So though the crowd of mostly shifters was used to the occasional human stumbling through, wolves were still wolves, and almost everyone turned their eyes toward the door, sniffing him out.
One thing you should never do with a predator was act like prey. But Carter also knew to never stare down a shifter long enough to make them feel challenged. His stare was confident but brief.
Satisfied that everything was right with the world, the shifters all turned their eyes back toward what they’d been doing when he’d come in. All save one—James was rigid as a board and staring at Carter hard.
“What does he want?” Mercer asked softly.
Considering Carter and I weren’t on the friendliest terms anymore, I could only imagine he’d dropped by to relate something noteworthy as it pertained to his case. I’d hoped after that night I’d not be dragged deeper into this one, but I knew I’d not been so lucky.
From the moment I’d touched Faith’s little hand, I’d been expecting Carter’s return.
“To talk about the case, I’m sure.”
Only once he’d established himself within the pecking order did Carter finally come to me. I’d already scooted out from beneath the bar and was leaning against it, waiting on him.
He arrived in a cloud of quality cologne and the soft musk of male sweat. Carter was dressed far more casually than was typical for him. He was normally a slacks-and-button-down-shirt kind of a guy. “Old school detective-ing,” he called it. But today he’d clearly been caught during a rare down day, dressed as he was in silver basketball shorts and a hunter-green T-shirt with the SCPD graphic stenciled in white upon it.
“Carter?” I lifted a brow, eyeing him with a whisper of a smile. “Slumming it today?”
He chuckled, the sound deep and throaty and taking me back to the many times he and I had started our conversations in just that way. Of course back then, I’d been on the beat too. He wouldn’t have needed to find me in a honky-tonk, wearing Daisy Duke shorts and cherry-red shitkickers, but times were a-changin’, I supposed.
“You could say that.” He rubbed his sweaty brow with his palm.
“You thirsty?” I asked, sensing it wasn’t a social call because of the way he kept glancing out the back door but wanting to be polite all the same.
“I’ll take a water if you’ve got one.”
Knowing Mercer was listening in, I turned and held up a finger. He was already pulling a bottle out of the mini-fridge. Handing it to me a second later, he then jerked his chin in the direction of the door.
Mercer also suspected Carter was here on business and was silently telling me to take our conversation somewhere else.
Shoving the bottle into Carter’s chest, I flicked my fingers. “Let’s go take a ride, detective.”
Rather than go out the back, I turned and headed toward the front exit, taking us right past James’s table. Whatever they’d been chatting about was winding down now. Clay, Medusa, and Viking were already up and shoving their chairs in. Only Emerson remained behind.
I made it a point to rarely be alone in the company of Emerson, but I knew him well enough to know that he was pissed from the way his nostrils flared and his fingers drummed out a staccato rhythm on the tabletop.
Neither Clay nor Medusa spared me a passing glance. James, however, fell into step beside Carter and me.
“Name’s James,” he said in a deep rumble, reaching around me to shake Carter’s hand.
Carter, having been around shifters long enough, understood what was going on. Turning head-on toward James, he shook his large hand back, allowing himself to be sized up and standing still under the scrutiny.
By no means was Carter a little guy, but compared to shifters, he might as well have been a gnat.
“Carter Monroe,” he said back.
James’s nostrils flared. He held tight to Carter’s hand for an obvious minute before letting it go. “You’re a detective.”
It wasn’t a question, and Carter didn’t treat it as one. He merely dipped his head in acknowledgment. I, however, thought James had done an awful lot of snooping in the four days he’d been here.
Sparing me the briefest of glances, James dipped his head. “See you around, detective.”
Carter and I stood where we were for a minute, watching him go. Only once we heard the roar of pipes traveling down that dirt road did Carter say, “You boast some interesting friends, Smith.”
I snorted. “He ain’t no friend of mine. Anyway, let’s go.”
