by Hannah Jayne
But the scene—and the body left behind—offered no such easy explanation.
The glass door was broken clean through, just as we had seen on the tape. Whatever had torn through the glass had done so with a thick tuft of fur protecting its skin because the majority of blood—so, so much blood—discovered at the scene belonged to the victim, Ms. Tia Shively.
The carpet was shredded. The once unblemished leather couch was torn into thin ribbons, with blood soaked clean through to the cotton and down that poked out from the cushions. There were bits of fur—five- to-six-inch locks of dark downy hair—that I tried to examine. But when I reached down to poke at them with my gloved hand I almost couldn’t stop the burn of the bile as it rose up my throat. The bits of fur were matted with rust-colored, congealing blood and—and this is where my esophagus betrayed me—chunks of Tia Shively’s skin. Its edges were already curling as its moisture evaporated. A crosshatch pattern of wrinkles and scratches were already beginning to show.
I don’t remember backing away, don’t remember stepping away from the scene, but suddenly my burning skin was awash with the moist cool of the city night and I was in the backyard, doubled over, hands on hips, my boots making the leaves and twigs crunch underneath me. Alex’s hand burned at the small of my back and he was murmuring something that was probably meant to be soothing, but all I could hear was the crash of blood as it pulsed through my ears, and all I could see were those emotionless eyes, caught on camera, daring me to catch the monster that did this.
“Tell me you have some sort of lead,” I remembered saying to Alex. “Tell me some band of terrorists or drug dealers or gangbangers or geo-cachers have taken responsibility.”
But when I looked up at Alex he wouldn’t look at me. “Your guess is as good as mine is, Lawson.”
His words came burning back into my mind now and my hand went limp at my side. I’d known Pete Sampson most of my life. He couldn’t have done something like this.
He wouldn’t have.
If he’d known.
I turned away from Will’s door and went to my own, slamming it hard behind me and sinking down on the carpet. When I’d worked for Mr. Sampson, one of my most significant job responsibilities had been chaining him up at night. Not just on moonlit nights, but every night, because, according to Sampson, one could “never be too careful.” I had considered him noble then and my responsibility simply part of the job. I never considered that there were things that Mr. Sampson might want to do, might need to do, might not be able to stop himself from doing if not for the chains. I looked mournfully over my shoulder, my heartbeat fluttering. Since he’d returned, Mr. Sampson had never asked me to chain him up. I swallowed down the lump that was growing in my throat.
“You know we have a couch, right?”
I blinked up at Nina, who had soundlessly appeared in front of me. She was barefoot and dressed in one of those adorable retro jumpers that showed off her pale, flawless thighs and proud shoulders. Her dark hair was clipped into two long, glossy pigtails and with her pursed, coral-pink lips she looked like any other twenty-something enjoying the sudden burst of San Francisco heat. If you didn’t know, it was impossible to tell that should she step one perfectly pedicured foot out onto the sizzling sidewalk, she’d burst into flames.
And if you didn’t know that Pete Sampson’s wide, Crest-white human smile could turn into snapping jaws with the shade of the moon, you’d blindly trust him, even when the evidence to the contrary was staring you right in the face.
I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my chin on them, then blinked up at Nina. “I think I may have made a huge mistake.”
Just saying the words made my muscles twitch. I felt guilty—for doubting Sampson and for not doubting him.
Nina flopped down on the carpet across from me, folding her legs underneath her. “I was wondering when you were going to bring this up.”
I swallowed. “You knew?”
Nina nodded. “It was impossible not to, Sophie.” She reached out and brushed her fingers over my kneecap. Her fingertips were icy, but the gesture was warm. “Did you really think you were fooling anyone?”
I flopped my head back, letting my skull thunk against the door. “I guess I was fooling myself. And now”—I closed my eyes—“and now people are dead.”
Nina blinked.
“People are dead?” she repeated, her lips moving slowly.
