Sacrificed in Shadow

by SM Reine

  “Blake Peabody.”

  Elise rotated a few pieces of the body, searching for distinguishing marks. “Could family identify the remains?”

  “Jesus. I don’t know. We didn’t try. Would you show this to a grieving family?”

  Point taken.

  She covered the body again, then inspected the others one by one. Lincoln stopped watching after the second. He sat in the corner of the room, breathing shallowly.

  “It’s interesting that none of these bodies have hands,” Elise said. “We can’t check hands and forearms for signs of self-defense. We also can’t get tissue samples from underneath the fingernails.”

  “What would you have done with tissue samples?”

  “Nothing. But the absence of hands on every single body makes me wonder if it’s deliberate.” She pointed at the two on the end. “Those have the most intact heads, and the teeth have still been destroyed. I don’t see any tattoos, birthmarks, or scars. It’s like the killer didn’t want us to know who they were.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. All of them had identification nearby, or were found with their vehicles,” Lincoln said.

  He was right. It didn’t make sense in more ways than one.

  Why make the bodies difficult to identify, then leave identifying objects? And the methodical nature of it didn’t fit Elise’s initial assumption of a crazed werewolf, either.

  She leaned in close to the forearms. Some of the damage looked like tooth marks, but some of them seemed to have signs of tooling.

  Someone had been cutting the bodies with a knife.

  Elise peeled the gloves off carefully. “I want to see crime scenes.”

  The deputy looked like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t get a chance to speak before his phone rang. He removed one glove and answered it. She removed the face mask and apron while he spoke. It sounded serious—he hung up after only saying a terse, “Yes, sir.”

  “What is it?” Elise asked.

  Lincoln removed his apron and walked out of the room. She followed. He signaled to Lance that they were done, but didn’t stop to talk or laugh.

  “They found a dead man on the side of the road outside Northgate,” Lincoln said, punching the elevator button. “The sheriff thinks it’s the missing guy, this Bob Hagy. I’ve been called in.”

  Elise glanced out the window. Still daylight. The full moon was that night, but sunset was hours away. Werewolves didn’t change until nighttime—later when they were new, earlier as they became older and more experienced. She had never heard of a werewolf that changed during the day.

  In any case, it was getting overcast. If it rained, it would be sheltered enough for her to go to the crime scene.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “You can’t come. You’re not authorized.”

  “Make up a reason for me to be there,” Elise said. “Tell them I’m a police officer from another county. Or the OPA. Get creative. I’m not useful if I don’t have full access to the information.”

  “You can check out the scene after it’s been emptied, and I’ll give you access to the evidence later. That’s the best I can do,” Lincoln said.

  “That’s great. Real fucking great.”

  He spread his hands wide in a helpless gesture. “Sorry.”

  Apologies were meaningless. They wouldn’t help her solve the case. Elise followed him upstairs, catching his arm to prevent him from exiting through the hospital doors. “Get your sheriff to authorize my presence as an independent consultant. I need access, Lincoln. If I can’t be allowed to do my job, I’m going to leave.”

  “I’ve already paid for you,” he said.

  “And now you’re wasting my time. Get access. I’ll see you tomorrow morning before the sun rises.”

  Lincoln blinked. “What are you doing until then?”

  Elise glanced outside at the gloomy day. Still hours until sunset—plenty of time to prepare for what she would have to do that night. She needed to be able to compare a werewolf jaw to the bites on the bodies, and she fully intended on getting a sample.

  “I’m going hunting,” she said.

  SEVEN

  THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE was mostly empty when Lincoln arrived, aside from the lone dispatcher in her office. The department had been suffering from budget cuts; their one sheriff and three other deputies were all working on the “animal attacks.” There just wasn’t anyone else to staff the office.

  Nobody except Lincoln.

  He had been truthful when he told Elise that the sheriff called him, but he had been instructed to report back to the station, not the crime scene. He was meant to cover the office while everyone else was in the field. But he hadn’t told Elise that. If he had, she would have wanted to go with him and look over files. She would have been in his office, at his desk, close to his body. He didn’t know how much more of that he could take.

