Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  Liam ignored the interruption as he topped up his coffee from the carafe. He took it black, unadulterated by coffee or sugar, with a shot of garlic syrup from a small bottle. The smell hung in the air. Took was allergic to it now, but he didn’t think he’d ever have enjoyed the stench of it mixed with burned coffee.

  “Whatever. She murdered all these people, and my poor son had nothing to do with it? Maybe she even framed him, or the Biters did?” Liam tested the theories out loud as he weighed which one would serve him best. He sat down behind his modest but nicely made desk and pointed at the papers stacked on it. “I speak for a lot of people who demand to be heard, people who don’t usually have a voice. The boyars want to silence us all so their words are the only ones that matter in the halls of power, even if they have to have to attack me through my son.”

  He waved a hand at the narrow chair on the rug opposite his desk. “Sit,” he instructed.

  Took dubiously eyed the neatly positioned chair. The complicated death traps and psychological games that Hunters played with the Anakim were—mostly—the preserve of movie makers. In Took’s experience, most Hunters depended on sneak attacks and overwhelming violence. Still, the chair made the back of his neck itch like he knew, unlikely or not, that there was a trapdoor and a pit of gators under it.

  He kept his post. “I’d rather stand.”

  Liam scowled briefly and then composed himself as he got back to the new narrative he’d crafted. It had already gone from theory to fact inside his head.

  “So when will the boyars admit that they made a mistake?” he asked. “How soon can we get Dom out of that hellish jail they’ve put him in? The Salt is for monsters, not a young boy.”

  “I think they’d argue your son is a monster,” Took said. He saw the disagreement brew on Liam’s face and didn’t give him time to voice it. “Your son was still found bloody-handed at the crime scene. He’s never defended himself, and the murders stopped when he was arrested.”

  Liam snorted. “Murder,” he muttered through a sneer.

  It was an old argument. Took could feel the edges of both sides on his tongue—“it’s not murder to stab a corpse” lined up against “it’s murder to stab someone who begs for their life.”

  He swallowed it. Even if he wanted to have that argument again—and he didn’t—he had a reason to be there that didn’t require Liam to agree with him on Anakim rights.

  “Either way, the evidence against your son is still compelling. This doesn’t guarantee him a stay of execution or even a retrial if the boyars don’t think it’s necessary.”

  Hard, flinty anger glittered in Liam’s eyes.

  “I will make them see that it is necessary,” he said. “Once people know that VINE framed my son—”

  “They didn’t,” Took cut in harshly. “And the boyars know that. Never try and bluff a vampire, Mr. Waring. They can tell.”

  “I thought you didn’t like that name.”

  The aftertaste of the word was bitter on Took’s tongue. It was the unvarnished, unsweetened truth of what he was, and something he didn’t want to always have to confront. But then, it was old, unvarnished advice from someone he’d never wanted to confront.

  “But you do,” Took said, the deflection sharp enough to make Liam draw back with a sour look. “So think the worst of the boyars, Mr. Waring, because if you embarrass them, your son’s stay of execution will be a short one.”

  For a second, fear showed on Liam’s face. It wasn’t often he let the mask of ambition slip and the man beneath exhale a real emotion. Then he plastered contempt over the crack as he curled his lip at Took.

  “When I hired you, I assumed that even if you bled black, you’d know better than to trust just any goddamn wetmouth,” he said. “Crane said I could trust you, that we could trust you to take the humans’ side over the monsters. I should never have believed him. Never trust a Goat should be the motto of my family. Once some fucker like you takes the fang—”

  It wasn’t like Took had never been angry before, just not like this. The usual cold, almost logical itch of it had turned into an icy blast that slivered through him on cold, splintered fingers and toes and dragged him along with it for a fast, vicious slide. When he slipped off the ride, he found his hand around Liam’s throat and the man bent so far backward in his chair that it was about to slip from underneath him. Took’s fingers were dug so deeply into his neck that the darkly tanned skin was blanched white. Liam’s breath smelled of garlic and coffee. It made Took’s eyes sting but nothing else.