“Alex and I went to two crime scenes. The teens on the Sutro Point trail, and then one at a house in Pacific Heights tonight.” I tried to suppress and involuntary shudder. “It was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen.”
Nina looked genuinely stunned—and horrified. “How did that happen? I mean, it’s been a long time for me—a very long time—but from what I remember, people don’t usually die.”
I frowned at Nina. “What are you talking about?”
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Sampson.”
Nina’s coral pink lips dropped into an astonished O; her coal-black eyes followed suit. “You slept with Sampson, too?”
“What? No!”
She splayed a hand across her chest. “Oh, thank God. I know I told you to loosen up a little bit, but I didn’t mean that loose.” She blinked. “Wait. What are we talking about again?”
I pushed myself off the floor and splayed my fingers over my chest. “I was talking about Sampson coming back and three people dying. Four, if you count Octavia.”
“And I was talking about you having sex with Will.”
I felt all the color drain from my face. “What?”
Nina shrugged, eyebrows raised in that Yeah, so? look.
“You know about me and Will?” I stumbled forward when I got goosed by the doorknob as the front door opened.
“Sorry, Soph,” Vlad said in his unaffected grumble. “Didn’t see you there. What about Will?”
Nina spun on her heel and went to the kitchen, yanking open the fridge. I heard glass tinkling and cellophane crinkling as she searched inside. “Sophie slept with him.”
All the color that drained from my face must have gone out through my feet and rooted me the carpet. For a fleeting second I thought that perhaps if I stayed perfectly still, I could blend into the apartment landscape and everyone would forget that I was there—that I had ever been there.
“Way to go, Sophie.” Vlad chucked me on the shoulder on his way to the dining table. He seemed to lose interest in me the second he sat down and booted up his laptop. “I don’t like either of them, but I think Will might be the lesser of your two evils.”
“No.” Nina shook her head, straightening up and massaging a blood bag. “I was hoping she’d hold out for Alex again. I like the whole fallen angel thing.” She hipped the refrigerator door closed and waggled her sculpted brows. “Doomed love. So romantic.”
Humiliation crept up my neck. I wanted to interject something, to change the subject, but all I could come up with was what I was sure was a look of complete dumbstruck silence.
“But I still don’t get how you sleeping with Will is making people die,” Nina said, popping a straw into her snack.
“We are not talking about sex,” I said finally, my teeth gritted. “Or Will.” I looked from Nina to Vlad and back again. Nina was sucking her fresh-from-the-fridge bag of O Negative, her cheeks hollowed with the effort. Vlad gave me one of those blank teenage boy looks, then clicked on his game. I sighed, not entirely sure that I wanted to restart a conversation about other mistakes I may have made.
I grabbed my jacket from the peg by the door and my shoulder bag. “I’ll see you guys later,” I said, clicking the door shut behind me.
I stepped into the hallway and paused in front of Will’s door yet again, then pressed my ear up against it. I could hear Mr. Sampson moving around inside, could hear the muffled sound of people on television making mundane conversation. I closed my eyes.
“P
lease, Mr. Sampson,” I whispered to the closed door, “please don’t be the one responsible for any of this.”
The movement on the other side of the door stopped abruptly and I stiffened, then hurried down the hall. I snaked around the corner when Sampson yanked the door open and stepped into the hallway. He had a dish towel thrown over one shoulder and one of Will’s aprons tied around his waist, Charles and Camilla smiling smugly from their spot just under his belt buckle.
“Sophie?” he said into the hall.
I straightened and took a tiny step from my hiding spot. “How’d you know it was me?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I fetch, I roll over, and I have incredible hearing. What are you doing lurking in the hallway?”
I blew out a defeated sigh. “I’m not sure.”
“Come in.”
I followed Sampson into Will’s apartment and leaned my hip against the counter as he went to work poking at a steak crackling and caramelizing under the broiler.
“I didn’t know you cooked.”
“A man’s got to eat. So what’s going on with you?”
