His identity finally swims to the forefront of my murky mind. “You’re the detective from Slate’s house. The one who threatened the reporters off us.”
“Yup,” he says, attention back on the road, “that’s me. Matt Lassiter. Detective First Class.”
“I…I don’t get it. Why were you out in the sticks so late at night? What sort of tip were you following? Murder case? Or…?”
His eyes appear briefly in the rearview mirror, brows raised. “Kinsey, I was looking for you. Half the damn PD has been looking for you for days.”
I tug the blanket over my head and reply, muffled, “I still don’t understand.” The PD searching for a missing Kook? “Can you explain what happened after I got snatched?”
“Sure.” The car cuts around a sharp turn a little too fast, and the detective clears his throat. “Few days back, all available units get scrambled to Lombard. Shootout in broad daylight between two unknown groups. Come to find out DSI is one of those groups, and the other consists of some naked wackos. A witness down the street claims some dogs are involved too, but, huh, we don’t see any of those when we get there. Strange.”
(I’m surprised the sarcasm doesn’t drool out of his mouth.)
He takes a short breath and continues. “So, anyway, bunch of naked weirdos, most of them down for the count, some with injuries so bad we aren’t sure they’re going to make it. And, standing in the middle of the circle of fallen nudists, triumphant—two women from DSI.”
Hah, Ella and Amy took them all down?
“Were they hurt?” I ask.
“The DSI ladies? One had a busted arm, but beyond that, some minor cuts, bruises, burns. They were only in the hospital for a few hours between them. Tough, I’ll tell you.” Lassiter scratches his head. “But they’re not the main focus of this story. Main focus is you and the other kid, Liam Calvary.
“The DSI ladies tell us that you all were ambushed by the naked weirdos because said weirdos have something to do with the Jameson Bar and Grill triple homicide. Which, as I’m sure you know, the PD was prevented from investigating by the mayor’s office.
“The women claim you and one other DSI detective were kidnapped during the ambush, and they need to hunt down your kidnappers immediately. About this time, more DSI agents show up, including several big wigs, your Captain Riker among them. More cops show up, too, including four police captains. There’s a big hullabaloo in the middle of the street—thankfully, the roads are empty due to the snow. And blah, blah, blah, we bitch for a while about jurisdiction on the shootout. Then Mayor Burbank phones in for DSI’s side of the game, so you all herd up the naked wackos and take them away to whatever holding area that I, personally, did not think the Kooks were allowed to have. But I digress…”
He flicks the turn signal, and the click-clicking fills the silence while he chews on the next part of the story. “Twelve hours on, we hear nothing else about this shootout, and then DSI finds one of their kidnapped agents…dead.” Lassiter sighs. “I’m assuming you knew about that?”
Liam’s terrified, tearful face comes back to haunt me again. How could I forget?
“Yeah. I was there.”
Lassiter is silent for a moment. “Sorry, Kinsey.”
“Me too.”
The detective fakes a cough. “Anyway, the police commissioner, playing ball with the mayor’s office, conscripts all available uniforms and detectives for a manhunt to find your kidnappers. Because DSI doesn’t have the manpower to conduct such a large-scale search in this kind of weather. And so, for the next four days, we’re going door to door with your picture, following up bunk tips, and doing all the other fun stuff associated with finding a missing person who might already be dead.”
I peel the blanket off my face. “Guess you win the grand price, huh?”
“Some prize,” he murmurs.
“Okay, I’m caught up, mostly.” I shift in the seat, and some laceration on my back tears open, leaking blood. I wince. “One question though. Why’d you take me away from what you would have reasonably concluded to be a murder scene?”
Lassiter considers the question, biting the inside of his cheek. “Also had hush-hush orders to cover up any strange things we came across.”
“Strange?”
“Yeah,” he says, in a pinched voice, “like burning construction sites surrounded by winding trails of large, dog-like paw prints—again, with no actual dogs in sight. Just you, a dead guy you clearly impaled with a pipe, and the charred corpse of another guy still on fire inside the building.”
