We couldn’t hear one another over the ringing in our ears from firing in such a small space. Sometimes I think I should just live in my damn ear protection. I could see Rico’s mouth open and knew he was screaming. His arm was a blood fountain spraying into the cell. Movement caught my attention, and I almost pointed my gun at Jocelyn, who was screaming in the doorway. I yelled for her to call an ambulance. Hell, I probably screamed it at her, but she vanished from the doorway, hopefully to do what I’d asked.
Edward motioned for me to watch the wereleopard. He and Olaf had to put their guns away to try to get Rico free of the bars, but his shoulder was wedged so tight that he was stuck. We were going to have to open the cell to stop the bleeding, or he would be dead before the ambulance got here. The wereleopard was still in animal form, which meant it was not dead, not yet. I was deliberately thinking of the furry body in the cell as the wereleopard. I couldn’t afford to think of it as Bobby, because the leopard in the cell didn’t have hands, and I was pretty damn sure that it had taken hands to pull Rico through the bars and wedge him there. Bobby had been in human form and known exactly what he was doing when he did it. No lack of control, no accident, just murder. Jocelyn had said that his eyes had changed. Had that been enough for Rico to try to kill him? Had Bobby believed he was acting in self-defense? Did it matter in the eyes of the law? It sure as hell didn’t matter to Rico.
Leduc was there from wherever he’d gone. He opened the cell, and I moved in with my gun aimed at the wereleopard on the floor. It was lying in a pool of Rico’s blood, and if it so much as twitched, I was going to shoot it again.
The blood slowed its spraying into the cell and then stopped. I gave the smallest eye twitch to see a tourniquet on the arm, but Rico was unconscious and sagging in the bars. Leduc was on the outside of the bars holding him up for some reason. Maybe there was a good first aid reason for it. I didn’t know. I fought to keep my attention on the leopard.
Voices came back in pieces with some parts louder and then farther away like some kind of special effect. I’d had my hearing come back from shit like this before, so I wasn’t worried. I didn’t look around, trying to figure out if people were moving closer and farther away or if it was just my ears. It would pass.
I yelled, “Where were you, Duke?”
“I took Troy down to see a lawyer.”
I realized that Troy wasn’t in the other cell. Fuck, that was all Rico had needed.
“It was your job to keep Bobby safe, damn it!”
I knew I was yelling louder than I thought, because my hearing wasn’t quite right yet, but honestly, screaming sounded like a great idea. All the effort to save Bobby Marchand and it was all for nothing, for nothing.
The ambulance arrived, but the crew members wouldn’t go in the cell with the leopard. I couldn’t blame them. The body on the floor moved, drew a breath that made the pale gold and black-spotted fur rise and fall. That one clean spot in the bloody mess of the rest of the body moved. It was alive, but if the paramedics and the firemen with the Jaws of Life didn’t get in here soon, Rico wouldn’t be. The leopard stirred enough that the first responders saw it. I felt rather than saw their panic in the hallway. I couldn’t see it, because I couldn’t afford to look away from the leopard at my feet. I shot into that body, making the change in angle for the heart in leopard form. I did my job. I did the job that Newman was supposed to have done before I ever got on a plane. Had Bobby been framed for the first murder? Yes, but that wasn’t going to be much comfort to Rico if he lived.
The body turned human, which probably meant that Bobby was dead, but not always. If you’d have asked me if Bobby was powerful enough to heal from this much high-content silver ammo, I’d have said no, but I’d also have sworn that he wasn’t a danger to anyone. I’d been wrong once. I didn’t want to be wrong again.
