His smile shone across the table, gratitude and happiness and guilt all sewn into it, and God help me, I didn’t want to tell him. For a moment, I considered just getting up and leaving. I could wish him luck, make my good-byes, and encourage him to get the hell out of town. I didn’t want him to know about the pack, or the murder, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to know that the wolves were committing mutiny and coming after me. The nicest thing I could have done for him would be to tell him we were over and walk out of there.
But I needed Eli to tell me more about the pack. And I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to him.
I took a deep breath, knowing I was being selfish. “There are some things you need to know,” I began.
It didn’t take long to fill him in on what had happened since I’d awoken. When I got to the part about Anastasia and her goons jumping me at Will’s, Eli’s hands tightened on mine, and his lips pressed together like he was swallowing a growl. Old habits.
“I can’t believe Ana’s terrorizing you for a cure,” Eli fumed.
“I don’t know,” I said tiredly. “I’m starting to think I should just give her what she wants.”
He sat up straighter. “You can’t do that!” he barked.
I arched an eyebrow, a little annoyed. Scarlett does not respond well to being told what to do. You’d think Eli would have figured that out by now. “Why not? I mean, she wants me to cure Lydia. It’s not like she’s trying to get me to rob a bank or drown a bag of puppies.”
“Because you have no idea if you would survive it, for one thing,” he said, holding up a finger to tick off his first point. “Because if it worked and you did survive it, every werewolf and vampire in the city—and probably lots of other cities—would come gunning for you. And because if it didn’t work this time, Ana would probably just think you were lying and you’d be exactly where you are now.” He waggled his three fingers.
“That is a compelling list,” I conceded, sighing. “I know, you’re right. All I can really do is help Jesse and hope it blows over.”
He stood up suddenly, dropping my hands, and went to pace around the big open area on the floor. “This is all my fault,” he muttered.
“Don’t be stupid.”
He paused, turning to face me. “If I hadn’t eaten those cookies, you wouldn’t have—” he began.
“You can stop right there. You didn’t change Lydia, Caroline did,” I interrupted. I had a weird urge to stand up and pace too, of all things, but it would only make my leg worse, so I settled for playing with my phone, flipping it over and over in my hands. “If you hadn’t eaten the wolfberry, Lydia would be just as changed.”
He looked away. “Those three people would be alive.”
“But they’re not,” I said frankly. “They’re dead. And that’s on Olivia, not on you.”
He paced again, fingers curling into fists and out again. “I should have kept control.”
I threw up my hands. “Stop,” I ordered. Looking surprised, he did. I pointed to the chair. “Please, sit. You’re giving me vicarious leg pain.” He sat. “Sure, if it was possible for you to keep control, that would have been great,” I went on. “But you know that it wasn’t, Eli. You also know that none of this would have happened if Olivia hadn’t bumped into me on the street ten years ago. Or if she wasn’t thirsty for a kid she couldn’t have. Or if she’d never moved to LA.” He had dropped his hands and was staring at me. I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms across my chest. “Do you want more? I could do this all day. Or, you know, we could stop trying to figure out where it all went wrong and actually look at what’s happening now.”
We sat there, staring at each other, and I had absolutely no idea what Eli was going to do—cry, scream, throw something at me. But after a moment another smile began to spread very slowly across his face. “You’re different,” he said, with quiet delight.
I couldn’t help it; I grinned back. “Not for nothing, but I think shooting your mortal enemy in the chest will do that to a person,” I allowed.
Eli nodded. “That’s some serious closure,” he said gravely, trying to keep a straight face.
“Closure’s my bitch.”
He leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs in front of him. Then without saying anything, he bent forward, gently scooped up my injured left leg, and placed it on his knee. “You should be elevating this,” he lectured. A long time ago, Eli had been a paramedic. I smiled. “So,” he continued. “What do you need to know about werewolves?”
