Silver Bound (Sammy Davis Book 1)

by Holly Rutan

"Damn it, Tim. You knew better," I said.

  Charles touched my shoulder gently, and I shook my head and got down to business, striding over to the scene to have a better look. One of the officers already on site nudged his partner. I ignored their whispers; there was nothing that could be said that would undo Joe's gossip.

  I took a deep breath, my mouth open and upper lip curled, and sniffed at the air, analyzing the scents eddying through the air. "He was killed somewhere else and moved here. He hasn't been dead too long, maybe three hours," I said.

  One of the officers shrugged. "'Course not, there's no blood on the ground."

  The coroner's van pulled up and parked in the street.

  "Of course there’s no blood on the ground. They’ve been using blood magic; the corpse is dry because they’ve drained it, and there’s no way they’d waste good blood by letting it spill. But even if they bled him out in a bucket, I'd be able to smell if a lot of blood hit the air in the area. Microscopic droplets would cling to the concrete in his immediate surroundings," I replied.

  The rope creaked, and my attention shifted from the officer to the dangling corpse. There was no breeze, but the wererat’s body swayed back and forth like a pendulum. The local current reverberated with a discordant twang and then fell silent.

  I took a step back, unease making my gut tremble, and the corpse rotated on his rope to face me. Its eyes opened, revealing orbs of pure blue fire.

  "Oh, I see you've arrived in time for the party. How nice," Tim’s body said.

  The voice oozed through the air, burrowing its way into my mind like a worm through a corpse, and hooked its claws into all the dark places inside. With a whine, I wobbled and fell to my knees, gripping my skull in shaking hands. I knew that voice.

  Echoing with laughter, the voice shredded and ate the darkness I'd childishly constructed to keep myself safe. It dragged my nightmares to the light of my consciousness, shook them, and presented them to me bare of the bonds of sleep and my desperate attempts not to remember and howled its amusement at my growing terror. My eyes widened.

  My mind disappeared in a wash of rage.

  I roared at the swaying body, caught in a shift up to battle form so harsh and sudden that the changing shape of muscle and bone actually hurt. The searing pain of my silver bracelet was insignificant in the face of my fury.

  "I killed you!" I shouted, blood and spit flying as I bit my own tongue, forcing words out of a mouth never meant to speak. With a bestial snarl, I lunged at Tim's body, thinking of nothing but making that voice stop.

  Disregarding his own safety, Charles brought me down from midair in a flying tackle while the rest of the officers scattered in terror. Charles threw a loop over my muzzle, and I fought against the tie, the thin nylon cutting into my muzzle. I wasn't fighting against him, though. I was only aware of his efforts as an obstacle. It wasn't until he cut off my air that I was forced to give him my full attention, and by then I was well and truly pinned. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. The world went soft-edged, and I went limp in surrender.

  My rage drained away, letting the pain in.

  With a helpless shiver, I curled around my mutilated wrist and moaned. The bracelet hadn't been large enough to accommodate a shift all the way to full battle form, and it had been burned and cut through to the bone. Far greater was the pain inside, and I let my breaths out in little whimpering cries, unable to gain the release of tears. Charles knelt and cradled me to his chest, comforting me, soaking me in his scent, and pain and heat fought for control over my body. Heat won.

  "So nice to see you well, little girl," Tim's body purred once it decided it had my attention. "Haven't lost your words yet, I see." The corpse swayed on its rope and rotated to stare with drying, glazed eyes at the stricken police officers. "Don't worry, boys. Your pain is only just beginning." With a last gurgling giggle, the corpse's face lost all expression, and its mouth twisted open until tendons cracked, letting loose a booming shout.

  “THE MASTER OF DEATH COMES! PREPARE YOURSELVES! SHED YOUR LIVING SKINS, AND BE REBORN AS HIS SERVANTS!”

  Charles whispered in my ear, "Was that someone I should know?" His breath tickled, and I suppressed the urge to tilt my face up against his. Heat made my racing heart slow and stilled the trembling in my limbs. My tight muscles relaxed despite the horror of the scene, my composure reinforced by the abrupt return of ambient melody. The necromancer had left the corpse.