Chapter 7
Scarlett
Pulling up to the eerily quiet junkyard, the rusted Ford truck came to a rolling stop before I put it in park. It might have seemed weird to like visiting a dump in the middle of the night, but it was only at night that the dirty became something beautiful.
A controlled fire burned brightly, painting the night with the reds, yellows, oranges, and blues of flame. No one knew who’d started the fires, but it’d happened long before my birth.
The legend went that a geologist had found a hole that was rumored to run forever down deep in the Smoky Mountains region. At some point, someone, somewhere had tripped, causing a flame-lit lantern to drop inside, igniting a massive deposit of natural gases deep within. For over fifty years, Hellmouth had burned, with no indication of stopping anytime soon.
Carter hadn’t said anything on the half-hour drive over, but the moment we settled in, he turned in his seat.
I could smell the heightened tension of anxiety sliding through his pores. The practically frozen water bottle I’d handed him earlier was sliding with thick beads of icy sweat onto his shorts, and he barely seemed to notice.
“Got a hit on prints,” he said, handing me the manila folder he’d been clutching tight in the bar.
I sighed deeply. “Carter, why are you coming to me with this? I did my part the other night. I’m not a detective anymore.”
His broad nostrils flared, and a muscle twitched in his cheek. “Just look at the damn file, Scar. That’s all I’m asking.”
He wouldn’t look at me, but his words were low and frustrated. He was angry with me. Well, what else was new in my world? All the men in my life seemed to hate me. If he’d been anyone else, I wouldn’t have bothered.
With a defeated sigh, I snatched it from him and flipped it open. I saw better in the deep night and didn’t need lights, but I flicked them on anyway for his benefit.
I briefly scanned the report, memorizing the pertinent information in seconds. I’d not had the best memory as a human. A solid C student in high school, I found that my thoughts had turned more toward fashion than college back then.
If there was any perk to being one of the undead, it was the fact that I was pretty sure my IQ had jumped a good fifty points after the change. I didn’t have a photographic memory or some crazy crap like that—I wish—but I was able to read and understand things far quicker since the turn.
I slapped the file shut and tossed it onto the seat beside us.
“Matilda Hicks, who’s that?”
Apart from the family’s prints in the car, the only other ones the CIs had found belonged to one Matilda Hicks. Carter seemed excited by that news; I had no idea why.
“Local woman about two counties over. Ran the Shop ’n Go.”
“Ran? As in past tense?”
He nodded, turning the file his way and flipping it open as he briefly scanned it with his “serious look” on his face. I knew when Carter was excited about something, and he was practically buzzing.
“I might be an empath, but what I’m not is a mind reader. Mind sharing what’s going on here, Hoss?”
Blinking as though surprised he’d spaced on me that way, he gave me a tight stretch of lips that I supposed he meant to pass off as a grin. “Sorry. This is huge, okay, because Matilda was reported missing a year ago.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. “Missing ain’t dead. So she’s your heart thief?”
He shook his head. “There’s more to it than that.”
I flipped my palm over, attempting to get him to clear up my confusion. “Then...”
After reaching into his pocket, he passed me a folded sheet of paper. After unfolding it, I saw that it was a photocopy of part of Matilda’s case file. The last line caught my eye.
I frowned. “They found flecks of gray matter in her home?” Fisting the sheet, I shook my head. “If there’s brain matter at the scene, the person is likely dead, Carter. There aren’t many Veilers can survive a hit that brutal, let alone a human.”
“Exactly. It wasn’t much matter and definitely not enough to definitively tell that it was Matilda’s, so the coroner was hesitant to rule homicide in this case, but that MO fits the bogeyman to a tee.”
I jerked, clenching my molars as my memories zipped to the one and only time I’d gotten close to the bogeyman. Back then it’d been a he—but he wasn’t always a he—and I’d been following that sicko for years.
Carter and I had taken to calling our guy the bogeyman for lack of a better word. All I knew was, he was nothing at all like anything I’d ever seen in the Veiler world before.
