Sliver of Silver (Blushing Death)

by Sabol, Suzanne M.

  “What was that all about?” he asked, glaring at the officer behind me. Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed the ass still had his hand resting on the butt of his gun.

  “Just a little test of wills. They don’t like you bringing a psychic in. Told you.” I shrugged.

  “Then it’s a good thing it’s not up to them,” he said.

  I followed him into the house, hoping I wouldn’t find what my gut and my nose told me was there.

  “You can see whoever it was broke down the door,” Derek said with sarcasm.

  Broke it down? They damn near blew it right off the hinges! The door lay caddy corner across the threshold, dangling from the doorjamb by a single screw in a mangled bottom hinge.

  We stepped over the door and waded through the living room, dodging cops standing around gawking at the psychic. Perfect! That’s all I needed, people watching me a little too carefully.

  The living room was tidy, but not overly clean. A couple of remotes, an empty beer bottle, and a Shape magazine were strewn about the old and badly nicked coffee table.

  We passed a bedroom that doubled as a gym with an elliptical and a weight bench taking up most of the space in the confined room. A set of eight pound, ten pound, and fifteen pound weights lined neatly on the weight rack along the wall.

  As Derek and I turned the corner, cops and techs lined the walls to the last bedroom at the end, crowding the narrow walkway with bulk and emotion. They didn’t raise their eyes to me and they sure as hell didn’t look in the bedroom. I could taste the fear and anxiety on the stale air, like honey ice cream, thick, rich, and sweet on my tongue

  So why was I going to go in there and not flinch when no one else would? When the look on these guys faces said that whatever was in there was bad? Real bad.

  I had to go in when no one else would. No matter how bad the dreams got, if looking at something horrible helped stop this, then I was going to do it. A lot of people were counting on me to be this person, to see the horrible things, to kill the horrible beings. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be this person anymore.

  I gathered myself together and breathed deep. Mistake! Big mistake. The scent of sweet metal, blood lingered thick on the uncirculated air, mixing with the heady stench of torn bowels. I almost gagged as I stepped into the room and the stench hit me full in the face. The confined space made the smell worse than in the open air of the hallway. Raising the back of my hand to my nose, I tried to breathe through my mouth. That didn’t work either. I tasted the scent of raw meat on my tongue and shivered as my stomach growled and my mouth watered.

  I tried to see everything else first, everything but the heap of flesh stretched across the bed. The walls were bare; no pictures, paintings, or memorabilia of any kind. The paint on the walls was chipped and cracked, peeling at the ceiling; evidence that the room hadn’t been painted in a very long time.

  There wasn’t enough whitewashing in the world to cover up the brown blood and fecal matter splattered against the faded olive-green walls. The carpet, a burnt orange shag, was full of flesh, blood, and little bits of gore that I didn’t want to identify. This house was going to be hard to sell.

  A vanity in the corner had a few eye shadows, some mascara, and pink lipstick. Sitting next to the mascara was a cheap bristled brush filled with long strands of dark, jet-black hair caked to the brush like plaster. The hair in the brush was so thick only the little plastic tips of the bristles showed. Of all the gore in the room, the hair in the brush was what was challenging my stomach. I turned to face the victim instead of the hairbrush and felt better.

  The woman’s skin was a deep, rich bronze, Hispanic with curves where women should have curves. She was more on the lean side than heavy and tall. From the length of her on the mattress, she was about six feet tall. She was strapped to the bed at all four corners with anything they could find. A scarf. A sock. The ankles were tied down with something so soaked with blood I couldn’t tell what they were. Her dark panties were shredded across her pelvis and hooked around her thighs like they had split them down the middle.

  “How long has she been dead?” I asked. The air-conditioner was off and the windows were closed. “Was the air off when you showed up?”

  “Only a few hours and yeah, it was.” Derek pulled out his notepad.

  Why would they have turned the air off? The heat only made the smell worse.

  “The neighbors heard screaming at around 1:45 a.m. and called the police. It took a while for the local sheriff to call us in,” he hissed. Contempt dripped from every word as Derek turned to the sheriff’s deputy standing near the bedroom door in the hallway. That was as close as the Deputy Sheriff was going to get.

  “So whoever did this was still close when the police arrived?” I prayed that maybe we’d finally found a lead.

  “They might have been here when the neighbor called but the response time was . . . what was the response time Deputy Harris?” Derek clipped, anger making his tone harsh and his words sharp. He sounded angrier than I’d ever heard him. Even I took a step back.

  “Twenty-five minutes, sir,” the deputy spit out at Derek with just as much venom. There was clearly no love lost between these two departments.

  “Twenty-five minutes? They were long gone by then.” I sighed in frustration.

  I inched toward the body, small steps through blood-drizzled carpet to get a better look. The gut wound was similar to the other woman, but cleaner, like one of them was a messy eater. The woman’s face was intact, thankfully. The only place that they’d really done any damage was the victim’s gut and soft tissue. Her intestines were flung all over her chest and the surrounding bed, soaking the sheets, comforter, and mattress with her now stale blood.

  A milky white substance ran from the woman’s nose down into her ear in a sticky stream that congealed and hardened in a trail down her cheek.

