Night Life

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Dmitri flicked the cap off my beer with his thumb and handed it back. I took a long pull, letting the cold, bitter tang slide down my throat.

  "I take it complications ensued."

  I nodded, watching the water bead on the curves of my bottle. "Unfortunately, I got a little too trusting and now I think I may have a murder pinned on me." I sighed. "At least now I know who got Stephen involved with the witch."

  Dmitri leaned forward. "Who? Did he kill Lilia? Tell me."

  "Regan Lockhart, the chief investigator from the DA's office. He was at the condo, and he makes sense. Control Stephen and by extension control Alistair. Leave your blood master free to bathe the whole city in blood. And yes, it's probable he killed Lilia."

  "Lockhart," said Dmitri slowly. He let out a slow breath and slumped back in his chair. "You don't know how long I've waited to hear that name." He picked up the bottle. "You mind?" I shook my head and he said, "It's kinda anticlimactic. You know?"

  "All that's left is the dying," I agreed quietly. "Me, Lockhart. Probably you. You don't stand a chance against Lockhart and the witch."

  "Your faith is touching," he said, finishing off the bottle. "But I ain't alone."

  "Excuse me?"

  Dmitri covered my hand with his. "I've got you, don't I? Fearless lady cop. If you'd chase me up onto a roof with no gun, this Lockhart asshole should be a walk in the park."

  I swallowed so he wouldn't see the frenzy of loathing and anxiety and fear Lockhart's name conjured. "Yeah, Dmitri. You've got me."

  He threw the bottle into a plastic garbage can and picked up the DVD, twirling it around one finger. "Let's see what's on this disc."

  * * * *

  I don't know," said Pete Anderson when I called him from Sunny's cell. "Video isn't really my area of expertise."

  "Come on, Pete," I pleaded. "You'd be doing me a service. I need a handsome man with a laptop and a brain."

  He sighed. "You know I would like nothing better than to rush to your rescue, Luna. There's a problem, though."

  I growled. "What now?"

  "You're barred from the labs," he said. "Some tool named Wilbur Roenberg sent around an all-staff e-mail with your picture, explaining that you'd been fired and were banned from the premises."

  I gripped the phone so hard the plastic creaked. Tool didn't even begin to describe Roenberg.

  "Is it true?" said Pete, sounding hurt that I hadn't called him before anyone else to relay the news. "Are you really axed?"

  "Afraid so," I said.

  "So… who's handling these three murders now?" he asked.

  "David Bryson," I said. The name tasted bad.

  "Oh, gods," Anderson groaned. "That guy. Wouldn't know trace evidence from his own ass if it bit him. He contaminates the scene and then raises hell with me for not finding anything."

  "If you want to really turn the screws on Bryson, help me look at this tape," I said. "If we could get a positive ID, I can give it to my lieutenant, and he'll make the arrest. Not only will a dangerous, er, murderer be off the streets, but you can make Bryson look like a horse's ass." And stop a witch bent on Hex-knew-what evil, but I didn't spread that info to Pete. He was plain human, after all.

  "Where can we work on the video?" he asked.

  Dmitri was going to kill me for this. "Take the expressway to the old Appleby Acres exit, and go until you hit the Crown Theater."

  Pete went silent. "That's Ghosttown, Detective."

  "I'm aware, Pete."

  "Okay," he said after a moment. "But if something in there eats me, I'm blaming it all on you."

  * * * *

  I went to the front of the Crown and stood on the curb, watching the empty boulevard for Pete's headlights and wishing I smoked or knitted or did anything to occupy my mind other than rock on the balls of my feet.

  The moon, a circle with one edge just slightly flat, hung over the dim lights of Ghosttown like a pale, bald eye peering over the horizon. I looked up and felt my skin prickle and the stab in my lower back as my breathing slowed and the power of the phase overtook me. Not yet moonrise, but coming too fast for comfort. The night sounds of the city flowed away and there was nothing but me and the blessed, bright moon.

  "Not so bad, is it?"

  I nearly leapt out of my rapidly phasing skin. "Dmitri!"

  He lit a clove and blew smoke into the black sky. "When you don't fight it, it can be wonderful. Something you never learn unless you're part of a pack."

