by Deanna Chase
Poppy returned with a tray for them: two matching pieces of cherry pie a la mode, and two chocolate milkshakes with malt. “On the house,” she said. She refilled their coffee cups and pinched Lincoln’s cheek again.
Elise was surprised to see that Lincoln’s “usual” had so much sugar. He seemed like a cornflakes and glass of orange juice kind of guy—as wholesome as his crew cut and police cruiser would suggest. There was something distinctly childlike about pie and shakes for breakfast.
Lincoln dug into it with gusto. “Are vampires real?” he asked around a mouthful of food.
“That’s your question? I already told you that I’m not a vampire.”
“Yeah, you said that, but you’re pale, you avoid sunlight, and I’m wondering if you’re coming after my blood next,” Lincoln said.
There was something a little too forcibly casual about his tone. Maybe the deputy wasn’t just into cherry pie for breakfast. Maybe he liked to get a little unwholesome in other ways, too. Elise twisted on the bar stool so that her knees touched his.
“Vampires don’t exist,” Elise said. “Vrykolakas. Succubi. Mara. They’re demons much like vampires. But what you’re thinking of…no. They don’t exist.” She dropped her hand to his wrist, feeling the pulse point throb under her fingertips. “But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t drink your blood, if that’s what you like.”
It took Lincoln a moment too long to pull away. He glanced around him again, as if afraid that someone had seen her hitting on him. She was a lot more discreet in a sweater than a leather jacket, and nobody in Poppy’s would have reason to think that she wasn’t human, but that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t whisper about the deputy’s date.
“Eat your pie,” he said gruffly. “You’ll want fortification before we go to the morgue.”
“No,” Elise said.
“No to the morgue, or…?”
“I don’t eat. That’s the last time I’m telling you before I assume you’re stupid and deaf.” She drained her coffee mug. It was good—it tasted like the beans had been roasted that morning. “Last question, deputy. Why did you offer a reward for people that caught me on camera?”
Lincoln’s fork stilled. “What?”
“I saw the email.” All of the flirtation had drained from her tone, leaving nothing but cold annoyance. “Two thousand dollars.”
She expected him to deny it. She thought a lot better of him when he didn’t.
“I was trying to keep tabs on you,” Lincoln said. “I wanted to know as soon as you reached town. I thought it’d take longer for you to get here, and that I’d be able to find you before you found me. Waste of money, I guess.”
“Is your salary as deputy so good that you can afford my fee and pay to spy on me?”
“You’re out of questions, Miss Kavanagh,” Lincoln said, drinking half of his milkshake like it was a glass of water.
“Elise,” she said again. He still ignored the prompt to call her by her first name.
Lincoln slipped cash under his plate, hiding it so that Poppy wouldn’t find that he’d paid for his meal until they were already gone. “It’ll hurt her feelings if you don’t at least try this,” he said, cutting off a big piece of the cherry pie and offering the fork to Elise.
“Then you shouldn’t have ordered it for me.”
“One bite, and I’ll let you have a bonus question,” Lincoln said.
Elise contemplated the ice cream-streaked cherries on the fork, then flicked her eyes up to catch his gaze. She didn’t move to take the fork from him. She leaned forward, closing her lips around the pie. It tasted like over-sweetened shit. Even when Elise had eaten human food, she had hated sweets. But she swallowed.
He watched her throat as she did it, like he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
“Okay,” she said, licking the sugar off of her lips. “Bonus question.” Elise leaned into him, letting the full length of her body press against his side. “Do you want me?”
Before Lincoln could answer, Poppy stepped out of the kitchen, heading over to bus their meal.
He pulled Elise through the bakery and out the side door. The sun had shifted—she only had inches of shadowed safety to get into the passenger’s seat of his cruiser.
“Well?” Elise asked when he started the car.
“Let’s go to the morgue,” he said. His pounding heart was answer enough.
She slid his aviators on again and smiled.
The Grove County Morgue was in the basement of the general hospital. The attendant on duty, Lance, had been college buddies with Lincoln, and was ready for their arrival. There were six bodies stretched out on surgical steel tables when they arrived, each of them covered in a tidy white sheet. The lumps under the blankets didn’t resemble human shapes.
Lincoln greeted Lance with a grin and a fist bump.
“Who’s the lovely lady?” asked Lance, shaking Elise’s hand. She could feel his pulse pounding on her tongue as clearly as though she had pressed her mouth to his neck. It was nerves. Cheer aside, Lance’s adrenaline was running high. Why?
“Possible witness,” Lincoln said. “Can we have a few minutes alone?”
If Lance thought that something weird was going on, he didn’t remark on it. “Sure thing. I’ll be outside.” He left.
Lincoln immediately began preparing. He produced a pair of face masks and aprons, handing one set to Elise.
“You’re very comfortable here, considering how few murders happen in your county,” she said, taking latex gloves from the box that Lincoln offered to her. She swapped gloves without letting him see her palms.
“Lots of old people in Northgate, Miss Kavanagh. Murders aren’t the only deaths that get autopsied. I keep Lance company, sometimes.” Lincoln gestured to the bodies. “Do you have a strong stomach?”
Elise had been to Hell more than once, seen the human-meat butcher shops, dressed herself in leather cured from the flesh of mortal slaves. She had seen men divided into cuts of meat and discarded as offal. She had skinned dozens of demons herself, removing their brands so that she could catalog the markings that helped associate them with the masters in charge. Her stomach was so strong, it might as well have been iron.
She answered his question by pulling the blanket off of the first body.
Elise stared for a minute, trying to assemble the pieces mentally, like a puzzle.
That must have been the jaw. The other piece must have been the back half of a shoulder. There was no hip left, although some connective tissues remained to hint at leg muscle. Everything else had been eaten. No wonder the white sheets hadn’t looked like they were concealing human shapes.
Now that she understood what she was looking at, it didn’t disgust her. She was, however, somewhat surprised. The killer must have been a very hungry werewolf—or several of them.
“You tried to feed me cherry pie before we came here,” Elise said.
“I like to have a belly full of good food before dealing with anything this terrible,” Lincoln said.
Cherry pie was an interesting choice, considering that its innards looked a lot like the jumble of human pieces she was studying now.
Tooth marks scored the bone, and chunks had been taken out of the meat. Elise spanned her gloved fingers over it to judge jaw size. Unsurprisingly, it was huge. She didn’t know enough about werewolf bites to confirm the match. She would have to find a specimen to compare—dead or alive. Good thing the full moon was coming up that night.
Elise examined what used to be the head. “Did you match the dental records to identify the body?”
“There weren’t enough teeth remaining,” Lincoln said, standing at her side. He was pale-cheeked and sweating, although he spoke with forced bravado, as if trying to reassure himself that his masculinity was unhampered by his reaction to the bodies. He would have been humiliated to know that Elise could taste his horror. “There was still ID on the body. Driver’s license, credit cards.”
“And which one was this?”
>
“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 the 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, the sky was becoming 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.
CHAPTER 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 agai
n.
“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?