“Paw prints, huh?” I pick at a spot of blood caked on my face. “Didn’t think about that. They’re usually more discreet. But, special circumstances…”
“Oh?”
“I escaped from the torture shack, and they chased me down.”
Lassiter rolls the car to a stop, and the red glow of a traffic light filters into the car. We’re on the edge of Aurora now.
Waiting for the green, Lassiter raps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay, first of all, what the fuck is the ‘torture shack’? And second, what the hell are they?”
I swallow thickly, tasting copper. “Um, torture shack is where they kept me. Cabin in the woods. No idea where it is. But you can probably find it by tracking my blood—or the paw prints—back to it from the construction site. If you really want to see the torture shack for yourself.” My fingers knead the fabric of the blanket. “As for your second question, do you truly want to know? Most cops aren’t receptive to this sort of…information.”
The light changes, and Lassiter taps the accelerator. “Let me guess,” he says with a hint of exasperation, “the naked weirdos are werewolves?”
I contemplate lying to him.
But I can tell from his tone that he’s not the sort of person to sweep logical answers under the rug, even if they conflict with his worldview.
“You got it,” I say. “Werewolves. They have a tendency to run around naked when they know they’ll need to shift into Wolf form. Clothes get in the way.”
Like with Martinez at Jameson’s. He couldn’t shed his clothes in time during the attack, and he got tangled up when he tried to shift. The killer was simply too fast and…
Hell, I’ve just realized. All this bullshit I’ve been through in the past few days, and I’m no closer to solving the bar and grill murders. McKinney was convinced the ICM had a hand in it, but I don’t buy that. There’s something else going on here. The Jameson trio, and whatever unknown cohorts they may have had, were planning a summoning for a particular reason. They wanted something from the creature they were prepping to yank out of the Eververse. Their killer, or killers, must have targeted them to prevent that summoning. Maybe the answer is in Slate’s emails. Maybe DSI is already further ahead in the investigation than me—
“Kinsey, you all right? You went quiet back there.”
Shaking my head to clear out the mental glut, I reply, “Sorry. Just thinking. Been a long week.” I nibble my chapped lips. “You believe me, about the werewolf business?”
If Lassiter’s a PD veteran, which he appears to be, given his age, and if he’s as smart as I believe, he must have noticed some strange happenings in Aurora over the years. Happenings he couldn’t simply rationalize away.
The car is whizzing past buildings now, homes and businesses, growing taller and brighter as we travel toward downtown Aurora.
Lassiter hums thoughtfully, eyes flicking from the rearview mirror to the side mirrors to the windshield, and around and around, until they finally settle on me once again. “Not saying I buy this supernatural shit a hundred percent, but since I can’t wish away what I’ve seen, I’ll play along with this werewolf narrative for now.” His gaze drifts back to the road. “So, which hospital you want to go to? We’ve got three choices nearby.”
“No hospital. DSI infirmary.”
“You’re shitting me.” He cranes his neck to scrutinize my injuries, but most of them are covered by the blanket. “Kinsey, you
need to be in the ER, not some understaffed—”
“DSI has full hospital facilities. We just call it the infirmary because it’s part of the office.”
Lassiter’s eyebrows shoot up. “You poor bastards get hurt so often you need a full hospital in your HQ?”
“Unfortunately.”
He grips the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turn white. “Okay, okay. I’ll take you to the DSI office. On one condition.” He raises his index finger from the wheel. “Sometime soon, preferably after this Jameson homicide shit settles down, you invite me out for lunch to a nice, off-the-wall diner, and we have a long, enlightening chat about what’s really going on in my city.”
As a DSI agent, I’m not supposed to tell normal people about the supernatural underworld, unless they get irreparably tangled in it, but I already know Lassiter isn’t going to let this go. He’s probably had suspicions percolating for a while now, especially with DSI butting in more and more in PD murder cases over the years. If I don’t bring him into the fold, he might bulldoze his way in through official channels, which would cause a ruckus at the mayor’s office.
