Blacke and Blue

by Fiona Blackthorne

  “We’re the law, McDade. We don’t get a choice.”

  “I’m the law, here. You’re an annoying out-of-town consultant who is freezing to death.”

  “Hey, I’m Fed. I totally outrank local!”

  “You should be getting warm.”

  “It’ll be warm in Perk’s house, I’m sure.”

  “Not by the looks of it,” Ian said, lowering his voice as they neared the edge of the graveyard.

  The house was an elaborate Victorian building, but it was clearly starting to sag, and the paint was peeling off the sides. Several windows on the upper story had been boarded over. No smoke came from any of the chimneys.

  “Doesn’t look like Perk’s been taking care of it at all,” Ian added, gesturing for them to thread their way just behind the line of trees that skirted the property. “I doubt he’s looking out, but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious.”

  Trisha would have nodded if her body hadn’t been so stiff and cold. The cold was now an intrinsic ache inside her bones, slashing at her marrow with burning ice spikes. She was having trouble pushing back panicked thoughts about just how she was going to be able to move physically at all through the pain and cold in her body. Would her gun still work? It had to. She sent up a wordless, formless prayer for strength and just a little luck.

  They crouched low and took advantage of heaps of trash and scrap metal in what appeared to be the backyard and crept toward the house. Trisha fell behind Ian. It was too dark for her to move quickly, plus she was in complete fear that she would spasm with cold and knock something over, probably something loud and clangy with her luck.

  She reached the side of the house, and they moved around the corner to where light poured out of several windows.

  “Kitchen, if I remember right,” Ian whispered.

  The chill going down her spine had nothing to do with actual cold. Perk in the kitchen was probably the worst combination possible.

  “Go low,” Ian whispered again into her ear. “Kitchen door around the corner. I’ll go in, you cover me.”

  She jerked her head, which was as close to a nod as she could get. Shit, how was she going to cover him? How many years had it been since she had actually been in the field? Even that didn’t matter because she couldn’t remember ever having been in an actual confrontation or fight with a suspect. Ever. Ten years since her last “training exercise” at Quantico.

  But Ian was depending on her. The memory of the feeling at sea of having lost him crashed down on her, splintering her fear and loosening her fingers from the cold enough that she could grip her gun. She would not let him down.

  They crouched and crawled around the corner of the house, and she was thankful for the muffling effect of the snow. Ian stood up on one side of the door, and she stood up on the other. The bright fluorescent light of the kitchen hurt her eyes, but she thought she saw a figure moving inside.

  Yet again, she found herself praying. Truly praying.

  She prayed Ian would be safe.

  She prayed her gun would work.

  She prayed the victim inside was still alive.

  Ian caught her gaze and nodded, mouthing, “One…two…three!”

  He kicked in the rickety door, shattering the glass in the panes.

  “Freeze!” he yelled, stepping into the room.

  Trisha was right behind him, gun drawn and scanning the room with a ruthless certainty.

  And then, the screaming started.

  Chapter 23

  “Put the knife down, Perk,” Ian shouted, aiming his gun directly at the smaller man who was holding a large, long knife in his hand and standing over the body of a blonde woman lying on the kitchen table.

  The woman was struggling against the rope that was looped around her arms, screaming at the top of her lungs. Another older woman was standing in the doorway at the opposite end of the kitchen, wobbling on a cane and clutching at the doorframe. Her lanky gray hair hung down around her sunken face, and she was screaming as her watery blue eyes focused on the center of the room.

  “Leave her alone, Perk!” Ian warned, taking another step closer to the man who was now trembling so hard, the knife was shaking in his hand.

  “Ian, wait, don’t!” Trisha cried out, but it was too late.

  Perk yanked a gun out of his waistband with a movement that was startlingly fast, faster than should have been possible. He fired three shots at Ian and Trisha. Her body collapsed on her from shock, landing her on the floor with a thump. Her gun went skittering out of her hand across the slick and weirdly clean yellow linoleum.

