by Lena Loneson
Cam was writing in a notepad he must have produced from that bottomless duffle bag. “Thank you, Hanna. This has been very helpful. Can you give me a description of what your sister was wearing when you last saw her?”
Hanna’s eyes went wide. “Did you find her?”
Cam gave her a small, pity-filled smile, but did not speak.
“She borrowed my shirt this morning—pink, cotton, long-sleeved. Jeans I guess. Cute black boots with a heel for the snow. And this, of course.” Hanna reached beneath her own green shirt and pulled out a pendant. It took Noire’s breath away—it was absolutely beautiful, a small dolphin carved out of a bit of turquoise, hanging on a silver chain. It matched Hanna’s eyes perfectly.
“My sister had one just like this,” Hanna explained.
Noire couldn’t take her eyes off the pendant. The dolphin’s grace was captured perfectly; she could easily imagine him sliding over the waves, jumping high as if he could reach the clouds.
“Do you live by the sea?” Cam asked. “Back home?”
“Yes.” For a moment, Hanna’s cloudy, tear-filled eyes seemed to grow a little brighter. “We do. Did. I just want to go home. I miss the smell of the sea like you wouldn’t believe. This wasn’t my idea. I didn’t even want to come here, and now—Linn’s dead, isn’t she?”
“We don’t know that,” the Mountie said. “But I’m very sorry to say we do have a Jane Doe that matches your sister’s description.”
Hanna began to shake under Noire’s arm. All Noire could think was, Thank God, he didn’t mention the state of the body. There’s no reason she needs to know her sister was likely skinned alive.
Just like mine.
“Now, do you have any other family or close friends in town who know Linn well?” Cam continued.
The blonde shook her head.
“In that case I’m going to have to ask for your help. We need someone to take a look at our Jane Doe. Make an identification.”
Hanna nodded, and Cam thanked her. He pulled out his phone again and made a short call to the station, asking for a detective to come pick Hanna up at the hostel. When he was done, he asked one final question. “You mention it was Linn’s idea to travel to Canada. Why did your sister choose Toronto in particular?”
Hanna explained that Linn had been posting online, at some message board she couldn’t remember, for a few months now. She’d been so excited one morning, talking about Canada—the girls had never flown overseas before. Hanna didn’t know if Linn had been speaking to Page in particular, but she remembered that she got the recommendation for the hostel from someone online. Perhaps it was him. It hadn’t taken much to convince Hanna to take the trip as well. The sisters were nearly inseparable, and Linn’s enthusiasm was contagious.
Cam asked if Hanna had friends she could wait with until the detectives came to pick her up, and the Swedish woman returned to her group, dissolving into tears and throwing herself onto Mel’s lap.
When Noire let the girl go, her arms felt empty. She thought about how less than a week ago, Fawn’s own voice had filled the dining area with laughter. She wondered what Fawn had told these girls that she hadn’t told Noire.
It was only when Cam placed a steadying hand on her shoulder and said, “You can’t stay here,” that Noire was able to rise, gather her pack from her room and leave the hostel.
Chapter Five
When they left the hostel, Cam used his cell to call a cab, then the police department. He gave a detective Linn’s username and email address, which Hanna had jotted on the corner of a newspaper. Perhaps someone would be able to track down the message board where she’d been posting online.
As they waited for the taxi, Cam turned to Noire and clasped her in a tight embrace. She hugged him back, shivering a little. He pulled a sweater out of his duffle bag and passed it to her. She had her own pack with her and could have worn one of her own, but was touched by his concern. She pulled the sweater over his head, inhaling the scent of it. “Thanks,” she said. As he zipped up his duffle, she spotted a silver glint in the dim hostel porch lighting. Handcuffs. “Kinky,” Noire observed. She could have sworn the Mountie blushed as he pushed them back in.
“Those are for criminals, but maybe we can try them out. How are you doing?” he asked. “That’s a dumb question, I’m sorry.”
