Under a Blood Moon

by Rachel Graves

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said dryly. “I scared him enough that he left.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I haven’t felt anybody that scared since I took my niece to a haunted house last Halloween.

  “Was it the one in the old hospital? That one totally gave me the shivers.”

  “Focus here, Mal. We’re talking about my lack of sex life right now, not attraction reviews.”

  I struggled to keep my laughter in check. “Right, sorry. I’m just not really sure what you want me to do?”

  “Talk to him for me? Please?” she sighed. “I need to know if I read him wrong, or if I should give up or what.”

  “I’m sorry,” I stopped trying to hold back my amusement. “You want me to ask the high and mighty werewolf hunter why he had problems in the bedroom.”

  “We didn’t get to the bedroom. We didn’t make it out of the living room,” she sighed again. “I know this is all incredibly juvenile, but Jakob’s his best friend and you’re the only person who knows him in town. Between the two of you, you should be able to find something out for me. Please?”

  I forced her to plead for a few minutes more and then agreed to see what I could find out. The whole situation kept me chuckling through my shower. It was eleven o’clock when I got into the station, and the smile still hadn’t faded from my face. I dropped of a box of chocolates from Indigo’s in the break room and went out to my desk.

  It was a few minutes before Danny and Simon arrived. Simon looked confused, then pulled a chair from one of the other desks. It took me a minute to realize he’d been using my desk and sitting in my chair. When my night shift counterpart did the same thing it didn’t bother me, but for him to do it…it wiped the smile off my face.

  “Anything interesting out there?” I asked Danny, with only the barest of nods toward Simon.

  “We visited the morgue, confirmed the lab work on Madame Marie. Dr. Mohahan agrees that the wolves don’t like dead meat. When she died they stopped eating and moved on to something else.”

  “How sad for them, a good meal ruined and all that. You didn’t have any problems with the dead body?” I asked Simon. I hoped he had. I knew it was mean, but I didn’t want to be the only one who couldn’t deal with the dead Bokor.

  “We didn’t go down to the lab,” he said sheepishly.

  I gave Danny a look.

  “It’s his first week. I’m not taking him down to the lab and risking him never coming back.” I made a point of letting my disdain show on my face. Danny had taken me to a murder scene my first day.

  “Keep looking at me like that, and I won’t tell you what Simon noticed about the good doctor.”

  “There’s gossip? Oh, dish, please dish.”

  “Dr. Mohahan is scared of you.” Simon blushed a little as he said it.

  A doctor that cuts up bodies all day, and he was scared of me? That didn’t make any sense. A phone rang, and Danny grabbed it. I was pestering Simon to tell me more when I realized Danny was scribbling fast, not talking.

  “Time to go, kids, they found last night’s crime scene,” Danny announced grimly. As we trooped out of the office together, I tried one last time.

  “Did you get any idea why he doesn’t like me?” Simon just kept blushing. In the car he managed to tell me that whenever my name came up the good doctor got scared. A little scared, but scared enough that Simon asked why. Mohahan wouldn’t say and, thankfully, Danny kep his mouth shut about the talking corpse incident.

  I hated thinking of myself as a freak, I hated the idea that other people thought of me as a freak even more. Danny was driving, so I was a little startled to look up from our conversation and see we were in the industrial side of town.

  Massive pipes connected concrete squares, and parking lots stretching into infinity. I grew up only a few hours away from Baton Rouge, but we didn’t have anything like this. Our main street was shorter than a city block, with a diner, a gas station, a hardware store, and a few other small shops. We had a movie theater, of course, a town couldn’t live without one, but it only played family friendly movies, not the latest foreign films or slasher flicks. It was the kind of town you wouldn’t want to be a teenager in. One with plenty of wide-open spaces but no soccer fields or malls to hang out at.