I closed my eyes and lobbed my head back against the microwave. “I want to help you, Mr. Sampson, I really do. But I just don’t know where to start. You’ve got to give me something to go on.”
Mr. Sampson swung his head. “I told you, Sophie, you don’t need to worry yourself about me right now. Not with what’s going on over at Sutro Point. You have a job to do.”
I swallowed, not feeling the least bit convinced.
“Like I said, I appreciate you wanting to help me, but you don’t need to. I’m going to do what I can from here and if I can’t find what I need, I’ll move on.”
“You mean you’ll go back into hiding. To running.”
Sampson shrugged and began scrubbing potatoes in the sink. “You should be helping Alex find this murderer.”
I gave him a closed lipped smile. How am I supposed to tell him that so far, tracking down this murderer had only brought me here?
“Sampson.” I worked the grout with the tip of my fingernail. “Look, I want to help Alex and I want to help you. I can do both. But I need your help. What do you know? Where do I go? How do I get my hands on this contract, or figure out who penned it? Right now, I’m not just looking for a needle in a haystack, I’m looking for the actual haystack.”
Sampson smiled softly and popped two freshly scrubbed potatoes into the oven with the steak. The luscious smell of the meat wafted out and I felt my mouth water, despite my growing desire to shove my head in the oven beside it.
“So about finding the contract. Maybe Alex and I can do a little double-detective work.”
Sampson whirled to face me. “You didn’t tell Alex I was here, did you?”
“Of course not. Though—” I was going to say that Alex would be a bigger help than just me. I was going to say that Alex would have better ideas and together, we’d have a better chance of finding the holder of the contract. But I knew what Alex thought now. And I knew that if Alex knew that Sampson had been hiding out in San Francisco, Sampson would be suspect number one in the recent murders. Alex wouldn’t want to accuse, wouldn’t want to believe it, but Alex was a detective above anything else. And right now, all the evidence pointed in one direction.
Mr. Sampson eyed me. “You’re not going to listen to me, are you?”
I looked away. “I said I was going to help you and I am. I can solve both.”
Sampson smiled and shook his head. “I appreciate your faith, Sophie, I really do.”
Give me something, I wanted to beg. Give me something to go on.
“Is there anything you can think of that will help? Anything that I”—I pushed my hand against my chest—“that I can do personally to help?”
I watched Sampson’s chest rise as he sucked in and let out a long breath. “Well, you can get into the UDA.”
I shrugged. “Of course. Wait—you don’t think that someone at the Agency—”
Mr. Sampson held up a silencing hand. “It’s just a theory I’m working on. I’ll need you to get me some files.”
I scanned the counter, yanking a sheet of paper out from Will’s stack of takeout menus and expired delivery coupons. I glanced at the paper—some sort of handwritten litany—flipped it over, and sat poised with my pen at the ready. “Whose files do you need?”
“I need you to get the file of every werewolf that has gone through the Underworld. Past, present, and deceased.”
I wrote the word “werewolves” on the paper and Sampson glanced down on it with a slight smile. “Really?”
I folded the paper and shoved it in my back pocket. “I like to be prepared. What else?”
Mr. Sampson paced, rubbing his chin with the palm of his hand. “Well.” He looked over his shoulder as if he was appraising me. “I think that’s a good start.”
I rounded the counter so that I was nearly nose-to-nose with him. “This is a start, but I’m going to need more than files to help you out of this mess.”
“I can handle Feng and Xian, if that’s what you’re inferring.”
It’s not Feng and Xian I’m worried about.
“Please.”
Sampson’s eyes held mine for a beat before falling. “Well, there is one thing. A guy. He’s—he’s kind of in between the two worlds—Underworld and regular. He’s a half-breed. Mother was a demon, father was a regular guy.”
A little flicker of community struck up in my belly. There are others like me?
“He’s like me?”
Sampson looked at me, his eyes kind. “No, Sophie. Mort is nothing like you. His father killed his mother.”
