Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel)

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Did anyone check the doghouse?” Molly asked innocently.

  “Molly,” I said reproachfully. “Not helpful.”

  Miguel was not amused. He wrapped a meaty hand around Molly’s neck and lifted, which I had thought was something people only did in movies. She made a gurgling sound, clutching at the big man’s hand as her feet left the ground. She aimed a kick at his groin, but Miguel expected it and turned his body sideways. The kick hit his thigh, and he didn’t so much as grunt.

  Molly’s eyes were wide, and there was suddenly a look on her face I’d never seen before—terror. Molly’s keen interest in humanity had always been one of my favorite things about her. She genuinely wants to know what modern humans experience, and she wants to feel those things too—hence the sushi class. But part of being human is being physically vulnerable, and neither of us had ever wanted her to experience that. What Miguel was doing wouldn’t leave lasting physical damage, not once she got out of my radius, but I doubted she would forget what it felt like to be victimized.

  My fingers tightened on the cane. I could hit him with it and he’d drop Molly, but if we started a fight in human form we weren’t going to win.

  Think faster, Scarlett.

  “Let’s all calm down,” I said, trying to make my voice sound reasonable. “How old are you, Miguel?” I asked. “You look maybe forty, but you’re a lot older than that, right?” When someone from the Old World is in my radius, I get a general sense of their power, the amount of magic that clings to them. For the werewolves, that magic determines their strength, speed, and healing abilities, which translates loosely into the pack’s structure—most powerful at the top, least powerful at the bottom. Miguel was huge and scary-looking, but he seemed about as powerful as he did smart.

  His eyes flicked warily toward me, and the arm holding Molly wavered a little. He was strong, but he was still close enough to me to be human, and holding a hundred and twenty pounds straight in the air would make anyone’s arm tired after a while. “I’m sixty-two,” he huffed.

  Werewolves age more slowly than humans, at about half the speed. “You’ve been a wolf for a while, then. But you’re not all that powerful. So you’re a follower.” I tilted my head at Anastasia. “I don’t know what she’s been telling you, but you’re backing the wrong horse, Miguel. That nice young woman you’re terrorizing is a vampire.” His eyes went wide, and I pushed on. “Anyone who violates the Old World peace is going to answer to Dashiell, and if you think Anastasia’s strong enough to protect you . . .” I shook my head emphatically. “You haven’t been paying attention.”

  Miguel looked uncertainly from me to Anastasia, and then lowered Molly back to the ground. She coughed, holding her neck, breathing in panicked gasps. “Miguel,” Anastasia snapped, but they were in my radius, and the nice thing about being a null is that you have home-court advantage wherever you go. The wolf pack instincts that drove Miguel to obey his superior didn’t apply when he was a human. Ana flashed teeth at him, but he simply stood there, arms folded across his chest.

  “You said we were here for the abomination,” he reminded her, nodding at me. “Not to fuck around with vampires.”

  Abomination. That was a new one. Not to mention an awfully big word to come out of Miguel’s mouth. I would have laughed if he hadn’t been quite so big and pee-your-pants scary. It sounded like they were considering applying some violence, so before anyone else could speak, I jumped in. “Look, you guys, this is ridiculous. I’m sorry that Eli hasn’t been around, and I know that’s thrown everyone off—”

  Anastasia’s glare turned on me so quickly and furiously that I would have instinctively stepped away from her if I could step easily. “Do not,” she snapped, “pretend to know about our pack. Eli is our beta. Do you have any idea what that is?”

  I blinked. “Uh, the beta’s the second in command. Will’s second.”

  She threw up her arms in frustration. “You ignorant little brat. Do you really think that’s all he is?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked warily.

  “The beta also takes care of the cubs,” Anastasia declared. “He helps them integrate into the pack, find their control.”

  Lydia. I’d changed Eli to a human, and now he wasn’t around to help Lydia. No wonder Ana was pissed off. If Eli’s absence was caused by something common and understandable, they would have been told, and someone else would move up in the pack hierarchy. But Will hadn’t been able to explain, and—

  “What’s in the bag?”

