She's No Faerie Princess

by Christine Warren

  Walker felt a flash of warmth and a tingle passing over his skin. The room around him seemed to spin and melt and all at once the hard wooden floor gave in beneath him. Caught off guard, he toppled forward onto the princess, twisting to keep his weight from crushing her into the… mattress.

  Lifting his head, he looked around his bedroom and down the length of his bare legs. Beside him, the princess settled herself back against the pillows and folded her hands over her belly, her expression smug and satisfied. Walker turned to look at her and saw her face, but he also smelled the subtle hint of nervous tension under her confident façade.

  "Huh," he said, leaning back beside her and draping one arm across her hips. "That's kinda handy, but have you ever considered a short trip to Tahiti?"

  Her eyes searched his face for a second; then the tension eased out of her and her smile curved wickedly. "Sorry, sweetheart, but you haven't earned Tahiti yet."

  Growling, he rolled back on top of her. "So I have to earn my rewards, do I?"

  "Absolutely." She looped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer to her. "And I'm a hard taskmaster."

  He felt his eyes flare and leaned down to take her mouth. "Not half as hard as I am."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  Fiona admitted that the cat-in-the-cream-pitcher smile on her face might look a bit out of place in a hospital morgue, but she couldn't help it. The expression had bloomed there the night Walker finally took her to bed—or floor—and she hadn't managed to shake it in the thirty-six hours since. Maybe because she had spent most of them in the exact same position that started the smiling. She blamed everything on the werewolf, and if she had been her aunt, she'd probably have ended up knighting him for it.

  She didn't know quite what had worked the transformation from grouchy ball of furry frustration to attentive and energetic lover, but she didn't plan to launch a protest. Not when she was so clearly benefiting from the change.

  The past day and a half in Manhattan had been perfect, exactly the sort of vacation she needed. She spent nearly all of that time under, over, or in front of but always very much around Tobias Walker. To be honest, it amazed her that she could still walk, and she had to give thanks for that to the rumored and very clearly limber nymph who lurked in her family tree.

  Once Fiona's reluctant werewolf got over his objections to touching her, he made up for lost time with flattering gusto. She had the marks to prove it—faint fingertip bruises on her hips where he'd held her against him, scattered constellations of hickeys and love bites from shoulders to toes, and the dark, shiver-inducing bruise where his teeth had sunk into the curve where her neck met her shoulder the first time he'd poured into her from behind.

  Her grin widened, turned soft and misty, just thinking about it.

  Not a single one of those proverbial battle scars hurt. She hadn't even noticed them being made. Her skin had always bruised easily, often from bumping into things so lightly she couldn't remember it later, and she knew very well that Walker would be aghast to think he'd actually hurt her. Most of the marks stayed hidden under her clothes, and the others she concealed with a small glamour because Walker had complained they made it look like she'd tangled with some sort of animal, which she very happily had. The only one he hadn't fussed over was the one on her neck, but her long hair covered that one well enough. After their time together, she was willing to cover the marks up for his sake, but when they went home, she planned to look at them all again and relive how each one had happened. Or maybe she'd forget reliving anything and just convince him to give her a whole new set.

  The mist in her grin faded, turning bright and wicked instead. Walker glanced over at her, his eyebrow quirking at her expression, but she just blew him a kiss and focused her attention back on the man who had just joined them in the cool, sterile room. The sooner they heard the news they'd been called out to hear, the sooner they could go home and rip each other's clothes off.

  Was it wrong to be entertaining lustful thoughts while surrounded by surgical instruments with refrigerated corpses resting in the next room?

  "Thanks for coming all the way down here," the man was saying as he shook Walker's hand. "The alpha told me this was a priority situation and that you were in charge, so I tried to get through as fast as possible. But I didn't want to miss anything, either."

  Walker nodded. "We appreciate you taking the time, Dr. Forester. With your schedule, it can't be easy."