  Tim's body fell apart, gobbets of rotting flesh falling from his bones to splat against the pavement, and I shuddered in disgust, gathering myself and pulling away.

  "That was the milker," I said in soft answer. "The one that I killed when I was a kid. I guess being dead didn’t stick. But the ‘master of death’? I have no idea."

  "We can talk about it later," Charles said.

  I nodded and then turned away, signaling the conversation closed. "Irwin, I can't hear anything. Do you see any residual magic?"

  The mage shook his head, eyes vague and unfocused. "Nothing so far as I can tell."

  "Then cut him down, gentlemen," I ordered. The men moved with as much wariness directed toward me as Tim's remains. I had no apology for them. My behavior had been inexcusable.

  Hopefully, Investigations would be able to glean some information from the body or at least the rope used to hang him. I wondered how much good it would do them, trying to find evidence on the pieces of a dead man about the other dead man who'd killed him.

  I had no hope for evidence from the scene, since Tim had not been killed there. Every piece of litter and scrap in the immediate area would be gathered for analysis anyway. Even the most innocuous of items could be a clue.

  "Could you take this off?" I asked, offering Charles my wrist. "They gave you something to keep the alarms from going off, didn't they?"

  With a nod, Charles slid his keys over the band. The bracelet came free, coated with my blood and the tacky substance I ooze from slow-to-heal wounds. I winced as the metal pulled away and licked at the wound until it stopped bleeding. Then I shifted down to beast form, putting my nose to the ground.

  The whole scene was permeated with the stench of rot and a foul, electric smell that I thought might be the necromancer. The pole Tim had been hung was free of any scents at all, as though someone had wiped down the metal with a neutralizing solution. I worked my way through the scene in a widening spiral; the blank area led to the middle of the busy street and then disappeared. The scent of exhaust wiped away any traces that were left.

  Irwin and Pyggie puttered around for a while, casting for clues. I let them work—nothing in the local current suggested alteration as far as I could hear, but a second and third check couldn't hurt. They also came up blank, so we reported our findings to the agent in charge of the scene and departed. The clean-up crew could handle the rest. The poor sap in charge of the scene got to write the report, and if he needed anything more from us, it could wait until the morning.

  I leaned my face against the cold glass of the car window on the way back to my apartment. We still had a few hours before we needed to report in for duty, and everyone was tired.

  "Poor Tim." I said, and sighed.

  "It wasn't your fault," Charles answered.

  He turned on the blinker, and we passed a slow-moving car. It was a little past two in the morning, and the club crowd was just heading home.

  "No, it wasn't," I agreed. "Tim was a pro, but he was in the business because he was nosy. I just wish he'd been smart enough to back off and call me like I'd paid him to."

  "Irwin and I have been there. The life of an informant can be a short one. I'm surprised how few of them are cats, come to think of it." Charles's gaze flickered to his partner, who was sitting in pensive silence. "Are you all right?"

  "No, not really," the mage said. "That necromantic song was ugly and discordant. I don't know what bothers me more, the fact someone animated that body or that the song didn't sound like anything that should work."

  "It's the si
lence while it was active that bothered me," I answered. "Aside from who was speaking, of course..."

  "Hmm," Charles said.

  "I think it's both, and I'm going to have dreams about it for sure," I said. "This rune magic doesn't make any sense. We can't always hear it, and I hate having to infer what a song is doing by its effect on the current. The stuff feels completely unnatural."

  It only took a few minutes to get back to my apartment. Leaving Charles to get Irwin settled, I retreated to lay on my bed for a while, staring at the ceiling. Thinking.

  Charles slipped into my room a few minutes later and let the door close behind him. I sat up, drawing my feet in to sit cross-legged, and patted the sheets next to me.

  "Irwin is out for the count," he reported.

  "At least one of us will get sleep tonight," I said with a sigh. "Thank you, Charles. Thank you for keeping me from destroying evidence, even if it rotted away anyway."