“I’m holding up,” she said. He cupped her chin in one strong hand and studied her eyes. “Really, I’m not going to have a breakdown. I promise.” When he tried to lean in to kiss her, Noire pulled back self-consciously. “I said I’m fine—really.”
She saw hurt and confusion in his eyes. She inhaled deeply. She was being an idiot. Yes, she was upset about Fawn, so why couldn’t she just let it out and have a good cry while this gorgeous man held her?
Because she couldn’t stop picturing his red-uniformed arm wrapped around Hanna or Mel or one of the other gorgeous young women inside.
In a sudden movement that surprised her, Noire leaned forward and captured Cam’s mouth with hers. She sucked at his bottom lip, claiming him for her own, savoring the taste of him, as his hand worked its way up her cheek and wrestled with her hair. His mouth opened and she leaned in, but he pulled back before she could touch his tongue with hers. She let out a small sigh of disappointment.
“While I think we should definitely continue this back at my hotel,” Cam said, “the cab will be here any minute.”
“Right,” Noire said, though she didn’t understand what that had to do with anything. She wanted to taste him again. Now.
“I have to ask you more about your sister. This is still an investigation.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. But do you know where she learned about the hostel? Was it from someone online, like with Linn and Hanna?”
“I don’t know.” She turned away from him. She felt like an idiot. Here he was trying to catch her sister’s murderer before he could kill again, and Noire was behaving like a jealous, lovesick schoolgirl. And she didn’t want to admit it, but she knew very little of Fawn’s life over the past few years. “I don’t know that much about the guy, either—she told me he was older, and that she thought he was her soul mate. He understood how hard it was for her to balance her dreams as an actress with how much she missed her home and the forest. I guess my own perspective was that if she missed home so much, why not just come home?” She chewed on her bottom lip, still tasting Cam. “The last time we spoke, it was a fight.”
“I’m sorry.” Cam clasped one of her hands tightly and waited for her to continue.
“We argued about it. She’d say, ‘Oh Noire, it’s so hard being here, I need you to visit—I miss home so much!’ She loved the city and felt she had to be there for her acting career, but she would also phone me sometimes with panic attacks because she felt boxed in, missed nature. I guess I told her kind of bluntly, if you miss home, Fawn, then come home.” She closed her eyes but held Cam’s hand between both of hers, drawing his warmth in as if it could reach down to her soul and thaw her out. “That was almost three months ago, and the last time she phoned me with a panic attack. I thought maybe it meant she was getting better—getting used to the city, not having the attacks anymore. I asked her about it once. She told me that since I was so judgmental, she wasn’t going to burden me with them. She said that she’d met someone online, and finally someone else understood what it was like being split between two worlds, the animal world and the human world.”
“You mean—she told him her secret?” Cam looked shocked.
“At the time I thought she was being dramatic. But maybe that was it.” Noire felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. “Do you think my sister meant that the guy was a shifter too?”
“It’s possible.”
Cam’s cell rang. It played an excerpt from the theme song to the show Due South, and Noire rolled her eyes. Secretly, though, she kind of loved it. Combined with the Dudley Do-Right patch on his bag, she realized that stalwart Mountie Cam Dawson was a bit o
f a dork.
When he was finished with the call, Cam explained that the detectives had found activity from Linn’s username on a message board for a popular author’s books. The books include vampires and shapechangers, and fans often spoke as if they were the mythical creatures themselves. Another user, BearTooth99, had frequently posted in response to Linn.
“Subtle name. What did he post?” Noire asked.
“Apparently, rather unsubtle suggestions that Canada, with all its wilderness, is rife with shapechangers. He pretty much guaranteed Linn the chance to meet with some if she visited. Then he recommends the hostel by name.”
“You think Linn was a shifter too? Like my sister?”
“It makes sense. Perhaps even Hanna was. They share DNA, and those necklaces.”
