by Nene Adams
“Gotcha.”
The remainder of the day was the usual routine, apart from the on-going stakeout at the Church of the Honey in the Rock. Annalee kept busy with paperwork, trying to distract herself. She wanted to avoid thinking about Dempsey, about the twisted corpse of Ruth Lassiter and the thing she was afraid Aiden Thompson had become.
She stared blankly at the computer screen. One word kept popping into her head with the same annoying regularity as the blinking cursor.
Werewolf.
Obviously, she had seen too many movies.
People transforming into monsters…nothing supernatural was going on in Daredevil County, no full moon, no occult curses. This was science gone bad, the stuff of nightmares and conspiracy theories, the sort of thing some black-hat government organization might be accused of perpetrating—experimenting illegally with recombinant DNA to create a super soldier or some such other nonsense. A nice plot for a novelist, perhaps, or a television show, but she suspected the reality was far less elaborate.
Without warning, a yawn split her face, widening it until her jaw ached. A troubled night always left her tired. She took a sip from her mug, grimacing at the bitter flavor of cold coffee. It was stuffy and humid inside the office despite the air conditioning. She desperately wanted fresh air, and her ass was going numb from sitting.
Annalee glanced at her watch and saw with some surprise the time was close to five o’clock. She stood up, stretched until her vertebrae popped loudly and walked out of her office. “I’m taking the SUV out to the Skinner place,” she told Minnie while going behind the reception desk to retrieve the keys.
The trip was impromptu, born of an impulse. If she saw Lunella, perhaps she could get the woman out of her system. Surely Lunella wasn’t as desirable as memory insisted. Once the rose-colored glasses were off, she would cease to burn for the woman. “I’ll be out of range for a couple of hours,” she said to the dispatcher.
Minnie nodded, most of her attention focused on the portable DVD player propped near her phone. She was watching a classic soap opera, The Edge of Night. Annalee remembered seeing the show on her grandmother’s black-and-white set back in the pre-cable days. The memory made her feel old.
Driving out to the Lauder extension road, Annalee tuned the radio to a classic country station and turned up the volume, hoping to keep her mind occupied with music for a while. Little traffic meant she could let her mind wander a bit, but at the end of every imaginary mental path stood Lunella Skinner, damn it.
She removed her sunglasses when she took the SUV off-road down the trail leading to the Skinner property. When she reached the gate, she parked and got out of the vehicle.
She stood there a minute, stretching out the kinks, inhaling the forest’s earthy smells, grateful to be out of the stifling confines of the office. In her experience, law enforcement was three kinds of butt work—sitting on her butt doing paperwork, sitting on her butt in a patrol car and sitting on her butt interviewing witnesses and suspects. I should probably add sitting on my butt eating rubber chicken at state-sponsored events.
Annalee was halfway over the gate when a distant howl caught her attention, followed by the unmistakable roar of a shotgun. The sound sent a chill racing up her spine to explode inside her skull, a panic signal that sent her scrambling to the ground. It might be hunters, but instinct insisted otherwise and her brain agreed.
She took off running, her shoes thumping on the earth. Her blood rushed cold through her veins, but hot coals lodged under her ribcage, and every mouthful of air seemed superheated more by urgency than temperature. By the time she finally reached the house, she was breathing hard, her lungs and the muscles in her legs cramping. Dark spots swam in the edges of her vision. She blinked hard to clear her head.
She saw nothing out of place in the yard, no vehicles missing, but the house’s front door hung off one hinge. Jesus. That can’t be good. Going up the steps cautiously but quickly, trying to control her panting, she noted high-velocity blood splatter. More blood was smeared in a wet trail wandering through the doorway. Drag marks. Someone had been shot, fallen, then been taken inside. She’d passed no one on the trail, which could mean the shooter was still in the house, or they were on foot in the forest, getting away.
Assuming the worst case scenario—that the shooter remained on the scene—she drew her .38, trying to force her body to move past the slight vertigo and breathlessness the effort of getting here had cost her. The situation could turn real ugly, real fast, and she had no way of calling for back-up. Of course, she could return to the SUV and try the radio, but she dismissed that option. People, possibly including Lunella, were in trouble now, right this minute. Returning later might be too late.
Her nerves tingled, her senses sharpened as she became more acutely aware of her surroundings. She heard a faint murmur of voices coming from inside the house. One voice rose above the rest.
