by Faith Hunter
His brother Eli was standing in front of the wide-screen TV, a forty-five-pound hunk of iron disguised as a hand weight in his left hand. He was watching the news—CNN, NBC, and Fox in three corners of the screen, and a local station on the fourth, as he did reps. Ten reps with each arm, his dark skin glistening with a thin sheen of sweat, his muscles bunching and relaxing, his workout clothes sweaty and sticking to him. He’d been at it awhile and he looked good. Eli was a totally buff former Ranger who ate only healthy food in healthy portions, and who exercised and trained daily. Like all day. As if Uncle Sam’s army might call him back any minute to fight a war, and he wanted to be ready. Eli didn’t have a nickname. Yet. Or maybe never. Some people just didn’t need one.
“You looking at my butt, babe?” Eli asked, without turning around.
“I’m not your babe. But it’s a nice butt,” I said. Without raising his eyes, Alex made a gagging sound. Eli tilted his head to me, giving me his version of a wide grin—lips moving a fraction of an inch, a hint of his pearly whites. Expressionwise, Eli was a minimalist all the way. “It is,” I said.
“Babe, I know my butt is good. Real good. But I’m taken. Keep the eyes off my butt.”
I grinned at him and cocked out a hip, waggling the cell at him. “Yeah, I know. No poaching on Syl’s territory. But I could take her, you know. I could.” Sylvia Turpin was his hunny-bunny, and also the sheriff of Natchez, Mississippi.
“Chick fight,” the Kid muttered, and I could hear the laughter in his voice. I decided to stop the teasing before we all started trying to outsnark each other.
“YS might have a job,” I said. YS came out Wizeass, which was our current nickname for our security company, more formally known as Yellowrock Securities. I let my grin widen. “With PsyLED.”
“No sh—way,” the Kid said, lifting his head, his eyes bugging out. Eli went still, his left arm frozen midcurl.
I raised my eyebrows. “You lost count, didn’t you?”
Eli frowned. “That was just cruel, babe. Cruel.”
I laughed. “Yeah, now your arms will be all lopsided. When you finish pumping up and showering, we can talk about the job. Meanwhile, Kid, e-mail Rick LaFleur our standard short-term, hunting-only, no-termination contract, and the liability one and—” I waved my empty hand in the air to suggest my uncertainty—“something to cover us having to kill supernats to protect the human populace in any life threatening, emergency, crisis, legal mumbo-jumbo situation. And whatever else you think we need.” The Kid had taken over the company paperwork and instituted files and files worth—various contracts, disclaimers, exclusions, standard expenses, and even a rider list (things the customer had to provide for us to do a job) all in legalese. Reams of the stuff. Ten times what I used to have as a one-woman company. He was a teenaged mutant ninja geek, and he was worth his weight in gold, even at today’s rates. I rattled off the fax number. Eli headed upstairs to shower, muttering under his breath about cruel women.
I got my old laptop and did a sat-map search for Chauvin, Louisiana. It was an odd little place by mountain standards, mostly a lot of water, a lot of swampy ground, a lot of weird canals going everywhere and nowhere, and most of them looking unused, some flatland along Highway 56, and less lining Highway 55. The city stretched out along the two parallel roads, hugging them like lifelines, which they probably were, during hurricane season.
Chauvin was in Terrebonne Parish, the sheriff’s office in Houma, north of Chauvin. So far as I could tell, Chauvin had no independent police and depended on the sheriff for law enforcement. There was no public airport closer than New Orleans, no hospital in Chauvin, and most of the parish social life seemed to take place in Houma. So I’d start out there. Assuming I took the job.
Eli trundled down the steps, the scent of vanilla preceding him. The shampoo had been a prezzie from his girlfriend and Alex had razzed him unmercifully about how sweet he smelled and how his old Ranger buddies would think he was pretty. Neither man was homophobic, and Eli took the teasing well, which all was a sign of how important his relationship with Syl was. He rounded the corner wearing only jeans and a T-shirt slung over one shoulder. Sweet mama, he looked good. And he knew it, flaunting it. And I had been too long without Ricky Bo. I just shook my head as he opened the fridge and pulled out a container of boiled, peeled eggs.