  She heard Ian’s yelp of pain as he fell to the ground, and she saw a new darker stain begin to spread over the shoulder of his darkly wet clothes.

  Instinct took over, and she crawled for her gun, blocking out the meaning of the scream from the doorway of, “Perk, the hell you think you’re doin’, you stupid boy? Put that down!” and the shot that answered.

  From her hands and knees, she could see the older woman’s body hit the floor, red soaking through the faded gray of her robe and spilling onto the floor in a growing puddle that crept closer and closer to Perk’s boots.

  Trisha was just about within reach of her gun when she saw Perk get down on his hands and knees and begin to lap up the blood with his tongue. She dry heaved, and he looked up, his face smeared with blood and a maniacal look in his eyes. He narrowed his gaze at her and was raising his gun at her when there was a clattering crash from the kitchen table, and the body of the woman fell to the floor.

  The woman scrambled to her feet still tangled in the half-tied ropes, but she stumbled and Perk was faster, jumping up and lunging for her at the same time Trisha lunged for her gun. She caught it, rolled, and had it aimed at Perk from her place on the floor.

  “Stop it, Perk!” Trisha yelled.

  Perk grabbed the blonde woman and held her back to his chest. Now armed with a human shield, he sneered at Trisha.

  “You think it’s checkmate?” he snickered, grabbing the knife from the counter where he had thrown it and holding it to the woman’s throat.

  “I didn’t know you played chess,” Trisha said, keeping her gun trained on Perk as she carefully got to her feet.

  “Oh, there’s so much you don’t know about me,” Perk replied gleefully.

  “That’s very true,” she replied calmly, ignoring the desperate look in the eyes of the woman with the knife to her throat. This was tricky. She had to keep one hundred percent of her attention on Perk, now.

  She had interviewed serial killers before, and it was always a test of wills and brain. But that was when they were safely behind bars, and she was surrounded by other people with guns who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the unarmed convict if he tried anything funny. Now, it was a test of wills and brain, and the playing field was a hell of a lot more even in the worst possible way with guns, knives, and an innocent life on the line.

  “Chess is a game that requires a high degree of logic and calmness to play well,” Trisha said evenly. “I’m not surprised that you play it. You probably kick ass at it.”

  “I do,” Perk replied, and then his smug sneer turned bitter. “Too bad there ain’t much call for professional chess players in Blue Moon.”

  “Why didn’t you ever leave?”

  “I had that ol’ bitch on the floor over there to take care of. When my dad ran off right after I was born, well, we were both stuck here. Seems it was my fault for being born, so I had to make it up to her. Except damn, she was a ripe bitch! Never let me forget I’m the goddamn reason we are stuck in this fucking piece of shit town.”

  Trisha nodded, giving him a moment to calm down. She had to keep him talking but also keep him calm.

  “You really threw me for a loop with your story about the break-ins to your shack,” she lied, careful to keep her eyes straight on his with no downward movement to the left. “You had me completely suspecting someone else for a little bit.”

  “I thought as much,” Perk said smugly,
pressing the knife against the woman’s throat a little too hard in his excitement. A trickle of blood ran down her throat, and she whimpered.

  “Shut up!” he screamed at the woman, pressing the knife in harder. “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Do as you’re told,” Trisha snapped at the woman, never taking her gaze off Perk. The last thing she needed was the woman doing something to complicate the game she was playing now.

  “Oh, so you think you’re the queen here?” Perk said with an almost eerie prescient echo of her thoughts. “You can order the pawn around? Well, I’m the black king, and she’s my pawn, and no damn police bitch is gonna tell me or my pawn what to do.”

  “You are definitely tricky to deal with,” Trisha said. “I was never good at chess.” She neglected to add that it was because she got bored with the abstract and preferred to play her game for stakes that mattered, like catching fuckers like him.