“I have to go after them! I have to! Aunt Rachael, don’t—”
Lunella.
Hesitating no longer, Annalee went in, keeping her step light although her heart pounded fast and furious with the need to protect. “Hey, y’all, it’s Sheriff Crow,” she called loudly, making sure to keep her tone casual. “Anybody here?”
After a pause, Lunella appeared from the direction of the kitchen. She seemed distraught, her hair hanging in pale tangles around her face. A bruise swelled on her cheekbone. “Oh, God…you can’t…please, you have to go,” she said. “You can’t be here.”
“Who got shot?” Annalee asked. Relief that Lunella was unharmed swept through her in a dizzying wave, but she didn’t holster her weapon yet. She lowered her voice, pitching it so only Lunella could hear her. “If there’s somebody in the house, just nod, okay?”
Lunella let out a strangled sob and shook her head.
Annalee was holstering her gun when Lunella’s knees buckled. She grabbed the woman before she collapsed. “Talk to me, honey,” she pleaded, searching Lunella’s expression for any clue, the least goddamned hint as to what was going on. “Tell me what happened here. Please, I want to help. I can help if you just talk to me.”
“It’s Bear,” Lunella said. Her eyes were huge, the brown irises sparkling with golden flecks of color. “They took Bear.”
“Who?”
“The Gunns.” Lunella’s fingernails dug into Annalee’s biceps, perilously close to drawing blood.
She ignored the twinge. “Are they still in the house?”
“No, no, they left. Took off with him in the woods.”
“Did you or your uncle or aunt shoot at them?”
“Uncle Ezra tried to stop them. They shot him.” Lunella’s voice dropped to a bare whisper and she shuddered. “They shot him.”
Shit. Okay, that changes things somewhat. Annalee swung Lunella around, grunting with the effort, and managed to get her seated on the leather sofa without dropping her. “Stay there,” she said, pointing a finger to emphasize the command. Unlike the other weirdness, this she could deal with—a hopefully non-fatal shooting incident with witnesses.
She moved to the back of the living room and through a door into the kitchen, where she found Ezra laid out on a wooden table, his shirt open, a dozen bleeding wounds visible on his hairy chest. Rachael was bent over him with a pair of tweezers in her hand.
“There’s no cell signal out here,” Annalee said, projecting calm in an emergency as she had been taught.
Rachael seemed to be in a state of shock. Certainly, her current behavior made her an unstable element whose behavior could not be predicted. As far as Annalee was concerned, folks who were normal in the head didn’t perform crude surgery on the kitchen table as if the clock had turned back a century or two.
She added, “Why don’t you put those tweezers away? We can stop the bleeding with pressure until the paramedics get here. You got towels, right? We’ll do that, then I’ll have to go back to my car and try the radio.” She ran through the plan in her head: take one of the S
kinners’ pickups to the gate, transfer to the SUV, raise dispatch on the radio. If not, haul ass back to the highway and call 911. If she hammered the accelerator and didn’t babysit the alignment, she could be in contact in less than ten minutes.
Ezra’s face was gray. He was sweating heavily and panting, the red curl of his tongue protruding from his mouth. Rachael didn’t acknowledge Annalee’s presence or answer any of her questions. Nibbling her bottom lip in concentration, she dug the tweezers into one of the wounds, making Ezra bite off a scream. His muscles went rigid, his back arched and he gripped the edges of the table until the wood creaked.
“Jesus Christ!” Annalee went to stop Rachael and froze when the woman bared her teeth and growled. “What the hell’s going on here?” she cried.
“Get out!” Rachael literally snapped, biting off each word.
She twisted the tweezers in the wound, her probing accompanied by a spurt of dark blood. Ezra bellowed in agony, the tendons standing out in his neck. When Rachael withdrew the instrument, the ends gripped a double-aught shotgun pellet. Silvery metal gleamed through a liquid scarlet coat.
“Look, Mrs. Skinner, your husband needs medical attention.” Annalee shifted around the table, trying to see if any of the man’s wounds showed signs of an arterial bleed. She thought she detected a discoloration signaling significant gunpowder residue on his skin, which didn’t jibe with the dispersed shotgun pattern—the wounds were too far apart for the shooter to have been standing any closer than thirty yards away by her estimation. She tried to catch Rachael’s eye and said, “Ezra could have internal bleeding.”