  Adam grinned. No more than thirty at the outside, he stood about half a head shorter than Walker and had the lean, wiry build of a runner. Or maybe just of someone who worked like a dog and barely had time to eat. Either way, his green scrubs bagged on him, and his battered running shoes looked as if they'd already covered a few million miles. His brown hair curled in chaotic disorder and badly needed cutting. It kept flopping down in front of a pair of appealing hazel-green eyes, and judging by its rumpled appearance, Fiona figured he made combing it back with his fingers something of a habit. He really was an adorable kid, and she couldn't resist returning his grin.

  "Aw, Sheesh. Call me Adam. Please," he laughed. "You've known me since I was still cutting my teeth on other people's kills, and I've looked up to you and the alpha almost as long. Besides, the 'M.D.' after my name is so new it still squeaks when I walk too fast."

  Fiona laughed. "Oh, I thought that was just your sneakers on the linoleum." She extended her hand. "But it's still nice to meet you."

  Adam chuckled and made a move to shake her hand, but Walker stepped swiftly to the side, almost accidentally nudging Fiona's arm to the side. Surprised, she glanced up at the werewolf beside her, but his eyes were fixed on Adam, their formerly friendly expression now turned cold and possessive and menacing. Walker nudged her another step to the side, his hand reaching up and brushing her hair back to rest with clear possession on her shoulder. He didn't say anything, but it looked like he didn't have to. Adam froze, glanced at Walker's hand, and shoved his own into his pockets. He also took a healthy step backward.

  "Ah, yeah. Thanks. Um, why don't you step this way and take a look at what I found?" He turned on his heel and hurried over to one of the two autopsy tables in the center of the room.

  A cloth had been draped over a still figure, and Adam pulled it aside as they approached. The girl from the park lay sandwiched between the cold steel of the table and the stark blue-white cotton of the thin sheet. The covering concealed the worst wound, the one that had severed her all the way through the middle, and her body had been cleaned of the blood and debris they had seen the other night. Two new pink lines ran inward from each of her shoulders, but compared to the demon wounds, the Y incision looked neat and clinical and bore precise lines of suturing.

  Fiona felt a stirring of sympathy for the human. She couldn't have been much more than twenty, and Fiona doubted she could have done anything to deserve her fate. Somewhere, someone was already missing her and would continue to miss her for years to come.

  Adam put the width of the table between himself and Walker and took a few more steps over to the wall behind him to flip the switch on a light board. A series of X-ray films already hung in a neat row across it.

  He cleared his throat. "Now, ah, Annie said she, ah… she already gave you a preliminary summary, so you know that the body is intact with the exception of the heart." He gestured to one of the films and struggled visibly to focus on something other than Fiona and Walker and the banked but warning flare in the beta Lupine's eyes. "The X-rays confirmed that it was all there and we weighed and measured everything during the examination, so I can confirm everything else was normal. She was a healthy girl until she met the demon. A broken ulna suffered sometime in the past, probably when she was just a kid, but it healed well with no surgical interventions."

  Fiona didn't bother to try to make out the hair-thin line the doctor pointed out on the X-ray. She just let him find his rhythm and tell them what he knew. And she made a note to herself to smack Walker upsid
e the head for his ridiculous spoiled-two-year-old impression later. This might be the first time she'd ever had an affair with a Lupine, but she knew well enough not to undermine his power in front of a lower-ranking pack member. She'd do that in private where she could really rip him a new one.

  "The films don't show us any perimortem fractures, so whatever kind of straggle she put up, it didn't lead to any broken bones, and the thing that killed her didn't get its kicks from snapping them like toothpicks. I'm not sure that's much comfort, but I suppose it's something." Adam flipped off the light board and moved back to the table, carefully pulling back the sheet to expose the girl's battered body. "She does have some signs that she fought back. There are defensive wounds on the palms and sides of her hands. The ones on the palms generally come from the attempt to ward off blows." He held his hands up, palms out, to demonstrate. "And the ones on the sides look like they came from banging against something hard and rough. Think the damsel in distress pounding uselessly away at Godzilla's thick hide."