  "Just doing my job," he said, and moved over to my bed.

  I looked up at him, and my breath caught. Letting the heat guide my hands, I reached out and caught my fingers through his belt loops, drawing him close so I could nuzzle his belly. I breathed in his wolf-musk scent and let it fill me. I wanted to roll in his musk and taste his skin, but he stopped me with a touch.

  Charles cupped my jaw in his hand and tilted my face up, examining me. I stilled, letting him. The werehunter still had business to conduct. Even if I didn't like it, I understood it and resisted the urge to move.

  "Your eyes are blue," he observed, loosening his grip. I turned my face to nuzzle his hand.

  "What? Is that why you didn't shoot me?" I asked, unwilling to move away from him long enough to check a mirror. I savored the feeling of my lips against his palm. "No one would have questioned you if you had."

  "No," he answered.

  "Why not, then?" I asked.

  "It's funny," Charles mused. "How the government considers me human, and you, not. The only difference between kin and were is whether we inherit the ability to shift. I've never made a mistake. Never killed a were that was not going feral, never spared a were that went on to murder the innocent. It's all in the smell."

  "What do I smell like?" I asked.

  "You smell like you're hurting and lonely," he said. His voice lowered, and he ran his thumb along my lip. "And in heat."

  "I am," I answered, fighting and losing the urge to nip at his thumb.

  "It will fade on its own in a few days," Charles said. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to."

  I trembled, rubbing my face against his hand. His skin felt cool, the perfect complement to the warmth of mine. He was most certainly excited; there was no mistaking that smell. It'd been a long time since I'd been with a man, and I wanted him badly. But heat meant commitment. We'd tie in more ways than one, and Charles would be just as trapped by that as I was. The mating bond would last for the rest of our lives.

  "I don't want to be alone," I said. "But I come with some really awful baggage. You might not want me."

  "Tell me," Charles said. The bed dipped from his weight as he sat and pulled off his shoes.

  I made a small, guttural noise and pushed him over, cuddling against the length of his body. He pulled one of my pillows over to cushion his head and put his arms around me, holding me close. I felt his breath as he pressed his mouth into my hair; Charles was breathing in my scent, just like I was taking in his.

  His scent made me feel like I was on fire and at the same time left me totally relaxed. I could feel how hard he was through his clothes and let one hand wander under his shirt to feel the softness of his skin. There was a lot of muscle under that smooth skin; the werehunter was in the peak of fitness. If we were mated, he'd keep me safe.

  I drew courage from the thought.

  "I wasn't born a were," I began. "My mother was human. God knows who or what my father was, but he probably wasn't a were, either. More likely some john who'd paid for a night of fun and moved on. She never said and probably didn't know."

  Cloth shifted as Charles nodded.

  "I’ve always been a little odd, so I knew I'd snap from the moment I knew what snapping was. The current has sung to me my whole life. I used to hunt and eat rats and pigeons raw, and I didn’t understand that was strange until I started going to school. I mean, that’s food, right? It’s not like anyone was giving me pizza. Officials didn't catch wind of it until I entered eighth grade. That’s when yearly testing began, back then. They’ve moved it to fourth grade, now. Too many kids were snapping before they were checked for current buildup. I thought my life had sucked before, but that's when things went from bad to worse. When the mage’s melody lit me up like a Christmas tree during testing, the school notified my mother."

  "They had to," Charles said.

  "I have scars down my back where she'd snuff her cigarettes," I said. "And the broken nose came from a fist. One of her boyfriends'. I'd interrupted some business or another, and he backhanded me with his .38. Most of the time, I just tried to keep out of the way. I scrounged and hunted food wherever I could. Sometimes the neighbors would give me a little work under the table and pay me in spare clothes, a bit of food, or even a few dollars now and then."

  The bed was vibrating. Charles was growling. His whole body tensed. Distracted from my story, I kissed my way down his throat until he stilled. Unlike me, he could sweat. I traced my tongue along the edge of his jaw and decided that I liked the way it tasted.