Oh, right. “Jesse will probably have his own questions,” I said hesitantly. I wasn’t excited about the two of them getting in a room together. “But for starters, Will keeps saying that the pack is unstable. What exactly does that mean, unstable?”
He tilted his head, gathering his thoughts. “Packs get unstable for a lot of reasons,” Eli began, “but most of them have to do with the alpha. He’s weak, or he dies suddenly, or he abuses his power. When that happens, the werewolves’ magic gets all lopsided all of a sudden. Fights break out, pack hierarchy is challenged, control weakens . . .” He winced. “It’s not good.”
“Wait, back up. What do you mean the magic gets lopsided?”
“Oh, right.” He smiled briefly. “Sorry, it’s weird to actually talk about this stuff. It’s like explaining what it’s like to have hair or something. What I mean is, an alpha is the leader of the wolf pack based on a few factors: physical power, magical power—which usually includes control of his wolf form—but also qualities like leadership, authority, kindness. But most important is that the pack agrees that he’s alpha. Think of it like . . .” He paused, considering for a moment, and continued, “A magic-based shield, made out of fused patches. Each pack member contributes a patch, and when cobbled together, they make Will stronger and more powerful. He in turn uses the shield to protect the pack.”
I looked at him for a long moment, working on the metaphor. “So the patches are like . . . their acknowledgment of him? As their alpha?”
He released my hand and twisted his fingers in the air, looking for words. “Acknowledgment, yes, but also their belief in him. In his ability to do the job. It’s all subconscious and almost automatic, but basically every pack member gives up a tiny piece of their magic, their own relationship with their wolf. That power, collected from the pack, builds the alpha’s shield.”
“So it’s like a self-feeding system. They believe he’s the alpha so he can be the alpha so they believe he’s the alpha.” Eli nodded. I frowned. “And when the pack gets unstable?”
“When a pack member stops trusting in the alpha, that magic is returned to him. But it’s also taken away from the alpha, creating a little hole in the shield.”
“And the more pack members who lose faith in the alpha, the more holes in the shield,” I said, understanding.
“I know, it’s weird,” Eli said, shrugging a little. “Wild wolves have this complex pack structure, and werewolves are emotionally and socially even more complicated than wild wolves. That gap, between wolf and werewolf, is filled in by magic.”
Huh. That explained why Will was looking so haggard lately, and why he’d been so busy. He was trying to get the pack’s faith back.
“We did it,” I said slowly. “I did it. I made the pack unstable when I changed you.”
Eli sighed. “How were you supposed to know? Besides,” he added, taking my hand again, “I know it looks bad now, but Will is a good alpha. He’ll get them back when this stuff with Anastasia and Lydia blows over.”
“But how is it going to blow over?” I asked. As long as Eli was around, the pack’s integrity was going to be constantly threatened. “Ana seemed more than just irked. She’s losing it. You almost have to . . . leave town. And tell everyone you left of your own free will.”
Eli considered that for a moment. We both knew that if he left, it would most likely be the end of us. I couldn’t go with him unless Dashiell released me from my job arrangement, which was unlikely. And
I couldn’t run away with him, because Dashiell was keeping my brother under his thumb for the very purpose of preventing that. Eli opened his mouth to answer, his face troubled, but at that moment my phone rang.
We both jumped a little. A tinny version of “Werewolves of London” came burbling out of my pocket. I fished out my phone and answered it without checking the screen.
“Hey, Will.”
“Scarlett,” Will said, his voice despairing, “there’s another one.” I met Eli’s blue eyes. He raised his eyebrows in question and I just shook my head.
“Another . . . ?”
“Another disaster. At my house.”
Chapter 12
After calling Jesse and giving him the address, I drove straight to Will’s house, beating Jesse by about twenty-five seconds. I backed the van into the driveway again, opened the van door, and pointed with my cane so Jesse would know to stash his sedan in the empty lot across the street from Will’s house.
