by L. A. Banks
She blew out a long breath and paced to the window and back when all they did was stare at her, chewing slowly and sipping their coffee slowly. “You guys have got to get up on the new technology and come into the human twenty-first century. Their technology makes them almost as formidable as you—it’s their brand of magic, their brand of telepathy, all right? So stop looking at me like I’ve grown two heads. This is serious. I need to check in—so can you just take me to the outside wall and drop the drawbridge so I can at least get cell phone reception?”
It was worse than she’d thought. Her cell phone was blowing up. Every member of her team had called twice, and Colonel Madison beat Doc’s three calls by mere seconds. Starting at the top of the food chain, she called Colonel Madison, then Doc, checked in with Winters and told him to get back to Clarissa and company, all while half listening to the phone conversation that Hunter and Crow were having with Silver Hawk and Bear.
“Respect restored, lassie. I need to create a human communications room in the sidhe somehow,” Sir Rodney said, looking at Rupert. “Who knew?”
“Definitely,” Sasha said, terminating the last call and shoving her phone in her pocket. “Okay, here’s the deal—I have to go to the base alone.” She glanced at Hunter, and he nodded. “Whatever any of you do, please do not rush in there and freak people out. Things are badly tense right now.”
“You have my word,” Hunter said. “I must go through the shadow lands taking Crow with me. Silver Hawk has seen much in new visions that could help our cause.”
“With a little glamour,” Shogun said, nodding to Sir Rodney, “I can work with Fae forces to try to track down where Lady Jung Suk is resting by day. After all her night hunting, she must be fatigued . . . and cats sleep by day, anyway. If she’s embedded in the Asian community, my language skills there will help.”
Sir Rodney nodded. “Summon my captain of the Fae guards, Rupert. I want an all-points bulletin out on this Lady Leopard, now that we have her image.” He tapped his cell phone and tossed it to Rupert. “Make sure my men know what she looks like. We follow Shogun’s lead, but we’ll have to glamour him since his face was on that video the civilian took.”
“We’ll all meet back up at sundown at The Fair Lady,” Sasha said. “But don’t anybody get jumpy—call, use a cell, send a missive, whatever, but no crazy, sudden moves.”
CHAPTER 17
The entire base was in a frenzy by the time she stepped out of the shadows. The only thing that kept her from getting shot was that she’d forewarned Madison and had simply shown up in his office.
“Why didn’t you call as soon as you saw the bodies?” he said, not bothering with formalities after she’d given him a start.
“These don’t work in the shadow lands or the sidhe, sir,” she said, showing him her cell phone. “We were unarmed, save our ability to do hand-to-hand combat, sir. You saw how that predator moves and what it can do. Our first priority was survival and evasive tactics. We took a fallback position in the sidhe. One of our men was injured and we had to get him out of there. He’s not a shadow-jumper, couldn’t get out of harm’s way other than to get him to the fortress.”
Colonel Madison nodded. “Been there. That is what I will report to the Joint Chiefs.”
Sasha relaxed even while remaining at attention.
“Course of action, Captain?”
For a moment, she just stared at him. Was he actually asking for her opinion? Wow . . .
“I need to get back to the scene of the crime before the scent trail gets too weak or is destroyed by human boots on the ground.”
“We already have a team en route that will seal off the area and will not even touch the bodies until you and your trackers can make an assessment.”
“Thank you, sir . . . thank you for not believing what you saw on that video.”
Colonel Madison nodded. “It was jarring, initially, Captain. You looked dirty, clothes torn, looked like you’d been in a scrape. But based upon the amount of blood that was let . . .” He shook his head. “You all would have been splattered from head to toe, no matter how fast you were moving.”
Again, she just stared at him for a moment, allowing new respect to dawn between them.
“I’d like to interview the civilian, sir, and then I want to take some samples from the bodies and have them sent to Doc in the lab. He’s familiar with demon-infected Were saliva. If he could also have a sample from the remains of your men, sir,” she added more gently. “We have to be sure that it was actually a Were and not a Vampire. They have different saliva tracers. We learned that when investigating the late General Donald Wilkerson’s death.”
“Consider it done.”
“And we’re definitely going to need ammo, sir. My weapons were stripped from me when I was detained at NORAD . . . but—”
“Say no more. You’re locked and loaded, Captain—and you just tell me how many men you need to hunt this beast down.”
“Thank you, sir. But before I put human lives in harm’s way . . . let me assess the predator, find out where its lair or den is, then I promise you I’ll come knocking.”
Colonel Madison gave her a slow, respectful salute. “I know we don’t generally do this indoors, but I owed you this.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He shook his head. “No, Captain. Thank you.” His gaze locked with hers as he lifted his chin a little higher. “Never in my life have I seen anything like what this beast is or what it can do . . . and you were out there with it alone with a team of unarmed men . . . and you are ready to head right back into hell, going where angels fear to tread. As a fellow warrior—you have my utmost respect. Hoo-rah.”
“Hoo-rah, sir.”
No one could have prepared her for the way Colonel Madison responded to her. That was the glorious and also unsettling thing about humans—you could never predict how they’d process any given situation.
