by Debra Dunbar
Chuck pursed his lips, scowling at the phone receiver. “You sure it’s not him? What did he buy? Cursed object? Maybe at night he turns into psycho-skinner man and he’s trying to throw you off the trail.”
“I didn’t get that vibe from him at all.” I bit my lip in thought. “He was down in South Carolina picking up a piece for an exhibit. Guy fancies himself one of those pickers, going around to flea markets and estates scrounging for a Fabergé egg in Aunt Mable’s dresser drawer. Cursed object is a good theory, but we’ve got witnesses that have them in the same place at the same time, so it wouldn’t be a cursed picker guy switching between a bunch of skins.”
The mage rested his chin on one fist and leaned forward, phone tight to his ear. “So tell me about skinwalkers. What do you know?”
Not much. Not until I got home and read more. Now that I’d narrowed it down, ruling out Aztec gods, this made the most sense.
“There are a few Native American tribes who have legends of individuals claiming to be skinwalkers. They’re human—at least they are at the start—and they were mostly likely magic users who turned evil.”
Chuck snorted. “Evil is such a subjective concept. Taking an animal skin and using it to gain power and knowledge? How is that evil?”
“Well, according to the Navajos, the skinwalker needs to kill an immediate family member to gain the skill.”
“Every gift of magic requires a sacrifice,” Chuck commented calmly. I glared at him until he squirmed. “I’ve never done it but I could see if there was a family member you really disliked—say that brother that bullied you growing up—there might be a temptation.”
“Anyway.” I frowned at him as I continued. “Once they gain the ability of a skinwalker, they use their animal forms to kill and injure others.”
Chuck snorted. “Seriously? Why bother? You can do that from a distance with all sorts of other magic—most of which doesn’t require you to off one of your own family.”
The mage was starting to get on my nerves, but I still had hope he’d have some insight for me. “I don’t know why. Maybe killing someone up close and personal as a scary animal is a thrill for them. Maybe they concoct blackmail schemes and rake in the dough. You know, ‘pay me or a giant bear will maul you.’ Or maybe they just like being animals.”
“Or they like being other people.” Chuck rubbed his chin. “That would be kind of fun, running around as someone else. There’s no accountability. Rob a bank, then ditch that skin and wear another. It would be like one giant high school prank.”
High school prank. I envisioned three teens running away from home and their Grandmother, hitchhiking their way to the big city, stealing people’s identities and living their lives. It did seem juvenile, if you took away the murder component.
Teenage skinwalkers. Whatever their true age, I needed to get back and research this further. What were their habits? And, most importantly, how could I stop them.
And what the heck was I going to do after I stopped them? Could they be sentenced to a prison for the criminally insane, one where the three teens could be in solitary confinement so they wouldn’t skin their roommates? But that would be Tremelay’s problem, not mine. My problem was bringing these three in.
I had one more thing I wanted to ask Chuck before I left. “Okay, so whatever Fiore Noir was spelling against, it wasn’t an Aztec god, and it clearly wasn’t three teen skinwalkers. Tell me, Chuck. Tell me what I’m going to have to kill in the near future?”
He grinned. “You know what’s been fun? Having you visit me and tell me about your skinwalker problem. I’d love someone to come by regularly and talk shop. I might even be able to help. I’m quite eclectic in my practice as compared to the others in Fiore Noir.”
How did I ever think I liked this guy? “You cared enough about the city to kill to protect it. Tell me what’s coming.”
“Once a month, on my visiting day. Each time you come I’ll give you a clue—after we talk shop for at least an hour, that is.”
“I don’t have time for this,” I snarled. “Baltimore doesn’t have time for this. For all I know there might already be a basilisk or some other monster terrorizing the city. I’m already sending you popcorn and now you want to be besties?”
“It’s September. If the Big Bad, as you call it, doesn’t appear by first frost, it will wait until spring. That’s plenty of time to visit me and put the puzzle pieces together.”
