Toss in the casual relationship with the sheriff and it was doubly strange. Working with Ava made perfect sense, given what he could do. Her magic had the potential to strengthen his. So far, however, he’d had little experience with the preternatural hunters like Lily. Usually the order didn’t pair a were-anything with a necromancer. Until now, that is.
“So what’s up?” He wasn’t one to wait around or stand on formality. Lily was the leader of the pack, so to speak, and that meant she always took the lead. This time around it was so different, he didn’t have a problem jumping in and asking questions. Hopefully it wouldn’t start his first meeting with Lily off on the wrong foot. His curiosity could only be contained so long, as anyone who was familiar with ADHD could attest.
Fortunately, it didn’t seem to bother Lily. Maybe she was accustomed to being around ADHD personalities like his, or maybe she was simply ready to move forward. Either way, she was ready to rock and roll. Lily looked at him and nodded. “Here’s what we’re up against, and here’s how we’re going to handle it.”
By the time she finished explaining the online dating scenario between her and the sheriff as well as the cover that he was her married brother who came with his wife, Ava, as chaperones, it was all he could do not to burst out in laughter. Nobody had to explain to him that it would have been the wrong thing to do. This was a deadly serious situation, and their solution was a serious cover. His urge to laugh was no reflection of what that meant. No, he wanted to laugh because it was like his prayers were being answered. He got to be up close and personal with the woman of his dreams, and it was all Jägers approved. It didn’t get any better than that.
What he did find interesting was that Jayne was clearly not a 210-friendly. She made that very plain through the bits she added to Lily’s explanation of what they were going to do. He should let it go and see where it went. Not his style. He opened his big fat mouth and voiced his observation. “So you’re not 210-friendly, and by that I mean you don’t believe in what we can do.”
Jayne’s eyes narrowed. “Anyone who’s been in law enforcement for any length of time understands the 210 reference to the Jägers. I get it. It just doesn’t mean I agree, believe, or that I have to like it.” Apparently suggesting she might not understand the 210 reference was insulting, if he was to judge by the edge in her words.
Oops. He’d put his foot in his mouth that time. Might as well put both of them in there. “Okay, noted. Even though you don’t like it, you’re willing to go along with all of this?”
Jayne stared at him for a second, her blue eyes serious, before she nodded. “Yes. I suppose that sums it up fairly well.”
“But you really don’t want us here.” As long as he had both feet in his mouth already he figured it wouldn’t hurt to confirm what he was picking up as easily as though he were a psychic. If she could wish them a thousand miles away, he was pretty sure that’s exactly what she’d do.
Lily jumped in before he said anything else or the sheriff had a chance to respond. “The Jägers have helped all over the world for centuries.” Her words carried just as much edge as the sheriff’s. Back at ya, sister, he thought. He was a little surprised at how insulted he felt by her obvious reluctance to acknowledge them or their skill sets. As far as he was concerned, they were all pretty damned cool, and she should be pleased they were here to help. It wasn’t like they were amateurs and had no idea what they were doing. If she knew anything about them, she’d understand it was the exact opposite.
Jayne was shaking her head. “When I think of international organizations that can help in instances like this, I think of entities like Interpol, not—”
“Not necromancers,” Kyle said, his irritation taking a giant leap. She didn’t approve or, worse, believe. In his time with the order, he’d been fortunate to have worked with those who at least believed enough to make the hunts successful. By all indications, that wouldn’t be the case here. After everything the order had accomplished over the years, it was unfair to continually have to prove themselves.
“Or witches,” Ava added. He noticed that, unlike him, she remained calm and polite. She obviously had more willpower than he did. Maybe the longer he hung around her, the more it might rub off on him. His family would like that.
“No,” Jayne said, and the edginess of a moment before was gone. “Not witches or necromancers.” Her gaze cut to Lily as if silently asking her what she had to add. Lily said nothing, and Kyle wondered why. Everyone in the Jägers knew what she was, and the fact she was not defending the order or her own preternatural powers was puzzling. Honestly, he figured it wasn’t much of a secret.
