I manipulated the air to create a shield around myself. The werelion charged and bounced off my invisible shield and fell backward into the cabinets.
The screaming doctor seemed to have grabbed the werelion’s attention. Good, let him distract this thing while I develop a plan. I dove down and started to search the depths of the seas of my brain for a plan against shifters. Time had run out already.
The werelion was using his paws to knock the tongue depressors out of the handles on the cabinet. I couldn’t let the killer get to the good doctor so I dissolved the shield and spotted a hypodermic needle next to the sink. I slithered across the room in silence, aided by the noisy machines, a screaming doctor, and a group of people pounding on the door and window outside the room. I ripped open the plastic packaging, not reading the information.
I jammed the needle into the werelion’s back and pressed down the plunger. The werelion screamed in agony and fell to the floor. It twitched on the floor in quick, spastic movements. I could tell it was being controlled by someone else. But who? Why?
The fur began to recede until it was replaced by dark human flesh. The lion’s claws and teeth retreated as dark hair sprouted from the man’s head and face. All the animal features disappeared and an older man lay still on the floor, confused.
I moved the bed so that Gretchen could get the guy down to the station. Then, I let the doctor out of the cabinet and he gave me an earful as he backed out of the crowded room.
The man who had just been a werelion looked completely lost, almost as if he had no idea what had happened. He appeared docile despite the surrounding commotion. Gretchen started demanding answers from me as she cuffed the perp.
My ribs hurt and my shoulder was bleeding, but all in all, no worse for wear. I had an extremely high tolerance for pain. We needed to ask this man so many questions it was going to make his head spin. I hoped we would get some answers but my expectations were pretty low. Most manipulators don’t allow their vessels a chance for memory recall. They scrubbed memories after every shift.
Gretchen helped the naked janitor to his feet. The man began crying and I knew it would be almost impossible to get information out of him. Gretchen handed the man off to another officer, who Mirandized the perp as he led him through the Emergency Room. I couldn’t believe this gentle looking man was responsible for those horrific murders I had just seen.
Gretchen turned to me. “What the hell happened? Are you all right?”
“Just my shoulder and my back. And my head a little. Nothing major.”
“What about your bloody mouth?”
I ran over to the cabinets and started to search. Nothing in this one. I moved some people out of the way, tore open another drawer and found a tiny plastic container. I scraped the dried blood from the corners of my mouth into the small oval. I found a cap for it in the cabinet and sealed it up. I put it in my back pocket with the hair from the shifter.
“Merlino, what are you doing?”
“Detective stuff.” I tried to sound tough, but it was a rather pathetic attempt and it sounded stupid. I can admit my own faults.
“We need to get down to the station so we can question this perp,” she said, as she pushed her way through the crowd.
We ran outside just in time to see Gretchen’s car being towed away. With all the commotion, I don’t even think she noticed. She said, “Let’s go find out where they are taking him.” She pointed to the two cops dragging the shifter away.
A small crowd had already gathered outside the Emergency Room, and we pushed through to get to the arresting officers. About ten feet in front of me, I noticed something strange about the shifter’s hands. They were moving in an odd manner. I thought he was just trying to bust out of the cuffs until I saw the first claw extending.
Then, fingernail after fingernail changed into claws. His hands morphed into paws, much narrower, and he easily slid out of the cuffs. A female cop lunged for the man as he shifted into animal form. The lion snapped at the officer and took a chunk out of her forearm. Her desperate screams threatened to shatter my eardrums.
The other officers took a few steps back as the man went into full shifter mode. He threw his head up at the sky and roared. The beast started running on two feet, but went down to all fours and quickly reached an amazing speed. The cops fired a hail of bullets at the werelion, but couldn’t slow it down.
I ran after him, hopelessly, as blood dripped from his crotch. How long could we follow the blood tracks? I ran out of breath almost immediately and watched the werelion dodge traffic on Freeport Road and cross the railroad tracks across the street.
The werelion zipped toward the river and out of sight. I yelled to Gretchen, “Have someone follow the blood. He’s bleeding.”
“What blood?” she asked.
“Right there.” I pointed to the trail of blood that I had just seen. It was gone. I ran along the same path as the werelion. Nothing. It had evaporated. What was I dealing with here?
Gretchen screamed, “Merlino, what the hell was that?” She’d apparently taken a shine to calling me by my last name.
“What do you mean?”
She pointed across the street. “I mean. That thing just turned into a lion and ran off. That’s what I mean.”
“Oh that. Right. What did you want to know?”
She threw her hands up. “Anything. Everything. Everything you know.”
“Prepare for disappointment. You know as much as I do. We both watched the same thing.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I know that. What I need to know is how it happened?”
“That makes two of us and I’m not trying to be a smartass.”
She shook her head, disgusted. “You don’t have to try, Merlino. You’re a natural.”
I took the jape in stride. “Thank you. As for our shifter friend, he’s not following the normal protocol. They need a source to shift. Most of the time, a full moon can provide enough of a source, but they didn’t use that. There’s only one other explanation that I can come up with and even this is a longshot.”
“Spill it,” she eloquently demanded.
