by SM Reine
“You think Tommy would be better than me?” Noah asked. “You into dynastic politics now?”
“Naw, the last thing Grove County needed was a third Dickerson in the office,” Lincoln lied. In truth, that was the second-to-last thing they needed. Noah was the last. “Just wondering where he got off to.”
“He came back a faerie,” Noah said.
The older people around the barbecue rolled their eyes. They shared groans.
Lincoln had to groan along with them. He’d been hoping there’d be no more sidhe bullshit once Ofelia dropped off Sophie. If even Grove County could land sidhe, then nowhere was safe from those prissy sluts.
“How about Chuck? You know, Chuck the Great?” Lincoln asked. They’d started working at the GCSD the same year. He’d had a hell of a lot more local law enforcement experience than Noah, and he’d earned his cheesy nickname.
“Came back as a shifter,” Noah said. “He tried to take the sheriff’s office, but I made it real clear that I was better suited, and the whole town knew it. Chuck didn’t last long.”
Sophie piped up from behind Lincoln. “I’m going to need you to clarify some details. Are you saying that you drove this individual named Chuck out of office merely for being a shapeshifter?”
“It’s the sheriff’s job to enforce laws and protect the public,” Noah said. “Sheriffs are lawmen. They are warriors for good, for God, and for the people.”
“Which does not include shifters?” Sophie asked. The woman just couldn’t let anything go.
Lincoln muttered under his breath at her. “Don’t.”
“I just don’t understand,” she said loudly. “Another man was better than you, with much of the same experience, I assume, and he attempted to take the mantle of the sheriff. Because he was Rebirthed differently, you drove him out of town. Is that what happened?”
Nobody was laughing now.
“I don’t know where you come from, but around here, we protect our own,” said Noah. His hands resting on his belt were awfully close to his sidearm. “Chuck didn’t belong to us anymore. He belonged to the monsters up that way.” The sheriff jerked his head northeast, and Lincoln understood him to be indicating the sanctuary.
Sophie opened her mouth to speak, but Lincoln brushed his fingers against her shoulder. She was going to keep arguing that Chuck the Great was one of their own, and it didn’t matter if she was right. Not with Noah.
“They’ve built this ridiculous ‘sanctuary’ past Mount Bain,” Noah went on. “The Feds are treating them like a legitimate settlement, so they’ve gotten uppity. Do you know that they think that Northgate’s theirs just because they ransacked it after the Breaking?”
Ransacking wasn’t what Lincoln remembered happening in Northgate. He remembered the werewolves sacrificing themselves to drag human slaves out of Hell and fighting to destroy the bridge that let demons invade.
The pack had its problems. But they weren’t the monsters Noah suggested.
“If they moved in during the Breaking or earlier, then I’d say they’ve been there long enough to have a claim,” Lincoln said.
Uncle Art waddled over to join them, taking the barbecue tongs from Aunt Bee. He wielded them at Lincoln like a nun with her ruler. “Don’t tell me that you think that these preternaturals deserve rights. They’re making the earthquakes with their drills!”
“You got any proof of that?”
“They’re doing it,” he insisted. “And then there’s all these people acting like the invaders are actual Americans, like they have rights—”
“They do have rights,” Sophie said. “Genesis changed normal Americans into different breeds, but they are still American citizens.”
“This is like the time you dated a feminist in high school, isn’t it?” Uncle Art asked Lincoln.
“We’re not dating,” Lincoln said.
Sophie gaped at him. “That hardly seems like a relevant defense at the moment. Who cares if we are?”
“But we’re not,” he said. She’d been real clear about that.
Noah’s belt erupted in chatter. That was his walkie-talkie. He kept a wary gaze leveled on Sophie as he lifted it to his mouth. “Adair here. What’s going on?” He released the button.
A voice crackling with interference came through. “Just got a call on the emergency line, sir. There’s been a suspicious death at Jay Creek Hospital. In their hospice. It—it looks like a murder, sir.”