Then again, they were here because of a suspected werewolf. If he gave it more than a glancing thought, then perhaps it might not be the best idea to have everyone know that Lily was, in fact, a werewolf herself. A werewolf with drug-aided control of her powers, but a werewolf nonetheless. Even in this so-called enlightened age, a very real danger for people like Lily still existed. Not everyone believed the world was big enough for both humans and preternaturals. So, if she didn’t want anyone to know, he wasn’t going to be the one to spill it.
It went beyond protecting one of his team, and he knew it. Regardless of how he might justify his actions in his own head as being for the greater good, he wanted the order’s number-one hunter to like him. It was something a good psychologist would absolutely be able to make a case out of, but there it was. He possessed an underlying need for approval from the mother figure, and that was really kind of funny when he looked at Lily. At thirty-one, he appeared to be a few years older than she was. In reality, she had him by a few centuries, so it was a bit of a twist that he appeared to be her elder.
“You know what?” He looked at Ava and winked. No sense in letting the sheriff’s reluctance to accept them for the help they really were affect him or what he came here to do. No, he was going to look at the positive side because that’s the way he rolled. “I’m on board with the plan. I can absolutely do brother and husband. It doesn’t matter what any of you believe or don’t believe. We’re here together to do a job, and that’s what we’ll do even if it means pretending. We got this, and among the four of us, we’ll stop this bastard before he even knows what hit him.”
Ava raised her eyebrows at him and shook her head slightly. “I too can play whatever role you need me to…emphasis on playing a role. Got it, Kyle? Play the role.” She patted him on the shoulder, taking a bit of the sting out of her words.
He grinned, and a surge of something indefinable washed over him. “Sure. You got it, Ava, my dear wife. I’m simply playing a role.” He also got that when the universe dropped an opportunity right smack in the middle of his lap, he planned to make the best of it. Ava didn’t know it yet, but he was going to be the husband she’d always dreamed of.
Chapter Six
This whole thing was fucked up, and Jayne still didn’t like it. It continued to rub her wrong that everyone believed she needed help. That the help came in the form of a woman who barely topped five feet tall bordered on downright insulting. She was a trained professional and perfectly capable of handling an investigation without outside help. Who knew what this team was really trained to do? A necromancer and a witch? Really?
Her biggest problem was that bucking up against the city council was generally a bad idea. No, that wasn’t accurate. It was always a bad idea. They didn’t put her in office, but given the size of her county, they could do enough damage to make it impossible to win another term. She liked being sheriff here, and as much as it galled her to do it, she was smart enough to know there were times she had to play their game. Once she’d made the decision to leave the city behind and come home, she’d found peace, and she didn’t want to lose it now.
She gazed at the unlikely trio in her home and wondered how in the world they were going to make a difference in this investigation. Throughout her law-enforcement career she’d heard rumors of the Jägers, but personally she’d expended very lit
tle effort listening to any of those stories. Some of her counterparts had been and probably still were true believers. Not Jayne. She’d always considered the tales of the so-called amazing order of supernatural hunters a crock. Hard to take people seriously when they came in claiming to be vampires and werewolves. Or, in this case, a witch and a necromancer and whatever in the hell Lily was. Those folk legends made for great horror movies, and that was about it. These creatures of the night didn’t really exist. Nobody was ever going to be able to convince her otherwise.
The only flaw in her personally held theory was the condition of the bodies recovered so far. During her time in federal law enforcement she’d been present at enough violent crime scenes to have a pretty strong stomach. She figured she could handle anything. She’d figured wrong. Nothing had prepared her for what she’d seen when the bodies of Clinton Bearns, Pearl Buffet, and Cheryl Tisdale were found. Vicious didn’t even begin to describe what they saw. It was as if each of them had been torn apart. She wanted to believe human hands had committed the horrible deeds because she knew how to hunt down and stop a very human killer. The problem facing her now was that every time she studied the photos from the various scenes, all she could think of was that each of the victims looked as though an animal had attacked them. Ignoring that deep-down belief of what her eyes were showing her was the route she took, focusing instead on the kind of person who would do these heinous deeds.