Sasha’s nervous system felt like it was on fire as she walked down the long corridor to a conference room, where two MPs stepped aside to let her and Colonel Madison enter.
Russell Conway looked up from his Styrofoam cup of coffee, his hazel eyes holding a slightly insane quality as sunlight shimmered in them. He was unshaven, his clothes rumpled and his hair mussed, like a man who’d slept on a park bench all night.
“They finally believe me. The world finally hears what I’ve been trying to tell them for decades.”
Sasha listened to the unstable wobble in Russell Conway’s voice and gave Colonel Madison a sidelong glance.
“Are you hungry, Mister Conway? Can we bring you some doughnuts or something?” Again, Sasha glimpsed the colonel, who nodded to an MP.
“No . . . no. I cannot eat food now. The ecstasy of discovery is far greater than you can know. They believed me!”
Sasha slowly moved to the table and sat down. An MP slid a yellow legal pad and a pen over to her as the colonel took a position in the back of the room.
“Mister Conway, can you go back to that night and tell us again in your own words what happened?”
He took a deep slurp of his coffee and then began toying with his cup. “My story won’t change, you know. It’s all on the videos. Those guards you called took me back to the hotel I was staying at, and it was loaded with journalists. I woke everybody up and showed them my camera. They ran with the feeds—let me give them copies and upload it everywhere. It’s worldwide now—breaking news. I’m famous. They’ve tested it and they know it wasn’t digitally altered or a hoax.”
“We believe you,” Sasha said carefully and slowly. “I was there, remember. We came up and got to you just in time, just before the predator got you.”
“Yes, yes, you see, Colonel! One of your people saw it, too!”
The colonel just nodded. Sasha leaned forward and clasped Mr. Conway’s hands, but then quickly drew back. The surge of insane energy made the hair stand up on her arms, and suddenly she felt nauseous.
“I’m sorry,” she said, �
�I didn’t mean to invade your personal space—you just seemed upset and it was reflex. I was out of line,” she added, trying to recover.
“It’s all right.” He smiled and leaned close to her. “I now know you believe me and I also know what you are.” He laughed insanely and shook his head. “You’re one of them and they probably don’t even know it.”
“Sir, I’d like you to focus on last night. Let’s go back to when you were walking in the woods to investigate the Bayou House with Ghost Finders, Inc. Did you hear any growls, any specific sounds . . . can you remember any smells?”
Russell Conway sat back in his chair with a smug expression and then stared at the wall. “I want a lawyer, if you’re going to detain me . . . and I have an interview at ten A.M. on CNN. Can I go?”
“There’s no reason to hold this man,” Sasha said, still trying to shake off the willies Conway had given her.
The colonel called the MP over. “Process him for release from the base and give him an escort back to his hotel.” He turned to Russell Conway and offered him a slight nod. “Thank you for making us aware of the situation.”
Russell Conway just laughed the shrill, high-pitched laugh of the insane.
Sasha stood and waited until the man had been escorted out of the room before speaking to the colonel. “You might want to put a detail on him. He’s thoroughly unstable. Something happened to him out there in the woods . . . might be a psychotic break, might be worse. But I’m concerned, sir.”
“He knew you were a wolf. You could see that in his eyes. Maybe he saw what we saw out there when you and your guide came out of the shadows.”
“Yeah . . .,” Sasha said, sounding distracted as she rubbed the nape of her neck. They’d come out of the shadows with eyes gleaming and canines presented, but hadn’t shown Conway a full transformation. Still, he was into supernatural research; that might have been enough.
“You said ‘might be worse,’ Captain . . . what could be worse?” The colonel’s eyes held quiet fear as he stared at Sasha. “I was out there under the same conditions—a sole survivor. Is the Werewolf virus airborne, catching?”
Sasha shook her head and extended her palm. “Let me shake your hand, Colonel.”
He stared at her hand for a moment.
“I need to feel your aura, your vibe. It’s sort of a wolf thing.”
Complying, he nervously shook her hand.
“You’re clean, sir. A little weary, but clean.”
“And that guy wasn’t?”
Sasha shook her head. “Not completely . . . but it wasn’t Were contagion. Truthfully, I’ve never directly felt anything like it in my life.”
* * *
This was the part of her job that she hated most, the aftermath forensics. A cloud of flies took to the air as she covered her nose and plowed through the swarm. Louisiana in July was no joke. Heat and death roiled the acid in her empty stomach, and she was glad that she only had half a cup of coffee in it.
Thick sulfur stench assaulted her nose as she stooped down to look at the claw marks on an arm and hand that was still attached to a camera. Carefully lifting the tissue by the open gashes along the bicep, she took a section of loose flesh off the limb with a pair of tweezers, dropped it on a petri dish, and covered it with the lid.
“Mark this claw tear sample,” she said to the soldier beside her. “Watch where you step, it’s gruesome out here. Ship that on dry ice to Doctor Xavier Holland at NORAD.”
The soldier nodded and extended the cooler for her with his eyes watering from the fumes.
“Just one more, and then you guys can bag ’em and tag ’em,” she said. “I need a bite site for saliva.”