Olaf was in the cell with me, his gun pointed at the body. I got my ear protection out of the pouch I kept it in and put it on. I covered the body while Olaf did the same. He didn’t question me. He didn’t try to ask to decapitate the body or take the heart with a blade. He didn’t do anything but back my play. I stared down at Bobby’s body. Mercifully he was lying on his side so I couldn’t see the front of him, and his head was turned so that I could see only the edges of his face. I didn’t have to stare into his eyes as I shot into his skull until it cracked and burst, spreading gore and brains all over the floor. I put my boot against the shoulder and rolled the body more completely onto its stomach and then shot where the heart would have been. I clicked empty and stepped back to reload while Olaf moved over the body and started firing into the chest. I covered the body while Olaf shot through the chest until the body was almost bisected.
Olaf clicked empty, and I kept my gun on the body while he reloaded. It was a formality, me watching the body like that, because it was as dead as we could make it unless we wanted to burn the body to ashes. But it wasn’t a vampire, so burning was overkill, both metaphysically and legally. The warrant was complete.
78
I STOOD OUTSIDE in the sunlight trying not to think, not to feel, and failing. Olaf was there almost blocking out the sun.
“We killed together after all,” he said.
I turned my head slowly to look at him. Anyone who knew me well would have moved away or stopped talking. Apparently Olaf didn’t know me that well.
“But it was not satisfying.”
“Not satisfying? Not satisfying! What the fuck, Olaf? What the fuck!” I yelled, and realized I’d used his real name in front of the other cops.
I took a deep breath, trying to swallow the anger down enough to think and not just react, but I kept seeing Bobby’s blond hair and his brains on the floor. I wanted to scream, not words—just scream wordless, hopeless, enraged. The only thing that kept me from it was knowing if I started to scream, I wasn’t sure I’d stop. I didn’t mean I’d say things to Olaf I would regret. I meant that I’d just scream until my voice was raw, and when the screaming stopped, maybe I’d cry, or maybe I’d think of something more useful to do.
Olaf said, “I am sorry.”
I stared at him, because of all the things he could have said to try to calm me down, that was a good one, especially coming from him. I stared at him, speechless. His face was still the empty serial killer calm. It wasn’t the face that went with I’m sorry.
I felt Nicky’s energy before the SUV pulled up behind all the emergency vehicles and the gawkers. There’s always an audience for tragedy. I hated them all today. But it had been the crowd and the lights that let Nicky and the others know to come find me. So maybe I shouldn’t have hated the crowd, but I did. They weren’t here to help; they just wanted to see the circus. Bread and circuses. Jesus.
Nicky was suddenly beside me. I’d missed some time somewhere in there. Shit. I had to do better than this. He was careful not to touch me, because he could feel what I was feeling, which meant he knew that hugging me now would either make me start screaming, crying, or hitting something. Touching was bad for the next few minutes.
“Anita, I’m so sorry.”
I looked up at Nicky, and Olaf was still close enough that I could see him past Nicky’s shoulder. They’d both said almost the same thing, and they were both still blank-faced and sociopathic.
“What are you sorry about, Nicky? You didn’t kill him. I did.”
“You didn’t make . . . him kill Rico,” Nicky said.
He’d been about to say didn’t make Bobby, but he didn’t want to remind me of names. It’s never good to think of names after you’ve shot someone to pieces. They’re bodies, meat, not real, not the people you knew or thought they were. It’s just an it. It’s just dead meat. You can’t personalize it. I swallowed the scream that seemed to be stuck at the back of my throat. Nothing I had said had cleared it, as if I hadn’t made the right noise yet.
I licked my lips; my mouth was dry.
> Pierette dropped to her knees in front of me. “I have failed you, my queen.”
“Get up!” I said.
Nicky grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet. He said, “We have an audience.”
“We’re being filmed, Petra,” Ethan said.
I looked for TV crews, but it was cell phones, smartphones, filming the scene, or as much as the police would let them. The state cops who had still been in the area had appeared like magic to help manage the crowd.
Leduc came toward us yelling, “You were supposed to keep this from happening!”
“You kicked them out, remember,” I said.
“We could have kept this from happening if we’d been here,” Ethan said.
