Night Life

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Night Life

  Nocturne City

  Book I

  Caitlin Kittredge

  Synopsis

  The first book a thrilling, addictive new series by a talented new voice in dark fantasy. Welcome to Nocturne City, where werewolves, black magicians, and witches prowl the streets at night…

  Among them is Luna Wilder, a tough-as-nails police officer whose job is to keep the peace. As an Insoli werewolf, Luna travels without a pack and must rely on instinct alone. And she's just been assigned to find the ruthless killer behind a string of ritualistic murders—a killer with ties to an escaped demon found only in legend…until now.

  But when she investigates prime suspect Dmitri Sandovsky, she can't resist his wolfish charms. Pack leader of a dangerous clan of Redbacks, Dimitri sends her animal instincts into overdrive and threatens her fiercely-guarded independence. But Luna and Dimiri will need to rely on each other as they're plunged into an ancient demon underworld and pitted against an expert black magician with the power to enslave them for eternity…

  For my mom

  I always said I'd dedicate the first one to you.

  Acknowledgments

  This book could not have been published without the tireless assistance of my fantastic agent, Rachel Vater. Rachel, you are awesome in every sense of the word.

  Thanks are also in order for my boundlessly enthusiastic editor, Rose Milliard. We've come a long way since that first draft.

  Night Life couldn't have been written or sold without the support of my friends and fellow Urban Fantasy Grrls: Jackie Kessler, my all-around Jedi Master; Richelle Mead, my wacky evil twin; Kat Richardson, my ferret-loving voice of common sense; and Cherie Priest, with her knack for proving that real life is much stranger than writing fantasy.

  Sara, thank you for knowing me since I was fifteen and never publishing any embarrassing photos, and also for believing me every time I said I was going to write a novel. Ravenna, thanks for making undergrad creative writing classes go by a little faster. Holly, Vera, Ann, Corin, and all the Writer's Weekend alums of 2006, thank you for reassuring me that I wasn't crazy to write a book about a werewolf detective.

  I'm exceedingly grateful to Agent Heidi Wallace, ATF, for the information on firearms and to Professor Rebecca Sunderman for teaching such a comprehensive class in forensic investigation. Any errors are mine, not theirs.

  Finally, thanks to my mother, Pamela Kittredge, for instilling me with a love of books, a desire to write, and for never, ever telling me that I needed to get a day job.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Biography

  One

  I smelted the girl's blood and saw her body in a pool of neon light. Signs from a bar facing the alley painted the scene dreamlike, the pavement slick and bottomless and the body's skin pink and hard.

  I could smell her blood because I'm a werewolf.

  I had gotten the call because she was dead.

  A uniform stopped me with an upraised hand. "Ma'am?"

  I drew my jacket aside and showed him the Nocturne City Police Department detective badge clipped to my waist. He squinted at it in the ineffectual light and then nodded. "Sorry, Detective… Wilder. Go ahead."

  He even lifted the tape for me. I rewarded him with a smile. "Call me Luna, Officer… ?"

  "Thorpe, ma'am." He smiled back, tired blue eyes lighting up. I tend to have that effect on men, even when it's 3 AM and I'm wearing raggedy blue jeans and a T-shirt stained with fingerprinting ink. Not my off-duty attire to be sure, but you try cleaning blood out of a silk halter.

  Thorpe called after me, "Hope you didn't eat dinner. She's juicy!"

  Fantastic.

  I walked into the red light from the beer signs, moving between CSU techs and a photographer snapping a digital Nikon. I stopped, the pointy toe of one boot just shy of the body, and looked down at the girl. Her throat was opened in a wide gash, obscured by dried blood. What hadn't been left inside her—and that wasn't much—was coating the blacktop, giving oily life to the ground below her. Her left index finger was severed neatly at the knuckle, a raw red-white disk with the blood coagulated.

  Someone spoke from below my line of vision. "Another night, another dead girl. Nice to have a routine, isn't it?"