  “You think too much, but you don’t really think enough. Nobody really thinks enough. Not enough to ever really see what’s in front of them.”

  “That’s very true. You’re right. I see it all the time.”

  “You didn’t even have any idea it was me that got you over the head, did you? Not until later, at least.”

  “Yeah. I honestly thought someone was using you and your shack again to drag red herrings—sorry about the pun—across their trail.”

  “Ha-ha! Yeah, well, it was a risky move, but I had to do something to protect myself. After the town meeting, it seemed like you were saying you were a lot closer on my trail.”

  “Well, that was a risky move on my part. I hoped to draw…whoever it was…out. I didn’t have any idea really even then,” Trisha said, trying to keep her words careful and neutral.

  “I should have killed you,” Perk said thoughtfully, looking her up and down. “But, I just don’t have the…I don’t like killing women. I don’t kill for fun, and you just don’t look…you just don’t look like you’d be good…be a good…”

  Trisha saw that he was unraveling a little when his search of euphemisms brought him too close to saying what it was he actually did. She jumped in.

  “I’m forty-two, and I smoke,” she said with a sort of sad, conspiratorial half smile calculated to reassure him that he didn’t have to say any more.

  Perk wrinkled his nose in distaste. “No, no. That wouldn’t do at all.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Trisha noticed that the blood from the body on the floor had now reached Perk’s feet. She realized that if he tried any sudden movements, he would slip. While that could work in her favor, it could also mean the slipping of the knife against the woman’s throat.

  “So here we are,” Perk said with a sigh, and Trisha was instantly alert to this new shift in his mood. “It’s the king’s move. It was going to be checkmate, queen takes king, but now? Now I think it’s king takes queen, pawn to king.”

  With his knife hand still at the woman’s throat, Perk raised his gun so that it was aimed point-blank at Trisha’s chest.

  “Drop it,” he said, his voice now flat and cold.

  Shit! Her hands were still shaking from the cold. Was she steady enough to take one good shot? No. There was no way she’d be able to hit Perk without hitting the hostage.

  Shoot the hostage?

  She could. Shoot the hostage in the leg, get the hostage out of the way. Shoot Perk. But could she do that before he shot her?

  “Drop it!” Perk screamed, throwing his head back and revealing teeth that were oddly long…and sharp…and…

  Suddenly the hostage woman squeezed her eyes shut and grabbed the knife with both her hands against the sharp end of the blade and pushed at it.

  She cried out in pain, and Trisha saw the blood begin to spurt from the severed veins in her hands, but it was enough.

  Perk was startled enough to loosen his grip on the woman and the knife, and she pushed harder until she stumbled free of him, falling to the floor.

  Trisha didn’t even breathe. She aimed and pulled the trigger.

  And shot at something that wasn’t there.

  A wolf, huge and gray with death in its mouth and murder in its eyes, was flying through the air at her from where Perk had stood.

  She watched it in blank incomprehension for a long second as the animal seemed to come at her in an awful, detailed slow motion that moved too fast for her eyes to truly see it.

  Glass shattered behind her, sending her to the floor instinctively as five other wolves came crashing through the windows, colliding with the gray wolf midair.

  The wolves knocked the gray wolf backward, and they all fell to the ground together in a slavering, snarling acrobatic dance of fur and death.

  Trisha heard the woman screaming from the floor where she was slipping around in the blood, trying to get away from the terrifying beasts. Without even paying attention to the broken glass around her, she crawled on her hands and knees over to the bleeding blonde and took her in her arms, both of them falling backwards, with Trisha landing on the bottom.

  Trisha kicked with her weak legs, trying to push them back from the fray when the gray wolf broke loose from the fight and dove at them again.

  Instinctively, Trisha rolled to put the woman under her, and she felt a heavy body cover them both. Blood dripped down onto her, and she twisted her neck around to look up and see Ian’s pale, sweaty face looking down into hers, his eyes ablaze with love.

