She Wolf

by Sheri Lewis Wohl

  When Kyle came through the back door with Ava on his heels, she experienced a slight surge of excitement. While they couldn’t save this young woman, maybe she could help save the lives of others. If, that is, Kyle was able to cross over into the world she now existed in. She’d seen him do it last night, and she was feeling confident he could repeat that feat today.

  “Oh God,” Kyle said when he stopped at the edge of the room and stared down to where Tess was sprawled in a pool of still-wet blood. “What kind of creep would do something like this?” Ava was right behind him, tears pooling in her eyes and a hand over her nose and mouth.

  Lily put a hand on his arm and looked up into his face. “I’m hoping you can reach out to Tess and find out who did this to her.” The faint metallic scent so unique to blood filled her senses. It was time to do what they could and get out of here. It was too close to a full moon and too long since she’d had her injection for her to be around this kind of carnage. Even she had limits.

  He nodded and took a deep breath. “I’ll do my best.”

  Jayne cleared everyone from the room, and they all marched outside grumbling as she closed and locked the doors. Not only did they not understand who the strangers were that Jayne had allowed in, but they resented not being able to monitor said strangers in the marked-off crime scene. Jayne didn’t leave room for argument.

  Lily looked down at Tess and then back up at Kyle. “Okay, Necromancer, the floor is yours.”

  As he did last night, Kyle dipped his hand in his leather bag and pulled out a small bundle of sage. Lily glanced over at Jayne, wondering if she would protest if he lit the bundle inside the house. She didn’t, and soon he was circling the body with the smoking bundle. Unlike last night, he didn’t sink to the ground. Instead, once the sage was out, he stood close to Tess, his hands held palm up, his head tipped back, and his eyes closed.

  For a moment nothing happened; he simply stood there as still as a statue. When she thought nothing was going to happen, his body stiffened and a moan rose from deep in his throat. He swayed slightly on his feet though he remained standing. His lips moved, and Lily thought words might be passing his lips. If they were, they were too low for her to make out.

  Tension in the room rose as he continued to mumble and moan. She wanted to know what he was seeing, to find out what he knew. It took effort not to reach out and grab his arm in the hopes she could see or hear whatever he was. She managed to keep her hands to herself. When someone knocked loudly on the door, all of them jumped.

  “God damn it,” Jayne spat out as she whirled and headed toward the door.

  Kyle crumpled as if someone had just taken a shot at him. Ava rushed to catch him before he fell into the blood-soaked rug. Lily stepped forward as well, and between the two of them, they managed to help him into the large kitchen, where he sank into a chair at the table. Without saying a word, he lowered his head to his folded arms.

  “Are you all right?” Lily thought he was unusually pale and had a slight tremor in his body.

  “Yeah,” he said, his head still down. “Just give me a sec to get my bearings. That was pretty intense.”

  Lily wanted to press him, to tell him they needed what he had right now. She didn’t. As much as she wished to, she knew when to press and when not to, even if she didn’t know him very well. Years of experience armed her with a finely tuned intuition, and it had served her well over time. She listened to it now.

  Finally, Kyle raised his head, and Lily was surprised to see tears in his eyes. His voice shook as he told them, “I felt it all, the pain, the fear, the surprise.”

  Once more Lily put a hand on his arm as she squatted down in front of him. “I’m sorry.” And she was. It had to be difficult to experience something like that. To go through it not once but four times in less than twenty four hours had to be awful. “Did you see who did this to her?”

  Sadness made him look older than he was. “No. Damn it. No.” His voice cracked.

  She hoped she kept the disappointment from showing on her face. It was clear the failure bothered him as much as it disappointed her. “You didn’t see anything?”

  “All I could get is that she thought it was the deputy sheriff who was here, but she never saw the face of the person who attacked her. She was heading to the door and then took a horrible blow to the back of her head. It went downhill from there.”

  *

  Kyle’s heart was thudding, and it was an effort to catch his breath. The emotion that came from the young woman was overwhelming in its intensity. Perhaps her age and the way teenagers felt everything so deeply made it more powerful. He’d felt the fear and the flash of hope when she believed the deputy was on her way, he’d experienced the terror and the pain when she was attacked. He’d felt it all and yet seen nothing. Neither had Tess, for the attack came swiftly and without warning. She’d died before she ever got even a glimpse of her attacker.

  Ava squeezed his hand. In a way she grounded him, and he managed to find his way out of the blackness and back to the light. Her light. As long as she was on the other side, the darkness could never hold him. He blew out a long breath and looked up at three expectant faces.

  “She didn’t see who killed her.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Jayne bit out. “I thought you guys came here to help. So far you haven’t given me shit.”

  He’d be offended except she was right. Nothing very helpful had come out of anything they’d done yet. His confidence wasn’t waning, however. In fact, if anything this made him more determined to find the werewolf responsible. Tess might not have seen her attacker, but she’d felt the teeth that sank into her neck and punctured her carotid artery. No run-of-the-mill animal had made that bite. No, this was a thinking, planning beast that knew exactly where to attack to inflict a maximum fatal injury, to make certain the girl died quickly before help could arrive, like the wolf knew the deputy was on her way.