  I opened the car door and tried to see past the yellow police tape and the flashing lights. The big refineries and chemical production areas still awed me. There was something otherworldly about the gravel-filled expanses. When I saw the rocks were soaked with blood, the feeling increased. An old copper-colored Cadillac sat in the middle of the circular pool of blood. Blood coated the windows so thickly I couldn’t see inside. Thanks to my abilities, I didn’t need to.

  Everyone who died in the car had died happy. Not orgasmic or elated, but high. I could feel their delight at it all. I’d felt someone die who overdosed on Blue, this felt something like that only fuzzier, less defined around the edges. They laughed while the wolves tore them apart. Everything about this death felt playful, the idea was deeply disturbing.

  “Is there enough blood inside the car for a toxic screen?” I called out to a forensics guy half way inside the car. He backed up, and I could see blood soaking into his coverall.

  “There’s enough here for five toxic screens, but I can tell you now that it was marijuana and ecstasy.” He picked up a limb and dropped it into a plastic bag.

  “How?” Danny asked from beside me.

  “I can smell one and see the other. There are pills all over the inside.” The nameless expert went back to putting things into evidence bags. Simon stayed back, far enough away that he could only see the blood on the ground. We waited for forensics to finish, then put on our own coveralls. I wondered if Anna ever imagined my new clothes going through a day like this.

  Inside the car I focused my mind and let my power go. I searched for something more about the deaths. The seat beneath me was leather, slick with the blood. I watched my gloved hands slide around in it, fascinated. Danny looked over at me with a confused expression, and I burst into giggles. Somehow my limbs didn’t work right. I ended up sliding out of the car on a slick of gore and blood, landing on my ass in the gravel, giggling like an insane person the whole time.

  “I’m sorry,” I choked between bursts of laughter. “I don’t know why.” I was helpless to stop it all. I couldn’t manage to stand up.

  “You’re high,” he said.

  The laughter kept coming, but something about what he said penetrated. “What?”

  “They were high when it happened, and now you are. You’re getting a contact high from them, from their death.” He shook his head. “That is incredibly weird, Mal.”

  I nodded. Tears began to seep out of my eyes, at least now I was laughing soundlessly.

  “Can you get anything past the euphoria?” he asked.

  I stifled another round of giggles and put my hand on the car door to lift myself up. Suddenly the death pushed through everything else. There were five of them, but only four of them died. Underneath the drug-induced haze, one of them felt betrayed. I searched for more but couldn’t find it. I told Danny as much, deliberately stepped away from the crime scene. My high evaporated the minute I did. I was almost disappointed.

  “Do you need to eat?” he asked.

  “I ate plenty last night.”

  Danny watched me strip off my coverall. “Should I ask why your eyes didn’t go this time?”

  “Maybe I’m getting better at this?” I asked as much as answered.

  The first person on the scene had been a worker in a nearby plant. He’d gone running on his lunch hour and seen the bloody windows. He hadn’t changed out of his Nikes before calling us. His outfit reminded me of the last jogger I had seen, and a wave of guilt passed over me. I left his interview to Danny and Simon. I was delighted to see that Danny and Simon didn’t work together nearly as well as Danny and I did. Of course, I suspected I was more than slightly biased.

  We worked
the scene for a few hours before I remembered to call Mark. I guess I wasn’t as good of a liaison as I’d hoped. I expected him to be furious, but he listened patiently. I gave him as much information as I could over the phone and promised to head out to Jakob’s when we were done. It was nearly four o’clock when I finally arrived.

  “Can you go over it again?” Mark asked, and I did, everything I had seen and felt.

  The office called with identification of the victims. They were all known gang members with prior arrests for drug sales and general violence.

  “Lowlifes,” Mark summed up.

  “Pretty much,” I said. “I admit this sounds incredibly needy, but can we be done for a few hours, please? I need a break from all this.” I gestured to the crime scene map, photos and files.

  “Fair enough,” he agreed but couldn’t leave it alone. “This one feels wrong.”

  He looked at me imploringly.

  I sipped a glass of homemade strawberry lemonade wishing I could think of a way to change the subject.

