by Faith Hunter
“It happened before you made your dramatic entrance,” I said.
“Oh.” She shook her head, wet hair flying, “I suppose that should make me feel better.” Soul knelt by Brute and ran her fingers deep into his ruff, scratching his skin. “Brute,” she said. “Attention.” The snuffling stopped and the wolf rolled his blue eyes up to her, but his nose didn’t leave the wood floor. “I want you to remember the scents. Tell him who they are, Jane.”
“The female human is the Devil. The Mithran is called Peregrinus, and he’s our enemy. He came to about here”—I pointed to the floor—“and left. The not-human that might have a slight wet-feather undertone is Gee DiMercy. Then over here we had Leo and his heir, Katie, and the vampire priestess Bethany. She smells old and crazy.” I looked at Soul, who stood up, leaving her hand in the wolf’s ruff. “The other scents you might make out are Derek, who you’ve sniffed, I think, and two les arcenciels. Their scents are fishy and plantlike.” Soul lifted her eyebrows in amusement at my description of her scent, or maybe at my attempt at speaking French.
Brute snuffled and snorted, this tone different from the earlier ones, now of affirmation. He raised his head and stood on his back feet to stick his nose into Soul’s neck near her ear. He blew, fluffing her wet hair. Claws clicking, he dropped, turned around, and headed up the stairs. I said, “Do not do anything bad to any room or any piece of . . . anything. Or the threat about the back porch will be true.” Brute sniffed at me and trotted on up, taking the stairs two at a time.
“Why is George Dumas asleep on your couch?” Soul asked, still in the foyer, looking over her shoulder.
“It’s a long story,” Eli said, making his weapons disappear. “We have steak. I can cook one under the broiler for you and feed one raw to the dog.”
We could hear the growl from up the stairs at the dog insult.
“If you don’t want him to pee in your boots, you’d better be careful,” I said.
“It seems I always show at dinnertime.” Soul gave us an embarrassed smile, eyeing the table. “If you have an extra potato baked, I’d rather have that, though I need to change first.”
“You can’t just make your clothes,” I make a poof gesture, “presto chango?”
“No,” Soul said primly. “I cannot.”
I grunted. “So why is a werewolf here without his executioner?” Werewolves, even one touched by an angel, as this one had been, were always accompanied by a grindylow, who would kill them if they tried to pass along the were-taint.
Her voice soft, Soul said, “Pea is in-country. And there was no one else to take Brute.”
I blinked. “Oh. Of course.” I turned away. In-country was the word Rick had used when I sent him into hiding. Pea was with my ex and his were-panther girlfriend. Ask a dumb question . . .
“Yes,” Soul said. “Also, Brute’s nose may be useful when we go after the hatchling. If you’ll excuse me . . .”
Alex stood at the bottom of the stairs blushing, his eyes carefully—very carefully—not staring at Soul’s cleavage or the way her body looked, with the wet clothes plastered to her as she made her way up to her room. All the time spent with Katie’s working girls was paying off in the Kid’s manners.
Eli and I went back to the kitchen where I nuked my untouched cold potato and lined up condiments in front of Soul’s plate. Eli used tongs to serve her salad, and set a raw steak on a plate on the floor. Faster than I could change—and I changed quick—Soul was back, wearing jeans and a lightweight sweater, her hair braided in a silver plait down her back to dry.
“When we go after the hatchling?” I asked, picking up the conversation where we had dropped it.
“She is a powerful weapon when being ridden. As a PsyLED special agent, I cannot leave her in Peregrinus’ hands. And she is one of my kind, a rare and precious hatchling. I will not leave her in his hands.”
As if we’d worked and lived together for years, we went back to eating, filling Soul in on the most recent events. It took some time, and Soul asked more questions about the missing hatchling and the vamps who took her. Some of the questions we could answer, and some were so off the wall I had no idea. Like, “How old is she? How did she first find you? Has she ever talked to you?” And my personal favorite, “What do the Mithrans who took her want?”
So far as I could tell, they wanted everything, but I said, “They came prepared with a crystal and some kind of lasso to capture an arcenciel. Why would someone want a hatchling?”