“Dolphins. I’ve heard of selkies—seal shapeshifters—so I guess it’s not impossible. Who knows what’s out there?” Noire mused. “But wait—if Linn was a dolphin, what about those feathers at the crime scene?”
“Just what I was wondering. Is there a chance we were mistaken, and they’re native?” Cam asked.
“There’s always a chance. But loons this far south, this close to the city? It’s doubtful.” The gears in her mind churned and Noire tried to piece it together. A killer that targeted shifters, to the point where he tried to recruit them from other countries. Bite marks from different animals on each body. A bear, a deer. Feathers from a loon near Linn’s body. Each animal, Noire realized, was native to Algonquin Provincial Park, which they now had reason to suspect the killer, alias Steven Page, also hailed from.
Darkness pressed at her mind. Something she’d heard before, perhaps. Something she didn’t want to remember.
The cab pulled up then and Noire and Cam got into the backseat, tossing Noire’s pack and Cam’s duffle into the trunk. Cam gave the driver the name of his hotel—a large, rather swanky place down at the waterfront. Clearly, the RCMP had more money than Noire on her own. She wasn’t sorry to leave the hostel.
The streets were deserted now and it was almost three a.m. As they drove, Noire remained silent, thinking to herself. She broke the silence briefly to borrow Cam’s cell phone (they rarely worked up north, so she hadn’t bothered to carry one of her own) and started running Internet searches from half-remembered thoughts.
As they drove, she continued her Internet sleuthing. Noire discovered that back in Algonquin Provincial Park and the surrounding areas, at least seven women had gone missing over the past ten years, supposedly victims of black bear attacks. Bear—like the bites found on the first body.
She did quick background checks and felt pretty confident that none of the women had been shifters. Several were completely inexperienced tourists, which was why their deaths hadn’t been investigated thoroughly. They had been on canoeing or camping expeditions for the first time, and were extremely inexperienced. All were tourists; none were from anywhere near where they were killed. Most interestingly, the deaths had primarily happened in different sections of the park, spread out over the years, so that no one warden would have investigated the same potential murder.
“That explains why they were so easily picked off from their groups—most of the women, it seems, wandered off alone. And more than the past ten years—some of these deaths go back over a hundred years.” She shared this information with Cam as she worked and he grew more enthralled, leaning up against her shoulder, watching the cell phone in front of them. From time to time he dropped small kisses down her neck. She found them horribly distracting but in no way wanted to ask him to stop.
They pulled up at the hotel. It was beautiful—all fancy chandeliers, shades of gold, doormen in uniforms nearly as red as Cam’s waiting at the front. She wanted to gawk, but turned her eyes back to the cell’s display and continued working. The next time she looked up, they had reached the elevator.
Cam pressed the button for floor fourteen and it lit up—gold again. The elevator was covered in mirrors and Noire spared herself a glance—wild, near-black hair escaping in every possible direction, a pale face with large eyes, doe-like, resembling her sister, but darker. A stark contrast to the man beside her in the pristine uniform.
She went back to the phone and clicked on a newspaper article.
“Look,” she said excitedly. “This one here. Bree McGregor. I knew this woman—she was a were-hawk.”
“What?” Cam said, taking the phone from her.
“She was a hawk. I swear, I’ve seen her shift. She was one of the women who took Fawn under her wing. Uh. So to speak. Her family said she’d been killed in an accident, but they never mentioned a bear. According to this, she twisted her ankle, couldn’t make it back, and they found her at the bottom of a cliff. But I knew her—Bree—she was smarter than that. She’d lived in the forest all her life. It says here they know she fell off the cliff because her back was all scraped up, to the point that her shirt had been torn away and her skin was missing. Scraped off by the cliff wall.”
“Or by our killer,” Cam said.
“Yes. You think she was the first shifter he killed?”
“How old was she?”
