Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  “Gatlin died an hour ago,” Anderson said grimly as he went to the metal cabinet on the other side of the room. He pulled the top door open and lifted out a half-drunk bottle of unlabeled booze. “I had to go to his house, wake his wife up, and tell her that she’d need to bury him. So don’t get me wrong, but right now I don’t give a fuck about your agent. Maybe he walked Gatlin into that trip wire, maybe not, but none of this would have happened if he’d stayed out of our town. Hell, if we stayed dry, then there would be a helluva lot of our people up and walking. At least, that’s the way I see it.”

  Madoc perched on the edge of the sheriff’s desk and watched as Anderson took a swig straight from the bottle. The liquor stank of smoke and oak, a nauseating tang in the back of Madoc’s throat as he inhaled.

  “My condolences,” he said formally. “If you need someone to put his heart to rest—”

  “It’s done,” Anderson said flatly. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and screwed the cap back on the bottle. Once it was tucked back into the file drawer, he gave Madoc a dour look and gave in. “Annabelle Franklin, that’s what brought your boy to town. He rolled up a couple of days ago, flashed his badge, and said she had a connection to one of his cases. It pissed off Gatlin—he’d been the lead on the case—but I figured why not let the hotshot VINE agent take a look. Maybe he’d see something we hadn’t, find something for the Franklin family to put in the ground.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Nobody,” Anderson said. The taste of the word made him grimace, but he stuck to it. “Sounds harsh, but that’s who she was—not the smartest, not the prettiest, not the most trouble, just nobody much. When she disappeared, nobody even worried at first. She’d run away the year before—some cockeyed notion she got in her head from the internet—and eventually came back with her tail between her legs. By the time her parents got worried and called us in… trail was cold. Never found hide nor hair of her.”

  “And Gatlin had a theory?”

  Anderson shrugged and leaned against the filing cabinet. “Call it a theory. Call it experience. She wasn’t the first girl to disappear since the county wet its head, and she won’t be the last. We clean out the trap houses when the stink attracts complaints, but there’s always another derelict place for them to move into. This time it was the clinic. A year ago some wetmouth turned old Mattie Sharpe, a God-fearing widow, and she cut the throats of field hands for him. There’s always somewhere for a kid who doesn’t see any future in growing up.”

  It was a sad story, all the sadder for being a common one. Madoc had seen it play out more times than even Anderson had, although when he was a cardinal, it had too often been his duty to turn a blind eye. What it lacked was the connection that had drawn Took down here. Vampires weren’t enough. Ninety percent of the Biters’ cases dealt with the undead.

  “She ran away before,” Madoc said. “Why?”

  Anderson coughed out a sour laugh. “Some boy catfished her on the internet, talked her into some cross-country hitchhike, and then stood her up. If she’d been smart, she would have realized she was lucky.”

  There it was. Madoc wasn’t a subtle thinker, but he had learned to follow the tracks of those who were.

  “This boy,” he said. “Was she supposed to meet him in LA?”

  Anderson scowled at him and reached up to toy with the cross that dangled from his neck. “But the magicians did the same by their secret arts,” he quoted in a mutter as he pinched the sliver of metal between thumb and forefinger. “A man’s heart should be known only by God. Keep your fingers out of my thoughts, sorcerer.”

  After so many years, there were few accusations that Madoc could straight-faced claim his innocence against. That he had paid the price for true magic, though, he could deny. He had always been too indulgent to deny himself anything significant enough to buy power.

  Still, Anderson’s suspicion was answer enough.

  LA. Where Dominic Waring, back when he’d still been the innocent boy in Took’s phone, had been headed. His family had pulled out the stops to get him back, but Madoc had the feeling Annabelle’s parents didn’t have the same clout.

  “Tell you what, Sheriff,” Madoc said as he stood up. “Get me all the files on the Franklin girl, anything else Bennett looked at, and I’ll have no call to carve the answers out of your gray matter.”