  Lincoln’s nerves were frayed. He wasn’t as disturbed by the bodies in the morgue as he had been by Elise’s obvious come-ons. No—not the come-ons in particular. She was an embodiment of the Devil. He would have been more surprised if she hadn’t tried to tempt him.

  He was bothered by the fact that he wanted to succumb.

  Lincoln had said three Hail Marys in his cruiser before leaving the hospital parking lot. It wasn’t enough to purify his thoughts.

  And, as if summoned by Lincoln’s impure urges, he found the angel sitting at his desk in the office.

  Sometimes, the angel appeared to Lincoln with a blaze of fiery light, accompanied by the glory of ethereal choirs. At other times, he appeared as a mere mortal. Today was one of the mortal days. He had propped his loafer-clad feet on the desk and perched reading glasses on his nose as he flipped through a manila folder.

  Lincoln had fought hard for a private office with a door. It was his personal space as much as the duplex—maybe more so, since Mrs. Kitteridge didn’t have a key. He was fiercely protective of it, and it stung to see that the angel had claimed Lincoln’s space.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” Lincoln said.

  The angel didn’t look up. “I sent a letter notifying you of my impending arrival.”

  “Guess it got lost in the mail,” he said. Belatedly, Lincoln added, “Sir.” It seemed to be the safest way to address him.

  Once, Lincoln had asked the angel for his name, and been told, “You’ll call me Orpheus.” It obviously wasn’t his real name. Lincoln had studied Judeo-Christian mythology in college, and there were no angels named Orpheus. He soon learned that it was a reference to Greek mythology—the prophet that had failed to rescue his wife from the Underworld—and Lincoln thought it was bizarre that an angel would want to go by such a pseudonym. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask about it.

  Even when Orpheus looked like a man, he was, in a word, awe-inspiring.

  Over six feet tall, with white hair and pale eyes, the angel seemed to suck all of the oxygen out of the room. The paleness of his features was in direct contrast to the black leather gloves he always wore, even on a hot summer’s day. Lincoln hoped he would never learn what Orpheus was hiding under those gloves.

  “What can I do for you?” Lincoln asked, clutching the crucifix at his throat. He hadn’t seen the angel face-to-face in months. Most of their communication was via unsigned notes, oblique voicemails, and the occasional envelope of money. There was no way that his arrival could bode well for Lincoln.

  Orpheus plucked off his reading glasses, folded them, and tucked one arm in his shirt pocket. “It seems that you’re having a werewolf problem,” he said mildly, as if remarking upon a sugar ant infestation.

  “It’s under control.”

  “Is it? Another man was found dead today, on the eve of the full moon.”

  “It’s under control,” Lincoln repeated. Orpheus stood smoothly. He didn’t step back when the angel approached him.

  But there was nothing that he could do to disguise the shock on his face when Orpheus spoke again.

>   “Did you enjoy your cherry pie?”

  That cool, emotionless voice sent chills down Lincoln’s spine.

  He knew.

  Lincoln put his hands into the pockets of his slacks to conceal the trembling. He had allowed himself to be seduced by the Devil’s charms, taken her to the church his family had attended for generations, and tried to hand-feed her breakfast. And the angel knew.

  “You told me to find her. I found her,” Lincoln said. “I sent you a message to tell you that—”

  “That she works with a group called the Hunting Club. Yes, I read your email. Well done.” Orpheus swept a gloved hand toward the desk. “Your payment is in the top drawer, as agreed.”

  The cold anger in his voice kept Lincoln rooted to the spot as Orpheus paced around him, slow and graceful, every movement as deliberate as though choreographed.

  “But I didn’t tell you to bring her here. In fact, I’m confident that I warned you that allowing her to come here would be catastrophic. There’s a reason we’ve had everyone on the lookout for her.” Orpheus grabbed an envelope off of Lincoln’s desk and removed a VHS tape from inside. “Evidence that she arrived was left in the trash outside. But you already knew that she’s here, because you invited her.”