  I looked up, startled by the new voice. It was one of the two werewolves on the van’s roof. He was a slender black man with a shaved head and sharp slanted cheekbones. It was forty degrees outside, but he wore jeans and a gray ribbed tank top that showed off wiry arms.

  Anastasia turned her body sideways, so she could look at him without turning her back to me. The man slid neatly off the van and onto the paved driveway. The second his sneakers hit pavement, the other wolf slithered down after him, flanking his side as he approached us. As he got closer I realized that his arms were covered in thin crisscrossing scars. One of them traveled diagonally down his shoulder to disappear under his shirt. He must have gotten them before he was changed, or he’d been in a lot of fights against silver knives, which can leave scars. Interesting. I wondered if werewolves got pack nicknames. His would definitely be Scarms.

  He hit my radius and stumbled a little—he’d obviously never been near a null, because it took him longer than most to recover his balance. I used the beat to gauge his strength, with mixed results. Scarms was definitely more powerful than Miguel, but what I could do wasn’t precise enough to get an answer to how he compared to Anastasia. They were pretty close.

  Then he was only a foot away from me. After a couple of seconds, Scarms repeated himself. “What’s in the bag?” I didn’t answer. Without being told, the wolf behind Scarms left his side and flowed past us, entering and then leaving my radius, toward the front door. He was a short, barrel-shaped guy who had probably been chubby before he’d been changed. He had those tight, artificial-looking curls that usually signified a perm, but his must have been natural. When werewolves change back and forth, they lose things like perms and tattoos and piercings. He bent down and examined the bleach-covered blood smears. “Blood here, I think,” he said to either Anastasia or Scarms. “But there’s bleach all over it; I can’t smell anything.”

  He pulled out a key ring—goddammit, of course all the wolves had keys to Will’s house—and opened the front door. “Same here,” he called. He disappeared into the house, probably to look for more blood.

  Thank you, Clorox. I dismissed him and turned back to Scarms and Anastasia. “There was a fight,” I lied. “Will called me to get rid of some furniture and some bloodstains. I’m taking it with me, and you’ve delayed me enough. Molly? Give me a hand?”

  I passed the tied-off garbage bag to Molly, gripped my cane, and took a step forward, forcing Miguel to either step aside or plow into an injured girl half his size. Confused, he stepped aside, but Scarms right behind him did not. The werewolf didn’t move at all, just stood there and looked at me with a curious, detached expression, like I was a turtle who’d fallen out of its shell.

  “A fight between whom?” he said. Anastasia made a quiet crowing noise behind me. I’m sure she was just impressed with the use of “whom.”

  “We haven’t met,” I said to him. I kept my voice confident and coldly polite, like the terrifying people who run the DMV. “I’m Scarlett Bernard. You are?”

  “Terrence,” he said. “Whittaker.” I nodded. My name for him was better. “That’s Drew,” he added, tilting his head toward the house.

  “Nice to meet you, Terrence,” I replied. Putting my weight on my left foot, I straightened up as tall as I could and met his eyes. “I haven’t seen you at one of my crime scenes before, so let me explain how this works. I come and pick up the bloody crap. I take it with me. I get rid of it. I don’t get details or names; I’m
just the cleaning lady,” I said, emphasizing each word.

  “I want to see inside the bag,” he said tersely.

  I gritted my teeth and said, “Tough rocks. I do not answer to you, or to Anastasia, or to anyone but Will, Dashiell, and Kirsten. I have another call across town tonight”—total lie— “and I do not have time to fuck around with cutting open garbage bags, cleaning up anything that falls out, and rebagging. So either get out of my way”—I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket—“or I will call Will and you can explain to him why you’re interfering with me.”

  Terrence glanced uneasily at Anastasia. “Don’t listen to her,” she interjected, her eyes wild. “Let’s stick with the plan. We hold her until she gives up the cure.”

  I could tell Ana hadn’t meant to mention “the plan.” I fought against a crush of panic, grateful once again that they couldn’t smell my fear.

