Wilding Nights

by Lee Killough

  While Allison washed up and brushed her teeth, he learned about meeting Deirdre at the gallery. Why she found Deirdre Hilst’s behavior bizarre he baffled him, but Deirdre being British told him werewolves must be all over the world. Countless questions raced around his brain.

  A phone call interrupted her recitation. Someone feeding her information. She set her notebook on the shelf above the basins and scribbled while she listened. “What did she say about shark attacks?”

  The door opened. “What the hell?”

  They glanced around. Phil Tushman from Property Crimes stared at Allison from the door. “Can’t you read the sign?”

  Allison finished her call. “My partner and I are discussing our case.” She dropped the phone in her jacket pocket. “What’s the problem? You have something you’re ashamed for me to see?”

  Zane tried not to choke on his toothbrush.

  Tushman stalked by them to the urinals.

  From the corner of his eye Zane watched the other detective’s back and debated if it were possible to use him for escaping from Allison. Surely she would not attack him in front of a witness. Or would she just kill them both? Even if he succeeded in leaving, however, who did he run to? His story sounded insane. The Queen of Homicide was a werewolf. The department was loaded with werewolves. And for over a hundred years the people of Arenosa had entrusted public safety to their nightmares.

  Belatedly he realized Allison had lowered her voice and gone on talking about Deirdre. He decided to keep his word to her...at least for the time being. Stopping the murders was more important...and being with Allison, maybe he could see to it Deirdre was arrested. After Tushman left, he said, “You’re certain she’s the one? How?”

  In Allison’s hesitation he saw reluctance to give him more information on her people, but presently she answered, “Scent.”

  That made perfect sense. Now he understood what was she was doing over the footprints at the Demry crime scene. It also explained her astonishing detection of perpetrators. She matched scents at crime scenes to those of suspects. “You’ve been close enough to Mrs. Hilst to determine her scent is the same as the killer’s?”

  They headed back for the office. Allison did not answer until they reached it. “It’s almost the same.”

  “Almost?” He shrugged into his coat and dug his tie out of the pocket. “Then doesn’t that mean she isn’t the killer? Isn’t every person’s scent unique? That’s how dogs track people.”

  She frowned thoughtfully. “Yes...but maybe something has altered her scent. In any case, with Deirdre the only suspect in sight and so close to a match...we have to check her out.”

  Of course. “‘Close’, then, is good enough to establish probable--” Hearing himself, he broke off in astonishment, and saw it reflected in her eyes, too...that almost without a hiccup in his thinking, he had accepted scent as evidence of identity and grounds for probable cause.

  2.

  Kerr’s remark illustrated everything she had feared about his ability to think outside the box. It also reassured her he was unlikely to become hysterical. Which was a relief. As her initial anger and fear on seeing he figured out what they were dissipated, she had realized Honora was right about the difficulty of killing someone in cold blood. If he tried blowing the whistle, of course, she would do what she had to, but in the meantime his cooperation left her free to focus most of her attention on Deirdre. With Honora on her way to settle a clan disagreement before the Gathering started, she now bore all the responsibility of handling Deirdre.

  “Unfortunately, we need facts more comprehensible to...ordinary officials and citizens.”

  His wry smile told her he understood she meant human officials. “So where do you want to start?”

  “With someone who also met Deirdre last night.” Matt should be here any time.

  Her cell phone warbled. Surely not Honora again. Her grandmother had already passed on the little learned from the Palm Beach clan chief...that Deirdre had always rebuffed attempts to draw her into the clan, so they knew nothing about her or her background...but they had no incidents in the area indicating rogue activity. There had been more shark attacks than previous years, the clan chief told Honora, but that matched a general increase in shark attacks all along the coast of Florida. Where most were not fatal, though, they had five fatalities in the past three months.

  From the other end of the connection, Del Kindly said hoarsely, “Gary’s disappeared.”

  Alarms screamed in Allison. In her peripheral vision Kerr started and rubbed the back of his neck. “Talk!”

