The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1)

by A. J. Scudiere

  “David bucked up then and told my parents. They came out and looked, too. It was another hour before they called the police. The police questioned me and David and then my parents. I didn’t know anything. I was ten. I was petrified.” And no one had paid any attention to her. Authorities knew differently now. At the Academy, she had received the very training she could have benefited from. She knew exactly what should be done and exactly what had not been done for her when she was ten.

  Her mother had looked at her wild-eyed and demanded to know why she’d let her little sister out of her sight. Now, of course, with the distance of time and adulthood, she knew her mother was mad out of her mind and not considered that her remaining child, obviously safe in front of her, was just as distraught as she was. Eleri had been questioned, locked up tight, and shoved aside.

  “They hunted for days. It was years before my mother could leave Patton Hall. She was so afraid Emmaline would return home and no one would be there to meet her.”

  Unable to handle any more, knowing she was close to losing the slight control that kept her from splitting into pieces, she blatantly changed the topic. “Cheer me up. Tell me I’m right about the wolf.”

  She was met with silence. Well, he had changed the topic on her, too. She sniffed a little and tried again. “Seriously, I just confessed I did a stint in a mental hospital. It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone about you. Besides that wolf isn’t a wolf except at first glance. After that, I saw that it has your eyes and your teeth. And that’s just weird if it’s not you.”

  He still looked at her, staring, that blank expression having slid perfectly back into place. Suddenly she hated it. She had one herself, a mask that shut out everything, but she wasn’t shutting out anything. She never told people about Emmaline; she sure didn’t tell people about the hospital. Even her perfect parents didn’t know where she’d been. She told them she was vacationing with Wade, afraid anything else would break them. Since the FBI picked up the tab—a good idea since they’d pretty much driven her to the brink—there was no reason to tell them. Nathalie and Thomas Eames had worked hard to return to their perfect lives. It was enough trouble that their federal agent daughter refused to marry and produce Eames offspring. They didn’t need to know she was mental as well.

  Donovan still didn’t answer.

  Having been through the wringer enough times, and being adult enough to admit that she’d put herself there and even turned the crank, Eleri stood and headed for the door. She was reaching for the lock, considering sleeping the day away and hoping she didn’t dream anything else useful when she heard the word.

  “Yes.”

  For a moment she thought that was all she needed. He obviously wasn’t going to be forthcoming. And suddenly she was tired. She flipped back the U-bolt that was still in her way and nodded once before turning the knob.

  “Yes, I’m the wolf. If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it. If you convince them, they’ll probably kill me.”

  Slowly, Eleri moved the bolts back into place. Kill him? Turning, she saw that he was serious. “Why would they kill you?”

  He broke. At first she thought it was instantaneous hysteria of some kind, but she quickly realized it was real mirth. He threw his head back and laughed loud and long. All she could do was wait while his laughter pulled her back into the room.

  Donovan was wiping his eyes when he finally found the voice to speak to her. “They’ll kill me because I’m a monster. Silver bullets and all that.”

  “No one would do that. Not in this day and age.”

  He laughed again. “There’s still a reasonable percentage of people who think that homosexuality in America affects weather patterns! Just because you wouldn’t string me up doesn’t mean others won’t think the world is better without me. They’ll become heroes, just for killing me.”

  “You sound like you know something about it.” Her heart twisted. This time it was his eyes that held horrors past. Because his eyes were usually relatively blank, she found that concerning. As the thought hit her, she whispered her fear, “Your mother?”

  “No.” He was fast, solid in his answer. “My mother died, never knowing what my father was, what I was. I didn’t even know it at the time. Back then, my dad was only hiding himself, but later, when I was ten, he took me to meet my grandmother.”

  His head tipped a little and Eleri read that as indicating the memory was not so good. Slowly she came back into the room and softly resumed her seat on the second bed.

  “I had just realized what I could do, discovered some of it on my own. It turns out my dad was hoping it would skip me, since my mother wasn’t one. His parents were both hybrids. That’s what he and his folks called us: Hybrids.” He smiled and his back straightened and when he started speaking, she realized he had transformed from Donovan, the poor kid with hardscrabble memories and the burden of being very different, to Dr. Heath, the scientist.

  “I’m guessing my father is double dominant gene, as both his parents are Hybrids. And ‘hybrid’ is completely the wrong term—we’re not half and half anything. We’re . . . weird human I guess. It’s a complex series of double-jointedness. Some people can contort and fold themselves into a suitcase, I can contort and fold myself into a wolf.” He shrugged as though it wasn’t a scientific breakthrough at all.

  “Show me!” Suddenly, she felt like a kid on Christmas morning. A complete one-eighty from where she’d been just thirty minutes ago.

  “No way in hell. You’ll freak out.”

  “No I won’t! I know what I’m in for.” She was leaning forward, her hands braced into the soft comforter, waiting.

  But he refused again, shaking his head. “Maybe someday, but not today.”

  She sighed. “So if you’re not a hybrid—and I’m not suggesting that a wolf and a human got together, because that kind of cross species mating does not work, and I know it—then how do you explain all the extras?”

  “Extras?”