  Irritation still scraped at Took like grit in an oyster, but the pearl of anger it generated had already crumbled away to nothing. It left Took with a dry mouth, a dull ache behind his fangs, and no idea of what to say. The blank fear in Liam’s eyes and the acrid smell of adrenaline that rose from him suggested Took hadn’t looked like he planned to say anything.

  “You don’t pay me enough to insult me,” Took said as he scrabbled for the right words. He hauled Liam back upright and let go of his throat. Liam coughed, spluttered, and scrambled away to the other end of the desk so the long length of wood was between them. He rubbed nervously at his neck with anxious fingers while Took stepped back and fastidiously straightened his jacket. “And whatever SSA Crane might have told you, I don’t care about sides. I just want to know the truth. If your son killed those families, I have no interest in getting him from under The Salt. And I’d have said that when I had a pulse. If that’s not good enough for you, Mr. Waring, pay the balance of your bill and we’ll call it a day.”

  Took drew back to the chair he’d originally rejected and sat down. A pool of sharks didn’t open under him, but the hard-backed seat wasn’t particularly comfortable either. Not a death trap, but the small meanness was still meant as a trap. His chest felt hollow and empty, the fizz of his panicked brain lonely without the company of a heart to pound. Last night there had been so much going on, and the overlay of pain as a distraction, that he hadn’t noticed it.

  A draft of coffee, cup held in a shaky hand, didn’t do whatever Liam thought he needed. He choked out a rough curse, fumbled in the drawers for a moment, and dragged out a bottle of whiskey.

  “You think you can scare me?” Liam said with a rough laugh. He twisted the cap off the whiskey and took a swig. It made him wince as the liquor ran down his raw throat. “What scares me is that my son is in a hell hole with monsters. What scares me is that I’ll never get him back. So fuck you for giving me hope and then acting like I’m the dick for wanting it. Dom’s just a little boy. Under that stare he gives people, all he wants is to come home.”

  “I can’t promise you that,” Took said. “All I can give you is the assurance that if he stays in The Salt, you’ll have a good reason as to why.”

  Liam took another long, sweaty gulp of booze. A twitch of thirst caught at Took’s throat, and he rubbed his tongue over the roof of his mouth after the memory of taste. He’d tried to get drunk since he died, but it didn’t have the same tang and it didn’t take.

  The tumbler cracked against the table as Liam smacked it down.

  “I was told to drop it,” he said. Blue eyes flicked to Took and then back down to the mouthful of whiskey left in his glass. “That I shouldn’t worry about my son when I was the one in trouble.”

  Took leaned forward. “By whom?”

  He didn’t really expect an answer, which was good since all Liam gave him was a brisk, tight-lipped head shake.

  “How?”

  It took a second, but Liam finally tossed back the last of the whiskey. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and leaned down to pull out the bottom drawer. When he sat back up, he pushed a handful of letters across the desk. The one on top was an official visiting order to The Salt. The other three were folded, stained scraps of paper with blunt, block-lettered threats scrawled onto them.

  “A martyred son gets you votes. A grave will get none.” It was signed with a scrawled wolf’s head, which effectively answered Took’s question about
who’d sent it. Took frowned and folded the note over. “How did you get in touch with the Hounds of Gabriel, Mr. Waring?”

  Liam choked out a cracked laugh. “Never. Not once,” he swore. “What good is it to jump from the vampire’s fangs into a wolf’s mouth? They’re all monsters.”

  He seemed to have forgotten to count Took among them.

  The Hounds weren’t all real werewolves, of course, despite what they implied. The Anakim had helped to nearly eliminate the curse. It turned out the cure was quite simple—a silver knife to the heart of the newly bitten to end the spread. Technically, sufferers had more rights today. The Nations had insisted on protections for their shifting types, and the lycanthropes, even if not quite the same, had been bundled in with them, but there were a lot of nurses and cops who still thought the silver stroke more merciful than life cursed.