  “We were checking with each other every fifteen minutes or so, but when I radioed him at quarter after five, he didn’t answer. I wasn’t worried at first because at five he hadn’t answered right away, either. He’d had both hands busy, he said. It bugged him that Deirdre got by us and he was prowling around climbing some fences and walls trying--”

  “Never mind that.” It sounded like Gary. She gripped the phone harder. “When did you start to worry?”

  “When he still hadn’t responded after ten minutes. I tried him again, but still nothing. So I ran around front. There’s no sign of him and his car is gone.”

  Damn. Damn! It had to be Deirdre, but how could she take him? Was there a chance he was still alive? “I’m on my way!” She threw the phone into her pocket.

  “What is it?” Kerr asked.

  “Find your gun.” Should she wait for Matt Bliss, though? She needed to talk to him.

  His brows rose. “You’re going to let me carry it?”

  “Just find it!” Her desk phone rang. She snatched up the receiver.

  To her relief, the clerk at the front counter said, “Matthew Bliss is on his way up.”

  Scratch that delay.

  Kerr located his gun on the top shelf of the Bass’s hutch in time for them to leave the floor and catch Matt at the elevator.

  Matt looked the same as the last time she saw him...as he had looked all her life, for that matter... military bearing, burr haircut, and a sweatshirt or t-shirt from his current branch of military service...today, a t-shirt emblazoned Rangers lead the way. “I’m sorry I let her get away. I didn’t know--” He broke off at the sight of Kerr.

  “I know. Let’s go.” Allison stepped into the elevator.

  “Go?”

  “The hunter may have gotten Gary Golden,” she said over her shoulder...and heard two intakes of breath behind her.

  “What’s happened to him?” Kerr asked.

  Matt eyed Kerr. “He’s coming with us?”

  She punched the down button. “Yes. Detective Kerr has discovered what we are, so I can’t leave him behind.”

  “I can do him for you.”

  Despite Matt’s breezy tone and her awareness that he liked many humans as individuals, she knew he meant the offer...and a tightening of Kerr’s jaw told her he took the statement seriously, too. “I don’t need him done. He’s useful to me.”

  Kerr’s jaw relaxed a little. “What about Golden?”

  On the ride down, she passed on what Del said. Once they were in the car, she said, “Matt, tell me about this woman you met.” How the hell had Deirdre sneaked past them?

  Matt leaned forward into the space between the front seats. “Well, about oh-one hundred I drove downtown and parked on Avenue B, planning to hit a few bars waiting for Sam to get off work. I’m headed for the cross-street to go down to the A when I see movement in the alley. I take a close look and damn if it isn’t someone in Shift, leaping up to a fire escape. From the noise I can tell it’s the Electric Warehouse, and as soon as she dropped back out of Shift I could see that was one foxy lady climbing the fire escape to the roof garden, and there was enough breeze carrying her scent to tell me she was pouring out the sex pheromones.”

  Allison glanced over to see Kerr’s eyes widen and the wheels turn in his head. He was making the connection to Rikki’s “perfume”.

  “So I thought that was interesting and I followed
her up.”

  Which explained how he missed meeting any clan members on the street. And how they missed seeing Deirdre. Not, however, how she left the Hilst house undetected. Del and Bob had been on the beach, she and Honora out front.

  “I didn’t have any trouble striking up a conversation in the club. You can’t talk there unless you shout so I couldn’t ask about her clan or anything. She said her name was Diana. We had a few drinks...danced...she wiggled her ass and knockers at me. Back at the table she starts playing with me under it, invites me to do the same to her. After it starts getting heavy I suggest going somewhere more private. She has a boat, she says, and we went out the back to my car.”

  “A boat,” Kerr said. “That’s how Surrette ended up where he did.”

  Yes. Allison gunned down Avenue F. Deirdre being a Hilst, the boat would be not at the Yacht Club nor any of the North Bay marinas but at the Basin...where they never canvassed because visiting pleasure boats did not dock there and the pleasure boats already there were not rental craft.