Chapter 15
Lincoln knew the same shortcuts through the forest as Ashley. He didn’t need a car to get to the hospice at the same time as Noah, even though the sheriff had retrofitted his Ford with a siren so loud that he must have emptied the streets for miles by blasting it. He burst from the thicket at the same time that Noah emerged from the driver’s seat.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” Noah said.
That was the truth all right. Lincoln wasn’t one of these men in uniform anymore, loyally serving his people and his nation in pursuit of justice. He’d lost that privilege years ago.
And yet…
Inanna brushed past him, close enough that their shoulders should have touched. She glanced at him through the tangled knots of her sandy hair. She faded away when she reached the doors, as if slipping inside alone to look around.
Her words lingered when she didn’t.
If he would keep you from doing your duty, it’s your duty to make him obey you.
Lincoln looked down at his hand, and he was surprised to find it in his pocket, clutching the icy die that Ofelia had given him. He’d meant to reach for the falhófnir dagger but still wasn’t wearing it.
What did Inanna want him to do with that? Stab his brother?
She’d wanted him to stab Ereshkigal too.
He made himself release the die—he wasn’t going to call in the unseelie queen’s favor like this—and thought instead of Sophie. “Dad’s in there,” Lincoln said simply. A reasonable excuse to be present.
“He’s not the victim,” Noah said.
“I know,” Lincoln said. Not this time. But if this death was related to the others, then John Marshall was far from safe.
Noah nodded slowly. “All right. Here’s the rules: you stick with me, you obey me, and you stay quiet unless I tell you to talk. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Lincoln let himself be escorted past the yellow tape. Painted in emergency lights, smothered under shadow, the hospice looked no grimmer than it had in daytime. At least the tape provided splashes of color against the grayscale life suffered by the patients in their final weeks.
Noah was met by a deputy Lincoln didn’t know, and he pretended he didn’t hear anything as Noah was filled in on the situation. A nurse had witnessed someone attempting to enter the building. She had alerted the other employees, but by the time police responded, it was too late: one of the patients had been killed.
“Has the medical examiner got any guesses about cause of death?” Noah asked.
“He’s not talking until he gets ‘conclusive information,’ and that’s going to be days since he already got called to the Knoxville airport for another case,” said the deputy. “But you’re gonna get a theory as soon as you see the D.B.”
Lincoln had a hell of a lot more than a theory. From the moment he rounded the doorway, carefully stepping around evidence tags, he knew exactly what had happened to the woman who was killed.
She’d had her whole chest crushed, like someone with preternatural strength had slammed a fist into her breastbone.
“Damn,” Lincoln said. The way they’d cut away her hospital gown to bare her wrinkly, aged body to the harsh police spotlights was almost as obscene as the injury. Her ribs had caved in. The brittle bones had splintered to shards.
There wasn’t as much blood as he’d have expected.
“You want a closer look?” Noah asked him.
Lincoln nodded, and the sheriff cleared the room. It was just the two of them as Lincoln circled. Inanna circled too. Sh
e stepped when he stepped, hanging along the outer rim of the room.
He watched the body, Noah watched him.
This woman hadn’t put up any kind of fight. She was still intubated in death, suggesting that nothing had disturbed her rest before she died. Her chart had been left behind by the medical examiner—no longer on the scene, called away to another issue in another county—and it said that she’d been on a heavy dose of morphine to keep her sedated until she died naturally.
There was no telling if she was supposed to die naturally soon, or in months or years. Lincoln couldn’t tell if she might have qualified as one of the suspected serial killer’s victims.
“What are you thinking?” Noah asked.
Lincoln set the chart down. “Why’re you asking me?”
“I heard you spent all that time away from the family cozying up with preternaturals. Figure you’d have a good chance of knowing what kind killed this woman.”
“You so sure it’s a preternatural?”
“You see an anvil drop out of nowhere to crush her chest like this?” Noah spread his arms, indicating the small, tidy room, its floor sparse but for the encroaching mold in the corners where the paint had chipped away. “Then it’s preternatural.”