  Terrence and Anastasia stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, with Miguel flicking his own gaze from one to the other. There was a palpable intensity between the two, even in human form, and I knew a dominance fight when I saw one. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with Ana, so I looked at her opponent and said softly, “Terrence. Will knows Molly is helping me tonight. If you dick around with the treaty, you’ll answer to Dashiell.”

  Miguel made a small noise in the back of his throat. We don’t talk about the actual treaty much, because in the Old World, threatening someone with it is more or less the social equivalent of the nuclear option. The treaty is very simple: don’t fuck with anyone. People who violate the treaty, or kill another Old World member under any circumstances, go to Dashiell. And everyone was afraid of Dashiell, with damned good reason.

  Terrence stared at Anastasia for another long moment, and then stepped out of my way without breaking eye contact with her. Finally his eyes jerked over to me. “Another time,” he said roughly. Anastasia folded her arms, anger and frustration written all over her body, but she didn’t speak. Molly’s presence had ruined her plan, and she knew it.

  Molly grunted as she hefted the bag onto her back, showing no sign of its weight. Go Molly, I thought. Trying not to lean on the cane too hard, I stumped past the still wolves, careful to keep Molly in my radius.

  As she passed Miguel, Molly couldn’t resist a last comment. “Nice doggie. Stay.” I held my breath, but although the big werewolf’s face clouded over with fury, he made no move to touch her.

  “Goddammit, Molly,” I muttered. I went straight to the van’s back doors and opened them for her. Ordinarily, I’d put a body in my van’s built-in freezer compartment, but we were passing it off as furniture, so I just pointed to the carpeted back floor and she hefted it in. As she pushed the doors shut I was already rounding the van to the driver’s seat, forgetting for a moment that Molly had driven us here. I wanted to get the hell out of there, but she paused at the back doors, leisurely peeling off her surgical gloves and pulling the keys out of her pocket. “Come on, Molls,” I whispered.

  She slammed the back doors shut finally, but before she could take a single step toward the passenger door the stocky werewolf came tearing out of Will’s house. Crap. I had forgotten all about him. “Hey!” he yelled from the doorway. “I know every stick of furniture in this house, and none of it’s missing!”

  Chapter 6

  All four werewolves turned their heads as one to stare at me. Then a slow, devious smile spread across Molly’s face, and she gave me a nod. “See you at home,” she mouthed. She tossed me the keys, and as they sailed toward me the bubble of tension popped and the werewolves sprang toward the van.

  I was already throwing my cane in and hopping up onto the seat. I started the van and instinctively pounded my hurt leg onto the gas pedal, ignoring the responding blaze of pain in my knee. The van shot onto the street (this, folks, is why we always back into the driveway) and I felt Molly leave my radius.

  I steered the van back down the little dead-end road, while trying to keep one eye on the rearview mirror. Behind me, the wolves were now right at the end of the driveway, practically in the street. All four of them were silhouetted against Will’s house lights, advancing in a semicircle toward Molly, who stood a few feet into the road. Would she be okay? Then again, what could I really do if she wasn’t? I needed to call Will.

  For a fumbling moment I tried pulling my cell phone out of my pocket with one hand, steering with the other while simultaneously watching the rearview mirror and ignoring the excruciating pain in my knee. It went about like you’d expect—if what you expected is a resounding fail. The van began to list to the side, and I dropped the phone when I had to put my right hand on the wheel to correct my course. Swearing, I mashed the brake with my good left leg, causing the cell to skitter deep into the passenger seat foot well. Awesome.

  Abandoning the phone, I stared at the rearview mirror, worried. Molly had always talked like she could take the werewolves easily when they were in human form, but I’d never actually seen any vampire go up against werewolves, thanks to the treaty. For a long beat she stood with her arms open in a relaxed, welcoming position—then she abruptly vanished from sight, leaving the angry werewolves standing in the driveway, grouped around nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t been expecting Molly to run away, but she’d be fine. Even in their human form, werewolves are a lot faster than most people, but they’d have to shape-shift to have a chance of catching a vampire. I put my foot back on the gas, gingerly, and began creeping forward again. I needed to go slow until I could get far enough away to put the van in park and rearrange my hurt leg. Not to mention retrieve my phone.

