"Open this door, Mr. Duncan!" I pounded again. "Don't make it my official business to open it for you!"
His harried face appeared behind the milky glass, and after unlocking a series of deadbolts he cracked the door. "Yes, Detective Wilder? May I help you?"
How dare he sound so damn calm after the night I'd had? I stuck an arm out and shoved the door wide, forcing him to get out of the way or be trampled. "You didn't tell me Stephen was involved with Lilia Desko."
He blinked. "Who?" Dressed in plaid pajamas and an expensive wool cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, Duncan was every inch the absentminded DA. Reading glasses dangled from his neck.
"Lilia Desko," I said, separating each syllable. "A dead prostitute that you oh-so-conveniently forgot to mention Stephen was involved with before she died."
"Detective, I have no idea what you're talking about and it's very late," he said, ruffling his hair. "I'm sorry, but Detective Bryson is working Stephen's case now. I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
"Bryson is working your case, not Lilia's," I snarled. "And your spoiled prick of a son is no longer my responsibility. So you can either tell me what you know or I go down to the jail where dear little Stephen is waiting for arraignment and I roust him out of bed for an interrogation. And by the way, when a judge denies the son of the DA bail, that means they think he's guilty."
His eyes narrowed and he leaned toward me, craning down from his lanky height. "Get out of here, Detective Wilder. Your accusations are baseless and I won't have this kind of behavior from a member of the force in my home." He held his fingers beside my face and snapped. "I could have you suspended like that." Snap. "Your pension like that." Snap. "Or your professional reputation, so you will never work in law enforcement again." Snap.
I upped the ante and got even closer to him. "And when I tie Stephen to Lilia's and Marina's murders I will bury him as the sadistic freak that he is. Regardless of what happens to my professional reputation. Or yours. Sir."
"You're threatening me?" Duncan hissed.
"I believe so."
"You bitch," said Duncan, his voice rising. "You're exactly what's wrong with the force."
"Al? Everything all right in here?" Regan Lockhart, in the same all-black suit, appeared from the archway leading into Duncan's dining room. He had materialized out of shadow without making a sound.
Lockhart saw me and his right hand dropped inside his open jacket. Mine went to my waist rig. We stared at each other until Duncan spoke.
"Everything is fine, Regan."
"Everything is not fine, Regan," I countered. "What in the name of the Hex Riots are you even doing here? Are you two secret lovers or something?"
Lockhart smiled, and something glinted in the depth of his eyes that looked almost human, like I'd amused him in a secret way. "It's not what you think, Detective. I assure you of that."
Al Duncan's cheeks turned the color of cheap red lip stick. "Get out of my house, Detective Wilder," he snarled. "You're finished in Nocturne City."
"You don't get it, Mr. Duncan," I said. "Your son ripped two women apart, and all you're worried about is yourself."
"Leave," Duncan said. Lockhart moved between us, holding up a hand to keep me away from Duncan. He still stank, but not of cologne this time. Something smoky, unidentifiable.
"We have a witness now who will testify that Lilia and Stephen had a long-term and often abusive relationship," I said. "So go ahead and can me, Mr. Duncan. We can stand on the unemployment line together. Reminisce about the good old days before you were a corrupt son of a bitch."
Lockhart started. "You have a witness?"
"Yes," I said, meeting his eyes. "A very reliable witness."
"Who is this witness?" Duncan demanded.
"His identity is confidential," I shot back, keeping my real attention on Lockhart, "so it looks like all you and Sonny-boy will be doing is cooling your heels until arraignment."
Duncan's jaw worked for a moment until he ground out, "You have no idea how badly you have screwed yourself, Detective Wilder. I look forward to your payment for interference."
What melodramatic crap.
"Good night, sir. Mr. Lockhart."
Duncan turned on his heel and stormed off. Lockhart blinked at me as I shut the door. His eyes, when they opened again, were pure black.