  My hands and face stung as the phase retreated and I blinked to clear the yellow from my eyes.

  "I don't think wonderful is ever the adjective I would use for the phase."

  Dmitri dragged and jerked his chin at my shoulder. "He worked you over good."

  I was glad there were no streetlights so he couldn't see my shamed flush. "Who?"

  "You know who. That Serpent Eye cocksucker who gave you the bite and decided he didn't want you."

  "His name was Joshua," I whispered. "And he did want me. He wanted me badly. I was the one who ran." Only a half-truth, but I couldn't admit that Joshua had been so bad that even knowing what I knew now about how it feels to be severed from your pack, I would still be racing up that beach road in the dark.

  Dmitri dropped his butt and stamped it out. "You don't have to suffer for him, Luna."

  I slid a glance to his profile. "Come again?" I said.

  Dmitri took a deep breath. "I could give you the bite and make you a Redback like me," he let out in a rush.

  My heart did a rapid slam-dance against my rib cage before settling somewhere in the region of my belt buckle.

  "How?" I whispered.

  "It's easy," Dmitri shrugged. "Another pack leader gives an Insoli the bite and claims her as his own."

  "Claims me. Like a slave."

  Dmitri shook his head violently. "Never. Some pack leaders work like that, but never me. I wouldn't make the mistake Joshua obviously did." He looked me in the eye. "You deserve a pack, Luna. Think about it."

  I had never been more relieved to see a plain white sedan pull up to the curb and Pete Anderson emerge. Dmitri scented plain human and snarled. "Who the fuck is this?"

  "Holy shit," Pete squeaked, holding his laptop case in front of him like a shield. He pointed a quivering finger at me. "I'm with the detective!"

  "You invited this human here?" Dmitri spat.

  "He's going to help us with the disc," I soothed. "It's fine."

  "You know, Luna, just when I start liking you, you pull something like this," Dmitri snapped, throwing open the Crown's door and storming inside.

  I kicked the pavement. "Hex you, Dmitri."

  "Listen, if this is a bad time…," Pete started.

  "No," I snapped, opening the door and jerking Pete inside the theater by the arm. "This is the perfect time and he is just going to have to get over it!" No one heard me but a pair of Redbacks disassembling a motorcycle block in the lobby. I sighed and led Pete through the seating pit and into the makeshift rec room where Sunny was glaring at me with what could only be described as an evil eye.

  "Sunny, Pete and Pete, Sunny," I introduced, handing the DVD to Pete.

  "Pleasure," he said as he plugged in his laptop. I saw Dmitri sulk into the doorway and watch the three of us cluster around the monitor, but I ignored him. He couldn't run steaming hot and snarly and then expect me to beg for more.

  "Okay," said Pete, popping the DVD into the laptop's drive. He opened the editing suite and watched as a progress bar lit up the screen. "So this is your basic E and C."

  "E and C?" I said, feeling like the only caster in a roomful of bloods. Normally, I was good with computers—I could make them sit up and do a trick or two where protected files and passwords were concerned—but digital tape was beyond me.

  "Enhance and capture," said Pete patiently. "Look, why don't you just sit back and watch, okay?"

  "She will not," said Sunny. "You may be smart but that doesn't exempt you from manners."

  "Listen
, I didn't have to come to this hellhole," said Pete, grimly pressing buttons. "Being around people with the blood makes me tense, so give me some space."

  "Sunny." I held up a hand to ease her. "Let him work, okay? We need this footage."

  "Call my house a hellhole again and I'll tear out your tongue for an appetizer," said Dmitri from the doorway. Pete's breathing bitched. Dmitri grinned, showing fanged-out teeth. "No pressure, Petey."

  I shot Dmitri a glare that would Hex a daemon. He flipped a hand like we weren't worth his time and strode off to Hex knew where. Fine. Who needed his sexy ass anyway?

  Pete rapidly saved and moved a series of files to the desktop. After a moment he clicked on the one named VIDEO and a player opened, showing a grainy moving image in which I could barely make out a stripper on the tiny stage of Double Trouble. Her face and the crowd were lost in a haze of pixels.

  "This is a shitty Web cam that was transferred to DV," Pete said. "I don't know how much better I can make the image quality."