I didn’t want to believe this, but she wanted to know. “They are being controlled by a powerful practitioner.”
“How would that work?”
“I’m not certain. They would have to have some type of being controlling them. A powerful being.” I specifically left out the word demon. “Again, this is just a guess. I’ve never come across this in my experience.”
She mocked me, “You mean in your vast amount of experience, you haven’t dealt with this yet.”
I let her have the first swipe free of charge. This one was going to cost her. I smiled. “You mean, Lieutenant Gretchen Meyer, with twenty-two years of experience in crime fighting can’t figure it out on her own. She has to turn to a twenty-three year old novice. Pretty embarrassing, Lieutenant.”
Her purple face gave me some satisfaction, but it didn’t answer any of the questions in my head. She muttered under her breath, “Asshole.”
I smiled again and held her keys out.
She spun around in two circles. I kept smiling. “Where’s my damn car?” she asked.
I held my smile and tossed her the keys. “Tera’s Towing. I think they’re located right down in Sharpsburg.”
She stuffed the keys into her pocket and this time she didn’t mutter, “Asshole.”
I convinced one of the officers to give me a ride home. He pulled out onto Freeport Road and my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a call. I never got calls from anyone, only texts that possibly led to a phone call.
I didn’t recognize the number and the way this day was headed, I probably shouldn’t have answered it.
8
I swiped the Accept button and held the older model phone to my ear.
“Detective Merlino here. What can I do for you?” I sounded like such a jackass, trying to deepen my voice. I tried to speak like Humphrey Bogart and failed m
iserably. Alayna had introduced me to the classic actor and I enjoyed using his voice style to sound older although I hadn’t mastered it yet.
A female voice said, “Hi, yes, I got your number from a flyer on a telephone pole and wondered if you could help me?”
My high-tech advertising was finally paying off. I had plastered business cards and flyers all over Pittsburgh. I hadn’t gotten around to advertising online yet. It hadn’t seemed appropriate for an Occult Detective.
I said excitedly, “I can certainly try. Can I meet you somewhere to discuss it?”
“Sure. I’m at my house right now if you want to stop by and talk about it. I don’t want to do it over the phone.”
Very interesting. She gave me her name and address and I convinced the cop to drop me off there instead of my house. The woman lived in an area called Montrose Hill. A main road led up a steep incline and plateaued off at certain intervals. We drove to the top of the hill and I said goodbye to the officer as loud as I could.
I hoped my prospective client had seen it too, to give me a little more credibility. She lived at the top of the hill, across the street from a park. Her house was surrounded by ancient trees, branches twisting and turning to create an arborous shield for the small, blue, one-story house.
The woman met me before I reached her door. I held out my hand and she planted her palm in mine. Her hand was sweating. I could feel the pulse in her palm. She was nervous.
“Detective Mike Merlino,” I said in my Bogart voice.
“Patty Elmhurst.”
I took a step back and conducted a two-second study. A sturdy woman stood in front of me with short, frizzy brown hair that reeked of hair spray. Her hazel eyes appeared to have been crying.
I softened my Bogart tone. “So what seems to be the problem ma’am?”
“I’m not really sure. I don’t even know if it’s anything, really. It’s like when you see a suicide bomber and they interview the neighbors and the neighbors knew something was wrong with him. I’ve seen interviews where those people said they could never sleep again. I just want a clean conscience if anything happens.” She started crying. I hugged her and held the back of her neck firmly, bleeding some of my strength into her. I snatched my hand away. I had forgotten that I might have swallowed some of that shifter blood earlier. I did not want to infect her.
I knew we weren’t talking about a bomber and my curiosity shot through the roof. “Do you want to go inside and talk about it?” I laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“It’s not inside. It’s up here.” She pointed to the park. She led me to a set of stone stairs with metal railings on either side. We got to the top and the park expanded. A searing pain radiated from my shoulder, but I needed to press on.
There was a baseball diamond right in front of me that blended into a steep hillside that acted as the home run fence. Behind right field sat a basketball court, slides, swing sets, a hand-powered merry-go-round and two port-a-potties that I could already smell in the slight breeze. The nasty aroma had something deeper behind it that I couldn’t quite put my nose on yet.
I held her shaking hand as she led me toward the basketball court. She huffed and puffed, and the aroma of smoked tobacco came from her mouth. I stopped and pretended to tie my shoelace so that the older woman could take a breather. Behind the basketball court was a major cliff and I assumed many baseballs had been lost over the steep drop off.
She pointed to a dirt trail that led uphill to another level of woods. I practically carried her up the steep incline, through her wheezing and coughing. She pointed toward the middle of the woods.
She covered her eyes. “Over there. I can’t be here. I don’t know. I just don’t want anyone else to die.”
I patted her on the back for reassurance. “I’m with you on that. I don’t want anyone to die either. If you feel safer back at your house, I can do this myself. I’ll stop by your door on my way out.”
She nodded, took off down the steep, loose incline and I could hear her sliding down. I hoped she hadn’t hurt herself. She looked like a sweet older woman trying to help the community.