“Details,” Eli said. He stuffed a whole egg in his mouth and dropped into a chair, chomping with exaggerated jaw motions.
I told him all I knew about our job and said, “I’ll stick a bag in the SUV and head out. I’ll text you with the hotel and where to meet up.”
Eli had eaten three eggs while I talked and stuffed a fourth one in his mouth as I walked off. Over my shoulder, I said, “One thing. If those eggs give you gas, I will not pay to have the hotel room fumigated.”
Alex groaned and snorted with laughter behind me. “His egg farts are enough to gag a goat.”
“Yeah, you should worry about that, Kid,” I said. “You’ll be sharing a room with your brother.”
“Aw, man. No private rooms? Gimme that box of eggs. Give it to me.” There were sounds of scuffles, muted screams, and laughter behind me, and I was pretty sure Eli gave me an obscene hand gesture, but I didn’t look back to be sure if the guys were really killing each other or not. It took effort to live with two men, and part of that effort meant treating them like brothers, crudities and all. And besides. Eli did get awful eggy-flatulence, and he had been on an egg protein kick for weeks.
Weapons locked into the special compartment and a satchel of work clothes tossed in the back of the SUV along with all the special equipment I might need in a were hunt, I helmeted up and zipped up my winter riding leathers. No one who had lived in the Appalachian Mountains would call the temps cold, but the air was always wet. What some locals called humid in summer was just damp and miserable in winter. Unpleasant most any time.
Eli—who was truly a jack of all trades—had become a pretty good Harley mechanic. Just last week we had taken the carb apart and cleaned it, replaced the plugs and checked the points and spacings, made sure the battery was working well and that the fuel lines were flowing. I had noticed it took more general maintenance to keep a bike running smoothly in the humidity of the Deep South. Dense, wet air is hard on engines, and thanks to Eli’s expertise, Bitsa was in excellent working condition as I took off on her, the engine a dark snarling purr between my thighs.
But even with a smoothly running bike, riding a Hog in Louisiana is a challenge. The roads are ribbed because their surfaces expand and shrink, and because the ground beneath them is marshy, with a high water table. By the time I got to Houma, I was vibrating all over and my hands were swollen like the hands of a jackhammer operator, so I stopped for a late lunch just outside town. After a plate of fried soft-shell crab po’boys and a huge vanilla shake, I cleaned up in the restaurant bathroom before I went to visit the sheriff. She was Rick’s first cousin and I wanted to be presentable. I even put on lipstick, the bloodred I preferred, and rebraided my hair.
Like a lot of places in the South, everything important to a town—except for grocery stores—is within walking distance, having been built back when walking was the poor man’s transportation method of necessity, if not of choice. Churches, graveyards, lawyers’ offices, restaurants, specialty shops, businesses, hair and nail salons, antiques shops were cheek by jowl with parish offices, farm bureau offices, and corporate offices. There were Porta Potties on street corners and men in construction clothes, most of the workers looking Latino—part of life in this part of the world, so close to the gulf and Mexico. The place smelled of water, but different from New Orleans. There, the scent hinted of power and sometimes I thought I could almost feel the force of the Mississippi moving so close by. Here I still smelled the salt of the gulf and the brine of the swamps, but I also got the lazy, sunbaked, rotting-vegetation scent of marsh, and the smell of slow-flowing water. Languid was the word that came to mind.
And the food scen
ts filling the air from deep-fat fryers and ovens and stove tops smelled equally of Mexican and fish, different from New Orleans. And here there was no overreaching stink of urine and vomit, scents I had come to ignore most of the time in the party city of the South. The air smelled cleaner. Slower. Easier.
The sheriff’s office and the tax collector were in the same white, two-story building where I parked Bitsa under a tree and entered the front doors. I was stopped by a guard, a big-bellied man of about sixty, with a gun and an attitude. He hooked one hand over the butt of his gun and the other into his belt and stepped in front of me as I entered. “Hold on there, little lady,” he said to me. “How can I help you?” He smelled of chewing tobacco and his teeth were stained dark brown. He was going bald on top and trying to disguise that fact by the futile comb-over from just above his left ear.
