by Anne Bishop
“I mean about having me involved. Swinn will chew bricks if he discovers I collected any evidence.”
Another thing he’d deal with later. “Well, he’ll never have a chance to look for himself, will he? Let’s do this and get out of here.”
The first thing he noticed when he approached the twisted body was the tie that was now partially visible. Which meant someone had fiddled with the corpse in the past few minutes.
“Gods above and below,” Julian breathed. He didn’t say another word, just started taking pictures of the body in situ.
Grimshaw looked around, moving out in an ever-widening circle. He found it unnerving that anything big enough to do that to a full-grown man also managed to leave no tracks—no sign of any kind of its presence. He bagged the service revolver that Baker had dropped.
“Done,” Julian said.
Grimshaw waved to the men in the hearse. The older man, who had been driving, paled when he saw the body and realized what “facedown, feet up” meant. The younger one stumbled away and was sick.
“We’re going to take a look around back,” Grimshaw said. “Wait for us to escort you out.”
“Caw!”
“Caw!” “Caw!” “Caw!”
The Crowgard didn’t follow them to the back of the house, but they weren’t unsupervised, not with a big-ass Hawk perched in one of the trees that gave it a clear view of the screened-in porch that ran across the back of the house.
Blood in the grass. A lot of blood.
“Whatever attacked must have hit an artery,” Julian said as he took pictures.
Grimshaw noticed something glinting in the grass. He pointed. “Take some shots of those before I bag them.”
Julian huffed as he photographed the set of lock picks. “Damned fools, trying to break into this place.”
Damned was right. Even the baby cop who wasn’t physically hurt would be damaged by the experience. At the very least, he’d ride through a lot of nightmare-filled nights.
After bagging the lock picks, Grimshaw turned the handle on the screen door.
“Wayne!” Julian breathed the word.
The door opened, proving Chesnik had gotten the door unlatched before he was attacked—proving he had broken the rules of staying out of Ms. DeVine’s house.
“Someone used lock picks to open this door,” he said in a loud voice. “From what I can see from here, the intruder didn’t actually enter Ms. DeVine’s house or disturb any of her possessions, but we will inform her attorney about the attempted break-in.” He started to shut the door.
“Wayne!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Grimshaw saw Julian drop to the ground. He hunched his shoulders and lowered his head a moment before he felt the tip of a wing brush across his back.
An aborted attack or a warning?
Shaken, and not daring to reach for the door again to shut it, he and Julian gathered the evidence and their equipment and headed for the front of the house.
Grimshaw glanced back. The Hawk they had seen was still in the tree, watching them. The attack, or warning, had come from a different direction.
Something to remember since he was certain he’d be coming back to The Jumble before this was over.
CHAPTER 14
Vicki
Sunsday, Juin 13
After receiving a call from Officer Grimshaw, Ilya Sanguinati gave me a ride to the Pizza Shack so that I could pick up dinner. He wouldn’t explain why he had ordered a large Meat Eater’s pizza with double meat as well as the mushroom and black olives pizza I had ordered for myself. Well, I’d be sharing it with Aggie if she decided to join me for cop and crime night on TV.
Then I met my new employee-lodgers, Conan Beargard and Robert “call me Cougar” Panthera, and I understood why I was bringing home what you could call the Carnivore’s Special pizza, which had so much meat you couldn’t tell there was sauce, cheese, or a crust underneath.
I looked at Conan and Cougar and hoped it was meaty enough that they wouldn’t be looking to nibble anything else. I rather liked having ten toes, not to mention a full set of fingers.
Aggie arrived before I could set out plates at the round kitchen table that seated four but could squeeze in five or six. She was a little wary of “the boys,” but that wore off in a hurry. My wariness didn’t wear off as fast, but I think I was entitled to a few moments of anxiety. After all, I, the dumpy human, was sitting with a Bear, a Cougar, and a vampire—because Ilya Sanguinati stayed and had a piece of pizza with the rest of us. I wasn’t sure if he liked it or just didn’t want to make it obvious that he had other dining preferences. Or maybe he understood that having a known predator sitting at the table would help me get acquainted with “the boys,” who were chowing down on the Carnivore’s Special.
While we bonded over pizza, I learned that Conan had settled into one of The Jumble’s cabins near Mill Creek because the creek provided good fishing, and he liked eating fish. Except for making patchwork repairs on the roofs and replacing a couple of broken windows in order to prevent any further weather damage to those cabins, I hadn’t done any renovating. By human standards, those cabins were still “primitive,” since anyone staying in them had to go to a separate building for toilets and showers. But Conan seemed to think the cabin was very “human,” although the bed puzzled him and he couldn’t figure out how to sleep on it, so he’d been sleeping on the floor in his furry form.
I explained that the mattresses had rotted and been removed, and that I would purchase a new box spring and mattress, as well as linens and blankets. Cougar was also in one of the primitive cabins, but he’d chosen one from the second set of cabins that were close to the lake. He, too, had been puzzled by the bed frame but hadn’t given it much thought.