“I said, leave us be!” Rachael snarled.
Lunella stumbled into the kitchen. “Let her alone,” she said to Annalee. “Please, don’t interfere. You don’t understand. Ezra can’t—She has to get them all out or he’ll be poisoned.”
Rachael dropped the pellet on the floor. Several rolled underfoot already, mired in little pools of drying crimson on the linoleum. Sweat glistened in her hairline, a sheen of white in the sunlight coming through the kitchen window above the sink. A droplet shivered on the end of her nose, winking like a diamond as it fell off.
A small lump writhed under Ezra’s skin, drawing Annalee’s attention. She took an involuntary step backward, her stomach convulsing when she was assailed by instant nausea. Her hand fell on the butt of her gun. Another quivering lump surfaced on the man’s body. She had seen a rat inside a corpse once, making similar movements as it ate its way through the abdominal cavity. Ezra’s moan raised goosebumps on her forearms.
“What the fuck?” she couldn’t help blurting.
Lunella grimaced. “I told you, he’s being poisoned by the silver.”
While Annalee watched, a greenish-black line branched out from an oozing pellet wound on Ezra’s belly, running toward his ribcage. Dirty yellow, foul-smelling pus began to leak out of the small hole. Rachael stabbed the tweezers into the wound while Ezra’s eyes rolled back to show the whites. Annalee had never seen or heard of such a physical reaction. This was something else, something beyond her experience.
“The hospital can’t help him, only Aunt Rachael can. She’s his mate,” Lunella insisted. “Come on, please, Annie, let her do what needs to be done. Ezra will be fine once she gets the silver out. He’ll heal.”
Annalee turned and took hold of Lunella’s arm. “Tell me everything,” she said through gritted teeth, suddenly furious, “and I mean everything!” Nothing made sense. She was not going to be jerked around any more. She wanted answers and she was going to have them, damn it! “Talk to me, Lunella.”
“The Gunns were workin’ for Lassiter, now they’re workin’ for Dempsey, and he works for Abner Cutshall,” Lunella got out in a gasp.
Not exactly what Annalee wanted to hear at the moment. She shook Lunella’s arm a little, willing her to be more forthcoming.
Rachael’s growl renewed—a sound like thunder, filled with threat and the promise of hurt. Lunella turned to her aunt, although she didn’t pull out of Annalee’s grasp. “Annie’s mine! She deserves to be told,” Lunella said, trembling but defiant. “I’m going to tell her everything, no matter what you say.”
“Go on, then,” Rachael replied, her focus returning to Ezra, who shivered and whined low in his throat. Another pellet wound began leaking pus. “Do what you want, girl. Please yourself. I don’t have time to stop you, so on your head be it.”
Lunella looked as if she might throw up from sheer nerves. Nevertheless, she pulled Annalee out of the kitchen, back to the living room. The door closed behind them, cutting off Ezra’s soft whimpers.
“We’re different from other people, us Skinners, I mean,” Lunella began, her expression beseeching Annalee to understand. “We can…some of us can…turn, you know? From human to wolf. No, listen to me. You wanted to know and I’m tellin’ you.”
“I’m listening,” Annalee said grimly, releasing Lunella’s arm. She’d keep an open mind, but that didn’t mean letting her brains slide out her ears.
“Maybe I should show you instead.” Lunella yanked her shirt over her head and unbuttoned her jeans, kicking them off in a few seconds.
Annalee stared, her mouth falling open as what seemed like an acre of smooth, lightly tanned flesh was exposed to her view. Her mind was temporarily derailed by Lunella’s breasts—small and firm, the nipples dusky pink, crinkling in the cooler air. The woman’s waist and hips formed a nearly straight line with very little feminine dip before melding into strong thighs and calves, giving the impression of dense bone structure and heavy muscles under a thin padding of fat. Husky. Powerful. Beautiful.
“Lunella, what are you do—oh, crap.” Annalee broke off when the woman’s whole outline suddenly shimmered, sparkling like dust motes in a sunbeam.
Lunella shrank vertically and expanded horizontally, her image blurring to mist. Annalee blinked, her rational mind insisting this was an hallucination, while the rest of her struggled to understand how and why. Lunella the human female was gone, replaced by a blond-coated wolf that shook itself vigorously, fluffing out a furry ruff. The wolf glanced up at her, the black-lipped muzzle parting in what was unmistakably a canine smile.