“They are easier to ride,” Soul said, again employing a prim tone.
Alex laughed, which morphed into a cough when Eli kicked him under the table. Soul looked amused at the byplay, and added, “Hatchlings are easier to control than the adults of my species. And we have magic that can be used by properly trained humans.”
I told them my suspicions about Reach possibly having a file about an arceniel in the vicinity of New Orleans.
There was no reason now to keep secrets. We knew too much about one another to play games, so the Youngers and I shared freely. Brute finished his tour of the house while we chatted, and settled at his plate, his ears flicking as he listened to us talk. The storm began to ease as we did the debrief, a gentle drumming as the thunder faded into the distance.
We were eating dessert, which was plain vanilla ice cream with dark chocolate melted over it, when my cell rang. The rain had slowed to a mellifluous patter, and the ringer was an annoying song by Madonna. While I answered I shot the Kid a warning look for messing with my ringtone. He tried for innocent. It didn’t work.
“Hey, Troll.”
“Where’s Katie?”
I went still. All the others turned to me and I put the call on speaker. “What do you mean, ‘Where’s Katie?’ She jumped the fence carrying Leo over an hour ago.”
“She never got here.”
“On it,” I said, ending the call. Moving with Beast-speed, I pulled on a headset and grabbed a flashlight out of my gobag, holding it in the hand with the vamp-killer, my right holding the nine-mil, one in the chamber. After a fractured moment of indecision, I raced to my room, and reached up into the top of my closet, for the box of charms Molly had prepared for me so long ago. I hadn’t used any of them recently.
I opened the box and took out one small charm, a fishhook carved of ash, painted with a streak of sterling silver. It was packed with witch power, a charm to freeze a vamp. It was crafted to work for fifteen minutes, give or take. Plenty of time to behead a vamp, even one as strong and as old as Peregrinus. I just hoped it had been created to hold power for a long time. I hadn’t asked Molly to recharge the spells on the charms. I hooked it into my T-shirt neck, securing it close at hand and easy to pull. I also took all of my silver stakes and tied the fuzzy purple T-shirt around my waist, the shirt crafted with healing in the knitted threads of the tee. Lastly, I slapped on the thigh rig.
Eli was upstairs, scouting the back of the house and yard with low-light goggles.
“Ears on,” I said into the mouthpiece.
“Running a sweep now,” he said.
“Okay. What do you see?”
“Back is clear on low level and infrared,” Eli said over the headset. He appeared at my side, silent as a hunting lion. “Clear to go.” Soul stood by the back window, her badge on her hip, a psymeter in one hand and her service weapon in the other. I wasn’t sure about letting the PsyLED agent take part but I also knew she wasn’t leaving. “No indication of magical power in the backyard,” she said, pocketing the device.
Side by side, Eli and I left through the window, Soul behind us. Though it was clear that she wanted to take point, we knew the terrain; she didn’t. In the dark, flashlights sweeping, we began quartering the backyard. Brute leaped through the window and followed, his nose to the wet, draining earth. The backyard was unchanged, as I expected it to be. I had seen Katie, with Leo, go over the back fence in a smooth leap that practically defied gravity, Derek right behind.
I nodded to Eli and he
climbed the rocks—the ones still whole and not reduced to rubble—taking the highest point. Using his equipment, he scanned the yard on the other side and nodded to me. I shut off the flash and pulled on Beast’s strength, leaping high, grabbing the brick top, and swinging over the fence, to land in a crouch. Mud flew up from my feet and I realized I was still barefoot. The breeze was silent but steady from upriver. All I smelled on it was food and rain and exhaust. All I heard was rain pattering down and cars and music from several directions.
One hand on the brick, I scanned Katie’s back garden with Beast’s night vision, a sheen of greens and grays and silvers everywhere. I sucked in scent through my lips, over my tongue, and across the roof of my mouth, trying to scent silently. I smelled rain, rain, and more rain, the ozone of lightning, and, faintly, just at the edge of my ability in this form, blood. Vamp blood, mixed varieties. Leo’s blood . . . He had stopped bleeding before Katie him took away. But—
“Holy crap,” I whispered to myself. If Katie killed Leo, or let someone else kill Leo, she would move to Master of the City by right of succession, according to Mithran law. Leo had been unconscious and gravely injured from the silver of my stakes, and I had let the one person guaranteed to benefit from his death at my hands take him off.