Veilers were what I called creatures like me—and Merc. Creatures beyond the veil who moved in shadows, outside the periphery of most humans. Humans knew most of us existed, to some extent or another. And there was an uneasy but tangible alliance between our kind. For the most part, we played nice and by the rules.
But there were a few of us, those less fortunate in the looks department, who chose to stay in the shadows. That was where the bogeyman lived.
What made the bogeyman so difficult to track was the fact that at any given moment, he could slip inside the skin of anyone or anything and erase all tracks of who he or she truly was until another crime was committed.
I rubbed my jaw, and every inch of me went absolutely still. After the night that he’d jumped from the hospital window, I’d lost sight of him completely and hadn’t heard a peep about him since.
“So this thing eats hearts now?” I knew I sounded confused, and that was because I was. Usually criminals had a modus operandi—an MO—and there was very little deviation from it. Serial rapists. Murderers. Dealers. Every case was different because every individual operated differently—didn’t matter if they were human or not. Up to that point, the bogeyman had stolen only skins. That was our only certainty. My brows gathered.
“What the hell, Carter? Why?” Remembering little baby Patience and Faith, my stomach lurched.
Scrubbing a hand down my face, I recalled those glowing red eyes. If we really were on the bogeyman’s trail again, then the stakes had just gotten higher.
I could have cut the tension in the truck, it was so thick. When Carter finally spoke again, it almost felt as if he were screaming into the thick stillness.
“It’s back, Scar.”
I shook my head. The bogeyman had given me nightmares. In fact, it was because of him that I’d finally decided to hang up my badge. Knowing there was something that wicked, that evil out there, and I’d always been helpless to stop it...I’d suffered a crisis of conscience, faith, I dunno what. It hadn’t been his evil that’d messed me up, though. It’d been the goodness inside of him that’d fucked me up bad, and I wasn’t afraid to say so.
But though I’d quit, I’d never been able to stop wondering where he was, whether he was still breathing, and why it always felt as if I were one step too late. It’d taken me years to get to the point where I could function halfway normally again.
To where I could sleep without images of skins and bloodied innards constantly haunting me. Carter, on the other hand, his obsession had only grown. In the beginning, I’d been the one fixated on the skin thief. But today, it was all Carter thought about.
He ate, slept, and dreamed about nothing other than finding it. Seeing shadows where there were none. I shook my head, and the lines around his eyes tightened.
“I’m not making this up.”
“I’m sure you’re not,” I said softly. “I’m sure you believe what you’re—”
“Dammit, Scar, just for once, for once, will you listen to me and stop judging me? Stop telling me that I’m seeing ghosts!”
He was so beyond angry that even I couldn’t help stilling at the sight of his rage. Carter had always been a methodical, by-the-book kind of detective. Calm. Patient. Introspective. Until the night of the hospital raid. Then everything had changed and not just between us.
He’d never told me so, but I knew he blamed me for freezing up as I had. For letting it get away and kill a decorated army soldier. And for the countless other bodies that’d piled up in its wake.
I’d had the means to stop it, and I hadn’t.
His hands shot out and latched onto mine, squeezing with a strength that came only from years of heavy lifting. “Please, Scarlett. Please.” His voice cracked. “I know you think I’m obsessed, and maybe I am, but I can’t do this without you. I need you in this. I’m telling you, it’s back and it’s here. I know the Veilers, but—”
“But nothing can prepare you for this monster. Believe me, I know.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. I’d gone to Carter’s apartment almost two years ago, hoping we could right the wrongs. That I could somehow get him to finally forgive me for failing him.
That was the first time it’d dawned on me just how powerful his obsession had become. His apartment, which had once been furnished with supple leather furniture, Afrocentric artwork, and a big-screen TV, was now sterile and cold.
At first I thought he’d been robbed, until I noticed his walls. The walls were lined with newspaper clippings, and manic writing detailing a timeline of deaths in other parts of the world. Times. Dates. Strings of yarn crisscrossing a massive whiteboard, looking for patterns any and everywhere.