  Her mouth worked for a moment. How was she supposed to put it? “You don’t just look like a wolf, you can hear like them, smell like them, run like them.” Eleri waved her hands around as though that helped. It didn’t. She was sure.

  He nodded, absorbing her question and bouncing it back to her. “I can run like a wolf only when I’m shaped like a wolf. That’s just muscle and physiology. The rest just seems to be mildly altered ‘normal’.” He ran his finger down the bridge of his nose. “My nose is long for a human, not out of normal but on the long side. It’s short for a wolf. I have a larger nasal cavity inside my head than most straight-up humans. That alone accounts for a good increase in sense of smell. Some normal people can smell really well. I’m just a bit beyond them.”

  “How do you know your sinus cavity is larger? And I thought your nose was long because you were part Indian. Just a guess though on the heritage.”

  He was smiling, genuinely smiling. “I have tested, X-rayed and CTed every part of me every chance I could. I’ve drawn my blood while in human shape but full fur, trying to see if there’s a chemical that runs that process—there’s nothing I can find, by the way. And I am part Indian. My mother was from Calcutta. Good guess.”

  Not a guess. She was a forensic scientist. She didn’t need to see the actual bone of his skull to place portions of his heritage, but she wouldn’t have guessed “wolf” from what she did see. If she and Jonah hadn’t both seen the creature, if Jonah hadn’t been so lucid and spot-on about everything else he said, if the wolf hadn’t walked so boldly into Donovan’s backyard and looked her in the eyes the way it did . . . If it all hadn’t happened the way it did, she would never have put it together.

  Silence fell between them. His laughter and sudden-onset happiness had sloughed off and in the wake of it his discomfort talking about himself settled back in. When he finally spoke, he shifted the topic yet again. “They never found your sister.”

  Eleri shook her head. It was all she could do. The crushing weights that had lifted for a
little while settled back into well-worn grooves, almost comforting in their familiarity.

  “So you never saw her again?”

  That was the million-dollar question. “My parents never saw her, but I did. I dreamed of her all the time. I dreamed of the man who came. I saw him open the gate and lead her horse away. I thought they were just dreams. I saw her with another family, over the years. I watched her grow.”

  The tears came again and she didn’t even try to stop them. “I didn’t know.” I t was a confession, whispered, pushed through her soul before the words formed. “I didn’t know the dreams showed me real things. I didn’t know I could tell someone or find her.”

  Eleri couldn’t breathe. She had failed her sister before her own life even really started. Before she became her own person. She had decided to join the FBI when she was twelve, just two years after her sister disappeared. Eleri was going to find missing kids and bring them back to their families, but when she was in college it all changed.

  “Even though I sometimes dreamed other things that came to pass, it never occurred to me that I was really seeing my sister.” Her hand came up, to wipe the tears so she could see.

  Donovan sat quietly, unmoving, not interfering. It was almost as if he wasn’t there.

  “When I was nineteen, the dreams changed. They became . . . real.” This time she looked at him, into his eyes and she could see he was terrified of what she wanted him to understand. She still didn’t really understand it herself. She just knew it to be true. “Nothing was surreal. I could touch things, think clearly, smell, taste, hear everything. Emmaline came to me. She was seventeen, it was her birthday. She wore a white skirt and a white t-shirt and there was blood on her. On her shirt, on her hands, dripping down her leg, but she walked fine and she hugged me. And it was real.”

  Donovan looked at her as though he could see her soul crushing under the pressure of the vise she felt. She couldn’t breathe for the weight on her chest, couldn’t see for the tears clouding her eyes. “She’s come to me like that in dreams since then. She wakes me before bad things happen. Tells me things I need to know. Emmaline is always real to me now when I dream her. She sees me, touches me, hugs me. But she hasn’t aged a day since then.”

  Eleri was gasping for air, but she got the words out anyway. “She was alive. She lived with another family for longer than she lived with us. She died on her seventeenth birthday. And I’m the only one who knows.”

  24

  Donovan searched the rabbit’s warren of rooms on the fifth floor of the Dallas FBI branch building.

  If he hadn’t double-checked the number placard on the wall he would have come back from the vending machines and inadvertently joined another group working on an entirely separate project. Aside from his recognition of Eleri, he could easily have done it. This other group sat at an identical table, sorting pictures and documents and talking about a stalker. Wrong crime. Donovan smiled and waved his apology for interrupting and they seemed to recognize it. Maybe people walked into the wrong room all the time.

  Eleri and Agent Bozeman were farther down the hall than he remembered. So Donovan kept walking, juggling the bottle of water he carried for Eleri and a second can of soda for Bozeman—a Dr Pepper, which seemed to be the state drink of Texas.

  Eleri looked up, nothing showing in her face of the day before. After telling him about her sister—which Donovan had not seen coming—she had sighed, put her head on the pillow for a moment, and passed out cold while he watched. Too deeply asleep to disturb, Eleri lay unmoving on top of the comforter and didn’t notice when he turned out the light and crawled into his own bed. Which was exactly where he’d intended to be almost a full hour before she marched in, accused him of being exactly what he was, then opened the floodgates on him about her sister.