The woods weren’t dense, but there was a good amount of brush and bramble to work around to get to the middle of the area. Even with fall in full swing, I heard the lively sounds of crickets, cicadas and other insects. The natural wildlife mixed with the sounds of the traffic from the street at the bottom of the huge drop off.
The porta-potty stench had been overpowered by a more offensive odor. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but my nose didn’t like it. It smelled worse than burnt flesh.
I pinched my nose closed and pressed on. Strange.
I found a black cast-iron cauldron hanging from a tripod. I touched the cold cooking vessel and realized the fire had gone dead some time ago.
I peeked inside, turned around and dropped to my knees. I hadn’t eaten anything yet so I dry heaved for about a minute. A burning rage started to build inside of me as I continued to retch.
I drew the courage to get back up and look inside again. I winced in pain at the thought of what had happened here. My rage started to overflow. I whirled around, crushing some fallen orange leaves, praying that the person or people responsible for this were here right now.
I tried to calm down but I couldn’t. I looked into the cauldron again at the charred bones and skulls of dogs. I didn’t have to be an osteologist or veterinarian to figure it out. I saw the remnants of a chain-linked collar and several tags that were now unreadable.
I classified myself as a pretty laid-back guy, but there were two things that made me want to murder someone and take my chances with the police or the Golden Chamber. I hated people that abused women or animals more than anything. I tried to think logically, but images of pounding some lowlife’s face into the pavement of the basketball court kept creeping in.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm down, but it wasn’t working. I heard a bark. A desperate bark that I assumed came from the cauldron. I took two steps forward and looked inside at the pile of burnt bones. Another bark sounded from behind me.
I whirled around and stared at a rhododendron. It was out of bloom, but the branches started to wiggle around. I took a step forward and jumped back in fear as a brown blur leapt from the bush.
The barking tone shifted from sad and desperate to a territorial, stronger bark. The tiny cocker spaniel landed, saw my size, and dove right back into the rhododendron. I sighed and dropped to my knees.
I opened my soul. A little. I needed this dog to see that my soul was pure. I tried not to open it too much. The poor little creature didn’t need to see any of the details of my death fight with George. I projected my spirit toward the animal, begging for it to accept my kindness.
It took about a minute or two and I couldn’t blame the dog for mistrusting me. He or she had been abused, I could see it in the brief glimpse I had gotten earlier. I opened the door to my soul a little more, hoping that I wouldn’t scare my new friend away.
The dog barked and this time it was a normal bark for a cocker spaniel of that size. I reached my hand into the bush and just left it there. A few seconds went by and I started to get nervous. This dog had been seriously abused to show this amount of distrust of humans.
I opened my soul a little more, worried that I might scare the emaciated dog away. A second later, I felt some warm air, and then a wet nose on the back of my fingers. I smiled. The little dog started licking my fingers, then the palm of my hand. I closed my soul just a bit so I wouldn’t frighten the dog and removed my hand from the bush.
The cocker spaniel peeked its tiny head out. I was kneeling with my palms open on my hips, inviting the animal to come out. I wanted to make sure he knew I wasn’t going to harm him.
“Hey little buddy. I’m not one of those sick, demented lunatics. I would never harm you. You got a home?” I noticed a temporary plastic collar on his neck that you get from the pet store after making a purchase. He scampered out, lifted his leg and l
et out a little squirt on the red and orange leaves. A bird started a shrill song and the cocker spaniel jerked its head toward the sky to see.
The emergency address had been clipped from the collar. The dog circled and smelled me for about a minute until he slowly sidled up next to me and mashed his wet nose into my hip. I gently touched the back of its neck and he jumped away in fear.
The dog had light amber fur with streaks of white over his body, but his floppy ears were a solid golden brown and he had a patch of white fur on his forehead. His glossy dark eyes and moist black nose made the little guy adorable.
I bonded with the dog for about fifteen minutes, completely forgetting about the killer cauldron and the sweet older lady waiting at her house for an answer from me. Some things were more important. I wasn’t leaving without this little guy.
A closer inspection showed burn marks all over the dog’s body. Big burn marks that must have been caused by a cigar. Lowlife motherfu… I bit my tongue and turned to leave, the true test.
I took a few steps and heard nothing behind me. I continued and still didn’t hear a shuffle of paw steps. I didn’t want to turn around. I took two more steps, and my little buddy darted across the woods and stopped right at my heels. Perfect. I needed to be sure the dog wanted to come with me. I wouldn’t take an animal against its will.
The cocker spaniel followed me down the trail, through the basketball court, down another small dirt trail, across the cobbled-brick road, and up to the woman’s front door. I knocked.
She immediately yanked the door open with a look of concern on her face and a cordless telephone in her hand. “Oh my God, you’re all right. Thank the lord and praise Mother Mary.”
I tilted my head to the side. “Why would you think something happened to me?” I scooped up my dog and held him to my chest, trying to calm his thumping heartbeat.
“You were gone for so long. I thought they had gotten to you too.”
“Who?”
She used her free hand to twirl her frizzy hair. “Oh, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t know if they’re real or if this is anything. I just don’t want something to happen that I didn’t say something about.”
Shifting Problems Page 6