  Bart Kronen, one of the city's three medical examiners, crouched next to the body, his bald head as red as everything else. I mimicked his posture and bent over the girl's corpse.

  "Nice wouldn't be my word for this." Closer, the blood wasn't the only smell rolling off the girl. A sharp, musky odor lay under it, and that only meant one thing. I slid a glance to Bart to see if he'd figured it out yet, but he was busy with a thermometer and a stopwatch.

  "Killer took time to get a souvenir, so make sure you print her skin before the autopsy. Any idea what made that gash in her throat?" Other than the obvious, of course— the musky scent was the panic of a trapped were, panicked because she had wandered down the wrong street and been jumped by a rival pack.

  Kronen chuckled, plump cheeks crinkling. "If this happened before the Hex Riots I'd say you've got an outlaw were that needs to be put down, but as it is …" He shrugged and began packing away small evidence bags filled with cotton swabs taken from the body. He didn't pick up my instinctive flinch at the phrase put down.

  Weres don't kill people, and never did, except the few who can't take the phase and go insane. Were attacks were the fuse that lit the bomb of the Hex Riots over Nocturne City in the 1960s. If you got the bite, you pretty much resigned yourself to living with the constant, twitchy fear that someone would discover your secret and take matters into their own hands. Witches and weres don't enjoy many civil rights in this day and age. On paper, sure, but when a self-righteous plain human with an aluminum bat is after you, it's another story.

  "Detective."

  I put my attention back on Dr. Kronen. "Hmm?" Great, could I manage to seem like more of an airhead? Maybe if I showed up for work tomorrow in a pink sweater set.

  Kronen gestured to the dead girl's hands. "You may want to take a look. She's got some nasty defensive wounds."

  I slipped on the proffered glove and took her right hand in mine. Her fingers dangled limply, flesh stripped off the tips, nails torn and broken. Good girl. You fought like hell. You scratched him and kicked him, and made it hard for him to hide what happened.

  "I'm also guessing we'll find evidence of sexual assault."

  "Why do you say that, Doc?"

  He rolled his eyes at me and stood up, brushing nonexistent dirt from his khakis. "Cause of death appears to be peri- and postmortem mutilation, and coupled with the ritual of severing the left digit, I'm guessing this is a sex crime."

  "Isn't mutilation usually a secondary trait in sex crimes?"

  Kronen nodded. "Usually, but I can't find another obvious cause. I'll know more when I can screen her blood for drugs and cut her open to have a peek at her internals. Your skin may lie but your guts never do."

  "Kronen, your reverence for victims never fails to amaze me."

  "In this line of work, Detective, if we didn't laugh we'd all be prey to the wolves of insani
ty before the night was out."

  Wolves again. What was it with this guy? Well, as long as he was harping on it I might as well put my talents to good use and see if I could find anything he'd missed.

  I took a second look at the girl, inhaling deeply as I let my eyes focus in on her skin, her hair, the creases and crevices where trace evidence could hide. The telltale sting told me that my eyes were starting to turn from their normal gray to deep were gold, and I blinked fast to clear them.

  Grease, urine, blood, garbage, and the smell of wet brick from the recent rain all mingled. It wasn't what I'd ever describe as pleasant, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, either.

  The girl herself looked about twenty, with porcelain skin and black hair, a lighter color showing at the roots. Leather skirt, black platform sandals, and a shocking lime-green halter top made out of stretchy material that showcased her chest. No bag, wallet, hidden money roll, or anything else that would help me ID her. And it wasn't exactly like I could go knocking on her pack's door for information. An Insoli like me would get a boot in the ass at best, a torn throat to match the dead girl's at worst.

  I walked with Kronen back to the ME's van. "So, any theories?" he asked me, tossing his gear into the back.

  "Based on the neighborhood and the outfit… pro. John gone bad. Always tragic, but it happens a lot around here." Kronen was a good medical examiner and a decent guy, but he shared the human attitude that Were=Bad & Scary & Okay to Hurt. Best to feed him the party line for anonymous dead hookers.