“All right, Lassiter. Deal. After the Jameson case wraps up, you name the day.”
“Good man, Kinsey.” Lassiter takes a sudden right, and a familiar row of rooftops pass by the windows.
We’re on Lombard Street.
Crafty bastard…he was taking me to the office all along. I got played!
Lassiter pulls the car up to the front lobby door, unbuckles his seatbelt, and turns around to face me, slapping on a dimpled gotcha smirk. “So, kiddo, what do you say we get you some medical attention?”
Chapter Sixteen
Eleven hours. That’s how long it takes for the lycanthropy virus to become detectable in human blood after initial infection. So that’s how long I have to wait to find out whether or not I’m doomed.
Thanks to my injuries, however, I don’t spend all eleven hours staring at the off-white ceiling. Instead, I lose the first seven to anesthesia, after I’m whisked away from Lassiter’s car and straight to a fully prepped surgical suite in the DSI infirmary.
The findings?
Four broken ribs. Three broken toes. Two veins leaking blood into my abdominal cavity. A hairline fracture in one of my tibias. A similar fracture in the femur on the opposite leg. Right lung punctured by a rib fragment—I’m lucky it didn’t collapse. More burns from the cattle prod than anybody cares to count. A dozen lacerations that need ten or more stitches. Hypothermia-damaged tissue on both feet—thankfully, no amputations needed. And, finally, an assortment of missing nails and teeth.
The upside of all those injuries is that Navarro puts me on the good stuff, so when I wake up after my stint in surgery, I’m feeling wonderful. The usually stiff hospital bed seems more like a tubful of cotton balls, and the blankets resemble fine silk sheets from some five-star hotel I can’t afford. The fluorescent lights are less glaring and more caressing, and my brain interprets the white spots that swim through my vision as falling stars in the clear night sky. I’m pretty sure I make a wish on at least one of them. And I’m pretty sure that wish is related to delivery pizza. Or maybe Chinese takeout.
Point is, I’m super high.
For, like, another four hours.
So by the time judgment finally comes calling, in the form of Navarro pulling back my curtain, holding an ominous-looking set of papers in his hand, I really only feel like I’ve been waiting for thirty minutes instead of an eternity in purgatory.
Navarro closes the curtain behind him and wanders closer to my bed as he peruses the papers—the test results—I assume he’s already read several times. His brows are drawn together, and his lips are pursed. Like there’s something about the words on the page he can’t quite decipher. He’s so consumed by this apparent mystery that he nearly runs into the railing on the side of the bed. He stops short and huffs, finally looking up from the papers to examine me.
“Come back down to Earth yet, Kinsey?”
I nod, and immediately regret it when my head throbs. (I miss the good stuff already.) Trying again, I murmur, “Yeah. You successfully ruined my high. Thanks.”
Navarro shrugs. “Sorry, but you can’t be too careful with narcotics these days. Too much addiction going around.” He clicks his tongue. “I’ll have a nurse come by and drop off some less dangerous painkillers after we talk, okay? Until then, bear with me.”
“Okay.” My gaze drops to the half-crumpled pages still clutched in his hands, and I wait for my life sentence. But when he doesn’t say anything else for another fifteen seconds, I lose my patience and egg him on: “Doc, come on. Give me the bad news already. It’s positive, right? I’m going to Wolf out?”
Navarro quirks an eyebrow at my phrasing, then clears his throat. “Well, that’s just it, Kinsey. Your results are negative. You’re not infected with the lycanthropy virus.”
All the stale air rushes out of my beleaguered lungs, and I take what feels like my first breath of fresh air in years. You’re not turning Wolf. McKinney failed. He died without accomplishing a goddamn thing. And yet, something about Navarro’s tone bugs me. I say, “Why do you sound so unsure about whether this is good news, Doc? Could it be a false negative?”
Navarro raps his free hand on the fake wood top of the nightstand next to my bed. “No, it’s not a false negative. I ran the test three times, and even recalibrated the equipment before the last run. You’re not becoming a werewolf. You’re in the clear.”
“So there’s something else wrong with me?”