  Not that he could; he could overwhelm but not vivisect the mortal will. Only the true Risen, those who’d gone into the dark and found their way back, enjoyed that gift. Even then, it was rare and a trial as much as a gift. But Madoc found a silver tongue and straight-faced lie just as useful.

  Anderson gave him a dour grimace of a smile, a flash of gum between his square, white teeth. “At least you make no pretense about being a monster,” he said. “I thought Bennett was a man until we saw him bleed.”

  “A better man than you, Sheriff,” Madoc said coldly. “I leave in a few hours. Get me what I want by then, or I take it.”

  Chapter Five

  THE CAT and Mrs. Waring were at Took’s front door to greet him when he pulled into his drive. Neither should have been there. The cat was supposed to be behind the state-of-the-art security system that was meant to make Took feel safe inside the narrow, sea-green house. As for Mrs. Waring, she was on the right side of the security, but she shouldn’t have known where to find Took.

  Not many people did.

  Paranoia tapped a nervous drumbeat against the back of Took’s eye as he watched Mrs. Waring get up off the rickety plastic lawn chair and brush the wrinkles out of her trousers with nervous hands. She looked like her son, even down to something in the weakness of her jaw that suggested she was younger than she really was.

  None of Waring’s alleged victims had put up much of a fight. Mostly that made sense. Not all vampires were created equal—a Risen trumped a still breathing dhampir, a dhampir outclassed a ghoul—and a blitz attack could put some down and keep them down. But some of them had been old and trained and should have held their own. Others had security systems that never went off, alarms that were never hit.

  Had they, Took wondered, found a nervous, stoop-shouldered redhead, young enough that he still got carded at liquor stores, on their porch and thought he was harmless? Maybe he learned the trick from his mother.

  Fear was a habit. The black hole in his brain wanted to be filled, and until he found out what happened the night he was kidnapped—the how and the who—it tried to make any other nightmare fit.

  Took dragged his mind out of that familiar sinkhole, the mire of it wet and reluctant to let go, and got out of the car.

  “Agent Bennett,” Mrs. Waring said as she stepped to the edge of the narrow porch. In all the old pictures Took had of Heather Waring from before her life took a left turn into hell, she’d always been elegant and fashionable, with tailored designer dresses and perfectly manicured nails—the perfect wife for an aspiring judge. The mask was still there, an on-trend mauve dress buckled tightly around her body, and her bag matched to her heels, but her nails were chewed down to the scabbed quicks and her makeup didn’t quite cover her grief. “We got a letter from The Salt. They’re going to execute my son, on his birthday. Please. Tell me you’ve found something.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Took said. “How did you get my address, Mrs. Waring?”

  Fresh tears welled in her eyes. She dashed them away with a furious swipe of her hand and glared at him.

  “I tell you that you’re going to kill my son, that they’re going to cut his heart out and bury his body where we’ll never find it—” Her voice cracked harshly, and she stopped for a second to take a ragged, damp breath. “Never find him. And you want to know how I got your address? Does it really matter?”

  Took shoved his keys into the pocket of his trousers. He could have made it home last night. It was only two hours from Appleton to Charleston. Even with the midnight rush hour, he could have made it back in time to sleep in his own bed. Instead he’d crashed in a McDo
nald’s parking lot, slouched in the front seat of his car as he watched the dull-eyed employees yawn and trade milkshakes for joints under the neon glare of the Golden Arches.

  “I guess not,” he admitted as he took the steps to the front door. The house hadn’t felt safe when no one knew he lived there. It wouldn’t change anything that now people did. He bent down to scoop the cat up from the doormat. It hissed in disgruntlement at being handled—a flash of white fangs and the pink curl of its tongue—and scrambled up his arm, claws hooked in his shirt, to perch on his shoulder. “You might as well come in. If someone sees you on my porch, everyone will know where I live.”

  Heather exhaled sharply between her teeth. “You do remember that you work for us,” she said.

  “Billable hours, Mrs. Waring,” Took said as he keyed in the security code and pushed the heavy, steel-core door open with one foot. “Until the clock starts on this dawn consultation, you’re just another solicitor who’s ignored the sign.”