As we talked, I had the impression that Aggie had more of what they called a human-centric education than the boys, who made me think of young men in earlier times of human history who would give up formal education before finishing grade school in order to go to work. I didn’t get the impression that Conan and Cougar wanted to get too humanized, but they wanted something enough to settle into two of the cabins and do some work in lieu of rent.
I put away what was left of the vegetable pizza. After confirming what time Ilya would return in the morning to take me to the bank, I said good night to my attorney and settled in to watch cop and crime shows with my new friends.
The boys had never seen television, so I had to explain that commercials weren’t some weird schism in the story, that they were like their own little stories about something humans were selling and wanted other humans to buy. When Aggie said it was all right to talk during commercials because no one wanted to listen to them anyway, that started a whole round of questions about why the TV police did or didn’t do the same things the police who had been sniffing around The Jumble had done. Which made me wonder if I should warn Officer Grimshaw about how carefully he was watched when he came around to investigate.
There were growls when the cops missed a clue and snarls when the bad humans did something sneaky—and more than a few eye rolls over human behavior in general. At one point, Aggie shouted at a woman who approached a villain who was pretending to be hurt. “It’s a trick! There’s no blood! Can’t you smell that there’s no blood?”
During commercials I tried to explain about human senses without sounding too apologetic for the inadequacies of my species. I ended up feeling that all I’d managed to do was convince my new friends that fish were smarter than humans even if humans did have those nifty opposable thumbs.
The other thing I realized by the end of the evening was that humans and the Others did have one thing in common—we both had a love for, and fascination with, stories. I learned that every form of terra indigene had its own teaching stories as well as stories that were the repository of their history and connection to the world. And they all had storie
s that were told for the fun of it.
After the last show of the evening, the boys and Aggie went to their own cabins, and I triple-checked the porch door to make sure it was locked. Ilya had said one of the detectives had opened the door but hadn’t gone inside. As I did my walk around the rest of the house, I stopped in the library and looked at the books I’d been buying from Lettuce Reed. I hadn’t purchased anything I didn’t want to read. With only one lodger, what was the point, especially since Aggie seemed as enthusiastic about reading thrillers as I was? But now I looked at the books I had purchased and considered them with an eye to reading level. I was pretty sure Conan and Cougar would like the story lines in the thrillers. I was equally sure their reading skills weren’t yet a match for those books, and making a trip to the story place had sounded like one of the big reasons those two had decided to interact with humans at all.
If Ilya Sanguinati was willing to stick around the village for a bit before taking me home tomorrow, I needed to talk to Julian Farrow about some appropriate books before I talked to the boys about a trip into town.
CHAPTER 15
Ilya
Sunsday, Juin 13
Ilya Sanguinati walked to the lowest level of the lodge’s deck and stared out over the lake. Had he made a mistake allowing Victoria DeVine to restore some of the buildings in The Jumble? If the terra indigene had prevented any human from taking up the agreed-upon caretaker duties for one more human generation, the agreement the Sanguinati had made with Honoria Dane and her designated heirs all those years ago would have been considered null and void, and the buildings could have been claimed as part of the terra indigene settlement. Humans could have been denied all access to Lake Silence except the southern tip, which, per the agreement with the first humans who had wanted to settle near the lake, was accessible to humans only as long as Sproing remained a viable human village.
But losing Sproing as a viable village would mean losing easy access to the Sanguinati’s preferred prey. They had successfully hunted from the shadows since the village’s founding, becoming more of a folktale that produced a delicious shiver than a real threat. Humans living and visiting Sproing believed themselves safe from those predators—even when the predators sat among their prey and became the seducers who were woven into a different kind of tale.
“This Victoria worries you.”
Ilya waited until Natasha, his potential mate, stood beside him before answering. “She is not what I expected.” Through the informants the Sanguinati maintained in the village, he had followed every step of Victoria’s progress with the renovations so that he could reassure the terra indigene the rest of them feared that this human was behaving honorably. He’d also been careful to keep his distance—until the Crow had come winging across the lake looking for help because humans had come to The Jumble and had taken Miss Vicki away.
Perhaps keeping his distance had been another mistake. The informants had been less forthcoming than usual, leaving him unprepared to deal with a human who was emotionally outside of his experience.
“You could have fed from her today,” Natasha said. “The rest of us could see it, feel it. She reads stories about a vampire’s kiss and would have given her blood willingly.”
He nodded. No point denying what even Officer Grimshaw had recognized when the police officer had tried to stop Victoria from moving toward him. “I could have fed from her, but only once. Then fledgling trust would have broken with whatever fantasy she has about our kind, and she would have run from any offer of help from us. No more flowing around the edges. With Victoria as caretaker, breaking the connection the Dane family had with the land, The Jumble can become a functional terra indigene settlement again, but we need direct access to her in order to deal with this potential threat.” He hesitated, then added, “Something inside of her is wounded.”
“I didn’t notice any damage. She doesn’t move as if she were injured.”