  “Do you think it’s the same people?” Derek asked in a low whisper so that only I could hear his deep rasp. “It doesn’t seem like the same M.O.”

  “Is that what I think it is?” I bit out, horrified as I pointed to the sticky substance filling her ear.

  “Yeah, it is,” he said with a grim note to his tone. “That’s why I question if it’s the same perps. I won’t know until the M.E. gets done with her, but I think there was sexual assault.” He closed his notebook, shoving it into his jacket pocket as he stepped up beside me.

  The victim’s eyes were still open, wide and frozen in a horrible nightmare that she’d never escape. Closing my eyes to try and wipe the horror of her lifeless eyes from my mind, I let my mind wander and sense what the room was telling me. A soft, treacherous growl rumbled through my brain as that familiar voice breathed in the scent of naked aggression, of the threat to us. I let my anger pulse through me, burning away everything else and opened my eyes.

  “There was no assault,” I stressed. This had been foreplay for them. It wasn’t about the girl on the bed. It was about them hunting together and a message to me. I got the message loud and clear.

  “Why do you say that?” Derek asked as he rounded the bed, taking in the scene from the other side. I glanced around the room at the three officers standing around, listening to us. Derek got the message and cleared the room with no more than an affirmative, “Out.”

  “She hasn’t been touched,” I stated.

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “There’s no bruising around the thighs or pubic region and more importantly, these are werewolves. In their basic nature they’re wolves.” I breathed in the smell of the room, trying to ignore the growl that rumbled in my stomach. I wished I could pick out the scents in the room, distinguish one from the other instead of one jumbled mess. My nose wasn’t that good and I wasn’t sure how to use the powers that I’d gotten from Danny.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I as
ked, glancing up from the girl on the bed to Derek. He nodded. “On the last body, did you find that one set of jaw marks was smaller or narrower than the other?”

  “Yeah. How did you know that?” he asked. Agitated, he took a few quick strides to close the distance between us.

  “One’s a woman,” I answered.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Werewolves are more like regular wolves than you realize,” I said, taking a quick breath. “Wolves are territorial, that includes mating. This is a mated pair,” I clarified. “She would never allow her mate’s seed to come into contact with another woman to procreate. She wouldn’t risk him conceiving with someone else. It’s against her nature, her very instinct, even if the other woman is about to die.”

  “Can she be that . . . pushy?”

  “You mean bitchy?” I scowled.

  He smirked at me. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “Yeah, she could be just that bitchy,” I said as an uncomfortable shiver ran up my spine. A twinge of power and magic lingered in the room that I hadn’t noticed when I’d come in. The magic poked at me, like it wanted to find out what I was, sending a cold chill of understanding through me. The sensation running up my spine was definitely more than Pack magic. Pack magic was warm, inviting, and hummed with the power of the hunt. This magic was different. It had a crackling sharp edge that hurt like running crinkled aluminum foil over my skin.

  I hadn’t felt any magic at the last scene but I hadn’t been looking for it either. This magic had latched on to the walls of the room and held on for dear life. It wanted to be known.

  “How do you know all this?” Derek asked, jolting me back to the crime scene.

  “It’s my job to know.” My tone was frigid and sharp. “Werewolves mimic a lot of wolf behavior in more ways than just their appearance. Their instincts in wolf form are the same, and their social structure within the Pack is very similar. The list goes on and on. It’s instinctual.”

  A light, almost uncertain, knock at the door brought us both back to task as a soft, warm shadow of werewolf power trickled through the room.

  Derek ordered, “Come in.”

  Tag entered the scene, steering a gurney and a folded body bag underneath his arm, followed by a smaller, much older man I assumed was the coroner.

  Derek slid out of the coroner’s way and came back around the bed to me, leaning down to whisper in my ear, not knowing that Tag would hear everything. Ha, Ha. The joke was definitely on him.

  “You know Taggar didn’t want to show up until I told him you wanted him here. Why is that?” he asked with a scandalous grin. Always thinking something dirty.

  “Maybe he just likes a pretty face,” I said with sarcasm.

  He watched me for a long moment as if his detective badge gave him special powers. An idea lit up his face like watching a light go off behind those hazel green eyes.

  “Maybe he’s afraid of you,” he said as if he’d discovered a deep dark secret.

  “Not everything and everyone is driven by fear,” I snipped at him. The coroner stared at me like I was just another hormonal woman. He was too old, too human, and too far away to smack around and teach a lesson so I let it slide. “Some are driven by loyalty and respect,” I finished in a more controlled tone.

  “So which one is it? Fear? Or loyalty and respect?”

  Tag stepped gingerly around the bed and over to me, standing close enough that I could feel the heat from his body.

  “Who says it can’t be all three?” Tag added, voice assured and firm.

  I flashed him a quick, thankful smile as he came to my rescue again and turned back to Derek. Tag stepped up to the bed and helped the coroner lift the body and guts onto the gurney.

  “What’s going on?” Derek whispered as Tag zipped up the body bag. “He looks at you like rookies look at their partners, like you have all the answers.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, skirting the issue as the Coroner removed the gurney from the room. Tag came over to me, his back straight, his head held high, and his eyes soft as he surveyed me.