  “You know,” he said as he intertwined his fingers with Ava’s. He didn’t want to break contact with her. With his skin touching hers he felt stronger. “She didn’t see her attacker, but something about the attacker struck me as odd.”

  “What do you mean?” Lily asked.

  “She was killed very efficiently, the bite placed perfectly to end her life the quickest way possible. That tear in her artery made her bleed out in minutes. She never had a chance even with the deputy on her way.”

  For a long moment the three women stared at him. Jayne spoke up first. “What kind of motherfucker are we chasing?”

  He couldn’t have said it better himself. “The kind that doesn’t hesitate to squash a young woman who was on the verge of starting her life.”

  “A dangerous one,” Lily added. “Very dangerous.”

  Ava released his hand and he wanted to grab it back. “This is all horrible, and if I can do anything like cleanse this place and the poor girl, I’d like to. I want to make sure her soul is set free of the tangled mess that used to be her body. It’s not much, but I can do that for her.” She was right. He’d done what little he could, and now it was up to Ava to do her magic.

  Lily nodded. “I think you should make sure she’s free and cleanse this house. I don’t want it stepping over the threshold again.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Ava said.

  Kyle turned to Ava. “What do you need me to do?” She was there for him and he was going to be there for her.

  “Just hand me my bag and I’ll take it from there.”

  He did as he was asked and grabbed Ava’s bag from where it was leaning against the still-locked back door. She took it from his hands and rummaged inside before pulling a couple of small bottles from its depths. Interestingly, she put drops of whatever was inside the bottles into the palms of her hands. He didn’t know if it was because they were technically at a crime scene or not, but she didn’t sprinkle any of the liquid in the bottles anywhere but on her own hands.

  She stepped closer to Tess’s body and then held her hand
s out, palms up. She murmured something so quietly he couldn’t make out the words. As she did, the room grew warm and the scent of lavender filled the air as it pushed out the thick smell of blood. Her magic seemed to flow all around them, all around Tess.

  What he wasn’t expecting was what happened next. When a shadow rose from Tess’s body he couldn’t help the gasp that passed his lips. Vaguely shaped like the young woman herself, it floated up from her body and seemed to hang suspended in the air for a few seconds before disappearing. Ava continued to stand still, her eyes closed and her hands held out in front of her.

  “Did you see that?” Disbelief was thick in Jayne’s voice.

  “It’s what she does,” Lily said softly. “Tess is free now, and there’s nothing more we can do here. We’ll leave so that your deputies can finish their work.”

  “Wow,” Jayne said. “Just wow. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it.”

  Kyle was concerned because the color had drained from Ava’s face. He didn’t know for sure, but he suspected the effort it took to protect this house from further invasion and to make certain she could guide Tess into the light had taken everything out of her. He stepped forward, grasped her hands, and said, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” He hoped he could pass along strength to her just as she’d done for him.

  As he stood there holding her hand, the smell of blood once more filled the air. It made the room feel small and oppressive. Definitely time to leave. Their fingers intertwined, she followed him to the back door without a word. If he had to guess, she was too drained to even talk. At the door, he turned the deadbolt and pulled it open. They both stepped outside and let the fresh air wash over them. It felt like a heavy load was lifted off his shoulders.

  “About damn time,” muttered Deputy Sheriff Landen. Her face was flushed, and Kyle figured his would be too if he’d been the one to discover this scene. Even her obvious emotion was understandable. He didn’t take her biting words personally.

  “We’re done,” he told her as they stepped past her. “The sheriff says you can go back in.”

  Shaking her head, she started forward and then stopped at the threshold. Emotion flowed over her face, and the color that had infused her cheeks moments before faded away. The about-face was surprising until he thought about it for a second. The level of violence visited on Tess was not something she’d come up against very often in her career, and the effect on her had to be staggering.

  Jayne Quarles was a different story, or so he heard. Her experience went far beyond this northern county. Given that type of background, she was the kind who could keep her cool no matter how horrible it was. Not so for this deputy sheriff. As she started to go into the house again, her skin was pale and her eyes wide. At the door, she stopped and took a step back.

  “I think I’ll let the sheriff handle this one.” She turned and sprinted toward her patrol car like someone who was close to throwing up.

  “Changed her mind in a hurry,” Ava commented as they walked down the steps that led from the deck to the grass.

  “Yeah, she did.” He stared after the fleeing deputy and for some reason felt uneasy. Probably what he’d just been through and had nothing to do with the deputy. He shook off the feeling, got in the car, and backed out of the driveway. He wanted to get away from here as well.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Enough was enough; Lily needed to get out of here right now. The smell of blood was suddenly overwhelming. She had to get back to Jayne’s house as soon as possible before she did something stupid. It had been a mistake to leave the house without first giving herself the injection that kept her under control. Her body was yearning to change, to roll in the blood, to run fast and wild. It was always this way when she went a little too long between injections and found herself confronted by blood and violence.