Until she heard the medical examiner’s findings she was able to keep to her stand that it was done by human hands. The report that came down indicated all three showed distinct signs of being ravaged by an animal or, as the ME hypothesized, ravaged by a wolf. His opinion came with a caveat. If it was a wolf, it would have needed to be one big-ass Canis lupus.
She wasn’t buying his assumptions, exactly. The rational law-enforcement side of her screamed to stay in the real world and to avoid thinking of avenues outside the norm. No big-ass wolf but rather a person who tried hard to make it look as though an animal had made the kills. A part of her—a tiny part—wondered if maybe there was more going on than met the eye. She hated that little voice and wanted it to go far away.
Except it was hard for that annoying little voice to shut up when she had three people sitting in her house who all possessed something otherworldly and who had been sent here to stop a so-called werewolf. Between the ME and these three, all she heard was wolf, wolf, wolf. Made her wonder what her world was coming to.
Fighting the inevitable was futile and a waste of energy, and given what was happening of late, she didn’t have time to squander. This team was here, she was stuck with them, and this rash of murders wasn’t normal. The sooner she reconciled with the way this investigation was going down and got to work, the sooner she could send this trio back to wherever they came from. Now that appealed to her a lot. “What do you propose we do first?” She directed her question to Lily.
If Lily was bothered by all the back-and-forth and the irritation Jayne hadn’t been able to hide, she didn’t let on. Her manner was calm and unflappable, which made Jayne think she might be okay to work with after all. “I presume you have files with photographs?”
Actually that was a kind of a stupid question, or insulting if Lily thought her county was so backward they didn’t even have basic crime-scene skills. She was going to give her the benefit of the doubt and go with stupid question. “Of course.”
“Here?”
Jayne’s gaze dropped to her hands, almost as if she might actually be holding a file, which, of course, she wasn’t. Still, was it a guess, or did this woman possess some kind of extrasensory perception? It would be improper to have a second set of documents here, and that’s exactly what she had sitting on top of her desk in her office here at home. Every night since the discovery of the first body she’d pored over the photographs searching for any clue she might have overlooked when on scene. She was certain she was missing something in those images that could bring this horrible nightmare to an end. Her sense was that Lily’s question wasn’t a guess. For a brief moment she wondered if Lily’s special skill might be mind reading.
She chewed on her lip before answering, giving herself time to think through what she would share. It was tempting to keep her impropriety under wraps. Her eyes met Lily’s, and she made a split-second decision. Hopefully it was the right one. “Yes.”
Lily stood, and Jayne had the impression her answer pleased her. “Well, then let’s take a look. It’s a good place to start.”
Given everything she’d done and the appearance of this strange team, it was silly to put up any kind of resistance. She did it anyway. “It’s not protocol.”
Lily tilted her head, her long shiny hair swinging, and raised a single eyebrow. “And neither is keeping copies of official police files at your house.”
Lily had called her on it, and Jayne had to admit she had her there. “No, it’s not.” She waved her arm in the direction of her office. “All right, I give up. This way. Let’s see what we can all come up with together.”
Sometimes a person just had to give it up when they were matched wit for wit. This Lily might be pretty and tiny, but she was sharp and intuitive. Jayne was going to have to keep an eye on her.
Her office was large enough to comfortably accommodate all four of them. They pulled chairs around the round table that most of the time served as a catchall space, and she laid out the files once she’d cleared everything off the top. The room got very quiet as soon as they began poring over the files and photographs she’d brought home. It might not have been the proper thing to do, but right at the moment, it felt like a good decision. After probably twenty minutes, Lily sat back and ran her hands through her long, dark hair. Then she looked over at Kyle and Ava.