“Seventy-five. At least. I remember her, just barely, from Fawn’s childhood. She knew Fawn’s dad, I guess? He was the shifter; my mom just carried the recessive gene. But I remember the hawk lady, Bree. She was wrinkled like an apple doll’s face. And she had the most beautiful deerskin moccasins. Fawn was afraid of them until Bree let her touch them. And then she never left her side, the entire day. I guess that was the last time we saw her.”
“So he started with random hikers,” Cam observed, “and then he moved on to shifters—but vulnerable ones, the elderly, then young women who desperately wanted to find someone who understood.”
Noire was impressed by his insight even as she wanted to argue. Couldn’t Fawn have talked to Noire? Didn’t she understand?
She supposed she didn’t. She could never be just like her sister, because she could never be a shifter. You had to be born with it. Born with the shifter gene from both parents, and then at puberty, your animal chose you. One animal—that was it, for life.
Wasn’t it?
That darkness in her mind crept forward again. This time she let it. She embraced it.
“Skinwalkers,” Noire breathed. The elevator doors opened.
“They don’t exist.” Cam shook his head. He stalked through the doors, turning left down a narrow hallway. Noire had to jump-skip to keep up, his legs were so long. It wasn’t something she was used to.
“What if they did?” she asked. Noire had heard of the legends of Native men who were born shifters—and those who weren’t. Those who weren’t often grew jealous and looked for magical ways to increase their own power. Out of myth then came the skinwalkers. These were men who stole shifters’ pelts. Wearing the shifter’s skin and performing the right ritual could turn an ordinary human into a coyote, a hawk, a deer—or whatever he wanted, providing he had the right pelt.
“These bear attacks continued for years, then the sudden switch.” Cam had taken the phone from her now and was searching related news articles, his head buried in the phone as he strode through the hotel hallway.
“So he was a bear at the start, and got greedy. Wanted more skins.”
“Maybe.”
“He killed my sister for her pelt. She was a deer—that’s not exactly powerful. Why kill Fawn?”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard stories that in skinning the animal, the skinwalker absorbs its life force. You said the original attacks went back decades.”
“You think it’s immortality.”
“Or close to it. Kill enough animals, take their life force, and add it to your own. Take their pelts too, and if you get enough, you can become anything, anywhere. It’s the perfect way to hide. Forever.”
“Immortality.” Noire stopped and leaned back against the wall, waiting for Cam to join her. Her shoes sunk into the plush maroon carpeting. “Let me see.” She took the phone back. “
These attacks were pretty spread out,” she said.
“They’ve occurred in every section of the park so far,” Cam noticed, “except one.”
“There are over three thousand square kilometers of forest in Algonquin. That’s an insane amount of territory to cover. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know. If he killed where he lived, it means he moved a lot. But there’s only one section with no deaths.”
“So either the murders were missed by the authorities or…” Noire grew excited. She didn’t want to finish the thought in case she was wrong.
Cam finished it for her, “Or that’s where he lives. Where he stays in between killings. We think he’s a black bear, right? So—”
“So that’s his den. And with all that gear he was buying today, maybe he’s going back. We have to track him.”
“We?”
“Yes. You and me.” Her enthusiasm faltered. “I’m a part of this too now.”
His look was sympathetic but final. “You’re not even a cop, Noire. You’ve contributed an amazing amount to this investigation so far, but it’s not yours to finish.”
“It’s my sister lying in that drawer in the morgue.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. But that’s why you can’t be a part of this. You’re not trained for this, you’re emotionally involved. This isn’t the place for this discussion. It’s the middle of the night, the last thing we need is security called on us. Let’s go back to my room, get some sleep, you’ll see how it makes sense in the morning.”
“I’m not leaving you. I’m finding my sister’s murderer.”
“I know you want to help. But this is what I’m trained for—both as a cop and as a werewolf. My pack back home in Prince George will fly out at a moment’s notice. I can call them right now, and they’ll be here.”
“Right. How often are direct flights from Prince George to Algonquin?” Noire was proud of herself; she was arguing rationally now. She just had to keep him distracted with intellectual arguments while she figured something out.