“There’s really another body?” Jesse asked as he joined me. I nodded. Jesse was silent for a long moment, and when I glanced over, he was visibly distressed. So much for trying to catch the guy before he could kill anyone else. We walked toward the house, with Jesse going extra slow and me working extra hard to keep up. It worked, sort of. It seemed to take forever for me to get out and make my way toward the door, even after Jesse took my duffel bag for me. Will was waiting outside when we made our way to the wooden walkway next to his house. The alpha werewolf paced back and forth, looking cornered and agitated. He had stuffed a towel in the crack underneath the front door, and I realized it was to keep the smell out. Or rather, to keep the smell in. That meant that the smell of the body had gotten to Will, whose control had always been so total. I shivered in my thick sherpa hoodie, spooked.
Will hurried to meet us on the walkway, possibly so we could talk, or possibly to get in my radius quicker. “I brought her inside, just like last night,” he said abruptly. “I figured that would cut down on the amount of flooring I have to replace.” Now inside my radius, he took a deep, relieved breath, as though he’d just popped out of the water after a deep dive.
“Was it a werewolf again?” I asked, and Will gave me a tight nod.
“Same one. I could smell him.”
I nodded back, glancing at Jesse. His jaw was clenched tight, and he looked as agitated as Will. “I should have been here,” he muttered. “I should have been watching the house.”
I winced. Will tilted his head quizzically, and I explained, “He thought we should stake out your place, but I told him the guy wouldn’t be able to change for a few more days.”
Will shook his head. “I would have said the same thing. He shouldn’t be able to change this quickly.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Will admitted. “Come inside. We’ll talk there.”
The new body was positioned almost exactly like the one from the night before, and I had the strange impression that it had grown through the floor in the same spot, like when a new snack rises to the front of a vending machine to replace the one you took. She was a small Asian woman in her early thirties, with chin-length black hair and the well-defined back and leg muscles of a serious swimmer. She was wearing only a pair of simple satin panties, and like Leah Rhodes, her face was untouched.
But she was different from Leah Rhodes in that no part of her appeared to be . . . missing. Instead, this woman had died the death of a thousand cuts—maybe literally. Wide, messy scratches in clumps of four covered her arms, legs, and torso. Each clump was deep enough to need stitches, but I doubted that any one of them—or hell, any three of them—would have killed her. There were so many, though. She looked like she was wearing a red-and-white Jackson Pollock painting underneath her underwear. There was a band of untouched skin on each of her wrists and ankles. Unlike Leah Rhodes, this girl’s fingernails were smooth and buffed to a shine. She hadn’t fought her attacker. I hoped that meant she’d been drugged and unconscious while he did this to her, but it might have just been because she was tied down.
“Same thing?” I asked Will. “She was on your doorstep?” He nodded.
“Were there any witnesses?” Jesse asked immediately. He dropped my bag inside the door, almost exactly where I had put it the night before, and began walking around me so he could see the body.
“I don’t think so,” Will said grimly. “My next-door neighbor has been on vacation in Aspen. I got lucky. Again.” He shook his head. “But for a lot of reasons, this can’t keep happening.”
Jesse didn’t respond. He had crouched down next to the corpse and was staring intently at her face.
“Jesse?” I asked.
“I know her,” he said softly. “I mean, I know her name.” He looked up at me. “When I went through missing persons reports at the station today,” he went on. “Her picture was attached to one of them. I saw that she was Asian and I clicked past it, but her name is . . . Kathryn. Kathryn Wong.”
“You’re sure?” I asked, and Jesse nodded.
He looked back at the dead girl, peering at the girl’s injuries. “See these?” he said, pointing to the wounds on her shoulders. He moved his hand until he was pointing at her shins. “And these? It’s a progression.”
“What do you mean, progression?” Will asked, frowning.
“He started at the top and worked his way down,” Jesse said absently. “See, the scratches up here stopped bleeding a while ago—they’re even starting to scab over. But the ones on her legs are raw.”