“What do you think?” Lily’s question wasn’t directed at her. She was talking to Kyle and Ava almost as if Jayne weren’t even there.
Ava brought her gaze up to meet Lily’s. “Looks like a were to me.” Slowly she ran a finger across one of the photographs, her eyes narrowed as she studied it once more, then looked back up again. “Feels that way too?”
Jayne scrutinized Ava from across the table. Her black hair framed her face and made her green eyes stand out. She was one of those people others describe as striking, and it was certainly true in her case. She also seemed to radiate a power that was alluring. “What do you mean, it feels that way?”
Ava’s hand hovered over three photographs she’d laid out on the table, one each of the three victims. She didn’t look up at Jayne as she said, “It’s what I do. Objects can sometime emit an energy I’m able to pick up on. These photographs have that kind of force even though they’re only images of a tragedy. It’s kind of a residual energy, if that makes sense to you.”
Strangely it did, although it wasn’t something she was willing to admit out loud at this point. Sometimes it felt to her as though inanimate objects retained an essence of evil. Just because she didn’t believe mythical creatures were roaming the earth and creating havoc didn’t mean she totally discounted bad forces. On the contrary, she believed the spirit of evil did exist, and it surrounded some people like a fog. The person out there killing in her town was that kind of individual: all human and yet intimately evil at the same time. When they held an object in their hand, touched a thing or a person, at times that evil lingered.
Lily tapped her fingers on the table as she studied the series of photographs. Suddenly she rose to her feet and met Jayne’s eyes. “I need to go to the sites where the bodies were found.”
“Why?” As far as she was concerned, the photographs and the reports gave them all the information they needed. Her people had done an excellent job documenting the scene both in writing and in image. She didn’t think it was necessary to go on a guided tour. “I’d prefer not. There’s nothing left to see.” The scene earlier in the day remained fresh in her mind, and she had no desire to relive it again so soon. She needed the distance to work through the details.
Besides, she’d already been freaked out by the electric shock she got when she touched Lily earlier. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her. She didn’t need to sit next to her in the car and have it happen again. A little too close and a lot too confined.
“Your opinion,” Lily said firmly. “The fact is I need to touch the ground they were found on, and the same goes for Ava. You have no idea what we can discern from physical contact. After that, we can let Kyle work his particular brand of magic.”
Jayne ran both hands through her hair. “And his brand of magic would be?”
“I’m the necromancer we discussed earlier,” Kyle said cheerfully.
“That means exactly what? I’m not up on all the terminology of your group.”
Jayne didn’t miss the way his gaze cut to Lily’s face. She gave him a little nod before he turned back to look at Jayne. “I can raise the dead.”
*
Bellona was restless. Even after a late-afternoon roll, it just wasn’t enough. As she paced across the bedroom naked, her gaze kept straying to the windows. The acres and acres of forest land beckoned to her. A long, hard run would feel so incredible. A hunt would make it even better. Darkness was beginning to take hold, and she loved racing through the night with the stars and the moon overhead.
A run she could do and it would be safe. A hunt was quite out of the question. Too much had happened recently, and scrutiny by local law enforcement was too intense. The biggest problem was her protégée. Little Wolf was so enthralled about her new abilities that she tended to go overboard. Honestly, it didn’t bother her much. In fact, she found it rather endearing. It had been so long since she’d had someone beside her who enjoyed this much as she did. She, however, had had a really long time to develop her skills and knew how to keep things nice and tidy.
Once darkness fell completely, she would run. She was anxious for the night of the full moon. The folklore that dictated the change only occurred on full moons was quite incorrect. The change was, when one was experienced, at will and not predicated on the presence of a full moon. Young ones needed time to harness their abilities, and it was always the tricky part that got them into trouble. Their joy and lust pushed them to change in inopportune times and led them to do unfortunate things. She was a patient teacher, though, and she would work with her children to create the family she envisioned. It was going to be beautiful and fill the void that had been in her heart for so long.
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