  She gave him a dirty look but held her tongue as she stalked over his threshold. “You shouldn’t let your cat outside,” she said as she passed him. “White cats can’t take the sun.”

  “Snack does what he wants,” Took said. To prove the point, Snack used his shoulder as a launch pad to leap over to the carved ball that decorated the banister. He didn’t look like a white cat, he looked like a talented child’s drawing of a cat, with milk-pale fur and crayon blue eyes and nose. Took could swear the kitten had been darker, his fur gray and his eyes green, when someone tossed him into Took’s box. Maybe he’d just been dirty. Snack stretched and dug his claws into the polished wood, his tail crooked up in a question mark as he gave a pointed, rusty mew. “And he can take care of himself. My office is down the hall.”

  Snack didn’t bother to follow them. The cat sitter would have left his food out. He just liked to make a reproachful point when Took was away for longer than a couple of days.

  It was optimistic to call the small room in the back of the house an office. There was a computer and a filing cabinet, but Took had barely used either. His therapist had suggested he try to write a book, to distract himself from the emptiness of his day-to-day with the memory of adrenaline. Took hadn’t gotten very far. He’d never had the patience for stories and, right now, thoughts of the past just reminded him on the stuff he couldn’t remember.

  There were chairs and a desk… currently covered with glossy, bloody pictures of Dom Waring’s crime scenes. Took cursed under his breath and ducked around the desk to sweep the photos off and into a drawer. Red and white, shattered bones, and wet meat.

  “I’ve seen them all,” Heather said in a tight, precise voice as she sat down. “The ones we didn’t see in court the press were happy to show us.”

  “Still,” Took said as he shoved the drawer shut and slid into the leather swivel chair. The still-raw skin on his back, open under his shirt, ached dully with something like pain. It wasn’t exactly welcome, but in a weird way, it reassured Took. When the sun was up, he felt close to human, enough to remember what it was like. He tried to hang on to that. The thought that he might forget one day scared him. “Not what you need before breakfast.”

  Heather sat back and raised her chin with brittle defiance. “They’re just ugly photos,” she said steadily, “of ugly things. It’s sad and it’s horrible, but it’s nothing to do with me. Because my son didn’t do that to people. He’s just who they blamed for it. And who they’re going to kill for it.”

  She broke up and covered her mouth with her hand. Her knuckles pressed down hard against her lips as she blinked back a fresh spill of tears. Her grief made Took look away uncomfortably and wonder what to do if the dam broke. It wasn’t easy to comfort someone when you didn’t entirely trust yourself that close to their throats or the crook of their arms.

  That admission made Took’s humanity feel a lot further away. He pushed his tongue against his teeth. They were sharp enough to cut, and his own blood was like burnt molasses as he swallowed it, but they were still where they belonged.

  “Do you have the letter from The Salt?” he asked. “The latest one.”

  It was a distraction that worked for them both. Heather sniffed, wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist, and pulled the bag into her lap. She had to wipe her eyes again, pinch tears away between her finger and thumb, before she could dig into the dark interior.

  “Here,” she said as she finally pulled out the creased, ripped-open envelope. Her hands trembled slightly as she looked at it, frozen for a second, then thrust it toward Took. “It arrived yesterday, by special courier. He said… he said that nothing I have to say would be heard.”

  The familiar seal of The Salt was stamped in blue ink on the envelope and embossed in raised threads of silk on the heavy sheet of paper inside. Took unfolded it on his desk and looked it over quickly. He’d seen execution notifications before. A copy of this one would have been sent to Madoc and the director of VINE so they could attend if they wanted.

  The date of execution had always been a grim sort of tick mark for his personal files. Job done. Monsters gone. It had never been a functional deadline before.

  “Tell me you can stop this,” Heather said.

  Took hesitated. He knew—it was an itch down deep in the fold of his brain—that VINE had missed something. That didn’t mean Dom Waring was innocent, not innocent enough to sway The Salt, anyhow.

