Fang and Claw

by Markie Madden

  Still, she couldn’t settle her thoughts. Arms crossed over her chest, Lacey’s fingertips traced the uneven and ragged scars marring the otherwise smooth flesh of her right arm. The hair on her neck still stood on end, as it had ever since the flashback had revealed the possibility that their unsub was a Skinwalker. She didn’t know much about them, and knew they would have to dig even deeper than expected to uncover any information about this obscure species. No, there is no longer any we. I’ll make damned sure it’s just me.

  With that thought, Lacey stepped to her office door. “David!” She bellowed, mentally pacing as the man approached her in his usual slow manner.

  “Need something?” His grating voice irritated the hell out of her.

  “Tell the commander I need to see him ASAP! And I mean right away!”

  “Yes, sir, no problem.” He lumbered back in the direction of his desk.

  She almost screamed in frustration at his snail’s pace. Remembering where she was, she returned to her office and sat down at the desk, forcing herself to boot up her laptop and put the case file on the screen. She knew she must at least give the appearance that she was working, even if her heart wasn’t in it anymore. Lacey noted with bored interest that no new lab reports had been entered into the system. That was so unlike the lab that she fought the urge to pick up the phone and harass Linus with a call, their usual song and dance when results were taking too long. But she just couldn’t generate enough interest to do it.

  Her phone rang, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. It was only David, reporting that the commander would see her in 20 minutes. It might as well be 20 hours, she thought as a sinking feeling came over her. What am I supposed to do for 20 minutes??

  It occurred to her then that she still had several of the old case files to sign off on, cases she had overseen before being put in charge of the Undead Unit. The unit which, if she had anything to say about it, would no longer exist half an hour from now. She put aside those thoughts for now, calling up those old reports as nothing more than a way to keep her mind occupied. Otherwise, she feared that she would have a meltdown at that very moment. But the monotony of the paperwork managed to distract her until, to her surprise, it was almost time to meet the commander in his office.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  Before she could even step out of her office, the phone rang again. With a small scream of frustration, she sat back down again and reached for the handset, assuming the commander was calling to reschedule for some reason. “Anderson.”

  It was dispatch. She held the phone to one ear while grabbing her tablet out of her pocket so that she could enter the necessary information. As if she needed another case to deal with right at this moment! Lacey scrawled as much down as she could and hung up the phone.

  “David!” She yelled once again, sure that the man would be confused that she was yelling at him twice in a time frame of about 15 minutes. “David, get in here!”

  She counted off the seconds, wondering if he’d ever make it into her office. But he surprised her for a change, moving down the bullpen walkway in a gait that might have kept up with a regular human’s pace. Almost. “Boss?”

  “Tell the commander I’ll have to reschedule with him. I caught a case.”

  “Sure, no problem.” He lumbered off and back to his desk where, she imagined, it would take him all of ten minutes to make a simple phone call.

  She started to take this case alone, but as it was a mugging involving a knife, she knew it wasn’t a great idea to go off herself. Damn it, why does this have to come down now! It never rains, but pours. Seeing Colton in his cube, she snapped, “Let’s get going.”

  He jumped as if she had scared the daylights out of him. “What? Where?”

  She ignored his question and headed for the parking ramp, not caring if he hadn’t followed her or couldn’t keep up. But somehow he did, and by the time she locked her seatbelt into place, he was doing the same. Without a word, she started the car with the sound of a quiet purr.

  11

  “Our strength grows out of our weakness.” ~~Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Colton sucked in his breath and steeled himself for a harrowing experience. Not only did Lacey’s driving terrify him, but now he was enclosed in a small metal death trap with the woman who had just learned that his family had wiped out everyone she’d ever loved. This should be interesting as hell, he thought with more than a touch of sarcasm. He wondered if he ought not just close his eyes and wish for death as a means of escaping the fate that he was not at all certain was undeserved.

  Still, curiosity reared its ugly head inside him as Lacey spun the tires leaving the parking ramp. He dared to ask, “So, what’s the call?”

  Tight-lipped, she answered without taking her eyes from the road. “Assault with a deadly.” Colton noticed with fear that she hadn’t set the sporty car onto auto drive.

  Fingers dug in to the leather seat, Colton started to speak but only managed to make a high-pitched squeal of terror. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “Weapon?”

  “Knife, from the sound of it.” She seemed to be enjoying his fear, and it seemed that she was going to speak to him as little as possible.

  He sighed, realizing Lacey was going to make him pry every little bit of information out of him, which he suspected would be just as fruitless and frustrating as carving a sculpture from a slab of granite using only a butter knife and his bare wits. It might be about time to request a transfer. He squirmed, uncomfortable in his seat. Like, maybe to Mars. As if that would get me far enough away from her! For the first time, he began to worry about his safety around her. When he’d assumed she known of his connection to her family’s attackers, he’d not once felt that she would cause him harm, at least, not intentionally.