  I leaned forward and squinted at the upturned faces of the men. Somewhere, the witch was in there. Lockhart, too. "Try."

  Pete heaved a sigh. "Fine." He stopped the footage and began selecting tools from the bar at the bottom of the screen. "I'll equalize the levels as much as I can. Filter out the noise, the unnecessary pixels in the image field."

  I pointed at the crowd. "Let's isolate the frames where the guys at the stage are facing the camera."

  "Do you have any idea how long that will take?" Pete asked me.

  "We're looking for the man who killed a member of this house's pack," I said. "It would behoove you to do it."

  Pete blinked. "Wow. You didn't tell me that."

  "Moonrise is in a couple of hours," I said. "Get to work." I didn't add the obvious—that when the moon came up I would be just as phased as everyone else in the pack house and Pete would be screwed—but from the ferocity of his typing I think he got the message.

  He fast-forwarded the footage, filters working on the bad lighting and low quality to bring a slightly blurry but well-lit picture to life on the screen. Every time the camera caught the flash of a patron's face turned toward it, Pete captured the frame and saved it as an image file.

  After almost forty-five minutes, the tape was over and Pete's desktop was full of images. He closed the video, cutting Katya off in midgrind. She hadn't been a terribly attractive girl in life, but she moved with the sensuous confidence of a trained dancer.

  "Okay," said Pete. "I'm done." He stood up and rubbed his eyes. "You guys go on playing Dick Tracy. I'm headed home."

  "Thanks for your help," Sunny called after him. Pete's cell phone trilled and he answered it, walking out without a word to us.

  "Your friend isn't socially retarded or anything, no, sir," said Dmitri with sarcasm that could blister paint. He flopped himself on the sofa, a fresh drink in hand.

  I shrugged. "It comes with the skills."

  "So, can we look?" asked Sunny eagerly. I took Pete's chair and began opening the image files. A lot of them were useless half profiles caught in low light or men looking at their feet and showing us the tops of a lot of bald heads.

  We clicked through at least sixty pictures and with each one my hope that Stephen, the witch, or Regan Lockhart had been in Double Trouble before he tore Katya's throat faded, and my potential arrest warrant with it.

  "Just a few more," said Sunny, and yawned. "If I'm sleeping here, I have a feeling I'll need to get a head start on the night."

  "We'll finish after this one," I said. I was tired, too, the day from hell starting to catch up with me. All I really wanted to do was sleep for about two years, wake up, and realize this had all been a sadistic and extremely vivid dream.

  I opened the next file and stared at the pale face caught full on camera. My breath caught. Dmitri leaned over my shoulder. "What? You got something?"

  "Him," I said matter-of-factly. I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me and I was plummeting.

  The face on the tape was familiar to me, hawk nose and hard eyes catching mine. But it wasn't Regan Lockhart or a nameless blood witch.

  The face staring back at me from the screen was Alistair Duncan's.

  Twenty-One

  Shock is a funny thing. You think you're fine, sitting there and watching something too hideous to comprehend unfold before your eyes, and it's only later that you come to realize that you're comfortably outside your body, watching it react and seeing the horror grow on your own face. You don't really feel your head go light as the blood drops out of it or the numbness in your shaking hands until someone brings you back to yourself, as Sunny did to me.

  "Alistair Duncan," she said quietly. "He's the district attorney, isn't he?"

  We were sitting by ourselves on a loading dock at the rear of the Crown. I'd been silent the entire time, thoughts rushing and tripping through my head in a maelstrom too quick to comprehend.

  I just nodded at Sunny's question.

  "He killed those women?"

  "How could I be so stupid?" I asked no one. How, indeed? A smart cop would have long ago recognized Duncan's machinations for what they were. I was blind. Oblivious. I'd let Alistair Duncan slide away from me as easily as his knife slipped through the three women's flesh.

  "You're scaring me," said Sunny, sparing a glance away from the pavement in front of us. "Your face…"

  "I'm fine," I whispered. "I'm fine."

  "What do we do now?" said Sunny.

