“The more you know,” he murmured. “What the hell is that thing?”
“Containment suit. Crime scene cleaners use them to keep from contaminating the scene, or to prevent catching something nasty from it.” She glanced up from unrolling the odd parcel. “What, did you think I was putting on my jammies?”
“They might have been magic jammies,” he replied. “Do you always carry a containment suit with you?”
“Would it surprise you if I did?”
He considered that. “No. I don’t suppose it would.”
“Then prepare to not be surprised.” She held out a couple odd lumps of white material. “Put these on.”
“What are they?”
“Shoe covers. They’ll keep your shoes clean so you don’t track anything in the house.”
“Blood’s hard to get out of the carpet.” Grim humor helped keep him sane. He slipped the covers over his shoes.
“I get the idea blood is the least of our worries, out here.” Efficiently, she pulled the suit on over her clothes. She wouldn’t win any fashion contests in it, but he didn’t care. Her capability and preparedness lent her a greater appeal than designer clothes ever could.
“Yeah.” He looked toward the scene again, with its mangled bodies and black stains on the ground. “Remember when I told you I had a dream earlier? With some shadow thing shaped like a person?”
“I remember.”
“It was made out of that. That black shit you see under the bodies.” He hadn’t told her before because it had felt too personal. Too vulnerable. Now, she had to know. “In my dream, the ground was covered in it. It burned my paws. Covered the slopes of the mountain. Then it crawled up into a two-legged shape and tried to snare me.”
She fastened the suit up under her chin. “Did it?”
“No. You called and woke me up. I’d gotten fouled in the shit on the ground, and this tentacle was going to smash down on me, but my phone rang.”
“Mm,” she answered as she put covers on her own boots.
His eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“It means I wonder if that’s significant, but I can’t tell yet.” She got into the bag again. A headlamp came out this time. “The better question is, do you think it’s significant?”
A dream of darkness staining the mountain. The same tainted blackness on the ground at a ritual scene, down to the scent it gave off. “Yeah. I do. I’m just not sure how.”
“What do you know? We agree on something.” She pulled a notebook and pen out of her bag. “Let’s get this over with.”
They walked into the yard together. He had to admit, he was glad for her company. Dani couldn’t handle this as well as Sonja had, though Cameron couldn’t fault his enforcer for it. Between the two of them, he and Dani would have worked each other into a froth over the wrongness of the scene. They would have raged, and snarled, and they would have missed important evidence to help them discover what had happened. Sonja’s critical distance kept her sharp. Her knowledge provided insight. And her calm helped Cameron stay that way, too.
Fingers of the stain advanced from the ritual area, hard to spot without high-powered lights. He frowned at them as he stepped over them. “It’s spreading out. This black shit.”
“You think it could be natural seepage? Liquid wicking through the dirt?” She didn’t sound convinced of her own explanation.
“I think if anything about this is natural, I’ll eat my socks. The dirty ones.” He snorted.
“Don’t get the ketchup. I don’t think you’ll need it.” The light moved off the advancing stain as Sonja turned her head. “Look, here. You can see the blood is soaking into the ground. Your black shit isn’t.”
“Why is it my black shit?”
“Because I don’t want it.” The flashlight beam followed the trail of blood back to one of the bodies as she examined the scene. “We know it wasn’t humans who did this. No human is strong enough to tear ribcages open this way. There are easier ways to remove a heart.”
Cameron frowned at the eviscerated corpse in front of them. “Do we really have any doubts who did this, Carter?”
“Not doubts, exactly. Questions.” Her lips pursed as she examined the carnage. She’d guided them over to one of the victims he didn’t know, a young man with a University of Washington sweatshirt. Bad enough to look at a person in this state, but worse to stare into the face of someone he knew. Maybe she’d felt the same. “When Kiplinger made the shadow wolves, Kayla said he’d removed the hearts from the victims the efficient way. Up through the stomach, beneath the ribcage. This is a whole different method.”
“He could have been sending us a message. You don’t go to the trouble to kill someone like this unless you have something to say.” He folded his arms across his chest. “When he made the wolves, Kiplinger cleaned up after himself so we wouldn’t find the mess. He left this here. But there’s still four victims, and four hearts.”
“True. And look here.” She reversed the grip on her pen. A red laser pointer beamed from the butt end of it. “Flattened place on the ground. Circular. One of the jars?”
He crouched down to get a better look. “I think you’re right. We’ll know better if there’s similar marks by the other bodies. Pretty safe to assume it was a similar ritual.”
“I could have gone all week without hearing that.” The laser dot disappeared as she turned her pen to sketch in the notebook. “If it was a similar ritual, then he needed help. At least three others. Help will be thin on the ground for him. After Kayla planted Regina, and Kiplinger disappeared, a good half his lackeys crawled back to Pirelli to beg for mercy.”
“Did he give it?”
“Not so much. He’d run fresh out of fucks to give for anyone who’d throw in with that lot.” By her tone, this didn’t break her heart.
Cameron couldn’t muster any fucks to give for them, either. “What about the rest?”