  But, he could see her point. If the circumstances had been reversed, he might have thought she’d kept it from him on purpose. He imagined how he might have handled it. Or not have handled it. He knew there was nothing he could say to her, nothing that could take away the pain his family had brought upon her. Though he knew it was useless to feel guilty, that emotion was nevertheless a part of his psyche, something passed down in his ancestral memories and something he would carry around for the rest of his life.

  He shifted again, knowing that he must be betraying his nervousness, but unable to remain still. “What’s the situation?” He pulled out his tablet and prepared to take notes on whatever tidbits she was willing to share with him.

  “I don’t know much. Two young male Shifters got into it on the train over by Baylor. One drew a knife and stabbed the other.” He waited, wondering if that was all she was going to say, or all that she knew. As the uncomfortable silence stretched on, he was sure that she wouldn’t give him any more information. Damn it, I’m still your partner! I’ve got a right to know what we’re heading in to! As much as he wanted to voice those words to her, he held his tongue, knowing it might be the smartest decision he could have made today.

  Whether or not she sensed his uneasiness in the silence, she spoke again. “The vic went to Baylor Medical under his own power to seek medical treatment, and as he was buddies with the suspect I don’t think we’ll have much trouble figuring out where to find him.”

  “Guess they won’t be friends after this,” he commented wryly. Her only answer was to turn on the radio.

  With a shrug, he turned and looked out the window, watching as Lacey passed other cars on the highway as if they were standing still. That was, as he’d already learned, nothing new for her, but he wondered if maybe her judgment wasn’t a bit impaired by the emotional turmoil he knew she must be going through. Then again, she was not a Wolf, and he wasn’t sure if she even felt emotions in the way he was projecting that she would, in a way he could understand. Humans always tried to group all Undead into the same category, a fact that always pissed him off until the moment he found himself doing it to another, like now.

  Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the most politically correct pe
rson in the world. He doubted if there was anyone who was, especially those to whom outrage at injustices, imagined or real, came all too easy. He took several deep breaths, knowing that what calmed him when his anger was raging should offer the same benefit to his anxiety, and he was surprised when he felt just an easing of that terror. Again, he made an attempt to be social. “Any word on the vic?”

  She changed lanes rapidly and zipped off the highway so quickly that he didn’t even catch what exit they were taking. “Minor abdominal wound, from what I gather.” He thought she wasn’t saying anymore, until she remarked, “But you know how that can go.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. From her tone he felt as if he should be checking his own back for a knife. Maybe Becca was right. Maybe I do need to request a transfer. Surely this can’t be worth it!

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  Lacey barely slowed down as she took the exit, knowing that at this time of day, traffic would be horrendous no matter which way she went, and that 1st Avenue would get them as close to Baylor as possible. As she expected, traffic was backed up in all directions. A quick query to her GPS informed her that there had been a 4-car accident at a wide, dangerous intersection that Lacey had often likened to a “roundabout” in England. At the speed traffic was moving, Lacey knew they’d be sitting still for a while.

  Though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, she couldn’t keep herself from blurting all at once, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He looked at her with a stunned and pained expression on his face. He opened and closed his mouth several times. “Like I said, I thought you knew.”

  “How did you know? Who told you?” He mumbled something that even her sharp ears couldn’t catch. “What?”

  “Instinct, mostly.” He spoke a little louder. “I mean, the pack passes down stories and history, just like anyone else does, but we also have a sort of--” Colton broke off, seeming to have difficulty finding the right words. “I don’t know, it’s memory but much more. It’s pack mentality, not something I can really explain.”

  In spite of it all, she found herself quite curious. “You mean like a racial memory? You know what your ancestors know?”

  “Kind of.” His voice was gruff. “It’s not so much a memory, but a knowing. Like when you hear something that your ancestors knew, and you just know, too. Or you meet someone that your ancestors did, and you know them too. I knew it the moment I saw you when I first came to the Major Crimes unit.”

  “And you never thought to mention it?” Her hands tightened on the steering wheel as the car inched forward, bumper-to-bumper with the cars both in front and behind it.

  “Well, I thought it would be rude.” Out of the corner of her eye, she caught his shrug.

  Rude? Rude?? Well, for crying out loud, everyone knows Wolves are rude! Of all the things he could have said, this fired her anger to new heights. She squeezed the car around a pair of black-and-whites blocking the lanes where the accident was located and saw a couple of uniforms attempting to direct traffic. Then, Lacey slammed on the brakes suddenly to avoid another car that had sped out of a small residential street, cutting her off and barely threading through the space between Lacey’s car and the police cruiser.

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” Colton yelled, shaking his fist at the other driver. “Can’t you see we’re freaking driving here?” He continued to curse while Lacey activated the hands free cell on her vehicle’s dash. He seemed just as outraged at the near miss in her car as she imagined he would have been in his own scarred pickup.

  “This is Anderson, badge number 75-81918A calling dispatch.”

  “Dispatch.”

  “I’m on 1st Avenue just passing Commerce. I need a unit to check out a white Ford sedan.” She called off the car’s license plate. “Vehicle cut me off in a traffic accident area and is now moving northbound on 1st.”

  “Copy that, lieutenant. I’ve got a unit nearby.”