“Holy crap,” I said again. To Eli, I said, “Clear.” No louder, but not for the headset, I said, “Brute. Get over here.”
Two seconds later the wolf landed beside me and mud flew all over me. Brute, when he had been able to achieve human form, had weighed in at more than three hundred pounds. He was still that in wolf form. “Cute,” I said, wiping spatter off my face. “Sniff out everything from here to the house, please. Then I’ll ask a few questions. Okay?”
Brute made a low Rrrr sound in the back of his throat, which I took as affirmation, and started quartering the yard like a police detective might at a crime scene. I had a sudden vision of Rick and Brute working together, taking the same steps, following the same procedures, but working as a team. Minutes passed as I stood in the mud, rain falling on my shoulders. Troll, Soul, and Eli appeared at a back window of Katie’s, silhouetted by dim light from the hallway beyond. Someone had been smart, not adding new scents to the scene.
Brute covered the yard and reached the back door to Katie’s before he raised his head to look over his shoulder at me. His white coat was drenched with the slow rain, as was I, and his paws were muddy to the knees. He barked, the tone telling me he was done. I slogged to him through the wet grass, my jeans dragging, and the back door opened to let us both in. There was a length of plastic on the floor in the back entrance and a stack of towels. And four working girls in various stages of undress. I accepted a large towel from Troll and dried off while Soul, kneeling on the plastic, applied another towel to the wolf.
As we both worked at drying off the rainwater, I said, “Brute.” The wolf lifted his crystalline eyes to me, sat down, stared, and waited. Soul stopped drying him and put her hand into his ruff again, her eyes on me too. I said, “I need answers. Let’s start with: Did Katie and Leo and Derek land on this side of the fence?”
Brute nodded once up and down. It was a strange sight, seeing a wolf mimic human behavior. I wondered whether I looked that odd when I responded to questions like a human when in animal form.
“Okay. Did they make it to the door?” Brute shook his head side to side, no. “Was there a fight?” Brute nodded. “Close to the fence?” He nodded.
“Did the fight continue for a while?” He nodded. I took a slow breath. “Did anyone die in the fight?” Brute shook his head and I let the breath out. “Do you recognize the attacker or attackers’ scent?” He nodded again. “Was it Peregrinus?” Brute’s big head dropped and rose slowly.
“Was anyone injured?” The skin and hair over Brute’s eyes wrinkled, and I recognized his inability to answer the question. “Did you smell fresh blood?” Brute stared hard at me and dipped his head. I said the names, pausing between each for an answer. “Leo’s? Katie’s? Derek’s? Peregrinus’? The Devil’s?” I got a solemn nod with each name.
Soul said, “Peregrinus has the hatchling, Leo, and Katie. There is nothing he cannot do once he controls them.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking that over. “We have a limited time period to fix it all. First question is, how did they get out of the yard?”
Eli knelt and rolled towels to form a square on the plastic. “Here’s the fence at our back courtyard. Here’s Katie’s back door. There’s a long alley from Katie’s backyard to the street down this side, but it’s locked and a camera records everything there. There’s no side yard here.” He pointed to the other side, where Katie’s and the house being remodeled next door were so close that you’d have a difficult time getting an old-fashioned phone book between the walls. “So we have a fight that took place in a rain- and thunderstorm, in a locked garden area. Brute? How did they get out?”
Brute whined softly, looking at the towels and up to Soul.
“Brute is having some difficulty thinking in human terms,” Soul said, her tone gentle. “We think his brain has been too long in wolf form. It’s okay, Brute. Can you show us if we go outside, in the yard?” Brute whined and thumped his tail before nodding. He turned and put a paw on the door, which left a muddy smear before Troll opened it. I followed the werewolf stuck in wolf form into the dark.