“Pirelli had them hunted down. That used up all the fucks he had to give for them.” She straightened. “There weren’t all that many traitors, but it sent a clear message. You don’t betray the Lord of the City.”
Cameron stood up. “He took a stronger stance than Noah did with Todd.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“I wonder sometimes. Then I feel like an asshole for wondering.”
“Mercy is a double-edged sword. It might yet pay off.” She didn’t sound much more convinced than he did. “Let’s call him a better man than we are.”
“Fair enough.” They both looked down at the unknown college student, with his wide-open eyes and slack-jawed, silent scream. “Sorry, kid,” he murmured. “Sorry you got caught up in this. Rest well.”
Then there were no more words to say, and they had to move on.
Sonja hissed between her teeth when she saw the body at the south quarter. “I know her. That’s Jeanne Harlow. She’s an earth worker. A couple of the local open-minded farmers had her bless soil for crops, orchards, whatnot. Every other month, she did workshops for the covens about the energy in the area. Moira used to host them at Moon Blessings.”
“Fuck.” Cameron sighed. “That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.”
“No. It doesn’t. And look. Another place where a jar was.” Her pen scratched against her paper as she sketched the basics of this piece of the puzzle.
“Same as the kid. Heart missing. Jar nearby. And I’d swear someone laid them out for us. Neither’s in an ‘I just fell over dead’ position.” He made vague gestures towards the positions of Jeanne’s limbs, which lay neatly next to her body.
Sonja looked up and pursed her lips. “So it was a message.”
“I wish to hell they’d just texted.”
“So do I.” Sonja said nothing for a moment. Cameron could see her jaw work as she chewed over something she wanted to say. “Luciana Gaeta called me while you were talking to Noah. Pirelli’s security lead. Moira felt whatever happened here, just like Derek and Kayla did.”
“Apparently so. Gaeta didn’t say much, but I get the idea Moira’s reaction wasn’t as severe.” Her gaze slid over to meet his. “In case you’re wondering, I didn’t give them any information.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.” Even if he’d wanted to, he’d opted not to. That had paid off. “Seems to me Pirelli doesn’t like Kiplinger any more than we do. You’re not going to sell us up the river. You do what you need to, Carter. Besides, we’ve got a truce tonight.”
She blinked. Surprise wrote itself across her face before she smoothed her expression again. “We do.”
And just like that, we manage not to have an argument. I could get used to this.
The shadow wolf surprised him, when they arrived at that body for sketching. She had half shifted to gain mass, which he could have explained as a product of the ritual. But claw marks scored the ground around her, and the dirt packed the undersides of both her hands and taloned toes. “She wasn’t any more willing than the rest to do this,” he said.
“No. Who’d sign up for this? Though if anyone would...” Sonja’s lips quirked to one side. “But why would Kiplinger kill one of his own wolves? We know he lost most of his supporters to Pirelli. Why would he do in one of the few he had left?”
“They failed him. Kiplinger’s still not in charge of this city, the werewolves don’t bow and scrape to him...” He nodded down at the body. “Wages of failure. His retirement plan is pretty shitty.”
“Could be,” she said. “He went to a lot of trouble, and it didn’t buy him anything he wanted. One could say he even lost ground, since Kayla and Derek turned away from him, and he lost Regina to boot. I just— I don’t understand the big picture yet. He’s not acting like I’d expect.”
Cameron raised an eyebrow. “How do you expect a psychopathic vampire on a power trip to act?”
Sonja looked rueful. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe I’m overthinking this. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Kiplinger has to die.”
“On a permanent basis. No more of this undead timeshare bullshit.” He gestured toward the body. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do with them. The cops and the press would have a damn field day, what with a ritual murder and a werewolf. This shadow wolf isn’t going to shift back. We could bury them ourselves, but someone’s going to notice eventually. And that kid has family somewhere who deserve to know he’s gone.”
“The only other option I can think of is, mm, questionable.” Sonja winced. “The vampires have a cleanup crew they call when there’s an accident.”
“When they bite someone to death.”
“I was trying not to say that. But, yes.” She closed her notebook. “They keep one of the coroners in their pocket. Legalities are observed on the quiet, and bodies are disposed of without questions.”
Disposed of. His jaw clenched again. Don’t start shit. Not like a werewolf hasn’t flipped out and killed someone before. “That coroner trustworthy?”
“He’s well paid, and afraid of Pirelli.”
“That doesn’t sound like trust to me.”
“It’s not. But he’s the only game in town.” Cameron could hear her distaste. But like her, he didn’t see another option. With just the shadow wolf and Glenn, they could have found a way. Innocent mundanes caught in the supernatural crossfire changed everything.
“Let’s do it that way, then.” He sighed, then looked toward the eastern quadrant.
One body left to examine. The one that would take the last of his objectivity with it to the grave. A part of him shied away from that broken form, as if by not confronting it, Glenn’s death could not become real. It would remain an abstraction, an event that might have happened in another world but could never have occurred in this one. I’m not ready for my friend to be gone. I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want to see the proof that I failed someone I cared for.