This was Baltimore, first frost could be in October or it could be in January. I had no idea how long the last two soul magic spells would hold. I had no idea what the heck they were holding back. And I really didn’t want to visit Chuck monthly in addition to sending him popcorn.
But I had to. He’d just given me a clue. Whatever this was, it didn’t like the cold. If we had an early winter, there was a good chance I could figure it out before spring. Six additional clues. And, unlike most people, I had a brilliant father to help me.
“Okay. I’ll see you next month.”
I slammed the phone on the receiver and stomped away, but not before I saw the smirk on Chuck’s face. It made me think that twenty years at Jessup was far too light of a sentence.
Chapter 24
I’D BARELY CRACKED open Native American Magic when my phone beeped with a text. It was Tremelay, sending me an address.
The Powerplant? Was he asking me to go clubbing? Maybe. If there was a good band or a decent D.J.
I glanced over at the fox figurine, still resting on the book shelf with dull red eyes. “What do you think, Raven?” Then my phone chimed again.
Hurry.
I might not know much about the detective’s personal life, but I doubted he was in a huge rush to have me meet him at a drunken dance-fest. Tremelay wouldn’t demand my presence if it wasn’t important, so I threw my sword over my shoulder and ran out the door.
Parking in that section of the Inner Harbor was impossible at night, so I walked. Or rather, I ran. It wasn’t as easy as it had been a year ago when I’d been working out regularly. By the time I arrived at the huge building which had formerly housed a coal-burning electric plant, I was sweaty and puffing hard. And I was horribly underdressed.
Instead of eyeing my sword, everyone eyed my faded jeans and worn T-shirt. It was a far cry from the miniskirts and barely-there dresses most of the women were wearing. I shifted away from the crowd that was waiting for the concert venue, and looked for the address Tremelay had sent.
The Powerplant was a monstrous conglomerate of bars, clubs, and businesses as well as the concert site. Everything had been built onto and around the original building, which still had the iconic smokestacks. Well, iconic except that they were now adored with a giant guitar advertising the Hard Rock Café.
I went into the club he’d indicated, finding it packed with a plethora of people wearing black clothing.
“Where are you?” I texted him, looking around. I couldn’t imagine Tremelay in this sort of place, but who knows what the guy did for kicks in his spare time.
“Bathroom. Meet me here.”
I stared, open-mouthed, at my phone. He was in the bathroom? What the heck did he expect me to do, give it a shake when he was done?
I pushed my way through the crowd, fairly certain that people were fondling not only my rear end, but my sword as well. Finally I arrived at the very back of the bar where the bathrooms were located only to find myself refused entrance by a stern, uniformed police officer. A few texts to Tremelay and I saw him pop out of the silver-painted metal door and wave at the officer to let me through.
“What’s going on?” I asked the detective. The burly officer had been smack outside the men’s room. Whatever was going on, it had to be big to shut down the only place for guys to pee in a bar at full occupancy. Was there a celebrity in there doing number two? Because I couldn’t imagine any other reason for the cops to be guarding a bathroom.
Guarding a stinky bathroom. I wrinkled my nose as Tremelay opened the door. And I quickly
realized that the stench wasn’t from someone who’d suffered burrito-induced food poisoning, but from a body which had been dead long before the band took the stage.
“Bodies.” I’d never seen Tremelay look so pissed. “Two skinned bodies in one of the stalls. Fuck knows how long they’ve been there. People have been complaining about the smell since the place opened, but no one thought to check in the stall until just now. And these ones were posed. They look like they’re having sex. And yes, they’re both skinned.”
I peeked in the doorway of the stall and wished I hadn’t. The bodies were posed in a position that held sexual innuendo. I thought back on Chuck’s and my conversation about teenage pranks. The dead body falling out of the closet on top of me fit with that theme, too. Perhaps the one in the cooler had been destined for a prank along with Amanda Lewis’s corpse, if only her boyfriend hadn’t interrupted.
But two bodies meant two more skins. Assuming the one was only hunting vampires at this point, I was looking at two murderers who could assume any one of five identities—six if I counted the teenager’s Gary was in when they arrived.