“Not wrong, per se.” He scratches his head of curly black hair and sighs. “Look, Kinsey, I’m going to be honest here. I don’t understand what’s happening inside your body. I’ve never seen this before. It’s like…like…”
“Like what?” My stomach twists into a knot, and I gag. “What’s happening to me?”
Another long stretch of silence, and then Navarro finally replies, “You’re healing faster than you should be.”
“Huh?”
He folds the test result papers in half and shoves them into a pocket in his white coat. “When you were in surgery, we noticed that several—but not all—of your injuries appeared to be healing so quickly that they didn’t even need surgical intervention. Namely, injuries to your right leg, right hip, and lower right abdomen.”
“Right leg? That’s the one McKinney grabbed.” I shift to sit up higher in the bed, my body protesting every twitch with dulled waves of pain. “Wouldn’t that suggest I’m infected? That I gained the werewolf healing factor?”
“Yes,” Navarro says. He leans against the nightstand and crosses his arms. “Werewolf blood doesn’t act like vampire blood. If you ingest vampire blood, you temporarily get a healing boost, among other things, even if you aren’t killed and resurrected as one of them. But werewolf blood has no effect unless you get infected with the lycanthropy virus. So, during your surgery, watching you heal before our very eyes, we were sure you had it. And yet, the tests came back negative.” He bites his lip. “So I ran some additional blood tests.”
“What did those tests say?” I grip the sheets with my bandaged hands.
“Your white blood cell count is elevated, like you’re fighting off an infection.” The words slip off Navarro’s tongue like he can’t quite believe he’s saying them. “It’s as if your immune system knows how to fight lycanthropy.”
“I’m not following you.” I sink back into the mattress, my thoughts muddled. “I thought no one had immunity to the virus. That the immune system doesn’t even recognize it as a virus, because it’s a disease from the Eververse and virtually incomparable to the viral structures we have on Earth. At least, that’s what I learned at the academy.” I run my tongue across my teeth—I need to brush, bad. “So, if that’s the case, how could my body fight it off?”
“I have no idea, Kinsey. That’s the mystery here.” Navarro lifts his hands in mock surrender. “There have been attempts at vaccines in the past, bot
h traditional and magical, but as far as I know, none have ever been successful at the trial stage, much less made available to the general public. So, as far as I’m concerned right now, you’re a medical miracle.” His stern expression relaxes. “If you let me poke and prod you sometime, I might be able to—”
“Dude,” I half cough out, “you’ve been poking and prodding me for weeks because of this déjà vu shit. You really think I’m going to let you run more experiments on me?”
“Kinsey, this is pretty momentous, you have to understand…” An idea sparks in his eyes, and his whole face lights up with curiosity. “I wonder, could those two things be related?”
“What?” I go to scratch my nose, only to find a bandage on my nose, secured by sticky, itchy tape. “What two things, Doc? Stop being cryptic.”
A door somewhere in the infirmary clicks open, and Navarro perks up, leaning closer to me and whispering, “Don’t tell anyone about this discussion yet, okay? I don’t want news of your immunity getting out to the ICM. They’d be up in arms demanding an explanation, and we’re on thin ice with them as it is.”
“What two things?” I hiss quietly, hearing the telltale sounds of footsteps—many footsteps—padding on the worn tiles. Shadows ripple across the blue curtain. I drop my voice lower. “You’re not leaving me with that mystery, Doc. What’s related to what?”
Navarro gently grasps my shoulder. “Your trip to the Etruscan Underworld and your immunity to the lycanthropy virus. I’m wondering if you were exposed to something there that subtly altered your biology. The effects of the Eververse on the human body are poorly studied. It’s possible that…” He pulls away from me, straightens out his coat, and taps his index finger to his lips for a fraction of a second. Shush, Kinsey, I read behind the gesture. We’ll continue this talk later.
One of the shadows approaches the curtain, and a hand appears, tugging back the blue fabric to reveal a familiar face. Riker. He peers into my “private” space, eying Navarro before his attention drops to me.
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