“I don’t want to go over there, Carter,” he said, voice as raw as his heart.
He heard the material of her suit rustle, saw the light bob as she changed positions just before her hand slid into his. It startled him, but he couldn’t bring himself to pull away. Anger and sorrow had left him adrift. Her hand felt like an anchor to the place beyond the storm of emotion. “Me, either,” she said. “But this is how we honor him. We look at the evidence. We use it to find Kiplinger. Then we burn the fucker to the ground.”
He’d never figured Sonja Carter for an inspirational speaker, but with those words, she became his muse.
The remnants of a sweat suit clung to Glenn’s form, torn where it couldn’t accommodate his shifted shape. Ragged tears scored the arms and legs, ripped by what Cameron thought had to be hands clasping a struggling victim. They had left him posed as they had done with the others, chest up and opened to the sky, but they had not laid his arms next to his body. Instead, one stretched to the southeast, towards where Rainier waited on the distant horizon.
Cameron crouched down next to the body. Sonja squeezed his hand and let him go. Dimly, he heard her move around him, heard the murmur of a phone conversation, but it seemed far away. His awareness narrowed to his fallen packmate, the lacerations on his limbs, the vacant eyes. Cameron searched for accusation there, or recrimination, or forgiveness, but he found nothing. Nothing remained of the young man who’d asked how to exist in time with the phases of the moon, how to hide something so integral to himself as the wolf within. The pack would never again run with the swift brown wolf who chased after squirrels foolish enough to cross his path.
With the moon far in the west, and shadows all around, Cameron shed his human skin. He lifted his muzzle to howl into the night, for sorrow, for defiance, and for the promise of revenge.
Chapter Five
Heavy silence smothered them on the drive back to Tacoma. Cameron had fallen into an oppressive quiet from the moment they pulled away from the house, and Sonja knew better than to disturb that sort of stillness. She respected it. Recognized it all too well.
When she’d shrouded herself in that silence, she’d needed it. He would, too, for a little while. So she drove, and she kept her peace.
They’d left Glenn Riley’s house in the lull between bursts of activity. Dani had insisted on calling more of the pack guards in to handle what had to happen next. Cameron, she said, had already done enough for one night, for all he protested the fact. The pack needed him rested and mobile, not tied to a remote house with corpses intent on going nowhere. Noah would need Cameron nearby. So Sonja had called the local discreet clean-up crew, phoned in a bribe to the coroner, and left it in the pack’s hands. She could do nothing more for them.
Even though she wanted to. The thought nagged at her with annoying persistence. She ignored it. They had made their position on her help apparent for years. Why should tonight be different? Yet she waved off all offers to take Cameron home so she could step out of the situation.
She hazarded glances at him as they drove back toward Tacoma. He stared out the passenger window, thoughts turned so far inward that his face took on an intent flatness of expression. Light from the few cars on the road this time of night flickered across his eyes, lit them to show the hints of the pain he hid. All these years, she had known Cameron the Hardass, Cameron who handled everything with a calm that said he had all situations under control. His passion belonged to the pack, and while she’d always known he had friends within it, she’d wondered if he’d kept them all at arm’s length. Pack as a whole had mattered more than the individual parts.
Or so she’d thought. Then she’d heard him howl tonight. Wolves spoke a language
of visceral truth, even to one on the fringes like her. No, Cameron held everyone in the pack close to his heart. Whether they know it or not. Tonight, he had lost a friend. She ached for him. For his pain, for his guilt, for his helplessness to protect those he loved.
After that howl, she had expected tears. Fury. All she found was the tense silence of the heart of the hurricane that had to rage behind his stony expression. Who will you talk to when the silence has to break? Tonight, everyone you know is as heartbroken as you are. Will you talk yourself out of burdening them and mourn alone? Not while I’m around, bucko.
The Humvee’s tires crunched as she pulled into his empty driveway. “You still haven’t gotten your car replaced after the shadow wolves wrecked it?” she asked into the quiet.
“Insurance hang up.” His voice had a raw edge to it. “The policy hasn’t paid out, and I want to pay off that damn loan before I take out another one. Pack’s been giving me lifts.”
“I can’t blame you.” She cut the ignition. “Come on. I’ll walk you inside like a real gentleman.”
She got a wan smile for her trouble. “Am I the gentleman, or are you?”
“Pretty sure Charlie is the gentleman here.”
“It’s not me, that’s for certain.” He opened the door, but stopped to look over at her. “You can go home, you know. You don’t have to walk me in. Tonight’s been long enough.”
“No one makes me do anything I don’t want to.” She slid out so Charlie could follow by hopping over her seat. “And I want to walk you in. Charlie could use a drink, anyway.”
He closed his car door. “We can’t let Charlie stay thirsty.”
Dogs had their own variety of magic. They could break down barriers between people, give excuses for folks to act softer than they felt they could otherwise. Sonja traded on it shamelessly. Even vampires loved dogs. Dogs never judged. They didn’t care if you sucked blood for your dinner. They only cared if you would pet their ears and throw the ball to fetch.
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