Our mild-mannered Ethan saying anything meant he was as upset as the rest of us. He’d spent hours talking to Bobby, and now it was all for nothing. Leduc pushed into Ethan the way he had with Milligan and Custer earlier, shoving his bulk in against the slenderer man.
“Well, now he’s not going anywhere except the morgue, thanks to you not being here.”
I’d had enough, or maybe I just wanted a target I didn’t care about to aim all my rage and frustration at. Whatever the case, I pushed between them, forcing Leduc back from Ethan, and yelled, “It’s your damn jail, and you’ve had two of your deputies shoot at your prisoner. What kind of fucked-up shit show are you running here, Duke?”
He drove all that weight and extra height into me, actually forced me backward with his bulk. I pushed back with my hands so I touched him first. You don’t do that when tempers are this hot, not unless you want a real fight. He shoved me hard, and I was off balance, so I stumbled. Then I went for him. Nicky caught me, one arm across my shoulders keeping me back.
I screamed, “Let me go!” and he had to do it.
Milligan and Custer grabbed me. Newman and Edward grabbed Leduc.
Custer yelled, “Boss!”
I struggled, but I didn’t fight them. I had that much control left. I yelled, “You were supposed to be watching over Bobby. You want to blame someone, seems like there’s a fuck ton of blame to go around!”
“I told you I took Troy to see a lawyer—that’s why I wasn’t here,” he said, and he wasn’t yelling now.
He was getting himself under control enough that Edward stepped away from him. Newman stayed on his other arm, but more like patting him on the back than holding him, though I don’t think the audience that had pointed their phones at us were fooled.
“Why? He hasn’t been charged officially yet.”
“He’s not going to be charged, or he wasn’t. Bobby didn’t want him to be charged. Now that Bobby is dead, I don’t know what will happen with Troy.”
I didn’t want to get calm. I wanted to stay angry, because it had felt better than so many other emotions that were there just below the surface. I didn’t want to feel any of them. I fed my anger and called it sweet names so it wouldn’t leave me alone with the rest of the things I was feeling.
Edward said, “Anita, you’re bleeding.”
I frowned at him as if he were speaking a different language. He nodded down at my thigh. I looked where he motioned and saw the blood and the fresh claw marks in the cloth. My first thought was So what? One more scar. It didn’t even hurt yet, which probably meant it was worse than I thought or I was still in shock. Then I remembered that I’d gotten wounded because I’d pushed Edward out of the way. I had lycanthropy already, couldn’t hurt me any more. I looked at Edward’s thigh, but the blood on him was lower, closer to the knee, because he was taller, I guess.
“I thought I saved you,” I said.
“You saved me from maybe being crippled for life.”
“Or maybe not,” I said.
“Don’t second-guess yourself, Anita. You put yourself in harm’s way for me. That’s what I’ll remember.”
“You’ll have to get tested.”
“I know.”
We looked at each other.
“Did any of my blood get in your wound?” I asked.
“No way to tell yet,” he said.
I nodded. He was right, of course, but all I could think was in trying to save him from Bobby’s type of Therianthropy I might have given him mine. It was like the harder I tried, the worse things got.
“Rico gained consciousness and said something before he got in the ambulance,” Edward said.
“What?” I asked.
“He said, ‘I should never have listened to that bitch.’”
“What does that mean?” Leduc asked.
“Jocelyn was here when we pulled up,” I said.
“Did he say anything else?” Leduc asked.
“I asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘She’s killed us both.’”
“What the hell does that mean?” Leduc asked.
When Edward told Leduc what Hazel had told Livingston and us, he said, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, are you telling me that Rico . . . Ray and Carmichael, and that Bobby was just defending himself?”
I shook my head. “Bobby pulled him through the bars when he still had hands. He wedged Rico in so that he couldn’t get away. He made sure that your deputy got to watch him shift in his cell and was unable to escape, knowing what was going to happen to him. Bobby could have walked away from this. He was free, damn it. Why? Why kill someone now?”