And we’d never find them. Not when we had no idea who these bodies were. My only chance was to catch them in Gary’s or Bradley Lewis’s skins. Although murderers with any sense would have ditched those by now.
But I wasn’t dealing with adults. I was dealing with teenagers—teenagers who’d argued in a rest-stop bathroom and at the Inner Harbor. They’d not give them up. Not unless they had to run for it and leave a backpack behind.
Whoever these teens were, they needed to be prosecuted as adults. It wasn’t just the multiple murders, it was the absolutely psychotic desecration of these two bodies in the bathroom stall. It was vomit-inducing. Red bodies, tendons and muscles all on display like in an anatomy textbook, eyes bulging, teeth bared. The whole thing was like a scene from a slasher horror flick.
“Now you can see why we have the bathroom cordoned off,” Tremelay commented. “We didn’t want to clear the bar and alarm the public. We’re hoping to sneak these two out the back on stretchers, like overdose victims.”
“Who found them? And how the heck did the killers get them in here? You’d think someone would have seen them.”
“This place is locked down tight until the band arrives to set up. No one saw them. No one saw anything. The roadies did tell management the bathroom stunk something horrible, but nobody thought to look until they’d been open for almost an hour.”
I looked over at the stalls. If this had been the women’s bathroom, it would have been found right away, but with a line of urinals and two other open stalls, nobody would have thought to pry open the locked one and see what was going on in there.
I scrunched up my nose. “You can sneak out the back door, but this is gonna leak out, Tremelay. Like it or not, it’s gonna hit the morning paper.”
Mainly because I was going to call Janice. I owed her, and the woman needed to get a decent story after being scooped by the City Paper.
“I know it’s gonna leak out,” Tremelay snapped. “No news crews have shown up yet. I’m sure some asshole with a cell phone has gotten pictures, though. More skinned bodies. Everyone just got settled down from the occult sacrifices, and now we’ve got three teenage skinwalkers killing people.”
“Skinwalker is better than an Aztec god,” I reassured him. “I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to stop an Aztec god. Not that I have any idea how to stop a skinwalker, but that at least I can find that out in a timely fashion. I’ve got research material on them and so does my Dad. Aztec gods…not so much.”
“What have you found out so far? What do I need to know about these kids?” Tremelay asked.
“They’re a sort of Native American witch, an evil person who gains the powers, skills, and memories of whatever skin he is wearing. It’s usually animals, but I’m thinking if I dig a bit I can find incidents where skinwalkers have taken human skins. They transform into whoever they’re wearing at the time.”
“So these people are draping skins of their victims over themselves and walking around? Is that how Huang escaped? He shed his skin and turned into…I don’t know, a rat or something?”
“That’s what I believe. It’s a kind of magic,” I tried to explain. “They put on the skin and they actually become whatever. Coyote, owl, bear, Brian Huang.”
“Why? I’ll admit it might be kind of cool to be a bear for a day or two, at least until they darted me and stuck me in a zoo, but not other humans. At least not a lazy kid and a museum employee with a huge family crammed into a four bedroom rancher in Glen Burnie. If I was going to assume another person’s identity it would be the Mayor, or Bill Gates, or Brad Pitt.”
I wrinkled my nose, thinking that Tremelay should aspire to be a younger movie star than Brad Pitt, but who was I to judge?
“I really don’t know. They’re kids, like Stu Moreland said. Maybe they’re skinwalkers-in-training and out on a sort of lark. An evil joy ride.”
Tremelay shook his head. “The name Moreland mentioned matched up with the name of the skin in the backpack—the kid who’d gone missing at age six from South Carolina. Do you think a skinwalker stole these kids and trained them?”
It was a chilling thought, but one I’d had in the back of my mind. They had to have learned the magic somewhere, and given that Lawton had vanished from his home when he was only six years old, only to turn up a skin in a backpack ten years later…. Was that six-year-old boy trained along with the others, or had another trained skinwalker come upon Lawton King recently and taken his life?