Annalee’s chest burned. She had seen this same wolf in her dreams.
It took her a moment to realize she held her breath. She let it come shuddering out. The wolf—no, Lunella—pressed against her shins, whining. Hardly able to believe she wasn’t hallucinating, she put out a shaking hand. Lunella’s fur was soft, like glossy silk under her fingertips, and very dense. Lunella lapped at her wrist, showing an impressive array of sharp teeth. The tongue was wet and equally soft.
Annalee was somewhat surprised by her lack of fear.
Lunella’s outline shimmered again, and she returned to her human form. She seemed completely unselfconscious about her nudity. “Bear’s my brother,” she said. “He don’t like to turn, he’d rather stay wolf. There’s some like that in the family.”
“How? How do you do it?” The only question Annalee could think to ask. She was as much stunned by the revelation of Lunella’s change as by the woman’s nude body. Wrenching her gaze away from the nest of darker blonde curls at the juncture of Lunella’s thighs, she waited for an answer that would help her understand.
Lunella started shrugging on her clothes. “Just that way it’s always been.”
“Then how come you don’t get along with Noah Whitlock?” Annalee asked, recovering her wits sufficiently to recall Lunella’s apparent animosity. “He’s your cousin.”
“Yeah, but ain’t none of us trusts the law that much. Would you? Knowing what we are, would you trust a guy in a sheriff’s department uniform?” Lunella leaned down to pick up her shirt. Her breasts stirred provocatively. “Besides, Noah’s like Bear ’cept the opposite, you know? He can’t change from skin to fur. His mama wanted him kept out of family stuff when he was a kid and he went to some private school over in Ogee, so he’s not that close kin to us. And when he was twelve
, he spied on me when I was skinny-dipping over by the old quarry, and he caught me changin’ into fur and totally freaked out and ran into the pond and nearly drowned, the dumb ass. I was grounded for a month.”
Annalee carefully didn’t roll her eyes. Family feuds did not need to make sense. They just existed as a fact, logical or not. “Lassiter’s mother was a Skinner,” she said, trying to make connections to the murder case. She needed something rational to cling to, a distraction to help smooth out the jangled mess of her nerves.
“Yeah, he didn’t have the gift. That happens sometimes too. He was jealous of Uncle Ezra, ’specially after Aunt Rachael was sent down from Canada to join our pack. Grandma Naomi was groomin’ Rachael to be alpha bitch, plannin’ for her to marry Ezra, but Lassiter hated it. He wanted Rachael for himself. He tried to get her to run away with him, but him and Ezra had a dominance fight. Lassiter lost.”
“Lassiter went away, then he came back years later. Why?”
“Dempsey.” Lunella’s upper lip curled in disgust. Gold flickered in her eyes. “The gift’s in our genes, whatever the hell that means. We live longer than regular folks, heal a lot faster ’cept when it’s silver does the hurtin’…that’s why they hired the Gunns to put live traps on our land. Lassiter knew what we are and he betrayed us. He told Dempsey. We try to find all the traps, but the Gunns are good at poachin’, ’s why they got Bear. He’s not…Bear’s forgotten some human stuff, maybe he can’t change no more. We have to save him, Annie. They got him. They got him!”
Right. Abduction of a minor. Attempted murder. Annalee hiked up her thick leather duty belt, feeling as if she were girding her loins for battle. “You know where Dempsey is?”
“Cutshall’s place, I think.”
“All right. Let me call for back-up—”
“You can’t.”
“Honey, I can arrest Dempsey for kidnapping and—oh.”
Annalee remembered Bear was a wolf from a family of werewolves. No way could she make that charge stick. She could bring in Dempsey as a suspect in Lassiter’s murder, but that would likely expose his work to too many people. The situation had to be handled discreetly, at least until she knew the Skinners, Lunella especially, were protected, their secret safe. Visions of government laboratories, youth-greedy politicians with big budgets and few morals and vivisection experiments by cold scientists sprang to vivid life in her mind’s eye. She swallowed. The thought of Lunella strapped down on a table…She remembered the dead wolf in the morgue, its rigor stiffened legs splayed in the air, and almost gagged.