“Oh my God,” Will said, staring. “You’re right.” Will’s eyes unfocused suddenly, calculating.
“What does that mean to you?” Jesse asked, looking at Will’s expression. Will didn’t answer.
I tried not to imagine how the girl’s last moments must have gone, but it was impossible. She must have been in agonizing pain, trying to get away, bleeding. He must have attacked her upper body first, waited a little while, and gone after her torso. Then waited a little longer and come after her legs. It was eerily methodical, like he’d been waiting for something to happen in between each attack.
Playing a hunch, I added, “Will? Is he trying to change them?”
Will’s distant eyes flickered back to me. “It’s definitely a possibility,” he said at last. “I can’t tell if she bled out, or if the magic took her.”
Werewolf magic is contagious, but only through body fluids, and just a little bit won’t usually get the job done. So if somebody gets a single bite or scratch, they’ll most often recover and go about their lives. But the more magic-tinged blood or saliva that a person absorbs, the more the magic gets in. And if enough magic gets in, the body will try to make the transformation. Sometimes it works, and the person becomes a werewolf. Sometimes—more and more often in the last couple of decades—it doesn’t work, and the magic overwhelms the human body, killing the victim.
Jesse and Will were both staring down at the body, unmoving, so I broke in. “Guys?” I said, snapping my fingers. “Body now? Talk later?”
The men looked up at me, and under different circumstances their identical startled expressions would have been funny. “You’re right,” Will said heavily. “We’ve got to get rid of it.”
“Her,” Jesse corrected. “We’ve got to get rid of her.” His voice was loaded with . . . something. Resentment? Anger? I didn’t have time to worry about it. It seemed to me like this was a personal, werewolf-to-werewolf kind of thing, but there was still the chance that the guy who’d done this would call a tip in to the police, planning to frame Will for murder. And Jesse definitely couldn’t be here if that happened. Will and I could probably get clear of something like that with Dashiell’s help, but Jesse’s career would be over.
I stumped over to the duffel bag, which Jesse had dropped inside the door, and pulled out one of my good body bags. Leah Rhodes had seemed like a twisted collection of gore by the time I’d gotten to her, but Kathryn Wong . . . She still seemed l
ike a person. One who had suffered, and one who would now be shoved in a furnace and forgotten. She deserved every bit of respect I could give her.
I instructed Jesse and Will to lay the body bag out next to the body, unzip it, and sort of roll her in. Jesse had seen this done dozens of times on LAPD crime scenes, and Will had covered up more than one murder because of his wolves, so they were both pretty stoic about it—until they flipped her over. The woman’s legs and arms looked like her front, but her lower back was smooth and unbloodied. Instead of a hundred gashes, there was just a single knife wound, about five inches long and scabbed over. It was a loop and a quick slash—a number two.
Jesse paused, squatting down to peer closely at the mark. “This one was a knife, I think,” he said tightly. “It looks like it happened before the other marks.”
When he didn’t move, I gave him a little nudge. He looked up at me, startled, and there was anger in his eyes. “We need to move,” I reminded him gently. I was getting antsier by the minute.
Jesse nodded, and he and Will zipped the girl into the body bag. Will’s face was troubled and thoughtful. “You’re going to the Valley, right?” he asked. “I’ll ride with you. I might have a theory.”
Jesse’s eyes widened, but I just shrugged my acquiescence. We had to come back to Will’s anyway, so Jesse could get his car. Jesse carefully picked up the body bag and carried it outside, to the back of the van. He didn’t wait for me, and by the time I made it back to the Whale, he was closing the built-in refrigerator compartment and hopping down from the vehicle. He gave me a look as I approached, and that one expression was loaded with so many emotions that it seemed to weigh him down, his shoulders slumping forward under the load. I didn’t know if he was upset about the girl’s murder, or how she’d died, or the fact that we were going to destroy her remains, or the fact that he was helping. Maybe all of them. Now wasn’t the time to ask, though.
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