“Not the body. This wound wasn’t apparent—at least not to us. But the detective who was in the bank with her knew the wound was there and knew how to open it again.”
“So she is vulnerable to attack.”
“Yes. And like any other animal, she will hide the wound whenever possible to escape being targeted by a predator.” But hiding a wound wasn’t the same as healing it. Was there anything they could do to help Victoria heal? Their plan to reseed Sproing with humans of the Sanguinati’s choosing hinged on The Jumble being restored and providing another source of transient prey. And The Jumble’s restoration hinged on the Elders tolerating the designated caretaker. So far they were showing more than tolerance toward Victoria, and the warning should be clear enough for even humans to understand.
“Perhaps we should watch some of those cop and crime dramas to find out how humans think attorneys should act,” Natasha said as they returned to the lodge.
“Perhaps.” He had never been inside a courtroom to defend someone or argue a case. He specialized in leases for land and buildings, and his client had always been the terra indigene. Until now.
Victoria DeVine hadn’t been wounded during all these months when she’d been restoring The Jumble, but she was wounded now. What was he supposed to do about that? His informants had failed to provide any information or give any warning. Perhaps that was as simple as loyalty to a friend, but that meant he wouldn’t depend on them where Victoria was concerned. He needed another source of information.
“I’ll join you soon,” he told Natasha. Then he went into the room that served as an office for all of them, picked up the phone, and dialed the number for a Sanguinati who had access to other resources. “Vlad? It’s Ilya. I need to understand wounds that affect the human mind and emotions. Could the Lakeside Courtyard’s female pack help with that?”
CHAPTER 16
Grimshaw
Windsday, Juin 14
Grimshaw left the boardinghouse at first light and drove to a truck stop between Bristol and Crystalton. While he was on highway patrol, it was a regular stop for coffee or a meal—a place to sit and be quickly available without burning gasoline all day.
When he pulled into the lot, he noticed the new addition behind the diner. There had been toilets—a convenience for truckers who pulled in to a designated “safe” place after dark, especially after the diner closed for the night. Now there were also pay-by-the-minute showers, like the ones provided in a campground for those brave enough—or foolish enough—to stay that close to what watched them from the shadows of the woods. No sign advertising the new facilities, but the men and women who made a living on the road would know about the amenity.
Captain Walter Hargreaves was already in a booth, a cup of black coffee in front of him.
Grimshaw slid into the opposite seat, nodded to the waitress who lifted the coffeepot and raised an eyebrow in question, then studied his boss.
“Swinn and his CIU team work out of Putney on Prong Lake,” Grimshaw said. “When I called the Bristol station to confirm a suspicious death, why didn’t the CIU team from Bristol come to Sproing to investigate?”
“That’s a good question,” Hargreaves replied. Then he smiled at the waitress and ordered breakfast. He waited until Grimshaw placed his order and the waitress was out of earshot before continuing. “All I know is that Swinn called the Bristol station minutes after your call and said he and his team had been assigned to the case and Bristol was to stand down. He said he was already heading up to Sproing for a separate investigation and the suspicious death could be connected, so it made sense for him to take a look at the alleged body.” He swallowed some coffee, his eyes never leaving Grimshaw’s face. “His call came in so fast after yours, I started thinking he’d been tipped off, maybe even anticipated some trouble at The Jumble.”
“I didn’t call him,” Grimshaw growled.
“I didn’t think you did. But he was expecting a call and already had his team ready to roll.”
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“Including a baby cop who had no business doing more than directing traffic.”
Hargreaves looked grim. “Tell me all of it. Tell me everything you didn’t put in your report and wouldn’t say over the telephone.”
Grimshaw told him about the Sproingers gathering—and Julian Farrow’s theory that they were a form the terra indigene had absorbed to be able to wander all around Sproing without humans thinking twice about their presence. He told Hargreaves about Vicki DeVine’s state of mind when she got out of the car after Swinn and Reynolds brought her in for questioning, and the empty safe-deposit box, and the sudden appearance of one of the Sanguinati, who claimed to be her attorney. He recounted the terrified call from Osgood asking for backup, for help—and what he and Julian had found when they reached The Jumble.
Their breakfasts arrived. Grimshaw shoveled food into his mouth for a couple of minutes, then put his fork down and sat back. “Osgood shouldn’t have been there. He’s too young to be on a CIU team.”
Hargreaves kept eating for another minute. Then he, too, put his fork down—but he leaned forward. “Julian Farrow. You went into a bad situation with Julian Farrow as your backup? You’re either crazy or suicidal.”
“I trust him.” Before Hargreaves could respond to that beyond swearing under his breath, Grimshaw asked the question that had been bothering him since he and Julian returned from The Jumble yesterday. “All those years ago, did the brass know Julian was an Intuit? Did they know why he had that uncanny ability to sense things?”
He saw genuine surprise on Hargreaves’s face.
“Intuit? Are you sure?”
Grimshaw smiled when the waitress came over to refill their cups and ask if they wanted anything else. The smile faded as soon as she walked away. “I’m sure. Julian confirmed it.”