“I agree.” Lincoln stood over the woman, right where the guy who crushed her chest must have stood before she died.
Her features were unattractive now, aged and dead, but she might have been a lovely woman once. Broad nose bridge. Thick lips puckered and colorless. Hair thinning.
Lincoln swung a fist, stopping his knuckles inches short of the body’s concave chest.
“This blow came from someone a lot taller than an average human,” Lincoln said. His gaze tracked up the line his arm made toward the ceiling. There was a nick above her bed too. Maybe an elbow had made that. It would have had to be a big arm. “I don’t think he meant to hit this lady.”
“There was more force applied than a train hitting a brick wall at full speed,” Noah said.
“Preternaturals are strong. They can accidentally do a lot more damage than this.”
“And now they’re all over the damn world,” the sheriff muttered, face twisting. “Should put them all down.”
“Like they’re doing in Spain? Just shooting preternatural families?” Lincoln asked, easing back from the body.
“They’re not shooting families. They’re shooting rioters, looters—criminals. If civilians get themselves in the middle of that to help the insurgents, then they’re criminals too.” Noah crossed himself and pulled his rosary out from under his shirt. “Don’t tell me this Sophie lady has convinced you they should live among us.”
Lincoln’s fingers tingled with the urge to touch the rosary, pull the beads through his fingers. “You gonna pray for the vic?”
“Yeah,” Noah said, waving him over. They bowed their heads together. “Oh Lord, we pray for this mundane murdered by preternatural hands. We commit to your loving care those who have died, beseeching you to receive their souls into the mercy of your love. Let the love that you have made known to us lead us to create safer streets for all to walk upon. Amen.”
“Amen,” he echoed.
There was that feeling Lincoln missed. Not the rosary beads specifically, but the feeling that someone might be watching to make sure this woman saw justice. The feeling that Noah was on his team. That any such team existed.
Inanna stood where Lincoln had been, her muscular shoulders unlit by the police spotlights.
“A hunt,” Inanna said.
She swung her fist like Lincoln had, but she punched the knuckles right through the woman’s breast. Inanna’s triceps were a pair of vicious ridges dipping into the knife of her elbow.
“An impressive kill means impressive killer.” She shot a look at Lincoln, her cheek stretched back in the thin line of a smile. “This will be a glorious hunt.”
Inanna was a glorious nutjob, as always. At least some things didn’t change.
“You there?” Noah waved his hand in front of Lincoln’s eyes.
Lincoln snapped back to reality, swatting Noah’s arm away. “Don’t do that.”
“The stuff with Uncle John’s really bugging you, isn’t it?” Noah asked.
It was easier to explain than everything with Inanna. It wasn’t untrue, either. “I wish I’d come back sooner, to be honest. When he’d still been awake more often.” Lincoln rubbed his hands down his face, wishing he could scrub away his exhaustion. He sighed. “Did Ashley talk to you about Dad?”
“What about him?” Noah asked.
He wouldn’t have had to ask for details if he knew about Uncle John’s other son. The whole family would have been in an uproar. Ashley must have been sitting on it. “Never mind. We should focus on the case.”
“All right. Then give me a list of preternatural suspects for this murder,” the sheriff said.
“Damn, man. It could be so many things.” Lincoln had witnessed demons the size of sky scrapers before Genesis, and the nightmare who possessed him had known demons smaller than his thumb. The spectrum of sizes was enormous. Trying to guess the breed of preternatural just by “bigger than a human but fits into a hospice” left him with a thousand options.
“Could it be werewolves?” Noah asked.
“They’re human-sized when they’re not in animal form. I wouldn’t think so.”
“He could have been up high,” he said. “On a chair or something.”
“You thinking of a specific werewolf?” Lincoln asked. Like Abel Wilder, six and a half feet tall, muscled and scarred.
“I’ve seen them,” Noah said. “They’re big.”
“Big’s not evidence of guilt,” Lincoln said.