  “The Hunting Club are the experts. I’d already been investigating them at your request, and when I realized I needed help with the werewolf, I thought—”

  “You didn’t ask me before hiring them.”

  Lincoln swallowed hard. “Lives are at stake. I figured…if she’s so highly regarded, if her skill is so great, then I owed it to my town to get the best help possible.” He leveled his gaze to Orpheus’s. “Even if that meant doing what you told me not to do.”

  “You have no idea what you’ve done,” Orpheus said.

  “It’s the full moon. She’ll kill the werewolf tonight and be gone tomorrow.”

  “If she finds the werewolf tonight, you may as well consider the lives of all the ‘good people’ in Northgate forfeit,” the angel said matter-of-factly.

  Lincoln swallowed hard around the lump in his throat.

  Yes, Orpheus had said that Elise shouldn’t come to Northgate, but he hadn’t said it was anything nearly that dire. How was Lincoln supposed to get a sense of apocalypse from terse emails?

  “I didn’t think—”

  “No. You didn’t.” Orpheus stepped away from Lincoln, and it instantly became easier to breathe, as if a fist had released its steely grip on his lungs. “Clean up your mess before it’s too late to rectify, Marshall.”

  Lincoln’s mouth dried. “But…”

  What about the lives Elise could save?

  There was no point in asking, because the angel clearly didn’t care. That wasn’t his priority.

  “Remember that I still own you, deputy,” Orpheus said. “And you still owe me. This money we’re exchanging, the ‘favor’ you’ve performed for me, changes nothing.” He reached for Lincoln, who jerked back. But Orpheus wasn’t doing anything violent. He straightened Lincoln’s collar, smoothed his lapel. The touch of Orpheus’s gloved fingers was ice.

  Gentle as the touch was, Lincoln knew a threat when he saw it. Orpheus was making a statement with gesture as much as words. You’re mine, deputy.

  Lincoln could only respond with a nod.

  “Also, you’re missing files,” Orpheus said. “Someone’s stolen them.”

  He had thought that seeing the angel in his office would be the biggest shock of the day, but surprise washed over Lincoln anew. “What? Was it…?”

  “No, she didn’t steal them. She can’t get into this building.”

  Two more surprises. Lincoln wasn’t sure which one was more unpleasant—the idea that someone in his cozy little town would steal from him, or knowing that Orpheus had cast some kind of angel-spell over the office.

  He sank into the chair that the angel had occupied, staring at the files spread across the blotter. It was as much of a mess as his town was rapidly becoming. Murders, thefts, the Devil in leather and boots with a doll-like face. Lincoln swept the papers into a tidy pile. If only Northgate’s problems could be resolved so easily.

  Orpheus opened the door. “One more thing, Marshall,” he said. Lincoln looked up. “If you touch Elise again…we’ll be having words, you and I, and they’ll be far less pleasant than these.”

  The angel put his reading glasses back on. He took the surveillance tape from the desk. And he left.

  EIGHT

  “WHAT DO YOU know about werewolves?”

  “They change twice a month, on the full and new moons,” McIntyre said. “Silver kills them. What else is there to know?”

  Elise hugged her knees to her chest as she sat in the shadow of a tree outside Northgate’s sole Walmart. She had been looking for a prepaid cell phone, only to discover that the town was small enough that its Walmart only carried groceries. There was no electronics section, and no phones. So she had “borrowed” a cell phone from a cashier instead.

  “How aware are they, in wolf form?” Elise asked.

  “Not at all.” McIntyre shuffled papers on the other end of the line. “Yo, beaner, hand me that book.” Anthony must have been with him. Elise’s lips quirked into a smile when she heard Anthony’s responding string of curses.

  “So they wouldn’t be able to deliberately interfere with the bodies of victims to obfuscate evidence,” she said.

  “Hang on, let me look. I’ve got a manual on werewolf hunting here, if Tony’ll stop being a fag and toss it at me.”