  Kronen got into the driver's seat and shut the door. "Prostitute murder in a downtown alley? How rare. Shocking, in fact."

  "Absolutely shocking," I agreed, glad that he let it go at sarcasm.

  "I'll page you when the autopsy is scheduled."

  "Thanks. Night."

  "Morning," he corrected me. And it was, nearly four thirty.

  I walked back through the tape and sat in my 1969 Ford Fairlane. Black, shiny, fast, and a hell of a lot better than an unmarked vehicle from the motor pool.

  I was a liar. Even as I voiced my theory to Kronen, I knew it was a bad excuse. The torn throat, the fierce defensive wounds, and the missing finger joint all spoke to something far more violent than a business transaction gone sour or a were pack warning a pro off their turf. Lots of packs did street-level dealing and sent their mates out to work the streets, but run across one of those puritanical pack leaders and you were in deep crap. Usually the offending were got away with some nasty bruises and a humiliation bite. Killing just made it bad for all of us.

  It could have been a human who killed her, a savage one, but I dismissed that as quickly as it popped into my head. Even without phasing, a were could fight off a human three times their size. We're strong. Not SpiderMan strong, but we manage.

  Attempts to rationalize failed, which meant I was right. She had been killed for a reason. A heightened five senses comes standard with being a were, but I firmly believe it gives you heightened instincts, too. Now I would use them to find out why the girl in the alley was dead.

  * * * *

  I looked at the dashboard clock as I pulled away from the scene and turned onto Magnolia Boulevard, once the heart of downtown Nocturne City. If it was a heart now, it was one in dire need of a quadruple bypass and a pacemaker. Boarded-up storefronts glared at me like empty eye sockets, illuminated by broken streetlamps and holding enough shadows to hide a multitude of sins.

  The clock read 4:42 AM. With no means to ID the girl with until she was fingerprinted and x-rayed at the morgue, I had nothing to do for the rest of my shift except go back to the Twenty-fourth Precinct, file my report, and see if any progress had been made on my seven other open cases. That, I doubted. Working the midnight-to-eight shift in homicide does not lead to a high clearance rate, or a lack of bags under my eyes. Some nights I swore I should invest in the company that made my concealer and retire.

  Magnolia intersected Highland and I made the right turn, crossing over into the old Victorian district. Highland Park was one of the few neighborhoods where the residents had been able to stop the city from widening the street and chopping down the hundred-year-old oak trees. It also housed the Twenty-fourth, tucked neatly into a skinny brick two-story that had once been a firehouse, back when fire trucks were horse-drawn and the Hex Riots weren't even a puff of smoke on the horizon.

  The grazing lot for horses had been transformed into a parking lot for cops, and I pulled my Fairlane into the only free space—if the tiny margin between two patrol cars deserved the title. As a detective, I had an assigned spot, but someone was already in it. The Fairlane scraped against concrete, and I winced. That didn't sound like it could be repaired with a fine brush and a dab of Black Magick nail polish.

  I got out and looked at the license plate of the car that had taken my hard-earned spot. The small rising-moon crest told me city vehicle, a black Lexus with tinted windows and no other identifying marks. What it was doing at the Twenty-fourth, in my parking space, was a mystery I wasn't up to solving at the moment.

  I satisfied my frustration with a kick to the Lexus's bumper, and went into the precinct.

  * * * *

  At some point in history, the department had decided that fluorescent lights were not only cheap but also flattering to the complexion, and installed them on practically every inch of ceiling. Other than that small addition, the fire brigade had their way. There was still a brass fireman's pole in the corner of the squad room. Sometimes, at Christmas, we wrapped tinsel around it.

  My single desk, tucked into a corner, held just enough space for my computer, a hanging file, and a picture of me, my cousin Sunny, and our grandmother from when Sunny and I were kids. Sunny and Grandma Rhoda were smiling. I was not.

  I went for coffee before I settled in to type up the report on the dead girl. She'd be Jane Doe number three this year among my cases.

  The squad room was deserted, but the desk clerk waved at me as I walked by.

  "Long night, Wilder?"