  “What’s wrong,” Jayne asked as she preceded Lily out the door. The county coroner and assistant had arrived, and they vacated the house to let them do their work. It was more like Lily ran out to let them do their work. The crisp air outside was welcome. Hoping to vanquish the scent of blood that infused her body with desires she worked hard to suppress, she inhaled deeply. It helped, and she was able to calm herself.

  “Nothing,” Lily muttered and would really prefer to keep it at that. Some things were better kept close to the vest. Her expectation that Jayne wouldn’t let her was not misplaced.

  Jayne opened the driver’s side door and slid in behind the wheel. “Bull. Something’s up, so tell me what it is.”

  Lily sat in the passenger’s seat staring out the window at the fields where the bright sun overhead was melting the dusting of snow that had been everywhere when she first arrived in town. “It’s complicated.” It wasn’t a lie either. Trying to explain to someone who lived in the rational world about the details of her life was difficult under the best of circumstances.

  “I’m a smart woman. I can probably follow.”

  Sarcasm wasn’t swaying her or making her want to share any more than before. In her case mystery was good and no sense upsetting the tried and the true. “I’ve no doubt you can. We have more important things to concentrate on than my personal issues.”

  “I disagree. Your personal issues, as you call them, are obviously affecting my case, so spill or go home. You want me to trust you, then trust me. It goes both ways.”

  Share or go home…neither one of those options was likely to happen. She was just about to tell her so when Jayne reached over and put a hand on her arm. “Please.”

  Damn. This woman had so many sides to her, and they were all compelling. Just that one word made her want to tell her, and she hadn’t felt that way in so long she couldn’t even remember the last time. She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. It was easier to resist when she stuck to sarcasm. “It’s a long story.”

  Jayne squeezed lightly on her arm. “You can trust me.”

  “Funny thing is, Jayne Quarles, I believe you.” Any resistance was fading away in a hurry.

  “That’s cause I’m a believable kind of person.”

  Again she was struck by how multi-layered Jayne was turning out to be. Humor was not something she would have guessed about Jayne. The last bit of her inner conflict evaporated, and she made her decision. Trust it was. “I’m a werewolf.”

  “Yes, I believe we’ve already established that.” Jayne’s eyes were on the road as she navigated country roads bordered by open fields and dotted with occasional homes, some old, some new. Presumably they were heading back to her house, although nothing looked familiar to Lily, so if they’d come this way on the trip in, she’d missed it entirely.

  “True, but I’m not what is considered a hereditary werewolf. In other words, I wasn’t born this way.”

  “You mean it can be passed down?”

  That little fact had been a surprise to her too when she learned the intimate details of what she was to become. “Yes. Some families go back for generations, but not mine. My family was all too human.” The sadness that washed over her as she said those words was familiar. Even after all these years, she missed her family, flaws and all. “I was attacked and this is what I became.”

  “So when the full moon comes, boom, you’re a wolf.”

  Lily smiled wryly. She did so love the folk legends that sprang up around her kind. They were supremely exaggerated, even if they were based in a fair amount of fact. “The full moon is the best time for the werewolf, but it isn’t the only time they change. Many other factors come into play. A mature wolf can change at will, while a young wolf has far less control and will change when confronted by blood, desire, or fear. All werewolves can lose control when in the presence of blood or when the moon is full.”

  “What about you? You were just in a room bathed in blood. I didn’t see you turn all furry and wild.”

  Lily didn’t admit the very real truth that she’d wanted to. The effort it had cost her not to was monumental. “It’s what sets a Jägers hunter apart f
rom the garden-variety werewolf.”

  “I didn’t think there was such a thing as a garden-variety werewolf.”

  Jayne actually had a pretty good point. “Figure of speech. The Jägers saved me, and they continue to save me year after year.”

  “How?”

  “Disivaylo.”

  “Disi what?”

  “Disivaylo. It’s the serum that has kept me sane for nearly five hundred years.”

  Clearly Jayne was intrigued so Lily decided to go for it. She described the serum that was given orally when she was first rescued by the Jägers. The mixture of natural ingredients stumbled upon centuries ago made life for her and others like her tolerable. It allowed her to continue living her life without becoming a predator and to harness the power of the werewolf in order to be a contributing member of the world. She told Jayne how through the centuries the formula was refined and improved so that instead of daily doses she drank with her tea, she now took an injection once a week. Jayne listened without interrupting. When Lily finished, she leaned back and thought how freeing it felt to be absolutely honest with someone.

  “Now you’re due, is that why you’re pale and shaking?”

  “It is.” Had to give her credit for catching on quick.

  “Let’s get you back to the house then.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  The only part she didn’t share was that, even with the serum, Lily retained the ability to change if she desired. What the Disivaylo did for her was grant her extreme control. She could separate the woman from the wolf so that the woman was the one who called all the shots. The wolf was never able to escape without her permission. Except, that is, as long as she didn’t go too long without her injection. If she did, the wolf howled for freedom, and denying it was difficult. She was close to that right now, and it was her own fault. She didn’t mention any of that to Jayne.