  “I’m not disagreeing with you.” I walked into the living room in a vain attempt to end the conversation.

  “These are the first victims who have a prior history, they’re the first victims who were led somewhere to die.”

  “We don’t know that,” I interrupted.

  “Come on, why else would they be there? There are no nightclubs, convenience stores, or anything else out there. Does the area have a history of drug deals?”

  “No,” I admitted, wishing he would let the conversation die.

  “There’s something we’re not seeing, or something that’s not happening when it should.”

  His phrase reminded me of my conversation with Phoebe, and the things she had wanted to happen that hadn’t.

  “We were going to talk about something else, remember?”

  “Right. What else is there to talk about, again?” He looked at me expectantly.

  It occurred to me that this was Mark’s biggest problem: hunting werewolves was all he had.

  “What’s going on with you and Phoebe?” I asked. It wasn’t nearly as abrupt as asking ‘why didn’t you sleep with my friend’. I figured I’d work up to that.

  He blushed furiously. “Are you positive Jakob’s asleep?”

  I nodded, suddenly curious and cautious. I expected Mark to tell me she wasn’t his type. I wasn’t ready for a confession that needed absolute privacy.

  He sat down on the other side of the couch from me and fidgeted. Finally he blurted out, “She tried to seduce me.”

  “What?” I was completely confused. Phoebe was a Wiccan who didn’t have a single hang up about sex, but seducing someone who wasn’t into it didn’t seem like something she would do. The more obvious question was why Mark wouldn’t be into it. She wasn’t drop dead gorgeous like Anna, but there was nothing unattractive about her.

  “I’m sorry, stupid question. The right question is why was that a problem?”

  “I haven’t been with a woman since I changed.”

  I sat dumbfounded for a minute. “That was four hundred years ago.”

  “You see the problem.” I nodded and he went on. “Before I moved here, I barely even talked to people. I knew Jakob and a handful of other vampires.”

  “None of them were women?”

  “We’re not a social people. We don’t date among ourselves or hold huge parties. Sometimes a group will form—a mix of orgy and hunting party. I’ve never wanted anything to do with that.”

  “Did Jakob? No, don’t tell me, go on.” I was sorry I had interrupted. I’d never had a man pour his heart out to me. It was hard to know what to do. I heard the shutters open behind me, but I was fairly sure that Mark wasn’t about to run out. I was having this conversation whether I wanted to or not.

  “So now I have this woman who wants to be my lover…” his voice tapered off. “When she touched me I got nervous, and I knew she could feel it, which of course made it worse. Then I realized she’d end up seeing me naked…”

  He stopped and shook his head. “I don’t trust myself, so I left. It’s not like I didn’t want to stay, but it was just, just too much.”

  He looked at me imploringly, but I didn’t know what to say. It was awkward. It got even worse when Jakob walked into the room. Mark blushed again, his face turning so red his scars were pale.

  “Should I ask?” Jakob looked at me.

  “No,” I answered. I turned back to Mark. “I’ll explain to Phoebe. Don’t worry, you can trust her.”

  “I, that’s not,” he stammered. “Are you sure?”

  “We’re girlfriends, there’s nothing we don’t talk about. It’ll be fine.”

  “Is there something we don’t talk about?” Jakob asked me with a kiss on the cheek.

  “Men’s naked bodies and what to do with them, women’s rights, breastfeeding, and a whole list of things you don’t even want me to mention,” I said with a smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jakob walked into the kitchen to start dinner wearing jeans that covered him like a second skin. Suddenly, I was thinking about my own sex life not Mark’s or Phoebe’s. I got so lost in my thoughts that when I looked up Mark was coming back into the room. He’d changed completely, putting on a pair of leather pants and dark high collared shirt. I wondered if he bought his shirts by the dozen. He didn’t seem to own anything that showed even the smallest bit of his scars.

  “I’m going to get something to eat. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. We can go see the crime scene then,” he said.