  I knew I had to tell Sunny the truth—she was my cousin, she was in the crossfire, she had to know. Still, it was the most difficult thing to open my mouth and start talking. "If Al Duncan murdered three women, we're not safe, even here. By now Lockhart knows that I'm not in custody, and that means Duncan knows."

  Sunny said nothing, just stared ahead into the black alley that faced us, her face grimmer than I could ever remember it being. "So what you're saying is, we're dead."

  "I am so sorry, Sunny …"

  She held up a palm. "Don't, Luna. You're not sorry. It's your nature to hound things until you catch them or drop dead."

  I pulled my knees to my chest, stung. "That was such a shitty thing to say."

  Sunny pinched the point between her eyes. "I'm sorry."

  "Me, too."

  "So what do we do now?"

  What a truly excellent question from my ever-practical cousin. Every bone in my body screamed Action!—go to Duncan's place, kick bis door in, hunt him down, and make him feel terror for once in his entirely too-long life.

  But the real answer was, there was nothing I could do. I no longer had the authority to as much as look at Al Duncan cross-eyed. I wasn't a cop anymore.

  I was just Insoli.

  "Luna?" Sunny crossed her arms expectantly.

  "How should I know?" I threw up my hands. "We sit here and wait for Duncan to kill more women, and finish whatever the Hex he's trying to do just like the rest of the city."

  Sunny gave me the look, with the one cocked eyebrow. The one that said I had let her down in some unimaginable way. It stung, not because it was undeserved. I had let her down. I had let down Dmitri and Lilia, Katya and Marina, McAllister and everyone who thought I was capable of not screwing up. Just another inept human who ran against a blood witch and lost badly.

  "Where's the box with the Cedar Hill files?" I demanded, jogging inside the Crown, Sunny at my heels.

  "What are you doing?" she asked as I began to rip papers from their folders, tossing Levinson's spellbook aside.

  "Alistair is after the same daemon as Marcus. There's got to be a thread." The top page of the transcript from Marcus's bail hearing caught my eye. Marcus had been released into his parents' custody at that hearing, been taken to their home, and promptly savaged another woman. The system had done a bang-up job.

  The smudged and many-times-xeroxed copy listed basic information like name of defendant, judge, docket number, date. In the box for legal counsel for the defense, the name Alista
ir L. Duncan was typed neatly on the line. She looked over my shoulder.

  "Hex me."

  Alistair had been Marcus Levinson's attorney thirty years ago. He had learned all of Marcus's secrets, and now Marcus was dead and Alistair had them all to himself.

  "We have to find Stephen."

  "Why, and who's Stephen?" Sunny asked.

  "Stephen Duncan, Alistair's son. He disappeared after Duncan bailed him out. He's the one with the mark." I tossed the spellbook to Sunny. "Figure out how to read this. Dmitri and I are going out."

  "Where are you going?" Sunny yelled as I jumped the stairs and jogged up the aisle toward the door. I didn't reply, because the answer would provide Sunny with entirely too much satisfaction. There was only one person I knew who could attempt to call a mark, and much as the thought of seeing her sent heat and anger racing along my spine, if I didn't find Stephen soon we were all screwed.

  * * * *

  The light in my grandmother's small cottage, perched on a dead-end road at the dead end of the cliffs at Battery Beach, was still on when we pulled up. As a worthy witch whose magick rose and fell with the moon, she would probably be staying up until it set.

  I was just glad it hadn't risen yet. My tattoo and the pentacle were holding back the phase, but the back spasms were getting closer and closer together, sharper and more persistent. Merely a friendly reminder from my body of what I was about to give birth to.

  Grandma Rhoda opened before my first knock fell. "Luna," she said, blue-white eyes flicking up and down me once before settling on Dmitri. "And I don't believe I know you."

  "This is Dmitri, Grandma," I said with a forced smile. "We need your help with something."

  She considered that for a minute. My grandmother was the consummate woman of few words, unless she was scolding Sunny and me. Finally she sighed. The verdict was in my favor.

  "You'd better come inside, then."

  Dmitri had to duck to make it through the narrow front door, but he did it gracefully and wiped his boots once we were in. "This is a nice place, Mrs. Wilder."

  "My name is Swann," she told him curtly. "Wilder was the unfortunate surname of the animal my daughter married."