* * * *
In the Fairlane, I took a minute to breathe. What I had done was insane and potentially damaging to my case, but the threat of Dmitri testifying had bought me a little time. And I had seen Al Duncan before he got angry, the panic that had washed over him. The revelation about Stephen and Lilia had struck him. And let's not even start on Freaky-Freak Lockhart and his eerie eyes. Sometimes you can see the madness under the surface of a person, and I'd seen it in Lockhart, him and his secretive smiles. Al Duncan was playing Russian roulette keeping that guy employed in his office.
I pulled out and started for home. I was exhausted and tomorrow I would be interviewing Stephen Duncan again, no longer a likely suspect but a sure killer, brutal and vicious. Never mind that he wasn't a were. I'd been wrong, it'd happened before, and I should just be glad I'd keyed in to his pathology before he was released and cut off someone else's finger. Men like Stephen didn't need a were inside them to drive their bloody urges. They were monsters, stalkers in the night jungle.
The moon had swollen into a silver orb, and it cast light on the street ahead of me. I felt its cold light cut through me, and shivered.
* * * *
I got home close to midnight, far earlier than I'd landed in months. Sunny was standing by the kitchen stove watching our red teakettle intently as if by biting her lip and frowning she could make the water boil faster. I opened the FrigiTank and looked for an alcoholic beverage or ten. Of course, there was nothing.
"Jasmine tea?" Sunny offered when I banged the door shut. "Help you sleep."
"The only thing that will put me to sleep tonight is a brick to the head," I told her.
"Oh, gee, did the interview not go well or something?" Sunny inquired with wide eyes.
I flipped a hand at her, too tired for a rebound. The energy needed to tell the whole story of Dmitri, Duncan, and Lockhart's creepy smile was not forthcoming, either.
The kettle screeched and Sunny poured the steaming water into her mug, took down another one, and made me a cup as well. “Try to rest, Luna. Every time I see you those bags keep getting bigger."
I glanced at my reflection in the kitchen window. "I do not have bags," I muttered, pushing at the skin under my eyes.
Upstairs, I found an old packet of allergy medication that one of us had taken for some ailment long forgotten. The package instructed me to take one tablet every six hours. I took three, washing them down with the jasmine tea.
A lot more effective than a brick to the head.
* * * *
The first thing I saw when I woke up was the glowing blue display on my alarm clock, placidly telling me it was 3:23 AM. I registered that the wind had picked up and the trellis roses were lashing back and forth outside my window, casting kinky shadow patterns across the bar of moonlight streaming in.
Over the face of the man standing above my bed. He pressed a hand across my mouth before I could breathe, strong as a steel plate.
I kicked up and out, struggling to free my arms, but my heavy quilt effectively had me pinned. I stared up at his face, a plain black stocking mask with two shiny dark eyes. That charred smell rolled out from him and choked my nostrils.
Oh, this is good, Luna. You drug yourself insensible and totally miss the fact that some wacko pervert has snuck into your bedroom until he's right on top of you.
"Don't make a sound," he whispered. His voice was high and smooth.
I tried to say, Kind of impossible with your hand across my face, jackass, but what came out was "Kurmph!"
He reached behind him with his free hand and took out a knife in sheath—a blade with a matte-black handle designed not to ref
lect light. He thumbed the sheath off and touched the point to my cheek. I was shivering now, hard, my body racked of its own accord.
"If you have anything more to do with the weres, Stephen Duncan, or any other aspect of your current case," the masked man hissed at me, "I will turn you into a pretty little doll, with no tongue." The blade skated over my lips. "And no voice." It caressed down my throat and pricked the hollow. "And no heart." He drew the blade down with force and cut my T-shirt open leaving a thin scratch in my chest that stopped just over my left breast.
"Do we understand each other, Officer?" he breathed.
Fear is not something that you will ever meet face-to face. It will sneak up on you and grab you, wrap arms around your chest, put ice in your blood, and freeze you still. I lay there, cold, as he ripped my bedding back and sat astride me, keeping the point of that horrible knife twisting in the soft flesh over my heart.
"Just to be sure you won't do anything foolish, like tell someone we had this interlude," he said, lifting my left hand to his mouth. My arm was stiff as a corpse in rigor, and he jerked at it. "There's a good girl." He smeared my own hand in the blood from my cut, and then unzipped the black nylon jacket he wore, revealing a bare chest covered with brandings that showed up as dark veins in the moonlight.