  “She has her hand in my fly making it hard for me to concentrate on driving. She won’t say where she’s moored. When we turn down West Bayside she suddenly says she has a better idea...sex al fresco in the park.”

  “Do you have any idea why she changed her mind?” Allison asked.

  Matt shook his head. “Not a clue. At that point I didn’t give a damn where she wanted to do it, as long as it was close and soon. I do remember her nails digging into me when we passed a couple of police cars.”

  So...maybe Deirdre switched venues because of the way police interrupted her game the night before.

  “When we parked, she peeled off her shoes and pantyhose, said, ‘Catch me.’...and took off running.”

  Playing the same game she had with Cromer...and probably with Demry.

  Matt flopped back in his seat. “I followed her scent to a grove of palms where all of a sudden she jumped out--” He leaned forward again. “Are you sure it’s all right for him to hear this?”

  “Forget Kerr for the time being. The hunter jumped out.”

  “Right...in Shift, of all things. I told her, ‘Hey, normally I like chase games as foreplay but lady, I don’t need any more foreplay! Or do you want to do it with us both in Shift?’ Which might have been interesting.

  “This is where it started getting strange, though. She drops out of Shift and stands there with her mouth open. She says, ‘You’re...like me?’

  “Well, duh, I say, ‘What did you think, I was human and you’d have a little fun scaring the shit out of me?’ Then I realized that had to be the case, though how in hell she mistook me for human, I don’t know.”

  Allison wondered, too. Especially when Deirdre reacted so strongly to her at the gallery. That suggested they were dealing with two separate individuals. But...two Brit female volke in town at the same time?

  “She’s starting to frown and I see my chances of getting laid tonight are going away but I want to try salvaging something here because she is so hot, so I said obviously she’s new in town and may not realize we’re having a Gathering this weekend. I invited her to be my guest, promising her plenty of fun with sex and hunting.

  “‘Even if I’m...half human?’ she says.

  “I didn’t know what the hell she was up to. I said, ‘What? Ain’t no such critters possible and we both know that.’

  “She stares at me and after a minute she gives me this tight smile. ‘Of course not. It’s just I’m a long way from home and feel like an outsider.’

  “I tell her, ‘At Gatherings, outsiders have the best of it.’ I tell her about attending the Spring Equinox in Cornwall while my outfit was in Devonshire gearing up for D-Day.

  “Her eyes go like saucers. ‘You mean World War II?’ she says. ‘You’re not old enough to have been there.’”

  Allison swung onto Laguna Drive. Another volke whose age Deirdre could not read.

  Matt grinned. “It shows how doing something you love keeps you vigorous. I swore I was twenty-one at the time and even if I hadn’t been full of myself for finally learning to Shift, it still would have been the greatest experience since trading my hunt dreams for the real thing!” He punched Kerr’s shoulder. “There’s nothing like being an outsider male! The alphas sicced all their young females on me for a contribution to their gene pool and I got fucked blind! Had to be almost carried back to my unit.”

  Kerr’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.

  Matt went on, “Diana starts breathing hard and I thought whoa, maybe I’d get laid yet. But when I reach for her she backs away and says, ‘Hunt dreams. What were yours like?’

  “I really don’t understand this chick. I tell her mine were like everyone’s, as far as I know.

  “‘Like...everyone’s,’ she says, then grabs my arm and digs in her fingernails. ‘In yours, was the grass whipping at your legs and dust coming up in your face from the herd running in front of you, but you didn’t care because the power surging through you made you feel you could run forever...and then you leaped onto the prey’s back and tore into it and there was blood all over you and tasting hot and salty.’”

  Allison heard Kerr catch his breath.

  “I asked why did she think hers might have been different from normal?”