  "Why didn't anyone call Social Services?" he asked, outraged.

  I gathered my scattered thoughts.

  "Social workers came around a couple of times," I answered, "Early on, when my mother had herself more together. She was pretty good at lying, and I'd just get beat worse after they left. When my adult teeth grew in, it became too obvious to everyone that I was a changeling child and that I was going to snap. I mean, even human children occasionally have ears that are a little pointy, or exceptionally sharp incisors, but both? My neighbors had heard that the authorities can be pretty careless with nonhuman children, especially if they haven't been registered yet, so they stopped trying. Snaps tended to die in foster care. It seemed like that situation would have been even worse than what I had. If we'd figured out what kind of snap I was going to be, they could have drawn the attention of a wolf pack, but none of us knew. I was just a little too odd. A little too feral. Most weres mainstream really well."

  After a thoughtful pause, Charles nodded.

  "So anyway. The agents notified my mother. Suddenly, I went from 'liability' to 'money-making opportunity,' and she turned around and sold me straight to a milker for a suitcase of twenties."

  "You snapped while in captivity, killed the mage, cannibalized his bodyguard, and were rescued by the DMA along with some other kids a few days later," Charles said.

  "Is that all of what's in the file they gave you?" I asked. "They whitewashed the hell out of that."

  "So tell me what really happened," Charles prompted, sounding unsurprised.

  "I was kept in a closet that was maybe two feet by four and only escorted out for bathroom breaks twice a day. It was dark all the time. The wild mage took my blood every other night. The stress made my incipient snap go out of control. My metabolism kicked into high gear. They fed me enough for a human child, but not enough for a were, and I started to starve. The stress was horrific," I answered. "I began to lose my grasp on language. Always a bad sign. The mage started to talk to himself about 'alternate plans,' and I was taunted about losing my words. They knew what they were doing to me. About a month after I came into their possession, he had his bodyguard acquire three new children."

  "Penny Blake, Timmy Watkins, and Eddy Pearson," Charles said.

  "Which one died?" I asked.

  "Eddy," Charles answered.

  The memories cut through the haze of heat like a knife, and my voice went soft with sorrow. Charles stroked me, moving his hand in small circles on my back as he offered gentle encourage
ment. I drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and continued.

  "When Big Man—that's what I called the bodyguard—brought in the other children, I went berserk. It was a strange kind of madness. I was in complete control. Nothing mattered to me but getting those kids free and safe, and I would do anything to make that happen. I'd die for them."

  Charles said, "Higg’s Instinct. You have to protect the weak of the pack."

  I nodded.

  "I guess how I broke out wasn't important. What mattered was that I snapped. I found the mage. He was in a room painted in a double spiderweb of runes made from my blood mixed with Eddy's. The melody he was composing was complete. Something scary was coming through at the apex of one spiderweb. It pulled at me, inside. The other spiderweb held Eddy's body. He'd been sacrificed. I still see his body in my dreams. I was too slow to save him, but I took the mage completely by surprise. Killed him. Killed Big Man when he came and stood guard over the children until help arrived."

  My sentences were growing clipped in response to my stress, and I stopped to take another deep breath. The air was saturated with werewolf pheromones. I could smell his rage. His anger on my behalf gave me a measure of peace, and I pressed my face against his shirt, sucking in Charles-flavored air through the cloth until I felt better.

  "Penny disappeared. I had lost the capacity to understand what she said when she left. I had no rational thought at all by the time a strike team arrived to extract us. Timmy needed medical attention, but I couldn't understand that. I was terrified by the large, dangerous humans who had come and had no reason to trust them. Since I was extremely aggressive, they shot me up with tranquilizers to get at Timmy, had a technician assess me, and set my execution date.

  "The technician who was supposed to kill me felt bad for me. So he 'euthanized' me on paper a week after my rescue, smuggled me to an unused lab down on the containment level, and set language tapes to play on a loop with a projector. He worked with me every day, talking to me, playing games, that sort of thing. After wavering back and forth for months from beast mind to human consciousness, I woke up."