  With a flick of her thumb on the steering wheel, she disconnected the call.

  “These a-holes, they don’t even bother to look when they come out of side streets. Hell, most of the time, you’re lucky they even stop at the damn sign! Jesus, these people are crazy!” Colton’s voice was full of fury.

  She glanced over her left shoulder to hide the hint of a grin. The near miss seemed to make him forget that he was uncomfortable in her presence. She decided against continuing the conversation as they neared their destination. She preferred to carry the lighter mood into the interview with the victim, rather than the rage that was still simmering inside herself.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  Baylor University Medical Center was just like any other big medical complex. To Lacey, it smelled like any other hospital. Colton must have heard her quick, indrawn breath because he looked at her with a quizzical expression.

  “I don’t like hospitals,” she said in explanation.

  At first it didn’t seem that he understood what she meant, but she could see that his nose was working almost furiously, and when he caught the scent of human blood, he nodded at her. For the first time, it occurred to her that he, too, must have a little difficulty in walking into a human hospital. Wolves were predators, after all, and in the beginning they had hunted humans as often as Vampires had. It wasn’t likely that Colton was old enough to have actually eaten human hearts, or other parts for that matter, but that made her realize that she didn’t know how old he was. It had never crossed her mind.

  Though Lacey had been to Baylor in the course of working cases with the department, she wasn’t as familiar with it as she was with Medical City; it seemed that most of her victims of violence had gone to Medical City. Or maybe it just meant there was more trouble in the neighborhood of Medical City. In any case, she had to stop at the information desk and ask for directions to the ER.

  The elderly woman at the desk put her knitting aside as Lacey pulled out her badge.

  “Oh, my goodness!” She had the feeble voice Lacey had come to associate with humans of extreme age. With a hand that seemed to tremble, she pointed them in the right direction. As Lacey thanked her, she sat back down in the comfortable-looking chair and picked up her project, never missing a stitch.

  “What are you making?” Colton asked the question that was on her mind.

  “Oh, this is going to be a sweater for my great-granddaughter,” she answered with a grin. “That is, if I can get it finished before she outgrows it!”

  Lacey was shaking her head as they went down the long hallway in the direction the woman had shown them.

  “What?” Colton asked her.

  “Why on earth someone would want to make clothes like that when it’s just easier to buy them?”

  He shrugged as he shuffled along in his unusual gait. “My mom likes to do that. But she crochets, that lady was knitting.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I dunno except knitting uses those two needle things, my mom always used just one, with a hook on the end of it.”

  Lacey envisioned his mother, in full Wolf form, sitting and making whatever it was by hand, and the image was so absurd that she almost laughed out loud. Though she was still furious at Colton, just for being a Wolf, and her commander, for giving her a Wolf as a partner, she was able to control the anger within. At least for the time being. But she still had a bone to pick with Commander Wilson.

  12

  “What you are will show in what you do.” ~~Thomas Alva Edison

  Their victim was in the process of getting the slice in his left side stitched up when Lacey knocked on the door of the hospital exam room. He was young, maybe in his early 20’s, with sandy brown hair and wary dark brown eyes. Lacey watched his eyes constantly flick back and forth between her and Colton, yet the young man ignored the doctor who was working on his injury.

  “I’m Rick. Richard Stemple,” the victim introduced himself. He made no attempt to shake either of their hands.

  “Can you tell us what happened, Rick?” Colton asked b
efore Lacey could get the words out. She scowled at him but said nothing.

  “Oh, sure. Me and Jonesy was just sittin’ there on the train, we was playing Duty Calls on our cells.” Lacey raised her eyebrows and gave him a puzzled look. “You know, it’s a first person shooter game? You have to be a soldier and get through the campaigns, kill the bad guys, stay alive.”

  “Okay, so what started it all?”

  “We was on our way to Fair Park, we wanted to buy some tickets to a concert. Well, Jonesy, he got all peeved because I didn’t have his back and he lost a life. I went through the map a different way than he did.”

  “Wait a minute. This started over a video game?” Colton sounded skeptical.

  “Well yeah, you know, like, I cost him a life, dude.”

  Colton glanced at Lacey, and she gave him an ‘I don’t have a clue’ look. “So, what happened next?” She glanced at her tablet where she was making notes.

  “So he like, punches me in the shoulder, right? I ain’t gonna take that shit off nobody so I punch back. Next thing I know, we’re standin’ up in the train and now he’s all-out punching me, not playin’ around.”

  Richard drew in a sharp breath and glanced at the doctor, who was still working on the 6 inch gash in his side. “Damn dude, like that freaking hurts, man.”

  “Sorry,” the doctor muttered.

  “So here I am, trying to dodge blows with the train a-rockin’ and a-swayin’. That’s when Jonesy pulled out a pocket knife and swiped at me. By then, train security had come into the car, just as we’re makin’ the stop at Baylor Station. Jonesy zips off before the car even quit movin’. Security took off after him and I called 911.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  Richard looked at Lacey as he answered. “Willard Jones. But we all call him Jonesy.”