“All I know is we’ve got a possibility of five identities to look for if we rule out the girl up north and her vampire skin. Five, including these two.” I waved a hand at the corpses as a tech loaded them carefully onto gurneys and covered them with sheets.
“Gary, that we have pictures of, these two unknowns, a rest-stop guy, and Lewis.” Tremelay’s mouth set in a grim line. “I’m gonna try to fast track the DNA on the cooler body and these two. With this many murders, we’ve got a crisis. We’re also going to probably have the feds knocking at our door the next day or two. This kind of thing is right up their alley, and we’ve got four dead including Amanda Lewis and body and skin from her house.”
Feds. Crap. If this had been a human serial killer, I would have welcomed their presence, but with a supernatural element…
If only there really was a branch of the FBI that dealt with supernatural phenomenon. What I wouldn’t give for Scully and Mulder right now. I’d team with those two in a heartbeat. But unfortunately I’d wind up with a bunch of suits who shuffled me aside and put every officer to work looking for three human psychos.
Skinwalkers. I watched the bodies being wheeled from the bathroom and out the emergency exit at the back of the building and knew this was going to be up to me. If the feds arrived, they’ve grab Tremelay as their lead detective on the case, tying up all of his time.
Me. Again I felt a wash of loneliness. I liked working with Tremelay. I liked working with Raven. And I liked working with Dario.
I needed to cut the self-pity crap. Feds or not, Tremelay would always find a way to make time for what might become our side investigation. Raven would help once she regained her strength. And Dario—he would find that vampire imposter, I just knew it.
“What are you thinking, Ainsworth?” Tremelay asked. And I knew then that he was with me, no matter what his job demanded of him.
“I’m thinking I need to research skinwalkers more—how to detect them, how to catch them.”
How to kill them? Admittedly these three had done their share of murder. I’d killed Dark Iron but I didn’t want to kill again. These were kids, even though they were murderers on a spree. This was different. There was plenty of evidence to put these kids away for life. There was no need for me to take justice into my own hands.
But the skinwalker who’d posed as Brian Huang had escaped prison in a matter of hours. Like Dark Iron, I wondered if
human justice would possibly be enough for kids with this level of magical ability. My soul was smudged already. It was about to become even darker.
“So you’re nose-deep in books tonight while I’m filling out reports.” Tremelay sighed and ran a hand through his already messy hair. “Do you have a sec before you go home? I’ve got something I wanted to give you, but it’s at my apartment.”
I blinked in surprise. Not that I thought Tremelay would try anything sleezy, or that I had anything to fear being alone with him in his apartment, I’d just never thought about where the detective lived. He seemed to be either out investigating a case or at the station.
“Sure. I’ve got time.”
We stood for a moment, as if both of us was waiting for the other to do something, then Tremelay finally turned, gesturing for me to follow him. “It’s not all that. My place. I mean it’s kinda cheap and small. And I just moved in a few months back and have been too busy to unpack much. I haven’t even put the bed together yet. I’m sleeping on the mattress on the floor.”
We walked through the same emergency exit as the bodies had gone and toward his unmarked car, double parked next to the ambulance. Being a detective had its privileges. Parking was evidently one of them. “Well, hopefully I won’t be seeing your mattress,” I teased.
“Hardly,” he shot back, tempering his word with a quick grin. “I’m just warning you that the place is a mess.”
“You’ve been in my apartment. People who live in glass houses and all that.” He unlocked the unmarked car and I slid into the passenger seat, waiting for him to come around and get in. “Besides, I’m eager to see where you live. Do you actually own an iron? Are your clean clothes twisted up in a heap in a laundry basket in the living room? Are there dishes stacked up in your sink with dried food crusted on them?”
“Now you’re describing your place.” The smile stayed on his face as he pulled away from the curb. “It’s not that bad. Mostly unpacked boxes. And yes, I tend to live out of a laundry basket. Hanging and folding clothes has got to be a torture technique. I’d rather be suspended by my toes than try to match socks.”