  When I checked the mirror again, though, I could see the short figure of Anastasia gesturing wildly at the van, at me. Then she was ripping off her shirt, her pants quickly following, and the others were disrobing too, though not quite so quickly. After a second I realized that she was trying to talk the others into chasing me down in the van. Not good. I didn’t have Molly with me anymore, which meant that technically they wouldn’t be violating the peace treaty if they hurt me. I pressed down harder on the gas, ignoring the pain. They were going to hunt my van like it was a frickin’ buffalo. Werewolves are basically indestructible, and they can run forever. They could just follow me to the nearest red light and—

  But as I checked the mirror again, a shadow flew across the street so fast I only had a sense of it, rather than actually seeing it. The werewolf farthest from the house, a man in the process of pulling his shirt over his head, suddenly disappeared in a flying tackle. I grinned stupidly. That had been Miguel, and that had been Molly.

  I relaxed in my seat. Technically Molly had just violated the treaty by drawing first blood, but I knew she wouldn’t kill them. She could still get in trouble, but only if someone told Dashiell or Will, and I didn’t see any of these wolves wanting to advertise what had just happened.

  I decided not to call Will until I had a chance to talk to her.

  A few minutes later, my adrenaline faded, and the pain in my knee crashed into my brain fast enough to make me dizzy. Goddamned vertigo. I pulled over. “Scarlett,” I said into the rearview mirror, “I really don’t think you should be driving.”

  Even after rearranging my leg, it took me almost an hour to finish the job and get back to Molly’s. I was too battered to limp up the stairs, so I just stripped and washed off the worst of the night in the downstairs bathroom. Molly had run a load of laundry for me and left the basket of clean clothes sitting on the kitchen table like a gift from the flying spaghetti monster itself. I dressed in baggy running pants and a T-shirt, then sacked out on the couch with a sheet and my downstairs stash of painkillers. I swallowed two pills, enough to knock me out before I had to think too long about the dead body I’d been handling just an hour earlier.

  Mostly.

  I woke up to an insistent rapping on the front door. “Noooo . . . ,” I mumbled, but it didn’t help stop the knocking, so I forced my eyelids open. There were stripes of weak morning
sunlight on the floor, filtering through the venetian blinds. I squinted to see the clock that Molly has hanging above the television. It was eight o’clock.

  “Scarlett and Molly aren’t home right now,” I yelled at the door. There wasn’t even a pause in the knocking, so I finally dragged myself out of the couch nest and grabbed my cane.

  My personal physician barely waited for me to pull it open before she walked in. “About time,” she snapped.

  “Please, come in,” I muttered, closing the door behind her.

  Dr. Stephanie Noring was an East Indian woman who usually worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She had one of those short, plump figures that looks sultry on a few lucky women. I wasn’t sure how old she was, maybe a well-preserved fifty-five, but she had a lyrical British accent that I might have enjoyed listening to if she weren’t perpetually annoyed with me. Today she wore a rose-pink blouse and khaki pants, and her hair, a gorgeous black with elegant streaks of gray, was pulled into a loose bun at her collar. Gold bangles clinked pleasantly on her wrist as she stormed past me into the house.

  “Did you bring doughnuts?” I grumbled, closing the door behind her. “Anyone who shows up anywhere before nine should bring doughnuts.”

  “No, but I brought antipsychotics,” she said tartly, her British accent making her sound more crisp than sarcastic. Must be hard, having your accent ruin your demonstrations of attitude. “I heard you were in a werewolf fight and dragged around an eighty-pound bag of trash. I could only assume that you’d lost your bloody mind.” She followed me back to the couch, where I held up my hand to cover another yawn.

  “First of all, you said ‘bloody,’” I pointed out cheerfully. “I’ve never heard anyone actually say ‘bloody’ in real life. That’s adorable. And secondly, the bag wasn’t more than seventy pounds, tops. How did you even find out?”