I chuckled and said, “Little lady? Really?”
He squinted at me as if checking to make sure he had gotten my gender right. “What else I’m supposed to call you?” he asked, his eyebrows coming together. I looked like a motorcycle mama in my leathers, and my skin was dark, like a furriner, so I knew why people didn’t want to let me in. But really. Little lady?
I didn’t bother to enlighten him on the modern forms of address. When I was growing up in the children’s home, it was called throwing pearls before swine to try to explain manners or etiquette and simple basic pleasantness to people who simply had no clue. “I’m looking for Sheriff LaFleur. She’s expecting me.”
“You don’t say. Lemme check on that. Name? ID?”
“Jane Yellowrock.”
He grunted, looked at my driver’s license, and told me to have a seat. Instead I stood, staring at him until he began to sweat. Then pulled my cell and dialed Rick. I didn’t give him time to even say hello. “Special Agent Rick LaFleur. I am trying to get into the sheriff’s office, and Officer”—I peeked at the man’s badge—“Officer Delorme won’t let me in.”
“I’ll call the office. Sit tight.”
“I’d rather stand and stare at Delorme.”
“Be nice to the locals, Yellowrock.”
I laughed and disconnected. About two and a half minutes later a woman rounded the corner. “Dellie, this is the woman I was expecting.”
“You sure, Nadine?”
“I’m sure.”
I followed Nadine LaFleur to her utilitarian office, admiring the building but fighting off a case of the sneezes. The building was old enough to have a faint, nose-wrinkling stink of mold and dust and age. The sheriff’s perfume was strong enough to take the edge off, but was also an additional odor for my sinuses to fight.
I stepped into Nadine’s office and took my first good look at Rick’s first cousin. She was Frenchy—dark-eyed, black-haired—and stout, maybe five feet four inches of shrewd, narrow-eyed, political acumen. She looked meticulous, tough, and competent, giving off a far different impression from Rick’s pretty-boy, come-hither personality. Not that Rick wasn’t smart and tough, but he hid it well. Nadine didn’t try to hide it. Underneath her perfume were pheromones of aggression, anger, frustration, and territoriality.
Nadine was glad I was here but equally wanted me to be gone. She settled on a grudging but determined welcome. Closing the office door with a firm snap, she stuck out a hand and gave mine a firm shake before indicating one of the chairs in front of her no-nonsense desk. “Rick says you can help me with the dog attacks,” she said,
“Uh—”
“Except I don’t think it’s dogs. I think it’s werewolves.” She slapped a stack of files on the desk in front of me, opened the top one, and spread the photographs inside across the desktop. I had been right in my first estimation of what I would see here. It was gruesome. And Nadine was watching me like a hawk for any reaction that was squeamish or girlie. I hadn’t taken a seat yet, and so I inhaled slowly as I leaned over the desk, palm flat on the desktop, letting my weight fall onto my left arm and using my right hand to reposition the photos in order of interest: overall crime scene photos together, heads together, torsos together, limbs together.
My Beast pushed into the forefront of my brain and looked with me, though she still had some trouble accepting two-dimensional photographic representations of anything. No scent, she thought at me. No dead meat smell.
No scent, I agreed. Paper pictures.
Stupid paper pictures. Need scent.
I have a feeling we’ll get all the scent we want, I thought back. Sadly.
A quick scan of the first crime scene showed me body parts scattered over a small clearing, blood soaked into the ground, clothes bloodied and shredded, a backpack, contents spread to the side. The body had been dismembered and eaten. The age and gender of the victim was impossible to discern: no face, eyes, nose, or lips over the gory skull, no flesh or viscera over the chest and abdomen, hands too swollen by decomposition to guess at a gender. Long brown hair on a chewed scalp. And maggots. Lots of maggots. I hate maggots.
Oh yeah, Nadine was watching me like a hawk.
I lined the photos up the way I wanted and opened the file beneath. This one had sat in the sun for a while before it was discovered. Scavengers had been on the scene longer. There was less to see. The third crime scene, however, was fresher and had taken place after a rain. The black mud had dried, protecting the tracks and physical evidence better than the other scenes. I checked the time stamp. Yesterday. These pics were the ones I needed.