Sasha stood and allowed her gaze to scan the ground, looking for a gouged body part. But everything that she saw seemed as though giant claws had raked it. The torn-off limbs clearly had been removed by powerful swipes. So had most of the guttings. Then she spotted a crushed skull that had been shorn from the body and walked over to it.
The person’s face was crushed flat as though each side of the head had been held in a vise-like grip. Brains had exploded out of the back; the eyes had obviously burst from their sockets given the sudden pressure. But to actually get the head off the shoulders required huge fangs.
Hurrying to the gruesome task, Sasha called over her assistant and got another lab evidence dish and several swabs. Green, slimy goo mixed with blackening blood stuck to the long swab and came away from the bite site in a tar-like string. Her assistant turned away and finally tossed his cookies.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, panting and covering his mouth and nose with his forearm.
“Not a problem, soldier,” Sasha said, stripping off her latex gloves and dropping them in the cooler with the last sample. “Just as long as you missed a body and didn’t upchuck in the cooler, it’s all good.”
Fresh air never felt so good. She didn’t care that it was close to ninety-eight degrees or that the humidity was probably 102; she just needed the downwind scents of the true outdoors to clean the filth out of her sinuses.
Every so often, Sasha leaned her head out of the Humvee window and took a deep breath. It would have been easier to shadow-jump, but after what she’d seen, she was bone-weary. A little normal human companionship, even by way of a silent MP, was better than going into the misty darkness alone.
She gave her driver the location of Lawrence DeWitt’s apartment and jumped out of the vehicle when it came to a full stop on the street.
“Wait here,” she told him. “I’ll be ten minutes, tops.”
It seemed like a simple thing. She just wanted to check on the kid and ask him a few more questions. But when she came out of his closet, for a moment all she could do was stand there.
Blood and flesh were everywhere. Sulfur reeked so thickly in the room that it made her eyes water until she gagged. It was as though something had exploded DeWitt. A lone eyeball stared up at her from the rug. Green gook mixed with fat, muscle, bone, and flesh covered the walls and furniture, splattered his television and computer screens. The kitchen cabinets and counter were sprayed, and every few feet she could see chunks of flesh embedded in the blood-soaked rug.
“Shit . . .” Sasha backed into the closet and came out in the alley to begin casing the building for signs of how the attacker had gotten in.
If it was Were, it could have just crashed through the door, a wall, or a window, but the building was intact, just as DeWitt’s doors and windows seemed to be. He was fortified against Vampires, since her little visit, unless he’d foolishly opened the door for one—which was very, very possible. But she’d never seen Vampires off somebody like this. Then again, they might have thought he and his crew had opened Ariel Beauchamp’s coffin to daylight and been really pissed. Plus, he had ratted them out on cell phone video, which she’d sent over the airwaves to Winter’s. “Damn, damn, damn!”
With a knife in her conscience, she walked back to the military vehicle. “Let the colonel know there’s been another killing. One civilian, male, ID: Lawrence DeWitt. No need for a body bag, just an evidence cooler and a wet vac.”
* * *
Elder Vlad opened his eyes in his lair and chuckled as his fangs lengthened. He breathed in deeply and then closed his eyes again, sending his thoughts to Cerridwen.
Have you watched the news, love?
She opened her eyes as her fingers curled around the icy armrests of her throne. “Yes,” she murmured. “The butcherings leave nothing to the imagination. The humans are now fully engaged, I suspect.”
Yes . . . you and I now have our wolf hunt. All that is left now is to bring it all to a vote.
Hunter sat before his grandfather, listening to his slow post-trance speech pattern while trying to understand the ancient wisdom embedded in the parables and images he conveyed.
“There is a twin evil slithering in the darkness. Two souls inside the same body . . . one is but a faint wisp of life—the other ferocious.” Silver Hawk drew a labored
breath, and Hunter placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Grandfather, you must rest. How deeply did you go into the shadow lands for this information?”
Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow glanced at each other when the elderly shaman didn’t respond.
“He was in at least twenty-four hours without relenting,” Bear Shadow confided. “There were times he seemed to be fighting something or wrestling something.”
“Grandfather . . . why didn’t you call me to you in the shadow lands? You went through the demon doors, didn’t you!”
Hunted squatted down before his grandfather, who was seated on the cabin sofa.
“I am old; my life force is to be used for the future generations, not to cling to this world as though I am unaware that there is another side.”
Hunter closed his eyes and hugged his grandfather for a moment before coming to sit beside him.
“I had to go in and seal the breach,” Silver Hawk said in a rasp. “The sigils against each spirit in our clan that the Unseelie left from the earlier war—it weakened the veil between the worlds. The shadow lands were in peril. Something got out and had a grudge against the way of the wolf. This thing that is trapped cannot go back into our shadow lands or slither through by way of the demon doors. It is trapped in the world of the humans, hence it will continue feeding until it is destroyed.”
Hunter pulled out his cell phone and showed him the image of Amy Chen that Shogun had given them all. “This girl, is she carrying the demon you speak of?”
Silver Hawk shook his head no. “She is the whisper of life and Light battling within her own body against a ferocious predator within. Her parents’ prayers are keeping her light alive . . . but this other thing is stronger than what lies within her.”