“I’ll go to the hospital and see if I can get Rico to tell me more about Jocelyn’s part in it,” Leduc said.
“Tell the hospital to use minimum heat on the wound, because if he’s caught lycanthropy, then he’ll grow the arm back if they don’t burn the flesh and kill it,” I said.
“Motherfucking son of a bitch,” Leduc said, already on his phone to the hospital.
I looked around for Jocelyn so I could ask her what she’d said to Bobby that had made him lose control so completely. I could aim my anger at her next.
Nicky said, “She got in a car with the older woman who came in to be questioned. She works for the family.”
“Helen Grimes,” I said.
He nodded.
“What did Jocelyn say to Bobby to make him lose his shit like this?” I asked.
“I don’t think it was what she said,” Olaf said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, and I tried to stay angry, but I wasn’t angry at Olaf for this. I could feel the adrenaline from the near-death emergency leaking away. When it left, I’d want to be sitting or lying down.
“I held the deputy in my arms. I was very close to his body, and I smelled the woman’s scent on him.” I looked at Olaf and realized that he was covered in Rico’s blood.
“Woman—you mean Jocelyn?”
Olaf nodded.
“What do you mean you smelled her scent on him?” Milligan asked.
“The scent of her body was underneath his clothes on his skin.”
“You mean they had sex,” Custer asked.
“It is likely. I can tell you that their naked bodies rubbed against each other’s, sharing scent back and forth, but I did not sniff his groin or hers, so I can’t be a hundred percent certain of what they did while they were naked.” Olaf said it all with almost no change of expression, as if it was all completely normal.
“That would mean that she smelled like Rico,” I said.
“Probably,” Olaf said.
“She didn’t have to say anything if he smelled them on each other’s skin,” Nicky said.
“She didn’t come here to have him smell their bodies next to each other,” I said.
“She said something to Bobby that made him freak out,” Ethan said.
“If she is as cold-blooded a schemer as this, then Ethan is right: She wouldn’t have just chanced Bobby smelling their scents on each other’s skin. She told Bobby of the affair before she left to let the deputy finish the kill,” Piere
tte said, and the men all nodded in agreement.
“Where’s Angel?” I asked.
“She’s throwing up in the weeds over there,” Nicky said.
I went over and held her hair while she finished, and then something about the smell of her being sick hit me wrong. I had time to stumble farther away from her and catch myself against a tree before I started throwing up, too. I ended up on my knees, throwing up until I was dry-heaving. Nicky held my hair and then brought me some water.
The paramedics in extra ambulances that someone had called insisted on Edward, Olaf, Angel, and me going to the hospital. Edward and I were hurt, though I didn’t need stitches and he did. Olaf was just covered in so much blood, they didn’t believe it was all someone else’s, and when he found out we were all going, he agreed to go. Angel got to go because she was faint after she finished being sick. I’d really expected better of a weretiger. They put the men in the back of one ambulance and us girls in another.
Angel started to cry on the way. “I am so sorry, Anita.”
The thick Goth eye makeup started to run down her face like black tears. She needed to switch brands. Mine didn’t run like that. Thank you, Dior. I felt nothing, watching her cry. It was like the inside of me went to that quiet white-noise place where I could pull a trigger and take a life and not feel anything. Maybe it was shock, or maybe killing Bobby had been the last piece of my soul I could lose and not lose myself.
The paramedic kept trying to take our vitals, while Angel cried like her heart would break and I just stared at her. I finally moved beside her and got the paramedic to leave us alone long enough for me to hold her and let her cry on my shoulder. Somewhere on the drive to a hospital that had facilities for dealing with supernatural wounds, I started to cry with her. We held each other and cried like a couple of girls. I could never have done it with Edward. Part of me regretted that I wasn’t with him, and part of me was ashamed of letting go like this, but a small part of me felt that every tear I shed got me a little piece of my soul back.
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