  "The longest, Rick."

  He clucked in sympathy.

  "Heard you caught a mutilation homicide down on Magnolia."

  I've given up trying to figure out how the police gossip network disperses information. It could give you a headache.

  "That's right" is all I said.

  "So, how's Sunny doing?" he asked me, smiling shyly. Rick has been in love with my cousin ever since she moved here. Whether he's figured out that she's a witch or not, I don't know.

  "She's fine. Teaching meditation over at Cedar Hill Community College. How's your little one?" Rick's wife had left him three years ago, leaving him saddled with a five-year-old son and a job that kept him working nights. As far as I could tell, though, he did okay. He was attractive, in that quiet dark-haired way, and stable as a cement pylon. He would be good for Sunny. But he was also a plain human, and I wasn't going to encourage them.

  "Great. He's growing like a—"

  A bang from the frosted-glass door down the hall opening interrupted us. Wilbur Roenberg, captain in charge of the Twenty-fourth, stepped out. Seeing him working at this very early hour made my gut clench. Roenberg and I didn't get along even when I'd had a full night of sleep and wasn't on the tail end of a bad shift.

  "We'll talk, Wilbur," said a shortish man in a dark suit, with hair and eyes to match. He shut the captain's door and took clipped steps down the hallway toward Rick and me. He carried a black briefcase, and his shoes were highly polished. I realized the dark suit was a tuxedo. He wore a red silk tie, the only hint of color on his monochrome frame.

  Roenberg wiped his face with the back of his hand before disappearing down the hall toward the men's room.

  "You have a nice night, sir!" Rick called as the visitor passed. The guy turned and gave Rick an evil eye. I heard Rick gulp. Tuxedo kept staring, his hand on the door to the outside. His posture had the reptile quality of someone who knew how to fight, and probably fought dirty.

  "Shouldn't you be
doing your job instead of flirting?" he finally asked, pure dark eyes flicking to me.

  It was my turn to provide a hostile stare. Tuxedo didn't flinch, but his full lips curled up slightly.

  "Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?" I asked, adjusting my loose tee so that my badge and my service weapon showed clearly.

  After a long two ticks of the clock, he looked away. Point, Luna.

  "The name is Lockhart. And I doubt very much that you can, Officer," he said, before turning on his heel and striding out like he had a badger nipping at his ass.

  "What a butthead," muttered Rick, punching a few keys on his computer.

  I walked over to the door and watched Tuxedo leave. I wasn't surprised when I saw the black Lexus screech out of my space and speed away down Highland. A city bigwig named Lockhart. I'd remember the name. See if he got a warm welcome next time he needed someone to fix a parking ticket.

  Walking back to my desk, I almost ran head-on into Captain Roenberg. He jumped aside, face flushed and stale coffee on his breath. "So sorry, Detective Wilder."

  "That's fine, sir," I told him. He wasn't sorry. Roenberg was a throwback, and it was apparent every time he deigned to make eye contact that he was really seeing me in pumps and a frilly little apron. Fair's fair. Every time I was unfortunate enough to see him, I wanted to plant a solid left in his smug little mouth.

  "Yes…," he said absently, hurrying past me toward his office.

  "Don't get any cooties on you," I muttered, glad I was going the other way. At least not all cops in the Twenty-fourth felt the same way as Roenberg. Most of them could deal with my being female. It was the were part I kept under my hat. Not that I wore a lot of hats. They make my head look like a dinosaur egg.

  I decided to type up Jane Doe's report and clock out early. Those other seven cases weren't getting any colder.

  Name? the computer prompted me. I typed Jane Doe. Age? Unknown. I filled in all the boxes for physical description and forwarded the file to Missing Persons for a cross-check. In three weeks, if I was lucky, they'd tell me they found nothing.

  Cause of Death?

  My fingers stopped. I saw the girl lying on the wet pavement, dried blood on her tattered throat. Wet blood under her, matting the long black hair. The tight clothes that left no room for any ID. Torn, bloody hands reaching out to fend off… what?