  He figured he deserved it for turning the tables on her.

  But he’d fallen asleep for the first time realizing he wasn’t the only freak in town. And he’d woken up alone. At some point, she must have crawled back to her own room, and he didn’t see her again until this morning.

  Donovan had gone running late in the day yesterday, showered, and walked the two blocks it took to find a steakhouse. It had been good to be by himself. Yet it felt surprisingly good to be here now, to be part of a team for the first time in his adult life.

  He spent the morning at the autopsy of the girl from the field—currently identified as “Faith.” Fingerprint analysts had matched her with nothing yet.

  At first, he and Eleri had simply watched the FBI medical examiner perform the task, but then the woman smiled and offered him a scalpel. She even mentioned that she’d heard about him from his days in Columbia, that one of her partners had shipped him a body and Donovan located a test and noted an obscure poison for them.

  He was startled by the recognition and happy at the mention. He spent so many years living, then working, in a bubble, to hear that he wasn’t as isolated as he thought was mind-blowing. It had been a lot to absorb that he wasn’t the only one. Now, he was seeing that others appreciated his freakishness, even if they didn’t know the full extent of it. While it was good news—or at least interesting news—he still felt like he was pulled by a tide and thrown against the rocks. Each time he was relieved and swept back out into the nothingness, he’d be surprisingly bashed again.

  When he and Eleri joined in the autopsy, though, it was a roundhouse the likes of which he’d never experienced before. Eleri pointed out photos that needed to be taken and walked the assistant through a series of shots. She led them to check inside the sneakers, look for marks left by the seams of the clothing, things he not often looked at in a standard autopsy. She pulled soil samples from under the nails and used forceps in pockets.

  Dr. Madison didn’t bat an eye when Donovan leaned closer to the liver, only continued acting as though this was perfectly normal. “You smell something I’m missing, don’t you?”

  Surprised, though he didn’t know why, Donovan didn’t really know what to say. Eleri stepped in for him. “He has a great sense of smell. Even better, he has a scent memory like nobody’s business. I can barely tell you when cookies are baking!”

  Madison had laughed out loud at that. “Me, too! I thought that was an advantage in this job—not being able to smell—but now I’m rethinking that.” She turned her attention from Eleri back to Donovan and he started to tense. The two women were a dangerous combination.

  One of them could ask sharp questions, since she was seeing him work, and being an ME herself she would know exactly where he deviated from the norm. The other one could answer truthfully about him. It was a concerning situation, and the excitement and collaboration he’d felt just a moment before began rapidly congealing into a knot of dread.

  “Does the decay smell not bother you?” Madison turned to him, her head tilted, genuinely curious.

  He was sorting out how to answer that without saying too much when Eleri beat him to it again. “It doesn’t seem to. Or else he has a way better poker face than me.” She’d turned Madison’s attention away from him, even if the conversation was about him. “We pulled this girl up, the rest of us taking breather breaks, but not him.”

  “Wow.” It was all the other doctor said. She went back to examining the body and working one of the most thorough forensic autopsies on the books.

  At lunch, he’d retreated back into himself after being buffeted with group conversation all morning. In fact he and Eleri had exchanged only a few words past deciding where to go to eat.

  Tense and worried, he asked her point-blank, “Are you going to out me?”

  “Never.” The answer had been swift and sharp, her eyes narrowing on his, her brow furrowing as if to wonder how he could ask that. “You have to tell people something or else you look guilty.” She had the right of that, he knew, and he took a moment to nod and acknowledge how she’d manipulated the conversation this morning. She allowed him to do what he did without making it odd. She distracted Dr. Madiso
n when he needed to poke at something, sniff something else. But before he could tell her he understood, even thank her, she volleyed it right back at him. “Are you going to out me?”

  “Of course not.”

  That had been the end of all conversation until they came to the FBI branch building and met up with Bozeman. While Donovan and Eleri peered at internal organs that morning, Bozeman had the thankless task of delivering the news about Faith to Jonah and Charity. He and another agent had interviewed them separately, and Bozeman was delivering those results, joining the braintrust here, while the second agent babysat the escapees.

  Given that he’d spent yesterday sleeping, Donovan felt they had accomplished a lot here today. They had a location for the community. They had several proven deaths. They had children, some with IDs. At least one confirmed missing child had turned up in the City of God, though there was no evidence that these were the people who had taken her. In addition to working those angles, the team was figuring out a way to exonerate Bernard Collier.

  The three of them sat around most of the early afternoon on that one. It was unanimously considered that the man panicked when the girl died. He knew she didn’t have any family connected into the grid, and he didn’t want to get his friends in trouble. Further interviews had revealed that he had not picked anyone up again since then, and was unable to offer input on the City of God’s feelings about the missing Faith. So Eleri, Donovan and Bozeman came up with a plan to take to Westerfield about giving Collier a way to clear his name, given that he did commit several crimes.

  While Collier knew nothing about the City’s reaction to Faith’s death, Jonah and Charity did. Ashlyn Fisk was being slowly reunited with her family, and they weren’t dragging her home and thus away from Jonah. Or away from the investigation where she was needed.