  The wolves who survived the purge disagreed, and the Hunters had made an uneasy peace with their new allies. They might be monsters, but they hated the Anakim more than humans did.

  “When did you get them?”

  “After I got the letter,” Liam said. He braced his elbows on the table and pressed his knuckles to his lips. The words filtered out between his fingers. “I pulled every string I could reach, burned all my bridges, called in every favor I was owed or will ever be owed. It finally paid off. Someone finally came through, a week ago. The next day someone gave the first note to my… to a friend… and the next was tucked into my mother’s door. I found the last one in my bed.”

  “They wanted to scare you.”

  A grim smile twisted over Liam’s face. “They succeeded. When you came in tonight, I thought that maybe I wouldn’t need to defy them. Instead I had to decide who was more important, me or my son. I think it might be the first time I’ve ever picked him. You’ve got what you want, Bennett. Help my son.”

  “If I can.”

  Took tapped the letters together and tucked them into his pocket. He left Liam to finish the bottle of whiskey.

  MORGUES DIDN’T smell any better to the undead than they did the living. Even when Took held his breath, he could taste the corruption, coffee, and cheap bleach on his tongue. He could practically feel it in his nose and throat, ready to slip down the next time he took a breath.

  The corpse of last night’s competent killer lay on the stainless steel slab. Stripped of combat gear and weaponry, he looked like a dead man with a weak chin and not much left in the way of a foot. His throat had been cut, and his associates had finished the job with a bullet to the forehead. The black hole was punched just above his eyebrows, like a powder-rimmed period to the problem caused by a disposable thug in need of medical attention.

  “Alan Beam,” Dr. Forrester said as he pushed his glasses up his forehead to squint at his paperwork. “He’s a two-time felon with previous for arson and sexual assault. That was ten years ago. It looks like he didn’t get religion when he was inside, just this.”

  He pointed with his pen at Beam’s naked, pallid chest—not that he needed to. The tattoo was clumsily drawn, all blown lines and rough scars, but the ink had been worked deep under the skin. It was stark black, and each letter was a foot long.

  DNR.

  It stood for Do Not Rise—not that it was an issue for Beam. The bullet in his head wouldn’t stop him rising to the Kiss, but what came back wouldn’t be much use to itself or VINE, and it was a popular slogan for antivampire paramilitaries of a nonreligious bent. After all, what religious schism could be bitter enough to prevent common cause against the undead? For the likes of Beam, though, it was because Hunters who carved crosses into their arms and had the Word of God in their mouths expected a certain standard of behavior from their recruits. Murder and torture they could turn a blind eye to, but rape was the sort of thing that made it hard to keep up the pretense that you were the good guys.

  “How did you get his ID so quickly?” Took asked. He lifted Beam’s arm off the slab and turned it over. As expected, Beam’s fingertips had been scoured clean years ago. There was just a pad of smooth white scar tissue where his prints should be. “Even VINE would have taken a while to run his DNA through the system.”

  Forrester used a pen to pull his glasses back down onto his nose as he looked up at Took.

  “Luckily enough, he’s a local boy,” Forrester said. “Charleston born, bred, and with an old warrant for burglary hung on his sheet. So he popped up quickly enough, especially since Special Agent Madoc made this a top-priority case.”

  Forrester was, by all accounts, a good pathologist, professional enough not to ew over corpses or flush at the mention of a handsome man. Took could still… feel… the suddenly quickened blood under night-job-wan skin, smell the cocktail of hormones and spunk on the air.

  The scrape of hunger in the back of his throat wasn’t unexpected. His regime of dry little pills was guaranteed to satisfy his dietary requirements, but that didn’t mean they satisfied. Like a thirsty alcoholic with a glass of milk, it did the job but left the craving. But Took didn’t expect the flash of razor-sharp, wholly hypocritical possessiveness that dug its claws into his spine.

