With what we’ve got so far, I’m betting in the next five to ten days we’ll see a hit among this cluster of forty werewolves. If we combine them into household groups, we’ve got twenty eight households we need to look at.”
“We need to narrow that down,” I said, looking at Candy.
It wasn’t just the numbers that were an issue, either. Even if we got some indication that there was a kill in progress, we wouldn’t get there in time to catch him. We’d need to be pretty confident on a target, then do some kind of stake out. The prospect of sitting outside a house for five to ten days was frightening. Torture would be preferable. I’d be bored beyond belief. I’d be lucky to last a few hours before I went stark raving mad. I wished we could just track the guy down and kill him in a sneak attack.
“I’ll dig around and see what else I can do to get a profile on the victims,” Candy said sorting through the pictures. “That’s the York/Lancaster area, so at least we don’t have to go flying halfway across the country to test our hypothesis.”
Candy gathered up her pictures, casting another dark look at Wyatt and his tablet, then told me she’d call me in the morning. After she left, Wyatt snuck a bite of my cherry pie and made approving noises while I mulled things over.
“You’re a whole hell of a lot more useful than Candy ,” I told him with admiration. “You’ve been holding back on me. I thought all you did was kill zombies.”
Wyatt shrugged. “You never asked, never really seemed interested in any of the computer stuff I do, so I didn’t bother.”
I peered at him to see if he was hurt, or angry. He seemed rather cheerful, eating my pie and relaxing back in his chair.
“It’s probably the most boring thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” I confessed. “But I’m glad you know all that stuff. It’ll probably keep me from getting killed. Thank you for coming.”
I meant it. I was glad Wyatt was here. He might get hurt, but everything was a lot more fun when he was around.
Wyatt smiled and saluted me with his fork.
“You are welcome, Sam. I’d do anything to help you out.”
Wyatt polished off the rest of the pie.
“Why would an angel suddenly decide to go on a killing spree?” I asked, half to myself. “To begin a genocide? I’m pretty sure they didn’t even really want us exterminated during the war. They just wanted us to abide by some crazy list of rules. If we’d complied, we would have been in the same spot as the werewolves, but I can’t see them offing us just for the heck of it.”
“I can’t see you or any of your kind complying with those types of rules,” Wyatt said, pushing the empty plate away.
“Oh, no. Totally against our nature. They were insane even to demand it. If there hadn’t been the treaty and the division of the realms, the wars would have only stopped with the extermination of one or both of our races.”
I went back to pondering this particular angel. “The genetic alteration thing bothers me, too. That’s not something angels do. Plus, the bloodiness of the kills doesn’t seem in keeping with them either.”
“So, maybe he’s not an angel supremacist trying to rid the world of werewolves and preserve the master race. Maybe something happened to him that sent him off the edge of what angels view as acceptable. Maybe he’s got something making him crazy, turning him un–angel. Or uber angel.”
Or rogue angel, I thought.
Chapter Ten
It was about four in the morning when my ringing phone woke me up.
“He’s hit again. York. Time of death between midnight and three–thirty that we can tell.”
Candy, I thought rubbing sleep and gunk from my eyes.
“Two victims this time. A husband and wife. I’ve asked the local pack to secure the scene until we get up there to look at it. They’ve already done their sniffing around, but your skills may be able to find something beyond our ability.”
“Are you up there now? Do I meet you, or do we ride together?” I asked, still groggy.
“I’ll head up there now. If you can meet me up there as soon as you can, I’d like you to check everything while it’s still relatively fresh. Besides, the local guys really do need to start cleanup soon, before neighbors notice anything.”
York was about a two hour drive. I took down the address, writing it on my pillowcase since I can never seem to find a pad of paper when I need one. Then I quickly called Wyatt and threw on some clean clothes. A shower would have to wait. Wyatt was just coming up the drive when I emerged from my seldom used front door. He raised his eyebrows a bit at the pillow case I was carrying, but didn’t comment.
I wasn’t a morning person, but this was the kind of morning to make me want to change my habits. The normal nighttime din of insects had quieted, replaced by early birdsong. It was still fully dark, but there was an expectation of light, an anticipation hovering on the eastern horizon. Everything seemed to be suspended, teetering right on the edge of daybreak. On a razor’s edge of becoming. Even Boomer, standing at the corner of the house
watching us, seemed to be in transition. As if he were two different beings, one day and one night, on the verge of transformation.
We drove north, taking back roads to Route 15, with Wyatt sleepily navigating through his cell phone GPS. The sun came up with orange and red over the little farmhouses and fields. It was pretty much just us, the early morning commuters, and the cement truck drivers from the plant, although there were signs the dairy farmers had been up earlier. Huge milking barns, long and flat, were lit up brightly before the first rays reached up over the horizon.
We’d made a quick stop at a 7–11 for some coffee and Wyatt grumbled. He was grumpy and the beauty of the morning was lost on him. Evidently, zombie killing last night hadn’t gone well, and he’d not had much sleep. He complained repeatedly that he was tired, hungry and hated 7–11 coffee. I was ready to dump his coffee over his head if he didn’t shut up about it. I may be a vodka snob, but I’m not a coffee snob. And I don’t bitch and moan constantly when I don’t get my preferred vodka. Well, maybe just a little. When I got tired of listening to him complain, I pointedly turned on the radio. I had thought about finding some soft rock just to annoy him further, but instead put on blue collar comedy. Wyatt was more fun when he was in a better mood.
The sun was up and Thurmont was stirring with the beginnings of their country rush hour as we passed through toward the highway. Wyatt saw a Sheetz and insisted on stopping, pointedly dumping his previous coffee into the bushes as he walked in. I bought another coffee, too, just so I could compare them. I couldn’t tell the difference. The both tasted like cheap generic coffee prepared hours ago and slowly burning on the bottom of the pot ever since.
This area of Maryland was really beautiful. Green covered mountains flanked the highway, separated from the road by flat acres of fields. Signs indicating directions for various national parks, orchards, and historic attractions didn’t detract from the stunning morning view. Route 15 was a scenic route north of Thurmont. Mountains all along the horizon were the backdrop for miles of forests and picturesque farms. The occasional fruit orchard, with the requisite roadside stand, and its manicured, geometrically arranged trees dotted our view.