I had studied up on wolves, wild dogs, and other predators after I fought the werewolves, research that would have come in handy ahead of time, though that wasn’t something I could have planned on needing. But it was handy now, and I dredged up the facts from my memory.
“Measurements differ on how and who you ask, but researchers with digital bite meters have done testing and discovered that adult humans have a narrow range of bite force between one twenty to two hundred twenty pounds per square inch, or p.s.i., of bite force.” My voice sounded dispassionate, reasoned, and almost pedantic. Maybe even bored. And not at all nauseated. Go, me. Keeping my eyes on the photos, I continued. “Wild dogs, German shepherds, pit bulls, and Rottweilers can have a bite force from three-twenty to five hundred p.s.i. Hyenas, by contrast, have a p.s.i. of a thousand, and wild male crocodiles have been measured at around six thousand, by far the highest bite force on the planet. Wolves at play measured in at four hundred. Wolves eating have, rarely, measured in at fifteen hundred and can snap their way through an elk femur in less than eight bites.”
I turned the shot of the shattered femur to Nadine. “I’m guessing this wolf bite was upwards of twelve hundred p.s.i., maybe even higher than fifteen hundred p.s.i., because I’m not seeing but two bite marks, which means he snapped it like a twig.”
I pushed the skull pictures to her. “The orbital bones are cracked, the jaw was forcibly removed in what looks like a massive wrenching motion, and the skull itself was cracked open.” I turned to another shot. “Brain removed.” I pushed a photo of the torso toward her. “All internal organs eaten.” I pointed to two what looked like puncture marks. “Wolves and dogs share a similar canine tooth length and have the same number of teeth—forty-two—but this one bite mark”—I indicated a set of score marks on a meatless bone—“looks deeper than dog canines. What did the medical examiner say?”
Grudgingly, Nadine said, “He suggested the canines of the predator were longer and sharper than dogs. Maybe two and a quarter inches long.”
That was big even for a werewolf. “And?”
“He says there’s no animal in the state that has teeth that long except the Florida panther.”
She was testing me. Nadine smelled of challenge. Which meant she was holding back on something and was wondering if I’d catch it. I paged through the photos and realized what was missing. Inside me, Beast huffed with amusement. Alpha woman is playing cat-games. Hiding paw prints in mud. Inside me, she yawned to show her canines. Beast killing teeth are longer than small cousin called Flo-ree-da.
>
Still mostly toneless, I asked, “Where are the photos of the footprints?”
Nadine relaxed suddenly and blew out a breath. “Okay. You know your way around. I wasn’t sure Rick—never mind. Here.” She handed me another folder, this one much thinner.
I chuckled dryly and opened the file to expose prints in the mud, cracked and partially dried, several full of dried blood. Without looking up, I said, “You weren’t sure if he sent you some ditzy woman he was sleeping with or a real expert.”
“Yeah,” she said, her tone as dry as mine. “Women seem attracted to my cuz.”
I separated out and placed three different paw prints on the desk. “He is a pretty boy, not saying he isn’t.” I pointed from print to print. “All these photos have claws in the prints. Puma concolor coryi, like all pumas, have retractable claws and most prints display clawless, meaning claws retracted. Yours?”
“All with claws exposed. So. Not a lion.”
“And Florida panthers have been extinct in this state for a century or more,” I said. “It would be astounding to have three in one place.” I tapped the smallest print and spread my hand over it. According to the ruler beside the print, the paw pad was over four inches across. “This wolf or dog is the smallest of the three, and while the density and water content of the substrate makes a difference in the size of the paw prints, I’d estimate this one weighed in at one twenty. Big for a gray wolf.” I pointed to the larger print, which was more than five inches long and more than four inches across. “Maybe three hundred pounds. Gray wolves in this country are big, very big, at one fifty. That medical examiner?”
Nadine shook her head. “He said something about a dire wolf.” She shrugged. “An extinct wolf. He’s an amateur paleontologist and archeologist.”
I went back to the photos and handed her shots as I explained them to her.