And yet, I wasn’t totally convinced that Mort had a worse father figure than I did.
“He vowed to kill Mort, too, so Mort’s pretty much gone into hiding, but he keeps tabs on everything in the Underworld.”
“Why would he keep tabs on the Underworld if his dad was mortal? He was the one who killed. Shouldn’t he be focusing his attentions elsewhere?”
“He does that, too. Mort’s problem is slight paranoia and that he is a recognizable half-breed. There are people in the Underworld who don’t like that very much.” He sucked in a breath. “People who want to kill people like him.”
“And like me.”
“They think that half-breeds are sullying the demon gene pool.”
I felt as though I had just been kicked in the stomach. I had never belonged anywhere—my mother had killed herself, my father had left me, my high school life had been dominated by bullies and jeers. The Underworld Detection Agency—and Sampson—had taken me in and made me feel like I belonged. I knew people weren’t crazy about my being human—but I never thought that I was in danger because of it.
“Why didn’t I know that people wanted to kill half-breeds?”
Sampson clapped a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Because at the Underworld Detection Agency we’re family, and we always protect our own. We keep tight tabs on that kind of people.”
I should have felt bolstered by Sampson’s protection, but I didn’t.
“So, Mort. He makes a living pitting demons against each other. Not exactly a stand-up guy, but if there’s any information out there, Mort’s going to know about it.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling a twinge of angst. “How do I find this Mort guy?”
“We’re not going to go find him, Soph. I’ll go.”
“You can’t. If this guy is not very good and has a bone to pick with the Underworld—or with everyone for that matter, you’re toast. I’m going.”
“It’s not safe,” Sampson said, carefully enunciating every word. “You’re not going alone. Period. End of story.”
“So you’re going to stay here and rot until Will comes back, then you’re going to run away like a pup with his tail between his legs.” I stopped, realizing what I’d said. I chanced a glance at Sampson and I could see the fire in his eyes, see the slight curl of his lip.
“Sorry, Sampson, bu
t I’m going.”
“You’re not going alone.”
I put my hands on my hips, ready to make a deal. “I have an idea.”
Chapter Eight
“So, Dixon told you about this guy, huh?” Alex asked.
“Yeah,” I lied, nodding, keeping my eyes focused on the freeway as it whizzed by. “Dixon said this guy might have some information that could be useful—um, for the case. He might know what Feng was looking for, or if there is a new demon we should be looking at.” I had fabricated the story and repeated it numerous times to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, but I could still read suspicion in Alex’s questions. I tried to play it as coolly as possible, but bat wings flapped in my stomach and my guilty conscience was working overtime.
I could feel Alex’s icy blue eyes studying my profile, but I refused to look at him. “And you trust Dixon? I mean, we’ve been driving for almost an hour now. Are you sure he’s not leading us into some crazy vampire den?”
I gulped. “What do you mean, do I trust Dixon? Of course I do. We got over our whole issue. Why? Don’t you trust Dixon?”
Alex shrugged, his eyebrows rising with his shoulders, “Hey, I’m just the arm candy,” he said, switching lanes. “Is this where we exit?”
I squinted down at the map Sampson had drawn out for me. “Yeah, this is it.”
“Who is this guy again?”
“Dixon,” I said his name carefully, “said this guy is kind of—like, he kind of works on both sides. Underworld and non-Underworld, I guess. He’s—he’s kind of like me. Half-breed.”
Alex savored my last statement before replying. “Did Dixon tell you that, too?”
I wracked my brain for any additional crumb of information that Sampson may have offered that I could attribute to my fake conversation with Dixon. All I could answer was a piddly, “Yes.”
“So this guy might have information on who—or whatever—tore these people apart?”
I took a tiny sip of the latte I was holding. “Yep.”
“And you don’t know anything else about him?”
“Nope. Just that he’s, like, a super librarian. He knows something about everything.”