He took my saturated palm and pressed it to his flesh, and I felt a pop like I had connected with static electricity. The charred smell came back tenfold and my stomach bucked. Touching magicks is like touching heat lightning, and his were black as a moonless storm.
A tiny light flamed on in the recesses of my mind, and with remarkable clarity I realized that if he had only intended to scare me, he would be gone already, leaving a job well done. He wasn't a blood witch—otherwise he'd be using his own blood. Something else was going on here, and it was dark and ancient and filled up with the most primitive kind of fear.
"Now you're marked," he told me in that same whistling hiss. "And we see everything you do."
My right arm, creeping across my mattress and up over the edge of the nightstand, finally closed around the prize, a now-cold cup of jasmine tea.
"I guarantee you didn't see this," I whispered back and smashed the mug into the side of his skull with all the force of my fear. With my desire to get out of this alive, it was a considerable blow. The cup pulverized into shards of ceramic sand, and he went over the side of the bed and down to the floor, howling.
I was up and over him before I'd had time to blink, racing out of my room, bare feet tangling in the hallway runner and pitching me down the stairs at an angle that made my ankle sag and give under my weight.
At the bottom in a heap, I heard him screaming in another language. Pain always sounds the same.
Across the living room even though my ankle cried out, to clutch a hand around the drawer where I kept my gun, rattling it desperately for a full three seconds before I remembered it was locked. I reached for the key on my neck chain.
It wasn't there.
His heavy panting finally caught up with me and he laughed, thickly. "Looking for this?"
I saw the key dangling from his fist and lowered my hands to my sides. He had a Glock, too, a .44 that looked like a slim black cannon in the low light.
"Don't run, Detective Wilder. You'll just make things worse on yourself."
With the gun and all, he made a certain amount of sense. But when did I ever do what anyone told me, never mind masked creeps breaking into my cottage? This son of a bitch didn't know me at all.
I bolted for the kitchen. He snarled and tossed the key aside, reaching for me as I passed. I kicked over a chair to block his way and didn't look back to see if he fell. If I could just get outside, to the working circle, I could stand inside it and be safe…
I heard and felt it all—the trigger clinking, the slow-motion boom as the gun fired, and burning cold-hot pain pass through the meat of my right arm.
The bullet spanged away somewhere into the wall and I was left with the worst agony I've ever felt, worse than any bullet had a right to inflict. It spread through my arm and my chest and clenched around my lungs and heart, a horrible full-body spasm that almost dropped me. I looked and saw a shiny liquid like mercury bleeding from the wound.
Silver. The Hexed bastard had used a silver bullet. And it had worked.
Crap.
"I warned you," he called, examining me with a critical eye on his handiwork.
I staggered to the cutlery drawer and grabbed the first sharp things I saw, a handful of cheap steak knives we'd never used because Sunny wouldn't let meat in the house.
"Not advisable, Detective!" he shouted at me, taking aim again.
"Go to hell!" I replied, and hurled a knife at his head.
It stuck in his leg because I'm not a circus performer or a ninja, and he fired. A cluster of herbs next to my head shattered in a puff of sweet-smelling dust. I needed cover. I was in a gods damn kitchen. Never mind details, I needed cover.
I whipped open the door to the FrigiTank and ducked behind it just as he unloaded a volley on me, apparently tired of the you throw, I shoot game we were playing. The bullets impacted with the door, and the plastic in front of my eyes cracked.
He ejected his clip and loaded a fresh one. "Cute." He was back to hissing. "Now I suppose I'll just shoot you in the head for my trouble. You know, if you hadn't hit me—"
"Freeze!" a quavering voice screamed from behind him. Sunny stood in the kitchen doorway with my Glock trained. "Drop it!" she yelled at him when he didn't freeze, but turned to stare at her.
"Oh, witch," he said. "What are you doing with that?"
I hit him from behind and locked his gun arm behind his back, squeezing on his knuckles until he let the weapon go. I made his knees buckle and he went to the floor.