  “Do you really need to feed?” I asked. “Something makes me think you could go a day or two and be fine, maybe emulating a certain suave vampire I’m in love with.”

  “Not all of us are willing to dine for the rest of eternity on—”

  “Mark.” Jakob’s angry voice cut like a knife, literally. I saw a thin line of blood blossom along Mark’s perfect cheek. The blood formed tiny drops while the cut healed.

  “I’d say that’s my cue to leave the happy couple alone. A bientôt, Mallory.” Despite the cut, Mark left looking happy.

  I listened to him walk out of the house shaking my head. He was making progress toward being more human, but he was still a troublemaker. I wandered into the kitchen and found Jakob angrily chopping. I’d watched him cook enough to know something was bothering him. Normally he took care with the food. Tonight he was practically stabbing it to death.

  “Penny for your thoughts.”

  He dumped the contents of the cutting board into a frying pan. It looked like I was having fajitas. Then again it could have been any dish where everything was diced and fried.

  “I’m trying to contain my jealousy. It’s not working.” He didn’t look at me.

  “Who do you have to be jealous of?”

  “Mark.”

  “Huh?” My confusion made me inarticulate.

  “I don’t like the idea of him sharing intimacies with you on the couch.” I was relieved to hear it was something simple.

  “You mean when he was telling me that he hasn’t had sex in four hundred years and that the idea of being alone with a woman makes him nervous? If you want to be jealous of that, feel free,” I shrugged.

  “What?” He turned away from the cooking to stare at me.

  “You heard me.” I grinned at him but couldn’t let it go. “Phoebe came on to him, he didn’t handle it well. Things would have ended there except…”

  “She’s Phoebe,” Jakob finished for me.

  “Exactly, she couldn’t stand the idea that she had read someone so wrong. She asked me to find out what his problem was.”

  “Which one? There are so many.”

  “Mostly the one that made him leave her place profoundly afraid after she came on to him. She was dying of curiosity, so I talked to him to find out what was going on, and that’s what you walked in on.”

  “Oh.”

  “Uh-huh. In the future will you check with me before taking off on these
wild flights of fantasy?” I teased.

  “I’ll do my best,” he promised, sealing it with a kiss. I caught him as he started to pull away and kissed him back, laughing. We stayed locked together, our bodies pressed close, tongues exploring. There was something decadent and young about just kissing him, something I missed. I indulged myself until I could smell my dinner sizzling.

  “What am I having?” I asked, moving a bit away from him.

  “Umm…” He searched for an answer as he walked away from me to move the frying pan.

  “Fajitas, maybe?” I offered.

  “Yes, exactly what I had in mind,” he smiled broadly.

  “Liar.”

  ****

  Dinner turned out much better than I had thought. There wasn’t anything even resembling a tortilla shell in the house, but I managed a lettuce wrap. It was probably the healthier of the two alternatives, but I didn’t mention that to Jakob. In fact, I used it to tease him mercilessly as he got dressed for work. Finally he found pleasant way to stop my teasing. He left me naked and asleep in his bed, which was where Mark found me two hours later.

  “Mallory?” Even on the edge of sleep I could tell his voice was hesitant.

  “Hmmm?” I rolled over, and then realized I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Coming more fully awake I pulled the covers up. “What’s up?”

  “They’ve found something. They’re not sure what it is. We need to go.” I focused my eyes on the clock. It had only been hours ago that Danny had said nearly the same thing to me.

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  “Gladly,” he replied. The tone of his voice told me he meant it. I wondered if Mark knew how incredibly jealous Jakob could be or if he was just mortified to find me naked in his friend’s bed. I showered and got dressed, carefully tucking my service revolver into its holster. The full moon would be over tomorrow night. I couldn’t wait.

  We took Mark’s car. While he drove I called Auster for details on my cell phone. When he picked up, I was shocked to hear Danny’s voice in the background. The call was important enough for Danny to work nights. Remembering some of the things we’d seen this week, the idea scared me.