  “I can try.”

  She choked out a rough bark of laughter. There was no real humor to it, just a desperation that didn’t know where else to go.

  “You know, you could lie,” she said. “I won’t mind.”

  “Trust me,” Took said. “You would. Eventually. People always do.”

  She closed her eyes and pulled her mouth into a blind, ragged smile. “Right now,” she said bitterly, “I can hardly face tomorrow, never mind ‘eventually.’”

  Took averted his eyes from her pain for a second time. He folded the heavy notification letter back into the ruler-straight creases to give her a moment to compose herself.

  “As I said before, it would help if I could talk to your son,” he said when he finally looked up.

  “If Dom would speak to anyone, it would help us all,” Heather said bitterly.

  “I don’t need him to talk. Just listen.”

  Heather shrugged. “My husband said he’s working on it. I’ll get him to email you if there’s any progress.”

  The Waring parents made statements to the press hand in hand, in lockstep on their son’s innocence and the stable home they’d given him. Since they’d hired Took to consult on the case, he’d only seen them together once. The space between them was so full of blame, guilt, and resentment that they could hardly look at each other. He had practically been able to hear the unspoken accusations. Heather coddled him…. Liam pushed him too hard…. He/she/we should have seen something.

  “Thank you.” Took held up the neat rectangle of the letter. “Can I keep this? I can make a copy and get this back to you.”

  Heather gave the ivory paper a disgusted look and waved her hand in a brusque, dismissive gesture. “Keep it,” she said as she fumbled her bag closed. “I’ll remember what it says. Until my dying day.”

  She hooked the bag over her shoulder and stood up. Then she stopped, as though there was something else she needed to do before she left.

  “Mrs. Waring?” Took prompted as he stood up.

  She blinked and cleared her throat. “I remember when I was Dom’s age,” she said. “I thought I was so grown up, an adult who wasn’t going to mess up like all the other adults in her life. Now I look back, and I was just a kid. I didn’t really know anything.”

  Her hand worked around the strap of her bag as she talked, the leather twisted and folded between her fingers. She paused for a second to take a quick breath between words.

  “Liam thinks that it was all nothing, that VINE framed Dom because of Liam’s political ambitions, because he’s a breathing man’s poli
tician. I know that’s not true,” she said, the words like stones she had to spit out. Maybe it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Took was sure it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. “I know Dom did something. I’m his mother and, like you said, I don’t need him to tell me, I can see it in his eyes. He did something, but not—” She jabbed a shaky finger at the drawer where Took had shoved the pictures. Out of sight obviously wasn’t out of mind. “Not that.”

  Took wished he could reassure her, or at least part of him did. It had been easy to pick apart the Biters’ case against Waring with the detachment of nearly two years. Since Madoc pulled his fat out of the fire and reminded him what it was like to be part of the team, despite the unignorable suspicion that Madoc had betrayed him first, it felt disloyal to hope they’d fucked it up.

  Took left the letter on the desk as he stood up. He settled on “If I can prove that, I will.”

  She looked grateful. Took felt the weight of it against his shoulders as he showed her out. He wasn’t sure he was a good bet to be anyone’s best hope these days. The cat waited until Heather was gone and then mewed rustily for his breakfast.

  That, Took thought as he headed toward the kitchen, felt more his speed.

  He made a mental note to call the dispensary and get an emergency refill on his… medication.

  “DID YOU give her my address?” Took asked.

  He stood at the window in VINE’s Charleston offices, close enough that he could feel the heat of the setting sun through the glass, and looked out over a skyline of narrow gray towers and brassy mosaics that glittered sourly in the sun. Most depicted Tepes in some form, his distinct crown—some rendered the pearls on his crown in ivory and others in glass, but all placed seven for the souls of the Solomonary—more faithfully recreated than the sketch of his stern face. Charleston had been one of the first footholds the Haza had in the New World, and the boyars had wanted to show their loyalties hadn’t faded as they crossed the salt sea. They were all under The Salt now, but their stamp lingered on the city.