  Madoc wasn’t his, would never be his. Even if Took wanted more than last night’s satisfyingly bad idea, which he didn’t, he’d just be an itch for Madoc to scratch. Even if they were together a decade—ten times longer than Took’s longest relationship to date—he’d still be nothing more than a brief digression to the immortal.

  Although, he supposed, he was immortal now too.

  For a moment, with an indrawn breath of realization, he almost understood the people who acted like he’d come out of that box ahead. Then the taste of death hit his stomach and shriveled his cock—blood soured quickly in the body—and he remembered they were full of shit.

  He dragged his attention back to the corpse.

  “Any known associates?” he asked.

  “Plenty, most of whom wouldn’t have a good word for him,” Forrester said. The flush faded from his cheeks as his mind drifted away from Madoc. “Mr. Beam had a good habit of turning snitch when he needed and a way about him that got the wrong people to talk. ‘All hat and no cattle,’ one of the officers said. SSA Madoc has the file.”

  The corner of Took’s mouth twitched in a dry smile. Until today, West’s more-or-less unofficial approval had been enough for Took to forge a fair relationship with the local cops. At least in the morgue, that was apparently now on hold. Forrester wasn’t going to go against the Biters.

  God knew, Took couldn’t judge. He’d done the same thing, way back when. It had made sense at the time.

  “Thanks for your help,” he said.

  Forrester had the grace to look abashed but didn’t back down. He started to turn away, but he hesitated as he frowned at something he’d written down on his pad.

  “There was one other thing,” he said. “He has another tattoo in his armpit. It could just be art. I ran it through VINE’s database, but I couldn’t find anything like it listed as having significance. But it’s a painful place to get inked and not one that’s seen a lot.”

  “What is it?”

  Forrester tucked his clipboard under his arm and leaned over the table. He grabbed Beam’s bony elbow and lifted his arm. Flaccid underarm skin, whatever muscle tone Beam had gone flabby with death, peeled away from his ribs with a dry, sticky sound. Under the gingery stubble of coarse hair in Beam’s armpit, a spindly ink nightshade bloomed.

  Only an idiot, after all, would use the publicly known sigil of their organization as the secret sign of membership. The Hounds were a lot of things, but none of them were idiots. Instead the werewolves and their groupies took the thing that could kill them and made it their own. Literally, since normal ink would bleed out of a werewolf’s skin within days.

  “People do stupid things when they’re drunk,” Took said. “If it isn’t in the database, I don’t imagine it means anything. The VINE database is quite exhaustive.”

  Forrester looked dubious as he stared at the bl
ob of ink as though it might turn into words if he squinted the right way. When it didn’t, he dropped Beam’s arm back onto the table with a meaty thump and scribbled something on his clipboard.

  “If anyone would know, you would,” he said. The look Took gave him made him pause. “You were Agent Bennett, right? He was the one who did the latest compilation on the database. I attended his training course on how to use it effectively. That’s why the tattoo stood out.”

  Took should have appreciated it. He had spent two years as Took, because the person he’d been before that box in that room had gone forever. The Endorian view on the undead—that they were shells puppeted by a curse that thought it was alive, the soul long gone—should have been a welcome acknowledgment. Instead he felt disoriented at the relegation of his whole life to the past tense, thrown off balance when his balance was already shaken.

  “Glad you paid attention,” he said stiffly. His brain scrambled for something to change the subject, and he grabbed at the sudden memory of Forrester’s early, absentminded comment. “You said that Agent Madoc had made this case top priority?”

  It hadn’t been top priority last night. It was important because of the children involved, even if they were dead, but not enough to slide it into the category usually used for active, ongoing Hunter attacks. The last time something had been shoved that unceremoniously to the top of the list was when they closed down the compound in Utah.

  The expression on Forrester’s face said that Took had missed something. That always put Took’s back up, and frankly, right then, the little pathologist wasn’t on his good side.

  “What?”

  “I… it’s VINE business,” Forrester said.