"Sunny, get my handcuffs."
"Luna!" she cried, her eyes quarter-size with panic. "Are you… ?"
I smelled that smell again and with a moan that sounded like ribs breaking he heaved himself up and sent me sprawling, going at a dead run straight for my cousin, who dropped the Glock in alarm and backed up so fast she fell. Hex it, he was stronger than Sandovsky.
"Forget the gun, he's got a working on him!" I screamed as she sat there with her mouth in an O, letting him bear down on her.
She blinked and held out her right palm. "Blood to dust!" she shouted. It was a standard dispel for blood witches, and did nothing. He kept coming.
"Blood to dust!" Sunny screamed. He grabbed her outstretched arm and I felt the impact of their two magicks hitting each other.
"Forget that! He's not a blood witch!"
Sunny jerked against him, tears coursing down her face with pure helpless terror as he held her close.
"Are you going to take me seriously now?" he asked.
I picked up his gun and it was heavy, so heavy I could barely hold it steady, but I did, raised and aimed. "Let go of her."
"You think that will kill me?" he sneered.
"No," I said honestly, "but I think it will hurt a whole hell of a lot."
I lowered my aim to clear Sunny's quaking body and squeezed the trigger.
A fountain of flesh erupted from the same thigh where I'd planted the steak knife, and he howled, shoved Sunny aside, and barreled through the front door and out into the night. The screen door flapped on its hinges and then everything was quiet except for the whoosh of the waves and Sunny's soft mewling sobs.
I dropped the gun and went to her, wrapping my arms around her while she cried and shook. "I'm s-sorry," she hiccupped. "I didn't wake up until I heard the screaming, and then I waited too long to get the gun…"
"Sunny," I told her. "Your timing was perfect. You're my gods damn hero."
She sniffed hard. "Who was he? Something bad… he made my skin creep …"
"He was bad, all right," I agreed. "Freaky-deaky blood-licking bad." I helped her up and sat her on the one chair that hadn't been knocked over. "You stay put. I'll call Mac and the crime scene unit."
"I was so frightened…," Sunny whispered. I picked up the phone and punched 911. I would never admit to Sunny that I had been terrified, too.
Twelve
Mac showed up within fifteen minutes, the strobe on top of his personal car going a thousand miles an hour and filling our still-dark living room with bloody flashes.
"Oh, Hex," he said when he burst through the door and saw the wreckage.
"We're all right, Mac," I said. "We're fine."
"You're not fine, Luna," Sunny piped up. I shot her a look.
"I'm fine," I repeated to McAllister.
He had taken hold of my arm and was examining it. "Sweet merciful gods, what happened to you? It's … burned. Does it hurt?"
"What do you—ow! Let go of me, Mac!—think?"
He didn't get a chance to tell me, because the blue crime scene van pulled up, followed by an unmarked car containing a detective I didn't recognize.
"Estevez, from the Forty-third," Mac said by way of introductions. "Wilder, from Twenty-fourth Homicide. This is Estevez's jurisdiction."
"Hell of a thing to happen, Detective Wilder," said Estevez, who was tall and broad with chubby cheeks, sort of like a cuddly tank. "Do you need medical attention?"
"I called the paramedics," said Mac. "She'll get all the help she needs."
I pulled McAllister aside. "I should show the crime scene unit where the bullets went, and where he was in my bedroom. Could you stay with Sunny?"
He nodded and took a seat next to her. "You okay?" he asked by way of greeting.
"No, Lieutenant McAllister," she said. "I'm not." Her hands were still shaking as they clutched the tissues.
Mac said, "Call me Troy. What can you tell me about the break-in?"
"Ma'am," called a CSU tech from the head of the stairs, "could you come take a look at this please?"
I climbed up to meet him, aware of the twinge every time I tried to put weight on my left ankle. Okay, it wasn't just a twinge, it was excruciating, but I wasn't about to let anyone know.
"You said you woke up and saw the perp standing over you?" said the tech as he went into my bedroom. Flashes popped and the lights were on, yellow marker tags hovering over the knife on the floor and the shards of mug.
Night Life Page 11