“But the fact that we’ve got big, aggressive werewolves a stone’s throw from here makes for a compelling case.”
“Only if you’ve got the right judge.” Lincoln folded his arms. “Like Judge Smith?”
“There it is,” Noah said. “I knew you were gonna bring it up.”
As if Lincoln could ignore the proverbial elephant in the room. “You heard from Derek lately?”
“No, of course I haven’t fucking heard from Derek lately,” he said. “That was twenty years ago. You just can’t let shit die, can you?”
“Some shit shouldn’t die,” Lincoln said. “Especially once the sinner’s got control of county law enforcement. Think you’d have been allowed to keep the office if anyone else knew you’d let Derek take the fall?”
“Kid was a tard,” Noah said. “He didn’t even try to fight back for himself. It wasn’t like I conspired with Judge Smith. Derek basically confessed!”
“Because he was a fucking retard, man,” Lincoln said. “You said it yourself. He didn’t know how to act in court. His family couldn’t get him a lawyer. If you’d just confessed—”
“You’re just jealous,” Noah said. Both of them had been on Grove County High School’s football team, but Noah’s build meant he’d always gotten to be linebacker. He’d gotten so much praise from the coach, from the school, from the local papers. Noah had gotten the most blowjobs from cheerleaders too.
Not that Lincoln hadn’t gotten his share of glory. He was the one who’d gone on to play at college, after all. He’d been seen as an asset because of his brain and agility, not his build.
But there was always Noah Adair.
That damn Noah Adair had the build all right, and the charisma to go with it.
Nobody believed Noah could do anything wrong.
Nobody understood why Lincoln had forbidden Abigail to date him, and more than a few folks were still pissed he hadn’t gone to the wedding when she disobeyed him.
“Are you jealous?” Noah asked. “Are you going to shoot your mouth off and try to ruin this for the whole county? You know they need me.”
At the moment, Lincoln felt more exhausted than jealous. It was too late to shoot his mouth off about Derek anyway. “I don’t want to mess with anything here. I’m just visiting.”
> “Good,” Noah said.
“You said there’s a witness? Did she see a werewolf?”
“Let’s find out.”
A deputy was sitting with the hospice administrator in her office. Noah dismissed him mid-sentence and stood over the witness, arms folded, looking as huge and looming as he had when wearing all his football gear. He’d picked up the authoritative stance of a sheriff with ease.
“I’m Sheriff Adair,” he said. “This is my consultant, Lincoln Marshall.”
“Deputy Lincoln, baby!” The wrinkled older woman was named Leslie, a friend of Grandpa Marshall. He took her hand. Her skin was so soft, and she smelled like talcum powder. “Little Lincoln Logs. Look at you.”
He chuckled. “Nobody calls me Lincoln Logs anymore, ma’am. Or deputy. Like Sheriff Adair said, I’m only here consulting.”
“Consulting?” Leslie asked, squinting at him through glasses as big on her head as an owl’s eyes.
“He’s here as a preternatural expert.” Noah didn’t try to make it sound like that was a good thing, and Lincoln was too busy glaring hellfire at his back to argue over it. “I understand you’ve been talking about this with my men, but I’d like to hear it from your lips. Tell me what you saw tonight.”
“It was a monster.” Leslie spoke to Noah like she was describing the incident to a child. “I called as soon as I saw it trying to break into the hospice. It shattered the window in my office—look!” She lifted a bony hand to point.
It wouldn’t have taken much to break her window. It was single paned, with enough gaps around the frame that a hard wind could have made it shatter just from shaking. The blow had come from outside. The wafers of glass peppering her carpet were profuse.
Lincoln took the door out into seamy nighttime to look at the window from outside. It was the only window on this wall without metal mesh protecting it.
The room beside her office was where John Marshall rested.
“Can you describe what the trespasser looked like?” Noah asked, his voice echoing out against the wall of poplar.
“Big. Like this.” She held her hands above her head, sketching out a shape much taller and wider than she was. “It had glowing eyes!”