  I slid my arm around Tag, nudging him to the side and away from Derek. I needed to speak to him and not be overheard. I motioned for Tag to head outside. When I stepped to follow Tag out, Derek grabbed my bicep.

  Did I have a big sign on my forehead that said, ‘Hey, grab me! I like it.’

  When I turned my glare up to meet Derek’s confused expression with violence shining in my eyes, his fingers relaxed against my bicep. His grip changed from an angry snatch to a trembling grasp as a low, warning growl vibrated through Tag’s chest.

  Derek released my arm and raised both hands out in front of him, palms out. I could smell the fear wafting from him like a soft, sweet musk.

  Derek had shoved his authority around and hadn’t intended to run into a werewolf in his mists. That’s the problem with playing badass; unless you know you can back up the threat, you’d be better off to just stay home.

  I patted Tag on the forearm, calming him, petting him in reassurance. Tag’s growl dissipated softly in the back of his throat.

  “Derek didn’t mean anything by it,” I whispered.

  “What’s going on?” Derek asked, visibly shaken.

  I took a deep breath and instead of being a bitch and telling Derek that he didn’t have a right to know, I put it in a way that would protect him instead. I must have been feeling maternal or something. I wanted to protect everyone lately. I wish I could protect myself.

  “Derek, you don’t want to know,” I said sympathetically.

  “I think I need to know,” he forced. He’d been threatened and kept in the dark. Like any other Alpha male, werewolf or not, Derek acted out in the only way he knew how, aggression. “People are dying in this city and you know why. Maybe even from whom! I should drag your ass in and see how you do in an interrogation room,” he huffed.

  “Do what you have to do,” I said. “Taking me downtown isn’t going to get these two assholes off the streets.” I gave him a half-hearted smile, a quick shrug of my shoulders, and followed Tag out.

  Tag and I stood in the yard underneath one of the only mature trees on the block. Tag was reluctant to talk, seeming restless as he glanced over his shoulder more times than I could count. He probably hadn’t intended to give himself away in front of one of his coworkers.

  “Thank you.” I was touched by what he’d done. I couldn’t explain why it meant so much to me. I barely knew the guy but I felt an inexplicable need to protect him too. I needed him to know his risking himself for me didn’t go unnoticed.

  “He shouldn’t touch you,” Tag growled but there was possessiveness to his tone I didn’t understand. I wasn’t even sure how to ask the question forming in my mind so that it made sense. I ignored it and moved on to business I did understand.

  “Is it the same two?” I asked. People were coming and going and every one of them seemed to be eyeing the “psychic” with a lot of interest. The coroner, in particular, watched us with a lot of interest and annoyance. He pursed his thin lips like he couldn’t wait the two minutes for Tag to be done with me.

  “Yes,” he answered, scrunching his nose in protest. “He fouled that woman,” he said. His eyes stopped darting around the scene and he stared down at me with cold fury in his eyes. He seemed more relaxed, rested, at peace as he stared into my eyes. Tag was several inches taller than me as I stood next to him, gazing up into his flashing silver eyes. Derek had shaken him more than I’d thought. His wolf peeked out at me from underneath barely visible orange eyelashes. Considering what he was, I should have felt small or fragile next to him. I didn’t. I felt enormous, like I towered over him. It was an odd sensation. I didn’t hate it.

  “It isn’t right,” Tag whimpered, visibly shaken as he spoke about the ejaculat
e on the woman’s face. He had to have seen this type of thing all the time but it’s different when the perpetrator is one of your own.

  “They played with her,” I said as I glanced over my shoulder at the house still ablaze with light. “It seemed to me like it wasn’t more than that though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This one isn’t like the other one. This woman ran, she lifted weights, she was fit and active. The victim was more physically in shape than the last one. They humiliated her in a way that we’d see right away.” I was still staring at the house as I verbalized my thoughts, still focused on the scene and the locked expression of horror in the dead woman’s eyes as they’d stared lifeless at nothing.

  “You think it’s a message?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they’re working up to something else,” I rambled, trying to make sense of it all.

  Tag turned and met my eyes. I saw a perfect understanding in the glimmering silver eyes staring back at me.

  I’d felt magic in that room. It was minimal, but it was still magic. They were practicing, working their way up to me. Upon that lovely realization, nausea swept over me and made my eyes water. I refused to vomit at a crime scene. I couldn’t show weakness, not to the cops and not to Tag. I swallowed the bile back down and focused on Tag. I’d throw up later.

  “I should call Dean. The Gaoh needs to know,” Tag declared. I wished I felt as certain as he sounded. I had a really bad idea about how to force those two assholes’ hand and no one was going to like it.

  “Tell him to keep it quiet and for everyone to lay low. Maybe I can draw them out,” I ordered.

  “He won’t like that, especially not using you as bait,” Tag warned.

  “Not my problem,” I said. I watched his startled face and his silver eyes flash as his lips curled up in a snarl of disagreement. I took a deep breath. “As long as they smell pack surrounding me, I don’t think they’ll make a move,” I explained, exasperated.