  More vividly than the dreams, Allison remembered how they intensified as the moon waxed, bringing hunger she could not satisfy, an ache for freedom her body could not achieve. As she reached her teens, she had felt suffocated. She began running, pushing herself more each night, convinced that no matter what the adults said about when she would finally start Shifting, if she ran fast enough, hard enough, she could break through the constriction now! Going out for track in college had given her a good excuse to run on the stadium track at night.

  “‘The dreams are normal,’ Diana says. She’s staring at me but I can tell she doesn’t see me. ‘They’re...normal.’”

  In the rearview mirror Matt grimaced. “It gave me the willies. The last person I saw with that expression in his eyes was a human member of my platoon emptying his .45 into a twelve-year-old VC girl we caught after his best buddy fell into a man trap. So when she takes off again, I wasn’t about to go after her. I didn’t know there was a rogue until I got home and told Rick about this chick.” He grimaced again. “The rest you know. We tried tracking her but she’d jumped into the river and we couldn’t find where she climbed out.” He shook his head. “I’m not surprised she’s a rogue. She was just too weird.”

  As Deirdre was.

  “I wonder,” Kerr said. “The way you describe her reactions matches how I’ve felt here. I just don’t know how this could be the first time she heard that information, or not know her hunt dreams were normal. Her family would have told her, wouldn’t they?”

  It made no sense to Allison, either. The Hilst house lay ahead. She pulled over to the left curb facing Del Kindly’s car. “We’ll ask her.”

  3.

  In the library back at the Goodnight house, Zane’s brain felt overloaded. He had passed way beyond that now. If this Diana/Deirdre really did not know all that about herself, he understood exactly how she felt and why she bolted. His dash to the solitude and sanctuary of the office had not been much different. Except for his anxiety about Gary Golden, Zane felt disconnected from reality, an observer to some parallel world darkly variant from his own.

  Del Kindly’s dubious stare at him had turned to a shrug after Allison explained his presence. “As long as you’re responsible for him. I sniffed around the area while I waited. Gary parked here, and a female with an outsider volke scent approached the car.”

  Volke...like the German for “people”? Zane wondered. Russian had a word “volk,” too. It meant “wolf.”

  Allison crouched over the spot and took a deep breath. “The hunter.”

  “Deirdre?” Zane asked.

  “No.” She shook her head, frowning. “Definitely the hunter.”

  “That’s Diana’s scent,” Bl
iss said.

  Allison stood and stared down the street north. “She couldn’t have caught him in the car. Her scent leads in from two directions, from down the street and straight across the street. Either direction he would have seen her coming and signaled Del.”

  “I think she got him down there.” Kindly pointed toward the wall around the art deco sprawl two properties down from the Hilsts’. “Their scents overlap at the foot of the wall...though not up the wall. That’s just his scent. Then they overlap coming up the street to outside the Hilst fence.”

  In this parallel world, Zane accepted detectives playing bloodhound and working out crime scene movements by scent. When they said sniffed around, they meant it.

  Allison’s mouth thinned. “She must have ambushed him as he came down. Drew made sure all our Patrol officers knew her scent. The first whiff, Gary would have hit his mike button. She struck too fast for him to react.”

  “There’s another scent, too, but I don’t know what to make of it. It’s almost the same as this one. Over there.” Kindly led the way to a spot outside the fence around the Hilst property. “It overlaps both Gary’s and the hunter’s, then all three scents disappear. My guess is the hunter brought Gary’s car over here and they left in it. It’s a two-seater but she could stack two in the passenger seat.”

  When Allison sniffed at the fence, she stepped back with a frustrated frown. “Here’s Deirdre’s scent.”

  “Then they’re different people,” Zane said.

  Bliss and Kindly looked skeptical. Kindly said, “Having another female Brit in town at the same time might not be that big a coincidence, but...a Brit volke with a scent so similar...then her coming here and Deirdre climbing over the fence with her? That’s really stretching it.”

  Allison grimaced. “I know.”

  A thought occurred to Zane. “What if they’re two different personalities in one body...a dissociated personality.”

  The three stared at him. Allison said, “I’ve never heard of multiple personalities in our people.”