Outside, the rain had stopped and there was only the gurgle of water running off the roofs and through gutters, and the heavy fall of collected rainwater dripping from plant leaves and house eaves. Distantly, I heard cars splashing through the rain and jazz from uptown, R & B from downtown. The wind was still moving downstream, carrying the ever-changing scent pattern.
Nose to the ground, Brute trotted around the yard, circumscribing an area about twenty feet round. Most of the yard. Several times he put his paw down as if indicating something important on the grass or on a plant. “Soul, what’s that mean, when he puts his paw down?”
“He smells blood.”
“A lot of blood, then,” I said, counting back to eight different places just in the circumference.
Brute trotted to the side yard and put his paws up on the building next door to Katie’s, the building where I had heard hammers and skill saws earlier in the week, where the construction was taking place. I looked up and saw that a window on the attic floor was broken. “Crap,” I said to Eli. The breeze had carried all scent from the window away from us, so I hadn’t noticed it. I was too wedded to the nose and not enough to the eyes. “We suck as investigators,” I continued. “You found the sniper out front. But I’m betting we had someone watching the back from the attic of that house.”
“I’ll take the front, through Katie’s and out to the street,” he said into my ears. He looked at Troll, taking in the broad shoulders and huge chest. “Think you can boost Janie up to the window when I give the word?”
“Piece of cake.” To me, Troll said, “You find who took my Katie and you put a hole in him for me.”
I nodded and sheathed my weapons. I’d need hands free to climb through a high window. I just hoped they weren’t still there waiting in ambush. At that thought, I said, “Eli, take Brute with you. See if he smells them leaving through another door.”
Brute woofed and raced to the house, Eli hot on his tail. Literally. Which made me smile as much as I could, knowing that the Master of the City and his heir had disappeared on my watch and under my nose.
Troll stood bent-kneed, about five feet away from the wall of the neighboring house, and linked his meaty fingers together to made a basket of his hands. I gauged the distance from his hands to the window and backed up fifteen feet. Drawing on Beast’s strength, I raced toward Troll and leaped, landing with my right foot in his hands. I pushed off and up as Troll straightened his knees and simultaneously raised his arms, pushing, shoving, lifting, throwing me high, like a gymnast. I shot up and over at the window, meeting the window sash at waist level, my hands thrusting down, using the momentum to
lift my legs up. I caught my balance and paused on the sash, hands and feet all together, the way a cat might stand on a narrow ledge or tree limb.
“Janie,” I heard softly below me.
Before answering, I inspected the room inside, dark and shadowed. There was no one there, but the smell of fresh vamp and human blood hung thick on the air, mixing with the scents of glue, putty, wallboard, wood, and human sweat. If there was an intruder inside, one who had a better-than-human sense of smell, he or she would know I was coming.
“Janie,” Troll called again.
“What,” I hissed over a shoulder.
“Your feet are muddy. And bare. And the window’s broken.”
“I noticed,” I said dryly.
“Be careful,” he said. “And bring my Katie back.” Vamps and their humans were big on terms of possession, but there was something tender and yearning and frightened in his voice. I so totally did not want to know about his relationship with Katie, but there was no doubt that he loved her.
On a silent breath I said, softly, “Working on it, Troll. Working on it.” Then I let myself drop to the floor of the dark room, drawing my weapons, my feet on carpet and shards of glass. My weight drove the glass into my soles and I hissed at the pain of sliced flesh. I took a second step inside, trying to avoid the glass, but a needle of antique window pierced my instep. Beast, responding to the danger to my feet, dropped us into the gray place of the change and my legs morphed from the knees down. I held in a scream of pain as my bones cracked and shrank and then expanded into the half-human, half-puma, big-cat form of paw. When she was finished, I had bitten through my tongue, adding the smell of my blood to the stench of the house. I gasped when the bone pain eased and shook the glass off my hard paw pads.
The gasp drew air into my mouth, and the scent and stink of humans and freshly spilled blood filled my head. Blood-servants, several of them, had entered here earlier today. Peregrinus’ men and women. The construction guys had disturbed them in the attic and died for their trouble.