  Just as the gray wolf was about to land, a giant golden wolf with golden eyes launched at the gray wolf. The golden wolf sunk its teeth into the back of the gray wolf’s neck and jerked it out of midjump to land hard on the ground. The gray wolf sprung up and returned the favor by clamping its teeth down on the golden wolf’s tender and vulnerable throat. The golden wolf yelped in pain, and the other wolves piled onto the gray wolf and tore it off the golden.

  The golden wolf staggered to its feet, and with a snarl that sent shivers of absolute terror down Trisha’s spine, sprung at the gray wolf with all its might. There was a thudding crash and a complicated twisting tangle of paws, legs, tails, teeth, and claws as the two fought.

  The other wolves broke up, two of them seeming to take up protective positions in front of Trisha, Ian, and the woman, and the other three waiting on the sidelines, trying to get into the fight without hurting the golden wolf.

  But it was a fight between two wolves in the end, and there was a final snarl, an anguished cry of pain, and then silence except for the heavy panting of the golden wolf who stood over the now-dead gray beast.

  The other wolves bowed their heads in the direction of the golden wolf who tried to raise its head and howl, but could find no voice because there was too much blood dripping from its throat. It gave a small whimper then collapsed over the body of its prey.

  “Oh my God,” Trisha whispered. “Holy fuck!”

  “No!” Ian cried out, his voice full of fear and…grief?

  He stumbled to his feet and over to the golden wolf and gray wolf, the other animals oddly parting in an orderly way to let him through. Trisha got up as well, but a wave of nausea hit her, and the edges of her vision closed in with darkness.

  “Ian!” she called out, gripping at the kitchen table and trying to make her way over to him.

  She watched in disbelief as he knelt down by the golden wolf and took the animal in his arms, seeming to check for a pulse and smoothing back the wolf’s fur.

  “Don’t you die,” Ian said, his jaw tight. “Not here, not tonight!”

  Three of the other wolves carefully and respectfully approached Ian, and Trisha held her breath, sinking to her knees because she was pretty damn sure was going to pass out if she tried to stand any longer. One wolf stayed by the shaking, panic-stricken woman who was hugging herself into a little ball and watching everything with wide hazel eyes. The other wolf dashed out the broken kitchen door and into the night.

  “I’m insane,” Trisha whispered.

  She couldn’t believe her eyes. It had
to be a pre-death-from-hypothermia hallucination. In which case, death had a lot to answer for because this was not the shit she wanted to be seeing in her last moments.

  But there was no denying that she had seen it. Her psychology training even now was reviewing every neurological function and explaining to her in her head why she was not hallucinating.

  If she wasn’t seeing things, then how could she explain what she had just seen?

  The gray wolf on the floor had seemed to dissolve into a shimmering liquid form of its own body shape and then…morphed…into the body of Perk Hawkins, except it was Perk Hawkins with his throat torn out.

  And the golden wolf in Ian’s arms had just done the same thing, only…

  Only it was Ian’s brother Ger that lay there.

  Bloody and still as death.

  Chapter 24

  Trisha stared at the bloody, battered body of Ger, cradled in his brother’s arms.

  She felt nothing.

  There was just too much feeling to pick from. Her heart had short-circuited.

  Most of all, she wanted all of this to go away. She wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. Be kind and rewind.

  She leaned against the kitchen table’s leg for support, unable to move from where she sat on the floor. She felt stupid, like her jaw was hanging open. There were things she had to do. She had to help. But she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do, and her body was unresponsive. Or maybe her mind had decided to stop issuing commands.

  She felt her eyes glazing over. It felt like she was watching a scene through a telescope. No matter how far she got from the present, though, it was still real. It had all happened.

  There were two dead bodies on the floor. Ian held Ger. Three wolves surrounded them. A small blonde woman shook and cried quietly while another wolf sat by her side and looked at her with what Trisha would have sworn was compassion.

  This was real. This was happening.

  Ger was really hurt. Ger was dying.