  Fiona leaned closer and saw the cuts as well as some bruising on the outer edge of the girl's hand.

  Adam picked up the other and pulled her fingers back gently. "We scraped some debris from under her fingernails as well. In a normal murder case, that would be sent to the police lab and they'd analyze it for DNA, but, well, I don't think that will be helpful in this case."

  "No. Not really." Walker's voice sounded nearly as cold as the temperature in the room, but now his grim expression was for the dead girl.

  "You already know it was a demon attack from what Annie and Fi—er… from what the princess told you," Adam continued. "And the removal of the heart makes that pretty obvious. It wasn't done neatly, but it was efficient. The thing just reached up into the chest cavity and gave a good tear. Her aorta looked like it had been snapped like a rubber band. Other than that, the rest of the wounds are pretty standard slashes and gouges. They aren't that dissimilar to what we'd expect to find in any case of a predatory attack by a large, powerful animal with really sharp claws."

  Walker's scowl deepened. "Annie already told us all of that. I was hoping you'd be able to give us something more."

  "Well…"

  The young man hesitated, and Fiona had to bite her tongue to keep from murmuring something reassuring and reaching out to pat his hand.

  "What is it?"

  Adam pulled the sheet back up over the girl. "Annie mentioned that there was a theory about the demon trying to make the kill look like a Lupine or a Feline attack."

  "There were some symbols that seemed to indicate it was possible."

  "Then I think you ought to see this." Frowning, Adam walked over to the far wall of the morgue with its rows of metal drawers and pulled one open. "He came in this morning just before dawn. I didn't find out until I came on shift, and even then I didn't think much of it until I talked to Annie again."

  Walker and Fiona moved closer and looked down at a second body. This one topped the girl from the park by a couple of decades and had a lot less hair. About fifty, balding, slightly overweight around the middle, the man looked pale and still and oddly peaceful. His chest sported the same autopsy Y incision as the girl, but other than that, Fiona could see no obvious wounds. Certainly nothing to indicate this was another death meant to look like a werebeast had done it.

  Then Adam turned the man's head to display a ring of mottled bruising and two neat, symmetrical puncture wounds on the side of his neck. Walker swore softly but creatively.

  "I was going to just go with standard procedure on this," Adam continued, looking up at the beta, his face serious. "You know, when a death comes in that looks Other related, we make sure an Other on staff does the autopsy, and then we report it to the Council for investigation so that they can take care of it without causing a panic among the humans. But this seemed odd."

  "Why?" Fiona asked. "Are the fang marks the wrong size? Because it looks like a vampire bite to me."

  "No, it looks just like a vampire attack, and the body had less than a pint of blood in it at autopsy."

  "But?"

  "But look at the bruising." Adam pointed to the discolored skin and traced the uneven edge of the mark. "Vampires rarely leave contusions around the bite. There are theories that the same properties in their saliva that help seal the wounds when they're done feeding on a living donor also help to prevent bruises. And even in the few instances when bruising has been recorded, it didn't look like this. This is too irregular. It doesn't look like it was caused by a human-shaped mouth. If it were, it would look more like a hickey. This almost looks like the guy was punched and then bitten."

  Fiona thought of the love bites she carried beneath her clothes and had to agree. The bruising around the dead man's bite wound looked nothing like a hickey.

  "Are you saying this wasn't a vamp kill?" Walker asked, looking very unhappy. "What else could it have been? If it were a demon kill, the heart would be missing. Demons always consume the hearts of their human victims."

  "No, the heart is there," Adam said. "That's why I was going to treat it like a vamp kill. Some fanged idiot got carried away and had a little too much to drink. But the heart isn't… normal."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that the average human heart weighs about three hundred twenty-five grams at autopsy. That can vary depending on disease, age, and weight of the decedent, but it's a round number. This guy's heart weighed seventeen grams."