  Anthony must have tossed it at him, all right, because Elise heard a loud clatter, and the call cut off.

  She redialed. McIntyre answered quickly.

  “Asshole,” he said. For once, he didn’t mean Elise.

  “There’s a manual on werewolf hunting?” she asked, gently redirecting his attention to the task at hand. Sunset was approaching rapidly. Moonrise would follow not long thereafter.

  “Yeah. Written by Lucian Wilder. He is—was—the authority on the subject. It’s not easy to get a copy. I had to practically sell my firstborn for it.” McIntyre’s voice went muffled. “Yeah, I’m joking, Tish. Christ. I would never sell Dana for a book.”

  McIntyre used to be a hard, uncommunicative man, but he had been softened by two children and a few years training Anthony, whose niceness was infectious. It was still kind of strange hearing McIntyre whipping out the sarcasm.

  His end of the call rustled. “Okay, I bookmarked this page. I’m gonna read an excerpt to you. Ready?”

  “Shoot,” Elise said.

  His reading skills weren’t great. He spoke slowly, as if sounding out each word as he went. “The soul of the wolf eats the soul of the human. By the time six moons pass and the change is complete, all that remains is a monster.”

  “What’s this about six moons?”

  “It takes three months to go from getting bitten to becoming an actual werewolf,” McIntyre said. “Two moons a month for three months—six moons. It’s a gradual change, but by the time they’re done, they’re stone cold killers. If you spot this thing, swallow it.”

  That was what McIntyre and Anthony had dubbed Elise’s demonic ability to consume everything in her path: “swallowing.” She could wrap darkness around her enemies and absorb every drop of blood and flesh. It was deadly. Terrifying. But the boys liked to turn it into sex jokes half the time. Elise always swallows. Fucking hilarious.

  McIntyre’s wife, Leticia, had once told Elise that it was how the men coped with the fact that her inhuman form frightened them. Better to tease her than run screaming. Elise wasn’t a fan of either option.

  “Okay,” she said. “One more thing—where can I get silver weapons? Not for me. I’m going to give someone a present.”

  “New boyfriend?”

  “Nothing so formal.”

  “Deputy Pretty Boy?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “All right, hang on.”

  McIntyre flipped through vendor list and gave Elise a name and ad
dress in New Jersey. By the time she had it memorized, the sun had disappeared.

  She blinked into darkness.

  Elise’s falchion could slaughter anything that lived. It had been changed into black stone by the ichor of the mother of all demons at the same time that she had become a demon, and she had bathed it in blood a hundred times since. It never failed to kill.

  Even when she didn’t land a mortal blow with the falchion, a cut with its blade spread infernal ichor through its victims and turned them to stone.

  She was confident that it could take down werewolves—silver or not.

  But silver wasn’t merely a way to kill a werewolf. A silver infection was torture. With Lucinde Ramirez allegedly missing, Elise wasn’t going to take any chances that her quarry might die before she got answers.

  That was why she needed Brannigan Lane, incubus and weapons dealer.

  The latest law passed by the OPA required preternaturals to display their registration prominently on the front door of their businesses, but Brannigan didn’t have a registration to show. He operated out of a marijuana paraphernalia shop—not, in Elise’s opinion, the best way to avoid the attention of the law—and he had a “We Report Preternaturals” sign next to his “Buy One Vape Get One Free” sign.

  He also carried every kind of weapon imaginable coated in silver.

  “You look like the type that’d be good with a whip,” Brannigan said with a leer. He offered her a cat o’ nines with silver spikes on the tips. “I’d be happy to let you try it out on me.”

  “Just the knives,” she said, ignoring his come-ons. He was dumping sexual energy into the air of his shop, as thick as the stench of pot smoke, but she was unaffected. A petty incubus’s power was nothing in comparison to that of the father of all demons.

  “I have orgies every Friday night,” he said, opening the glass case to remove a set of silver knives. “You should come.”

  Elise could think of few things she wanted to do less than join a weapons dealer’s orgy. “I need bullets, too,” she said.