That was the day I knew Carter would never forgive me, and also that he’d gone completely off the deep end. I’d begged him to seek help, but he wouldn’t. I knew why, of course. He would have been taken off the case. A case he was desperate to solve. Desperate enough to solve that anytime a strange and grisly death occurred, he knew, just knew it was the result of the bogeyman.
And as always, I felt sad for my friend. It was gut-wrenching to know that because of me, so many lives had been ruined.
“Oh, Carter, I’m so—”
He jerked his face to the side, staring out the window and scratching his jaw. “Don’t say anything else unless you’re willing to help. That’s all I want to know.”
I shut my mouth.
Veiler law stated that as acting sheriff, I could choose to cede the case to the local PD. And a part of me desperately, desperately wanted to.
The bogeyman had been my personal brand of hell for far too long. But if something happened to Carter, I’d never forgive myself. Because the Alpha, as powerful as he was, had an elite guard. He wasn’t simply an Alpha.
Oh no, Clarence was far more. Clarence was a McCarrick of the clan McCarrick, and he was also the laird, which technically was like a king. Clarence was big shit, in other words. It was why he had the Wolf Pack here.
Because Clarence was such a big deal, things like murders really didn’t happen ’round our parts too often. Very few Veilers wanted to face the wrath of an enraged Uber Alpha.
But when crime did happen, I could—on certain occasions—gain access to the Wolf Pack.
Most problems, I tended to handle on my own. Dumping a too-drunk fae out on his ass or busting up some small-time narc deal was easy enough. A vampire was more than enough muscle to tackle most things. However, when the monster could literally steal someone’s skin and masquerade as them, well, that went beyond what I wanted to handle on my own. Still, Clarence wasn’t known for being the sharing type.
Only once had I gotten him to cede control over the Pack. That had been for a bog monster, and it had only been for twenty-four hours at that.
I still wasn’t convinced it was the bogeyman at all. But I also couldn’t forget those burning red eyes. I’d never
known the bogeyman’s eyes to glow. In the hospital room, they’d been bloodshot, not illuminated.
More than likely, what the Silver Creek PD had on its hands was some form of demon, which was still some nasty shit.
As if sensing my near capitulation, Carter grinned, his pearl-white teeth practically gleaming.
“I haven’t said yes,” I groused.
“Yeah, but I know you. And you just can’t take the chance that I’m right.”
“I’m gonna be honest with you, Carter, I don’t think you’re right. I think your preoccupation with the Veiler is a serious problem. From skin thief to heart thief, it doesn’t compute. The bogey is a very specific kind of killer.”
He shook his head hard. “No. I’m telling you—”
I held up a finger, halting him. “But I also think that whatever killed that family is more than just our run-of-the-mill Veiler.”
“I don’t fucking care how you spin this, the only thing that matters to me is that you go back to your Alpha and you tell him to send us help. That’s all that matters to me right now, stopping this bastard before it kills anyone else.”
There was such passion and strength of conviction in his voice that were he anyone else, I’d almost have been tempted to believe him. Carter was right about one thing, though. That monster needed to be stopped.
“Brain matter, Scar. You tell me how Matilda’s DNA showed up at that crime scene spattered in blood and gore and now suddenly her prints were in that car? Fresh prints. C’mon. This isn’t coincidence. You and I both know there can only be one explanation for this.”
Brain matter at a scene was bad, yes, no doubt about it. There were cases, though rare, where someone’s skull had cracked open and they’d gone on to survive.
Matilda having been gone so long, it didn’t look good in her case.
“But why are you so sure our bogeyman is really masquerading as Matilda? For all we know, she did survive that braining. Maybe she’s some sort of Veiler you didn’t clue in on.”
“Brain. Matter,” he stressed.
And I gritted my teeth. “Demon. Think about that. Impossible to kill. They eat offal. It makes sen—”
Whiskey, Vamps, and Thieves (Southern Vampire Detective #1) Page 8