  Fiona's stomach jumped. "How is that possible?"

  "I have no idea. It was like a shell that had all the contents removed. At first I thought it might be a side effect of the blood loss, but it's just not possible. Heart is all muscle. Even with all the blood gone, there should still have been more than seventeen grams' worth of water and fiber and solid tissue."

  "Why the hell didn't you report this to the Council the second you discovered it?" Walker roared.

  "I was going to report it at the end of my shift along with any other suspicious deaths or injuries the way we always do. There are diseases and conditions that can result in decreased heart weight, so the idea that a demon had sucked it dry wasn't really the first thing that occurred to me."

  Damn it. It might not have occurred to Adam, but it was definitely occurring to Fiona. She sighed and tugged on Walker's arm. "Step back."

  He scowled down at her. "What? Why?"

  "Step back," she repeated. "You, too, Adam. I'm going to see if there's any demon taint on the body. He's been gone a lot longer than the girl was when I checked her, but we might get lucky."

  Walker didn't look happy, but he did take a step back, and better yet, he ordered the young doctor to do the same.

  With all the energy Fiona had gathered up in Walker's bed, she didn't need to tap into anything else to repeat the revealing spell she had used on the girl's body. Once again, Fiona brushed a layer of magic over the still form and held her breath.

  This time she didn't see the bright glow of sigils and marks but a faint, sickly shimmer like a cobweb of slime wrapped around the dead man's neck and chest. The demon's taint had faded too much for her to make out the sigils with any clarity, but she didn't need to read them to know that a demon had killed this human as well.

  She considered using one of Walker's curses but opted for a traditional Fae one instead and stepped away from the drawer. "It was a demon. I can't tell if it was the same one that killed the girl, but I'm inclined to think no. The modes of death were too different. Even if the summoner were to order a demon to make a death look like it was caused by something other than a demon, you can't make a demon that attacks that savagely go so completely against its nature that it won't at least take a few swipes."

  Adam looked at her for the first time since Walker's earlier unspoken threat. "You mean there are two demons out there killing humans and trying to make it look like Others are doing it?"

  "That's what it looks like."

  "Holy shit!"

  "You might say that." She gl
anced at Walker, who looked like he either had just swallowed a mouthful of arsenic or was planning on forcing it down someone else's throat. "I definitely think it's more than one demon, but that doesn't necessarily mean more than one summoner. I haven't heard of one magic user strong enough to control multiple demons anytime since the Wars, but it is possible. And somehow it makes more sense than multiple demons and multiple summoners. That just smacks of conspiracy theory."

  "Whatever it smacks of is irrelevant," Walker said, his voice low and tight and vibrating with anger. "We need to tell the Council about this." He took Fiona by the elbow and began guiding her from the room, still speaking to Adam. "If anything else comes through these doors that has so much as a hair out of place, call me immediately, you understand? Otherwise I'll be doing a few autopsies of my own, but I can't guarantee I'll wait for you to be all the way dead. The princess and I are going back to the club."

  "Vircolac?" Fiona sighed. "My home away from home. Let's hope that this time I don't get abandoned or lectured. It would make a nice change of pace."

  Graham took the news about as well as Walker expected, which meant that his bellow would have the police department in Albany fielding noise-disturbance calls for the rest of the night. Even the normally stabilizing influence of his luna didn't seem to be helping keep him calm. Walker had to wait until the walls stopped shaking before he managed to get the rest of the story out, and even then, Graham jumped in swinging before the last syllable fell.

  "What the hell was the puppy waiting for?" he roared, his expression dark as storm clouds. "Did there have to be a fucking massacre before he thought we'd be interested in what was going on?"

  "Walker already explained that," Missy said. Her voice stayed serene and quiet, but no one could mistake the steel in it. "He didn't think it was that unusual, and you need to calm down."

  "I'm about as fucking calm as I'm likely to get in the middle of a goddamned crisis."